Mr. Thomas Mota

Clean.  There was something about how clean they were that I didn’t much like.  Mayhap it was something about the way their teeth looked when they smiled.  A room didn’t have no life in it if there weren’t a few cobwebs hugging up in the corners of the ceiling.  My hand itched to do something.  I hadn’t cleaned the Sig yet today.  No time alone with these people.  Naive as they looked they knew enough not to trust a dusted up old man who’d come knocking on the gates just ahead of a mob.  They way they’d looked at me you’d thought I was one of Them.

Grub was good.  I knew they wouldn’t poison me.  Now that vixen with the tight mouth might, but the rest of them had their morals.  If I was them I would’ve done it.  But then again I wouldn’t even have let myself in the gates.  This was why things got to be the way they were, all that trusting and all them morals.  I leaned back in the chair and looked at the dirt under my fingernails.  It weren’t fake like all these white walls and whiter smiles.  I was real.  They were just ghosts.  She looked up from her glowing sheet of whatever gadgetry she was fooling with and smiled at me real fake-like.  I picked my nose and flung what gold nuggets I could find onto the floor.  She looked away real quick, back down to her work, whatever kind of calculating she’d been babbling about over dinner.  I grinned, scratching at the salt’n’pepper stubble on my chin.

“Eyla,” the Mayor called from the other room, “Eyla, please show Mr. Mota in.”

She hesitated for a moment before looking up, first at the door, then at me.  I got to my feet as she stood with that kind of unsettled jitteriness I’d seen on plenty a hoss.

“Right this way Mr. Mota,” she said with a nice kind of pleasantness that didn’t come nowhere near her eyes.

I grinned and walked by her into the Mayor’s office, giving her a wink as I ducked through the door.  Old coot I might be, but I still had the step and the charm to unsettle a shaker at midday.  I shook the mayor’s hand and let my mind wander as he began rambling through the niceties any blowhard windbag loves.  That boy.  There’d been something about that boy that didn’t fit with the rest of the place.  I grinned and the mayor seemed pleased.  He must’ve said something clever.  I’d never know.  Before I lit a shuck and left this place to the mob I’d have a talk with that boy.  Like as not he knew the good sense of cobwebs and dirt under your fingernails.