The Drive

by Teresa Bruce

  Nothing I have done to prepare for this moment will save me. All my worrying, researching, insurance purchasing, and gun smuggling leave me as unprotected as my parents were on a beach thirty years ago. Fists are shaking and machetes waving, and the driver quickly pulls a U-turn and guns the accelerator. I’m so afraid he’ll run somebody over that I can’t look forward. I can’t look behind me either; I would rather be shot in the back than see it coming. I can’t even look at Gary; if there is fear in his eyes I know it will dissolve me.

  The most I can worm out of the driver is something to the effect that the Zapatistas are ghosts, ancient history, and the protest is just over Ocosingo natives wanting private tour drivers to go on strike. They routinely block the road to Palenque in protest even though it is the only way goods or services get into or out of the Lacandon Jungle. I deduce that our driver is considered a scab and a sellout to foreigners.

  The crowd surges, and men hold their guns up in the air, safe from shoving elbows and lunging shoulders. I clamp my hands over my ears, pre-recoiling. Colors start to blur and angry faces fall out of focus. Our driver does not even roll down his window to negotiate. Nothing he can say will ever convince the protestors to let us through. Anything might be the flash point. Hands rock the van and sticks smack the windows as we retreat. The gunshots I have been expecting fire into the air. I feel as trapped as I was in my red sleeping bag soaked through with the terror of my little sister.

  When they realize we will never reach Palenque, the French and Israeli couples begin demanding that the driver issue a refund. They have every right to be furious with a man who drives tourists into known conflict zones, but it is easy to see why indigenous people prefer living off the land to placating tourists. It’s harder to fathom anger so deep, disillusionment so raw, that they routinely cut off their own lifeline in protest.

  “I keep thinking about what that guy Gaston said,” Gary says on the long ride back to San Cristobal de las Casas. “They only need a messiah.”

  Until today we have been too cocooned in our own world to really experience the one we are driving through. The camper has become an island, and away from it, even for a day, we are swept into much deeper currents.

  Chapter Twelve

  SAINTS AND LITTLE DEVILS

  If we needed a nudge to leave Mexico it comes during our final fuel stop. It is approaching ninety-five degrees, and there is a cattle truck in front of us, the rural type in which slaughterhouse-destined animals are penned behind hand-painted wooden slats. But dozens of men with guns stand in the back of this truck, black eyes peering out from holes in heavy, knit ski masks.

  “Right now I am hating our DC license plates,” Gary says. “Those guys are Zapatistas.”

  The masked men jump down and reassemble around the truck bed in a wary pattern, choreographed for vigilance. It is at once exotic, mundane, and revelatory. The roadblock we encountered at the entrance to Chiapas was never about finding tourists with .38 Specials hidden in their vintage campers. It was about intimidating these men and their supporters. The indigenous revolution is still real and armed, but even freedom fighters have to stop for Doritos and diesel.

  Part of me wishes I had the nerve to walk up to them and ask a million questions, but the smarter part just wants to get the hell out of this place where Americans have no business interfering.

  As Gary fills our tank with our last drops of Mexican fuel, I replay the slide-show version of the country we are about to enter in my head as a distraction from the masked men. To a seven-year-old girl, Guatemala was Willy Wonka wondrous. All it takes is tracing the smudge of my father’s fingers along the highways of his folded maps and the names of towns jump out in double-Dutch rhymes: Chichicastenango, Huehuetenango, Sololá.

  I picture black-haired girls with long braids down their backs and instantly leap into the rhythm of twirling jump ropes: cha-cha and tango, way-way-to-go and so-long-ago. Even my mother’s journal sings along.

  JAN 17, 1974

  No hassle. Beautiful country. Clean.

  JAN 18–22

  Food cheap—fish dinner for four $1.7

  It was a new year, and for my family Guatemala was a fresh start. Nine days we wandered through this country the size of Tennessee and only one night passed in the misery of a repair shop. Even my father’s refusal to pay a bribe to cross the border resulted in only one night camped, in protest, in front of the immigration office.

