The Long Walk Home

22Oct09

The sign read Filthy Restrooms. Truth in advertising or fair warning? The ramshackle gas n’ go style station also featured an audacious sign proclaiming ’self-service’, whatever that meant. Undaunted, but curious, I approached the restroom door. I had no intention of utilizing the facilities of this borderland, southern Arizona hell-hole, but the facts of the matter had to be known.

I gripped the handle, turned it and pushed the door open. The sight was appalling. Shocking. Everything the word ‘filth’ promised and more. The door swung closed as I stood agape. I pulled a lighter from my pocket and burned the flesh of my hand until it crackled and bled. I would have lopped it off altogether but it was my gun hand and I wouldn’t last a week without it anyway. Hopefully the cauterizing would stave off whatever infection, virus, blight had attack and had its way with that restroom.

On closer inspection the sign that gave notice of these conditions, now clearly a warning put forth by a kind and benevolent god, was hand wrought. Carved into the sign which itself was carved out of the one lone tree that must have stood here before the time of man. The effort and dedication put into crafting the letters the work of a steady and studious hand. The amount of time it took to carve the sign may well have been used to prevent the very condition that it gave notice of.

But I had just seen that room. And it would take a rapture, a ritual, a holy man of great renown to make it past the threshold of that place. And I knew of no such men.

I made my way into the shop. Bandages and smokes must be procured. Still a long ways to go to reach The City and no ready transportation across the desert this far south. It was going to be a long walk. On that note, I grabbed a straw hat and purchased two towels. My head was scarred and baked from the trip north through the jungle and I had lost my hat to the damned Destrega brothers back in Rio.

The shopkeep was an eldery man. Bottom jaw suffering from a combination of ailments unknown to me. It was bloated and distended and his bottom lip was twice the size of his nose. It was palsied and he couldn’t move it. His thick tongue rattled and clicked in his cage as he mumbled “That’ll be eight-fitty.”

I pulled the small pile of bills from my pocket and counted out more than half of it to him. He nodded once, curt, to the point, eyes milky with age but unwavering. He didn’t blink.

I wrapped one of the towels around my head and strapped the hat on with twine. Then I ripped the other into a make shift sling for my left arm. There were gaping infected holes in the thing from a snake bite that thankfully turned out to be less than poisonous. I used the sling to keep it elevated and the puss from leaking with each merciless pump of my heart.

My feet were stiff in some other guys shoes. But at least I was whole. At least I was out of the jungle and out of Mexico and finally back in the States.

From here to there, as they say.

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Tags: Johnathan Riggs