The One Eye of Jack
What do you call a dog with 3 legs? Why Lucky of course!
I am not sure why that joke has always made me laugh, but I suppose the same would apply to Jack, the one-eyed dog who stood clearly on his last legs. I am the only one who calls him Jack because Jack lives in a place where dogs are not really pets. They are just sort of vultures who roam the beaches looking for the next meal, fighting their way through life in the same way the local people do, only with far less success. The dogs here sleep right on the road; they have an insanely great sense of how the traffic works. They know that one quick blast of a horn means to move along, where as two means to move much faster.
Jack lives in Honduras, in a tiny town along the coast that would like to call itself a tourist attraction. With mounds of trash on the beach, I would say it needs more than a little bit of work. But Talles has not always been just a sleepy beach town with too many dogs and no recognizable source of income, once it was a major port of the United Fruit Company. Americans in the late 1800s purchased the land from people who clearly did not understand the value of it and soon endless miles of fruit plantations appeared. Talles boasted a large train station and tracks that ran out to middle of the bay to dump mounds of fresh fruit on large boats, all ready to be shipped to the United States.
I could not tell you what happened to the tops dogs from the United Fruit Company. Only their large houses still remain, with remnants of shops where they spent lavish amounts of money. And the remnants of the train station with the tracks that now just lead out to a part of the bay where they fall into the water. And the remnants of people who still live in town, all looking for a sources of income with the remnants of dogs who wander the streets, waiting for table scraps to fall on the floor. White small dogs like Jack who seem half starved, and missing an eye from god knows what.
My friends and I stop at a local restaurant and order the special of the day which is an odd combination for an American like me. A scrambled egg, fried plantains, a big slice of an avocado, a piece of overly fried chicken, tortillas, some odd white cheese that does not taste like cheese, and black beans. It is as if a finicky small kid designed the meal to keep each portion in a separate pile.
As we are finishing our meal, I think of Jack. So I pile up the table scraps and then find him out wandering along the beach. I put the food down quietly in front of him, hoping that no other dogs will notice him eating. The top is part of a pork chop, followed by the odd cheese, the bread, and beans. And at first Jack can not believe his luck… he cowards away thinking this was surely some trick on an old, one-eyed dog who maybe does not see so well. But soon his one good eye and canine nose zeroes in on the smell of the food and he begins to chow down. He does not look up, he inhales the food. As I walk down the beach, I look back several times and am happy to see that nobody had discovered Jack’s good fortune.
On the next day, I scour the beach looking for Jack but cannot find him. This makes me wonder if Jack has now slipped into the past, joining the top dogs from the United Fruit Company. Maybe, he now sits at their tables and the special of the day has become his every day meal. Pork chop bones, odd white cheese, beans, tortillas, and avocados. And after he is done with his feast, they all wander down to the old train station and catch a ride out to the middle of the bay, to watch the fruit mounded onto endless large boats.
And while it certainly was NOT my intention to kill the poor little white dog, I soon find myself hoping indeed it was his last supper. After all, what a better way for the poor fellow to go. With an overstuffed belly and the thought that today he was NOT the dog named Jack, but Lucky.
By Linda English
