I AM A VOYAGER
I am a voyager, like the little red
airplane cavorting about in this blue-tinted, brownish sky. Mouth
agape, I am sensitive to the possibilities of gravity; blue eyes
staring wide into the mouth of the universe – is it really only a
bowl? Am I a spaceship out of control, in headlong flight, a crash
inevitable? With palms pressed together, I pray, and press my face
into the damp pungent earth. It feels like home.
In a world of my own beliefs, I’m a
newcomer – a Mexican, perhaps. And, I have been hurled around in
this city for far too long. The possibilities of escape intrigue me.
I have been hurled around inside the
universe for much longer, and I am like a leaf pressed flat against
this spinning plate, until I am no longer conscious of my previous
state, eternally removed from my earth bindings – I am an Inuit. My
igloo has melted and I have no map to tell me where to go.
I am a voyager, in a world I don't
understand. A world of big league television, video life, the
shopping mall, a brown baked world under a sun of 365 days, where belief is an excuse to murder. And for those who put fire in their
mouths and mush in their minds – I am a Christian, a Catholic, a
protestant, a Jew. I am every man, every woman.
I have been sitting in my place on the
road. It is the same corner where the blind man sits. There is a tree
here on this narrow two-lane highway. The shopping centers are
nearby, and there is a television every 200 feet. I am reading a
book. It cost fifty cents, slightly used. A book heralded in 1929 as
an adjunct to the English novel, a book in which a young girl says,
“My lover, never fails to leave me with too much
optimism, and therefore I am never disappointed.” Did she really
say that? I don’t know.
It would seem that the whole of
Christianity were based on this novel, appropriately. Too much
optimism being the case in point. Does one really wish to acquire too
much of anything? Not according to this source, albeit tongue in
cheek.
I am watching a cloud formation build.
I see reflected in the sky lost dogs, people with questions,
scientific explanations, and the Spanish lady who saw Jesus with
outstretched arms in the rainbow about four o’clock this afternoon.
Farmers harvesting sugar beets nearby
don’t even look up. Pickers shouldering black garbage bags in the
baby’s breath field are only waiting for the truck. “Jesus says,
Jesus says, Jesus says,” is whispered down the track, where the
pickup will bounce and jar through the ruts at dusk, and the long
river of gold winding up the hill tonight will be the headlights of
the trucks, in which the pickers are riding home on the 101 freeway,
out of Ventura.
And, the Indian Chief cleaning out his
vending wagon at the gas pump water hose curses his fat son, who
worries about finding a safe place to keep the picture of the
piggyback space shuttle he has recently acquired.
The cab of the wagon is so filled with
garbage that it falls out on the ground when the door is opened. In a
practical sense he is correct to worry, as the shuttle, an eight by
ten glossy is sure to be lost in that mayhem. The Indian Chief turns
his cursing to the onions, which have wilted, and as he goes to the
station attendant to get water for washing them, he only momentarily
glances at the sky, which has turned fierce and threatening. The
onions fall out of their cardboard box as he hurries – they mix
with the oil and dirt of cars and diesel trucks. The rain is now
imminent, if there is any justice left in the world that’s not been
used up by the spiritual forces, a woman, he thinks.
There used to be a girl living on this
road who was stagnant. Her ovaries were useless. Her mother, who had
long been accustomed to braiding her daughter’s hair in ribbons,
took issue with the trucks, believing that the stench that had
lingered about their house for years was the overpowering smell of
diesel, and that the fumes were responsible for her daughter’s
condition.
This was not found out until the girl
had gotten a husband, however. The young couple had been subjected to
years of detailed questioning about their sex lives. This caused them
both unbelievable embarrassment. And, the ritualistic foods that the
girl's mother made them eat was the most awful stuff anyone could
imagine. This devil of a mother–in-law suspected the husband as the
source of their infertility, and she was determined to bring order
to the chaos of this childless marriage.
Finally, she consulted a witch or
seeress, as some may call this creature, who to this day lives behind
the gas station. Ashamed of her failure in setting things right with
her daughter’s ovaries, she sat with her head bowed, prepared for
censure, but to her horror was treated to a comedy. No sooner had she
sat down in the most confining and stuffiest of shacks, when the
witch turned to this distraught and maddened mother-in-law and hooted
so loudly that several trucks nearing the intersection slammed on
their brakes, one screeching sideways into the private area of the
gas station, nearly demolishing the shack itself.
Both women stared through the tiny
window of the shack at the grillwork on the truck just a few inches
from their noses. The witch woman, a self-confessed observer of such
events was the most stunned, for it was the first prophesy that had
come through for her in months.
There are fewer diesel trucks on this
road now, for it is fairly common knowledge that someone is taking
pot shots at their tires. The police were summoned in the beginning,
but as there was no serious crime as yet, their attention soon waned,
and their report time became so sporadic that they sometimes arrived
to investigate the first shooting after the third had occurred. No
one has called them in weeks. And, nobody has been killed.
[to be continued]
Shareen Knight
© 2014
