by Tim Cahill
The officers instructed us to drive a few miles and check in at the immigration trailer on the left side of the road. We gave our guide a five-dollar bill and he ran back down the road, waving it over his head, whooping and laughing, as was his way.
“Shitheads,” Garry said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they were giving the kid a chance. Couple of strange-looking gringos. Let the crazy kid have a little fun. Maybe he wasn’t crazy. He could have been retarded.”
“Those papers,” Garry said, “are the key to this whole thing.” He was very angry. “They were playing around with us.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Nicaraguans,” Garry said. He made the word sound like a curse.
The border was a war zone and the old immigration building didn’t look so good. There were bullet holes in the adobe. The roof, what there was of it, consisted of twisted girders. It had apparently taken a direct mortar hit.
So the government was checking passports out of an old airstream trailer home. Soldiers drove it down to the relative safety of town every night. A wooden set of stairs led up to a window in the trailer. There was a thin cloth over the window and we understood that we were to hand our passports through, one at a time. You couldn’t see inside. It was like a confessional in a Catholic church. There was no way to know precisely how much disgust the information presented has generated. There could be a big penance to pay.
I don’t know what they did with my documents, but I stood on the top stair, alone in the sun, for a full ten minutes. Then a brown hand reached out. I took my passport and saw that I was stamped for exit. No words were exchanged.
When Garry took his passport back, his hands were shaking in fatigue or fury or some combination of more complex emotions.
While Garry drove to the Honduras border station, which was a mile away, over a rocky summit, I quickly hid the letter from the Nicaraguan Institute of Tourism and put the letter from the Honduras Institute of Tourism in its place.
* * *
IN HONDURAS, there was the usual scatter of boys, twenty or twenty-five of them, offering, at top volume, to guide us through customs. I looked out at the customs hustlers, the bustle, the black marketeers sitting on benches, the soft-drink vendors, and I felt myself slide into a bleak depression. Here it was: the border rat race, again. This was the seventh set of formalities we had gone through since starting from Panama thirty hours ago.
Garry did it all, laughing with officials and bargaining with the boys. He had completely shaken off the strange fever that had deviled him for most of the day. It took two hours to clear the vehicle.
Garry had been at the wheel almost continuously since Panama City: twenty-six out of thirty hours. It was Nicaragua that had somehow driven him, kept him awake, and sent the fever flush rushing to his face.
And now that we were out of the country, the tension was gone. Garry sat back in the passenger seat and sang, to the tune of “We’re in the Money,” a little song of his own. The only lyric was “We’re in Honduras, we’re in Honduras …”
I WANTED TO KNOW what was going on with Garry and Nicaragua. Perhaps he didn’t want to talk about it, and I came at him from an angle. I advanced a theory that the Sandinista government, in its attempt to build the New Man, had appropriated some of the least appealing aspects of classical Catholicism, like the squirming agony of confessional. Guilt. Single-minded pursuit of a higher goal. Restricted reading matter …
Garry wasn’t as willing to generalize about the country on the basis of a curtain over a window in a trailer. He thought there might be a simpler explanation: “Maybe the Elephant Man got a job in Nicaragua.”
The comment was encouraging. Eight hours before, my friend’s conversation had to do with an imagined case of malaria.
“Tell me about Nicaragua,” I said.
“We made it.”
“Something else.”
“It was always the biggest obstacle on this …”
“There’s something else.”
Garry paused.
“I lost it there once,” he said finally. It was a story he didn’t like to tell. “The only time in my life I ever just really lost it.”
Back in 1977, Garry had been traveling in Latin America with his girlfriend, a French Canadian named Solange. They were hitchhiking back to Canada. At the southern border of Nicaragua they were detained at customs. Garry was put into a small room. A man who seemed to be the commanding officer came in, and, without a word, took off his cheap digital watch and put it in Garry’s shirt pocket. When the man started to walk out of the room, Garry jumped up and gave the watch back.
