Road Fever

by Tim Cahill

  Ricardo, who spoke good English, often drove to the United States, and he didn’t advise traveling at night through Mexico. Taxis, he said, have lights on the roof and it is easy to mistake one for a police car. The lights on the police vehicles, however, revolved; the ones on the taxis did not. “If someone tries to pull you over at night and his lights don’t revolve, don’t stop. You’re going to get robbed, or worse.”

  If we were stopped by police and detained for no discernible reason, it was best to tell them that we didn’t have much time and ask if it was possible to pay “the fine” on the spot. Ricardo taught me the Spanish word for fine. Five bucks was usually enough.

  WE WERE UP before dawn and beat the traffic out of Guatemala City. We were driving on a good fast road, through a lush valley that was lined, on one side, with a spectacular range of perfectly conical volcanoes. It was a brilliant, sunny morning, not too hot, and I found myself rehashing something that had happened in Sincelejo, Colombia.

  We had pulled into town late in the evening and driven through traffic-strewn streets. A motorcycle pulled up alongside the truck. Sitting behind the male driver was a young woman wearing a long purple skirt and a white blouse. A breeze blew her skirt high up on her thighs and she pulled it back down. The woman glanced up at the truck, saw me staring at her, and blew me a playful, meaningless kiss. She had wonderfully large, almost Eurasian, eyes. Some congenial confluence of races had blessed her with an olive Polynesian complexion.

  I don’t know: maybe other people have noble sexual fantasies. Maybe they don’t have them at all. Better men and women than I can probably drive for weeks through various foreign countries without the consolation of a proper companion of the opposite sex. They don’t suffer unbidden and undignified sexual fantasies. They contemplate the dialogues of Plato and concentrate on the road.

  The woman on the motorcycle and I made love in the most astounding locations, and we did it constantly, without surcease. She was, of course, educated in a convent. She had much to learn about the physical aspects of love and was always eager to learn more about the physics of copulation in, say, a hammock. I am, in my fantasy, a masterful lover.

  I felt an obligatory twinge of guilt—a voice from the past; my own personal radical feminist, circa 1972—and told myself that there was a reason for meditating on a sexual relationship as it might be conducted in South America, with a South American woman. These were the very countries that gave us the word macho after all. I would, yes, examine this strain in myself to better understand my Latin American friends. I was indulging in a kind of contemplative sociology. It would be best, then, if I had some social position, if I were, for instance, rich and powerful. A patron.

  I am now married to this woman I first saw on a motorcycle in Sincelejo.

  We live in a large white house with flowers all about. I have sired several delightful children. When local people talk about me, they do so in folkloric phrases.

  “The handsome gringo is very rich and he has a beautiful wife.”

  “Do not think of the handsome gringo’s wife, Juan. You must never think of the wife of the handsome gringo.”

  And then the handsome gringo and his beautiful wife were making love underwater, wearing scuba gear.

  On the shoulder of the road, a hundred yards ahead, a boy was mounting his bicycle. His dog—I assumed it was his dog—capered alongside. It was a medium-sized black-and-white mutt that I knew would run along beside the boy’s bike and give Garry, who was driving, fits. There was a three-quarter-ton pickup truck ahead of us and a bus coming fast in the other lane.

  I saw all this, but, in my mind, the handsome revered gringo and his beautiful insatiable wife were experimenting with a rather contorted position under a warm tropical waterfall in a forest alive with birdsong.

  “Oh shit,” Garry said.

  I heard it before I saw it: an obscene crunching of bones. The boy’s dog came out from under the back wheels of the three-quarter-ton truck, already dead, its back twisted nearly double. The dog bounced once, four feet into the air, then spun off onto the shoulder of the road.

  No one stopped and we didn’t either. What could you say to the boy:

  We’re sorry someone ran over your pet.

  Traffic is murder.

  There are no old dogs on the Pan-American Highway.

  My fantasies of sex and power died with the dog, and at the very same moment.

