Road fever : a high-speed travelogue

by Cahill, Tim

  THE HANDSOME

  GRINGO MEETS IGOR

  AND THE CYCLOPS

  October 14-17, 1987

  T

  he mountains of Honduras were more lush than those on the Nicaraguan side. There were occasional rocky cliffs, and a few small waterfalls. Men on horseback wearing blue jeans and straw cowboy hats drove cattle across the roads to autumn pastures. There was a billboard for Lee jeans featuring a man who dressed much like these Central American cowboys. The last billboard we had seen was in Nicaragua. It showed a heroic Nicaraguan woman taking a blond-haired man captive near the wreckage of a small plane. This one was about pants, proper fit, and buttocks.

  Garry had fallen asleep in the passenger seat, which was something he never did. It was as if he had just run a marathon and collapsed.

  The road dropped into a flatland between mountain ranges. There was a perfect Central American sunset in progress. The sky was blood-red and the long shadows cast by the trees were dark scarlet on thick pink grass. Great flocks of small black birds, like starlings, swept across the flatland. They flashed in front of the windshield, one after the other, dozens of blurred black shapes.

  The sun was near the horizon, perfectly round, perfectly red, and I could stare directly into it without squinting. Which is what I was doing when something hit the truck with a terrific thud. Bullet, I thought, but it hadn't sounded like a bullet at all.

  A voice I had never heard before said: "Wah!"

  Garry had snapped bolt upright from his slouching position in the passenger seat. He was holding his belly, as if he had been shot.

  "Wah," he said again in his strange, thick, sleep-clogged voice.

  He opened his hands. I saw one of the small black birds that had been sweeping past the windshield. Its neck was twisted to one side, and it lay on its back against Garry's stomach, staining his white T-shirt with blood.

  He looked at it for what seemed to be a very long time. Nothing made any sense to him. He had been asleep for an hour and then there was a loud noise and now there seemed to be a dead bird in his lap. I reached over, took the bird by one leg, and tossed it out the open window.

  "I thought," Garry said, "I had been shot."

  "Those birds," I explained, "were flying in flocks across the road. You know how birds fly right across your windshield? I think this one hit the side mirror on your side and flipped right in the window."

  "I reached down there," Garry said. "I felt something warm and wet. I was sure I had been shot. I thought I was feeling my own intestines. Then I started wondering why my intestines would have feathers and bird feet on them."

  "You were dead asleep. Drooling."

  "It's the wide side mirrors," Garry said. "I bet we have the widest side mirrors in Central America." He was beginning to wake up. "I bet the last thing that bird thought was, 'Oh shit, wide side mirror.' "

  The road began a long, twisted climb to the capital city of Tegucigalpa, which sits in a cool mountain basin.

  An hour later, we saw four Honduran soldiers in camouflage gear with rifles on their backs. They were flagging us down with the hearty handshake wave that means stop when soldiers do it. People in civilian clothes use the same gesture to hitchhike.

  "Slow down," Garry said.

  I backed it down to fifteen miles an hour while he examined the soldiers. "Doesn't look like a stop," he said. "I think they want a ride."

  We turned on the dome light so the soldiers could see us. When we were abreast of them, Garry said, "They don't look sure of themselves. They want a ride and don't know who we are. Just coast on by."

  We passed the soldiers at a crawl and Garry waved at them imperiously. One or two of the soldiers saluted, uncertainly. "Don't speed up," Garry said, "we're not escaping."

  "What are they doing?" I asked.

  "They're talking together. One of them is pointing at us."

  Then we turned a corner, and I floored it. We both began laughing for no reason at all. It was just tension and release in rotoville.

  "Damn," I said. "I wanted to do that ever since you told me about the soldiers you left on the road in Turkey."

  "Just leave 'em standing there," Garry said. "They don't know whether to shoot or salute."

  We both had a piece of beef jerky and Garry made himself some cold, foaming roto coffee.