“The guy was playing around with me,” Garry said. “You know. He was showing me he could do anything he wanted to me. A bully kind of deal.”
“Yeah, but that was Somoza time.”
“You don’t understand,” Garry said. “It’s not politics I’m talking about. I’m talking about losing it.”
I thought about the times stress and fatigue gang up on a person; about the swirling mindstorm of dread and anxiety that is panic. It is a kind of insanity, accompanied by profuse sweating, a racing pulse, and the inability to function. And what is more frightening than any outside stimulus is the idea that you are no longer in control of your own life. You think: I can never come back. Not now.
It happens to everyone at some time or another; it happens in business, or in personal relationships. It happens for good reason; or for no reason at all. The context isn’t important. When people say they are losing it, they mean they are losing their minds.
Ken Langley, Garry’s partner on the around-the-world trip, knew he was “losing it” when he asked to be restrained, tied up, because he couldn’t stop seeing himself opening the airplane door and happily stepping to his death.
Garry said: “This customs guy tried to put his watch back in my pocket—I don’t know what he was doing or why—and I wouldn’t let him. So they wouldn’t let us into the country. We had to go back to Costa Rica. The only place to sleep was in that town where we got diesel this morning. What’s it, about forty miles from the border?”
A bus came by and Garry flagged it down. The driver would take them to the town for $10. “It was robbery,” Garry said, “but we paid it. So we get on the bus and all the women are sitting in front, all the men are in the back. The men started calling out to Solange. She spoke fluent Spanish and didn’t like being called what they were calling her. She also had a fiery French-Canadian temper and she said a few things that made the women laugh. The men just shut up and stared at me.
“This all happened in a few seconds. I still hadn’t found a seat. The only place for me was in the very back. So I squeezed in there. The guy next to me leans over. I can feel his breath on my neck. He says, in English, ‘Twenty bucks or you bleed.’ ”
“So what did you do?”
“I gave him twenty bucks.”
I thought about it for a minute.
“So,” I said, “when we came up on that southern border …”
“Where it all happened ten years ago …”
“You started feeling it again.”
“Yeah,” Garry said. “And that’s probably why I thought I had malaria. I mean, that sounds crazy to me now. And then when they gave our papers to that poor crazy kid, I thought it was starting all over. I thought they were going to start that bully stuff, playing around with us.”
“You kind of barked at those kids at the Costa Rican border. I thought there was something wrong then.”
“It started before that,” Garry said. “I felt it in Panama, but it got worse. And then I’m sitting at the gas station, talking about malaria. I figured you knew I was starting to blow up. But you were calm. You reached out and felt my forehead. I thought, there’s another person here. It’s going to be all right. I’m going to come through it.
“And then the Costa Rican lady tried to give me five bucks. I looked down at this wadded-up bill in her hand and
I felt tears come into my eyes. She saw it. I know she did. And she thought I really needed the money. I don’t know …”
We hadn’t been stopped by police once in Nicaragua. There were no guns and no threats of ambush. The war was on hold until the various parties decided what they wanted to do about the Arias peace plan. It had been a fast, easy drive. And, for Garry Sowerby, it had been terrifying.
“It was never about politics,” Garry said. “It wasn’t about Nicaragua or Nicaraguans. All that back there: it was about me.”
THE HANDSOME
GRINGO MEETS IGOR
AND THE CYCLOPS
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
October 14–17, 1987
THE MOUNTAINS of Honduras were more lush than those on the Nicaraguan side. There were occasional rocky cliffs, and a few small waterfalls. Men on horseback wearing blue jeans and straw cowboy hats drove cattle across the roads to autumn pastures. There was a billboard for Lee jeans featuring a man who dressed much like these Central American cowboys. The last billboard we had seen was in Nicaragua. It showed a heroic Nicaraguan woman taking a blond-haired man captive near the wreckage of a small plane. This one was about pants, proper fit, and buttocks.
