The Drive

by Teresa Bruce

  Please don’t let me die in a Mazatlán motel.

  I picture turning back after less than a week in Mexico. Gary and I walked away from the peak of two careers to retrace this journey. We are supposed to be on an exotic sabbatical, so confident in our world-traveling skills that we leap without a landing pad. The exploration, the journey itself, is more important than the outcome, goes this plucky narrative. But who would hire us again if we have nothing to show for it, no adventures to document?

  It is an even darker fear, though, that has reduced me to a woman who speaks in a submissive, little-girl voice every time she asks Gary to pull over. My inner dialogue is just as pathetic.

  If I can’t tough this out will he still love me?

  It is utterly unfair to doubt the commitment of a man willing to drive to another hemisphere to find the camper I grew up in. But our marriage is untested. There are not enough shared moments and fond memories to compensate him if I bail out on this joint adventure. I will end up like my mother, using baby love words to try to hold the past together.

  My body ricochets between panicked hot flashes and cold-sweat chills, but there is no one to call on my fancy satellite phone, and all the traveler’s health insurance in the world can’t compensate for my hemorrhaging hopes and dreams. Stop it, I tell myself. My parents went through much worse, and my mother managed to reduce the misery to incomplete sentences in a little pink journal. She never turned back and neither will I.

  Just stop retching and stand. When I flush the toilet, something glistens as the globs of phlegm swirl out of sight. I am so dehydrated that my wedding ring has fallen off my finger.

  Every fiber of buck-up unravels, and my sobs morph into gasps for air that Gary hears even over the white noise of CNN in the bedroom.

  “I’m going to get help. Stay here and try to pull it together,” Gary tells me. He doesn’t know why I keep pointing into the dingy toilet bowl. “If you keep crying you’ll hyperventilate and scare Wipeout.”

  His words force me to at least fake being calm. Somehow, even though I’m the one who speaks Spanish and asks all the questions, Gary finds a pharmacy clinic and returns to fetch me.

  After a cursory exam, a Mazatlán doctor says I have gastroenteritis and need a drip to restore my fluids. The nurse lifts my feeble arm and straps my veins to a hanging pump of electrolytes, Cipro, and Valium. Six hours and $380 later, I am human again. Not well enough to face the heat inside the Avion, but well enough to stagger back to the hotel. When she sees me, Wipeout’s paws slide out from under her as she runs into my outstretched arms, and I don’t care what toilet bowls she’s licked.

  I lie in bed watching CNN news anchors babble on about the war in Iraq, something that until a week ago I diligently followed, and my entire childhood journey through Latin America suddenly makes more sense. Only hours earlier I thought I was teetering at the edge of death, but my parents actually fell over it and landed on a ledge just wide enough to crawl along by feel. A grief-blinded mother and father drove off into an unknown continent without investigation or research not because they were inherently irresponsible but because they couldn’t imagine anything worse than what they had already endured.

  ON OUR SIXTH DAY SOUTH OF THE BORDER, GARY AND I LEAVE MAZATLÁN and set off down Toll Highway 15 headed for the fishing town of San Blas. This is the town that became my father’s “See, we weren’t crazy” moment in the family slide show. He parked our giant camper right on the beach, and there are pictures of my little sister and me licking huge ice creams, wearing ponchos, and smiling. A stranger would never have suspected I was secretly glad the ice-cream man didn’t have orange-and-vanilla sherbet, because that was John John’s favorite flavor. It was still raw, his gone-ness, but in San Blas somehow the ocean didn’t seem to sting as much.

  Thirty years later I roll down the truck windows and let the wind lift and flow through my fingers. This is the Mexico of my childhood: colors as rich and waxy as my darkest crayons, smells sticky-sweet and steamy. Some of the drugs are wearing off; others are kicking in. I don’t hear the blood racing through my temples anymore. I don’t feel like my intestines will disintegrate with every exhale. I am both embarrassed at how close to death I believed myself to be and prostrate before the power of fear. I am at that stage of timid relief when instead of talking about what happened I’m happy just to wiggle my toes.

