The Drive

by Teresa Bruce

About twelve vehicles are backed up behind us. The semitruck driver trying to climb the bank honks his air horn one too many times.

  My husband is a man whose steady, delicate hands can adjust the f-stop on a lens without his even lifting his eyes from the viewfinder. He can hold a video camera still for hours, controlling the pace of his own breathing. I’ve watched him film gory surgeries without even clenching the muscles in his neck. But out of the truck’s side-view mirror I witness his composure finally snap.

  That signpost the Avion hit? Gary yanks it out of the ground like it is a matchstick. He flings it down the hill with a bloodcurdling yell. All around him men are getting out of their vehicles, trying to reason with him.

  “Tranquilo,” one of them says.

  “Get out of the goddamn way or I’ll throw every last one of you over the side too!” Gary yells as he climbs back inside the cab.

  No translation is needed; his is the universal language of a man pushed too far.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  BOYUIBE

  I walk backward between oil-stained planks of the railroad trestle, directing Gary a little to the left and back to the right. Through missing boards under my feet I can see the muddy, flood-swelled river swirling and breaking over the tops of exposed boulders. The sound is terrifying; with each rotation of the truck’s wheels the bridge moans. The Rio Grande Guapay, thirty feet below this creaking trestle, slurps and snorts like a caged monster.

  I did not sign up for some extreme, Bolivian version of a demolition derby, but I will not let this testy country beat me now. Gary has already started to lose his mind; I can’t afford to lose my nerve. Plank by plank we nudge toward the other side, as gingerly as a one-ton truck and vintage camper can manage. Then we lock the hubs into four-wheel drive to plow through the muddy ditch that stretches infinitely into the distance.

  “You’d think your father would have warned us about this pathetic excuse for a road,” Gary says.

  I remind him this is the same country the famed bank robbers Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid used as their final hideout. Che Guevara tried to launch a worker’s revolution in southern Bolivia in the late 1960s, only to be assassinated here. The Nazi exile Klaus Barbie became a naturalized Bolivian citizen and a close confidant of the brutal dictator who seized power in 1980. Roads are an afterthought in a country like this.

  “So what’s in Camiri?” Gary asks.

  I look up; he is pointing to a rusted signpost that says Camiri, eighty miles. “A place to eat, maybe camp?”

  According to my guidebook, Camiri holds only the dubious distinction of serving as headquarters for the US-trained Bolivian death squad that hunted down Che Guevara.

  “Well, that explains this lovely welcome mat of a road,” Gary says. “They don’t want any other American to ever find this place.”

  I read the last paragraph of my father’s e-mail out loud. The town he calls Aymiri sounds almost the same as Camiri. In an instant I realize that my father probably just dropped the consonant. If he actually meant Camiri, then the road that leads to the camper could be anywhere off to our left.

  I am so lost in thought that I don’t see the approaching semitruck bearing down on us, too far in our lane. In half a second it shears off our side-view mirror. The mirror’s metal bracket smashes into Gary’s door, and bits of shattered glass scatter across the windshield like a collapsing wave. It happens too fast to scream.

  “I guess that’s payback for the signpost,” is all Gary says when it is over. His outrage is exhausted.

  The last outpost my father remembers consists of two blocks of mud houses and a dirt road that crosses a north-south railroad line. The road is the color of a gumbo’s roux, and along it the stripped branches of skinny trees are lashed together into uneven fences, marking property lines. Windows have no glass, and the beams that support the sagging roofs of storefronts serve double duty as hitching posts for horses. Scrawny donkeys nuzzle clumps of littered grass.

  I carry with me a photograph of the old camper and another of my bearded father standing waist high in a field of cotton, even though I know it’s hopeless. The men of Boyuibe are drinking beer on the railroad tracks. Gary is with me, so they are obliged to at least acknowledge my questions.

  “Muy linda,” they agree. Everyone I ask says that the camper is beautiful, but they have never seen it. No one has heard of an American named Jim and his Bolivian wife, Sonja, or even of a cotton farm in the vicinity.

