Cantina Expats

By J. Lee Porter and Ed Teja

The stories they do tell!

It seems that all the expats who hang around Raquel's canina have a story to tell. Every one has some secret life he is dying to share, but of course, he can't.

The good-looking newcomer is no exception. He's another American expat in Mexico, there on a mission--a man of secrets. And everyone wants to know what those secrets are.

Or do they?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nomadic Giant
• Release date: Nov 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781949063202

J. Lee Porter

J. Lee Porter is a former IT specialist, programmer and data analyst for banking, security, and government agencies. He left the IT world behind on July 4th, 2016, declaring it his personal independence day to travel the world full time in search of inspiration for his writing. @JLPorterAuthor on Twitter Ed Teja is a writer a poet, a musician, and boat bum. He writes about the places he knows, and the people who live in the margins of the world. After being friends with tech giants, pirates, fishermen, and a coterie of strange people for many years, he finds the world an amazing place filled with intriguing, if sometimes crazed characters. @ETeja on Twitter

Book preview

1.

Merida, Mexico

Raquel Hernandez put on her apron and took a stack of small, carved wooden bowls down the shelf. She opened a large bag of peanuts she’d gotten at the mercado on her way to the cantina and began pouring them into the bowls.

Soon, after the lunch hour, her regulars would start arriving; they would begin drifting in, depositing themselves on the same barstools or at the same table they sat at every day. Not that Pisano, Raquel’s small neighborhood bar in Merida, Mexico, on the Yucatan Peninsula would be booming, but she business would be steady, the demands on her constant, and this quiet hour was her time to get ready.

They came like clockwork. Of course, that’s what made them regulars. They didn’t just show up every day, they tended to sit in the same seats, drink the same drinks, and have more or less the same conversations.

There weren’t many of them, just five she counted as regulars, and two more that qualified as semi-regulars. All seven were all retired, or at least unemployed gringos. They weren’t a bad lot, and mostly she liked them. They came for cheap booze and local atmosphere in a place a far cry from the upmarket bars that catered to the tourists who came to Mexico to party in the same kinds of hotels and bars they had in the US and Europe. Her customers weren’t particularly demanding and, happily for Raquel, they all drank steadily enough to pay her overhead. They kept her in business. That meant that the locals who came in for a beer or tequila were pure profit — except for Hector. Hector was not profit, except when the gringos, who liked him, bought him a round. No, Hector was family, sort of. A primo, a distant cousin, the son of a cousin.

The gringos called him her shirt-tail relative, which made no sense at all. What did clothing have to do with la familia?

Whenever the gringos ignored him, Hector would wait until the times when she was busiest to order himself a drink. When he finished it, he would wait until another whirl of activity and sneak out. It was a game. He’d pretend he forgot to pay and she’d pretend she didn’t notice