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A Starving Indian Woman JOHN MACAYEAL Dusk set in on the dirty streets lined with red-brick tenements. A short Indian woman walked by a tenement house painted purple, a tiny child at her side. She remembered when she had walked into that purple house hoping for work. A Mexican woman had driven her out like she was vermin. She passed a fourteen-year-old temptress in a short skirt and barefooted, leaning out of a lounge. The girl did not deign to notice the Indian woman in her dirty green dress, soiled white blouse, a red headband around her gray head. The Indian woman would not look at the girl either. She knew the girl would give her no alms. She passed some little children playing in the street, dressed not too differently from her three-year-old boy, who wore blue chinos and a T-shirt, though he was coated with filth, while they were clean. Of course it was too much to wish that her little boy could play with them and she could live in one of those red-brick shelters. She turned a corner and was now on the busy street lined with parked cars, cab drivers, and entrepreneurs standing outside and yelling strange words to the white people who gawked at her. She tried not to look at them with her wrinkled, grim face that had not smiled in such a long time, not once, it would seem to her, since she left the desert where she would sleep in a cave and stand out in front of the trains all day, waiting for the white people to throw her coins. She walked up the street and came upon the long arching bridge over the brown river that separated the land of the white man from the land of the Mexican . A Mexican border guard looked at her with his hard, mean face as she trudged up the bridge. She stopped halfway up it and sat down, taking out her alms cup. She saw some young white people coming by and held her cup out, but they ignored her. Some Mexicans came by, looking away from her and striding past. It was getting darker. Fewer and fewer people were coming by. Her little boy became tired and lay next to her. She put him under her dress. His little bare feet stuck out from it. The bridge was now pitch-dark and lonely. The last time some people had come by was fifteen minutes before. It might not be for a while until some more passed. ♦ ♦ ♦ 244 ♦ John MacAyeal She saw three figures moving on the other side of the bridge. One jumped over the sidewalk rail and yelled to his companions in Spanish. She put her cup out. They were coming toward her. When the three men came closer she saw smiles that betrayed a mean mischief. She held her cup out farther and weakly pleaded, “Leche para niño,” some of the few Spanish words the Indian woman knew. The men laughed. She stared up at them with confusion. Suddenly two of them bent down, each grabbing one of her arms. The third one ripped her blouse away and crouched down. She felt his hands on her back, spreading some sort of watery paste. She gasped and looked up at them to see if it were true, and, if so, why they would want to harm her. Now their mischievous smiles were gone. In their place were hard, cruel smiles. They glared at her with sinister eyes. One of them kicked the tiny foot of her child and he jumped up crying. She wished she could have hugged him. One of them shouted an order and they slammed her back against the wall and held her there, her lungs heaving with terror. She gaped at their menacing faces and wished she could have negotiated, asked who they were and why they were harming her. But all she could do was gasp in their faces. The little Spanish she knew—leche para niño—would be to no avail. Time stopped as they pressed on her torso and her little boy cried into her breast. She did not know if they would ever let go. She did not notice it once they finally did take their fingers from her. She heard them laughing and realized they were walking away. She tried to bend forward but found that she was stuck to the wall...

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