Buck season opened—still does—on the Monday after Thanksgiving. In Bakerton it is a holiday of sorts. School was closed for the day, and I reported to Keener’s at 4 a.m. to serve eggs and sausages and countless cups of coffee to men in...
My mother went to a high school which was run by the nuns. After she got through she wanted to be a nun too. My Grandma Toscana told me. But Grandma and the whole family didn’t want her to become a nun. They told her it was all right for...
Indian #9’s voice was gassed out of him in a trench in the Argonne Forest. After the war he’d left Chicago and come to California; with no voice, he decided to seek work in the movies. Because of his bulk—broad shoulders, bullish jaw, fists...
When Mr. Glen Otterbausch hired Sammy Boone she was sixteen and so skinny that the whole of her beanpole body fit neatly inside the circle of shade cast by her hat.
We hung our heads out of the window every time the train stopped, raising false hopes in the hearts of the Indian women, who ran along beside us even after the train was moving away. “Fresh pulque!” they urged mournfully, holding up jars of...
Fishily, he stared at the high ceiling, where grey plaster, delicately ringed by marks of old damp, was still shadowy, although bright sunshine struck into the room between cracks in the drawn blue curtains. Between the cracks in the...
The big white flakes sank down from the sagging sky. A wet gray light hung over everything; and the flakes looked gray against it, then turned white as they sank toward the dark earth. The roofs of the few houses along the road looked...
Seven years after the dictators left, their luggage stuffed with whorls of clothes and cash, we found out what Mateo Musco really was. We’d all seen him, walking his dogs around the neighborhood, smoking his cigar, letting ash scatter at...
The day care is run out of an old boxing gym where corrugated tin ceilings spread like sky and the glossed cement floors are always cold to the touch. Tucked into a northern corner of Long Beach, far past the beach and not so far past the...
