TORTILLA PRESS

James Calore

Leather and Lizard

Edward “Fortune” Smith stopped and looked down at his new boots that had cost him a week and a half's pay at the postal sorting center where he'd been working in the five months since his release. He walked another twenty steps, stopped and renewed his gaze downwards; confirming his initial thought that something was wrong. The late afternoon heat was pressing down on his back like a sticky moist hand, but the boots, made of mulatto brown leather with shiny green and graduated grey lizard inserts, consumed every bit of his awareness.

Eddie Fortune, as most people knew him, was waiting for his new western style boots with square toes to speak to him and tell him what to do to make themselves right. He wanted to love them in the worst way, but now he wanted some love back. He squished his toes and squirmed his feet to relocate the fit, but he wasn’t satisfied. He contemplated this latest unhappiness in his life while deliberately raising his head skyward, drifting deep into boot-fitting thoughts, when a quick movement and the feel of a gathering urgency distracted him.

Two men in suits with matching ties were running his way, jackets flapping this way and that as they loped from side to side gaining momentum. They were, in fact, looking directly at Eddie, focused on him like a locomotive headlight coming out of a dark tunnel. His mind blank for a moment, Eddie felt his body in motion slightly before his brain told him this was a potentially harmful situation and that he probably should remove himself from the vicinity. Pronto.

Eddie darted into motion, down an alley to his right and after a short sprint and a hard body lean into another tight right, brought him down a narrow passageway that opened into a small circular brick-floored dusty plaza. To his side and angled slightly away from the sun-drenched plaza, behind a half-height retaining wall, Eddie stopped to rest his wheezing body in a nondescript, recessed doorway perhaps a dozen paces toward the west, and the slowly departing afternoon sun. The ground below his uncomfortable new boots radiated the heat up in agonizing waves that enveloped his entire being. He was considering the unpleasantness of this when he heard the men run past the alley into the small, tucked-away plaza to his left. Eddie was sweating bullets, hoping his nickname “Fortune” still held some say in his future.