“Why not have me do it?” I asked him.
“Keep out of my business,” he said. “It’s my business and I’m going to do it.”
“All right, if that’s the way you feel about it,” I said. “Do your own business.”
He got the money out of the cash box, although then he always carried a hundred or more pesos with him all the time, and he said he would look after it. He went out with the money and so of course I thought he had attended to it.
A week later the notice came that they had no response to the final warning and so his mother’s body had been dumped on the boneheap; on the public boneheap.
“Jesus Christ,” I said to him, “you said you’d pay that and you took money out of the cash box to do it and now what’s happened to your mother? My God, think of it! The public boneheap and your own mother. Why didn’t you let me look after it? I would have sent it when the first notice came.”
“It’s none of your business. It’s my mother.”
“It’s none of my business, yes, but it was your business. What kind of blood is it in a man that will let that be done to his mother? You don’t deserve to have a mother.”
“It is my mother,” he said. “Now she is so much dearer to me. Now I don’t have to think of her buried in one place and be sad. Now she is all about me in the air, like the birds and the flowers. Now she will always be with me.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said, “what kind of blood have you anyway? I don’t want you to even speak to me.”
“She is all around me,” he said. “Now I will never be sad.”
At that time he was spending all kinds of money around women trying to make himself seem a man and fool people, but it didn’t have any effect on people that knew anything about him. He owed me over six hundred pesos and he wouldn’t pay me. “Why do you want it now?” he’d say. “Don’t you trust me? Aren’t we friends?”
“It isn’t friends or trusting you. It’s that I paid the accounts
