Road Fever

by Tim Cahill

  “Or—you know how you get silly after a long time, laugh at stuff that isn’t really very funny?—In India Kenny and I notice that Indian men stand on the street with their hands over their privates. And we spent a long time trying to figure out why. Were they advertising? Or was it a defensive thing? Was it a way of constantly telling themselves, yep, I’m a man all right. And we talked about this for hours, different anthropological and psychological theories. And we couldn’t figure it out. Now, I’m not proud of this, really. I know it’s wrong. I know these guys standing on the corner grew up in a different culture and it’s not for me to judge. We’re just silly, Kenny and I. Goofy. And he leans out the window as we’re going around the corner, he screams, ‘Get your hand off your dick!’

  “And the guy waved at us. With the other hand.

  “I suppose it’s not funny in the telling, but we had tears in our eyes from laughing. Couldn’t stop.

  “And once we were in a plane on our way from Pakistan to Athens with the Volvo. Cargo plane. We were over the coast of Iran. It was the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war and there were oil refineries burning below. Kenny said he was having some trouble. We were badly fatigued and he couldn’t sleep. He said, ‘It’s like a hallucination.’ He was seeing something he didn’t want to see, like something that was going to happen in the very near future. And finally he told me that he had a very clear vision of himself popping the emergency exit and jumping. ‘I have to be restrained,’ Kenny said. So I told the captain and we looked around and found some rope, and that’s the way Kenny went to Athens, tied to the fuselage.”

  The transcript ended there, on that bittersweet note.

  Few people who know Sowerby, I thought, understand how hard he works. I suspect Jane is right: Sowerby is a workaholic. He spends sixteen hours at a crack shuffling between the pit and the bunker, or he’s on the road, traveling to Detroit or Toronto or Los Angeles to make deals. His parents shrug off his life-style: he’s thirty-seven years old, he keeps his family fed, and he’s not hurting anyone. They refer to him, affectionately, as the orangutan. Jane’s parents are supportive, though her father, a prominent physician, isn’t sure why Garry doesn’t simply go into some legitimate business. With his capacity for work, persuasive personality, organizational talent, and drive for success, he could be a very wealthy man in a very short time. Work in a real office with fluorescent lights.

  After Kenny bowed on the Pan-American run, Garry made some notes about what keeps him in the adventure-driving business.

  “I never set out to become an adventurer. The money we owed after the around-the-world trip forced us to do the Africa-Arctic trip, and by the time that was done I was hooked. I like taking a concept that involves travel and making it a personal, political, and technical challenge. The job involves conceptualizing, planning, financing, public relations, writing, and lots of wheeling and dealing. I like the fact that I can move through different elements of the job, which keeps the boredom factor at a low level.

  “The glossy image is a nice bit of frosting on the cake. I think the reaction I get from people thrills me more than the fact that I am the guy that’s done it. And dealing with the unusual, sometimes in stressful situations, has forced me to be more capable, to manage things more responsibly. This carries over from my business to my family.”

  We were in the pit from eight that morning until seven-thirty that night. Garry did a phone interview for CBC radio. He assembled another package to be sent south to Canadian embassies, to the auto clubs, GMC dealers, and other contacts in Latin America. “Let them know we’re coming in a couple of months,” Garry said.

  The day before, Garry had registered the truck, which had been built in Canada’s new GM plant. It had New Brunswick plates that read: B4 NE1. “That was Janet’s idea,” Garry said. Janet Shorten had been working for Sowerby as an aide-de-camp. Garry had wanted a personalized plate, “but I didn’t want it to be a word, like ‘further’ or something. I thought the plate ought to have numbers and letters. Prevents confusion at the borders that way.”

  In the time that it took me to read over the transcripts, Sowerby also arranged for a kind of loan, a $75,000 letter of credit from GMC in Pontiac, Michigan, to cover the Carnet de Passage, a document required to take a vehicle across borders in South America. (Central American countries do not operate on the carnet system.) “The carnet itself is one of the largest obstacles for a novice endurance driver,” Sowerby said. “When you tell people that in order to get a carnet you need to submit a letter of credit to your national automobile association for three hundred percent of the value of the vehicle, they think about it.”

