Effluvia

Move along. Nothing to see here.

I don't know what this is - it's an odd little piece of fiction that popped into my head, full-grown. Enjoy.

I had no reason to doubt that the man sitting across from me had just come from where he claimed to have just come from. He sat at that splintery table, an ashtray already overflowing with cigarette butts in front of him, wearing a frayed old dress shirt and tattered, faded jeans that he'd stolen from a laundrymat. The shaking never stopped, though it had faded quite a bit after a fifth of scotch - he drank it down like water - and a pack of Camels.

His skin looked raw, like he's stood out in a hurricane for hours, and when I'd walked beside him earlier I'd seen the tiny cuts and scrapes that covered his bald head and his forearms. He'd winced and drawn away when I'd held out my Zippo to light his first smoke, and since then he'd lit the next one on the glowing end of the last one.

And his feet were a bloody mess. I had him rest them on a dishtowel so he wouldn't leave smears of gore under my table, but his red footprints had already tracked from the door to the kitchen. I had no idea how far he'd walked before I found him, but he was in my neighborhood, where broken bottles and cracked sidewalks are more the rule than the exception. Nobody really notices them, but nobody goes around barefoot, either.

"So what was it like?" I asked him.

His eyes widened as he looked up at me sharply, then dropped his gaze to the ashtray in front of him. He finished a cigarette and lit another one. The air conditioner in the living room behind me rattled and whooshed. I could hear a dog barking in one of the apartments down on the first floor. He was quiet a long time.

"I got in a fight once," he said finally, "in this bar in Mexico City. I was workin' in the oil fields then, I was twenty-three, twenty-four....I went in this little neighborhood place, right around the corner from the offices of the company I was working for. I was the only gringo, I was by myself, I was half-drunk already...I started talkin' shit to the bartender and whoever got near me. It got later and later, and I got drunker. It was way after midnight, I bet, and I was about to fall off the stool, I was so wasted, and I was callin' everyone in the place a motherfuckin' wetback...see, I thought the Mexicans were humble and servile and terrified of the white man, you know? And finally the bartender said something, sort of sharp and quick, and then he tossed this stuff in my eyes," he looked up at me again, a translucent ghost of his old smile on his lips, "ground-up red pepper, is what it was. I couldn't see a damn thing - couldn't open my eyes at all - and those Mexicans just kind of fell all over me. There had been ten or twenty of 'em in the place last time I looked, and it felt like all of 'em were trying to get their licks in on me.

"And I lashed out at 'em and I hit one or two, but I couldn't see and they could. I knew if I got on the floor they'd really kick the shit out of me, so I kind of fell back against the bar and slid down. They kicked the shit out of me anyway, and after while one of 'em started rapping me in the head with a bottle, not too hard, but hard enough to make me see stars every time.

"They kind of made a game out of it. They knew I wasn't gonna do anything, so they went back to drinking. Whenever I'd move someone would give me a kick, or throw a bottle at me, or something, just to let me know I was supposed to stay still. Finally it got to where whenever I heard one of 'em move near me I'd scream, 'cause I was scared and I was pretty sure they were gonna kill me, and that pissed 'em off even more. I was screamin' and they were gangin' up on me again when the police came in. Not because anyone had called 'em, but just 'cause they heard a noise."

The smile disappeared.

"It's been just like that for the last eight years," he said, "except I had to stand up the whole time."