ERRANDS TO RUN IN BOGOTA, 1976
The easter season was winding down, and Bob and Elise had to get on the ball and get down to the U. S. Consulate and renew Elise’s visa so she would be all set to apply for a U. S. Permanent Resident card, known as a green card, which would allow her to get a lab job in the U. S., and be a Teacher’s Assistant at a university chemistry department.
So she was dragging him along downtown through the echo canyons between skyscrapers, and there was diesel exhaust smoke from the buses, which would belch clouds of it when they took off. There was also charcoal smoke from the food wagons along the sidewalk.
Stepping excitedly around a dying beggar covered in sores, Bob pointed at a movie marquee and yelled, “Look! It’s ‘The Exorcist!’”
One of those oops moments. He looked back at the beggar, who said in Spanish, “Don’t you have some place to go?”
Later in the waiting room of the consulate the people on the couches were shooting the bull. There was a sturdy suntanned Japanese woman who had been farming in Brazil. Elise got to talking with a friendly and funny Taiwanese guy trying to start a chain of restaurants in California. She got tips from him about how to make fried food taste better, and she took his telephone number to get in touch with him back in the States.
He said he hoped to live long enough to forget some things he’d lived through. Though he looked like he was in his 30’s, he was 50 something.
He said back in the days of the ROC, the Republic of China, when the Generalissimo (Chiang-Kai Shek) was still running things in Taiwan, he (the restaurant guy) had been doing his military service
OK, and one time they’d put him on a firing squad detail. He and the other lost souls in the detail had stood around with their guns in the execution court, joking as they waited. A little gallows humour as it were.
Finally a door creaked slowly open and men brought the prisoner out, a woman who had belonged to a Communist cell. She had her eyes tightly shut, and her legs didn’t want to work. She had pissed herself. They helped her along. She kept saying, “No! No! No!” She was crying.
The soldier who would years later become the restaurant guy, thought, “Is this for real? We’re going to shoot that lady? She looks like my mother!” They had told him and his buddies that one of the guns didn’t have a bullet. Now in the consulate he said, “I hope the empty gun was mine! But maybe it wasn’t. You know,
I gotta live. I have a wife now, and two kids.
Maybe if I love them very very much,
every moment of my life,
I won’t think so much about that one day.”
Richard Wayne Horton has published 3 books of poetry and hybrid fiction, Sticks & Bones (2017, Meat For Tea Press), Artists In The Underworld (2019, Human Error Publishing), and Ballet For Murderers (2021, Human Error Publishing). He received 2 Pushcart nominations, and was the 2019-21 MA Beat Poet Laureate. He has published in Meat For Tea, Bull & Cross, Danse Macabre du Jour, Lothlorien Poetry Journal and others.
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