An Acquired Taste

by Darrell Maloney

  They’d replaced the boats with a stone bench dedicated to John Benevidez.

  Many tourists and residents alike had rested their backsides upon that bench over the years. Many had wondered about the inscription:

  DEDICATED TO THE LIFE OF

  JOHN BENIVIDEZ,

  ONE OF OUR FINEST

  It was a simple tribute, much like Benividez himself, who’d been short on words and long on actions.

  Many times in the years since its dedication passersby had wondered, “Who is John Benividez, and why does he have a bench with his name on it?”

  Most, though, couldn’t have cared less.

  John smiled as he sat upon the bench. Doing so never failed to call back memories of the gentle old man.

  This bench was just one of the reasons John enjoyed coming here.

  The old man had been a kind soul, yet just a little peculiar in his ways. But he was far from the only one.

  “Hey, you on the bench!”

  John heard the words, clear as a bell.

  Now, John was a Godly man, and would have been forgiven if he thought it was the voice of his maker, coming from the heavens above.

  But God’s voice would have been powerful and distinctive.

  It wouldn’t have had the quivering quality of an old man’s voice.

  Nor was it likely to have a heavy Spanish accent.

  He waited until it came again.

  “Hey! Hey, you on the bench!”

  Then he looked up and laid eyes on Loco Julio for the very first time.

  -18-

  He was a strange little man who reminded John of a leprechaun, although he wasn’t dressed in green. His dress suggested more a Mexican laborer, with black work shoes, khaki pants and a short sleeved plaid shirt.

  A heavy tuft of gray hair peeked beneath a faded San Antonio Missions baseball cap. The old man had worn the cap for so long the once-vivid Mission blue now matched the color of the sky above John’s head.

  An even heavier gray mustache, perhaps once neatly trimmed, now extended well beyond the corners of the man’s mouth and threatened to take over his whole face. It was thick and unkempt and did an effective job of covering the man’s lips.

  John couldn’t help but think a good-sized Guinea pig had taken up residence by parking himself permanently on the man’s face.

  By studying the man above him, John was obviously taking too long to respond.

  “What are you, deaf or something?” the man yelled again. “I’m talking to you.”

  John took no offense. The words weren’t overly harsh, nor were they meant to be.

  He responded, finally, to the little man standing on the seventh floor balcony of the hotel directly in front of him.

  “Yes, sir. How can I help you?”

  “How can you help me? How do you think you can help me? You can hook up my bucket. I’m not standing here for my health or to get a sun tan, you know…”

  As he spoke he shook a rope in his hand.

  John hadn’t noticed the rope until then. One end of it was attached to a metal bar on the balcony’s wall and extended all the way to the ground, twenty feet or so in front of John’s feet.

  At the base of the building, next to the end of the rope, were five bright yellow Igloo brand water coolers, each with a bright red screw-on lid.

  They were lined up in perfect order, like dressed-out soldiers waiting their turn to march into battle.

  John was surprised he hadn’t noticed them before.

  “Well, what are you waiting for, young fella? Tie one on. You gonna make me climb down like a monkey and do it myself, what good are ya?”

  A lesser man might have taken offense at the old man’s words.

  A lesser man would have decided he didn’t have to take such abuse and would have walked away, perhaps cursing at the old man or flipping him off in the process.

  John just thought the whole thing odd.

  And perhaps a little bit ludicrous.

  He did as he was told. He took the end of the rope and tied it around the handle.

  “Be sure and tie it tight,” the old man warned. “If ya don’t you’ll pay a heavy damn price.”

  It took John a moment to figure out what “heavy price” the man was referring to, then determined he wasn’t making a threat. Not necessarily, anyway. He was apparently going to lift the cooler up to his balcony, and was warning John that a sloppy tying job would result in it tumbling back down again.

  Likely upon John’s head.

  John finished the tie and took a step back, then looked up at the old man.

  Sure enough, the man pulled the rope, hand over fist, and drew the container closer and closer to him, struggling and grunting all the while.

  The strain of his task and his grunting, though, didn’t stop him from muttering the entire time.

  Many of his words made no sense to John, yet some were quite clear: “Can’t get good help anymore… about time… how long does it take to tie a simple damn knot, anyway?”

  A lesser man might have walked away, but John didn’t.

  John just smiled and watched.

  “Now don’t you run away just yet, you varmint,” the old man said as he struggled to get the container over the patio’s rail. “You ain’t done yet.”

  John, half out of curiosity and half of desire to be helpful, held his ground.

  As the old man lowered the rope again for the next cooler, John’s curiosity got the best of him and he opened the lid on one of the plastic soldiers.

  They were all filled with the murky green water of the San Antonio River which flowed a few feet behind John’s back.

  Some things suddenly made sense.

  But many others didn’t.

  The old man obviously lived in the high-rise hotel.

