Gun for a Gringo

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I was sitting there sketching with a pencil — stub on the marble table-top and rubbing it out with my elbow, when he came over and took a gander across my shoulder. It’s a great habit I have of killing time when I can’t pay for a drink I’ve ordered, for instance, or I want to stay out of the hot sun like I did just then. That sun they have down there at Costamala is nothing for a white man to fool around with. But under the big stone arches of this sidewalk café, which they called Filthy Frank’s, it was nice and cool and shady. So all the dirty looks I was getting from the mozo for staying there all afternoon on a twenty-cent gin daisy (unpaid) just rolled off my thick skin.

This guy that had just come up looked like a big shot; he reminded me of some of my former side-kicks in Chi. He had a headlight on his little finger the size of a walnut, and after he’d been breathing down the back of my neck a couple of minutes he said in my own language, without much of an accent: “You do that very well.”

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