Road fever : a high-speed travelogue

by Cahill, Tim

  The interior minister said that the Shining Path had declared war on Peru.

  The president, in an effort to stabilize the economy and put a lid on inflation, had nationalized all banks. There was a firestorm of criticism.

  And while the guerrilla cells were located in the forested eastern slopes of the Andes, where the mountains dropped down into the vast-ness of the Amazon, Lima was not in any way a haven of safety. A month before, "terrorists using submachine guns and dynamite killed the president of the state trading company," reported The Miami Herald. In the same week, a car bomb exploded at Citibank headquarters, and another bomb damaged the Lima Sheraton hotel.

  North of Lima, in the middle of the country, on the coastal desert,

  there was noticeably less guerrilla activity. The north was noted for highway robbery, and was home to gasoline bandits.

  Watching a party of North Americans, two couples in their twenties, I wondered how they had managed to get so deeply into South America, overland, without learning anything about ordinary self-protective border behavior. They had just come off a bus and were waiting in line at the Peruvian checkpoint just over the border from Chile.

  "Check out the hats," one of the men said in English. And then there was a good deal of laughter because the uniformed soldier watching the line was wearing a hat that was somewhat more ornate than the sort a U.S. soldier would be issued.

  "Where do they get those hats?" one of the women asked in a tone of amused horror, much as someone else might ask where Jimmy Swaggart gets his hair greased. The party burst out laughing again. They were having a jolly time and the soldier in question began taking an interest in them. He had a nine-millimeter pistol in the holster on his belt.

  It was a busy border. Chilenos from the town of Arica were traveling into Tacna, Peru, to buy fruits and vegetables. Peruanos were passing the other way, into Arica, to buy goods—clothes primarily—manufactured there under government tax subsidies. The locals, Chilenos and Peruanos, rode in special taxis, painted blue. It was a border with an international taxi service, and the people were familiar with border etiquette, which is to say, no one, except the North Americans, was laughing.

  Chance had placed us just behind this party and I thought it prudent to emphasize the fact that I was not with them. We faded to the end of the line: no great problem in South America which, on the whole, does not have a tradition of orderly queuing. People will yield if you assert your right to the position you hold. Relax for a minute and you are at the end of the line. We relaxed and put some distance between ourselves and the other North Americans.

  From this vantage point I saw the soldier stroll past our line—which was for the Peruvian Investigative Police's document check—and stop at the customs window to exchange a few words with an official there. Customs was the next order of business for all of us in this line.

  It's always a bad bet to suppose officials don't speak some English. Win the bet and you get a cheap laugh. Lose and you may end up enduring a body-cavity search before being denied entry into the country in question. Fines or a few days in detention are a possibility.

  An official came out to search the truck. He opened the camper shell, and the smell of festering strawberry milk shakes literally knocked him back a step. He was not keen to crawl around in there. Various letters of recommendation suddenly impressed him, and he waved us through.

  "We should break open a few more shakes back there," Garry said. "Get up in the tropics with milk shakes baking in the back. We'll never get searched."

  The formalities were endless. We signed, by actual count, twenty-eight documents. We had taken to describing ourselves as a driver and a mechanic because officials were used to that. Garry was generally the mechanic, primarily because he found mecdnico an easy Spanish word to say. An obliging official signed and stamped our logbook with the date and time.

  We weren't, Garry thought, drivers so much as men who carried documents.

  "Documenteros," I said.

  We rolled into the Peruvian border town of Tacna just after dark. It was a busy night, and the long main street was thronged with couples strolling under the stately palms that lined the street. Cruising pickup trucks carried a dozen people or more, all of them hanging from the bed and shouting to friends on the street. There was music everywhere: boom boxes, car radios, loudspeakers in front of the stores, all of which were open for business. It was a cacophony of styles: salsa, disco, high Andes flutes, and American rock 'n' roll. The Animals with Eric Bur-don shouting about how "we gotta get out of this place."

  We asked directions from a man wearing a moth-eaten coat that had once been mustard-yellow and was now mustard-gray. He motioned us to the proper road with his right arm, which had been amputated at the elbow.

