The Drive

by Teresa Bruce

  “I’m telling you, you’d be better off not taking her.”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this, Dad. You drove two little girls into a dozen revolutions and you think we’re getting in over our heads?”

  Chapter Seven

  MEXICO

  Wipeout’s wet nose rests on my left shoulder as the Ford F-350 creeps toward a checkpoint dividing the United States from the country where she was born. We’ve removed the useless, tiny backseat and replaced it with a carpeted bench so she has room to stretch out and sleep along the way. Underneath this platform is a locked wooden box storing spare parts and valuables we don’t want every border agent to see: computers, camera gear, satellite phone, cash. Wipeout is a willing decoy and guard—she paces with excitement and sticks her head out the driver’s-side window when Gary rolls it down to show our passports.

  I am both nervous and exhilarated, clutching Wipeout’s documents in sweaty hands in case they’re demanded. But the border agent just waves us through to a fee station, warily backing away from the drooling seventy-pound dog displaying every tooth she still possesses. Over a period of forty-five minutes between Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Mexico, we pay seven different clerks a total of $275 to stick holograms on our windshield and fastidiously enter copies of our driver’s licenses, the title to the truck, insurance receipts, and passport photos into some presumed database of foreigners passing through.

  “What was our daily budget again?” Gary asks as he starts handing out our credit card instead of our rapidly thinning stash of cash.

  I do the math. “One fifth of how much we just got fleeced.”

  “You don’t know that,” Gary says. “We weren’t singled out as far as I can tell.” It’s irritating how easily he can roll with punches the producer in me can’t. Luckily I built some wiggle room into the script I’m not supposed to be following. I pull out my mother’s journal to see if the crossing knocked the breath out of her as well.

  DECEMBER 16, 1973

  $2 fee at customs. Trucked stopped side of road in desert.

  Maybe not. Even in 1973, two dollars couldn’t have seemed unreasonable. The diesel engine purrs as we pull out onto our first Mexican highway, and despite the shock to my projected budget I feel invincible. This is going to work. Wipeout and Gary are with me, and I am ready for everything ahead, open to the pure adventure of it. I’ve prepared well enough to relax, confident that this new truck and this new journey will somehow lead me to the camper of my childhood. Cocooned in air-conditioned comfort, the first day of my new life flashes past the windshield. It is a suffering desert landscape—scorched sand, withered trees, and shriveled towns—but I am as excited as I was at seven.

  We haven’t passed a supermarket since leaving Nogales, Arizona, but flyaway plastic bags snag on every brittle stump of a bush. These shredded North American garbage kites are the only splashes of color, relief from grey monochrome monotony. This stretch of northern desert, the fastest overland route to Mexico’s coast, will never grace the cover of a guidebook or tourism website. I turn away from the occasional dead dog, smacked by semitrucks and left to bake along the road. I wave at children gathering scraps of discarded tin cans, their bare feet hardened against the sizzling asphalt by thick layers of blackened calluses. They wave back with gap-toothed smiles, transfixed by the sight of a beautiful silver castle on wheels.

  THE AVION IS A GIFT FROM ANOTHER ERA, ONE WHEN CAMPING WAS glamorous and pickup campers were more stylish than most people’s homes. She is constructed entirely of aluminum panels, like an airplane, and weighs only twenty-two hundred pounds—a fraction of my father’s Frankenstein beast. Even so, balanced on teetering stacks of bricks in the driveway, the Avion looks like an elephant on toothpicks. Gary’s parents have restored her to a lustrous silver shine after years of neglect. Joe winterized all the pipes. Angie reupholstered the worn, orange seat cushions with a velvety African safari print of zebras and rhinos. The Avion is airtight, riveted against whatever tests we will put her through.

  The camper’s original owner saved the sales brochures and instruction manuals that came with her. They are full of glossy photographs of a buxom woman in satin capri pants admiring the all-in-one toilet and shower compartment and the full-sized oven with three burners. “This compact castle lets you live like kings and queens wherever you go—even way back in wild bush country!”

