The Drive

by Teresa Bruce

  We are agonizingly close. Finding the old camper has gone from a remote possibility to a potentially dangerous exploit in the face of a looming coup. We have nearly beaten our own camper to death in the process. This isn’t a quest, I have to keep telling myself. There is nothing to prove.

  At one point I might have been able to accept that the camper would stay a part of my past, lost forever in the Bolivian outback. I might even have preferred that to discovering that it was picked over for scrap or chopped up for kindling. But in the last few days, under the shade of mango trees, I have allowed myself to picture a cinematic ending to this journey. It is a glorious wide shot, Gary tracking the camera over a landscape of grit and determination. In the distance, the camper will crest above the horizon. A rising swell of music ushers in the closing credits; soon the screen will fade to black.

  Reality is considerably less dramatic. Sonja’s farm is a quilt of damp soybean fields sliding under thorny trees to butt against a swollen, muddy river. Surely nothing as vulnerable as a handmade camper could be protected here. The sun beats down relentlessly, and the air is thick with mosquitoes and blackflies. The ground greedily pulls at our feet, as if to devour, not deliver us to the camper. My legs have forgotten how to flex at the knees, my ankles how to articulate and release my toes.

  “I don’t know if I’m ready for this,” I confess.

  But Sonja misinterprets my reservations.

  “Oh, don’t worry. We have the spray.”

  She coats me in repellent to ward off swarms of mosquitoes. Scruffy children materialize like ants from an unseen mound, opening another wire gate and leading us through a cattle corral. My eyes struggle to adjust to the glare.

  “It’s over there,” Sonja says. “Just a little more to walk.”

  I am breathing like a little kid, in spurts and gasps. It’s as if I can’t exhale properly; the heavy air of expectation is sucking me backward. This soggy field feels somehow like a fairground, our journey to get here a rickety carnival ride. I can’t walk so I am being tugged, rung by rung, up a steep track, and I am scared to peek.

  Through squinting eyelids I can make out an unmistakable silhouette. Under a lean-to shelter made of raw tree trunks and a thatched palm roof, sharing the outermost wall of a brick farmhouse, squats the camper.

  It is both too close and too far away. The emotional roller coaster I have been riding for almost a year suddenly peels off its tracks. I am suspended somewhere in the air above the twisted, tangled route that led here.

  “Look, babe, there it is,” Gary shouts. “Still in one piece!”

  Not me, I want to say. I am split in two, wanting to believe this and not sure I can. But in the horizontal, stripped-lean landscape of a Bolivian soybean farm, my father’s creation stands tall. We approach from the front. The white aluminum skin is still stretched taut over a massive wooden frame. It looks injured and awkward propped up on sawed-off tree stumps instead of straddling the mighty Jeep. But even indisposed, it is impressive. The rectangular window of my parents’ sleeping berth is a huge, unblinking eye staring down at the search party fanned out below.

  I always imagined that if my childhood home were actually still on earth, not burned for firewood or dismembered for its parts, in the moment I discovered it time would stand still. But it’s rushing past, like a time-lapse movie, in every direction. I am the only object rooted, motionless. The sun zips westward through the staggered sky. Clouds race by, forming one shape after another, all from the corner of my frozen-forward eyes. Sounds barrel past me, too: John John laughs, my mother sings “Frère Jacques,” and Wipeout pants in my ears. But they are all just the bees, scoring this moment with a sound track of relentless buzzing.

  The back door of the camper hangs a little crooked. The hinges are rusty, and the brass doorknob is tied open with a string to let a fog of insecticide disperse. The smell is acrid and burns my eyes, but it masks the mildewed scent of neglect, so I gratefully inhale the poison. Even with the door wide open, the dark wood paneling sucks away the light as if to hide the signs of aging.

  I know how the camper feels; I’m not quite ready to share the guts of this reunion either. The camper feels hollow, or is it me? My skin, hair, and clothes are just membranes stretched over the outline of my body. Inside the lines is empty space. I should celebrate, but if I smile I might dissolve. This weary shell was once my armor.