  “How did he get out of that one?” Gary asks.

  It is one of my father’s favorite stories. Apparently I wandered into the aduanero’s office the next morning, introduced myself in Spanish, and somehow charmed the guards into letting the camper through with only a cursory inspection and no payoff. Considering that Guatemala was two decades into a thirty-six-year civil war that left two hundred thousand people dead, I do not expect my husband to completely swallow my father’s seven-year-old-saves-the-day recounting of history.

  “Let’s try a safer border crossing” is Gary’s way of telling me he doesn’t.

  We bypass the main Guatemala border crossing, still renowned for relentless searches and shakedowns, in favor of what guidebooks describe as the “easier” frontier in the mountains. When we arrive there is no “Welcome to Guatemala” sign, just a mechanical gate salute in the straight-up position. It looks more like a flea market in a chaotic delivery alley than an international border. Women waddle between semitrucks selling fresh fruit and bottled water. Grandfathers pedal bicycle carts, saving energy by grabbing onto the side mirrors of slowly passing cars. Young men wave wads of quetzals in the air to exchange for Mexican currency, but nobody wearing anything remotely like an official uniform pays attention to us.

  While Gary stands guard next to the Avion, I drag Wipeout and her dossier of permission slips into an unmarked wooden shack filled with crates of live chickens. Wipeout strains against her leash while a guard leafs through page after page of her documents, every one of them upside down. After fingering the impressive stamps and embossed foils, he asks for a dollar and pencils a check mark in an otherwise blank ledger. That’s it—all of my reputed charms are utterly unnecessary.

  Since we are already in the mountains, we decide to deviate even farther from the course my parents followed and drive to the village of Todos Santos. It is not along the Pan-American Highway; we seem to be driving down the slope of a gravel pit. Exuberantly painted hand-me-down US school buses called “chicken buses” hunt and peck their way around fallen boulders, creating blinding clouds of dust in their wake. Landslides have wiped away entire chunks of hillside, and we slip and skid between foot-deep wheel ruts.

  Still, I can’t shake the giddy sense of adventure. We’re finally abandoning the familiarity of my father’s maps and my mother’s journal and simply exploring. But I’m not the one behind the wheel, straining to keep the camper upright. Gary is focusing so intently on the cratered road ahead that he hasn’t said a word in forty-five minutes.

  “So there must be a reason they named this town Todos Santos,” I toss into the tense silence.

  Gary is a long-lapsed Catholic, and the only time I’ve seen him blush was before we were married, when his mother bragged about his short-lived stint as an altar boy back in Wisconsin.

  “Don’t you remember any saints we could start praying to, just to get us there in one piece?” I figure it’s worth a try, anything to ease the tension in his jaw and grinding teeth.

  “I think it’s time to try out the four-wheel drive instead,” Gary says as he gets out and kneels in mud beside the front wheels to lock the hubs in place. The truck grips the earth and chews up ruts and boulders like a jaguar ripping through the flesh of its first catch. Wipeout slides from one side of her platform to the other, and water bottles and sunglasses fly through the air. It is strangely exhilarating until I remember the thirty-five-year-old Avion swaying from side to side overhead.

  I reach over to rub a charm hanging from the rearview mirror. The mirror itself is use
less because the camper blocks the back window. We are using it as a hook from which to hang a growing chain of good luck charms: my grandmother’s Navajo ring with its huge chunk of traveler-protecting turquoise, a Mayan calendar amulet for wisdom of the elders, and a fang-shaped piece of jade and silver to ward off the evil eye. The truck skids to the left, and suddenly the entire necklace of charms flies off the rearview mirror.

  “So much for all the saints,” Gary finally laughs. “It looks like we’re on our own.”

  Hours later, we descend into the village of Todos Santos: a two-kilometer strip of houses, restaurants, and markets wedged in a ravine between mountains. The peaks soar four thousand meters on either side, and we are trapped in a different century.

