AltBrothers

Roaches in the street

The morning began like any other had during that time. I’d woken up and gotten ready for work. I knew that I needed to be at the bus stop at a certain time. If I took the bus that stopped at the end of my street, it would take me into the few blocks I needed to go into downtown where I’d connect with the bus that would take me to work. I was doing temp work, as seemed to be my destiny after graduating from college, but the work had been paying the bills, so I didn’t complain.

On this particular morning, I followed my routine all the way into downtown. It was a cool but sunny Autumn morning. I had to walk between my bus connections and was nearing my downtown-to-work stop when I noticed a couple of men walking casually on my side of the sidewalk. I usually try to pay attention to what’s happening around me and my attention to these people was nothing out of the ordinary.

Two twenty-something Latin guys who’d been walking in front of me stopped to speak with two guys, one a middle-age white guy and the other a Latin-looking guy in his thirties of fourties. “Just some guys hanging out on the street” I thought as I approached. The conversation might have lasted a minute, two max. By this time I was within six feet of them. The older Hispanic guy turned to walk in the direction I’d just covered as the older white guy accompanied the young Latinos to the corner.

The white guy stopped at the corner waiting to cross the street and the two Latinos rounded the corner and continued to walk. I was at the bus shelter by this time. The Latin guys were about 50 feet away at the entrance of a parking lot that sat behind a building. The sound of a revved engine suddenly caught my attention. I turned toward the noise. A blur of white, traveling faster than the sound it had produced, passed in front of me.

The white SUV swerved toward the entrance of the parking lot, blocking the path of the young Latin guys. The situation happened so fast, it seemed as though the police had jumped out of vehicle with guns pointing, even before it had stopped. The police’s suspects obeyed their shouts to “get down”. The two suspects were cuffed and loaded into the vehicle as fast as the incident had begun.

I turned to look in the direction that the white guy had taken. He was walking back up the street, along with the older Hispanic guy. I looked at them closely. They wore the same clothes as before the incident but now they no longer seem like street people to me.

What had the Latin guys done? Who were they? Where did they live? Where did they come from? Where’s the mother who gave birth to them… the brothers, the sisters, the aunts, the uncles, the cousins, the good friends? Where was the family? I still wonder what happened to the Latin guys taken down, that morning, like many black brothers have… like roaches in the street.