  The carpet has worn through to the plywood floor, warped into a heavy sag. The camper seems to buckle under its own mass, fittings and fixtures too bulky for its bones. My parent’s empty sleeping berth is king-sized. But the mattress is long gone, and without it the space is a dark, receding cavern lined with shed snakeskins, insect carcasses, and dust.

  The side bench seat where my sister and I slept is no wider than a cedar hope chest. For a moment I can’t visualize how even two tiny children could fit. Sonja watches my reactions, laughs, and grabs a hidden handle, pulling out a nesting drawer within the drawer that doubled as our bed. How ingenious my father was, and how small and fragile his daughters must have looked as he tucked them in each night.

  “I’m going back to the truck to get the satellite phone,” I tell Gary.

  “They’re never going to believe where you’re calling from,” he says. He’s already taking photographs, busy documenting our discovery. “I’d love to see the look on your father’s face.”

  But it isn’t my father whose voice I am craving. I need to thank my mother for what she did here. As I am dialing the number to the Corn Island Dive Resort, a place as isolated as this soybean field, I realize my father never got over Bolivia. Nicaragua is just a substitute frontier.

  “Joe’s Bar and Grill.” He has no idea who is calling.

  “It’s me, Dad. Gary and I found the camper.”

  I am expecting a string of questions. Where? How? There is nothing but the low hum and crackle of the satellite connection.

  “Dad, have I lost you?” I am turning in circles, ninety degrees at a time, and fiddling with the antenna.

  “No, I’m here,” he says, and I hear him sucking on his lips and swallowing. He is crying. “After all this time, I just can’t…” believe, accept, understand, all of the above.

  “I know, Dad, me too.”

  He sucks the tears back through his nose, snorting everything inside. He is overwhelmed, and when my father begins to lose control, he claws his way to the mechanics, pulls himself up on the back of detail.

  “How’s the truck holding up?” he asks.

  “It’s gone, Dad. Sonja says it was sold for parts. Years ago.”

  There is a long silence, then a deep inhalation through his nose before he asks, “So the whole rig is up on jacks?”

  I picture my sun-withered father teetering on the verge of disappointment, and I race to shore him up.

  “No, more permanent than that. It’s blocked up against a farmhouse. Sonja even built a thatch roof over the whole thing.”

  “Well, that’s a little overkill,” he says, collecting himself. “It never did leak. I made sure of that.”

  Here comes the father I know, shaking it off, looking around to see if anyone saw him slip.

  “So it looks as good as new, eh?”

  The carousel is in my hands now; I project images for him to lean on.

  “Damn, even I didn’t know I was that good.”

  He is behind the wheel again, me in the backseat doing everything I can to please him.

  “Hey, did you happen to notice if the gun is still in the hidey hole?”

  My stomach drops. He wants me to check, sweet talk the guards, get him out of jail.

  “Dad, are you saying you don’t know what happened to it?” I ask. “What if a kid found it, or a criminal?”

  I walk back to the camper as I talk, looking for Gary. He’s not going to believe this.

  “I might have given it to Jim with the rig, or sold it,” my father muses. “Christ, I can’t remember.”

  This is someth
ing he and Jim probably kept from Sonja. My mother documented every other possession we were forced to sell, but there is no mention in her journal of the gun.

  “Have Gary feel along the edge of the refrigerator for the corner molding,” my father begins to instruct. “Follow that around next to the bed, and you’ll hit the seam.”

  This he remembers exactly, like a blueprint. I am losing the signal, so Gary crawls up into the bed compartment alone to search for my father’s hidden gun. He must be thinking he has married into lunacy, with a wife who insists on buying a pistol and a father-in-law who forgets where he left one.

  I look over at the Avion and wonder what will happen to it one day. We’ve talked about selling it in Brazil or Argentina and flying back to the United States. But not with a gun hidden under its floorboards. If I could travel back in time, I would argue with the person I was when I bought it, convince her she wouldn’t always overthink things. But I made a bad decision, and I can’t run away from it and abdicate my responsibility to some stranger who discovers the gun in the future. If Gary finds the gun my father abandoned along with the camper I grew up in, the sins of the father will be added to the daughter’s.

