After breakfast he continued to erode and blow off life's embankment but he was sanguine for here he was once again in America, the country that made up so many of his years. Insular capsule that it was under the current chauvinistic and militant regime, it was more or less his land as one of its class that was entitled to permanent residency. Still he could envision a more preferable state. It would be a UN government of the world mandating human affairs without any member countries having the right to veto. It would have the best hope of bringing financial equity and justice to the world, halt excessive military spending and wars, slow down environmental degradation, and allow for an extra millennium of life; but such a thing did not exist. Such a thing could not be sought by sensitive souls as a refuge for hope, optimism, and an ongoing positive perspective of life. Here he was in the embrace of the bully, and he told himself that here in America he would stay. But then he thought that it really was not his country anyhow as proven by how he had been treated at the airport. The immigration officers had put him through an inquisition suited to potential terrorist cells all because of his tourist visas at Vientiane and Kuala Lumpur prior to his arrival in South Korea. His treatment had not exactly been a welcome home placard; and of course having lost his residency card, that laminated summation of himself, had not helped.
Guillermo decided, as night approached, to take the trolley into San Ysidro to make his exit into Tijuana. He was not about to stay in a shelter. Unlike many Mexicans, he could reenter America another day. His was a mostly legal journey having obtained a passport years earlier for his military service, which enabled these sojourns. Still he did not have much money so at the tiny train stop, feeling that his monetary worth was no different than muffin crumbs sustaining pigeons at St. Vincent, he stared at the large ticket machine with awe and bewilderment and then spontaneously leaped into the sudden emergence of the trolley with the automatic opening of its doors.
The doors closed and then reopened at the next stop. He breathed out, wondering if he should get out quickly. His ambivalent finger remained pendent over a button that would keep the nearest door open if pressed. A man entering the back of the car with his back shoving and parting those that clogged a door was not a trolley cop. His leather coat was a lighter brown than trolley trolls and his entrance came backwards. A woman entered with her face forward. The face lacked animation apart from a visible twitching or throbbing in her left temple. Both of them carried a stroller. Guillermo looked again. No one else was entering from the other end of the car. He was safe.
His eyes returned to them. The black woman was pregnant and in her early thirties. She slowly seated herself, careful not to disturb the infant that she now had pressed against her. She did not look at it nor at the man that had helped her raise it here. The raising of the stroller, the folding of it, and the child himself were the only evidence of the marriage of these heavily withdrawn strangers who were forced to sit next to each other. The man's size 13 shoe was in the aisle pointing toward two black women in the passage interlinking an adjacent car who danced long inundating rhythms reminiscent of tribal heritage and sang a beautiful threnody together. He thought to himself that if all marriages were what he witnessed he was lucky that experience had mutilated his normal proclivities. As he saw them he felt the reality of what he construed to be their life together. His mind began to refine some philosophy or perspective from the raw material of his feeling and his whole body tilted in their direction when he suddenly lost what was his focus for the doors again opened.
Have your tickets out!" the trolley troll spoke generically from another door in the car. His words were rough. He turned his head to the right. The trolley train troll saw a little child around the age of six putting her hands in the greasy KFC bag and pulling out a KFC bird. He watched her eat the meat as the trolley recording said, "I would like to remind all passengers that there is no smoking, eating, or drinking in the trolley; and please, out of consideration for other passengers, do not put your feet upon the seats. Thank you." For a second it seemed that the saliva lurched around the lips of the trolley train troll like a lasso. He snatched away the bird from the child's fingers and the entirety of the KFC bag causing the girl to cry. Then to Guillermo he said, "Get out your ticket!" Guillermo gave an affected display of a search. He hesitated, contemplated his situation for some seconds, and spoke.
"Listen, I am trying to get a job in San Diego. I only have $20.00 but I didn't deliberately set out to avoid buying a ticket. Without thinking about it I just jumped in. Maybe subconsciously I wanted to save money but I didn't plan it that way. You are a brother. Surely you understand desperate situations cause desperate actions."
"I'm not your brother," spoke the trolley troll in Spanish.
"You know the language of the Mexican brothers and your skin says that you are south of the border."
"All skin, as you put it, can be American. An American is from everywhere."
"I know English well, and I am Latino so I guess I'm American as apple pie."