Rivera The Flower Vendor

Rivera The Flower VendorRivera The Flower Vendor, 1949Rivera The Flower SellerRivera The Flower Seller, (Vendedora De Alcatraces) 1942
exposed timbers. Not dilapidated enough to be called ramshackle, not nearly dirty enough to be called squalid, the place suffered instead from a sort of genteel neglect.Trotter didn’t spend much money he expected to have to as innocent letter carriers.He had prepared a series of bolt-holes, each more remote than the one before it. He hoped to escape civilization by degrees when the bloodbath began.No doubt he would have fled after Corky’s first visit had he not believed that Corky, as Robin Goodfellow, knew the location of every one of his bolt-holes and would descend on him in his hideaway with a company of cutthroat mailmen who would show no mercy.Toward the east end of the property, away from the house, stood an ancient unpainted barn and a prefab steel building of more recent construction. Corky knew only some of what Trotter was up to in those structures, but he pretended to have full knowledge.In the fierce heat of summer, the real threat to Trotter would flee at any moment. A man with his head in the lunette of a guillotine lived with no more tension than what Jack Trotter daily endured.A conspiracy theorist, he believed that a secret cabal ran the nation, that it intended soon to dispense with democracy and impose brutal dictatorial control. He was ever alert for early signs of the coming crackdown.Currently Trotter believed that post-office employees would be the vanguard of the repression. They were, in his estimation, not the mere bureaucrats they appeared to be, but highly trained shock troops masquerading