The Drive

by Teresa Bruce

  There’s time for one last stop before Shawn and Susie have to catch the bus back to Lake Atitlán, and they want to show us a flea market famous for antique Guatemalan weavings and carved figurines. I remember, out of the blue, that today is Gary’s birthday. We pick out a delicate, intricately patterned head wrap that Susie says women used to wear for special occasions. It’s long enough to encase a mummy—or a man recovering from dengue fever.

  I’m tucking it into my bag when Gary and Shawn wave from an interior courtyard in the back of the building. They’re standing behind some sort of brick alcove, shrouded in hazy smoke that makes it hard to see what has caught their attention. Susie raises a finger to her lips when we approach and whispers into my ear.

  “It’s a Maximón altar.” Instead of the hard X sound like that in Maximilian or Mexico, the syllables in Maximón’s name are held together by a soft, shushing sound. “The Catholic Church doesn’t recognize him, but the locals think of him like a dark saint.”

  I’ve been reading about this mysterious Guatemalan highlands deity, always depicted as a carved figure wearing black with a cigar pinched between blood-red lips. Whatever it is that Maximón officially protects or bestows seems to vary from village to village. The only constant is that he expects booze and cigars in return. According to all the guidebooks, Maximón’s physical location is supposed to be secret, his carved figurine paraded in public only by specially appointed believers one day a year.

  My eyes sting and I swallow back a cough. Surely nothing good could come of interrupting the private, somber ceremony we have stumbled onto. A kneeling man and woman, their backs to us, squeeze each other’s hands as two men wave bundles of burning herbs over their bowed heads.

  I squint through clouds of copal incense. There’s a waist-high carving of a man at the base of the brick altar. His face is black from soot and the tip of his stogie is a red-hot coal. A plastic bottle of Coca-Cola is tucked into the crook of his arm. In another context it might be comical, his outsize cigar a blatant phallic symbol. But here, even though the hot sun beats down into the courtyard, a cold chill makes me shiver.

  This is no genial, macho offering of booze and cigars. We are eavesdropping on some sort of ancient fertility ritual. The men are hissing and spitting streams of alcohol through their teeth in Maximón’s direction. The woman seems about to faint, and her husband closes his eyes and presses his hand into her stomach. I look down and find that I am doing the same thing to my own bloated gut. It is time to leave.

  We walk Shawn and Susie to the bus stop, and I am actually grateful for the contractions in my lower intestines. If we hurry, I might make it back to the camper in time. The threat of imminent disaster excuses me from trying to thank Shawn and Susie enough. I couldn’t fight back tears through a long good-bye or watch their smiling faces recede when all I’d want to do is run behind the bus taking them away. Two people we didn’t know a week ago have carried us across a threshold, and seeing them wave through a dirty window would make it seem like they, and Wipeout, existed in another lifetime.

  I am practiced by now in the art of hurrying as fast as I can without vibrating my digestive tract, and the camper has never looked more beautiful than when we arrive at the deserted gas station. But when Gary unlocks the door, the wave of trapped heat is enough to make me consider searching out some bushes behind the fuel pumps instead.

  “I have a better idea,” Gary says. “Just hang on.”

  He hops inside and fishes through our tiny closet for swimsuits and a change of clothes.

  “Run a comb through your hair and put on these sunglasses. We’re crashing the resort across the street.”

  It is a trick every traveler on a budget should learn. Walk into a five-star hotel like you own the place, and not a soul will say a thing when you stop at the lobby bathroom. Emerge wearing nothing but a huge smile and the bathing suit you’ve just changed into, and staff will point you in the direction of the swimming pool.

  That locker-room shower you’re supposed to take, the one to prevent hair gel and sweat-proof sunscreen from greasing up the water? A perfect place to shave off two days of stubble and to trim toenails caked with grime gathered from strolling through parades and bus stations in open sandals.

