The Drive

by Teresa Bruce

  Now they are de facto zookeepers and camp counselors. Between the daily dramas of waitresses quitting and suppliers running out of ketchup, Sheila nurses animals to health and Dennis is organizing a through-the-locks kayak race across the Panama Canal. They are refurbishing an old ambulance for reliable transportation to the nearest hospital and trying to start a library for local kids. But instigating change takes enormous energy in the village of Santa Clara, even for unlikely guardian angels. The default setting of the expats who gather here is do nothing, collect a check, and drink too much. Dennis’s dark tan doesn’t hide the lines of frustration in his face. The weight of even a Virginia Slims cigarette slumps Sheila’s tired arm over the bar, and I am reminded of my mother’s face in all the photos from Panama.

  It was near here that my father decided to drive us deep into the jungle, trying to camp for free while we waited for a way to South America. But even though the United States still controlled the canal, transient Americans were not allowed to camp in a military zone. So we went into hiding.

  MARCH 8TH, 1974

  Cop said it was against the treaty to camp here. Men! Me and Jenny went to the authorities but it was a no go. Went shopping and moved camp half mile from locks—out of sight. Pleasant, tropical setting.

  This is the other Panama I remember, days of hide-and-seek with my sister in the jungle and swinging from vines into rivers and lakes. Eventually, nineteen other travelers, in tents and campers, all trying to book passage from Colón to Colombia, joined us in our jungle hideout. Each day, to escape the attention of the zone police, we left our hidden compound and split up to go exploring.

  MARCH 9TH, 1974

  Went to Fort Lorenzo—the pirate Henry Morgan’s hideout. Climbed around rocks and walls and into dark rooms. Hiked down cliff to a bay and went swimming.

  Deal after deal fell through, and days turned into weeks. I was glad. I learned to sneak up on giant blue morpho butterflies and hold my breath while I plucked them from flowering vines. I tried to keep them inside the camper as pets, but our half-blind kitten ripped off their wings and squished their heads. My mother even showed us how butterflies kiss each other, picking us up to her hip and batting her eyelashes until they tickled ours. One afternoon the three of us were walking back to camp from a swim in Gatun Lake when my mother froze in place.

  “Girls, don’t move,” she said in a low, I-mean-it voice. “See, over there where the trees part? It’s a mama panther and her babies.”

  I looked up and saw one solid black kitten in the mother’s mouth and another hiding between her legs. When I was born, my father gave my mother a necklace charm: a solid gold cat with a kitten in its mouth. On the day we saw the panthers, my mother and I looked at each other in synchronized, unspoken astonishment. The charm had come to life. The mother panther was slick and silent, and we held our breath to better hear hers.

  It was the exquisite fulcrum of instinct and curiosity, and we were all six transfixed. The stealthy hunters broke the spell first and padded off into the hills like shadows. At that moment, I decided to name my half-blind, butterfly-killing kitten Pantera, the Spanish word for panther.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  RED MEAT

  I have voluntarily gone without red meat for twenty years, smug in conscientious pseudo-vegetarianism. But in my nomadic childhood meat was a luxury. Gunfights over the roof of our camper were simply “Mexicans with guns,” but each hamburger we ate was individually detailed in my mother’s journal.

  JANUARY 5TH, 1974—MEXICO CITY

  Took subway to Western Union, got money—ate hamburgers (expensive) walked home

  APRIL 9TH, 1974—CARACAS, VENEZUELA

  Ate hamburguesas with papas fritas—yumm

  On burger nights in my home-on-wheels, we took turns scraping the stuck-on crumbles from the cast iron skillet. I craved the fatty, rich flavor of meat, the way the smell smoked up the camper and settled into the cushions and carpet. That smell meant we were safe, for a while, not spending the night in a garage or on the side of the Pan-American Highway.

  Tonight that smell is back, and it means something completely different: Sheila is grilling for the expats at XS Memories.

  “We always do it for Oktoberfest,” she explains. “But we could pretend it’s for your birthday if you’d like.”

