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I was an average man, somewhat short and
dark skinned and I listened and kept silent the seven years I spent in jail in
Mexico for killing a man. I barely came out alive. It was there that I began to
learn a little English and there I began to speak less Spanish> Really I
hardly spoke at all, but I listened like I used to listened for my father to
return.
I was a good person, but I killed a man and it changed what kind of
person I was. There was something that happened and then I killed him and I was
taken away. It was an awful thing to do, but I was not sure what part was awful
as each day, almost each moment, I replayed it in my mind. There was no trial
or anything. It wasn’t like Law and Order I saw on T.V. that I watched
sometimes late in the bar. I wanted to be a lawyer on the show and I laughed
when I first learned they weren’t lawyers but just people acting. I had
seen shows on T.V. too, when I was a boy and when people killed each other it
was nothing like real life.
So I spent those seven years in jail fighting
some of the time and it was rough the rest of the time. I could show you my
back or chest, my hands, but it would mean nothing to describe it. I killed a
man with my hands and I was very sorry some of the time. He was bad, an awful
man, but any man was a man that died. A dead man was an awful thing to see, and
a body rotted, but bones became white and pure. One person looked like another.
Only Jesus knew who deserved what life afterwards, you couldn’t tell by
looking at the bones.
I thought I was a good looking man, not too old yet,
and I kept myself clean shaven and smelling good which was hard during the day.
I tended to the bar once in a while and washed dishes and cooked. I was told
that my job was pretty good. I didn’t want to be rich. I saved my money
and didn’t waste it because I wanted to be a father one day if I ever
could and I saved for my son that Jesus would give me, but I was afraid of
having a bad son because I had done something against His wishes. I was afraid
I would get too old to have a son and a family, and when you were too old,
perhaps bitter, I thought, you’d be like the father I remembered.
I
was protecting my mother when I killed that man. That was all I could say. She
died when I was in prison. I hadn’t seen her since I went to the Mexican
jail. I found out when I went home she died two years earlier and it
wasn’t my home anymore. I felt like a tire with all the air finally
expelled out of it.
I walked through the back of the restaurant. I was
usually the second or third one in. There was only one or two people very early
in the mornings. A waitress named Rosie and the manager, Evelina. Rosie was a
nice Mexican lady who worked very hard. I didn’t know too much about her.
She was very quiet and we didn’t talk much. She was always there working.
multiple shifts. She didn’t smile and the other girls I heard them talk
that she didn’t make as much money as they did because she didn’t
smile or move quickly or was too friendly. Rosie was a young girl’s name,
I thought, but she wasn’t that young and the work from where she had come
from before the restaurant made her serious and hard. Her hair was deep black
and her face dark and she wore a straight black ponytail that moved little,
only shifting with her head.