part four, 6

"As we climbed, the air grew cooler and the Indian girls on the road wore shawls over their heads and shoulders. They hailed us desperately; we stopped to see. They wanted to sell us little pieces of rock crystal. Their great brown, innocent eyes looked into ours with such soulful intensity that not one of us had the slightest sexual thought about them; moreover they were very young, some of them eleven and looking almost thirty. 'Look at those eyes!' breathed Dean. They were like the eyes of the Virgin Mother when she was a child. We saw in them the tender and forgiving gaze of Jesus. And they started unflinching into ours. We rubbed our nervous blue eyes and looked again. Still they penetrated us with sorrowful and hypnotic gleam. When they talked they suddenly became frantic and almost silly. In their silence they were themselves. 'They've only recently learned to sell these crystals, since the highway was built about ten years back--up until that time this entire nation must have been silent!'


The girls yammered around the car. One particularly soulful child gripped at Dean's sweaty arm. She yammered in Indian. 'Ah yes, ah yes, dear one,' said Dean tenderly and almost sadly. He got out of the car and went fishing around in the battered trunk in the back--the same old tortured American trunk--and pulled out a wristwatch. He showed it to the child. She whimpered with glee. The others crowded around with amazement. Then Dean poked in the little girl's hand for 'the sweetest and purest and smallest crystal she has personally picked from the mountain for me.' He found the one no bigger than a berry. And he handed her the wristwatch dangling. Their mouths rounded like the mouths of chorister children. The lucky little girl squeezed it to her ragged breastrobes. They stroked and thanked him. He stood among them with his ragged face to the sky, looking for the next and highest and final pass, and seemed like the Prophet that had come to them. He got back in the car. They hated to see us go. For the longest time, as we mounted a straight pass, they waved and ran after us. We made a turn and never saw them again, and they were still running after us. 'Ah, this breaks my heart!' cried Dean, punching his chest. 'How far do they carry out these loyalties and wonders! What's going to happen to them? Would they try to follow the car all the way to Mexico City if we drove slow enough?'

'Yes,' I said, for I knew."

-----Jack Kerouac, On the Road