The Drive

by Teresa Bruce

  Now the contrasts are coming into sharper focus. I am seeing things I couldn’t as a child. The soil and the sky merge in dusty lilacs and olive yellows. Peaks in the distance are kitten’s-ear pink, and the sudden canyons that slice from the grassy plains recede in glints of silver. It is not entirely wild and uncultivated. Mud clusters of farm huts and animal corrals interrupt wide swaths of emptiness.

  We need to find a place to camp before we lose the light, but there are no more towns listed on the map. I have a strong sense of a safe place behind a mountain, but the memory is not a physical one, nothing I can describe aloud to Gary. The details floating back to me are sensory and peripheral. I am groping in the fading light, trying to remember. It had to have been a place where Jenny and I could crouch behind the wheels to pee and vomit without being seen by passing trucks or curious llamas. Up ahead, on the left, I see a crescent-shaped mound of earth, like a gently curving riverbank along a dry bed.

  Gary maneuvers the Avion into its lee. The camper is blocked from sight. Tucked behind the mound, we are sheltered from intensifying wind. Gary goes through seven matches before one can hold its flicker long enough to light the wick of our propane heater. I hold my hands against the metal and I am filled with more than warmth.

  I suddenly realize why it is that all my life I have been so compelled to control every detail and plot every possible outcome before I step out into the world. It is a reaction to what happened here. My little sister was broken and it was my fault. My father and mother couldn’t fix her. They couldn’t fix the road. They couldn’t fix the truck. Every list I make, every decision I second-guess, and every precaution I take is one less chance of feeling like a helpless seven-year-old girl.

  Blood is pounding in my ears and I want my mother to know the fairy-tale ending of the story she started so long ago. I dig out the satellite phone and call Corn Island, Nicaragua. Usually my father answers but this time I hear my mother’s voice, timid and uncertain.

  “Yes?” she asks, forgetting hello. She talks on the phone the same way she enters a room, hanging back, letting my father bluster ahead of her.

  “Mom, it’s me,” I shout. Then I realize the connection is pure and close. We are so high there is nothing to block the satellite signal. I lower my voice. “I’m calling you from Peru.”

  The place where you thought we all might die.

  “Did you say Machu Picchu?” she interrupts. “That’s where your little sister learned to cuss, you know.” I can hear her smiling; she wants to replay the slide-show version of the story.

  “Damn, this is hard work,” I dangle for her, something to hold on to. She giggles, so I say it again, just like Jenny did. Over and over. Damn, this is hard work. “I love you, Mom.”

  “I love you too, Princess. Daddy will be mad he missed you.” I put away the phone. The connection is gone.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  MACHU PICCHU

  Our next night’s campground is a gas station outside Cusco. It is noisy and filthy and smells like diesel fuel and grease traps, but the men’s room has hot showers for truck drivers. We are the first to pull in for the night.

  “Sea rápido; usted tiene treinta minutos.” The attendant says I have a half hour before the bathroom will fill with drivers, all of them men.

  He shows us how to fasten plastic bags around the faucets with rubber bands to avoid electrocuting ourselves by touching metal in an electric shower. Gary stands guard while I take the quickest, scariest shower of my life. I leave the water running for Gary as I bolt to the privacy of the camper.

  As darkness falls, semitrucks fill in on all sides of the Avion. The backfiring exhaust systems and rattling diesel engines take hours to shudder to a stop. I can’t sleep anyway; there isn’t enough air to breathe, and the Cusco entry in my mother’s journal is far from comforting.

  JUNE 6TH, 1974

  Got two good contacts to sell the truck. Sold our camping mats. Teri washed dishes.

  It comes suddenly, this mention of selling the truck, the words like a mangy dog my mother rattled a stick at, hoping it would limp away on its own. Without the camping mats my father was forced to sell, there was nothing to cushion my sister’s injured shoulder. In Cusco we started sharing my sleeping bag so that we could use Jenny’s as extra padding underneath. There is nothing in my mother’s journal of the outcome of the “deal” my father was working. We just moved on.

  “Your dad would never settle for the first offer that came along,” Gary says. “It’s not in his DNA.”