  “Posible atrás en Santa Cruz,” slurs one man, watching his sons kick a soccer ball along the tracks. “Hay fincas allí. Y gente rica.” There are still farms in Santa Cruz, he thinks, and rich people. Ask them your stupid questions.

  I’m angry with my father for not remembering where he sold the camper. But Gary reminds me that finding it was our idea, not his.

  JULY 18TH, 1974

  Finally we leave.

  My mother was finished with everything, including complete sentences, by this point in her journal. Reading it I am torn between wanting to push on toward Paraguay and a fear of actually finding the camper, abandoned in this wasteland like a carcass. Somewhere out here my father relinquished his getaway vehicle. What a bitter place to surrender.

  Gary and I return to the Avion as uncertain of the future as my parents must have been thirty years before. Our camper is bruised and battered and so am I. There are no more addresses of travel angels tucked into my mother’s journal. Even my father doubts that the camper could have lasted thirty years in this hardscrabble country. It would be easier to let grass grow over the dirt I have disturbed. I could let it go and write a new ending to the story. It would go like this: two wiser souls follow the Pan-American Highway to the end of the road—Tierra del Fuego—and never look back.

  But it is Gary who refuses to give up. I have shut down, just like my mother, but he is breathing life into my fluttering hopes.

  “Look, we haven’t exhausted all possibilities; we just haven’t thought them through.”

  We are thousands of miles from the two people who stood on a beach in Mexico and said yes to a life together. We have spent every waking and sleeping moment of our marriage within arm’s reach of each other. We’ve shared the same forty-two moldy paperbacks and read each other’s personal e-mails from home. After two hundred fifteen days in the cab of the same truck we can recite the words to each other’s favorite songs, stupid jokes, embarrassing childhood stories, and indignant rants. Yet there are still possibilities.

  “We’re never going to stumble on the camper on our own; that’s obvious,” says this man I will never be able to completely predict. “We need a plan.”

  This is another possibility I never imagined: Gary admitting we need a plan. If he takes out a sticky pad next and starts writing a list, I will have to check the photo on his Washington, DC, driver’s license against the man in front of me in Bolivia.

  “Let’s backtrack to Santa Cruz and poke around town for a few days. Some clue may turn up yet. For all we know, Sonja and her kids still live in Santa Cruz. One of them might know what happened to the camper.”

  This time it is my turn to pour a lukewarm beer into Pachamama’s thirsty dirt. Then I take off my shoes and stand in the soggy spot, willing the wisdom of Mother Earth to rise through the soles of my feet.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  ANOTHER BOY

  Santa Cruz is a city of 1.5 million people and overflowing roads jammed with SUVs and four-wheel-drive pickups. Drivers pass on the right, block intersections, and park on top of sidewalks. There are car dealerships and fast-food restaurants, but I see very few hotels; Santa Cruz is less a destination than a destiny. So it feels like the first stroke of luck in a week when we spot a public swimming pool and recreation complex on the side of the Pan-American Highway a few miles west of Santa Cruz.

  “Look, a balneario,” we both shout out at once.

  Two Olympic-size swimming pools take up the front of the property, and dotted along a wide and sand
y driveway are twenty camping spots nestled under mango trees. Each tree is strung with electric power outlets and extension cords. Across an irrigated lawn are men’s and women’s locker rooms with sparkling-clean toilets and private, hot showers. Behind the campground stretch acres of rolling farmland and grazing horses. It is not the first time we have pulled into a swimming-pool day park and asked if we could pay to spend the night. But at this one, curiously called Fabio Andres, we are greeted by a handsome man in his early thirties wearing pressed slacks and a short-sleeved button-down shirt.

  “Hello, my name is Richard,” he welcomes us in practiced English. “I see from your plates you’re from DC; I have been a few years in Maryland for my studies.”

  He brings over cold beers after we park and level the Avion, and I expect a valiant attempt at remembering verb tenses and Redskins scores. Usually these introductory conversations get pulled out to sea after “What’s your name?” and “Do you have any kids?” But Richard swims against the rip currents with grace. His eyes are warm but direct, like he can sense we share more than vocabulary. I ask him how he got into the Bolivian balneario business. The Fabio Andres complex is named in memory of a beloved nephew, he explains, a child killed in an accident.

