“I am happy about what has happened to my mother,” he said. “You cannot understand.”
“Thank Christ I can’t,” I said. “You pay me what you owe me or I will take it out of the cash box.”
“I will keep the cash box myself,” he said.
“No, you won’t,” I said.
That very afternoon he came to me with a punk, some fellow from his own town who was broke, and said, “Here is a paisano who needs money to go home because his mother is very sick.” This fellow was just a punk, you understand, a nobody he’d never seen before, but from his home town, and he wanted to be the big, generous matador with a fellow townsman.
“Give him fifty pesos from the cash box,” he told me.
“You just told me you had no money to pay me,” I said. “And now you want to give fifty pesos to this punk.”
“He is a fellow townsman,” he said, “and he is in distress.”
“You bitch,” I said. I gave him the key of the cash box. “Get it yourself. I’m going to town.”
“Don’t be angry,” he said. “I’m going to pay you.”
I got the car out to go to town. It was his car but he knew I drove it better than he did. Everything he did I could do better. He knew it. He couldn’t even read and write. I was going to see somebody and see what I could do about making him pay me. He came out and said, “I’m coming with you and I’m going to pay you. We are good friends. There is no need to quarrel.”
We drove into the city and I was driving. Just before we came into the town he pulled out twenty pesos.
“Here’s the money,” he said.
“You motherless bitch,” I said to him and told him what he could do with the money. “You give fifty pesos to that punk and then offer me twenty when you owe me six hundred. I wouldn’t take a nickel from you. You know what you can do with it.”
I got out of the car without a peso in my pocket and I didn’t
