By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
SAN BENITO, Texas |...Nightfall crawled heavy in dark-black, half-colored by the day's grief and hassles, finished off with the angered brush strokes of black & blue pain. Few in town drifted out after dark feeling good about doing it. The damned job was a drag, paid peanuts and the boss was always hitting on the gals, went the line from one end of town to the other.
You could cut the air with a fingernail. A whispered word of complaint went a long way.
Some locals said the mess was because too many residents were in the red with God.
Others, the older ones with longer, harsher memories, said it was all because of a curse leftover from the days of the mean White settlers who raped and murdered the pretty Native Mexican women. The Mexican face was not what it had once been. Noses and lips knew it.
Still others blamed it on the bad, killing booze supplied by the unclean, cash-strapped mojados in what they called old bottles of rot-gut whiskey. Cheap, horse urine-laced beer was being trucked-in from the sticks.
A few said little about it, fully believing that enough bullshit flowed through town that to say anything else would only add to the horrible portrait of the town known well to others living better elsewhere.
The year was ending, and, for many, that was a good thing. An ever-rewarding God still made the new day full of promise, the old ones meant solely for the dust-covered ledger of bygone memories. You could sit down with the neighbor or the wife and hear stories.
Licha's Lounge had emptied slowly, and it was a hard-coughing and the flicking of a cigarette lighter outside that offered the night a soulful soundtrack to something or another...
-30-
[EDITOR'S NOTE:...An excerpt from a longer version in the collection...]
Oooooooohhhh-Kay!
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