  HOURS LATER, in Mexico, the incident was still haunting me. Garry said, “What if it had been a child?” and then we didn’t say anything for several more hours.

  The border formalities on the Mexican side had gone quickly. We were stopped for a second customs inspection at a roadside checkpoint half an hour into the country. And half an hour after that, two police cars pulled us over for another document check. Ten miles later we stopped for a roadside agricultural inspection and traded jokes with the fruit police.

  All the officers accepted lapel pins. All were professional, polite, and there was never a time when I felt a bribe was in order. Mexico was not living up to its reputation as the most corrupt, bribe-ridden society in all of Latin America.

  Several hours into the country, traffic died down to a trickle and the road was a two-lane blacktop, as good as any county highway in the United States. The land along the Pacific coast was heavily forested and vultures soared over the highway, looking for road kills.

  We turned east, onto a highway that would take us over a range of low mountains to the Atlantic coast. At the intersection, there was a police checkpoint.

  The land was bare and sandy. A thirty-mile-an-hour wind drove the heat before it like a blast furnace, and the two officers manning the checkpoint belonged in the Mexican version of Deliverance. They were living stereotypes, every gringo’s nightmare: two genuine steenking bach Mexican policemen.

  The older of the two was a short man with a mean sour face and one gold tooth in the middle of his mouth. His uniform shirt was rumpled, stained with sweat, and was buttoned in such a way that his belly button was visible. He had no holster for his revolver and wore it inside his pants.

  The other officer was a tall, stooped man with dull, uncomprehending eyes and a slack face. He wore a sweaty gray T-shirt that had once been white. The officers wanted to see our passports. They wanted to see the lengthy document we had filled out at customs. The short man, who seemed to be in command, reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pair of reading glasses. The lens on the left side had been shattered in a starburst pattern.

  The tall man leaned over the shorter one’s shoulder and together they examined the single sheet of paper.

  “You will,” the short officer said, “need to show me an inventory of everything you are carrying in the truck.”

  This, we knew from our reconnaissance trip, was not true. Still, we had the document and gave it to the man.

  It must have been infuriating.

  The officers already had their lapel pins, but, I saw, they didn’t want to settle for mere pin money. Garry and I were well ahead of schedule and pretended not to understand. It was a chance to stand and stretch, to look around a little bit, to torment these officers with shrugs and dumb questions.

  “Why can’t we go? Everything’s in order.”

  The tall man walked around in a circle, scratching his head and muttering to himself. The short officer stared at us with his one shattered eye. No words were exchanged for at least five minutes. The hot dry wind kicked up a minor sandstorm. It would be much more comfortable inside the checkpoint guardshack.

  “Go,” the man with the bad eye said finally. “Go now.”

  We waved and thanked the officers, who were, at that very moment, pulling over a pickup truck carrying three rusty fifty-five-gallon drums.

  The land became more fertile as the road rose into the mountains. “The tall guy back there,” Garry said, “what do you figure his IQ was?”

  “Thirty-four, thirty-five, around there.”

  “H
e looked like somebody who ought be called Igor.”

  “I don’t believe they were real policemen,” I said. “A guy with a perfect starburst in his glasses? C’mon. I think they’re from the Mexican Department of Tourism. Their job is to give visitors something to talk about.” I saw, in my mind’s eye, a travel documentary featuring these officers. “And so,” I said, “as the sun sinks slowly in the west, we bid fond adieu to our new friends …”

  “Igor and the Cyclops.”

  * * *

  THERE WAS A LINGERING golden sunset across the fields and we were following a truck with a large name painted across the back: RENEGADE. The truck was running a straight-through muffler, and it was terribly loud. In all of Latin America, only Mexican truck drivers run these deafening mufflers. Some of the Mexican trucks, however, were no louder than our own.

  Garry advanced the theory that noisy trucks belong to bachelors. “When they get married,” he hypothesized, “they have to shut their truck up. That way the road hookers and women of the night can tell who’s available by the sound of their truck. It’s like a sign of virility or something.”

