Once You Go Back. 5 & 6

A Note From the Author. There are two chapters in this post. Buckey falls quickly into a new world. Without understanding the language, he’s swept to unexpected places and lot of new people. These pivotal chapters seem to go together. Hopefully this helps the reader identify with all the new people, places and feeling Buckey finds himself experiencing.

I’d really love y’alls comments about the length of these post. Do you want more longer ones like this, more short ones or a mix? Now, let’s hear Buckey tell his story…..

Chapter 5

Within an hour of my arrival, I already felt totally lost in this massive city where I couldn’t speak a word of the native tongue. Although I looked skyward to find my bearings, I couldn’t tell how tall the buildings were beyond the dense canopy of tropical fig trees. The sidewalks, if you could call them that, were jammed with little carts where locals sold piles of papayas and the donkeys slumbered behind them. 

Sleek powerful Jaguars crept by; the cars I mean. There were more Jags than I’d ever seen. At the corner gas station, a guy with a guitar wailed a country song at a volume that shattered my ears. Why so loud? And who ever thought they’d have country music in Spanish?

I arrived at the home of my new family where I experienced a less than warm welcome.

“You are too old,” Andreas, the Dad, greeted me at the gate to his yard. “We expected a college student.” 

He spoke broken English and was close to my age, but clearly I had already disappointed him. I panicked. Would I be orphaned by my family? No house? No hospitality? 

He opened the little gate off the sidewalk and stepped back to allow me to enter. A rusted Jeep sat on one side of the ‘yard,’ balancing out two lawn chairs and a sandbox on the other. The concrete house had only bars where there should have been windows. As Andreas closed the gate, two thugs harassed him about something. 

Glenda had been right about the urban ghetto but somehow purple bougainvillea tumbling over the garden walls made it sweet. 

“I am to be Daddy,” Andreas began to explain. “Well, we all have to play our roles.”