At old Fort Craft Park Delores links hands with the flush faced men in floral shirts who are too polite to decline, and the women in broad straw hats whose thin lips fix in frightened smiles. Before the tourists pass Delores’s stall, she listens to the prices the other higglers quote them—prices that make the tourists politely decline and walk away. So by the time they get to Delores—the last stall in the market—she’s ready. She pounces.
Tool bag in hand, I went through two double doors, then climbed three flights. Brown paint chipping off the walls, a layer of dust on the steps, smell of turkey bacon beating back the stale piss. And from up above, I heard the sound of a suitcase banging against the steps. A brown-skin lady lumbered downstairs. Two plaid suitcases in her hands, two beige children tugging at her arms. Today’s lucky losers, I assumed. Another tenant that hadn’t paid, tried to sneak back in and was getting kicked out again. They looked the part.
Pola waited until there was people silence. The other women in her cabin snored or lay motionless after a sixteen-hour day in the heat and sun. The men’s cabin across the way was dark and still. There wasn’t even the squeak, squeak of the hammock ties. The overseer of Hacienda Paraíso (hijo de la gran puta, may he rot in whatever hell he believed in), even he, was a man of habit. He had surely put his whips away for the night and was sleeping off his latest raid on the women’s quarters.
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