by Teresa Bruce
“That’s the smoothest fire I’ve ever swallowed,” he says. “Tell him the only thing I taste is the plant. It’s magnificent.”
It turns out that Martin’s Spanish is much better than mine, even though it’s his second language too. He’s a native Zapotec whose family goes back hundreds of years in the Oaxaca Valley, and when Gary tries to stop him from pouring another shot he smiles out of one side of his mouth and tells him to relax and let the woman drive for a while.
We agree to buy some mezcal to go, but that’s when the transaction hits a snag. Martin doesn’t have any inventory on the shelf. His customers are mostly Mixtec and Zapotec Indians who bring old jugs from home to fill. The closest thing I can scavenge from the camper is an almost-empty glass jar of pickles. I feed the shriveled cucumbers to the donkey while Martin rinses out our container with a few drops of mezcal right from the spigot of his copper still. It kills the pickle smell instantly, and he dips the now-disinfected jar into a fresh vat to fill it. We drive away with a gallon of 100-proof mezcal for the equivalent of three dollars.
THERE IS A POINT IN SOUTHERN MEXICO WHERE BOTH COASTS ARE pinched so close together that the Atlantic and Pacific winds collide onshore. The gusts of the Isthmus of Tehauntepec are so famously violent that truckers are permitted to drive across it only in the morning, before the day’s building heat exacerbates the crosswinds. The fact that no trucks are in sight when we begin the crossing should be a warning, but there is mezcal in the back and a campground to reach before we lose the light.
Compared to the graceful Oaxaca Valley, studded with its outcroppings of ancient holy sites and fortresses, the isthmus is as difficult to admire as it is to pronounce. Even in the high, top-heavy Avion we can see nothing but drab scrub jungle, tilted almost horizontal by the constant wind. The air is so thick with humidity that the horizon is a blurry smudge, and neither one of us notices the two massive oxen camouflaged in the underbrush.
They lumber out onto the road, shoulders hunkered down against the wind. Gary has less than thirty feet to maneuver and not nearly enough time to brake. He guns it, heading for the opposite lane and hoping the oxen don’t spook and run for the other side. It may be the howling wind, but I could swear I hear the sound of horns scraping along the length of the Avion as we hurtle past.
I HAVE FORGOTTEN ABOUT THE GUN HIDDEN UNDER THE FLOORBOARD OF our camper until we are flagged to the side of the road again, five hours from Chiapas. In a single moment it is as if the generous spirit of Mexico spits me out, my I-think-I-am-above-the-law taste too bitter to tolerate.
I can’t tell if the checkpoint is military or routine law enforcement, but there is no mistaking the intensity of the serious men in dark blue uniforms. Cars are stopped in both directions. Drivers raise and keep their hands in the air; trunks and hoods of cars are flung open like gaping mouths. The air smells of submission, and German shepherds sniff and strain against their leashes, thrilling in it. Guards with rifles pace the aisles of passenger buses while others, with nightsticks, bang on the gas tanks underneath. Women stand in ditches, hushing babies, while their young sons drag suitcases off rooftops for inspection.
The driver in the car stopped behind us walks up to Gary’s window. “Hey guys, my name is Gaston, from Mexico City,” he says, in perfect English. “I lived in the States for a while so I recognized your plates. Looks like this is going to take a while.”
Gaston explains that it’s a weapons search, so routine he takes advantage of the delay to socialize. He removes his Ray-Bans and dangles them over the side-view mirror while he chats with Gary. I squirm with dread, but Gaston and Gary trade philosophy and theory. Gaston views these searches as evidence that those in power are afraid those without power will take up arms.
“The poverty here is a ticking time bomb,” he says. “The only thing that has prevented a major rebellion, a revolution really, is that we haven’t had a Martin Luther King. We haven’t had a Che. When the poor people find their messiah, they will take back the power.”
The Avion is far too conspicuous. I can’t look at Gary, knowing that if these cops or soldiers find the gun I insisted on bringing, he will be the one to go to jail. I want him to yell at me, blame me, anything but calmly chat with Gaston and trust that I can talk my way out of this.
