A Mile in These Shoes

By Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

These nine stories describe people who live on the margins of society, people who are often oppressed and always ignored. These stories give them voice and let the reader into their worlds on the edge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Wessex Collective
• Release date: Mar 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476486017

Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

Sandra Shwayder Sanchez earned a BA in Behavioral Sciences at University of Maryland and a Juris Doctor degree from Denver University Law School. Her law practice involved the representation of indigent clients in the Denver criminal, family and mental health courts. In the early seventies she built a house and farmed in rural West Virginia. She now lives in a small mountain town in Colorado with her husband Ed Sanchez. The short stories and novellas of Sandra Shwayder Sanchez have appeared in The Long Story, Zone 3, The Healing Muse, Storyglossia, The Dublin Quarterly, and Cantaraville. Her first novel, The Nun, was published in 1992 by Plain ViewPress, and a new novel, The Secret of a Long Journey, a novel about the secret identity of generations from the Inquisition to New Mexico and told in magical realist style will be forthcoming this year from Floricanto Press.

Book preview

Sachez’ writing style is exquisite. Her flawless prose flows—sometimes beautiful, sometimes disturbing —but always memorable. –Mayra Calvani in The Bloomsbury Review

"The way Sanchez integrates the natural world with character and personality and actual events is masterful. She moves around in time, picks up threads and makes connections among the characters in a seemingly effortless manner, and the result is stunningly beautiful. For me the

book was a gift." –Gloria DeVidas Kirchheimer, author of Goodbye Evil Eye.

A MILE IN THESE SHOES

by

Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

The Wessex Collective on Smashwords

A Mile in These Shoes

copyright 2010 by Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Acknowlegements:

A Modern Peruvian Tale was originally published in Zone 3, Three on A Pier in The Healing Muse, Give Me a poster of an Old Rodeo, Danny & Joe, and Lillian & Alexander were all originally published in The Long Story, Incident on the #15 Bus was originally published in The Monocacy Valley Review, and The Rose Bush was first published in the online publication The Dublin Quarterly (an Editor’s Choice Best of 2007 selection) and reprinted in The New Scene Quarterly in 2009.

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Table of Contents

A Modern Peruvian Tale

Three on a Pier

Give Me a Poster of an Old Rodeo

Danny and Joe: A Friendship

Yellowwolf and Shortstuff

Incident on the #15 Bus

Lillian and Alexander

The Rose Bush

The Podunk International Bank Heist

a note about the writer

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A Modern Peruvian Tale

I.

Kevin Costner is a shoeshine boy in the Andean city of Cuzco. His English is excellent and he is popular with the American tourists who come to explore the ruins of the Incas and seek spiritual experiences while hiking the Inca Trail. He tells them his name is Kevin Costner or John Wayne because it amuses them and they remember and ask for him so it is good for business. His real Spanish name, even though shared with hundreds of boys from this city, is his own, private, not to be given out lightly. He is hardworking, a hustler, the first one in the plaza in the morning and the last to leave at night. When some tourist ladies tell him he should go home, that his mother must be worried about him, he laughs because his mother is just around the corner selling handmade dolls and gloves knit from the wool of old alpacas, or asking the tourists to take her photograph for two sols. If he or his mother returns home without enough money, the father will beat the mother and the mother will beat the son and that is the way it goes.

Kevin Costner hopes to go to North America someday. When he finds a gringo tourist who will talk to him, he asks first if the tourist will adopt him and take him to America, then when he is refused, he asks if the tourist will give him money for his education and when he is refused again, he asks for a new pair of shoes. He finds that a surprising number of tourists, feeling guilty that they cannot adopt him or pay for his education, are willing to go with him to the shoe store and buy him a new pair of shoes. Later, when all the tourists are on trips to the Sacred Valley or gone to Machu Pichu, he goes back to the shoe store and returns several pairs of new, unworn shoes and gets the money which he hides from his father because he is saving to go to the north.

His plan is to join one of those groups of musicians who walk up through Guatemala and Mexico to the United States, playing their Andean music which has become very popular. He has an uncle who went all the way to Denver. There is a very good group that plays at the fancy hotel at Machu Pichu where people pay $300 U.S. to stay one night and drink in the bar and listen to the musicians. They pay $7 U.S. for one imported beer and toss their Peruvian change into the jar at the foot of the stage for the group of five musicians to share among them.