  Foreign automobiles are heavily taxed in most South American countries. The idea is to stimulate the local economy by forcing people to buy locally built or assembled cars. These nations do not like the idea of North Americans driving comparatively cheap cars to their countries and selling them at an outrageous profit to wealthy locals who consider such vehicles a bargain. The carnet is a small book, and each page is perforated into three sections. The first section is taken by a customs officer when a vehicle enters the country, the second section is taken when you leave. If you don’t have the vehicle when you want to leave—if it has been stolen, for instance, or demolished in an accident—you forfeit the entire letter of credit, say, 300 percent of the actual value of the vehicle.

  “The carnet situation scares people,” Garry said. “They realize that they may need to back the letter of credit with their house. By the time you paint the picture of the truck being stolen in Colombia and the insurance only covering the vehicle and not the markup, they realize they would lose their house to cover the letter of credit. So the carnet is a problem. Tomorrow I’m going to see if I can have the truck insured at approximately the amount of the letter of credit.”

  “I wonder how our pal in the Caddy handled the carnet,” I said.

  “I suppose we’ll never know,” Garry replied. “I wrote him at the Montreal address he gave Veronica in Ushuaia. No answer. I asked a reporter friend there to look into it. Guy went to Jerzy’s place, no one there ever heard of him.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “I think he did it and we have to do this drive in under twenty-six days.”

  When the local paper, The Times-Transcript, came out that night, there was a long feature story about our upcoming trip. Garry had managed to name every one of his sponsors: GMC truck, Canadian “Motomaster” Tire, Stanadyne Auto Products, Delco Suspension Systems, Detroit Diesel Allison, GM Canada, and something I’d never heard of called Farmer’s Milkshakes.

  “Who’s Farmer’s Milkshakes?” I asked.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT, about eight o’clock, Garry and I walked down the beach at Cape Bimet, about a twenty-minute drive outside of Moncton. He had rented a beach-front cottage for a month. “Our vacation,” Jane said mildly as we walked in twelve hours after we left. Lucy, three and a half, was watching a video featuring Rainbow Bright, who was, apparently, a chubby white horse who could fly. Or maybe Rainbow Bright was a little girl who could ride the chubby white horse. I never figured it out.

  Karen and Jane had had the kids all day, so Garry and I took them for a walk. Sowerby gently picked up Natalie, who was three months old, born between Garry’s first and second reconnaissance trips to South America. Lucy came out of her bedroom wearing a T-shirt and nothing else.

  “Put your swimming suit on,” Jane said. Lucy stared up at the assembled adults with the contemptuous disdain of the true sophisticate. “I like to air my bum,” she said.

  It only took a moment before Lucy was decently dressed and we were walking down the brown sandy beach. The waters there were shallow, surprisingly warm, and it would be another two hours until dark. The Canadian sun was dithering about above the western horizon on this long summer day, and every little cloud it touched burst into flame so that our shadows fell red-orange on the sand. Lucy was looking for shells, which she pronounced “fells.”
When I squatted down to examine one of her prizes, she said I looked almost exactly like the Magic Bunny. This creature, I learned, was Lucy’s imaginary friend who unaccountably lived in Key West, Florida. Lucy showed me how to hop like the Magic Bunny. I was to squat with my hands balled into fists and placed precisely between my feet. The Magic Bunny hops as high and far as he can and lands back in the proper position, with his balled fists between his feet.

  “Do the Magic Bunny!” Lucy screamed, and I hopped down the beach followed by my red shadow and Lucy’s hysterical laughter.

  “Farmer’s Milkshakes,” Garry said, “is a Canadian dairy. They make these shakes that come in little square boxes, Tetra Packs, and they have a nine-month shelf life. Don’t have to be refrigerated. Little seventy-five-cent milk shakes and they want to come on board for five thousand dollars.”

  “How did that come about?”