  I am more compelled than ever to move on. The intensity of Peru is draining. In the nineteen days since we left Ecuador, we have camped in eighteen different spots. There is trouble brewing ahead, in Bolivia, the country where an expat finally bought my father’s camper. We want to cross the border and search for it before the country explodes. Bolivia’s disgraced president has fled to Miami, seeking refuge from the indigenous protestors who ran him out. Riots have killed more than seventy people, and more protests are threatened in the coming months.

  If that weren’t motivation enough, with each night in Peru it seems colder and harder to breathe than the last. The altitude makes my chest feel too tight for my lungs. Gary’s jaw and shoulder blades ache in the mornings from the bitter cold. The futon that functions as our mattress collapses into a mean shelf that bruises my hips if I turn on my side to read in bed.

  Other than the occasional stare at our silver camper, our presence in modern-day Peru is accepted without curiosity. Thirty years ago my wounded family was a spectacle. We stumbled, limped, and crawled from one good Samaritan to another, so routinely at the mercy of random rescuers that my mother stopped listing their last names or addresses in her journal. There is no context to the entries or explanation of how or why we met these strangers. But her tone turns reverential when one of them gives us the chance to bathe.

  JUNE 14TH, 1974

  Stayed in Hector’s house all day, had a delightful visit and BATH. They have a 13-month boy. Dave visited the factory where he is the boss and he took us to dinner. The maid did our washing. Pantera disappeared.

  It is almost an afterthought, those final two terse words tossed into a description of more important things. Losing a loyal companion was nothing compared to all the losses we had already suffered, barely worthy of a mention. Our brutal, spirit-breaking journey through Peru began with my father’s willingness to backtrack through the Sechura Desert to find Pantera. A month later he didn’t look back, and my mother’s journal never mentions the cat again.

  “Listen to all she wrote next,” I tell Gary. But I can barely get the words out.

  JUNE 15TH, 1974

  Dave fixed camper and we drove. Bumpy as usual, and cold.

  Gary takes one hand off the wheel, closes the journal, and laces his fingers through mine. “We made her a gravestone,” he says, and my unspoken guilt over leaving Wipeout behind is lifted and separated from the long-ago loss of a half-blind cat.

  Gary and I leave Cusco and drive until we reach the last town on the road to Machu Picchu: Ollantaytambo. The only way to get from there to the base camp for the ruins is by train, so for the first night since crossing into South America we have to abandon the Avion.

  “I don’t like this,” Gary says as he locks the dead bolt and sets the truck’s alarm.

  I am trying to fight my inner voice of doubt and distrust. We are in the same place where Pantera disappeared. Someone could hot-wire the truck in the middle of the night, and we would return from Machu Picchu literally homeless. Because all the vendors in Ollantaytambo’s plaza are already gawking at our elaborate security precautions, I offer to hire one of them to guard the camper while we’re gone.

  “No necesita,” says a woman bundled in shawls with coins sewn into their fringes. She just wants us to buy two of her llama-wool blankets when we get back.

  We enter Machu Picchu hours before the waves of day-trippers from Cusco. The mist is slowly clearing from the mountains, patc
h by patch, revealing glimpses of stunning, verdant jungle. Jutting out above the ruins are snow-capped mountains like peaks graphed on an axis of earth by sky.

  It is like opening a favorite picture book and watching it come to life. This one, for me, will always star my little sister as the heroine. Here she began the rebuilding of my mother’s spirit with every step and arrested, for a while, my father’s despair. Jenny was as strong as any son would have been, and her triumph still echoes between the stone slopes, bouncing back to me more vividly than my own recollections. When I was a child, Machu Picchu seemed miles wide with exhaustingly long, grassy fields, but now the aspect ratio is radically different. Everything is steep; terraces, altars, storehouses, and sundials are stacked almost on top of each other.

  “No wonder your little sister cussed a blue streak,” Gary says. “Even an adult could pull a hamstring on these steps.”

  When Jenny produced the first grandchild in our family, I asked her which was harder: giving birth or climbing the ruins at Machu Picchu.

