Tag: childhood

Couldn’t have been more than 10 years old when I saw that dead body. No way. I remember being in a kid body, small the way it feels in a big car. We’d just gotten out of that shithole desert. Sonora. Really, it’s just an absolute fucking hole. I know I wasn’t saying or thinking that way, but it’s how I translate it. Fucking hot is what I’m saying. Pop decided to take the Impala down to Jalisco that year. You ever been in a cherry ‘64 Impala? Well, me neither. Not cherry, anyway. But it was a sight. Two grown men, one woman, and three kids. Think about that. Just like people joke about. I just know it was a squeeze. We’d been out of Sonora enough to see green and some signs of the valleys. Fields of corn from here to the end of the world. No joke. We were on a two lane highway and had just rolled through a small pueblo that didn’t have asphalt streets, just cobblestone. We bumped through and didn’t stop for sodas. At the edge of the pueblo we found a paved highway. It was dark out there and cold as it gets when it’s only you and your car out there in the middle of nowhere. Doesn’t matter how many are inside. I was at the left window, watching ragged trees. When we’d gone out a ways I heard my uncle remark about something. Something exciting as near as I could tell. When I looked forward, there was just a rusty curved fender truck sitting on the side of the road, and beside the truck a couple of guys looking down. I could tell the body was a man’s body. He was dark-skinned, leathery as all the farm people we saw on the road. One of his brown leather shoes was missing. It’d gotten sort of dark but the black pool of blood beneath his head was obvious. He wasn’t deformed in any way, just lying dead, missing one shoe and some blood. We drove past and kept going into the depths of my head where I forgot the rest of that trip. Don’t even remember what we did when we got there. The night before, we stopped in a restaurant. I was given a bowl of refried beans with a single slip of cheese in the middle. By the time it got to me the cheese was soft. They looked at me like I would never eat it all, but I did.

Couldn’t have been more than 10 years old when I saw that dead body. No way. I remember being in a kid body, small the way it feels in a big car. We’d just gotten out of that shithole desert. Sonora. Really, it’s just an absolute fucking hole. I know I wasn’t saying or thinking that way, but it’s how I translate it. Fucking hot is what I’m saying. Pop decided to take the Impala down to Jalisco that year. You ever been in a cherry ‘64 Impala? Well, me neither. Not cherry, anyway. But it was a sight. Two grown men, one woman, and three kids. Think about that. Just like people joke about. I just know it was a squeeze. We’d been out of Sonora enough to see green and some signs of the valleys. Fields of corn from here to the end of the world. No joke. We were on a two lane highway and had just rolled through a small pueblo that didn’t have asphalt streets, just cobblestone. We bumped through and didn’t stop for sodas. At the edge of the pueblo we found a paved highway. It was dark out there and cold as it gets when it’s only you and your car out there in the middle of nowhere. Doesn’t matter how many are inside. I was at the left window, watching ragged trees. When we’d gone out a ways I heard my uncle remark about something. Something exciting as near as I could tell. When I looked forward, there was just a rusty curved fender truck sitting on the side of the road, and beside the truck a couple of guys looking down. I could tell the body was a man’s body. He was dark-skinned, leathery as all the farm people we saw on the road. One of his brown leather shoes was missing. It’d gotten sort of dark but the black pool of blood beneath his head was obvious. He wasn’t deformed in any way, just lying dead, missing one shoe and some blood. We drove past and kept going into the depths of my head where I forgot the rest of that trip. Don’t even remember what we did when we got there. The night before, we stopped in a restaurant. I was given a bowl of refried beans with a single slip of cheese in the middle. By the time it got to me the cheese was soft. They looked at me like I would never eat it all, but I did.