  “Do the Magic Bunny!” Lucy demanded.

  I hopped down the beach in my magical way. Garry said that on a flight out of Montreal, he had met a man who represented Farmer’s. They had talked a bit and the Farmer’s representative came to see the Pan-American run as a good way to promote his product. Farmer’s Milkshakes: from the Antarctic through the tropics to the Arctic: the quality never varies. “They’re going to give us about a thousand shakes to take with us,” Garry said. “Three hundred thirty-three vanillas, three hundred thirty-three chocolates, three hundred thirty-three strawberries.”

  “What’s in line for tomorrow?” I asked.

  “We’ve got three more people coming in.” Joe Skorupa was the outdoor and boating editor for Popular Mechanics. The magazine was planning a feature story on the Pan-Am run and Skorupa would ride with us for the Peru-to-Colombia leg of the trip, then meet us at the finish line. Jon Stevens was a Canadian photographer Garry had met in Barcelona, and he was coming to take some photos for Skorupa.

  Graham Maddocks was a police officer from Vancouver, Canada. Garry had asked him to be our security consultant. Maddocks had some impressive credentials: he was a hostage negotiator, a member of the Emergency Response Team (SWAT) in Victoria, and had been a bodyguard to British royalty. It all sounded good, but I wondered if the guy knew South America.

  “I met him in Peru,” Garry said. “I should tell you that story.”

  “What I mean is, does he have any idea about what we’re likely to run into down there?”

  “He thinks of things that never occurred to me,” Garry said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like: we’re driving through some little town on the Pan-Am Highway. You know how those places are, narrow cobblestone lanes, no curbs, houses that front the street, people all around. Okay, we’re at a stop sign. It’s hot. The windows are open. Somebody runs up, throws a pail of gasoline on us. Sticks his arm in the window, he’s holding a Bic lighter. Graham asked me: ‘What do you do?’ ”

  I thought about it as the sun ignited another cloud and the waves came in like pale blood. Natalie was sleeping peacefully in Garry’s arms.

  “What do you do?” I asked finally.

  “Do the Magic Bunny!” Lucy squealed.

  ZORRO MEETS THE

  GASOLINE BANDITS

  [HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT 101]

  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

  August 1987 • Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada

  REGARDING THOSE PESKY gasoline and lighter bandits, Graham Maddocks thought it best if we didn’t let ourselves get into such a situation. Which was rather my idea to begin with, though Graham insisted there was a benefit in understanding that it could happen. He wanted to examine every possible worst-case scenario, in detail. The record attempt, he said, should be run like a military operation. A soldier does not encounter problems he has not trained for, or at least considered. A soldier should know all his options. I had a lot of trouble thinking of myself as a driver, much less a soldier.

  Graham Maddocks was a dark-haired, handsome fellow with an ingratiating smile and a polite manner. He was not overly tall, nor did he seem, at first glance, to be heavily muscled. An average sort of guy. Except that after listening to him for a while and examining the way he held himself, I began to see that he was as solid as a chunk of chiseled granite. You could peg a golf ball into his chest and it would come zinging off as if it had hit a brick wall. He was, I thought, a concealed weapon, in and of himself.

  Garry had met Maddocks in January, in Peru, drinking Pisco sours at the bar of the Hotel Gran Bolívar in Lima. Graham was taking a break from his duties on the Victoria, British Columbia, Emergency Response Team, which was basically a special weapons and tactics squad. In order to avoid burnout or the suicidal depression that plagues some cops, Graham took long climbing vacations in South and Central America. Risking death on solo climbs in the high Andes gave him a sense of control over his life that police work tended to erode.

  Aside from his work with the Emergency Response Team, Graham had served as a bodyguard for British royalty in the Bahamas. As a hostage negotiator, he knew something about the terrorist’s motivation and aspirations. Significantly, he had trained with the British SAS, a force whose antiterrorist squads are considered the most skilled in the world.