  And he was obviously replenishing his water supply.

  But why live so high? There were many places in the abandoned office buildings in the area on the first and second floors.

  And why lift it up in such an odd manner?

  Why not merely walk to the river and fill up a few bottles, then carry them home in a backpack?

  That was the tried and true method; the method used by hundreds of other survivors who depended on the river to provide water for boiling; then for drinking and for cooking.

  That method, though, wasn’t good enough for this nutty old man.

  Whoever he was.

  John was conflicted. He could see the old man struggling as he lifted each cooler up the seven stories. He wanted to offer to carry the water up to him. But at the same time he suspected that making such an offer would subject him to an outburst. Perhaps a long streak of carefully chosen curse words.

  But he couldn’t risk the peculiar little man having a heart attack. Not when he was able to head it off.

  “How about you just open your door for me, sir? I’ll bring these up the stairs to you.”

  “Ain’t no need for that, you snotty-nosed whippersnapper. Just ‘cause you’re younger than me don’t make you no more capable. No stronger either. This ain’t my first rodeo, ya know.”

  John didn’t know why, but he liked this salty old man. He seemed to have a die-hard spirit and need to fend for himself.

  He seemed determined to conquer the world and to show everyone else it was his planet and they were just visiting there.

  He needed no one.

  Except for maybe a passerby to tie his rope to his water containers for him.

  -19-

  Tillie surprised herself when she awakened in late morning. Her last memory was of lying on the bunk beneath a nasty bed sheet, hiding from mosquitoes which had made their way into the sleeper. She’d tried her best to swat them but they were impossible to see in the inky blackness.

  And they seemed to be eating her alive, a tiny bit of blood at a time.

  The bed sheet, on the floor beside the bunk, seemed her only course of action. It smelled of body odor, urine and spilled food. But she’d endured
worse smells in recent months.

  Her last thought before she awakened was one of disgust, thinking she’d never get any sleep on this particular night.

  She’d cast the sheet away long before, as she descended into a deep slumber. Now the sun penetrated the opaque sky light above her head, and the cab was getting very warm.

  The mosquitoes were nowhere to be seen, and the bites she’d suffered the night before were gone without a trace as well. Either they’d drained her of every bit of blood she had or had grown bored with her and gone off in search of other prey.

  Her body was stiff from having slept in the same position, a fetal position, for several hours.

  But at least she’d slept, and she needed sleep to be on her game.

  She stepped off the bunk and started to straighten, then reached out to support herself against the side of the sleeper to keep from passing out.

  The dizzy spells were coming more frequently now, sometimes several times a day.

  She knew why they were coming, and worried about their increasing frequency as well as their intensity.

  Tillie used to tell people it sucked to be in bad health. It sucked even more to get old while in bad health, for aging seemed to amplify the health problems she’d had all her life.

  Still, she always told people, getting old and sick was better than the alternative of being dead.

  “I’ve got plenty of time to be dead later,” she’d say with a half-hearted smile. “Right now I’ll just enjoy being alive, as miserable as it is.”

  She’d suffered from high blood pressure since she was a young woman.

  The doctors couldn’t tell her why she was afflicted with it, exactly, other than to say it ran in her family.

  She did exactly as she was told to do. Exercised when she could, kept her weight down, ate the proper foods when she could, avoided stressful situations.

  And took her medication religiously.

  Then the blackout happened.

  Stress became a very real, and very unavoidable, way of life in the new world.

  And her medicine became harder and harder to find.

  Luckily it wasn’t one the dopers were stealing from the local pharmacies. At least not at first. Later on, when they started running out of the tried and true methods of getting high, the pain pills and anxiety meds, they started experimenting with new things.

  But by that time Tillie had taken enough of her hypertension medication to last for several months.

  She could have taken much more. Could have cleaned the pharmacy out of a bulk container holding almost a thousand pills.

  But Tillie, being Tillie, had refused to do so.

  She reasoned that others would come along who’d need the drug as badly as she did.

  She would not allow herself to be greedy and deprive someone else of the life-saving medication.

  It just wasn’t her way.

  Instead, she learned how to find more of the drug from other sources.

  She learned to identify the pallet on the trucks headed to the big box stores which contained pharmacy supplies.

  It was the pallet with an orange paper placard attached to all four sides.

  The pallet at the very front of the long trailer.

  The first pallet to be loaded and the last one off for security purposes.

  It was the only pallet which had to be inventoried jointly, between the truck driver and a representative from the receiving store. Every box on the pallet had to be removed and inspected for signs of tampering, then checked off the driver’s manifest.

  She found, while traveling across the country on her way to San Antonio, that most such pallets were left undisturbed.

  The items on such pallets were of little use to most highway scavengers. For the cardboard boxes were mostly unmarked.

  They weren’t marked with words such as canned soup, or dried pasta or breakfast cereal.

