After having eaten, thirty hours of starving due to Johnny's high school Spanish being very shallow so not understanding the dining car was going to be left behind before they arrived at the place where the bell had been ringing as Johnny had insisted to his wife Linda Ann that a second bell would ring signifying another dinner time and then being sidetracked for ten hours waiting if the Mexican President's train going north as they waited with all the vending machines out of order with this added frustration matching their not see through compartment window that made for a twilight zone feeling to pervade their lives since they left Nuevo Laredo the morning before, Johnny decided to go look for accommodations having told the travel agent that if she did it for them it would have stifled a doing of a tourist thing. Johnny told Linda Ann, that she would be comfortable in the park beneath lovely trees watching their luggage and by the time he returned she would be feeling better; still resenting her a bit for having devoured his hot-hot spicy meal saying it was hers and he sort of delighted that she was feeling the effects of the never before eating anything more spicy than a tiny dash of black pepper. He bitched and moaned for ten minutes on how she had stolen his meal.

A half hour later Johnny returned drenched with sweat suggesting it wasn't going to be as easy as he thought; mentioning three places had seen his desperation and had jacked up their prices and then when he said his wife was with him the sleeping price went up to double - way over the thirty-five dollars he had budgeted for each night in San Miguel Allende.

Within five minutes, still complaining about his lost meal, he was up again and the look on Linda Ann's face as he left was the same one on her face when he tried to take his meal from her and she had waved her fork - missing his forehead by inches.

As he walked in this old section of town he felt as if he had returned a hundred years in the past where the once free proud Indian had dwelled. When the furtive whistles began, he flashed back to an eleven year old kid staring at a picture depicting Custer's Last Stand and now suddenly he realized what the guy was thinking when viewing the eighty million Indians looking down at him from a hundred ridges: Look at all those fucking Indians! He was sort of glad only whistles accompanied his walk and had stopped as he was leaving the old impoverished neighborhood.

Just before the park entrance he spotted a guy wearing blond hair and he hoped it was the guy's; rushing up to him nearly out of control with eyes glazed; surrounded by sweat; in a trembling Custer like voice he asked the guy if he were a USA person. Johnny jumped with excitement when the man replied: "I'm a bloody Englishman, sir."

"You were once our mother country! And because you taxed us for past services like the French and Indian war and we thought if we could dump you guys we'd never have to pay taxes aga-"

"Are you quite all right?" the man said in his most vehement caste system tone.

Johnny got a grip on himself realizing he often meandered around a point he was trying to make and he finally asked him, using less than ten words, if he knew of any reasonable accommodations in the area. When the man told him of one about two miles out of town, Johnny almost kissed him but his upbringing rivaled the mucho shit of the conquistadors and so he just pumped the man's hand for a minute and than began a big run to Linda Ann who was still wearing a severe expression - only now it had added ingredients of anger and disdain to it.

Within minutes they were in a cab and so excited he was he didn't realize his front seat tilted so much that he was leaning so far backward that he could see Linda Ann from ankle to head.

Getting out of the cab just in front of the very nice looking hotel surrounded by many trees, Johnny bent to get the suitcases but on the upswing he could not manage to get back into an erect position. He whispered painfully for Linda Ann to get a room and not to worry about the price.

Linda Ann came back in five minutes telling him it was thirty-five dollars. He nodded and smiled and began his hunch back of Notre Dame walk - not able to see the smile on Linda Ann's face.