Make money doing the work you believe in
Tuxtla
Isabella, the first leg north. The third of Eyes Open.
The first bus ran down to Tuxtla, out of the mountains into the heat, and I need you to understand that for about three days I thought I was winning.
I had the window seat, because I had picked the coyote running the group and made myself useful to him inside the first hour. Not the way you are thinking. Or not only. I read him. That was the thing I could always do, the one gift dear old Dad left me that I decided to keep. I could look at a man for thirty seconds and tell you what he was scared of, what he wanted, and which of the two was stronger. This one wanted to be the boss more than he wanted air, wanted the others to see him as the boss, and a man like that you handle by being the one who takes him seriously when nobody else bothers. So I took him seriously. I asked him things. I laughed where he wanted laughing. By Tuxtla I had the good seat and first pick of the food and a little pocket of safe built out of nothing but paying attention.
I was good at it. I had been good at it my whole life, because when you grow up reading one dangerous man to get through the night, you come out able to read all of them. I never sat in a classroom for it. I never sat in a classroom for much of anything past ten. But there is a kind of smart they do not hand you a paper for, the kind you only get by needing it, and I had years in that school before I was tall enough to reach the stove.
So for three days I rode north feeling something I had no business feeling, which was good. Steady. In control. Like I had finally walked into the one place where my one skill was the whole game. These were men who bought and sold people, and I could work every last one of them, and that meant, I thought, that I was going to be fine. Better than fine. I thought I would come out of this the way I came out of every room I had ever been put in, holding more than I walked in with.
I want to be fair to her, the girl with the window seat. She was not stupid. Every single thing she believed was true. She could work any man on that bus, and she did. What she did not know, what nobody had taught her because the lesson does not let you live through it twice, is that there is a difference between the men and the thing the men work for. You can own every man in the room. I am going to keep saying it in these notes until you feel it the way I had to. You can own every man in the room and still be a box getting moved through it. But that was Tuxtla, and in Tuxtla I still thought the men were the room.
So let her have the window. She watched our country go by through dirty glass and felt like she was getting away with something. She was not getting away with anything. She was just getting closer. But Dios, she felt good those three days, and I am not taking it from her. It is the last time in this whole story she gets to feel like she is winning and be right.