  For the majority of highway nomads things which couldn’t be eaten were worthless.

  She’d been able to maintain her supply of medicine until recent weeks, when she noticed someone else knew the secret of the magical orange placards.

  Someone else, apparently, who suffered the same ailments which had dogged her for many years.

  Someone who was also headed east.

  In recent weeks she’d come across several of the pharmacy pallets which had been rifled through, boxes thrown everywhere.

  And all of her life-saving medicine was missing.

  Not everyone in the world was like Tillie.

  Not everyone had enough humanity to take only what they needed, and left the rest for others.

  Perhaps she’d been a sap for doing so.

  She’d recently run out, and had gone without her medicine for almost a week now.

  The dizzy spells were increasing and were becoming more severe.

  Several times in recent days she’d passed out, coming to after a few minutes face down on the pavement.

  She tried to be calm, for stressing out would only make things worse.

  But she had to find more medicine. She just had to.

  Or she’d die.

  -20-

  Tillie waited until the spell eased and her vision cleared once again.

  She waited a couple of minutes extra just to be sure, lest the dizziness return.

  While she waited she guzzled a bottle of water, then half of another. Dehydration, she was well aware, compounded the problem.

  The sleeper cab was equipped with a small access door which she could have used to egress directly onto the highway.

  As was her habit, though, she chose not to use it.

  To do so she’d have had to climb down, facing the truck, her back exposed to whatever dangers might be out there. She’d be blind to whatever or whoever might wish to do her harm.

  And she was already skittish because of the pack of dogs which had forced her into the truck to begin with.

  No, her habit was to climb from the sleeper area into the cab and then into the driver’s seat.

  From the driver’s seat she’d have an unencumbered view through the truck’s expansive windshield of everything which lay before it.

  From the driver’s window she could see everything south of the rig; from the passenger window, everything north of it.

  And the huge mirrors which hung on each door gave her a fairly good view of what was behind her.

  She’d sit in the driver’s seat for several minutes, surveying everything in all directions for any sign of movement, any of a dozen different threats.

  And to get up her nerve to go outside.

  It was a hell of a way to start her day. Actually a hell of a way to live her life.

  But it was her lot. There wasn’t much she could do to change it.

  It was, in essence, her cross to bear.

  And she was up for the task.

  Through the windshield, from a vantage point she hadn’t had the day before from the highway, she could see a UPS rig a quarter mile above.

  It was the first good news she’d had in days.

  For her education about life on the road included things other than the magical orange placards and the goldmine of medications such marked pallets contained.

  She’d also learned that several drug store chains relied on UPS to move their medications for them.

  It made sense. For while it cost more to ship medicines by UPS, it was also considerably more secure. Each box was scanned and tracked separately. None ever got “lost in shipment” or “put on the wrong pallet.”

  In Tillie’s experience, few highway nomads knew that secret.

  Virtually all nomads and scavengers steered clear of the UPS trucks. Word had gotten around they contained precious little food. And never any water.

  They contained lawnmowers and computers and copy paper and desk chairs and a thousand other items which were absolutely worthless in the new world.

  In short, they weren’t worth the time and effort to pilfer.
<
br />   Except for people like Tillie and precious few others who knew their secret.

  People like Tillie who were desperate to find the medicines they needed to prolong their lives.

  Tillie forced herself to smile. Maybe her luck was beginning to turn.

  Finally summoning the courage she needed to exit the truck, she opened the driver’s door and looked down to the ground.

  Then she gingerly climbed down to the blacktop, looking in all directions to make sure she was still safe.

  “Please, Lord, have my medicines on that truck. You know I don’t ask for much. As much as I want to meet you someday, today is not that day. I have people I love I want to see again first. People I want to hold and express my love to. If it be thy will, let me do that before I come to see you.”

  It wasn’t much of a prayer, but she got her point across.

  She struck out, thankful her stroller was still where she’d left it. Surely several nomads had passed by and could easily have taken it. Most wouldn’t have, for there were certain unwritten laws most of them conformed with now. To steal from another nomad while he or she was sleeping would have been bad form.

  Still, there were still a few rebels out there who thought only for themselves. The way Tillie’s luck had gone lately, it wouldn’t have surprised her if one such miscreant had happened by while she slept.

  The hard rubber wheels of the stroller purred as they rolled along the asphalt. Tillie crested a slight rise in the highway, the same one which had prevented her from seeing the UPS truck the day before, and saw she was only a couple of hundred yards away from it.

  She smiled again, and crossed the fingers on her left hand.

  She needed the medication, and was confident God would have it there waiting for her.

  But nothing had been easy for Tillie for a very long time, and this would be no exception.

  As she walked past an SUV the dizziness returned.

  Her head began to spin, slowly at first, then enough to make her feel nauseous.

  Even worse, she was seeing spots.

  The same spots she saw as a precursor every time she’d passed out in the past.