  At the Hotel Gran Bolívar, Garry found himself grilling the policeman about various South American scams. Maddocks was fascinated with the various schemes crooks had devised to separate inattentive gringos from their money. He was a professional officer who collected crime stories in the way an entomologist might collect butterflies. The more brightly colored and flamboyant the scheme, the more skillfully executed it was, the more Graham Maddocks treasured it. Scams were his hobby.

  Maddocks didn’t have a lot of respect for the practitioners of the simple dodge. Climbers, for instance, were continually losing their packs on bus rides to the mountains. “What happens,” Graham said, “is that the overhead rack is filled and the climber will put his bag in the rack several seats back.” He assumes that anyone trying to steal his gear will have to walk past him, with the pack, to exit. But when the bus stops to pick up and disgorge passengers, someone in the back simply hands the pack through an open window to a confederate on the street.

  Not much skill involved in that modest crime of opportunity. There were better examples of the art of thievery in the larger cities, Lima, for instance, where highly skilled teams of pickpockets could create a diversion while a master razor man slashed open the bottom of a woman’s leather purse and caught the contents.

  A less remarkable method of picking pockets was the ubiquitous dirty diversion. Someone who looks fairly presentable poses as a helpful local. As you walk by he notices some dirt on your shirt, generally on the upper arm, just below the point of the shoulder. He wipes it off for you—actually he is wiping the dirt on as he pretends to wipe it off—and someone else picks your pocket. “The dirt,” Graham said, “is the diversion. It takes your mind off your wallet. But, consider: what does a person who is scrabbling on the street care if some gringo has dirt on his shirt? Anything unusual, anything that doesn’t make sense is a likely diversion.”

  Garry sipped his Pisco sour and expressed some doubt that these scams were all that widespread. Maddocks suggested they take a stroll around the Plaza San Martin. “Keep your eyes open,” he said. Minutes later, in a crowded alleyway, someone actually made the mistake of rubbing dirt on Graham Maddocks. “Señor, you have …” Garry was flummoxed: here was the dirty diversion in the flesh. There was a momentary blur of action, then a frozen tableau: Graham staring down the dirt wiper, his right hand behind him, gripping the wrist of a second man who had his hand in Graham’s back pocket. The first man turned and ran. Another blur of action. Graham was now facing the pickpocket. Somehow he had gotten hold of both the man’s wrists and was holding them just at chest level in an iron grip. Maddocks stared at the fellow, smiled sadly, and shook his head.

  “Uh, Graham,” Garry said. Maddocks glanced over at Sowerby, dropped the pickpocket’s arms, and le
t him go running off into the crowd.

  “Yeah?”

  “Have you ever worked as a security consultant?”

  GRAHAM MADDOCKS had prepared a twenty-page report regarding security on our drive, and we went over each recommendation in detail. We were sitting on lawn chairs in Garry Sowerby’s backyard. Fat bees buzzed among the flowers and there was a symphony of birdsong in progress. It seemed as if bandits and terrorists belonged to a distant and probably fictional world.

  Graham said that one option regarding gasoline bandits was to keep the windows closed when passing slowly through towns. And for those gasoline-minded persons inclined to break windows in order to indulge their predilections, Graham suggested heavy-gauge chicken wire on the outside of side windows and on the windscreen. Bulletproof glass was okay, though it wouldn’t stop certain kinds of rounds, and was so heavy it would affect the performance capabilities of the truck. Graham thought we would be protected from bullets fired from the front. The engine block would stop just about anything. If they were firing from the front, just duck down and accelerate. Piece of cake. On the other hand, it takes only a minute or so until futile front firing becomes somewhat more lethal and problematic side firing. Light bulletproofing in the doors was a good idea, though it wasn’t impervious to certain high-powered rounds. And we were, Graham thought, most vulnerable to shots fired from behind. What we needed was a big slab of tempered steel set behind the extended cab.

  All of this—it’s not just a truck anymore, it’s an armored vehicle—would cost us in weight and performance. I found myself sinking deep into a kind of glowering paranoia. How about one guy, he’s not driving, he locks himself up in a little metal egg? How about maybe we just stay home and watch TV?