Trevor Griles is a roustabout who left the US in 1998. His works include a novel (Pero…Mañana), a collection of short stories (Kamion), and two books of poetry (Waxing Gibbous Gambol and City of Bone). He has traveled across a hundred countries, studied five languages, and over the past twenty-five years taught ESL in the Czech Republic, South Korea, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia. He currently lives somewhere in China.
FROM KAMION
Two days before my thirty-first birthday in the year before the Millennium, I had just eaten a large portion of pasta at the train station where I exchanged two hundred and twenty shillings for about thirty thousand lira before limping down to the maritime landing ferry in Messina. That’s when I heard the thud, the same sound as that of a truck passing over a speed bump too quickly, but what I thought that I had seen was too brutal to believe. An action news photographer scampered past. There was a body twisted in the street, inhuman in a pool of blood.
I had spent sixty thousand lira, the majority of what was left in my pocket, for only a twelve-hour stay at the Hotel Touring di Gaetano Fiumara (The Godfather was on TV), where in a bidet I soaked my feet and the ankle that I had sprained at the Colosseum of Rome, thinking that numb would be better. To die a natural death in one’s sleep is uneventful, but a Cavalieri kamion had been waiting in queue on the ferry for the forty-seven-year-old Sicilian woman at the Imbarco Automezzi Per Villa S. Giovanni.
Her blood, the color of Kool-Aid, wasn’t as thick as I...wasn’t as dark as I...the smell I cannot describe, perhaps old fish and seawater and sweat, a stink more rank than what I had acquired after only sponge baths and sleeping under an orange tree by the Vatican wall. I had started out on the rainy streets of Ostrava with only a shoulder bag and the flu; a dirty tram in the death of night to Svinov station; the fast train to the border at Breclav; suspicious questions from young border guards with guns, demanding a search for contraband and a show of money and a passport, but I am free without plan; then sallow villages empty of movement, with wooden shutters covering windows, and the presentiment that the Plague had come and gone; finally a lift from a Czech restaurateur with a pizzeria near Vien; the train to the practical Autobahn and hitchhiking the slow road again; maybe hastily to France, Angorra, bullfights in Spain, then across the channel to Morocco for hash and a camel ride in the Sahara; I don’t know where I’m going; spur of the moment on a packed fast train with a backpacking American cellist; a campground overlooking Firenze beside Michelangelo Piazza and its statue that I wanted to circumcise at night; feeling haggard by the Autostrada, waiting again with my thumb in the air; long rides with various Italians getting darker and more beautiful the further down; walking the Seven Hills of Rome and twisting my ankle at the Colloseum; grandiloquent columned monuments, fountains, and memorials that I know not by name; I can’t get her out of my head; tousled hair and greasy catnaps on the bench in Napoli Centrale train station beside an old woman with butched, gray hair with a round, pouting mole at her temple, scrunching a well-fed al dente face to read an article about the tragedy of young Kennedy in flight; the pain has become unbearable; the bag lady bitten by a little dog and the fight that followed because the owner refused to beat her mutt; (what have I forgotten?) bums with bad legs and broken teeth using baggage carts as rest home walkers; some of them walk better than me; then snoozing the Serpentina obstacle at 200 km/hr in a brand new Mercedes Benz sportster and another kamion around the cliff-hanging bridges of Reggio Calabria overlooking Sicilia and a royal blue-green sea reminding me of her eyes, and I yearn to swim in it.
She had abandoned me in the Black City of Ostrava, an industrial mining city of graffiti and smokestacks near the Polish border in Czechia, releasing me to the manacled freedom of being alone in a big world tasting of new cultures, new foods, new women, and the thick smell of armpit sweat, the unexpected laugh and delicacies that permeate the sponge that I am, only to be wringed out again and so on, the tortures that stalk the traveler with two dreams: to either see the world and all of it or for a woman loved to love me all the same. My way or the highway, a road merging cities of bone where many city people overlap with Mad Cow Disease comfort. People embark and disembark in loose rank and file while a hack hustles through long days.
