Pietro and Valencia Part two.

Pietro wakes up early; he is still thinking about Valenica; about the smell of her hair, her softness, and her eagerness. He also thinks about how a life with her would be, about how it should be but cannot be. He heats yesterday’s coffee in the tin pot and pours a cup. It is too hot to drink. He goes outside with the cup. With one hand he shakes a cigarette out of the pack and places it to his lips. He reaches in his pocket for his father’s Zippo. He looks at the USMC emblem on the old lighter.

The Zippo clinks open and Pietro lights the cigarette. He thinks of his father Noe, whom he knew briefly and misses terribly, and his mother, Maria, whom he never knew, and he is sad about the tragedy of their lives. It is too easy to imagine that this type of life could happen to himself and Valencia if they joined. He does not want this life. He does not want Valencia to have that life.

Pietro takes the cup and cigarette and walks along the quiet lane on which he lives. He can hear dishes clattering in Josephine’s house across from his casa. A dog is scratching fleas in the packed dirt lane. He thinks of his own family, such as it was.

Pietro’s mother died giving birth to him and this left only a stricken 20 year old Noe and the newborn Pietro. Noe fled with his grief and left the newborn Pietro with a sister. In a week he came back and began to raise Pietro with the help of the sister but the tiny boy’s eyes always reminded him of Maria. Noe blamed Pietro for Maria’s death but in reality it was their poverty that caused the young woman to die. Money for a clinic might have saved her but Noe had no money.

When Pietro was four Noe could face the child with Maria’s eyes no longer. He fled again, this time for good, to El Norte it turned out. Later money came, and once a photograph: a man in a green soldier’s uniform who looked somewhat like Noe, but to Pietro it was a stranger and he had to force himself to think of this man in the green uniform as his father. But Pietro loved his father and wanted him to come back and even if he didn’t exactly recognize the man in the picture he looked at it often and waited.

Pietro was raised with his seven cousins and the money from his father helped the family but one day the thin envelopes with only a check and a slip of paper with maybe a word or two no longer came. After five years they heard no more from Noe.

When Pietro was 12 a gringo came to his village and the padre brought him to see Pietro. The gringo’s said his name was Gary and he was Noe’s friend. He told of Noe’s bravery fighting for an adopted country and how he died by a bullet meant for the Lieutenant, fired by another soldier; a bad soldier. Noe was a hero but the circumstances of his death were never acknowledged. Gary gave Pietro the Zippo and at 12 Pietro was alone. He no longer waited for his father to return.

Pietro’s thoughts turn to Valencia and he knows what he must do. He turns and walks back to his casa; today he will see the coyote.

Go to Part Three