Garry had fallen asleep in the passenger seat, which was something he never did. It was as if he had just run a marathon and collapsed.
The road dropped into a flatland between mountain ranges. There was a perfect Central American sunset in progress. The sky was blood-red and the long shadows cast by the trees were dark scarlet on thick pink grass. Great flocks of small black birds, like starlings, swept across the flatland. They flashed in front of the windshield, one after the other, dozens of blurred black shapes.
The sun was near the horizon, perfectly round, perfectly red, and I could stare directly into it without squinting. Which is what I was doing when something hit the truck with a terrific thud. Bullet, I thought, but it hadn’t sounded like a bullet at all.
A voice I had never heard before said: “Wah!”
Garry had snapped bolt upright from his slouching position in the passenger seat. He was holding his belly, as if he had been shot.
“Wah,” he said again in his strange, thick, sleep-clogged voice.
He opened his hands. I saw one of the small black birds that had been sweeping past the windshield. Its neck was twisted to one side, and it lay on its back against Garry’s stomach, staining his white T-shirt with blood.
He looked at it for what seemed to be a very long time. Nothing made any sense to him. He had been asleep for an hour and then there was a loud noise and now there seemed to be a dead bird in his lap. I reached over, took the bird by one leg, and tossed it out the open window.
“I thought,” Garry said, “I had been shot.”
“Those birds,” I explained, “were flying in flocks across the road. You know how birds fly right across your windshield? I think this one hit the side mirror on your side and flipped right in the window.”
“I reached down there,” Garry said. “I felt something warm and wet. I was sure I had been shot. I thought I was feeling my own intestines. Then I started wondering why my intestines would have feathers and bird feet on them.”
“You were dead asleep. Drooling.”
“It’s the wide side mirrors,” Garry said. “I bet we have the widest side mirrors in Central America.” He was beginning to wake up. “I bet the last thing that bird thought was, ‘Oh shit, wide side mirror.’ ”
The road began a long, twisted climb to the capital city of Tegucigalpa, which sits in a cool mountain basin.
AN HOUR LATER, we saw four Honduran soldiers in camouflage gear with rifles on their backs. They were flagging us down with the hearty handshake wave that means stop when soldiers do it. People in civilian clothes use the same gesture to hitchhike.
“Slow down,” Garry said.
I backed it down to fifteen miles an hour while he examined the soldiers. “Doesn’t look like a stop,” he said. “I think they want a ride.”
We turned on the dome light so the soldiers could see us. When we were abreast of them, Garry said, “They don’t look sure of themselves. They want a ride and don’t know who we are. Just coast on by.”
We passed the soldiers at a crawl and Garry waved at them imperiously. One or two of the soldiers saluted, uncertainly. “Don’t speed up,” Garry said, “we’re not escaping.”
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“They’re talking together. One of them is pointing at us.”
Then we turned a corner, and I floored it. We both began laughing for no reason at all. It was just tension and release in rotoville.
“Damn,” I said. “I wanted to do that ever since you told me about the soldiers you left on the road in Turkey.”
“Just leave ’em standing there,” Garry said. “They don’t know whether to shoot or salute.”
We both had a piece of beef jerky and Garry made himself some cold, foaming roto coffee.
TEGUCIGALPA is located in the highlands, at 3,200 feet. Honduras is the poorest country in Central America, but there were plenty of Mercedes cruising the streets. I thought of the cars as badges of corruption. The town itself was alive with neon signs, and there was a vibrant street life. It was a hilly place, hemmed in by mountains, and it is considered “quainter” than Guatemala City or Mexico City, by which people usually mean that the poverty is more apparent. The people, however, tended to be clean and polite and cheerful.