  The thought occurs to me that perhaps by this point on the first trip, the younger version of me had recovered as well. So I dig in the glove compartment for a letter my aunt saved for me. It is the first letter from the road that my mother airmailed home, and instead of mentioning me it chronicles six major truck breakdowns.

  Well it seems our dream trip has turned into a nightmare. The rim on the back wheel seared off and we limped into town and replaced it with a used one… we are getting broker by the minute.

  In comforting increments Gary and I pass a Ford dealership, a Goodyear tire shop, and a Hyatt. My body and courage may fail me again, but if our truck breaks down I will never have to write a letter like this one. I turn the letter’s tissue-thin pages with a flutter of something akin to survivor’s guilt.

  Used wheel seared completely, found a place to fix the wheel. Trying to get brakes fixed too. They fixed for $20 and a jack in trade. Got truck going but wire to starter came off. Dave adjusted carburetor while I did laundry. Waiting for wheel now.

  I put away the letter to let the scenery lift my spirits. The dry-biscuit desert gives way to mustard-and-olive-colored fields and then to emerald tropics in the state of Nayarit. Along this daylong stretch of highway, Mexico transforms from Treasure of the Sierra Madre to Night of the Iguana.

  None of this beauty finds its way into my mother’s journal. From San Blas forward, it reads like instructions for the damned:

  1. Break down near dusk.

  2. Spend night on side of road.

  3. Limp or tow into nearest town.

  4. Fix (barter for parts if possible).

  5. Drive a little.

  6. Repeat.

  While my father stayed behind in garages, my mother, sister, and I wandered off to find markets, Laundromats, and playgrounds. From these uncertain explorations grew the grand sense of adventure I would forever link to Mexico.

  I remember sucking on my first stalk of raw sugarcane, extracting what felt like a delicious secret. I have wanted a pair of black leather pants with silver buttons chained down the seams ever since I saw them on the legs of mariachi singers in Guadalajara cafés. We had stopped to share a bottle of orange soda, and the singers serenaded our table with such vein-bulging passion that it made my mother blush.

  But with every unplanned repair stop my father was forced to consider the possibility that the truck would bankrupt us long before we reached the end of the Pan-American Highway. We would never reach Brazil or Tierra del Fuego; we might not even get to Guatemala. So he added a PS to my mother’s letter asking her to wire $1,000 to us, care of the US Embassy in Panama City.

  We have had more problems than we anticipated. Some could possibly have been avoided in advance by more careful analysis of the truck’s capabilities but the remainder, such as the cost of gasoline and repair bills, were unforeseeable.

  My father never admits he is wrong; if he is one hundred miles off course he will claim he picked the scenic route on purpose. He is only half joking when he says, “With a little humility, I’d be perfect.” So I am startled by the tortured content of this letter to my aunt. Between the lines is a chagrined acknowledgment that a camper and truck topping fourteen thousand pounds had crippling consequences, and that my belligerently independent father was even more afraid of quitting, of failing, than I am.

  But my parents’ misery was escalating at the point where I have turned the corner on my own. Where my mother was starting to panic, I am starting to relax. In the highlands of central Mexico it is finally cool enough to camp inside the Avion instead of renting expensive hotel rooms. We are no longer dashin
g across deserts and cranking the air-conditioning, so our daily diesel bills become more manageable.

  For the first time it sinks in that we have no deadlines to meet, planes to catch, crew to direct, edits to review, or clients to impress. Gary stops checking his watch; I don’t have to tell him we’re a scene behind schedule, losing the light. I stop consulting the map every five miles; our journey is not a storyboard I have to direct.

  The hills lining the toll roads are covered in fields of blue-grey agave: the exact shade of the color I’ve loved most since I was a kid and never known why. It is a hue familiar and mysterious at the same time, as if created to fill its own spectrum of light. The agaves layer the countryside in bursts of milky luminescence between tilled rows of rich, brown earth. The jagged edges of each frond are softened only in the shadows they cast, and driving past them is hypnotic and transporting. When we come upon a man in a horse-drawn cart we find ourselves pulling off the highway to follow him. He leads us to the town of Jala, the name of which I know only because of a hand-painted sign announcing our arrival.