  For an instant my head is underwater, tugged down by an undercurrent of John John before I can close my mouth. Gary puts his arm around my shoulder and I surface, spitting out the first words I can think of.

  “Is that his picture?” I ask, looking at a billboard near the front gate.

  “Yes,” Richard says, with gentle finality. “The way we will always remember him.”

  A dozen questions are splashing inside my head, but Richard is smiling and offering me a lawn chair.

  “So what brings you folks to Santa Cruz?” he asks.

  “We are trying to find a woman who might know where we can find an old camper. Kind of like this one, only bigger, that my father sold somewhere in Bolivia thirty years ago,” I answer.

  My sentences sound circuitous and illogical, but I am too tired to organize them. Why bother? After this past week’s futility I am expecting only polite smiles and awkward silences. Instead, Richard calls for his mother, Carmen, to join us under the mango trees. Then he waves forward a group of workers raking leaves a few rows behind us. Gather around, he is telling them. You are among friends, he is telling us.

  “Teresa, Gary, let me introduce you to the balneario’s groundskeeper, Celso, and his eight daughters.”

  Richard is both interviewer and translator for our growing audience. I realize with relief that I will not have to pantomime the story, draw pictures in the dirt, or proffer photographs from the past. I can ease back into my chair and let the strain and disappointment of the last week drain from my body. Gary squeezes my hand and backtracks through our story, from the blank stares in Boyuibe just a day ago to a three-year-old boy killed in an accident in 1972.

  Richard says only, “What was his name?” not “How awful” or “I’m so sorry.” He has been there himself, and the unlikely parallel settles on my shoulders. We are meant to be here, under these mango trees. After driving for almost nine months, incredibly, we have found a family who has traveled the same road.

  “When I take my mother home tonight, we will look through old phone books,” Richard tells us as darkness closes in. “She has saved them since I was a boy.”

  Carmen feigns vindication, hands on her hips, for being the pack rat everyone teases.

  “Don’t worry, we will find this Sonja and your father’s camper,” Richard says. “We should go now and let you get some rest.”

  Carmen kisses both my cheeks, and Richard gives Gary his home and cell phone numbers and says good night. There is no one to watch us take off our clothes and slip into the deep end of the swimming pool, moonlight glancing off the swish and splash of cool water. We are alone in the still, fragrant sweetness of a Santa Cruz summer night. Perfect for the conversation I have been avoiding for ten countries. I dip under the surface, tilt my head back, and let the water pull the hair away from my face as I come back up for air.

  “I want out of it,” I start.

  Gary splashes me. “Go ahead. Nobody’s stopping you.”

  He thinks I mean the pool when I actually mean my own skin. I want to be the person Richard and his mother assume I am, someone who is searching for her past but not chaining herself to it.

  “Why did you let me do it?”

  It isn’t pool water sliding down my cheeks. He glides through the water to wipe away tears.

  “Babe, it’s okay. If we don’t find it we don’t find it,” he says. “Not all experiments prove their hypothesis, but you always learn something anyway.”

  This is as close to philosophy as I have ever heard my practical, no-drama husband utter. But he still doesn’t understand why I am crying.

  “No, I mean why did you let me buy the gun?”

  He thought this trip would allow me to say good-bye, but I have dragged everything wrong and paranoid and angry and dangerous with me. This continual, willful resurrection of every frightening memory of my childhood belittles its joys and erases the good of the Samaritans who stepped in to lift my seven-year-old spirits. Not to mention the kindnesses of Shawn and Susie, Mariamalia and Arnoldo, Ernesto and Yanina, Eosebio, Margit and Don, and now Richard and his mother.

  “You learned something anyway, didn’t you?”

  Now it’s me not following.

  “Your hypothesis was wrong. So what? We’re here, together, and even if we never find the camper you can still say good-bye.”