A piece of brain was stuck like chewing gum to the back tire of the white Infortunistica Polizia Municipale van that had first arrived on the scene, and I pictured her as a belladonna after shopping on a day blessed by a breeze in the Mediterranean sun, Latin boys turning greased heads in the offering position of adolescence, imagining her naked. Brain and flesh can often be transfigured into wasted food, and we are all so easily mangled in a multitude of ways. I thought about the possibility that it could’ve been me, but I wouldn’t let that happen, would I? The keystone cops were all wearing guts, tans, thick body hair, moustaches, and dark shades above dangling Marlboro lights. A golden statue stood erect in the bay, with the inscription “Vos Et Ipsam Civitatem Benedicimus,” as cranes and old men with long poles were fishing off the dock. A policeman with black leather knee boots and buckles, black trousers, white belt, and a blue shirt gave his chum an energetic kiss on each cheek as measurements of skid marks were taken with a white tape. Despite the red cones with white stripes, spectators vouching for a closer look stepped in scattered brain sticking to shoes, myself included.
They lifted the white, see-through shroud. Her face was distorted out of proportion, its skin hanging provocatively off bone, and her dress, striped as that of biblical Josef, was hiked up. Her hips as full as a Botticelli, and white panties fringed with lace, for whom now? A young man crossed himself, his eyes without tears, only squinched thought. Her head was compressed to the asphalt. I had stopped for a cigarette the day before beside a memorial statue of a helmeted WWI soldier hunched with a rifle and a bayonet over a dead boy and a wounded man gripping a pistol: “Ai Caduti Della Batteria Massoto Messina.” Canons were mounted at the base.
Beside her was a brown paper bag holding a recently purchased picture frame. What photos, what memories were meant for that frame? Or maybe it was a picture, or a small painting for her bedroom, where she slept at night, cuddling, shifting, and sighing in a bed that’s different every morning, especially tomorrow. Another bag held something called Striptease, maybe lingerie for her unsuspecting husband, or merely coloring for her hair. Off to the side, round black sunglasses twisted as herself, with one lens to the ground and the other smashed seeking Jesus Mary and God in the sky. Her son showed up at the scene: no scream, no tears, only a mouth gaping in disbelief, silent.
Sometimes running away brings us back strong in this marathon often measured by the boldness of newspaper headlines, the birth then death of nations notwithstanding, rather than the smile between, on a child’s face. And when asked about my love for you, simply I say the subtleties that make you so, subtleties not soon to be forgotten.
I wondered what her name was, and I doubted that she would have believed an hour ago that a stranger would be crying for her because she had died in the street. How would you, any of you, react if I, a stranger on the street with a limp, told you that your brain would be scraped off the asphalt today? When six dark men lifted her useless corpse off the street to drop her into a gray metal casket, her head clung to the ground before finally popping loose. Blood and leftover brain spilled out of the hole in her skull, and the ferries have not stopped. And for you who use God as a pretext of saying, “Why do you have to be so negative?” I say, “Fuck off. For He is my witness, when I wake Him up.”
The site was cleared and cleaned by two men in orange work pants with shovels and straw brooms, as hallway vomit by elementary school janitors. The lime was scooped into a plastic, green trash can with 232 insignificantly marked on the side. A tourist van, a Lamia sedan, and shiny red scooters scattered the lime into the eyes of unknowing passers-by.
And the tourists keep coming, workers still at their task, and there is money made and money spent, vicariously. And that woman just died. Her mother does not know yet. Backpackers from East and West dance the fight and fiddle with never-ending adjustments, and that woman just died. Her husband does not know yet. A young, impervious couple dust off the curb, roughing it with a fogaccio sandwich split between the two of them.
“Here, you take the bigger half.” And that woman just died. Her daughter does not know yet. Those subtleties which bring us closer, together we, a body in the street, and that woman just died.
I have never seen anything so vulgarly brutal as half a face ripped off the human body. The body was before me lewd, and it was time to leave Sicilia, once again feeling blistered feet, knowing that numb is too easy, any day. In my shoulder bag, I had a small sign saying Napoli, so I took it and stood by the entrance to the ferry landing, standing in the dust of the lime, waiting for a kamion to take me back home.