little salt

little salt

Little Salt rubbed the sleep out of of his eyes with the back of his hand.

He saw a wiry man with greasy, slicked back hair who smelled 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 Little Salt’s 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’ nor 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 through the war in Afghanistan, that must have held the traveling goods of the whole family.

He tried to stuff it in the luggage bin above his head, giving it a hard whack with his bony fist.

The driver moved toward him.

“Hey there, mister!” said the driver sternly, “Cain’t you see it ain’t gonna fit in there? You’ll have to give it to me so’s I can put it in the storage compartment below the bus.”

“Well dammit then,” cursed the man, “Least let me git out the bottle o’ formla for the baby there. It belongs to this yere girl behind me.”

The teenaged girl turned bright red, her ears the color of the tomatoes Little Salt 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 up the aisle to the door.

The other passengers had to lean toward the windows as he passed by.

Little Salt wondered if they did that because of the size of the bag or the smell of it, for it had taken on the odor of it’s owner.

“Wait one more minute, thar,” commanded the man.

The driver ignored him in much the same way his family did.

“Well crap,” the man sighed as he collapsed beside Little Salt.

“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 Little Salt.

Within a minute, the man’s head dropped back against the padded seat of the bus and he was asleep.

Little Salt listened carefully to his sleeping neighbor and heard a crackling in the man’s lungs and a whoosh click in the man’s heart.

“Hmmm,” thought Little Salt, “This man’s had a hard life. He’s too young for his body to sound like that.”

The teenaged boy sitting behind him leaned over the seat and put his hand on Little Salt’s shoulder.

He pushed until Little Salt turned and looked at him.

“Hey, you one’nem Meckicans, ain’t you? You speak English? Or just Meckican?”

Little Salt looked into the boy’s cloudless blue eyes.

What he saw there surprised him.

The boy’s question was a question of curiosity, not one of meanness

The boy had heard those words before, not in a question but in an accusation.

By a whole community of people.

“Look at them Meckicans,” he had heard. “They come here to ‘Merica and take everthin’ from us and don’t give nothin’ back.”

Little Salt whistled the song the right whale as it tries to communicate with another right whale on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

He said nothing.

He said everything.

He hoped the boy could understand him with the ears of the heart.

Maybe that’s how understanding begins.