The heels started moving again, this time in our direction, and a woman appeared at the end of the aisle.
“Enrique!” She stormed toward us. “All this time I’ve been looking for you,” she yelled as she stopped very close to him. “Where the hell have you been?”
She slapped him so hard that he lost his balance. Then she grabbed his hand and yanked him up. The woman cursed me, kicked the stuffed rabbit, and practically dragged Enrique away. I followed them for a couple of steps. They passed the counter, headed for the door. When they’d almost reached it, Enrique tripped and fell to the floor. On his knees, he turned to look at me. Then his face crumpled. She grabbed his hand again, yelling, “Enrique, come on!”
I stayed where I was, watching and doing nothing. Just before the door closed, I saw his little fingers trying to pull away from his mother’s as she, furious, leaned down to pick him up.
UNDERGROUND
I needed a break, and a drink to clear my head. The road was dark and I still had to drive several more hours. The truck stop was the only one I’d seen for miles. The interior lights gave the place a certain warmth, and there were three cars parked in front. Inside, a young couple was eating hamburgers. There was a guy in the back facing away from me, and another, older man at the bar. I sat down next to him. The things you do when you travel too much, or when it’s been such a long time since you’ve talked to anyone. I ordered a beer. The bartender was fat and slow-moving.
“That’ll be five pesos,” he said.
I paid and he served me. I’d been dreaming of this beer for hours, and it was a very good one. The old man was staring at the bottom of his drink, or whatever else he might be seeing in the glass.
“He’ll tell the story for a beer,” said the fat bartender, pointing to the old man.
The old guy seemed to wake up, and he turned toward me. His eyes were light and gray, maybe the beginnings of cataracts or something; he didn’t seem to see well. I thought he was going to tease the story a little, or introduce himself. But he stayed quiet, like a blind dog that thinks it’s seen something and doesn’t have much more to do.
“Come on, buddy,” said the fat man, and he winked an eye at me. “Just one beer for gramps.”
I said yes, sure. The old man smiled. I took out five more pesos for the fat man, and in less than a minute the old guy’s glass was full again. He took a couple of sips and turned automatically toward me. I thought that he must have already told this story a hundred times, and for a moment I regretted sitting down beside him.
“This happened in the interior,” he said, pointing at the drying rack, or perhaps toward an imaginary horizon that I couldn’t see. “The interior, way out in the country. There was a town there, a mining town, see? A little town, the mine was just getting going. But there was a plaza, with a church, and the road that led to the mine was paved. The miners were young. They’d brought their wives out to the town and after a few years passed there were already a lot of kids, ya know?”
I nodded. My eyes sought out the fat man, who clearly knew the story and was occupied with arranging bottles on one side of the bar.
“Well, those kids spent all day outside. Running from one house to another, playing. And then it happened that a few of the kids were playing in an empty lot, and one of them noticed something strange. The ground there was sort of swollen. It wasn’t much, it wouldn’t have caught everyone’s attention, but it seemed like enough to him. Then the others came closer, and they all made a circle around it and stood like that for a while. One of them knelt down and started to scratch at the ground with his hands, and so the others started doing the same. Soon they found a toy bucket or some other thing that would work as a shovel, and they started to dig. Other kids joined them over the course of the afternoon. They showed up and pitched in without asking questions, as if they’d already heard about the hole. The first kids got tired and other kids took their places. But they didn’t leave. They stayed nearby, watching the work. The next day they came back more prepared, with buckets, big kitchen spoons, gardening trowels, things they had surely asked their parents for. The hole became a pit. Five or six kids could fit inside it. Their heads barely rose above it. They loaded the dirt in buckets and passed them up to the kids above, who, in turn, carried it to a mound that was growing bigger and bigger, ya see?”