a dream deferred
by free man jung
The road thru San Juan pueblo is a thin copper wire stretched neatly taut and sometimes in the opaque early morning darkness the truck seems almost to float, as if thru space and as tho it knew no direction home. They say that in an airplane traversing a deep fog, one can lose sight of which direction is up and run the airplane into the ground. It's something like that, but there is an inscrutable, fearsome feeling of being lost which overtakes me sometimes as I drive home after work.
The night shift ends at 2 am and I usually drink a lot of coffee on the way so I don't fall asleep, but on this night, there was none in the kitchen or at the bar and so I left without it. In my dreamy haze, I almost didn't even notice, and I was already pretty close when I saw what appeared to be a black plastic bag in the middle of the lane, flapping in the wind. I swerved the little truck-- my brother's truck-- to avoid the dark void in the road and as I drew near, I stopped alongside it. Suddenly, emerging from formlessness, a young girl in a cheap, black, shiny jacket, much too big for her, stood up and stared directly at me. She couldn't have been more than sixteen. At the moment, I didn't even know that I took account of her appearance, but now I am sure it shall never be forgotten.
Her face was pale and sullen. Her hair fell in a pitch straight line behind her neck. One little ear lay hidden beneath, but the other stood out. She pulled at the elastic cuffs of her jacket but didn't move from where she stood in the freeway. I began to feel a panic for her sake. Any moment the lights of some enormous truck would overtake us and I would lose sight of her in the blinding flash. Rolling down the window, I leaned out and said,
"You're gonna get hit by a car sitting out here in the dark like that. Don't you have somewhere to be?" I looked closer and saw that tears streaked her august cheeks. My previous apprehension melted and dissolved into a deeper, more sinister feeling, but I tried once more.
"Get on now, go home!" and before she disappeared into the emptiness, she intensified her gaze for just a moment. I will never forget her eyes -- clear, penetrating. Even now they send a violent tremble thru evbery fiber of my self.
As soon as she was gone, I continued onward, thru the embudo and to my bed, and I didn't think about her again before falling asleep. I dreamt that she was standing in front of me, just as I had seen her there-- her hair as black and brilliant as her jacket moved ever so subtly by a breeze unfelt and unseen. This time, I stepped out of the truck and shut the door behind me. This time, I didn't speak and she didn't run. This time, I held still and stood before her and allowed her dark, crystalline eyes to set my very soul ablaze. In that moment I loved her with a passion that could never be reclaimed in my waking life. I awoke to the early afternoon sun pouring over my eyelids and felt a heavy longing descend.
I felt exhausted. I could have slept til work, but I forced myself to get out of bed. The azulejo of the old adobe was ice-cold to my toes, but I stood it as best I could.
Wasn't she cold out there with no shoes on? I thought, stupid Indian girl. It felt morbid to imagine that she had done anything other than run home to bed. Surely her mother or father was awake and worried-- an abuelita at least? She might even be married, have kids at home.
What would drive someone-- a young, pretty someone-- to do something so-- I stopped. For a moment, I couldn't catch my breath.
I'm sure she made it home alright. I began to think that maybe I was just jumping to conclusions. There's a million reasons why she could have been out there, right? If there's anything I've learned, it's that people rarely do things for the reasons we all assume. Maybe she was looking for her cat, or just wanted some fresh air. Still, that doesn't explain why she was kneeling in the freeway.
Suppose that spot was some sacred place, I thought, and we just went and put a road there. And maybe she was keeping some blood ritual, because they do that sort of thing, you know. My stomach began to hurt.
As a line chef composing immoderate opulence for the unendearing masses, breakfast is rare, or any cooking at home for that matter. Most days I just wait until work to eat, but I had some chorizo in the fridge and I thought the food would do me good. Sometimes in whirlwinds of desperation, I used to rely on food to satiate my anxiety, but I don't think it was like that this time.
I smashed three cloves of garlic with the flat of my knife. I can mince garlic in no time, but decided to be more careful with the onion to get a finer mince than usual.The rhythm of my Wüsthoff steel against the heavy wooden board was hypnotic. Before too long I started thinking of her again.
