Panorama City by Antoine Wilson Page B

could have been eating at the fast-food place by the freeway in Madera, the people of Panorama City didn’t look that much different from the people of Madera, except that when I looked at their faces I didn’t recognize any of them, and they didn’t recognize me, they didn’t know to call me Mayor, they didn’t know to ask me if they needed anything done around the house, they didn’t say hello, they didn’t say excuse me, they just moved around me like I was a dog who wouldn’t get out of the road. At one point a Mexican man in a cowboy hat smiled at me and said good afternoon, his teeth were capped with silver, he reminded me of the old ranch hand Sergio Cruz from Madera and I said good afternoon, did you enjoy your meal, and he nodded. I introduced myself, I let him know that I was new in Panorama City, I let him know that I’d only been working at the fastfood place a short while, but that if he needed anything at all he shouldn’t hesitate to ask, if there had been cameras they could have put it on the training video. He shook my hand, he introduced himself, his name was Alcibiades Cervantes, he’d worked on farms and
ranchos
in the area before they had been bought out and sold to real estate developers, before there had been a Panorama City at all, he lived in an old farm building right in the middle of town, he missed his horses, he thought about going back to Mexico, but the last time he had gone back so much had changed there, too, and it broke his heart to see the changes back there, even more than to see the changes here in Panorama City, and besides, his grandchildren, they were building their lives here, they were ignorant of all the changes that had come before, but that was their job, his words, that is all of our jobs, he laughed, to be ignorant of what came before, then he said he didn’t really believe that, as a matter of fact he believed the opposite. He said that the only good thing all of this civilization ever brought here was the fastfood place, he called it by name, at least now you could eat quickly and inexpensively, in the old days feeding yourself was a challenge, you were at the mercy of the weather and your animals. Of course I was talking, too, I don’t remember what I said. Then Roger appeared and said excuse me to Alcibiades, not like he meant it, but like he was telling someone to get out of his way. He pulled me to the back of the restaurant and explained that customer interaction was not part of my job, my job was floater, and right now my only interaction was supposed to be with trays and the dishwasher. He explained that customers walked in with full pockets and empty stomachs and left the other way around, no monkey business.
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    At the bus stop, a kid with a skateboard kept stepping into the street and standing on his toes to see if the bus was coming. I mentioned something your grandfather used to say, which was that there’s an art to waiting. He said why don’t you get me some fries and a Coke, then laughed, he looked around for someone to laugh with him but no one did. I didn’t answer him but instead reached into my pocket and pulled out my small binoculars and looked down the road to where the bus was coming from. There it was, shimmering in the heat of the road and the afternoon, about twelve blocks away, the flat face of it peeking through a tangle of traffic and wires and signs and palm trees, it was like looking through layers of grass and dirt and branches and leaf litter and seeing a ladybug on the ground. I told the kid that the bus was twelve blocks away, that it would be here soon, and he started to ask me how I could possibly know, and when he saw the binoculars he was silent.
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    A moment later, or maybe it was that same moment, Aunt Liz pulled up in her Tempo, she pulled to the curb in front of the bus stop, the kid had to jump out of the way. Even before I got in the car Aunt Liz asked why I was