  “In the hospital at least they give you drugs,” she said.

  WE RETURN TO FIND IT IS 30.4 DEGREES INSIDE THE CAMPER. MIRACULOUSLY, the pipes didn’t freeze overnight, and when we light the heater a wave of warmth and comfort fills the galley. Gary starts the long process of boiling water, and I search for a plastic bag of coca leaves. Forty minutes later we are sipping on the bitter, acidic tea that indigenous peoples use to dull hunger and open the lungs.

  Our bones might not agree, but we both know how lucky we are. We can start up our diesel engine and leave whenever we want. The closest to truck trouble we ever encounter in Peru isn’t with our own vehicle. It comes after a daylong hike to the top of the ruins of Písac in the Sacred Valley. As if out of a kid’s fantasy, the clouds part and a vendor appears, peddling ice cream.

  “How the hell did he get that cart up here?” I must be having another flamingo hallucination.

  Gary points to a beat-up pickup truck with tie-down cables in the bed. I am too light-headed to make sense of it. The thought of trekking back down to the camper on foot is unbearable, so I walk over to the ice-cream man to negotiate a lift.

  Franco speaks some Spanish and cheerfully says there is plenty of room. Gary will have to ride next to the ice-cream cart in the back, along with several poncho-wrapped men who materialize out of nowhere, but I am given the prime position in the front seat next to Franco. It is the perfect vantage point from which to notice 199,994 miles on the odometer, no glass in the front windshield, and no instrument panel of any sort in the dashboard. I have the distinct premonition that I am about to be punished for my laziness.

  Tangled green, red, and blue wires thrust into the empty space like amputated bouquets. The steering wheel comes directly through the cab floor, the foot brake is missing its pedal, and the gearbox is almost rusted through. When the truck picks up speed there is a dusty blur beneath my feet, and I bring my knees to my chest because the seat seems sturdier than the floor. Franco doesn’t seem to notice, and I realize he might easily have been one of the countless, unnamed strangers who stopped for my father while he thumbed a ride on the side of the Pan-American Highway. Franco’s truck is held together just as ours was: by necessity.

  He stops to collect more passengers as we descend into the town of Písac. Each time he stops, the pickup stalls. The passengers in the bed have to jump out and push-start it to life. At least Gary has something to do, a way to contribute. I am paralyzed with fear, wedged behind thrusting wires that spark when they touch.

  The potholes aren’t so much holes as collapsed gravel pits. To protect my spine I lift myself off the seat like I’m pedaling a bicycle over a curb. This is how bodies are flung from cliffs and piles of crumpled metal end up at the bottom of ravines. I close my eyes and promise myself I will never hitchhike in Peru again.

  Yet Franco calmly steers through the remnants of landslides, and over the racket I manage to tell him that I visited Peru as a little girl.

  “What do you think has changed the most in thirty years?” I shout through the rattling.

  “When the terrorism stopped, the government rebuilt everything for tourists,” he replies. “Thirty years ago this road was terrible.”

  IN THE ALTIPLANO THE AIR IS SO THIN AND THE SUN SO SLICING THAT the mountains are upthrust scars, eruptions of earth that block the winds from carrying rains inland and coating their slopes with gentle green. The people who survive here do so out of sheer force of will, their presence shouted out in shocking colors.

  On our last day in Peru, Gary stops to take what will become my favorite photograph of the continent. A faraway woman, wrapped in a teal-colored shawl, appears to part a sea of golden grains. She is alone and unequaled. The shadows cast by the towering Andes draw the eye away from the earth and up to the clear promise of another day.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  CHRISTMAS IN BOLIVIA

  By the time we leave Peru I have acquired the camping skills to cope with sub-forty-degree days and below-freezing nights. I can whip up a pumpkin and potato curry in one pot, frying onions in curry powder and turmeric and then pouring just enough water over the caramelized base to boil the vegetables.

  I can take a shower in two, seven-second increments: the first as I hang out of the camper in my underwear and Gary pours a milk jug full of water over my head, and the second to rinse off the shampoo that I’ve recycled from my hair to my shivering body. Not that clean hair matters when it is shoved under a pointed wool cap twenty-four hours a day; in photos I am so bundled against the cold it is impossible even to recognize my gender.