  We passed a rolled-over truck on a straight stretch of road. There were four or five vehicles stopped nearby, and several people stood over a man who lay in the grass, as if dead.

  Traffic was murder, and had been for days. Ever since the Mountain of Death.

  WE SLEPT in Veracruz, and were up and out of the city before dawn. We passed through Tampico, and then crossed the Tropic of Cancer.

  “We’re coming up in the world,” Garry said. It looked that way on the map.

  “We should,” I said, “have a coffee party.”

  Since one of us was usually trying to drive while the other slept, we seldom drank coffee together. When we did, it was a celebratory occasion.

  And now a coffee party seemed particularly appropriate. We had just crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, and in a few hours we’d enter the United States. Matamoros, then Brownsville, Texas. The thought of interstate highways ahead made us giddy. Cruise control! Mindless hours of monotony. Paradise.

  “You know those tires we got in Chile,” Garry said.

  “We didn’t need them. We just put them in the back and gave them a ride.”

  “They’re Korean tires,” Garry said. “I wonder what they thought?”

  During coffee parties, various objects in and on the truck often developed their own personalities.

  “They were probably terrified,” Garry said. “Get thrown in the back with a couple of old tires that are all beat to hell, punctures all over.”

  Garry spoke for the voiceless tires: “ ‘Don’t put us on! Don’t leave us in Colombia! Take us to the United States!’ ”

  “And our jackets,” I said. “Coats that we wore down south, rolling around in the mud, tightening shocks, changing tires. They’re all soaked with diesel. Roll ’em up and throw ’em in the back with the old beat-up tires and the quivering Koreans.”

  “I wonder what they say to one another back there?”

  We cogitated on this matter for some time, presenting various conjectures as to the nature of the conversation between our tires and our jackets.

  We were only twenty miles from the United States.

  WE DROVE OVER a toll bridge on the Rio Grande, checked in with U.S. customs and immigration, got our logbooks stamped, and were back on the road in ten minutes. Garry pulled in at the first convenience store in the U.S. that happened to be on our side of the street. There were two pay phones in front of the place. Garry called Jane. He spoke to Lucy and listened to Natalie gurgle. I called my friend Karen and told her that I was at a convenience store in the United States, not far from an interstate highway. This did not seem as remarkable to her as it did to me.

  “Karen,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  I heard my voice rise in excitement. “They have shampoo here!”

  A flashy red Camaro driven by a teenaged boy pulled up near the phone. He had his sound system turned up near the level of physical pain.

  “This is a place,” I screamed, “where you can use the phone and buy shampoo. In one stop.”

  There was a private home next door. An elderly gentleman was sitting on his lawn in a wooden chair watching a small black-and-white TV that was set up on a card table with a blue cloth over it. A long extension cord snaked its way back to the house. The man had a pad on his lap and was taking notes.

  “I’m surrounded,” I shouted, “by Americans!”

  WE DROVE NORTH on Highway 77, a double highway, two lanes going in each direction, and there was a large grassy strip of land between the lanes. Everything was very clearly marked with big green signs. There were no chickens, burros, or oxcarts on the road. Everyone had lights that worked.

  Outside of a town called Raymondville, we were stopped at an immigration checkpoint. The officers chatted with us for all of thirty seconds, then waved the truck through.

  “What kind of checkpoint was that?” Garry said.

  We were consumed by an entirely feigned anger and shouted at each other fiercely.

  “They call that a checkpoint?”

  “Wimp!” Garry screamed. “Wimp checkpoint. We should have said, ‘Okay, we give up. Take us to the pit. Where’s your pit?’ You need a pit that doubles as a garbage dump.”

  “Do we have to teach them how to run a checkpoint? What you do-first you turn off all the lights and then you take people around the corner in the dark.”

  “To the pit.”

  “That’s full of garbage …”

  “And you have to put a gun to someone’s neck.”