  We were stopped by armed police outside of Tacna. Garry was driving and dining on beef jerky. For reasons that have yet to be explained, he slipped the jerky under his seat, as if to hide it from the police. An officer searched the cab in a cursory fashion. He did look under the driver's seat where Garry had stashed his guilty jerky. They let us pass.

  "Why did you do that?" I asked.

  "Hide the jerky?"

  "Yeah."

  "I don't know. I saw the police and suddenly felt guilty. I suppose it's the way I feel. Like I'm on some kind of drug." "A jerky junkie."

  "Jerky junkie and big-time milk-shake smuggler." "We are," I suggested, "beginning to lose brain cells."

  Garry woke me in the middle of the night and said he was tired. I poured my cup about a third full of instant coffee and wet it down with cold bottled water. I took the wheel and read Garry's note on the suckerboard: "Switchbacks, potholes, and fog at the top of the switchbacks. Very ignorant fog."

  The road was paved but in such bad condition—so riddled with deep and dangerous potholes—that driving was a nightmare. We were sla-loming along the Pacific Ocean on headlands fifteen-hundred-feet high and more. Old riverbeds ran down to the sea, and we dropped into these steep valleys through a series of tight switchbacks. The valley floors were narrow, and then it was another fifteen or twenty miles of uphill switchbacks to the high plateau above where the road ran straight for fifteen to fifty miles. Each and every one of the plateaus was shrouded in a gelatinous fog. Work the switchbacks, crawl through the fog. Garry was right: the fog was ignorant.

  On the plateaus, some of the rivers held water, but the bridges were rickety, patently unsafe, and most of the big trucks turned off the road and followed the riverbed for as much as a mile, looking for a shallow crossing. At some places, I got out and waded the river, just to be sure. When I got back, one of the big semis would be waiting behind me, and the driver would follow me through. Other times, I would sit behind a semi, and when the driver came back from the river, his pants wet to mid-calf, I'd follow him through.

  Often we passed a few words together, these drivers and I. The words were obscene and concerned the fog. Sometimes, rounding a corner over a fifteen-hundred-foot drop-off, the lane would narrow against a cliff face. In those places, our truck and a big semi couldn't pass. I'd stop, and the trucks would stop as well. I couldn't actually see the big trucks, only the yellow foglights shining in my eyes like a nightmare predator. One of us had to back away, let the other through, and there was no macho posturing. These narrow turns were matters of life and death. Whoever had the easiest backup took it. Often the drivers flashed me a V-for-victory sign. It occurred to me that there were very good drivers doing a very hard job. I came to respect them.

  There were occasional towns, mud huts lining the narrow Pan-American Highway. We were looking at monuments to poverty so grotesque I imagined people literally starved to death in these towns. Outside one of them, I rounded the first bend of an "S" curve and saw something that squeezed at my chest like a vise. On the cliff wall ahead, written neatly in white paint where every driver had to see it, was large angry graffiti that read, we are not animals.

  It is sometimes easy to let calluses form whe
n confronted by starve-to-death poverty, to become callous. In these towns, there would be the odor of sewage and sickness. Men moved slowly, and projects were started and abandoned.

  Well-fed foreigners sometimes think of these people as sluggish, lazy, dull-witted, little more than animals. The truth is, they had been hungry all their lives. It was the constant ache of malnutrition that set such a sticky, hopeless, slow-motion pace in these poor towns along the coastal desert.

  There wasn't much in the way of a sunrise. The land was covered over in grainy sand, the cliff faces and hills were the same color, the fog itself was sandy brown, and when we passed the ocean, it rolled up onto a dirty beach in gray sand-colored waves.

  Garry was up, going through his usual case of post-sunrise blahs. Along the beach, a wind off of the Pacific had piled a series of dirty gray dunes across the highway. A man dressed in rags and two small children in the filthiest clothes imaginable shoveled at the sand, clearing a lane for traffic.

