Standing on the hill encampment where I had sought refuge that was actually an illegal shanty town settlement among the homeless, I suddenly became afraid. I could not decipher, or make out any sort of sense in what my eyes saw in the eyes of some men and women shuffling in a drunken stupor, dazed like zombies with far away look in their eyes. I asked myself if it had been wise to come here, as I realized that I was now going aimlessly not knowing what was ahead for me. Looking down in the direction from which Jesse and I had come I could see that it was not actually too far from Comal Street. From where I stood I could see the railroad tracks and the snaking Alazan Creek that we jumped over to come here. I heard a laugh and I turned to see Jesse hunched down among a group of men moving his hands and arms and I walked over to see what was so funny. Jesse was rolling what I would learn later, a pair of dice. I became more concerned of being here. Jesse was having fun. I felt alone and afraid.
The hot late morning air brought into my sinuses the smell of burning wood. I could actually feel, or I thought that I felt, the smoke from the fire hurting my ear. I touched the wad of cotton that Raul`s mother had placed inside the auditory canal of my ear to arrest and stop the oozing or dripping of blood from smearing the side of my face. The stinging pain forced me to tilt my head to the side as if needing to rest it on my shoulder. A dusty looking women sitting with two small children by the fire that sent the smoke to my ear which triggered imaginary blame for my pain noticed that I appeared to be in some type of child trouble. She gestured with nods from her head for me to come over.
Standing at her side as she sat by the fire I saw that she was feeding her children. She asked me why I seemed to be in pain. I told her about my aunt Elvira`s beatings as I continued to try to sooth my pain by touching with my hand. She drew me to her by an arm to look closely at my ear. She wanted to look inside the canal and tried to pull the cotton but it had already reached the congealment stage so she decided to avoid pulling it out causing more bleeding. She wanted to know where my mother was and why I was there. I explained as best as I could about my situation and how my mother had gone away, leaving me behind.
The woman did not find my situation surprising, or that was the obvious shrugging of her shoulders impression that I got. A boy like me had to think that this was the way it was suppose to be. My infant imagination told me that children were supposed to be beaten, discarded like trash and left to fend for themselves. I did not know any better. The woman reached into a cardboard box and took out a glass saucer. From a cooking pot she had over the fire she served me some of her porridge looking gruel. I tried to eat slowly as I listened to her talk to me. Despite my lack of knowing any better I did understand that this woman had a mother`s instinct within her as she explained to me in words that a child like me could understand. She told me that I could not remain there. That I would be roused up in the middle of the night and beaten again, by the police because the place was an illegal homeless dump. I still did not understand. She said I had to keep moving. "You have to go back to your community and stay there." she told me, as my attention span left me.
Jesse was pulling at my arm as the woman was still talking to me. "We have to go!",
Jesse said. I just looked at him and thought that maybe the police were already here as the woman had just told me. "Where are we going?", I asked. "Didn`t you hear it?" he asked me. "The train, the train is coming!!". "We have to leave quickly, it will be here in a few minutes". I still did not understand the importance of a train that was coming, but I followed Jesse down the slope of the rocky hill towards the Alazan Creek. Even before reaching the bottom of the hill I heard it. It was the faint sound of a train coming at still a long distance away. Wooooo, Wooooooo it sounded far. I became excited because for the first time I would see a train up near during the day and not be afraid. The Alazan Creek curls in a curve under the Puente Negro where I stopped chasing Jesse the day earlier as he ran barefooted on top of the railroad track trying to teach me how to play at racing on the tracks. The Alazan Creek makes a wide turn under the bridge and the swath of dirt that was cut for flooding protection is close to fifty yards wide and swirls around and behind Raul`s block back yards. It runs to the spot where Jesse and I jumped over to get to the shanty homeless community earlier and continues swirling forwards until it reaches the Chinese grocery store where my grandmother and Amelia work.
Raul was standing in front of his house when Jesse and I got there. It was easy for me to assume that both of them knew what was coming today. Raul walked to the middle of the street to pose a watchful eye as one would do while waiting for a bus on a corner. Stretching his neck sideways he looked in the direction towards a sound of the train. Jesse went to join Raul and he shouted, "There!! come and see!!" he motioned to me to approach. I went close to them but could only see smoke that was swirling high into the hot sun far away on top of the slope. I felt good because I did not have to worry that my aunt would see me. Her house was at the far end of the block. We took our positions as near to the high asphalt slope as possible and waited. Soon I saw a different type of monster coming. This one was a sleek and shiny passenger train, not an oily black fire spewing freight train like the one my grandfather rode as a goon at the midnight hours.
The train was now visible to my eyes. It was moving slowly with a rocky sway that made the sun bounce off its shiny snake looking body. The head of this snake where to engine that made it slighter so lightly and smooth on the tracks, slid, oh so slowly to a near stop just above where we had taken our positions to wait. As far as I could see, military service men in brown and white uniforms were waving their arms and signs of victory with their fingers at all the people who had positioned themselves in the grassy deep gully to salute our soldiers. We as kids obviously did not know their destinations or if indeed they were at that point on their way to war. Japan had just bombed Pearl Harbor and all Hell was about to break loose. In order to try to make some sort of small living, I was taught to beg these soldiers to toss me a nickle or dime as I stood on that deep grassy gully. I would be very good at it. These warriors would continue to come by