  NO CLAIM SEEMS TOO EXAGGERATED WHEN WE PULL THE TRIUMPHANT Avion into an empty RV campground in San Carlos, Mexico, on our first night. Even with hips stiff from three hundred miles of desert driving I feel regal mixing two gin-and-tonics over our compact sink. It’s so hot inside the camper that we slip into swimsuits and carry our celebratory cocktails across a two-lane highway to the beach.

  I fling off my flip-flops and dig my toes into searing hot sand. I am standing in the first footprint of my childhood odyssey. The beach is flecked with thumb-sized pebbles of deep jade. I roll them in my palm, and when the glistening seawater evaporates they fade to the olive green of a long-ago memory. Wipeout chases Gary into the waves, and they both howl like shipwrecked castaways too long in the sun. I hang back, spinning and skipping in the beige sea foam.

  When the vomiting starts, hours later, it is the same color and consistency: a frothy mix of bile and tonic. I abandon the Avion, too claustrophobic to puke inside our compact, all-in-one toilet. I stagger to the campground’s restroom in pitch-black night with Wipeout underfoot.

  “Gross,” I moan, begging Gary to take her back to the camper. She has pushed her way into my stall and is licking my chin, eyeing the puke-covered toilet bowl rim.

  On our second day in Mexico, the air-conditioning inside the truck struggles to keep up with the desert temperatures, and a visible suspension of particulates streams through the vents with the thick, sweet scent of Freon.

  The soothing blue sea disappears from sight, and the shoulderless asphalt hovers and seethes on a baked, colorless horizon. I roll down my window, and the desert smells like the inside of a Laundromat dryer. Each time Gary pulls over so I can vomit again, the heat presses down on my lungs and I can hardly draw the breath to heave.

  There is a beach town ahead promisingly called Las Glorias, but the Avion’s plastic water tank cracks when we hit an unpainted speed bump, and all thirty gallons of our chlorinated water supply seep into the carpeted camper floor. By the time we reach Las Glorias, three hours later, the thermometer inside the Avion reads 114 degrees. Every air-conditioned hotel is full, so we park on the beach.

  “Can you feel that?” Gary asks, turning my flaccid body to meet a breeze coming off the ocean. “Try not to panic. This wind will keep the bugs away so we can open all the windows and let the camper cool down. You’ll be able to sleep it off.”

  I have to hold onto the truck’s back tire to keep from falling into pools of my own vomit. My throat feels like it has been scored with a rake. Sand is plastered to my knees and my lips are caked. Gary ties Wipeout to the truck next to a cooler of water, and we walk to the outdoor pool of the nearest hotel. It is dark and no one sees us opening a chaise lounge to the completely horizontal position. I lower myself stomach first with my face between two sagging rubber slats. When I throw up in my sleep at least I won’t choke to death.

  The next morning I roll into the pool and let the cool, overchlorinated water wash away the stink and stickiness. We make our way back to the camper, but not even Wipeout’s joyous, sand-flinging morning greeting revives me.

  “Your parents might have let you puke your way through Mexico,” Gary says. “But I’m taking you to a hospital. Mazatlán looks like the next big city; there’s got to be one there.”

  DEC 20th, 1973

  Drove our big rig through narrow streets and parked by a square to watch kids breaking piñatas in a churchyard. I bought a dress for 90 pesos.

  Camped by the beach—pretty. Teri sick.

  Gary thinks it is pent-up stress that is coursing through my bowels, but I know the truth. I am
being punished for a decision I made a little over a week ago.

  Chapter Eight

  THE GUN

  I called my father for advice before the drive began, and even after a week on the road the disbelief in his voice still rings in my ears.

  “Come again?” he had sputtered, from a neighbor’s phone in Nicaragua. “This line must be crappier than normal because I know you didn’t just ask me what kind of gun to get.”

  Ever since I was a teenager I have harangued my parents about the evils of guns. The fact that they only used them to hunt deer, which stocked our freezer all winter, did not temper my haughty judgment. I became a sulky, vegetarian know-it-all who listened to the Smiths’ “Meat Is Murder” over and over on her Sony Walkman. That’s when my father gave me my nickname.

  “Hey Miss Information, are you forgetting how I almost shot myself?”

