He the sleep out of of his eyes and saw a wiry man with greasy, slicked back hair smelling of body odor and cigarette smoke sitting beside him.
The man was directing a woman holding an infant in one arm and the hand of a toddler with her other hand to sit in the seat in front of them.
He was also directing a boy and a girl about Hilcias’ age to sit beside them.
And a teenage girl and boy to sit behind them.
None of them were paying any attention to the man, but he kept on talking as if they couldn’t function without him.
“Lissen yere,” he said a bit too loudly. “Git yourselfs settled down now. We got a ways to go, and we don’t need no cryin’, wigglin’, playin’ not poutin’. Hope we’ll be thar ‘fore nightfall.”
The man had one bag, a tattered olive green rucksack that looked as if it had been action in the Vietnam War, that must have held the traveling goods of the whole family of seven.
He tried to stuff it in the luggage bin above his head, giving it a hard whack with his bony fist as the driver moved toward him telling him it wouldn’t fit and that he’d have to put it in the storage compartment below the bus.
“Well god dammit then,” cursed the man, “Least let me git out the bottle o’ formla for the baby. It belongs to this yere girl. You can see she ain’t old ‘nough to make no milk so we got to feed this yere ‘spensive stuff.”
The teenaged girl turned bright red, her ears the color of the tomatoes he and his mamí and his abuelo picked on the farms in the summers, as the man looked away from her and back to the bus driver, who was wrestling the bag back up the aisle to the door.
The other passengers had to lean toward the windows as he passed by.
Hilcias wondered if they did this because of the size of the bag or the smell of it, for it had taken on the odor of it’s owners.
“Wait one more minute, thar,” commanded the man.
The driver ignored him in much the same way as his family did.
“Well shit,” the man sighed as he collapsed beside Hilcias.
“I needed my Bible out from thar,” he whispered. “It’s good luck to hold it when our lives are in the hands o’ somebody like that thar driver,” he winked at Hilcias.
Within a minute, the man’s head dropped back against the padded seat of the bus and was asleep.
Hilcias listened carefully and heard a crackling in the man’s lungs and a whoosh click in the man’s heart.
“Hmmm,” thought Hilcias, “This man has had a hard life. He’s too young for his body to sound like that.”
The teenaged boy who was sitting behind Hilcias leaned over the seat and put his hand on his shoulder.
He pushed until Hilcias turned and looked at him.
“Hey, you one’nem Meckicans, ain’t you? You speak English or only Meckican?”
Hilcias looked into the boy’s cloudless blue eyes.
What he saw there surprised him.
The teenaged boy’s question was a question of curiosity, not a question of suspicion.
The boy had heard those words before, though not in a question but in an accusation.
By a whole community.
“Look at them damn Meckicans,” he had heard. “They come here to ‘Merica and take everthin’ from us and don’t give nothin’ back.”
“How could I change his mind?” thought Hilcias.
Hilcias smiled at him and turned back toward the road in front of them.
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