excerpt
Pony Express
WHENEVER RELATIVES CAME to visit they would always ooh and aah and ask the same stupid question. How old are you now? All summer I told them the same numbers. I’m nine going on ten. Oh, you’re such a big boy, they would say and congratulate my parents and themselves and the Italian community and the gene pool and the Earth and the Christian cosmos. As soon as I saw an opening, I’d slip out of the house and run almost all the way to the Palace Theatre where, for fourteen cents, I could get lost in the tumbleweed heroics of Lash LaRue, Hopalong Cassidy, The Durango Kid, Red Ryder, Tex Ritter and, if I were really lucky, that masked man, The Lone Ranger.
Well, it was Friday, an hour after dark, and most of the kids had already been called in by their parents. Out on the nearly empty street, I stood with my back against the fence, looking up through poplar leaves, feeling left over but oddly free though I didn’t know what to do with myself.
I remembered a story we had studied at school. Something about carrying a message to Garcia. For some reason, it made me think of Wells Fargo. The nuns were always asking us to write essays about what we wanted to be when we grew up. I knew what I wanted to be. Sister Bernice was careful not to dampen my enthusiasm. She had written that I probably would have made a very good Pony Express Rider, but because this vocation only survived in history books, I should consider a career in the U. S. Postal Service.
I hung around on the sidewalk in front of our garden, practising the cradle and the sleeper, moves I’d watched the older guys pull off with their two-dollar yo-yo’s. Now I had my own, a present from my uncle. Every now and then, I turned and looked in through the ground floor windows of the party-walled, four-storey Row-house that was my home. I didn’t want it to be my home. I wanted to live in the mountains, or in some dusty place like Laramie, Wyoming. And as I drank in the light and the talk and the music, I imagined that this late summer street was not downtown Jersey City but an outpost with a zingy name like Abilene.
Libros Libertad 