  “If we go any farther we won’t be able to get back out,” Gary says. The truck will soon be pinned into a one-lane, dead-end road, at which point turning around will require squashing small children or livestock. There are no gas stations here, no parking lots or rest areas, and certainly no campgrounds. We will have to ask landowners for overnight camping privileges.

  It can’t be all that different from negotiating location fees for films, I tell myself. When we pass a farmer tilling a plot of land, I lean out the passenger window and offer him the equivalent of five dollars to let us park. It may be because I’m a woman, but he doesn’t ask questions or even look me in the eye when I hand him the quetzals.

  “That was almost too easy,” Gary says as he searches for the driest patch of grass.

  “Don’t be so paranoid,” I tease him. I am feeling smugly self-confident. Every system has a set of rules, and I take the farmer’s cooperation as a sign that I am already mastering Guatemala’s.

  Nine little ruddy-cheeked boys approach as a group while Gary sets up the camper’s awning. It’s eerily silent. These kids, unlike any we’ve encountered on the trip so far, make no attempt to tell us their names or ask where we’re from. They just stare, without even blinking. If they possess any curiosity at all it must be satisfied through some sort of painless mental answer extraction. Just when it’s starting to creep me out, Wipeout climbs down her ramp and the boys erupt with shrieks and squeals. All we needed was an ambassador, even one with wobbly legs.

  “She’s too beat to walk all the way into town with us. What about hiring these kids to watch her for the afternoon?” Gary asks me. “They look like they could use something to do.”

  We are eager angels, their cherubic faces say to me. They plop down in the soggy grass and let Wipeout make her own approach. Her slobbery tongue knocks off sweaty straw hats, and she nuzzles under pink-and-purple woven vests to identify their little boy scents. They collapse in giggles when her feather-duster tail tickles their chapped chins and bright red lips. I reach into my pockets and divvy up coins among the nine boys.

  “Muchachos, protegen por favor mi perra.” I ask them to guard her.

  Gary takes a group portrait of Wipeout’s new guardians, and the kids immediately strike a pose. I could swear some of them are flashing gang signs. “Where the hell did they learn that?”

  “I guess we haven’t driven far enough away from the US,” Gary says. “That, or one of these little guys must have a satellite dish at home.”

  We leave Wipeout under a huddle of boys stroking her silky white fur and fighting over the right to lift the water bowl to her lips.

  It is two o’clock when we make it to the Todos Santos Saturday market, but vendors are already packing up their wares. There are only a few blankets with peppers and flowers still spread on the ground in front of the white stucco Catholic church.

  The street is jammed with chicken buses, revving their diesel engines to signal impending departure. The air is choked with exhaust and dust; feathers and chaff swirl around our ankles. It is part farm, part carnival, and the atmosphere is alien and familiar all at once. I walked through countless markets just like this one, clinging to my mother’s hand, and I feel just as out of place now, as if my uninvited body is taking up too much physical space.

  Gary and I climb uphill to watch the mayhem from a perch in the town square, which overlooks the road. It is like stepping into one of my father’s slides. There is no evidence of any other foreigners, not even a scraggly backpacker in sight. Women wearing long skirts the blue of spun night sky huddle in the shadows, babies strapped to their backs by sarongs woven through with emerald greens and fiery magentas. I catch them sneaking glances at us, but the minute I smile, eyes drop to the ground and whispers stop.

  The two of us, in dusty cargo pants and wicking fleece, are the most unisex-looking, conspicuously underdressed people in the square. The traditional traje, or indigenous costume, worn by the men of Todos Santos is black leather riding chaps over red-and-white candy-cane-striped trousers.

  “See what I meant about Guatemala?” I whisper. “Willy Wonka Land.”

  The men’s jackets have padded collars and cuffs, embroidered in iridescent blues and purples. Even their straw hats are jubilant, decorated with padded woven bands under studded strips of leather.

  By four o’clock the sun is falling behind the high peaks of the surrounding mountains. We hurry back to the camper, and there is barely light enough to see that Wipeout’s entourage has turned into a mob. There are at least fifteen kids squatting under the awning, and another ten descend as we approach. They poke at our pockets, demanding money, and Wipeout howls in relief when she sees us.