  I was seven at the time, and I still remember how his face got sweaty and grey—like canned tuna when you press the lid down really hard and squish out all the juices. It happened in Bolivia, during a shakedown for a bribe. A border guard demanded to inspect the camper, and my father had forgotten to put his revolver back in its hiding place after cleaning it. He spotted the gun lying on the bed and shoved his way past me to conceal the illegal weapon—by sitting on it. He squirmed and scooted all the way to the left of the bed like he was dying to go to the bathroom.

  “The inspector searched all around the camper,” my father always says when he gets to this part of the slide-show version of our life on the road, “but not under my ass.”

  He can laugh about it thirty years later, but I can’t push back the walls of fear closing in as Gary’s parents finish restoring the Avion in Milwaukee. I print out random, unverified stories from the Web about kidnapped tourists, gang shoot-outs, American women mistaken for foreign baby-snatchers, violent guerrilla insurgencies, and military clashes with indigenous peoples.

  “I’d feel safer with a gun,” I tell Gary, when Alex is out of earshot. I can literally see my husband’s patience with my paranoid overpreparation departing his more rational brain like quivering waves of heat.

  “Listen, babe, we’re still technically residents of Washington, DC,” he says. “We don’t have the right to vote and we sure as hell can’t buy a gun.”

  Fear can be so powerful it creates its own logic, and nothing Gary says stops me from fixating on the worst possible outcomes. Our beautiful camper is so conspicuous we get truckjacked and stranded. Wipeout gets hit by a car and there’s no vet to put her out of her agony. We naively stumble into a coup or a civil war like my parents did. One of us is held hostage by narco-traffickers.

  Gary keeps trying to reason me down from my mental cliff. We make a pact. If at any time either one of us gets a bad feeling about a place or situation, we will tell the other and immediately turn around. No second-guessing each other’s instincts. It is a pledge that comforts me on many levels but not enough to give up on the gun.

  My scenarios are convincing enough that Gary’s eighty-one-year-old father caves in and buys a pistol for me. In roughly one week, we will be crossing the Mexican border with a gun registered in Wisconsin under the name of Joseph Geboy. Whatever he thinks of his new daughter-in-law Joe keeps to himself.

  “I’ve been thinking of a place you can hide the gun,” he says instead.

  I can’t let on that I haven’t thought this far ahead. I watched my father build a secret hiding place thirty years ago and now I watch Gary’s father do the same.

  “See right here, where you put your feet when you sit down to eat at the table?” Joe has been working on the camper for weeks and knows it far more intimately than we do. “Well, that’s just a platform, a false floor. There’s a storage space underneath. If we lay carpet over this whole thing and piece it in where the floor lifts up, I don’t think anyone will see the seam.”

  It’s perfect, so of course I have to make it more complicated. “Let’s store our books under the floor too.” I am thinking of my father’s ass in Bolivia, his bare gun out in the open. “No border guard is going to dig through all these paperbacks to find a buried gun.”

  While Gary and Joe piece together carpet segments, I get down on my belly and shove the gun as far back under the false floor as I can reach. Then I stuff in forty-two books.

  “What about this box of bullets?” Gary asks when I am finished. Out come the paperbacks, one by one, and I realize that if we ever need to use this weapon it will take me fifteen minutes to get at it.

  “Let’s hope the bad guys give you lots of warning,” Joe mutters as he tacks down the last carpet nail.

  JOE WOULD NEVER TELL ANYONE ABOUT THE GUN OR ITS HIDING PLACE, but my guilty conscience makes me blurt out the secret as soon as we reach Prescott, Arizona. I choose my audience well for this confession: Gary’s older brother, Michael, his wife, Carol, and their seventy-two-year-old friend, Nancy, have just opened a bottle of wine to celebrate our arrival. We are spending one last weekend with family before entering Mexico. Staring at three disbelieving faces, I feel a little of the guilt-laced defiance that flows through my father’s veins. I can’t back down now; better to make light of it.

  “No border inspector will suspect we have a pistol, not with this fearsome guard dog for protection,” I say. Wipeout lazily licks her privates and then falls asleep.

