The Front of the Freeway Read Online Free PDF

barren white walls. A long rectangular ice-cream cooler stretches across one wall, bright Nestlé and Häagen-Dazs stickers splashed at angles across the cold metal front, as a silent body shivers nervously against it. Martín greets me with a skittish glance and buries his eyes in his lap. Tony shakes his head and snaps the gaping side-window shut.
    “What’s going on, Tony?”
    “Business, my man, business. Always business.” Tony turns and moves to cross the narrow sheet-metal cabin but loses his balance as the truck lurches and leaps back into the dense, frantic rush hour traffic. Hurling across the van in two wild, lunging steps, he catches himself on the cooler, resting his hand just behind Martín’s bowed head, gently nodding in rhythm with the sway of the cubicle. “And today,” he finishes, knocking his pointed knuckles against the cooler, “this is our business.”
    Clinging to the wall for support, I edge towards the cooler, around Martín, and beside Tony to pull back the loose white lid draped over the trunk. Inside, a dense, icy haze sifts and crawls between four glacial walls, a thick, smoky mist breathing in slow circles around the frost-coated frame that caresses three stout plastic cylinders buried in the fog.
    “January’s a bad month for ice-cream business, Tony.”
    “Who said anything about ice-cream?” The van pulls hard to the right, launching Tony hard into the cooler, as the heavy plastic tubs slide through the murk of the metal coffin. Martín’s head bobs. “People don’t need ice-cream, you know? And I always try to invest my money in the things people need. Food, shelter…medicine.” He pauses, hanging on the word medicine, letting it sit and sink and weigh in the air as he plunges his hand into the swirling mist. “Supply and demand, JT, that’s what it’s all about. You got to supply what people demand. If people demand medicine, then today we give them medicine. And this right here, this is my pharmacy on wheels.” With three soft pops Tony snaps three plastic disks off of the ice-cream tubs, churning the smoke and drowning the open containers in the haze of a flustered cloud. But as the vapor settles and the plastic columns appear through the fog, the ice-cream turns to bricks: three narrow stacks of flat, square, clear-wrapped bricks, the size of business cards, separated by color, mud-brown, clay-orange, and a flawless, sugar-white. A chocolate-coffee-vanilla Napoleon, straight from Tony’s freezer.
    “Medicine?”
    “Medicine!” Big Officer Pauly growls from the driver’s seat, his swollen, bulging eyes watching me in the rear-view mirror, his leather-bound badge dangling from a beaded, metal chain around his massive neck. Los Angeles’ finest, here to escort Tony straight to the scene of the crime.
    “Well, now I know where all the ice-cream went,” I drawl. Tony looks up from the cooler and splutters a loud, surprised laugh, and even Martín breaks a timid smile. Pauly’s ballooned stare wrinkles to a bloated grimace in the mirror.
    “Listen, JT,” Tony starts, his voice sinking with an uncharismatic sobriety. “You don’t need to do anything. Just watch and listen, you know?” Just watch and listen. In a few days I’ve dropped from colleague to pupil. Or is this a promotion? I always thought Tony remarkably confident for a sandwich boy and a high school dropout, but with this, his business, I suppose it makes sense. And the ice-cream truck, and his interest in Pauly, that all makes sense, too. But what I’m doing here, that doesn’t make any sense at all. I don’t know if I’m Martín, an extra body that doesn’t threaten Tony, or if I’m Pauly, another pawn with some part to play in Tony’s game. Or maybe I’m something else altogether. But it feels good to be out of Romeo’s grip, and even if Tony has to drag me in by the collar, I know how rare it is to feel every pulse and bone and vein in your body telling you to go. So what’s one more