  I stand under a pulsing showerhead, inhaling the perfumed aroma of tiny bottles of Bulgari shampoo and conditioner and thanking the gods of pampered tourists. It’s bizarre how only three months ago I took such luxuries for granted. Whenever I had to travel I indulged in fully reclining airplane seats and noise-cancelling headphones. I ordered room service if I didn’t feel like making reservations at a restaurant and never worried about running out of Imodium A-D. In most hotels the bathroom was bigger than the entire camper I now call home.

  If we sell it to a traveling circus, that life is mine to lead again. I could get another job, buy another house, and compartmentalize these last few weeks as a bohemian sabbatical. But the woman in that parallel universe isn’t quite in focus; her voice is a distant echo. She never had time to watch Batman smoke cigarettes while turning cartwheels or her dog butt heads with a goat in a mango grove.

  Gary is already floating on his back in the cool, chlorinated infinity pool when I join him, and we swim until our freshly shaved skin begins to shrivel.

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE BROOMSTICK DEFENSE

  We wake in the middle of the night to the sensation of the camper rocking side to side. My reflexes are slow; I am still tangled in sheets of grief and fear. It could be a powerful gust of wind, but I find myself yelling “¡No me moleste!” to the darkness—a phrase that roughly translates into “Don’t bug me.”

  The rocking intensifies. A glass of water and Gary’s reading glasses fly off the shelf at the base of our feet.

  “Jesus Christ.” Gary bangs his head sitting up. “Someone is trying to tip us over.”

  He climbs over me, jumps down from the bed, and yanks a broom from the plastic clamp holding it to the curved, wood-paneled wall. He unlocks the door, waits a second, and then kicks it open with his bare feet and leaps into the darkness. It is so quiet I can hear the sound of the broomstick slicing through the air. If there is an element of surprise he has seized it, but he is only one man against an unknown threat.

  I drop to my knees, rip up the carpet, and start digging through the paperbacks burying the gun.

  “Leave us alone!” I hear Gary shouting. “Get out of here. I know you’re there.”

  I flatten to my stomach, extending my fingers to feel for the gun. It’s back there somewhere. Every worst-case scenario rewinds through my mind. You will be carjacked. You will be kidnapped.

  I claw the gun from its ziplock bag. It smells stale and metallic and feels cold and clammy in my quivering palm. I’m still staring at it when I realize that the rocking has stopped. The camper is dead still. I hear only the sound of Gary’s footsteps, circling the Avion. He has stopped shouting at ghosts.

  I am dangling the gun by its butt, like a little girl afraid to run with scissors, when Gary climbs back into the camper.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  My hands shake as I drop the pistol back into its ziplock bag.

  “It’s just losing Wipeout,” I say, as if this excuses me.

  But I know it doesn’t. I have failed a test I’ve been afraid of taking since the day we decided to drive from normal newlywed life into 24/7 togetherness and unpredictability. It’s the test in which our relationship either strengthens or splinters over how we handle a crisis. Gary hands me the first of forty-two paperbacks, not saying another word. I crawl back into bed alone while he sits, staring out the window into the tar-black night.

  THE NEXT MORNING, MR. JORDAN KNOCKS ON THE DOOR AGAIN, HOLDING up his wallet and asking if we’ll sell our camper to his circus.

  “¿Cuánto para la casa rodante?”

  He is wearing a black tuxedo and dangling a fat cigar from the corner of his red lips like the reincarnation of Maximón himself. B
ut I have a question rather than an offer. Did he hear of any riots overnight, young people raging through the streets trying to tip over anything in their path?

  “Pienso que no.” He twists the ends of his handlebar moustache and says he doesn’t think so. It is Betty the Ugly who offers the follow-up question.

  “¿Antes o después del terremoto?”

  “Wait, terremoto, I know that word,” I sputter to Gary. “Tierra means earth.…”

  Gary starts to laugh. He doesn’t need a translator. “Nobody was attacking us. It was just an earthquake.”

  We are camped on the outskirts of a city surrounded by volcanoes, on ground so riddled with fault lines that the country’s leaders long ago moved the capital to Guatemala City, yet the two of us couldn’t tell a temblor from teenage troublemakers.

