Jonathan Shaw is finishing up his rewrite of Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes and is suiting up for a cross-country motorcycle trip of Brazil. Over the next few weeks we will be featuring some travel-related blogs. This one was found in an old journal from 1978 and takes place in Suriname. Enjoy!
RUNNING AWAY
by Jonathan Shaw
Suriname, 1978
He climbed down off the little ship and looked around, slightly amazed at the lack of movement, at the stillness of things. After two months at sea his whole body was brown, browner than it had
ever been and his hands were big in front of him, palms red and swollen and calloused from pulling the big fishing nets out of the deep blue water. His arms and legs were scarred and scraped from the sharp, spiny submarine things that had brushed against him.
He stared out at the jungle for a moment. Beyond the docks and the little brown houses it was very green and flat and immense. He picked up his valise and turned around to wave goodbye to the shiny
negro boys who were still standing on the deck of the ship smoking and passing a bottle of rum. His companions for the last two months, they stood there like statues smoking and smiling and waving goodbye to him. They looked like they’d been standing there forever, carved from some decaying wood and photographed a long time ago. The photo was fading away already. He was alone again.
He turned and walked down the wharf, past the little fishing boats with their dark yellow ropes laying coiled on their decks like entrails of great, prehistoric things, past brown stevadores with
straw hats and the larger cargo ships, great looming hulks floating floating floating. It was all a dream.
He walked out on the road that cut like a hot black snake into the jungle. he had two hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket. He lit a cigarette and waited, and only as the little red and green and yellow bus rumbled up in the distance did he turn around again and see the port, the little wooden houses and figures moving about all frozen and tiny. Black and white and fading away.
The crazy gaily colored little bus pulled up and he took a seat beside a big black lady who was singing to a little baby that was resting in her arms. She offered him a piece of cassava bread from a
bag at her side. He smiled and thanked her though he really didn’t want the bread. The bus bumped down the road into town and the hot wind felt good blowing in the windows. The bread sat like dry cotton
in his mouth and the jungle was green and alive.
It seemed he’d been alone for as long as he could remember. Everything else was vague and black and white and faded away- not like this funny little bus that chugged along through the green green
jungle on its way to somewhere. This was real, this was life.
As he stared out the window at the blur of green green green his thoughts sunk into a lazy blur of black and white hazy things that he couldn’t understand. He looked out at the green, lost in the haze
of recollections. He tried to come back, but it was too late. He was tired, exhausted really. He was lost in it. He was a shadow.
He thought of a girl, though he couldn’t remember her very well; it was all hidden in the haze. Her face was a blur. It made him sort of sad that he couldn’t remember- only a dry hollow pit in the bottom of his stomach and even that was unreal and far away now. He saw other girls and other faces, some so old and faded away that it hurt his mind’s eye trying to distinguish one from another. Sad. All just a ridiculous painful blur of nothing. What did it matter? Why did this bloody thing have to creep up like a cloud of mosquitos and bother him?
He was drowning, oh God, come up for air, asshole… and like so many times before the phantoms retreated to their own far away place and he inhaled the deep fragrance of a new and unknown place and
sat back and lit a smoke and looked around at the bumping tumbling colorful mass of now and waited, waited, waited in the darkness of the burning sun, waited for the bus to arrive somewhere, some goddamned place.
He had two hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket and the little bus was moving. He sat back, relaxed and closed his eyes.
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 1978, 2009.
AAaaarrrrghhsome!….
Beautiful story telling.
been staying in the shadows for a little while reading your stuff here…just wanted say i enjoy a lot of it. the opening line on this piece was great in it’s simplicity yet captured much…& that’s exactly right, the stillness is amazing after being at sea…loved, too, his struggle with memory,
THANKS, GUYS… LOVE YA!!
THANKS SO MUCH, GUYS… LOVE YA!!
Love ya back!