Being out on the streets at all hours, Kevin sees many things and has learned to make himself invisible to make sure that he is not molested or robbed. He has learned to be stealthy and quiet. One night after the restaurants and cafes have closed and there is no noise to cover the sound, he thinks he hears a woman yell Ayudami and then Help once very loud, then softer, then he must strain to hear and hears nothing. He thinks that he should go see what is happening, try to help the woman because that is what men do. He also knows there is nothing he can do, a small boy alone in the dead of night. He removes his shoes so he can walk noiselessly on the cobblestone streets and stays in the shadows until he reaches the relative safety of his home. The whole way home he is thinking he is a coward and wondering what kind of man he will be when he is a man and when he will know. He thinks to himself that the woman was a tourist, she called out in English as well as Spanish. He tries to tell himself that the tourists are bad, that they deserve what they get, walking around at such a late hour in his town. But he cannot help remembering the plea, the need in the woman’s voice. He decides he will tell his father what he heard and let his father decide what to do next. His father is not home and so he goes to sleep and all night long he thinks he hears cries for help and imagines murders and rapes throughout the city. In the morning he remembers that he had a bad dream. He wants to tell his mother but she puts her finger to her lips and lifts her head in the direction of his father passed out on the floor. His father drinks away half the money the mother and son earn on the street. That’s how it goes.

The father is very dirty, has mud on his pants and Kevin imagines that there is blood mixed with the mud and wants to look more closely but the mother shoos him away toward the door and out. It is time to go to work.

II.

When Kevin gets to the main plaza there are more than the usual number of policemen gathered there and tourists are being kept away. There is an ambulance and workers are loading a stretcher with a body covered head to toe with a sheet into the ambulance while the police stand around and talk and some look on the ground for little bits of cloth, for blood and foot prints. There has been a murder and Kevin did not dream it.

Kevin stays away from the police and goes up the hill toward the ruins of Saqsaywaman. The guides always get a laugh when they explain that the name is pronounced like sexy woman. Everyone in Cuzco is a guide, the ones who don’t have horses or vans to transport the tourists hang around at the ruins and offer to walk the people around and explain the history. Some know more than others. It is too early to catch the returning tourists to shine their shoes. Ordinarily the plaza would be the best place to work at this hour but he doesn’t want to catch the eye of the police. He knows the victim was a tourist and they will want to find someone quickly to pin it on.

After killing an hour or so, Kevin goes over to San Blas where some ancient grandmothers cook bits of meat over a charcoal fire on the corner and he can get some breakfast on credit and then go see Juana at the Posada. Perhaps she will have some work for him to do, some errands to run, messages to carry. Kevin is a hustler and always has an idea about how to make a few sols.

His father had a similar idea it seems because Kevin runs into him there at the Posada. His father likes a young woman who works for Juana. Kevin knows this but says nothing because the one time he did, his father blacked both his eyes and told him that was what he got for spying. The young woman could be Kevin’s sister. He notices that his father has changed into fresh clean clothes and has apparently just given the young woman a gift, a pair of earrings and Kevin wonders where his father found them. Then his father sees him and tells him to stay away from the plaza because the police will be looking for boys like him to harass and question. Everyone is talking about the murder. The woman had been staying at the Posada in San Blas waiting for her husband to join her. He was due in that afternoon on the daily flight from Lima. Everyone is wondering who will break the news to the husband. Juana says she will ask the police to send someone over when she gets the husband’s call from the airport. She does not want to be the person to convey the message. Kevin watches his father closely during the conversation and his father gives him that look that Kevin recognizes as a warning to stop spying.

Without a word, Kevin runs out the door and down the steep winding street to the church. There is an old man by the door who looks at him with a big grin showing his splotchy gums and single tooth and speaks to him in a voice so old and scratchy that Kevin can’t understand a word he has said.

Que paso abuelo? Kevin asks. The man coughs, spits, and says, You heard me, little smartass. Kevin feels himself watched as he enters the church and he goes all the way to the front knowing the old man’s eyesight won’t penetrate the darkness that far into the church. Kevin hides all morning until hunger drives him outside again and the old man is gone or perhaps spying upon him from a shadow of his own.

III.

When Kevin Costner the shoeshine boy emerges from the church into the bright afternoon sun he is blinded by the light and almost steps on something that suddenly moves. Kevin sees that it is a snake and the sight of it makes him feel sick so he must sit down on the high stone curb of the street. He tells himself he must be hallucinating. It is still too cold for snakes to be out and about. He closes his eyes to clear his mind but he can hear the snake moving around him even though everyone knows you can’t hear a snake move. Kevin hears the words you must do something about this but he doesn’t know what is meant by these words, or who is speaking them. He isn’t even sure the words are intended for him until he hears them repeated in a whisper in his ear and feels a hot breath there but sees no one when he turns. Then there is shouting and screaming as other people have discovered the snake in the church courtyard and chase it with sticks intending to kill it.