  “Okay, Dad, Gary’s coming out of the camper now.”

  Damn, he is holding something. How will I explain this to Sonja?

  “And behind false door number one,” Gary says as he steps out into the light, “an empty hornet’s nest. That’s it. Relax, babe, nothing to worry about.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” my father says when I tell him it is nowhere to be found. “Guess we’ll never know what happened.”

  I can hear him downshifting into second gear, first gear, coming to a stop. This is all the information he needs, enough to distract him from deeper thoughts and implications.

  “Well, your mother’s sitting here chomping at the bit, so I’ll let you go,” he says. “I love you.”

  My mother wants me to repeat everything I told my father; she has heard only one side of the conversation and knows he won’t bother to fill her in.

  “You know how your dad is,” she says. “Thinks he’ll remember but he won’t.”

  “Okay, Mom, but I really need to say something first,” I tell her. “I know Dad wanted to go into business with Jim and live here. I am so proud of you.”

  “Proud of me?” she asks.

  “After everything that happened, it must have been incredibly hard to stand up to Dad and get us out of here,” I say. “You can’t imagine how lonely the camper looks. Thank you, Mom. Thank you so much.”

  I am expecting any response from my mother other than a giggle, but that is what fills the awkward pause. It is her little-girl voice I am hearing over the phone, the one she uses for asking favors and saying pretty please. She doesn’t know how to accept gratitude.

  “I’m glad you found the camper, but it’s your dad who deserves the credit,” my mother says. This is the role she is accustomed to: loyal follower. The line crackles, and the silence between us surges and retreats in my ear. I realize I cannot expect excitement or even curiosity from my mother. I have found the physical remains of the pain she wants most to forget. She says she’d better go; the guard dog is barking at something.

  “Your dad’s yelling. He has a conniption fit if the locals try to walk across our beach. Thinks they’re out to rob us,” she says, bowing out of the conversation. “Say hi to Sonja for me. Bye-bye, Princess. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

  This is a bedtime story for my mother, one with a happy ending. She has tucked me in, and I sleepwalk back to my father’s camper. Sonja is inside; if she overheard the phone call or anything about the gun, she clearly doesn’t want to talk about it.

  “Come look in the bathroom, Teresita,” she says. I follow, numbly. “We took out the toilet so there is more room for the shower.”

  She shows me that my mother’s oven still works, fueled by two oversized propane tanks like barrels braced against the camper’s side. I mutely nod, brain elsewhere.

  “I should go check that the caretaker’s kids closed the last gate all the way,” Sonja says, patting my hand. “Take your time.”

  Time is what I can’t take, or keep. The evidence of its passing is all around me. Above the sink I pick at a peeling plastic label my father stuck to the backsplash. I am surrounded by instructions.

  “Turn off when traveling,” the strip above the water pump reads. And, “This is hot!”—intended, no doubt, for my seven-year-old benefit. I laugh out loud.

  “What’s so funny?” Gary asks.

  “Dad must have dragged that label gun all the way to South Africa and back to Oregon,” I answer. “I remember him sticking these things to every potentially dangerous appliance, I swear, until I left home for college.”

  “Huh, sound like anyone we know?” Gary says, innocently rubbing his chin.

  It is too sweaty and humid for my lips to create any suction against his, but I kiss him anyway. There aren’t enough sticky notes in the world to list the emotions draining from the pores of my skin, my head, my heart.

  The cabinet doors still open but with creaks of reluctance. I peer into every empty cupboard where once we crammed the trappings of our transitory life. I run my hand along their inner surfaces, hoping to feel the scrap of a drawing, or a Barbie doll shoe. I expected finding the camper to tell me something about myself—that standing inside it would reconnect me with the little girl who talked her father out of jail and believed in gypsies who could see the future.