  I am about to turn thirty-seven, and the aroma of grilled meat is swirling all around me. I stare down at what will be my birthday dinner—Atlas beer and a mound of rice and beans—listening to my own inner lecture. Meat is the distance I have put between me and my childhood; my life is no longer a seesaw between feast and famine.

  “I am in control,” I whisper to myself. Okay, maybe it’s more like a whimper.

  I am so absorbed in my own memories that I almost don’t see the tears in the corners of Gary’s eyes. He is looking up at Sheila as if she might be an actual saint. Or his mother. They are the same, as far as bratwurst is concerned. His mother’s cooking is the only part of his childhood he recites like a homily: Angie’s tissue-thin apple-strudel pastry layers, her Depression-era penchant for margarine, the sausages that she soaked in beer and slathered with homemade sauerkraut.

  He has admitted to no pangs of homesickness since we pulled out of his parents’ Wisconsin driveway, but at Sheila’s Oktoberfest he is overcome. He notices me staring, about to say something comfortingly mushy, and does what he always does to avoid being fussed over. He turns the attention to me. He spears a brat with his fork and slices it open lengthwise on my plate. Steam escapes from the split casing and rushes my resistance.

  “Live a little,” he prods. “You’re not getting any younger.”

  Call it an emotional breakdown or breakthrough, but I begin my thirty-seventh year a carnivore again. That first bite of charred sausage casing is the next-best thing to hamburger crumbs on the bottom of a cast iron skillet. Gary leaps into the swimming pool fully clothed, a glimpse of the always-outdoors kid he once was. I plunge in after him, intoxicated with the smell of chlorine, salt air, and animal fat. The expats buy me weak Atlas beers all night, and I wander off to be serenaded by swaying palms, titi monkeys, and the starry Santa Clara sky. I’m not sure if Panama is changing me or resurrecting someone I once was.

  I WAKE THE NEXT MORNING WITH A SPLITTING HANGOVER AND THE REALIZATION that our drive has stalled. I check my laptop notes. We have spent twenty-three nights in the confines of a sports-bar campground. Worse yet, the agent of the freight line holding our $500 deposit tells us there isn’t enough prepaid cargo to cover the ship’s cost of passing through the Panama Canal. I might as well copy down my mother’s journal entries and change the dates; nothing’s changed except the prices.

  MARCH 4TH

  Boat fell through. Found another, better one—$50 deposit.

  While we wait, the rainy season begins in Santa Clara, and daily torrential downpours take the place of sunny afternoons at the beach. If I stood in one place longer than the time it takes to drink an Atlas beer, I would look down and find mushrooms sprouting between my toes.

  The rain pounds the camper walls closer together and compresses the air into barely breathable gel. Everything leaks. Even the drain plug in our Styrofoam cooler disintegrates, and melted ice soaks into the mezcal-stained carpet. Inside the Avion it smells like sweaty feet and rancid Wonder Bread.

  The first actual spores we spot are in the bathroom, splotches of texture on the otherwise slick plastic shower walls. Then the mold spreads to the inside of the refrigerator, oozing from under rubber door seals. The screen over the casement windows turns mossy, and under our futon mattress we discover a thin, velvety carpet of light green sponge. We drag every last possession out onto the grass and give the camper’s empty interior a sponge bath with bleach.

  “And to think,” Gary says as he snaps the fingers of his rubber gloves, “when you factor in crappy gas mileage and what we have to pay to camp every night, we could have ditched this giant germ jar and stayed in decent hotels.”
/>
  I am not ready to admit that driving a camper as old as I am through a succession of Central American rainy seasons was a bad idea. Hotel hopping would have been even worse. I am not naturally nomadic and I feel safer sleeping in my own bed each night, even if it is moldy and perched precariously above four wheels. A part of me wishes for a pad of sticky notes to write down all the reasons this trip is still justified. Not that anything would stick on moldy walls.

  “Well, at least we’re saving money on meals” is all I manage.

  “Sure,” Gary says. “And how long ago was it cool enough to cook inside?”

  I could look it up on my laptop. But then I’d sweat more, and it’d probably just prove him right. Sheila, with impeccable timing, pops over to feed our neighbors, the self-feather-plucking macaws. And to invite us to a party.