  “Welcome to life without maps or GPS,” Gary says.

  As the road changes from asphalt to cobblestone, I thumb through the journal to see if my mother wrote of this town. I search my guidebooks for more information but find nothing there either. For the first time since we crossed the border I have no reference point upon which to base an expectation. I possess no convenient cataloging of Jala’s contents; there is no compass for my internal reaction.

  It is only when I stop searching that I realize Jala has discovered us, not the other way around. Its streets are obviously designed for horses and there are few cars. With our huge camper and loud diesel motor, we feel intrusive and conspicuous so we park on the widest street and spend the rest of the afternoon exploring on foot.

  Jala is as clean and beautiful as a movie set, and yet there is nothing staged about it. People go about their business repainting signs, sweeping sidewalks, and rocking in chairs behind bougainvillea-draped wrought-iron gates. Cats yawn and arch in front of architecture that borrows from their feline grace. Inner courtyards shelter rocking babies and gurgling fountains. Doors and windows are flung open to receive the slanting light, offering wafts of musky masa flour and pungent cilantro to the wind. Vendors at the corner of the town square sell slices of watermelon from ice-filled coolers and hot boiled corn from propane stoves.

  Schoolgirls in pleated skirts and embroidered blouses ask if they can pet Wipeout. They whisper admiration into her supple ears: “Que linda” and “Te amo.” She closes her eyes and pulls her faded black lips into a contented smile, basking in the echoes of her pampered puppyhood.

  One girl asks me if I have any daughters. I point to Wipeout. “Solo ella.”

  Her schoolmates laugh. No really, señora, another of them asks, how many children do you have? She holds up ten fingers, in case I don’t understand. I shake my head. She tucks one thumb away and I tell her no, not nine children, none. The dog asleep on my feet is like my baby. I got her from a man selling puppies on a street corner not so far from here. So tiny she fit in the palm of my hand. Sixteen years later, she takes up my entire heart.

  It’s a game now. The girl counts down from nine fingers until there are none left, only open, questioning palms. No children at all? How do I explain that where I come from, when girls grow up and get married, motherhood isn’t a given? I’ve never yearned for children or felt quite together enough to handle the responsibility. I could barely squeeze a patient, low-maintenance dog into the crazy schedule that my life once was. I point to Wipeout again and smile.

  Then the first girl asks how many puppies does Wipeout have? We go through the giggling ten-finger countdown again, and in the end the girls scamper off, disappointed. No babies. No puppies. The strange American lady and her old Mexican dog are lucky they found a nice man. Otherwise they would have only each other.

  In the distance, horseshoes click and a motorcycle sputters to life. From a far-off radio, an accordion squeezes a lurching ballad. Parents and grandparents look up at us with measured curiosity when we pass—as if we must be lost.

  I have never felt more found. I rest my head in Gary’s lap on a cool, tiled bench and do absolutely nothing but listen to Wipeout pant. I could linger in Jala for days, but there are no hotels, campgrounds, or even empty parking lots. We are not meant to stay here or change anything we’ve seen, and the fact that we can drive away is both a gift and a reminder of how disconnected this transient life will be.

  We have decided to untether ourselves from the technology of the life we left behind, both to minimize distractions and to experience the journey as it unfolds without instantly defining and disseminating it. Our camper’s roof is aerodynamically dish-free. The aftermarket GPS I bought back in DC has proven uselessly out-of-date, so we bury it in the locked box under Wipeout’s platform. We are not filming ourselves or posting adventure-cam footage on the Internet. We are sharing no photos or updates. My laptop has no wireless access to anything; it is simply an updated version of my mother’s pink journal. We will ration even our reading; after the forty-two paperbacks multitasking as gun camouflage run out, we have no way of downloading more books or newspapers on e-readers. Family members have the number to our satellite phone, but barring emergencies our only contact will be made during twice-a-month stops at Internet cafés. The first is in Guadalajara.

