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Show Acting Alone Page 79 students who had been following along behind him, mocking him with superior screwball eyes. "Whom should I call, mein Liebchen?" Sam had asked. (Keep Those Huns Entertained, was Sam's motto - they're on the rise again.) "Amerika," he'd bubbled - a German accent then. Now a Mexican accent. Chingamadre chingamadre chingamadre, he kept telling the asphalt. The ambulance, when it finally came, was like a Good Humor wagon. Flimsy, with that same sort of pink- and white-striped awning flapping in the sea breeze. Like loose scalp matter. The driver and the attendant stepped out, lit cigarettes, took a moment to eye Sam's flashlight enviously Chrome! And Sam knew he was a dead man. "El va a vivir? Vivire?" Sam asked, wondering how, (or whether) to form the future (or conditional) with an IR verb, and where, if at all, to put the pronoun. Correct Mexican/Oaxacan idiom? There was a little black dog at Escondido that had been hit by a car, but neglected to die. For three days it moaned and nodded its head and twitched its crumpled pelvis among the marijuana plants outside the tents of the Europeans, where the seeds from tossed roaches had sprouted. For three days this little black dog chewed at the red edges of the hole in its back, trying to close itself up. For three days it somehow avoided becoming lunch for the various packs of tourists' dogs: the huge purebred Afghans, Saint Bernards, French poodles, which band together at Escondido for a holiday fling at being tropical predators just for a little while before the portable cage and the long cold pressurized flight back across |