  “It’s Halloween,” she says. “If you two are done fighting this losing battle, I could use some help hanging cobwebs in the bar.”

  A few hours later and XS Memories is decorated with crepe paper ghosts and ghoulish plastic pumpkins. Horror movies play on the big screen, and a cauldron of alcoholic potion steams on the stove. The expats and regulars arrive early to get first dibs at Sheila’s costume box. This stretched-thin woman, with hardly the energy to lift her cigarette, knows how far from home we all secretly feel, and she has pirated away two suitcases filled with costumes.

  “Get your mitts off,” she snaps at Peter, the retired Canal Zone pilot, who divorced and remarried the same woman four times. She also swats away the hands of Connecticut Don, who moved to Panama after a heart attack six years ago.

  “I’m saving my favorites for the new kids. Teresa, you’re the hussy señorita, and Gary, you get to be her pimp.”

  I emerge from Sheila’s living room layered in off-the-shoulder ruffles and squeezed into cleavage worthy of a brothel. Gary saunters out in a purple silk smoking jacket with black velvet cuffs, a plastic fedora, and Mardi Gras beads.

  Canadian John is wearing a costume of his own: checkered polyester blazer, fake sideburns, and dark sunglasses. Women line up to drape over his wheelchair for selfies as he puffs on a cigar, does his best Sopranos imitation, and forgets about the military diving accident that occurred when he was twenty-two. His disability checks go further in Santa Clara than they would in Toronto, and he likes the politics better anyway.

  “If you fall into a hole in a Panamanian sidewalk because someone stole the manhole cover, don’t even think of suing,” he begins, without a trace of irony.

  Peter, Don, and Dennis finish the story in unison; they know it by heart. “The judge will just tell you to watch where you’re going the next time.”

  My pimped-out husband shoots me a look that I know means “How in the hell did two people like us end up here?” But he clinks my Atlas bottle to his anyway, and in the collective laughter of the expats I hear the outlaw logic of my father.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  PANTHERS

  It has been one hundred days since we left the United States, and I’m convinced it is only the holding pattern that is dampening our spirits, not Panama itself.

  MARCH 10–15TH, 1974

  Men trying to get us on boat. Skinny dipping at night.

  Each night in slide-show Panama we floated naked under an onyx sky. The water was cool and soft, and skinny-dipping in the Panama Canal was like rolling in sheets of silk. I forgive a little of my parents’ recklessness in return for the magic that sprung from it: jungle vines, pirate coves, and secret hideouts.

  Gary and I decide to break camp, pay our staggering bar tab to Sheila and Dennis, and head for the canal. It has been under Panamanian control for three years; we know better than to try to camp in the jungle like my parents did. But I have to at least try to find our secret campground.

  We drive through miles of arching jungle canopy: giant palms, bamboo stands, and rainforest hardwoods. Roots twist and branches tangle, rendering the cement canal locks all but invisible. The sun shafts down in haphazard patterns, dodging the patches of soft raindrops that melt through leaves and drizzle down without a splash. The vegetation is dense and disarmingly close; roots like bulging veins suck on the damp jungle floor.

  I close my eyes and resurrect my father’s camper here—parked between vines, fourteen thousand four hundred pounds of timber and metal pressing into the spongy, unsuspecting surface. Branches and palm fronds could never camouflage this monster in the Panamanian jungle, my sister’s high chair dangling from the front grill like captured prey. It was too massive to be threatened, too mobile to be overtaken by hungry jungle vines. My father’s gleaming aluminum creation proclaimed invincibility, and every night I slept with the security of a princess.

  Driving through the jungle now is equally regal; I roll down the windows, blast the air-conditioning, and glide through my most vivid memories. I have the sense that we are only minutes late, that if we look down we’ll see the tire tracks of the Jeep where my father peeled out and headed for South America. It is the closest I have felt in months to finding my childhood home; the trail is still warm and steamy.

  But the Avion never makes it to the Gatun Locks, or to the clearing half a mile away where my family illegally camped in 1974. The national highway unceremoniously ends in the middle of a Colón slum. If Gary keeps driving forward we will be trapped in the chaos of a street market. Young, bare-chested men are hopping onto the bumpers and hoods of cars, hitching rides and demanding money to dismount.