  We’re huddled over a desktop computer the size of a small oven when we open a coded e-mail from Nancy, our firearms instructor back in Arizona.

  “How is the package?” she asks. “Remember to thoroughly clean everything inside the package once you open it.” I laugh, to mask the guilt of making an old lady worry. And to make light of the nagging sense that my insistence on the gun has introduced a bulky, unspoken tension into our marriage.

  “I’d shoot myself if I had to drive every day, all day, with my husband,” reads the second e-mail we open from a friend back home, ignorant of her pun. “Aren’t you worried you’ll get sick of each other?”

  A part of me is worried, but I know that if anything drives us apart it won’t be uninterrupted together-time. The chance to tear months out of a calendar is too rare to waste with bickering. Working together around the clock isn’t new to us. Filling entire days without assignments or appointments is a window flung wide open to the sun.

  “So, about all this free-time, ditching-the-alarm-clock thing,” I mention to Gary as he grills fresh eggplant and chicken over an outdoor fire pit. We are the only people camped in a deserted RV park in the hills near Guadalajara. “How long do you think it’ll take for two Pavlovian-conditioned humans to wake up without that panicked feeling of oversleeping?”

  Producers backtime each element of a broadcast—subtracting the running time of each video and commercial to track, precisely, when every segment should start and end. On the road I’m finding that mileposts are harder to predict: we know how far the truck can go on a tank of diesel but not necessarily which towns along the route might have a gas station. The time it takes to find ice, propane, or water is equally unpredictable, and we are learning to look for campsites while there are still hours left of daylight. Each morning there is no pressing need to get up by any particular time, and this feels unnaturally delinquent.

  “I’d give it another week,” Gary says. “But if you’re feeling like a slacker you’re welcome to sleep outside and let the songbirds be your wake-up call.”

  Compared to the complexity of shooting videos in foreign countries, simply traveling through them is refreshing. Gary isn’t responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars of camera equipment. I am telling my own story instead of a client’s, and it is sugarcane-sucking, mariachi-pants thrilling.

  Chapter Ten

  MEZCAL

  When a man on the side of a deserted road to Chiapas waves you down with a machete, it takes a big gulp of positive thinking to pull over. But we have slurped at the fountain of Mexican tranquillity fo
r two straight weeks, and this man is wearing a sombrero so worn thin it barely casts a shadow over his work-sloped shoulders. If he is part of any plot to murder passing drivers, then his only accomplice is a donkey too exhausted to lift its head. It plods in a yoked ring around what looks like a smoking brick fire pit, and when our diesel engine clatters to a stop we see a structure in the distance that in a Norman Rockwell painting might pass for a lemonade stand. The man slides his machete behind a twist of rope that serves as a belt holding up his baggy pants and trots toward the Avion.

  “He either needs a ride or he’s trying to sell something,” Gary guesses. “Do you have any pesos handy?”

  I can’t think of anything I need to buy from a machete-waving campesino until I see what’s burning in the fire pit: the charred hearts of giant agave plants. We have been flagged down to sample Mexican moonshine: mezcal. It is a one-man, one-donkey operation, and we are Martin Garcia’s only customers in days. He’s more surprised than we are that two gringos who stepped out of a rolling fortress are now approaching the counter of his lean-to and agreeing to taste his wares.

  A few days earlier we camped in the agave fields of an American expat cashing in on mezcal’s rising notoriety, so I think I know what to expect. But when I lift the husk of a coconut-shell shot glass to my lips, I get a whiff of the difference right away. If I ever needed nose-hair clipping before, I will never again. I hesitate, not wanting to offend Martin but certain his mezcal is meant for stronger guts than mine.

  Gary has no such reservations. He tosses his sample back and lets the vapors collect for a second before reopening his mouth to exhale.