  I look over at Gary, still wearing the pajama bottoms that were his only armor when he jumped out of the camper in the middle of the night, and double over with laughter. I am married to a man who battles earthquakes with broomsticks. He is married to a woman who would sooner shoot them.

  Mr. Jordan puts away his wallet, chews the end of his cigar, and shrugs his shoulders; we are clearly too crazy to know a good deal when we see it. The Jordan Bros. Circus will break camp and move on, and so will we.

  The Pan-American Highway has much more to teach us. Circumstances I am only beginning to understand forced my father to abandon the camper he built, and no matter how much I want to close that chapter of my childhood there is a chance that Gary and I may never find it. This journey has no guarantees, and there are no talismans or higher powers that can protect me against scares and heartbreaks still to come. But I could never sell the Avion. I would rather run away from one circus than rejoin the one I left behind.

  Chapter Seventeen

  EL SALVADOR

  Guatemala is only a few hours behind us but worlds away. The men cutting grass along the shoulder of the Pan-American Highway in El Salvador use Black and Decker weed whackers, not machetes. They wear baseball caps, not straw hats tied with hand-woven ribbons. The camping section of the Central America and Mexico Handbook offers only this advice for the country we have entered: “Camping is not advised.” It recommends registering with the US embassy if we plan on staying for more than a few days. “The legacy of many years of civil war is still visible.”

  The words seem to jump from the page to the road in front of us when we drive up on two men who stand between orange plastic cones blocking the highway. The butts of their semiautomatics, pressed into the asphalt, are like third legs in a pair of tripods. One cop gathers both weapons in his arms to free the other cop to lean over the threshold of Gary’s window.

  We are missing a sticker that should be under the visor, I translate for Gary. Something normally issued at the border.

  “Ask him how he could see that we were missing a tiny sticker before pulling us over.”

  For a second I consider relaying his exact words, just to be in sync with my husband once again. Because while my intestines are twisting in the knowledge of the actual illegal act we are committing, transporting the gun, Gary seems to have driven right past fear and into defiance.

  The cop who spoke moves away from Gary’s window to confer with his partner. They haven’t even named their price when Gary sticks both of his arms out over the side-view mirror, crossed at the wrist, fingers wriggling.

  “Tell them they won’t get a dime this time,” he says. “I mean it. I am never paying a bribe again.”

  I don’t know if the cops or I am more stunned at Gary’s pantomimed invitation for handcuffs. But the expectation is clear. All eyes are on me. I am supposed to step up and somehow smooth this over. Because I speak Spanish. Because I am a woman. Because I am the one with lists and plans and practice in this sort of thing.

  But instead I make the universal gesture for crazy, circling my finger in the space next to my temple. I shrug, just a little, in Gary’s direction but in truth I am referring to myself as well. This is nuts, loony, screwball—all the words I suddenly can’t find in Spanish but do not need. The cops have no fall-back move, no counter for insanity. They wave us on, laughing, but I can’t let it pass.

  As Gary drives, I read aloud that El Salvador has the worst levels of violent crime on the continent. The guidebook says kidnapping is a constant threat, and the per capita rate of violent deaths is higher here than in Colombia. But however justified, my lecture seems hollow and shrill as we pass elementary schools letting out for lunch; cascades of students in ties and white shirts wrestle under trees, chasing each other around cows and then waving at our startling silver camper.

  The camper that brought me to El Salvador the first time got more stares than waves. My family must have looked like dust-bowl evacuees from a Steinbeck novel, pulling into a gas station with one wheel wobbling under fourteen thousand pounds of misery.

  JANUARY 27th, 1974

  Still wheel trouble. Stopped to fix at station. Jennifer fell out of camper and broke her tooth. Took her to hospital in N. San Salvador. Dr. saw her and gave medicine. NO charge.

  When my sister screamed that day, it wasn’t a scream like when I took away a crayon she wanted. It was the kind that made everyone in the gas station run to the back of the camper and then turn their eyes away. A lot of blood comes gushing out of a two-year-old’s mouth when her baby teeth smash against camper steps her tiny feet have missed.

