The Roads, Puno and Real, passes by the Plaza de Arms in the city of Huancayo, Peru, the streets go back to the days of the Inca’s, now modern with smooth hard concrete, and dusty on this early Saturday morning. Surrounding this city are the Andes, high mountains, green and brown.
At the corners of Puno and Real are two wooden huts, each having a woman proprietor inside them, selling several different newspapers; this Saturday morning, the sun was dropping down over the mountains onto the city, the altitude 10,500 feet above sea level.
Outside the city, in the valley of Mantaro, are several villages, with adobe houses, and hard dirt streets: children and parents, doing their shopping, and so forth. Women on their roofs washing their babies and hanging cloths, dogs on the roofs barking, men on the streets, and in the side empty lots playing ball; some men just sitting on chairs by shops against the building walls, smoking and drinking beer.
Back in Huancayo, at Puno and Real, a garbage truck just stopped, two men run to the local shops, collect trash, some of the trash is sitting out on the sidewalk, near the street. There is a crowd of people in the plaza, gathering up for a wedding in the cathedral. And an old man has come up to the street corner carrying a suitcase, He’s looking about for a place to sit down or so it seems, he looks uncomfortable, and tired.
A kid asks him if he wants a shoeshine.
He handed him his suitcase said, “Look after this.”
“What did you say?” asked the shoeshine boy.
“If you would guard my suitcase while I find a place to wash up and so forth!” said the old man, somewhere in his mid seventies.
“Isn’t that a bit dangerous, I’m a stranger to you, I could run away with it, most kids around here would,” said Johnny, about fifteen years old.
The sun was taking the chill out of the air; it was bright and fresh, with a little breeze.
The old man was looking up the road, when the boy made his statement-question. He looked at the boy out of the side of his right eye. Keeping a view up the street, then he pulled his collar up, and hat down, covering his face somewhat.
“Maybe I’ll get them yet,” the old man mumbled. “They’ll kill us both if they see you with me.”
“Well I don’t know what you’re talking about old man, do you want a shoeshine or not?” said the boy.
The chill in the air was now gone, the old man’s eyes was boiling, looking at the boy annoyingly and suspiciously up the street. He started to grind his teeth. There was a new quiet between the boy and the old man, a kind of bubbling curiosity for the boy,
“Lad,” said the old man, “sorry but it is called self-preservation.”
For a block or two, the road was flat, and then it went down hill, that is when he saw the three men, one after the other, their heads appearing over the hill onto the flat road.
“They’re not going to stop,” he said to the boy.
“Stop it,” said the boy.
The old man grabbed his suitcase back out of the hands of the boy, untied a rope he had tied around it.
“You better go before you get into trouble,” said the old man to the boy, and handed him a dollar bill, but the boy remained standing where he stood.
“What do you want?” asked the old man.
“Nothing,” said the shoeshine boy with a face that said, perhaps the old man is having a walking nightmare.
“Why not?” said the old man, trying to see how close those three men were getting to him, talking to the boy, but not looking at him.
“Not sure why, old man, do I need a better reason?”
“Then thanks for your company, but get on out of here there’s going to be trouble.”
“Well,” said the boy, and stepped back a foot or two.
The old man smiled a beautiful Peruvian smile, holding on to his half opened suitcase, looking at the boy, and then the three men coming towards him.
“Wait,” said the boy, “I’ll talk to those men; tell them not to hurt you.”
“Don’t bother, they came to kill me,” said the old man.
The boy thought, he must had really got mixed up in something bad, awful. He reached inside his suitcase, pulled out a white towel; the three men walking across the street now, twenty feet from the old man. No one said a word, nothing. The boy wondering what the old man did,
The old man looked at the boy, said, “I was trying to get out of town, and I double-crossed those men, it now is them or me, now you know what it is all about.”
They were now all at the same street corner, Puno and Real, and looking at one another.
The boy said to the three men, “He’s just an old man!”
“You better step back boy, before you get hurt,” said the taller man of the three.
The old man dropped the suitcase on the ground,
The short fat man, one of the three, said, “He’s gentle as a lamb,” and they all started laughing. At that moment, the old man pulled out a silver plated 38 revolver, from under the white towel it was wrapped around, said as he started shooting ‘Well, good-night boys’ and within seconds all three men were dead on the ground.
The police were up the street, at the other end, two women directing traffic, one across the street guarding the bank, standing outside of it, leaning on its stone structure, another police man at the far end of the plaza, they all pretended not to have listened to the shots, and continued to do whatever they were doing with out interruption.
The old man then walked into the Plaza area, sat down on a bench, and told the boy, “Ok, now give me a shoeshine.”
9-12-2008
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