  Carol gets on the Internet to research the legal ramifications of getting caught with a gun south of the border. The first site she finds is not comforting.

  “Bullet point one (no pun intended),” she begins to read out loud. “You will go to jail and your vehicle will be seized. Bullet point two: you will be separated from family. Bullet point three: you may get up to a thirty-year sentence in a Mexican prison. Ignorance of this law will not get you leniency from the police.”

  Michael brings up Napoleonic Law. “Basically it’s the opposite of the way it works here. In Mexico, you are presumed guilty and must prove your innocence. Good luck with that.”

  The silence of a stupid idea hangs in the air. I am proving I am as bullheaded as my father, only these people don’t know him and therefore cut me no genetic slack.

  “Well, obviously you’re going to do what you’re going to do,” Nancy says at last. “I just have one question. Do either of you know anything about guns?”

  This is how I find myself firing a gun for the first time in my life, the day before we enter Mexico. Nancy, as it turns out, owns several guns and has driven through Mexico in her own RV—with her firearms locked safely in a cabinet back in Arizona. She offers to show us the basics, and we sheepishly follow her to a firing range in the hills above Prescott. Wipeout stays with our camper, guarding a pile of forty-two paperbacks.

  My palms itch and the gun’s first report reverberates in my cramping stomach. I squeeze my eyes shut to keep from crying.

  “Teresa, look at me,” Nancy says. “You have to be ready to actually kill someone if you pull the trigger in Latin America. Then you’ll have to drive the hell out of there without looking back.”

  Gary maintains his composure. It turns out years of holding cameras steady translates into decent aim, and Nancy is temporarily distracted by the fun of showing him how to shoot.

  “Squeeze, don’t pull, the trigger,” she coaches. “Brace for the kick and keep breathing.”

  Later, in a garage filled with deer-antler carvings and bullet-riddled target-practice posters, this five-foot-tall woman with sensible silver hair shows us how to clean the gun.

  “Don’t forget, border dogs can detect cleaning fluid as well as gunpowder.” I don’t ask her how she knows this. She hands me a box of ziplock bags. “Wear gloves, keep everything separate, and use these to throw away the evidence.” She means evidence of cleaning, I tell myself, not that she thinks we’ll ever have to fire the gun. We write down Nancy’s e-mail address and promise to keep her posted along the way.

  “I still think it’s a bad idea,” she says as she drops us off at Michael
and Carol’s house.

  I know she’s right. I will enter Mexico a suspicious, armed intruder—not the open, appreciative traveler I want to be. This gun is me hanging on to every wrong turn and fateful twist in my mother’s journal, coloring my future with fears I need to outgrow. I have disrupted my inner equilibrium between rational and irrational, trust and distrust, and I struggle to push down the bile beginning to fester in my guilt-twisted intestines.

  Chapter Nine

  BREAKDOWNS

  Driving a camper through Mazatlán quickly becomes a hangover without the fun of getting drunk. Overweight, underdressed tourists spill off the sidewalks. The streets slowly squeeze together until all the city’s faded glamour empties out into a dingy port and ferry terminal. Gary periodically pulls over to avoid me puking inside the cab, and I must look like the oldest spring-breaker who ever hurled humiliation into a gutter. But we pass no hospitals so we settle for a shabby hotel that allows dogs.

  By the time Gary locks up the camper I am blacking out on the hotel’s toilet, coming to with strings of vomit connected to the flush handle like a spider’s web. My arm drops off the toilet seat and the back of my hand makes a loud smack on the cool tile floor. I’m convinced someone has slapped my face, and I have no idea that I am talking to myself. I want to go home.

  I start to cry. In reality, the only home I now lay claim to is a 110-degree tin can parked on four wheels outside, but I am imagining our solid row house on Capitol Hill and its soft, handwoven Afghan rugs. The sloppy coating of Lysol on the hotel’s bathroom floor isn’t quite thick enough to blanket the smell of diarrhea. It sounds overdramatic, even to the voice in my own head, but to actually return to the United States means facing the desert again. And if I have to go back out into that heat, I will not survive.