  That’s just it. I can’t. Not while I’ve got that gun. And I have no idea what to do about it.

  “I can’t hit reset and have it disappear. Or walk up to a cop and say, Here, take this. I’m sorry, can we just pretend this never happened?”

  I want him to say I should have thought of that, or it’s what I deserve. But he won’t let me pick this fight.

  “You’ll think of something,” he says. “I trusted that all along. You were wrong, but you had your reasons and it wasn’t worth the time it would have taken to argue with you about it.”

  It is a tactic I should have recognized. It’s one we used in every shoot when clients wanted something I knew wouldn’t work. I would nod and listen to the client while Gary would film what he intended anyway. His job was to make it look beautiful, and mine was to make the client think it was their idea all along.

  “It’s not like the gun was going to sit out in the open on the dashboard,” he continues. “Why do you think Dad and I picked a hiding place that takes a map and a metal detector to find? I knew you were too terrified to ever use the stupid thing.”

  He could have been thrown in jail or worse. His fate and my complicity in it has stabbed at my conscience every time we drove past cops or passed through borders. But all the times I was certain that he was seething in silence, choking on suppressed I told you so’s, he just was nodding, listening, and doing what needed to be done.

  I wrap my naked, shriveled body around his. Anyone could walk up and see, but I am too relieved to care. I’ve already been exposed, and I could float forever in forgiveness.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  THE PHONE CALL

  I wake the next morning knowing how my parents must have felt when strangers dusted off their hopes. We wave to Celso and his daughters like they’re new neighbors. I shave my legs in a hot shower for the first time in weeks and then drape them across the camper’s table, crossed at the ankles so Gary notices. He is just about to abandon the scrambling of morning eggs when Richard knocks on our door.

  “Teresa, Gary, I have some phone numbers for you,” he calls out, and I slide my smooth legs off the table and jump to the door. In a phone book saved for decades, Richard has found two promising listings: one for Sonja and one for James, most likely the little boy who rode with us from La Paz to Santa Cruz in 1974.

  “Let me see that,” Gary says, reaching for the phone book like it�
��s one of my father’s slides he has to hold up to the light to see. “After all the hassles we’ve been through, it’s suddenly this easy?”

  Unspoken gratitude spills from my gaping mouth. I can’t believe this is happening. We have just arrived in a city roughly the size of Phoenix, Arizona. What are the chances of finding a campground owned by an English-speaking man whose mother keeps phone books dating back to the time when Sonja still used the last name written inside my mother’s journal? The setbacks of the past few weeks seem suddenly fortuitous. Without the mudslides in Cochabamba, we would have arrived in Santa Cruz during the peak holiday season. Richard’s balneario would have been filled to capacity; we might never have met Carmen.

  “If those don’t work, we can try another long shot,” Richard says. “I order the balneario’s beer from this distributor named Ann Juliet. Long blond hair and blue eyes. Kind of girl you don’t forget in Santa Cruz. Anyway, I checked our receipts, and she has the same last name as Sonja and James.”

  “Could she be the third kid in your father’s e-mail?” Gary asks. I know he is trying to keep a check on his enthusiasm, but every muscle in his body is coiled tight, ready to spring from the camper and run a victory lap.

  I don’t even have to look at the e-mail. The minute Richard says Ann Juliet, the memory of a gurgling baby girl reaches up for the name like it’s a shiny bubble floating by. Richard hands me his cell phone; the numbers are already programmed in. I have no idea what I will say if Sonja answers or if she will even remember me.

  “What if she doesn’t want to talk to me?” I hesitate. “She might think we want the camper back, or that we’ll hang around for weeks on end.” It took her twenty-six days to be rid of us the first time, according to the dismal entries in my mother’s journal.

  “Just call,” Richard says, smiling.

  Is he encouraging me for the sake of a little boy he never met, whose death was a loss like the one his own family has found a way to survive? Or is he caught up in the simple thrill of solving a mystery? I haven’t told him that my mother never wrote or spoke to Sonja again. She has every reason in the world to slam the phone down, but all my doubts dissolve when I hear her voice.