The Front of the Freeway Read Online Free PDF Page A

timecard folded between my fingers at my side. I should squeeze my pruned, soap-splintered knuckles into a fist and throw it right through that perfect glass face. I should shatter every smirking, ticking tooth. I should tear the box off the wall, slam it into the concrete, and drive my foot through its winding, grinding, brass skeleton on my way out the door. Or maybe I should wake up.
    “Alright, Hulian, see you tomorrow, gringo !” Rodrigo slaps my back affectionately and nearly smashes my nose into the clock, snatching his jacket from a hook near the back door as he disappears into the parking lot. I glare after him and jam my timecard into the machine’s open skull, tetchily prodding its plastic brain and ramming the oversized bookmark back into a wooden file drawer on the wall. I can always quit tomorrow.
    Between Romeo’s on 12th Street and the bus stop on 9th, there are three liquor stores, two Lavenderías, and one squat plaster shoebox with a red tile roof that sells the worst 99 cent tacos in Southern California. If I’m hungry, I can wait ten minutes for a quietly hostile sixteen-year-old Latino to try his best to ignore me while setting out a tray of cold leftover chicken. If I’m patient, I can wait thirty minutes on the bus for my father to do the same. Today, I decide to save the dollar.
    As I pass the stucco-wrapped kitchen, the warm taste of popping grease and tomato-soaked rice dripping down from the slanted clay roof onto the sidewalk in front, the soft, distant chime of bells catches the wind and washes faintly over the street behind me. I hardly notice it at first, hands buried in my pockets, intently reconsidering a damp tortilla wrapped around a handful of chicken and oil, but as I cross 11th Street, the ringing grows louder, a swelling, jingling nursery rhyme bouncing up Vermont. Before I walk another block, the tinkling of electronic xylophones is on me, a howling kindergarten chorus whining from the road, and as I turn to the street, there, hanging out the long side-window of a white box ice-cream truck, is Tony, a wide hooked grin beaming under a tall paper crown.
    “Hey, dishwasher! You hungry?” The truck swings sharply to the curb, the towering square body rocking to a halt, Tony swaying along inside. He leans halfway out the open, rectangular cut in the paneled frame and offers me an outstretched hand, exchanging a short, palmed greeting and an amused, unsettled stare.
    “You stole an ice-cream truck?” Tony reels in the window and does his best to look hurt, eyebrows pinched to an indignant arch on his forehead.
    “Steal? An ice-cream truck? Man, what kind of depraved piece steals an ice-cream truck?”
    “A depraved piece of shit with a blunt behind his ear.” Tony’s hand flies to his head, cradling a neglected paper stem as his eyes dart up and down the empty sidewalk. With a more natural humility he tucks the thin white roll in the front of his candy-striped ice-cream apron and throws down a cocked, agitated smile.
    “Are you going to keep asking stupid questions the whole walk home or are you going to get in the van?” Instinctively, I shift my stare to the street and begin forming my mouth to an excuse, some invented apology about the bus or my father or my 6:00 a.m. shift, but why? There’s nothing for me at home but a television that won’t stop talking and a roommate who won’t start, and after last night I can’t help but want to reconstruct the whole strange and beautiful memory. But still, there’s something there, some vicious reflex shuddering at the suddenness and the uncertainty of it all. But Tony must have known all that, because before I can string the metro, my job, and my family into a coherent alibi, the back doors are open and Tony’s pulling me into the van by the collar.
    Despite the kaleidoscope of friendly pastels streaked across the shell of the truck, the interior has all the charm of a hospital bedroom, a sterile white box propped up on four