  Tegucigalpa is located in the highlands, at 3,200 feet. Honduras is the poorest country in Central America, but there were plenty of Mercedes cruising the streets. I thought of the cars as badges of corruption. The town itself was alive with neon signs, and there was a vibrant street life. It was a hilly place, hemmed in by mountains, and it is considered "quainter" than Guatemala City or Mexico City, by which people usually mean that the poverty is more apparent. The people, however, tended to be clean and polite and cheerful.

  It was not safe to drive in Honduras at night. It was, according to an American embassy official I had talked to, not safe in Honduras at all. The embassy was located atop a hill and there was little evidence of a military presence. Honduran security guards admit you into the building, and then the marines take over. The man I talked with was blond, about thirty-five, and could not, he said, assist us in any way. He strongly suggested that we forget the entire project. He told me this from behind a pane of bulletproof glass, and from my point of view his features were vaguely distorted. He was a man who was slightly out of focus.

  There was a casino at our hotel. A large sign at the entrance to the gambling hall featured the silhouette of a handgun. A thick red line slashed diagonally across the gun. "No pistols in the casino." It was the sort of gay, madcap sight tourists can expect in Honduras.

  We were on the road at five-thirty the next morning. A man in a yellow Toyota truck saw us studying a map and asked if we wanted directions out of town. If we were going north, we could follow him.

  The road was very good, lined on either side by pine trees, and it was too early for traffic. We crested the mountains that surround Tegucigalpa and drove down into a valley where the sun was just burning away an early-morning fog.

  Fifty miles later, the man in the Toyota signaled that he was turning down a dirt road. We stopped to thank him for his help. He was,

  he said, an Israeli, working in Honduras for a year as an agricultural consultant. He wouldn't renew his contract. Honduras, he said, was too dangerous, too bloody.

  I thought he was talking about soldiers, guerrillas, violence in the streets, but he was referring to the stretch of highway we had just driven. Almost every day he saw mangled bodies, or blood on the pavement. "Traffic," he said, "is murder."

  Honduras is a country of mountain ranges. We drove through some cuts in the road where the rocks were a deep, burnished red. There was a large graceful lake called Yojoa, surrounded by green mountains. In the flatlands, between ranges, men on horseback led packstrings of mules. The mules were loaded with bananas to be sold in the markets of the mountains. They would be purchased by men in blue jeans and straw cowboy hats who herded cattle for a living.

  The officials at the Guatemalan border were particularly impressed with a letter from their director of immigration. It suggested that people fully cooperate with us. The fact that the director of immigration was the brother of the president of Guatemala was also helpful.

  Our destination was Guatemala City, a mere twelve or thirteen hours of driving. We might have pushed on, driven all night, but that would have put us in Dallas a couple of days early, and waiting around in motel rooms made Garry vomit.

  The road out of the checkpoint dropped into a reddish sandy-brown desert of scrub brush and stunted trees. Then we rose into the central highlands, climbing up to Guatemala City, another capital set in a mountain basin, this one almost a mile high. We were crawling along behind creeping oil-burning trucks.

  I was daydreaming, listlessly, imagining, for some reason, a time in the distant future:

  The world is a dismal place. The Amazon forest has been decimated. The trees that once
absorbed the carbon dioxide humans pour into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels are gone. The carbon dioxide now simply floats to a certain level and hangs above the earth, like an encircling pane of glass. The planet is a blistering greenhouse.

  Meltwater from the polar ice caps has raised sea level over one hundred feet. There is no more Central America. Instead, there are the Central American islands: the island of Tegucigalpa, the island of Guatemala City, the Costa Rican island of San Jose.

  I see people in the poor sweltering shacks of the Amazon desert.

  Many of them believe the past was a golden era of enlightened men. Some of them talk about the Lost Continent of Managua. They study its books of ancient wisdom: Fidel Castro Presents Three Ways You Can Improve Your Village.

  On the high traffic-clogged road above Guatemala City, we drove by the scene of a bad accident. There was glass on the pavement, sharp knifelike shards of it floating in a tremendous amount of blood. Four or five motorcycle policemen were working the scene, which was under a large billboard that read, cement is progress.