  We drove for several more hours admiring the flawless monotony of the road. There was an old Aretha Franklin song on the radio and we cranked it up. Somebody named Dick Barkly told us that the song had been brought to us, in part, by Big A Auto Parts. It was, Barkly continued, a solid-gold Saturday night.

  Which meant we were going to get into Dallas about a day ahead of schedule.

  FULL-TILT

  ROTO

  - - - - - - - - - - - - -

  October 18–22, 1987

  WE SLEPT in Kingsville, drove to Corpus Christi on time for a Central American-type red-ball sunrise over the Gulf of Mexico, then stopped in San Antonio to have a celluar phone installed, all of which put us in Dallas at three on Sunday afternoon. The press conference was scheduled for Monday, at nine o’clock in the morning.

  Garry handled the waiting well. It was his job: the PR payback. We met with some representatives of the public-relations firm who wanted to talk about the trip thus far. The PR people cautioned us not to make the transit of Nicaragua sound “too easy.” On the other hand, Chistita Caldera from Intourismo in Managua wanted us to make the country sound like a lot of fun for dentists. This, I thought, might require some tap dancing.

  I washed our clothes while Garry watched the mechanics put a new auxiliary fuel tank in the truck. The Sierra also got new shocks, four new tires, an oil change, and a new fuel filter. The back of the truck was cleaned and organized.

  I had some time to fill in a pocket calendar with our driving days. If we left tomorrow at noon, hit it full-tilt roto, all the way to Prudhoe Bay, we could be there in under twenty-five days, easy.

  “Why not,” I suggested, “do it in under twenty-four?”

  “Let’s do it,” Garry said.

  THE NEXT MORNING, we were standing in the front of the dealership at nine, ready to lift the veil of secrecy that had shrouded our project from the very beginning. From here on north, there was no significant threat of banditry or terrorist activity. Now it could be told.

  The media, however, wasn’t much interested in what was under the veil. It was not the kind of slow news day that generates our kind of story. The stock market had opened badly. We were trying to talk about places with names like Ushuaia during the Black Monday stock-market crash.

  Big money is a big story in the United States. So is ongoing human drama, and there was
a potential tragedy in progress just a bit south of us, in Texas. It seemed that a little girl had fallen into a well. She was trapped there. The rescue efforts were being televised nationally, even as we spoke. Every reporter in Texas was there. Which is why so few of them were in Dallas to see us lift the veil of secrecy.

  WE LEFT AT NOON, twenty-one hours after hitting Dallas. Before that, one of the supervising mechanics in the service department of the dealership asked if he might speak with us. The man said he was a born-again Christian and would offer us a blessing. He prayed that we would have a safe journey. We thanked him for his concern.

  “Who was that guy?” I asked Garry. “Did you meet him last night?”

  “No.”

  “Nice guy, though.”

  “Yeah,” Garry said, “Mr. Godwrench.”

  THE SIGN was a blue shield with a little crown of red: 35. We took the interstate north into a big, flat, straw-colored grassland that was patched red with shrubs in their autumn colors. We had had our spring in Buenos Aires and now we would get to appreciate fall until dark. When the sun came up, it would be winter.

  IN 1910, there was no auto road across America. There were a series of dusty tracks heading west, but they all ended somewhere in Nebraska. After that, the road was a wandering progression of ruts across the prairies. Adventurers attempting to drive beyond Nebraska encountered fences and locked gates.

  By 1923, a coast-to-coast highway, Route 30, had been built. According to Phil Patton, in his book Open Road, there were road signs on Route 30, but they were not uniform, and interpreting them was a matter of intuition: did the skull and crossbones mean dangerous intersection, and was it necessary to stop at the painted picture of a raised palm?

  The sudden popularity of the installment plan in the 1920s put America on wheels. By 1925, over half the families in the country owned a car. The roads weren’t very good, the road signs were sometimes enigmatic, and first-time carowners did not always drive with grace and precision.

  Measured in terms of deaths per million miles driven, the 1920s was the deadliest decade in the history of American driving. The road was a festival of blood.