  Gary has decided that brushing his teeth with Coca-Cola is safer than water and that growing a beard is more sensible than trying to shave through goose bumps. I wake each morning next to a man who looks more and more like the one in my father’s passport: grizzled, self-sufficient, and slightly deranged.

  The altitude and harshness of Peru have hardened us both, and I am counting on this thicker skin to get us through Bolivia. Friends from home forward us dire State Department warnings of anti-American outbursts and frightening news reports. Protests over the government’s plan to pipe natural gas through Chile to sell to the United States are becoming more violent. In thirty-three days of clashes between soldiers and demonstrators in the slums surrounding La Paz, at least seventy people died before multimillionaire President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada fled to Miami.

  Opponents of the interim president have issued him a ninety-day ultimatum: prove yourself a worthy successor or the riots will begin anew. We do not want to be driving through Bolivia with Washington, DC, license plates when this window of grace slams shut. Gary and I must enter Bolivia, find my camper, and get the hell out by New Year’s Eve. There is speculation that the US Embassy will close, severing a lifeline for travelers caught in the cross fire.

  It would not be unprecedented. In the nearly two centuries since its independence from Spain, there have been almost two hundred coups d’état in this landlocked, downtrodden country, earning it a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.

  It is also infamous in my family’s history as the country where my father had to sit on a loaded gun so border inspectors wouldn’t discover it. To lessen the chances of our own being uncovered, we decide to cross the least-traveled border, one that straddles a dismal frontier post called Yunguyo.

  The town seems to exist only because of the border; the shops and market stalls along its one dusty road sell things like expired bottled water and stale, tongue-colored chewing gum. Just a few miles on the other side is the resort town of Copacabana, where trucks and buses, decorated by garlands of flowers and tinfoil streamers, line up to be blessed by the priests. If we make it through this border crossing, I will gladly join them.

  “Esperate,” says the guard with the entrada stamp. “¡Haga una contribución al policía!”

  Bribes again, I begin to translate for Gary.

  “Not a bribe,” he says. “Just a con
tribution.”

  Grabbing a wad of dollar bills from the glove compartment, he hands them to the guard with a cheery “¡Feliz Navidad!” and we drive away, unsearched, into the country that was the last stop for my father’s camper.

  Gary’s cheeriness just makes me feel worse. My husband may have been the first to suggest this retracing of my childhood odyssey, but I’m the one with firsthand knowledge of how reckless it really was. And now we have entered a country that is even more dangerous than it was in the 1970s.

  I need something to distract me from such portentous thoughts, so I open the Christmas present we picked out before we left, ripping through faded Santa Claus wrapping paper. It is a stack of CDs—ranging from Bing Crosby’s White Christmas to an Elvis yuletide compilation. I put in the first CD and begin to sing along.

  “Deck the halls with boughs of holly, falalalalalalalala! ’Tis the season to be jolly.…”

  I have perhaps the most unlovely voice in all the Americas, and I wait for Gary to take his hands off the wheel and stuff his fingers in his ears, begging me for mercy. But his jaw is slack, mouth unable to close. I follow his gaze and see children lined up alongside the road.

  Some stand mutely with one hand out. Others go down on bended knee as we pass. Most pump their cupped hands up and down through the air in a gesture vaguely obscene in its desperation. There are hundreds of them, standing along the road like mile markers. Their cheeks are candy-cane red, chapped and blistered by the sun. Hopeful grins stretch over broken, black, or missing teeth, and the wind whips matted hair around their faces like dirty straps of leather. Occasionally cars coming from the other direction slow down and passengers toss out bags that spill at the children’s feet. Bread rolls and pastries tumble out, and the smallest children take turns shoving the goodies back in, saving them for later.

  I push eject on the CD player; it’s too hard to mix the merry and the misery. Even when we camped at the base of a Lima slum, we could watch the dirt paths leading into the hills and see that children had books and school uniforms. Now we are driving past malnourished toddlers begging for bread.