In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

THE PICKPOCKET OF TORRE BERMEJA / James Frazee I was buying merluza at the Plena Luna fish market when the pickpocket of Torre Bermeja went crazy, when I saw him walk in, this legless imp of a crook on the palms of his hands with lottery tickets clipped to the greasy lapels of his alpaca jacket. Earlier, he had been hawking these tickets without luck at a cigarette newsstand with his mangled gang, each with an eye or leg or arm missing; they had propped him on a trash bin behind them. Maybe it was their turn to stand in front and beg or maybe they just got sick and tired of him. No handouts in Spain; everyone had to work for a living. You see, this was the seventies and Franco was alive. How the pickpocket lost his legs you found out if you bowed to curiosity and made eye contact. I had already made that mistake. Without a peseta, no food, rent six months overdue, a hungry daughter, this widower found himself in a bank with a knife. Come from a family of caretakers, those nightwatchmen who cruise neighborhoods with skeleton keys to open doors for locked out residents at the clap of hands for small tips, he lost his patrol the night he let two kids in a flat they didn't own, who took off with jeweled crucifixes and a hidden life savings. As soon as he hit the pavement outside the bank, running with a pillowcase of money, the Civil Guard ordered him to stop and when he didn't, their machine guns fired cutting him nearly in half at the thighs. He winced, remembering falling back on his legs that tore away from beneath him. He said he looked like a run-over dog. The Missouri Review · 223 His daughter, forced into an orphanage run by nuns, scrubbed marble floors, peeled potatoes, was beaten by the tougher girls who swore to her Jesus wouldn't return until she was dead, then was locked up in solitary confinement for not confessing sins. Denied visits to her criminal father, despondent and mum, she stepped out in front of a bus, dying instantly. After four years of reading about it in her diary in prison he was released, and turned to cruising crowds on the Ramblas, in the darker plazas, at the Quo Vadis bar, any trafficked area where he could slip a hand into somebody's pocket. In summer he stole so much money he could afford a taxi from one hot spot to another. He bought a wheelchair in which he would run over, whenever he got the chance, the feet of nuns. But soon, as living on the edge catches up to you, he was caught with his hand in an off-duty policeman's pocket and spent six months in jail, his wheelchair taken away. The blue pigment in one eye began to chip away, his torso became stocky, his hands swelled into calcified paws, and his fingers, callus upon callus, yellowed from the filterless cigarettes he chain-smoked. By the time I heard his story he had been shouting out lottery tickets for three years. His voice was hoarse. When he came into the shady Plena Luna it was swarming with schools of shoppers and a pack of kids with squirt guns. Bluebottle flies strafed open barrels of fish heads at opposite sides of the counter, red gouges of mottled beef hung from bloodied hooks next door, and beyond, tables spread out carrots, squash, 224 ¦ The Missouri Review James Frazee onions, ropes of garlic, fat tomatoes, and liters of olive oil. The kids squirted him in his ears with the guns. He barked them away like a dog, swatted at them but they came back like the flies. No one did a thing to stop it, not even me, and the kids spun him around. Maybe it was a game. Maybe a dance for one. He fled to a fish barrel and tipped it over on one kid spilling hundreds of severed heads and guts and scales, then he ran to the other barrel, did the same and soon the floor sparkled and...

pdf

Share