Silently I debate the merits of “I don’t know how that weapon got there” against “May we please make a contribution to a worthy cause you recommend?” I can think of nothing remotely worthy of testing aloud on Gary.
“¿Qué estás buscando?” I ask when a soldier finally slaps his open palm on the hood of our truck. I have forgotten to insert the respectful usted in my blurted demand to know what he is looking for. There is neither amusement nor annoyance in the unblinking eyes of my inquisitor, and the presence of a growling, seventy-pound dog on the backseat does not faze him.
“He’s going to search the back,” I translate for Gary. With clipped courtesy the man with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder is explaining that all guns and ammunition will be confiscated. He’s apologizing for the inconvenience, but the word “please” before “disembark from the vehicle” does nothing to soothe my nerves.
My hands tremble and I drop the keys in the dust twice before I manage to unlock the dead bolts on the camper’s door.
“Es un camper,” I prattle. “How do you say ‘camper’ in Spanish? ¿Una casa rodante?” I trace the outline of a square house on rolling wheels in the air between our faces as if this is a game of charades. I am hoping to distract the soldier with obsequiousness, to make up for my earlier grammatical insult. I don’t know which is racing faster, my heart or my mouth.
“Se llama Avion,” I tell him, trying to explain that the brand name of the camper is the same as the Spanish word for airplane. Please laugh at me now, or at least smile.
My panicked strategy is to get in first and sit at the kitchen table with my feet firmly planted on the section of carpet that covers our gun’s cubbyhole. Planting his ass over an illegal gun worked for my father in Bolivia; I can think of no better plan myself. But the soldier leaps inside before I can pull out the step stool to hoist myself up. I am eye-level with the camper’s floor, and Joe’s slice in the carpet looks amateur and obvious. I look up at the soldier’s face to keep from staring at the hiding place, and for a second his disgusted grimace doesn’t make sense.
The smell hits me at the precise moment I see the shattered pickle bottle on the floor. Somewhere between the isthmus winds and hitting speed bumps the size of felled logs, our pantry door flew open, and Martin’s mezcal did not survive the fall. Hours of hundred-degree temperatures inside the camper accelerated the disintegration process of mezcal- and dog-piss-covered carpet fibers. The stench could peel the aluminum off the camper’s frame.
The gagging soldier doesn’t open a single cabinet or look under any cushions. He spins around so fast that the heel of his boot leaves a soggy indentation in the carpet just millimeters from the gun’s hiding place. In less than thirty seconds the search is over.
“Me disculpo por la interrupción. Vaya! Por favor,” he says, imploring us to drive this stinking vehicle away. He fumbles with his clipboard and diverts his eyes from mine. I have no idea what is going through his mind except avoiding the embarrassment of retching in front of a woman. As I lock the camper door’s two dead bolts behind him, I give silent thanks to Wipeout’s aging bladder. Not even the most suspicious, hostile, anti-American inspector would pick up a putrid urine- and mezcal-fermented carpet to discover a false floor and hidden .38 Special.
Chapter Eleven
SHOOT-OUTS
I am giddy with relief, but by the time we find a campground for the night the relief is replaced by retching. Lab results might define what is happening to me as a recurrence of gastroenteritis, but we both know by now that it is my body’s way of punishing me for the gun. We go for a walk through a mango grove, and even though it is my favorite fruit I know better than to fill my bowels with ammunition.
We watch as Wipeout ambles up to a grazing goat about her size. I barely get my camera out in time to document the meeting of the species when the goat lowers its horns and rams into Wipeout.
A better mother would have leaped to her dog’s defense but I am laughing too hard. Wipeout takes two steps backward and shakes herself, like she just got soaked with water instead of head-butted. She looks over at us, making sure we’re watching.
Gary realizes what is about to happen. “No, she’s not that dumb, is she?”
Wipeout has always been more beautiful than brilliant, and she does not let an insult pass. She backs up two more steps and charges directly at the offending goat. Their equally thick skulls meet with a loud smack and this time it is the goat who retreats.
