The King of the Jungle

By Emil Metallic

"White people don't ride buses in Colombia," Brian's friends in Bogota had warned, and the muted hostility of the Mestizo factory workers with whom he'd started his journey that morning told him they'd not been lying. The Mestizos Brian was used to were cheerfully subservient. They washed his clothes, cooked his meals, went for cigarettes in the rain, and smiled. These Mestizos were dour, and grim. They glared and scowled. When the bus emptied amid the factories fringing the city, Brian was glad to see them go. But his peace would not last long.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Emil Metallic
• Release date: Feb 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005295448

Emil Metallic

Emil Metallic writes stories based on people and places he knows or has known. Names are changed to protect the author.

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The King of the Jungle

By Emil Metallic

Copyright 2022

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is copyrighted property of the author and may not be

reproduced or redistributed without written consent of the author.

Only one in a thousand not born here survives, warned the priest.

What about you? asked Brian.

I’m the one in my thousand, replied the priest.

Brian Fellows lit a cigarette and leaned against the old school bus, enjoying the morning sun. The village, the first since they’d left the Bogotanian plateau, was just a handful of bamboo and banana leave huts scattered across a small clearing cut into the brush along the side of the road. Banana trees, bamboo, and brown-yellow grass climbed the steep mountain slope behind it. A crowd of Indians, mostly passengers from the bus, cluttered around a three-sided hut next to the road that served as the village bus stop. The men smoked, a few sipped from small bottles of beer. The women chatted quietly, sitting in the shade along the side of the hut. Several naked and nearly naked children watched from the safety of a bamboo thicket fifteen or twenty feet away. After a few minutes in the sun, Brian tossed his cigarette on the ground and climbed back on the bus. The children scrambled from the brush and fought each other for the still burning cigarette butt.

He was barely settled in his seat when the sound of a violent argument erupted from one of the closer huts. The crowd at the bus stop turned to the commotion as a white man, dressed in black, appeared at the hut’s door, struggling to get out. With a liter bottle of Aquadiente in one hand, thrust out in front of him, the man leaned into the sun, cursing a young woman who was trying to drag him back in to the hut. Someone yelled, "Oye Padre! Possiblemente Dios puedo ayudar a ti con tu mujer." A cackle of