“And do you know where the Honduran lives?”
“No, we’re new,” says the sad woman in the rented store, no customers.
I buy a soft drink, some cookies, small help.
“And do you know where the Honduran lives?”
“No, and do buy a fajita taco,” says the woman as a mass ends. “And take a candy, too.”
I do.
“And do you know where the Honduran lives?”
“No, but odd you ask. He was in here two hours ago. He lives down the road, but I don’t know on what side.”
She is behind a store counter.
I don’t buy anything.
“And do you know where the Honduran lives?”
“Yes, just three trailers up,” says a man grinning while two kids kick a ball in his driveway.”
“And is the Honduran home?”
“No,” says a man in his 20s, who will not tell me the Honduran’s phone number, and then he wonders if I am a detective, and if I am – I am not – why detectives take so long to solve crimes.
“Maybe it’s because they do not like to go door to door, as I did, and they overlook the phone book, though many people now have cells, not in the phone book. You’re the fifth and last stop.”
Talk ends, though he names the Honduran before the silence, only wind ripping.
I leave my phone number and a note.
I go back a day later and have a cheese cake for the Honduran.
His wife leads me deep into a dusty field where the Honduran and a man who does not show his face are eating fried fish.
Cars, hoods up, are under mesquite trees.
A rooster crows.
The Honduran takes the cheese cake, a thanks for a ride he gave me a week before, and then he resumes eating the fish.
His wife stays behind, and I go back to the street – alone.
——
A 350-pound man supervises the remodeling of a Mexican-themed food store.
He tells me he studied engineering in Mexico City, but was born in South Chicago where he lived until four when his folks moved him with them to Mexico.
“I can do just about anything in engineering, maybe even a little sun and wind power. I can easily do water power.”
“Tell me why these Mexican-type stores are so popular on the border.”
“Easy to answer. They sell ‘nostalgia.’ Customers remember their abuelas, the abuelas’ food. Like I said, ‘nostalgia.’”
“You might be a poet as well as an engineer,” I say.
“Hey, maybe I am.”
Eugene “Gene” Novogrodsky, early December 2011