If we had any of Martin’s mezcal left to toast our hardheaded mutt, we would have poured her some too. But instead Wipeout falls into an even deeper sleep than normal, on the ground next to the cot I’ve set up inside a mosquito tent so that I don’t have to climb out of the camper in the dark to puke. I lie on my back, stroking the head of a dog as dim-witted as I am. I will spend another night punished for owning something I have known is a bad idea since I was seven years old. All I have to do is reread my mother’s journal to remember why.
JANUARY 13TH, 1974
Finally made beach, not without battery trouble… Met some Canadians…
played guitar, and drank. Good time
My father didn’t give a second thought to the gun hidden next to his bed when we arrived in southern Mexico. That is, until one night on a beach near Puerto Angel, when we woke to a series of lights flashing out over the ocean. I remember the darkness crisscrossed by flashlight beams, like a laser version of cat’s cradle. I was poking my fingers through the streams of light, trying to catch one for Jenny. Then, from just to our south, came different lights—longer and brighter.
“Must have been boats approaching, but I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on,” my father describes it now.
Gunfire broke out all around us. We didn’t know it then, but police were using our camper as a shield in a shoot-out with drug smugglers. I could feel bodies bracing against the aluminum panel that stood between our homemade red sleeping bags and the outside; each new thump rocked the sticky mosquito strips hanging above my head.
“I don’t suspect they had any idea there were two little girls inside that camper,” my mother remembers with an almost forgiving tone.
I am far less magnanimous. I could feel hot pee soaking through my sister’s nightgown, but I drew her closer anyway. Her hair smelled like salt and bug spray, and her heart was beating like a trembling bird. I watched my father slide open the secret door beside the bed and grab the gun we were never supposed to touch. He tiptoed to the door and crouched, in firing position, ready to defend his family to the death.
He was doing the only thing he knew how, but it didn’t make me feel safe, not then and certainly not now. If he had fired, our camper would have been riddled through with bullets. The South African grandparents who had never met John John would never have met my sister or me either. But my father tosses it off like a funny scene in a Keystone Cops movie. Maybe because she always takes her cues from him, my mother also managed to make a joke out of the night her daughters could have been shot.
JAN 14TH, 1974
Had visitors in the night—Mexicans with guns.
That’s it. Eight words. A haiku requires more syllables than my mother managed. I have no idea whether she was always like this or if the ability to erase reality was a survival skill she developed, triggered by my brother’s death. But tonight I am sleeping on a coffin-size cot not a day’s drive from what might have been my childhood grave, so all I can do is laugh about it too.
THERE IS NO HINT OF DANGER WHEN GARY AND I ARRIVE IN THE MOUNTAINS of Chiapas, only the feeling that we’ve somehow missed a border and arrived in another country. In a sense, we have. The indigenous population, led by a mysterious, rarely seen rebel leader known as Subcomandante Marcos, is demanding autonomy from Mexico and setting up separate schools, hospitals, and governing councils.
The air thins and new colors draw together, dense and loud. Gone are the pearly tones of sand and hazy grey humidity of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. In one day’s drive they have changed to loamy reds and piney greens. The winding flatness heaves and struggles into peaks and ravines, closer with every twist and turn to a piercing blue sky.
We plan on using a wooded campground on the outskirts of San Cristobal de las Casas as a base for exploring the ruins of Palenque—a half day’s drive away through the Lacandon Jungle. But the severity of Mexico’s daily summer thunderstorms and the stress of constant traveling are taking a toll on Wipeout. She chews on her paws, legs, and tail whenever we leave her to buy groceries or ask for directions. On the afternoon of our arrival in Las Casas, even the benign activities of setting up camp unnerve her, and she paces between and underneath my feet. While we are taking showers I hear the first crack of thunder. I run back to the camper but Wipeout is gone.
Gary and I circle the campground, wrapped in towels and calling her name. We check under the truck and inside the guardhouse, in case she is curled up behind the watchman’s television. I imagine her on a desperate limp back to Washington, DC, in the driving rain, but as we pass an orange VW bus, a young Dutch couple slides open the side door.
“Are you looking for a dog, big and used to be white?”