  We checked into a hotel and had dinner with Ricardo Pennington, a GM dealer who ran a business called Fuertequipo. While Pennington's mechanics swarmed all over the truck like ants on a broken watermelon—they changed the oil, the oil filter, the fuel filter—we ate dinner at Rodeo, a steak house where patrons sit at picnic tables and listen to a live steel-drum band.

  Ricardo, who spoke good English, often drove to the United States, and he didn't advise traveling at night through Mexico. Taxis, he said, have lights on the roof and it is easy to mistake one for a police car. The lights on the police vehicles, however, revolved; the ones on the taxis did not. "If someone tries to pull you over at night and his lights don't revolve, don't stop. You're going to get robbed, or worse."

  If we were stopped by police and detained for no discernible reason, it was best to tell them that we didn't have much time and ask if it was possible to pay "the fine" on the spot. Ricardo taught me the Spanish word for fine. Five bucks was usually enough.

  We were up before dawn and beat the traffic out of Guatemala City. We were driving on a good fast road, through a lush valley that was lined, on one side, with a spectacular range of perfectly conical volcanoes. It was a brilliant, sunny morning, not too hot, and I found myself rehashing something that had happened in Sincelejo, Colombia.

  We had pulled into town late in the evening and driven through traffic-strewn streets. A motorcycle pulled up alongside the truck. Sitting behind the male driver was a young woman wearing a long purple skirt and a white blouse. A breeze blew her skirt high up on her thighs and she pulled it back down. The woman glanced up at the truck, saw me staring at her, and blew me a playful, meaningless kiss. She had wonderfully large, almost Eurasian, eyes. Some congenial confluence of races had blessed her with an olive Polynesian complexion.

  I don't know: maybe other people have noble sexual fantasies.

  Maybe they don't have them at all. Better men and women than I can probably drive for weeks through various foreign countries without the consolation of a proper companion of the opposite sex. They don't suffer unbidden and undignified sexual fantasies. They contemplate the dialogues of Plato and concentrate on the road.

  The woman on the motorcycle and I made love in the most astounding locations, and we did it constantly, without surcease. She was, of course, educated in a convent. She had much to learn about the physical aspects of love and was always eager to learn more about the physics of copulation in, say, a hammock. I am, in my fantasy, a masterful lover.

  I felt an obligatory twinge of guilt—a voice from the past; my own personal radical feminist, circa 1972—and told myself that there was a reason for meditating on a sexual relationship as it might be conducted in South America, with a South American woman. These were the very countries that gave us the word macho after all. I would, yes, examine this strain in myself to better understand my Latin American friends. I was indulging in a kind of contemplative sociology. It would be best, then, if I had some social position, if I were, for instance, rich and powerful. A patron.

  I am now married to this woman I first saw on a motorcycle in Sincelejo.

  We live in a large white house with flowers all about. I have sired several delightful children. When local people talk about me, they do so in folkloric phrases.

  "The handsome gringo is very rich and he has a beautiful wife."

  "Do not think of the handsome gringo's wife, Juan. You must never think of the wife of the handsome gringo."

  And then the handsome gringo and his beautiful wife were making love underwater, wearing scuba gear.

  On the shoulder of the road, a hundred yards ahead, a boy was mounting his bicycle. His dog—I assumed it was his dog—capered alongside. It was a medium-sized black-and-white mutt that I knew would run along beside the boy's bike and give Garry, who was driving, fits. There was a three-quarter-ton pickup truck ahead of us and a bus coming fast in the other lane.

  I saw all this, but, in my mind, the handsome revered gringo and his beautiful insatiable wife were experimenting with a rather contorted position under a warm tropical waterfall in a forest alive with birdsong.

  "Oh shit," Garry said.

  I heard it before I saw it: an obscene crunching of bones. The boy's dog came out from under the back wheels of the three-quarter-ton truck, already dead, its back twisted nearly double. The dog bounced once, four feet into the air, then spun off onto the shoulder of the road.