  It was the custom to stop, to give them a few pennies for their work. It was also clear that they only worked when they heard the distant sound of cars or trucks. They apparently lived in a nearby hut on the beach that was built of irregular pieces of driftwood, wired and tied into the semblance of a dwelling.

  Garry thought the man and his children looked "stunned," a word he reserved for that slow-moving hopelessness you see in the faces of the very poor.

  "Stop," he said.

  Garry got out of the truck and opened up the camper shell. He took out several boxes of the freeze-dried food we weren't eating and tried to give them to the man. The ragman backed away, afraid of some kind of a trick. I stepped out and tried to explain that this was food, that all vou needed to do to eat it was add hot water. The man stared at me.

  He didn't know what to make of all the foil packages we were trying to give him, and needed to puzzle it out. He looked, for a moment, like a man trying to add up a lot of long numbers in his mind.

  Garry had given the children milk shakes, and they were drinking them with pleasure, smiling brightly for the first time, so that I felt, through my fatigue, as if I might begin to cry.

  I drove while Garry drank the concoction of one part instant Nescafe to one part water that we still called coffee.

  "How," I wondered aloud, "do we get so filthy driving? I mean, we both had showers in Chile, and now we look like hell. I think we scared that guy back there."

  "Couple of gringos get out of the truck looking like they just walked fifteen hundred miles through the jungle and start throwing foil packages at him. We look bad."

  If you've lived for several days on three substances—jerky, milk shakes, and coffee—it becomes evident that coffee, as we made it, is an extraordinarily strong drug. Garry was brightening up by the minute.

  "When I was nine years old," he said, "a guy came to Moncton in a fifty-nine Mercury station wagon. It had a black bubble on the top where the guy could stand up and do exercises. Turned out the guy hadn't been out of the vehicle in two years. Or maybe it was five years. There was some sort of a bet that if he could stay in there for some impossible amount of time, he'd get a hundred thousand dollars."

  "This was a vision that warped your life," I said.

  "It made a big impression on me. He was locked in his car forever, like us on this trip."

  "The fog," I said, "was bad last night."

  Garry did a quick calculation: "We made three hundred sixty miles in twelve hours."

  "Was it that hard because of the road and the fog, or is it us?"

  "Couldn't be us," Garry said. "What day is this?"

  "Friday."

  "No. Thursday."

  "Wait." I needed to figure it out on my fingers. "Tuesday we left Ushuaia after three hours of sleep. Next night we got five hours in Chile ..."

  Garry began counting himself.

  We concluded that it was the fifth day of the drive and that it was Saturday.

  "The days and nights run together," I said.

  "What I like," Garry said, "is when I put my sunglasses on the dash at sunset, then—and it doesn't seem that much time has gone by—the sun rises and I take those glasses off the dash and put them back on."

  "H. G. Wells," I said.

  "What?"

  "In The Time Machine, the guy goes into the future so fast that the days and nights seem like the flapping of a great wing. That's what it's beginning to feel like to me, night and day, the flapping of a great wing."

  Garry took over the driving and I decided to stay up for a while. We both felt giddy and talkative. The coffee I made was a great pile of instant, barely wetted down enough to dissolve.

  I told Garry about the graffiti I had seen the night before: we are not animals.

  "We," said Garry, referring to the two of us, "are not men."

  I thought briefly of Al Buchanan outside the House of Pork in Santiago, and the wino that he had pointed out to illustrate the meaning of the day of the rotos.

  "We are not men," I said, "we are roto."

  "We're filth," Garry said.

  "We're dirt," I shouted, "we're slime. WE ARE ROTO!"

  "And we have to pick up Joe Skorupa in Lima. Like this."

  "Garry," I said, "Joe wrote me a nice letter before I left. Said he was looking forward to this, and that he thought it would be the adventure of a lifetime."

  "Poor son of a bitch."

  "Sit all cramped up in the cab of the truck. We haven't got anything to eat. We don't even have a pot to cook in. We gave it away in Chile."

  "Wait," Garry said. "Didn't you buy some bread in Arica?"

  "It's in the back. It's stale. Hard as a rock. Roto bread."