Kevin stands and gets in the way, being himself knocked down as one of the men chasing the snake runs into him. Then the snake is gone and people are screaming at Kevin, angry because the meat of the snake is tasty and gets a good price. Kevin pushes past the people and notices the one-toothed old man among them who smiles that sly smile of his and Kevin waves a hand at him saying, tu es loco abuelo and laughs like he means it. Overhead a condor, off its flight pattern, casts a shadow over the town and all its people, swoops down, picks up the snake in its beak and carries it to a jeep rental lot where it drops the snake into a warm, safe spot under the driver’s seat of a jeep and then continues on toward the south where it came from and where it belongs. No one notices the condor but Kevin who stands in wonder to see it, so large and graceful and truly godlike.

IV.

That afternoon the town fills up with gringos from Hollywood who have come to town to shoot a scene at Saqsaywaman for a film. Kevin goes to the plaza to get as much work as he can. He wants to catch the people before they have time to exchange their dollars for paltry sols. They laugh when he introduces himself as Kevin Costner but it gets their attention and he has his work cut out for him. They make jokes about putting him in the movies and he forgets about the murder. Then the word gets out and goes round that the director’s wife was killed in the night and the shoot is cancelled. People begin to wander off, not knowing what to do next. No one has seen the director.

That is when Kevin smells blood and sees it congealed around the rim of the sole of the shoe he is working on. It looks like mud but the day is dry and it has been dry for a long time. No one has mud on their boots, only dust, dry dust. Kevin recognizes the smell of blood. He has smelled it on his cousin’s farm after a chicken is killed or a goat. He recognizes blood and has a lot of thoughts. He is first frightened when he thinks this must be the murderer. Then he is relieved because he had suspected his own father and now no longer has to face that horrific thought, although the mud on his father’s pants and the earrings he gave that girl still trouble Kevin’s mind. He is thinking all this while he continues to rub the top of the shoe, careful not to wipe away the blood around the bottom, knowing it is evidence. Kevin remains cool, not letting his face betray the fact that he recognizes blood when he sees and smells it, or that he is frightened or relieved, just the same concentration on the top leather, not looking up until he has shined both boots to a mirror-like finish.

When the man pays him, Kevin looks at his face carefully in order to identify him later if he needs to and he is shocked to see that the man is not a gringo but an Indian, tall like one of the ancient Inca people. This frightens Kevin more than anything else for he realizes the man could be a brujo and know his thoughts and kill him quietly from afar if he decides to. He wonders why he didn’t kill the hueda that way and why he killed her in the first place. He wonders what the Indian is doing with the crew from Hollywood, if he is working for them, if he secretly hates them. Kevin can feel some of this. He is trying not to have these thoughts while the Indian is watching him so he looks down at the money in his hand. He sees that the man has given him a U.S. $20 bill and he realizes it is normal and completely unthreatening for him to react to this unexpected generosity.

Sir, sir you’ve made a mistake, Kevin says in English because he has heard this man speak English with his companions. Kevin holds the twenty out to the man who tells him to keep it and Kevin listens carefully to the voice in order to be able to identify that as well. But he does not have the name. He smiles and says with as much childlike glee as he can muster, Thank you Mr. …Mr.? and the man says, Call me Bruce, you know, like Willis, and smiles at the boy.

Kevin goes around the plaza to show his friends the twenty dollar bill and the money is a good excuse to point the man out to them. He tells a couple of his friends to help him watch the man. One of the boys goes to Rosie O’Brien’s to watch because they know the gringos will likely go there later and the man is clearly with them. Another positions himself at strategic places, moving here and there, to keep the man in sight. Kevin has not yet figured out how to put the police onto him or if he should take that chance. Finally he decides to find his father. If his father is sober that will be a sign and Kevin will tell him and let his father take responsibility for informing the police. If his father is drunk, Kevin won’t be able to tell him anything. That is just the way it goes.

He heads back up toward San Blas to find out where his father has gone. That girl will know. He is thinking about things, thinking about how everyone came into town at the same time this afternoon but maybe that one man came in yesterday and hid himself somewhere so he could kill the gringa and then blend in with the others. Why would the man have blood on his boot unless