  “Tu, tu, tu, and tu,” I point to every grubby face I recognize. “Ya les di dinero.” They have already been paid, but I am arguing with them in Spanish. Every single boy holds out his hand as though we’d never met before. They have transformed from sweet little animal lovers to hustlers in the space of three hours.

  “I don’t think they understand me,” I shout to Gary. “They probably speak Mam or some other Indian language.”

  “If we give in now and start handing out money, it’ll never end,” Gary shouts back, over their heads.

  A few boys start swinging on the awning bars, which strain perilously against the aluminum skin of the aging Avion. One boy cops a quick feel of my left breast, probably just checking to see if there is actually a woman under my androgynous, monochromic American clothing. Another pelts Wipeout with tiny pebbles, and his friends throw clumps of mud at the camper. Gary and I chase them in circles and eventually they scatter.

  At Todos Santos elevation it takes fifteen minutes for a breathless American woman to bring a teakettle of water to a boil, but instead of a whistle I hear a commotion outside the camper.

  “What do they want now?” I groan. The little rascals are back. Even Wipeout whimpers.

  “Think like a kid,” Gary says. “A Guatemalan kid. You made a promise.”

  It takes a second for the scope of my stupidity to sink in. The money changers at the border didn’t bother with exchanging coins into Guatemalan equivalents. All the pesos and dimes I so magnanimously showered on the kids for babysitting Wipeout won’t even buy them chewing gum in Todos Santos. No wonder the little saints turned into devils.

  I fling open the door to jump out and make amends but my right leg flails through three feet of empty space. My hamstring takes the brunt of a brutal landing—the step stool we leave outside the back door is tucked under the arm of a boy who can run much faster than a limping cheapskate.

  “Think of the karmic balance,” Gary says as he boosts me back into the camper. “Next week some other dumb travelers won’t believe their luck. They’ll find a brand new step stool for sale at the Todos Santos Saturday market.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE FUNDAMENTALS

  I am finally sipping a cup of tea, throbbing right thigh wrapped and elevated, when an otherworldly shrieking begins. Even through the protective hull of the camper, it sounds as though a man and a woman are being stuck through with pitchforks. They take turns, building on each other’s frenzy, and the sound is so tinny and shrill I can’t tell when one round of shrieking ends and its echo conti
nues.

  We lean out for a look and the wailing seems to be emanating from an unassuming, one-story outbuilding with a homemade wooden cross hung above its door.

  “That little church, all the way across this valley?” I ask, incredulous. The church is nothing like the grandiose Catholic cathedrals I associate with Latin America.

  Gary points to loudspeakers and megaphones strung all along a telephone wire from the building to the road. It appears a Pentecostal church service is under way. The racket ricochets between mountain peaks. We sinners are a captive audience.

  “Crank down the air vents and close all the windows.” Gary barks instructions like the captain of a sinking ship. “I’ll sandbag the door with towels.”

  In a matter of minutes the camper has gone from halcyon to hellish. The din is claustrophobic, and even though I know that the message is intended for everyone within earshot, it seems personal. We are unwelcome intruders.

  “What the hell are they saying?” Gary asks.

  I have no idea. There seems to be no distinction between words; syllables bleed together in incomprehensible babble. We might as well be aliens who crash-landed on another planet. A headache is working its way to my frontal lobe, and I’m actually grateful I don’t speak the language of our torturers. If I could, the hellfire being spewed through this isolated town would surely translate into something like, “Skirtless, barren woman: repent and return to the United States or burn in a lake of fire forever!”

  I’ve read of the rise of Pentecostalism in Latin America—how some scholars credit its fundamentalist, zero-tolerance attitude toward alcoholism for a reduction in domestic violence in remote villages.

  “At least women and men seem to share the pulpit,” Gary offers, but I am certain that whatever brimstone being broadcast is far from tolerant or egalitarian. Why else would it be force-fed via loudspeaker the minute the sun goes down?