Mama always used to say that they have a violent culture, & I suppose I believed her. I wondered if the girl had been a victim of violence who was running to escape and it was all just too much for her. She had to cross a good piece of nothing to get out there too. She must have been walking for hours. I wondered if there might be alcohol involved because that's a big problem in their culture. If I had been more honest with myself back then, I would have acknowledged that in my own norteño culture, alcoholism is tolerated & domestic violence is not uncommon. It's always easier to see faults in them, I suppose-- human nature.
I began to wonder about whether this had been her first time, or if-- I hesitated a moment on the brink before diving into a flood of macabre fantasy-- if she had tried herself in places of imminent mortality before, only to shirk the knife edge at the last moment, dodge the bullet. I was so lost in thought that I almost burnt the eggs. I grabbed the skillet & placed it near a window.
What else could she have meant by being out there all alone? The beginnings of a tear welled up in the corner of my eye, but I was sure then that it was just the onions even though it had been a while since I chopped them.
Before getting the job at the casino, I'd gone almost three months without a paycheck. I'd had to borrow money a few times from mi Tio. With guilt, I had spent some of the money on pot. I justified it to myself as "necessary" to help me get thru the difficult time; I can still remember the sinking, empty feeling when the sack ran out & I still hadn't found a job. There were nights when I lied awake in despair & might have wound up on the freeway myself; or with a gun in my mouth if I'd of had the tenates. Pills were just much more like me-- cowardly and afraid. But I didn't. And she was stupid for being out there. She should have been at home. I was glad I talked some sense into her. I believed, then that she had run on home and sat and thought long and hard about her life.
For the rest of the morning I was a man justified-- moving the furniture around and taking out the garbage, I was as light & as honest as I had ever been in my life-- in that moment. The drive to work was effortless. The sun had already set but the warm rose light lingered like an indirect stage lamp behind the smooth rounded hills that themselves could have been stage props in a play about the Wild West. Only as I approached the pueblo did night finally overtake me and I began to feel alone once more. The earth, the mesa, the rock all became engulfed in the inky entirety. I could have been peering thru the windshield of a vessel in deep space-- the red & gold lights of the casino could be a space station. My vessel approaches slowly and enters thru the loading dock. I took the service elevator to the kitchen.
My buddy Juan-- a tall Indian guy-- is already in his white jacket, which he keeps immaculate, much cleaner than mine. He's chopping something, but I tore his attentions away.
"Spookiest thing happened to me last night on my way home, man." He turned to face me. He was always real quiet-- like most Indians I've met.
"There was this girl who knelt down in the freeway last night-- just right in the middle of the road. Someone could have killed her--" and then I added, "Good thing I sent her home."
"She must have gone back out there" Juan said slowly-- his face taut & controlled, "You were the last person she spoke with in this life. He maintained the gaze for a length of time that in my culture, between men, is downright uncomfortable.
That's when I realized that I had killed her; we all had really. Not just with our guns and diseased blankets, but with our indifference our superiority and our cold judgmental gaze. I didn't put on my jacket or say a word to anybody. My car I left parked in the loading dock. I don't know what became of it. The air was cold and biting, as desert nights always are. I took off my shoes, as she once had done, tho it seemed like a faraway dream. The earth was rough and unforgiving in the darkness. I walked alongside the freeway until I could no longer see the glare of the casino, or any light except the occasional blinding absoluteness of a passing car, quickly extinguished into the night.
I kept walking, because I wasn't sure exactly on foot where she had been anymore-- it had all been so different when I was the one behind the wheel.
"If I could just find the spot where she had been," I thought, "where she had knelt inviting her fate--" But I didn't know what I would find when I got there. I just kept walking.
In the darkness, the road, the earth and everything is obscured. I was alone in space, wandering, walking. The next night too, and the night after that, sleeping in culverts and arroyos, this will be my life: in search of a woman who I know nothing about, who once surrendered instead of putting up a fight. I was gripped at the throat by the prospect that I could do nothing less. For hers can only be a truth so sweet that it must remain untold for a time. But I will find her in the dim twilight on the horizon & maybe catch a fleeting glimpse of her in my siesta dreams.