It was not safe to drive in Honduras at night. It was, according to an American embassy official I had talked to, not safe in Honduras at all. The embassy was located atop a hill and there was little evidence of a military presence. Honduran security guards admit you into the building, and then the marines take over. The man I talked with was blond, about thirty-five, and could not, he said, assist us in any way. He strongly suggested that we forget the entire project. He told me this from behind a pane of bulletproof glass, and from my point of view his features were vaguely distorted. He was a man who was slightly out of focus.
There was a casino at our hotel. A large sign at the entrance to the gambling hall featured the silhouette of a handgun. A thick red line slashed diagonally across the gun. “No pistols in the casino.” It was the sort of gay, madcap sight tourists can expect in Honduras.
WE WERE ON THE ROAD at five-thirty the next morning. A man in a yellow Toyota truck saw us studying a map and asked if we wanted directions out of town. If we were going north, we could follow him.
The road was very good, lined on either side by pine trees, and it was too early for traffic. We crested the mountains that surround Tegucigalpa and drove down into a valley where the sun was just burning away an early-morning fog.
Fifty miles later, the man in the Toyota signaled that he was turning down a dirt road. We stopped to thank him for his help. He was, he said, an Israeli, working in Honduras for a year as an agricultural consultant. He wouldn’t renew his contract. Honduras, he said, was too dangerous, too bloody.
I thought he was talking about soldiers, guerrillas, violence in the streets, but he was referring to the stretch of highway we had just driven. Almost every day he saw mangled bodies, or blood on the pavement. “Traffic,” he said, “is murder.”
HONDURAS is a country of mountain ranges. We drove through some cuts in the road where the rocks were a deep, burnished red. There was a large graceful lake called Yojoa, surrounded by green mountains. In the flatlands, between ranges, men on horseback led packstrings of mules. The mules were loaded with bananas to be sold in the markets of the mountains. They would be purchased by men in blue jeans and straw cowboy hats who herded cattle for a living.
THE OFFICIALS at the Guatemalan border were particularly impressed with a letter from their director of immigration. It suggested that people fully cooperate with us. The fact that the director of immigration was the brother of the president of Guatemala was also helpful.
Our destination
was Guatemala City, a mere twelve or thirteen hours of driving. We might have pushed on, driven all night, but that would have put us in Dallas a couple of days early, and waiting around in motel rooms made Garry vomit.
The road out of the checkpoint dropped into a reddish sandy-brown desert of scrub brush and stunted trees. Then we rose into the central highlands, climbing up to Guatemala City, another capital set in a mountain basin, this one almost a mile high. We were crawling along behind creeping oil-burning trucks.
I was daydreaming, listlessly, imagining, for some reason, a time in the distant future:
The world is a dismal place. The Amazon forest has been decimated. The trees that once absorbed the carbon dioxide humans pour into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels are gone. The carbon dioxide now simply floats to a certain level and hangs above the earth, like an encircling pane of glass. The planet is a blistering greenhouse.
Meltwater from the polar ice caps has raised sea level over one hundred feet. There is no more Central America. Instead, there are the Central American islands: the island of Tegucigalpa, the island of Guatemala City, the Costa Rican island of San José.
I see people in the poor sweltering shacks of the Amazon desert. Many of them believe the past was a golden era of enlightened men. Some of them talk about the Lost Continent of Managua. They study its books of ancient wisdom: Fidel Castro Presents Three Ways You Can Improve Your Village.
ON THE HIGH TRAFFIC-CLOGGED ROAD above Guatemala City, we drove by the scene of a bad accident. There was glass on the pavement, sharp knifelike shards of it floating in a tremendous amount of blood. Four or five motorcycle policemen were working the scene, which was under a large billboard that read, CEMENT IS PROGRESS.
We checked into a hotel and had dinner with Ricardo Pennington, a GM dealer who ran a business called Fuertequipo. While Pennington’s mechanics swarmed all over the truck like ants on a broken watermelon—they changed the oil, the oil filter, the fuel filter—we ate dinner at Rodeo, a steak house where patrons sit at picnic tables and listen to a live steel-drum band.