  No one stopped and we didn't either. What could you say to the boy:

  We're sorry someone ran over your pet.

  Traffic is murder.

  There are no old dogs on the Pan-American Highway.

  My fantasies of sex and power died with the dog. and at the very same moment.

  Hours later, in Mexico, the incident was still haunting me. Garry said, "What if it had been a child?" and then we didn't say anything for several more hours.

  The border formalities on the Mexican side had gone quickly. We were stopped for a second customs inspection at a roadside checkpoint half an hour into the country. And half an hour after that, two police cars pulled us over for another document check. Ten miles later we stopped for a roadside agricultural inspection and traded jokes with the fruit police.

  All the officers accepted lapel pins. All were professional, polite, and there was never a time when I felt a bribe was in order. Mexico was not living up to its reputation as the most corrupt, bribe-ridden society in all of Latin America.

  Several hours into the country, traffic died down to a trickle and the road was a two-lane blacktop, as good as any county highway in the United States. The land along the Pacific coast was heavily forested and vultures soared over the highway, looking for road kills.

  We turned east, onto a highway that would take us over a range of low mountains to the Atlantic coast. At the intersection, there was a police checkpoint.

  The land was bare and sandy. A thirty-mile-an-hour wind drove the heat before it like a blast furnace, and the two officers manning the checkpoint belonged in the Mexican version of Deliverance. They were living stereotypes, every gringo's nightmare: two genuine steenking bach Mexican policemen.

  The older of the two was a short man with a mean sour face and one gold tooth in the middle of his mouth. His uniform shirt was rumpled, stained with sweat, and was buttoned in such a way that his belly button was visible. He had no holster for his revolver and wore it inside his pants.

  The other officer was a tall, stooped man with dull, uncomprehending eyes and a slack face. He wore a sweaty gray T-shirt that had once been white. The officers wanted to see our passports. They wanted to see the lengthy document we had filled out at customs. The short man, who seemed to be in command, reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pair of reading glasses. The lens on the left side had been shattered in a starburst pattern.

  The tall man leaned over the shorter one's shoulder and together they examined the single
sheet of paper.

  "You will," the short officer said, "need to show me an inventory of everything you are carrying in the truck."

  This, we knew from our reconnaissance trip, was not true. Still, we had the document and gave it to the man.

  It must have been infuriating.

  The officers already had their lapel pins, but, I saw, they didn't want to settle for mere pin money. Garry and I were well ahead of schedule and pretended not to understand. It was a chance to stand and stretch, to look around a little bit, to torment these officers with shrugs and dumb questions.

  "Why can't we go? Everything's in order."

  The tall man walked around in a circle, scratching his head and muttering to himself. The short officer stared at us with his one shattered eye. No words were exchanged for at least five minutes. The hot dry wind kicked up a minor sandstorm. It would be much more comfortable inside the checkpoint guardshack.

  "Go," the man with the bad eye said finally. "Go now."

  We waved and thanked the officers, who were, at that very moment, pulling over a pickup truck carrying three rusty fifty-five-gallon drums.

  The land became more fertile as the road rose into the mountains. "The tall guy back there," Garry said, "what do you figure his IQ was?"

  "Thirty-four, thirty-five, around there."

  "He looked like somebody who ought be called Igor."

  "I don't believe they were real policemen," I said. "A guy with a perfect starburst in his glasses? C'mon. I think they're from the Mexican Department of Tourism. Their job is to give visitors something to talk about." I saw, in my mind's eye, a travel documentary featuring these officers. "And so," I said, "as the sun sinks slowly in the west, we bid fond adieu to our new friends ..."

  "Igor and the Cyclops."

  There was a lingering golden sunset across the fields and we were following a truck with a large name painted across the back: renegade. The truck was running a straight-through muffler, and it was terribly loud. In all of Latin America, only Mexican truck drivers run these deafening mufflers. Some of the Mexican trucks, however, were no louder than our own.