Candy Kid by Dorothy B. Hughes Read Free Book Online

observing a complete stranger.
    Jose repeated, gesturing toward the street, “Your pardon, Senor.” And out of whim, surely for no other reason, he converted to the Spanish tongue. “Step aside, you great mountain of warm chicken fat,” he directed. “Allow a true gentleman to pass beyond the stench of your uncleanliness.” All of this he spoke in gentlest fashion, smiling courteously the while, bowing in compliment.
    The man gave no indication that he understood. Not one of his sparse eyelids twitched. He did stand aside, but only as if it had just permeated his thick brain that Jose wanted to go by. He said nothing at all, not so much as a grunt of apology.
    Jose passed, murmuring, “Mil gracias.” He turned left, he had no idea where lay the street of the Female Burro but it wouldn’t be to the right, the bridge lay to the right. Tourists were coming across it in a constant trickling line by now. The time by his watch was eight-twenty. He would not inquire directions as yet; if he went as far as the Plaza it would be no more than a brief and entertaining walk. A man might need a breath of fresh air and moonlight away from this perfumed section of town. There were shops on the Plaza, shops that did not depend on Americanos, where he might make his inquiries with more discretion.
    By this hour the pavements were crowded. He threaded his way through those men who would sell and those who might buy. The din of those who cried their wares, and those who babbled of the heat and the smell and the prices and the postcards they must send to the folks back home, the added blare from the loud-speakers of the big cafes across the street, did not permit a man to speak to himself of precaution. The large woman in the damp print dress, the large man with wet circles under his arms, a wet swathe across his shoulders, did speak a warning. The same kind of jostling might remove an envelope from a pocket. Jose slid his hand into his pocket and kept it there. Without the envelope, he could not receive the package from Senor Praxiteles.
    He had moved one block only when his path was again barred. And again it was deliberate. But this time it was not because of the envelope he carried. The barrier was a small staunch man, incredibly dirty from his shapeless straw sombrero to the gunny sacking laced about his feet. Not because shoes were difficult to steal, from a borracho it was nothing, but because shoes hurt the man’s toes. Hung from his neck was a battered accordion, an equally battered cornet, a flute which had once been polished, and two small brassy cymbals. He clanked when he moved, he had clanked from the doorway of a liquor store just before Jose approached. He was called Canario.
    He swept his dirty hat from his dirty head and he bowed with a renewed clanking before Jose. “It gives me pleasure,” he pronounced in Spanish, “to make music for you, Don Jose.”
    Jose had not expected the old brigand to remember him after so long an absence. It was true that Canario had helped him and a couple of fraternity brothers escape the police on a night out in long ago college days. But the memory was as far away as childhood to him. How Canario could carry one face in memory, out of the hundreds he saw come and go on the bridge, was little short of incredible.
    Jose gave him bow for bow before apologizing, “Later, my good friend. I am in haste at the moment.”
    He might as well have saved breath. Already the flute tootled from Canario’s lips, his elbows squeezed the accordion, a string wound about his tapping foot clanged the cymbals.
    “Later,” Jose repeated impatiently, meanwhile attempting to crowd by. But Canario would have none of it. He pulled away the flute and began to sing in cracked falsetto. It was a moment before Jose listened to the words:
    “Take care when you walk the Avenida Juarez,
    Take care, take care, my old friend;
    There are girls who will wink at you,
    There are men a little drunk,
    There are men who