Milo awoke from dreaming in Spanish, bumped his head on something cold, and caught his reflection momentarily in the daycar window, as the train slowed. It was pulling into the station in a small town in the Midwestern United States, but Milo, still half-dreaming, was drenched in the subconscious details of an almost-forgotten holiday to Spain, years before.
"So this is Majorca," he thought to himself, noting the puffy, pasty, bloodshot face that regarded him from the reflection. He shook himself almost imperceptibly, and stretching as best he could while still sitting, realized he had to pee.
Before he had strutted confidently away from the laundry van a couple of weeks previous, Milo had donned a somewhat tatty and ill-fitting, brown pinstripe suit he had snitched from Armand. That the addled youth was six inches shorter and outweighed Milo by 45 pounds hadn't seemed important at the time. Now in America, he felt obviously out of place.
"Damn," he thought. "I shoulda taken the blue suit."
"He looks Portugese or something," ... "Yes, but his father must've been a bohunk," Milo overheard two matronly voices stage-whisper loudly nearby.
Pretending not to notice the ignoble mumbling of the unconscious working stiffs who had chanced to be his fellow sojourners, Milo moved toward the coach exit, tucking his thermos under his arm securely, and clutching in his pants pocket the bit of cheese he had so lovingly forgotten to wrap. He moved somewhat unsteadily down the narrow passage, through the snickers and twitterings of at least three dozen wayfarers. He knew they were all just a bit too stupid to realize that what was being flogged in Vogue magazine that season was equidistant, in fashion parsecs, from what they wore, as their own costumes were from Milo’s.
Farm hands and their char-woman spouses dropped their eyes and adopted their best casual "it-ain’t-l’il-ol’-me" postures, barely breathing as Milo squinched odorously past them, one by one. But he could feel the stolen side-long glances singing the unwashed, greasy hair on the back of his head.
"There is no feeling on Earth like the one you have being the six-thousandth chicken in a six-thousand-head chicken barn", he thought suddenly. "There is no glee in being poor and a nobody, unless you can find someone who is worse off to peck at".
At least, unlike them, Milo knew that he was hip somewhere -- back in the Chacos.
Pausing at the coach door, he turned and looked back into an array of faces what could have been hostile if they weren't so cowlike. He slowly panned the mooing sea, meeting those brave enough to look him in the eyes. It occurred to him that he probably had seen much worse at frat parties at the University of Chicago.
"¿Dónde está el baño?" he asked quietly.
In the split second it took for their bovine expressions to turn variously baffled or outraged, he turned, stepped down, and vanished.
Majorca