  But there are no souvenirs of the child I was; I find instead a record of the childhood my mother vetoed. In the back of the closet where my parents hung their clothes is a rolled-up tube. I smooth out two sets of blueprints on the camper’s countertop. They are for the steel factory my father planned on opening with Sonja’s husband, and for a house I presume was meant for us.

  “It looks more like a jail than a home,” Gary says. “It’s just a square box of cement and rebar.”

  I see my father’s tidy handwriting in notes along the margins—numbers and instructions as unemotional as the writing in my mother’s journal. The distance between my parents was never greater than when he drew up these plans; they were living in separate worlds. When Sonja walks back inside the camper, I lift my hands from the blueprints and the edges roll up like a guilty secret.

  Sonja thinks the camper is beautiful, or at least she thinks that is what I want to hear. In truth it is a little sad and dingy, but triumphant. It has managed to survive, just like my family. All around me are physical links to my mother, father, and sister: the mirror where she brushed her hair, the secret compartment where he hid the gun, and the tiny bed where Jenny snuggled next to me. Yet more vividly than my parents, or my sister, John is beside me in the dark, enveloping heat.

  I feel not the physical presence of my brother, like a ghost, but the absence of him. It is a gravitational pull, his missingness, a tug on my soul. I will never really know my brother, what he would have looked like or who he might have become. He was taken long ago, and I thought I needed to find this camper to say good-bye to him. But it is his absence that I have to leave behind.

  I want to take some memento, something tangible to hold in my hands and prove he was real. But what is left of him is me. The proof is in the journey that taught me I don’t have to understand or fix everything. I can go on now. I know that John John is beside me. He always has been. He is there in the questions and the doubts, the spaces between life’s certainties. There is only the whisper of the hours passing, the smell of earth, and pale yellow butterflies fluttering between the walls. And that is enough.

  Afterword

  THE RESTING PLACE

  My parents dreamed of driving to the end of the Pan-American Highway in 1974, so Gary and I finish the trip—with John beside us. Argentina is the gentle denouement after finding the camper, a chance to hold each other and exhale. It is what I imagine the American West was like in generations past: open country, rugged and uns
poiled. Everyone camps in Argentina. From young lovers to families, they pile into beat-up old Fords and pitch tents alongside mountain roads, next to glacial streams, and in free municipal campgrounds in every town. Instead of roasting hot dogs and sipping coffee, Argentineans grill great slabs of meat around red-hot coals and pass the mate gourd.

  Gary and I are no longer quite the oddities we were in the rest of the continent: our skin tones blend, and even our 1968 camper is less conspicuous. We are left in peace to enjoy Argentina and let it soak into our hearts. We can camp without any fear of overstaying our welcome. We leave our lawn chairs, muddy hiking boots, and drying laundry outside our camper just like everyone else. We walk away from unlocked doors to bathe in crystal-clear, trout-filled streams.

  Argentina is our reward and renewal, a richer compensation than any imagined sufferings along our journey. The left and right sides of my brain are in complete balance; I plan only so far ahead as to arrive safely. Each day I am more comfortable letting go and relying on my internal compass. In Patagonia, on the long drives that the guidebooks shudder to mention for the monotony, we find beauty and peacefulness unparalleled. If I could fill my life with paintings of the way the land arches to meet the convergence of clouds in a Patagonian steppe, I would never need windows.

  The sun doesn’t shine here; it spreads and settles and seeps into your soul like a lingering kiss. The colors are a state of unfolding grace: soothing mustards, lifting lavenders, and calming greys against a sky the blue of childhood. There is nothing here to distract from the sky because no worry or concern could possibly compete. It is the sky both of awakening and of remembering seasons past—gentle seasons, the softness of daydreams, the cadence of a melody hummed. It is sky the blue of eyes closed, fingers crossed, and happily ever after. There is only one thing left to do.

  When we have driven as far south as it is possible to drive, to the Tierra del Fuego National Park, we take the gun from its hiding place under the camper floor and uncork a bottle of Argentinean champagne. As the vestiges of light drip down behind the peaks, I fling the gun into the Beagle Channel and watch it sink out of sight.