Wipeout has jumped through their door, panicked, dripping wet, and bleeding from the feet. These travelers, homesick for their own dog, are sharing tuna sandwiches and bottled water with her. They give her back to us with sympathy and reluctance; she has stolen much more than their supper.
I have spent almost half my life comforted by having Wipeout one step behind me. Now is the season when I must comfort her, and the anxiety in her watery brown eyes is heartbreaking. Listening to Wipeout’s labored breathing, in a camper just big enough for the three of us, I worry how much longer I can protect her. She is scared and suffering.
“I think the heat will be too much for her in Palenque,” Gary says. “Let’s leave her with the camper here in San Cristobal, where it’s cool, and take one of those group tours.” The Dutch couple says we can leave Wipeout with them for the day; she will be safe.
We wake before dawn to a violet campground shrouded in cool fog and pile into a twelve-passenger van. We are joined by an Israeli couple on their honeymoon, an older French couple, two graduate students from the UK, and a Mexican grandmother with her pregnant daughter and sullen son-in-law.
The first two and a half hours are uneventful. Tall spruce and pine trees poke their evergreen heads through the mist blanketing the valleys. I write my name in the condensation of my breath on the window, and my ears begin to pop when the van spirals down a one-lane road.
“I wish I were driving,” Gary mutters.
Until this moment, we have felt like travelers, not tourists, and I am suddenly homesick for the Avion. I know how to act, what to do inside a camper. When I was seven I colored pictures and practiced my Spanish. Now I ask directions, read maps, and negotiate with strangers. Gary mans the wheel of the machine that has replaced his camera. He checks the tires, the gauges, the propane and water levels. On the road he decides how fast, how close, how risky. I talk, sob, vomit, and recover, and he somehow manages to ignore these distractions and keep us alive.
If we were in our own camper now I could nod off, confident in his meticulous checklists and nondistractible judgment. Instead, our lives are in someone else’s hands, and the churning in my intestines is not purely motion sickness. Each switchback seems more violent than necessary, every curve too blind to pass. There is nothing between us and the ravines below. I have an uneasy sense that this whole excursion is a mistake, but it doesn’t rise to the level of invoking our mutual, instinct-trusting pledge, so I keep my worries to myself. Without our own wheels we couldn’t turn around anyway.
“Is it me, or is it getting really hot in here?” I ask Gary, nervous sweat beginning to collect above my lip.
He pushes open my window and I can smell that something’s changed. The approaching jungle reminds me of damp, tangled sheets just pulled out of a washing machine. The air is heavy and crackling with heat; it wants to expand but there’s no place to go. It must be 100 degrees with 100 percent humidity by the time we descend into the jungle crossroads of Ocosingo.
Suddenly, crowds of men fill the road, blocking the way to Palenque. My first, panicky thought is Zapatistas, but instead of the black rebel ski masks made famous by Subcomandante Marcos, these men are dressed in straw hats, dusty-looking jeans, and flannel shirts—like loggers at a lynching. Huge bulldozer tires, filled with boulders, form a blockade, and we are instantly surrounded.
For some inexplicable reason the French woman opens the sliding side door of our van and the crowd surges toward us. There are machetes and guns. I can make out questions like “¿Turistas?” and “¿Por Palenque?” The presence of the Mexican family and pregnant woman probably helps our situation, considering that the next question I hear shouted over the sea of heads is “¿Hay gringos?”
The French woman, in heavily accented, indignant English, replies, “We are Europeans, not fucking Americans.”
Gary and I try not to meet anyone’s gaze. We don’t dare speak to each other for fear of our accents giving us away. He puts his arm around my shoulders and pulls me closer. He wants to protect me, but he can’t. This is the province where, not quite ten years ago, Zapatista freedom fighters rioted against the North American Free Trade Agreement and paramilitary groups massacred villagers as payback. A man with a pistol in his belt slowly pulls it out—I am staring at the muzzle through the thinnest pane of window glass. I look up and see anger and resentment in the man’s eyes. Against the outside world he is powerless, and I can’t blame him if he thinks of a gun as some measure of control. But I also see fear, and in this he is no different from my father.