He comes to a stop before a hut with signs of commerce. He gravitates to an open door, desperate now for a life-saving short bottle of rum, a beer, something, anything, fuel, sustenance. An old man leaning on a wooden post stuck in the mud there stares at the traveler, unblinking, expressionless, with the look of a dumb domestic beast. A silver dollar sized birthmark dominates the side of his balding forehead. He continues staring with eyes like a guilty rat. What could he possibly be thinking? Who gives a fuck? Jonathan stands by the door and waits. Nobody comes out. No sale. Growing irritated now under the guilty rat eyed gaze, he wanders off again, feeling those rodent eyes behind him, following him down the muddy road like a beggar.
He walks on as if he really knows where the fuck he is going. But it’s always worked before. He can feel his boots sinking sadly into the red clay earth that permeates his cells in this place which is like an unwelcome part of his own lowly being. And this red clay earth knows his despair, knows his interminable irritation, frustration and unease, taunting him in the subtle molecular frenzy manifesting all around him now, as if conjuring and creating these perfectly irritating visions of scrawny mutts barking behind rusty barbed wire fences where tough bald skinned chickens run in circles of futility like tiny alien beings. Naked children gape and point and giggle like a horde of demon runts as they follow the strange looking traveler. Their numbers grow steadily as he trudges along wearily like a pissed off plague-ridden condemned sideshow attraction.
Dull-eyed gaggles of locals point and gawk at him like a spaceman as he approaches a mud-hole of an overgrown plaza, only recognizable as such by the crumbling monument to some ignoble looking military honcho. Indians are sitting around. They seem to be too bored to stare or even see the traveler as he passes. And he is invisible again now, standing finally in front of a ramshackle building with a weathered hotel sign and a glaring bare light bulb surrounded by bugs. Jonathan ducks inside quickly, as though afraid it will fade away like a mirage if he were to wait any longer. And then he is facing a counter where a wrinkled old mummy of an ancient woman takes some limp bills from him and hands him a bundle. There is a folded hammock, a towel, a tiny bar of white coconut soap, he notes as he hears her grunting something unintelligible at him. She hands him a key, pointing a skeletal brown finger down an unpainted wood hall. He goes.
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009