luck's tor part two

        "What's up, Jen?"
        "Just clouds."
        "No. Not just clouds. You've been depressed for weeks. You miss The Skipper."
        "That's the trouble. I don't."
        "You did your best."
        "Not really."
        "You think you short-changed him. You're wrong. He short-changed himself."
        "Yeah yeah."
        


                                                                                             *


        Powys Rhys-Jones hung up the phone. The connection to Cayo Verde had broken down. He wanted to speak to his daughter, to hear her voice, possibly for the last time. He looked around, eyes rabid, at the mongrel horde loitering in the bus station. They all had filmy teeth and wore pistols. He suffered from lice and genital herpes contracted in prison. A Mexican calabozo not far from a patch of desert where Zapatistas had been buried up to their necks and trampled beneath the hooves of Federales. He stood alone humiliated in this hellpit. His bowels began to squirm and cramp. He wanted to take a dump but was afraid of public stalls. He had not endured rape and beatings in prison and hitched rides with machete-wielding fruit-pickers who took wayside shits, laughing and joking, while he would seclude himself behind a prickly pear, all the way to the Rio Bravo, and ridden the damned Grayhound through Texas, Louisianna, Alabama and Florida, just to end up on a Miami commode with a bullet in his brain.
        His daughter had wired him enough dough for busfare and a few expenses. He could grab a cab now and and zip up Biscayne Boulevard to Little River and check into a cheap hole-in-the-wall motel he knew from the old days when he was Mister Slick, the man in the know, to all the maritime rednecks along 79th Street and the Causeway.