  My little sister was patient number 1,459-74 at Hospital San Rafael; a scrap of faded blue paper in the journal is the souvenir my mother kept of a wretched day. I wonder if she saved it because no one back home would ever believe her. This tiniest of Central American countries, just five years away from the tipping point of civil war, treated a two-year-old girl from a much wealthier country for absolutely no charge. And when Jenny was discharged from the hospital, the dental surgeon insisted that we camp at his farm on the coast while she recuperated.

  Maybe I am trying to atone for pulling a gun on an innocent earthquake, or for becoming the kind of person who hides one under the carpet in the first place, but I try to put more faith in the El Salvador I remember than the one described in the Central American handbook.

  In my mother’s journal, in handwriting more delicate than hers, are the names of the dentist, Ernesto, along with his wife and three daughters and their address in San Salvador. Gary and I are only two hours from the capital, and it is as if Yolanda, Carolina, Fiorella, and Lorena are calling out from the pages of my past.

  So much sadness filled the intervening years—750,000 died in the civil war, another 1,000,000 became refugees, and a 7.6 Richter scale earthquake struck in 2001—that there might not be a happy ending to this story. I decide to call my parents on the satellite phone to see if they know whether the dentist still lives in San Salvador.

  “How old do you think he’d be now?” I ask. There’s a long pause on the Nicaraguan end, memories too faded to help. “It’s okay, Mom. How old do you think he was when you met him?”

  The journal is in my hands, and without it my mother doesn’t remember Ernesto at all. My father can’t picture him either; there are no slides of this man to cue an entertaining story. El Salvador was an instrument of torture, trying to extract an admission of defeat one lug nut at a time. While my father spent hours underneath the jacked-up truck, my mother waited helplessly on beaches, grains of sand draining through her fingers like the money she knew would never be enough to last.

  JAN 28TH, 1974

  Fix truck. Went to beach in La Libertad 2 nites. Good swimming.

  Back to have wheel fixed again.

  My parents must have blocked out memories of the man who was wonderful to our family at one of the lowest points in the trip—broke, a little girl with a smashed front tooth, and a truck whose wheels barely turned. I have a chance to thank him now. The only problem is that my father’s map is thirty years out of date, and we get hopelessly lost trying to find the address in the journal. I spend an hour jumpi
ng in and out of the truck, directing Gary as he backs the Avion out of dead-end streets.

  “Why don’t we show the address to a taxi driver,” he suggests at last. “You ride with him and I’ll follow.”

  It is a brilliant solution to perpetually vague directions from strangers, and forty minutes later we park in front of a two-story brick home. There is a razor-wired patio on top of a garage and a bougainvillea-draped stairwell to the main entrance on the second floor. There is no name next to the doorbell, but the young woman who answers in a white tunic and apron confirms that we are at the right house.

  “I should have worn a dress or something; I didn’t really expect to find him,” I whisper to Gary.

  “Don’t worry about it. Your mother still picked out your clothes the last time he saw you,” Gary teases me. “If you got all dolled up he’d never believe it was you.”

  My hair is plastered to my forehead with sweat, and Gary untwists my collar as we walk up the stairs to the living room. Ernesto shuffles in. His eyes curve downward, too tired to register surprise. He smells faintly of aftershave, and the folds around his cheeks and chin are smooth and deep. He still dresses as though he has someplace to be: a starched striped shirt, polished silver belt buckle, and freshly pressed brown trousers. He extends his hand slowly to greet Gary, and I can see him wondering why we’ve come to see him: has he missed an appointment or forgotten an invitation?

  I show him my mother’s journal, opened to the page listing the address and names of his family. He brings it closer to his glasses and recognizes the handwriting on its faded pages.

  “Yolanda,” he mutters as we sit down beside him on a plastic-covered sofa. “Dios mío.”

  My parents never saw the home we are visiting now, so I flip through my mother’s journal to the part where she describes the dentist’s coastal farm.