  I am thinking of the pledge we took at the start of this journey, the one where if either of us has a bad feeling about a situation, there will be no argument from the other. It had been a kind of traveler’s prenup, a hedge against fights or inequalities we assumed would inevitably test our marriage. One hundred days ago I would have worried whether to speak up in the face of a situation only vaguely threatening as this one, the pledge untested by the truth of our lives together. But this drive has rendered words unnecessary. Gary’s eyes meet mine in comforting solidarity.

  “Not gonna happen,” is all he says, and I get out to help him turn the Avion around without running anybody over.

  On the way back to Panama City, we take a turnoff to the town of Gamboa. It stands near the edge of the passage known as the Gaillard Cut: the perfect place to watch ships pass and to shake off the disappointment of Colón. Gamboa could be a base town anywhere in 1970s rural America. There is a community pool, a Baptist church, and a two-pump gas station. There are two-story houses with porches; rocking chairs and swing sets from Sears; and soggy laundry hanging out front.

  All that’s missing are the inhabitants: men with starched uniforms and women with feathered hair. The streets are empty, and the air is so heavy I can’t tell if it is raining or dissolving. There are no cars parked on the streets, no babies in buggies on the sidewalk. It is as though the people have disintegrated into the rising steam.

  I’m glad; there is no one to disturb the sense that I have floated back through time. The ships we’ve come to watch are as oversized and out of place as the camper my father tried to camouflage in this jungle thirty years ago. Gary and I eat sandwiches from the back stoop of our camper like kids sneaking into a summer drive-in before anyone else arrives.

  The picture is living color, surround-sound stunning, and the ships look close enough to touch. Each passing giant is tug-shoved through the jungle with distorted depth of field. I sit cross-legged on the ground, and a container ship slides by. The jungle disappears as the ship passes in front of me, its hull replacing the horizon. Rectangular metal freight containers in primary colors stack, like building blocks, all the way up to the cloud-streaked sky. I can picture John John, sitting in the living room of our single-wide trailer in the Oregon woods with Legos strewn around him. Deep in his belly, laughter would be bubbling up, ready to erupt when the blocks came tumbling down.

  We sit for hours watching ships slowly squeeze through the jungle. I want to slip out of my sweaty clothes and swim through the silky
water to the other side—where there are no lawns, no roads, no abandoned outposts of yesterday. The air is thick with memory, and I can almost hear the panthers watching.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  THE CROSSING

  Somewhere along the two-day ocean passage from Panama to Colombia in 1974, my father snapped a shot of his family on deck. My mother is holding my little sister up to see over the railing. Jenny is gripping it with the strength of a ferocious toddler, her blond curls tangling in the sea breeze. I am squinting into the sun, horrified that my father is taking a picture of me, nearly naked.

  “Princess, we have to throw your shirt overboard,” my mother had explained. “It’s covered in too much puke to wash out. You’ll stink for days.”

  The girl in my passport photo has chubby cheeks dimpled with a confident grin. It had been only three months since we left Oregon. But on the boat passage from one continent to another, I looked like a walking skeleton.

  “Jesus, were your parents so broke by then they couldn’t feed you?” Gary asks. “Or is that just what a kid with malaria looks like?”

  I want to hug this little girl, brush her tangled hair, and reassure her that everything turned out fine in the end. But when this photograph was taken the worst had just begun, and that haunts me as I contemplate crossing to Colombia once more.

  Neither of my parents could have known that the speedboats passing our freighter in the Caribbean were transporting cocaine in large quantities. Drug-trafficking violence wouldn’t peak for another six years, but it is full-blown anarchy today. To continue following my parents’ exact route would mean plunging into drug wars and narco-terrorism. The dangers of Colombia are all Gary and I have been talking about lately.

  “It’s the most beautiful country in South America,” my father encourages, over a satellite call to Nicaragua. We tell him that we are considering bypassing Colombia and Venezuela and shipping the camper to Ecuador instead.