Cat Eyes

I was hitchhiking through Mexico with a guitar and a duffel bag. I scored a ride with a mango truck: cases and cases of mangos in the trailer of the eighteen-wheeler creaking groaning across the land.  The smells of dust.  Smells of mountains.  The smells of a dead horse lying by the road (narrow endless roads).  Young girls selling fresh juice at the crossroads in the daytime.  The smells of scrambled eggs and black beans and tortillas in the heat of early afternoon.

The kind and vulgar, smelly truck driver sat next to me, most of the time saying nothing, just staring through the smudgy windshield as I read a dilapidated Faulkner book even though my eyes couldn't focus on the words too well--the truck was lurching violently.  After several days, he turned to me and asked my name.

"What is your name?" he asked.  It was dark.  There was a comet in the sky surrounded by the stars that shone above the dark dark road (and headlight beams) in the nighttime as I fell asleep, my head against my arm against the window sill.  The breeze, the warm tropic breeze rushed by as we drove along the dusty road.

"Nate," I said, as I shook myself awake, shaking off the images that had begun to pass before my eyes of their own accord, fragmented images blending with other fragmented images--images of people I'd known, and places I'd been, and books I'd read, and thoughts I'd had, and prayers I'd prayed, images moving to the hypnotic sound of shifting gears and the squealing creaking groaning engine.

He was sleepy, too, and wanted conversation to help him stay awake.  So I tried to accommodate him as best I could.  "Your Spanish is very poor," he said.

   

One time we stopped in a little town:  three or four shacks on the left hand side of the road and everything else flat and empty as far as you could see with the shimmering of heat on the sand and on the road.

The driver took a nap in the truck and I went outside with my book, The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner.  A head popped out from one of the shacks far away...an old man furtively gesturing to me.  So I walked the length of the world until I approached him.  He invited me inside with great grandeur and I bought a coca cola. (Dusty floor and darker shadows.)  His wife talked to me a while.  Then he asked me if I would like to buy some medicine.  "Cat Eyes," he said.

 

"Are they the eyes of a cat?" I asked.

He shook his head and hobbled, disappearing into a room.  He came back out with a bag of seeds.

"They are for what?" I asked.

"They are for every illness," he said to me.  Both elderly people, they gazed at me, his wife quietly nodding her head.  They looked at me tenderly.  And waited for what I had to say. 

I said I wasn’t sick.

I walked outside into the blistering sun.  The flat empty land.  An empty land.  I went back to the truck.  The truck was rumbling into life.

Eventually I got to the border town of Nuevo Laredo, a town that I've been through several times.  I was walking towards the border when a drunken man who had eight children and no job came up to me to see if I had anything to give to him.  When he found that I did not, he offered to be my friend.

"You are crossing the border?" he asked.

"Yes," I said as we walked along, together.

"Which way are you going?"

I pointed vaguely towards the bridge.

"No, do not go that way," he said, grabbing my hand to lead me down another road.  "Do not go that way.  The current there is much too strong."