  "We'll pick this guy up, shove him in the back with the sour-milkshake smell, and give him a hunk of stale bread. EAT IT! There's water back there, too. The windows are caked with mud, he won't be able to see out, but he'll have bread and water. The adventure of a lifetime."

  We were laughing and giddy and exhausted and exhilarated all at the same time.

  "WE SPENT," Garry screamed, "THREE HUNDRED FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS TO BE LIKE THIS!"

  I took the pad from the suckerboard and wrote in large letters: we

  ARE NOT MEN, WE ARE ROTO.

  Garry and I couldn't stop saying the word.

  "Roto coffee. You eat it with a spoon."

  We were like very young children who have discovered a moderately naughty word and feel compelled to say it every few minutes.

  "Poop."

  "You're the poop."

  "You're a big poop."

  "You're an even bigger poop."

  Garry and I were five years old, going on four. We were laughing so hard we might have been in a state of infant ecstasy.

  "We are," Garry said, "on a roto run."

  "In our roto wagon."

  He passed a line of three lumbering trucks. "Roto one, roto two, roto three . . ."

  "Roto-ed 'em."

  "Roto-ed 'em good."

  We were laughing and shouting and not making any sense at all. I realized, at that moment, that Garry and I fully understood each other. We could handle anything the Pan-American Highway had to throw at us. We were roto and men who descend into rotohood at the same time in the same placp, only inches away from each other, are forever brothers.

  Roto.

  Garry horsed the big truck through central Lima and parked outside the Hotel Gran Bolivar at 5:00 p.m. on the dot, precisely as we had promised. Joe Skorupa was not there.

  PSALM 91 VERSUS

  THE GASOLINE

  BANDITS

  October 4-5, 1987

  G

  arry guarded the truck while I ran into one of Peru's most venerable hotels— in my condition —and inquired, hysterically, after the whereabouts of a guest named Joe Skorupa. He was registered, I was told, but was now out having a late lunch with . . .

  Late lunch?

  The desk clerk found the concierge for me, and together we sat at the man's desk and m
ade phone calls to restaurants inquiring after Mr. Skorupa. Lima is a town of five million souls: how many restaurants could there be? Skorupa was supposed to be packed and ready to go at five.

  The concierge, an elderly gentleman with a dignified air, was dialing frantically, caught up in a quick burst of contagious Zippy's, when he looked at his own watch and informed me that it was not yet five. It was, in fact, four in the afternoon.

  It can't be, I told the man. Here, look at my watch. 5:00. On the nose. See? See! I couldn't be an hour fast because I had set the watch in southern Argentina and . . .

  Oh

  I had neglected to consider the fact that Lima is one time zone west of Ushuaia.

  We were an hour early.

  Garry walked into the carpeted lobby and stood under the chandelier, looking for me. Well-dressed guests glanced at him, surreptitiously, and adjusted their paths so they didn't have to walk near this

  apparition. His eyes, in a civilized setting, were frightening: they seemed to be sunk deeply into his skull and surrounded by bruiselike circles, which set off the blue of his irises so that he appeared to be staring in a kind of fixed madness. His movements were jerky.

  Skorupa, he said, had arrived. He was outside with the truck. Garry looked at me strangely. I wondered if I looked as bad to him as he looked to me.

  Joe Skorupa, a handsome young man sporting a dark mustache, wore neatly pressed slacks and a clean polo shirt. He was staring into the cab of the truck where there were mounds of jerky wrappers and milk shake cartons and a note on the suckerboard that read, we are

  NOT MEN, WE ARE ROTO.

  The last time he had seen the truck, in Moncton, it was shiny clean, with logos all over. Now it was caked in filth. The last time Garry and I had seen Joe, we were men, not roto. Joe looked a little shocked about the situation. Were filth and insanity part of the adventure of a lifetime?

  Worse, Garry and I were jabbering at each other in our own mad language: what the hell, Skorupa must have wondered, did it mean to go with the Zippy's, forget Zorro, and just roto the damn gasoline bandits. Was Popular Mechanics paying him nearly enough to deal with this situation?