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Evelina was only part Mexican. She rarely
spoke Spanish, even to the Mexicans. Evelina had no accent at all and she was a
very pretty woman with short black hair tossed to one side by a part and she
had a strong white smile. She was here early every morning and she put her
energy together before the people came. She was a strong woman and had two
children. She was in her early thirties, and she was no longer married. I knew
this, but she didn’t speak of it at all. Her husband died years ago, and I
guess it was a relief for he made it difficult on Evelina and her children.
Sometimes her mother came to the grill to pick up the children if they were
here with her. Everyone called her Eve and her smile lit up the room.
I
knew her routine all the time and she had some friends at the grill and
sometimes they would tell about the weekend and they would laugh and have fun
in the telling of something that had happened. But she was their boss and it
tired her also to be a friend and also to tell them what they had to do. She
did her job very good and very thoroughly and sometimes it meant speaking
harshly to someone she spoke often to of things other than work. It was poor
judgement to cross Evelina, but it happened so few times. It was her
mother’s instinct that made her tough when she had to be.
I could tell
you about all of the people in the grill who worked there or about many of the
visitors because I liked to hear them talk about themselves. I didn’t mind
it at all. I imagined myself doing all the things that others did and go the
places that others had gone and in that way I did those things myself. I did
that when I came here because I wasn’t a traveler. I didn’t want to
go places, just to go north a bit and away from the jails. In the jails, it was
different because you couldn’t get those other stories out of your head
when you heard about the people that were there. I was told about coming here
too because there were Mexicans that had come here and you’d hear about
the north.
There were two American boys that were in the jail where I had
been. I didn’t know how they had gotten so lost. They weren’t very
tough boys, but they seemed to act that way and it got one of them killed. I
didn’t know what happened, but one woke up with the end of a sharpened
chair leg sticking out of his chest. He seemed like a nice fellow and I
didn’t know what the boys had done. I spoke with them little, but I
listened to them talk and they spoke a lot and that might have been what got
one killed. After the one was killed, the other was always scared and then he
was taken way. Maybe he was released. I didn’t know where the one boy
went. I hoped he had made it back to his own country and family.