As per the letter’s instructions, Hernando approached the innkeeper, Señor Juan Gonzales, hired by Don Rafael to run the inn in order to pay off a debt, and informed him that letters would soon arrive, sometimes many in just one day. Gonzales was to keep these letters, and every Sunday after the eight o’clock Mass, he, Don Hernando, would come to the inn for breakfast and Señor Gonzales would slip the letters to him, hidden wrapped with the tortillas. Señor Gonzales was not, under any circumstances, to hand the letters to anyone else.
For three months, Gabriela mailed all letters for Hernando to the innkeeper. Don Rafael, at first glad to see his son had finally given up his foolishness, quickly grew suspicious of Hernando’s Sunday visits to his innkeeper, Señor Gonzales. When confronted, Señor Gonzales, easily intimidated, told Don Rafael that, yes, Hernando received letters, though Señor Gonzales claimed not to know from whom. Don Rafael instructed Señor Gonzales to set aside one of the letters to be handed over after Hernando had retrieved the others. Unable to disobey Don Rafael, yet unwilling to betray the young Hernando, Señor Gonzales took the first letter to arrive on Monday, hesitated only a moment before opening it, and set himself the task of copying it over and over again, doing so for the full week, meticulously tracing each letter until he had finally mastered Gabriela’s hand. And then, Saturday night, Gonzales forged a letter from Gabriela, claiming that she no longer loved Hernando, that she had met another man, a doctor, and that she wished to never see him again. He sealed this fake letter into an envelope and marked the envelope with a small X in the top right hand corner.
Anxious about the deception, however, Señor Gonzales, by mistake, gave the forged letter to Hernando, and accidentally passed one of the real letters, one that had arrived just the day before, to Don Rafael, only realizing his mistake as Don Rafael, after opening the letter, handed the unmarked envelope back to Señor Gonzales.
“Aha!” exclaimed Don Rafael. “It is just as I suspected. It is a letter from Gabriela. And also as I suspected, she has finally broken his heart, has left him for another man, a doctor.”
Escape from the Mall
I have only known Roger for a couple of hours now, but when he comes over to me, he’s got a look on his face that tells me he’s got something on his mind.
He’s wrapping a strip of tattered cloth around the palm of his hand. It’s a serious venture, this wrapping of the cloth around the palm of his hand. As he walks over to me, he seems to be considering this process more than he’s considering me, more than he’s considering the act of walking, which is why, even though we are all huddled here — the seven of us — here in this janitor’s supply closet, which cannot be much larger than a decently sized public toilet, why it takes a good minute or two for him to reach me. Why it takes him long enough that for a moment I consider meeting him halfway, if only to quickly get over with whatever it is he is going to propose to me.
Instead, I try to think back over the past couple of hours to see if I can remember what he might have done to the palm of his hand, but I can’t remember anything in particular. Granted, there is a lot to remember. Granted, there is a lot I’d rather not remember.
The way Jennifer slipped on the wet tile in the middle of the food court just as the hordes rushed over her, for example. The way she screamed for our help. The way they slurped as they slurped her up. I could stand to forget that.
Not to mention the way that black guy, that black guy with the kid, the kid who’s now sulking, red-eyed and snotty and blotchy-faced in the corner, the way that guy turned around at the last minute, at the very last minute, right before Roger jimmied the closet door open, turned around and charged into the throng of them, wielding Roger’s Louisville Slugger and yelling over his shoulder, “I’ll always love you, Tyrone,” the way they kind of just parted for him, like the Red Sea for Moses, stepped aside and let him charge right into the heart of them before the mass of them swallowed him whole.
That.
I’m pretty certain I’m not the only one who’d rather forget that.
But as for Roger and his palm and what might have happened to his palm that might now require such deliberate attention, I can’t say as I remember.
He hasn’t stopped moving toward me even as he’s come close enough to me that he could probably whisper whatever it is he’s going to say and I’d still be able to hear it, and for a moment I think to myself, Maybe he’s going to kiss me. And then I think, That’d be unexpected.
But he doesn’t kiss me, which is fine, as I think it might hurt Mary’s feelings, Mary who’s been looking at him doe-eyed since he decapitated the one that was about to rip her skull off and eat her brains out.
He doesn’t kiss me, but he leans in close enough that I could bite his nose if I wanted to. I guess he could bite my nose if he wanted to, too.
Neither of us bites the other one’s nose.
“How you holding up?” he says, whispering hoarsely.
“Great,” I say. “What happened to your hand?” I ask.
He lifts it up and points it palm forward at my face and says, “This? Nothing. This ain’t nothing. I’m good, man. I’m good.”
I don’t get much of a look at it before he drops it quickly back down to his side, but the smell of it that lingers in the air where his hand was just a second ago smells rotten and earthy. But before I can force the issue, he tells me he has a plan.
“A plan?” I ask. “A plan to do what?”
“We’ve been sitting here almost an hour now,” he says. “We’re starting to get restless. We’re starting to panic.”
I shift my eyes to get a look around the room, and no one looks restless or panicked. Everyone looks tired and sad and sweaty. No one looks restless or panicked at all, except for Roger, I realize, once I shift my eyes back to him.
“Sure,” I say. “What’s your plan?”
This story has nothing to do with me. I know this, even as I am in the middle of it. This story has everything to do with Roger and Mary and Tyrone and the security guard. I don’t know the security guard’s name, but he’s got a look about him, a look that makes me think that this story is his story, too, more his story, anyway, than my own. He’s got that reformed-addict-turned-security-guard-waiting-to-make-the-ultimate-sacrifice-for-people-he-doesn’t-even-know-in-an-attempt-to-atone-for-the-misery-he-caused-in-his-youth kind of look. That, or maybe it’s just that he looks bigger than the rest of us. Bigger and unhurried, too, as if he has seen all this before, or as if just this sort of situation — a zombie attack, an alien invasion, a giant, ferocious lizard, mutated by the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima, rampaging through Houston — was what he had been planning for, what he had expected when he signed up for the job as a security guard for this mall in the suburbs. But when I mention this to Mary, who, every time I speak to her, looks surprised to see me there with the rest of them, she tells me he’s stoned.
I’ve got a story for Mary, too.
Recently divorced, mother of two.
Not the prom queen from high school, maybe a late bloomer, but when she bloomed, pretty enough that she married that prom-king type.
Maybe an actual prom king from the rival high school, or not a prom king at all, but a quarterback, or point guard.