Joe Stevens Mocks a Llama

by David D Hammons

  “Oh come on, Joe, it’ll be fun,” Freddy insisted, “We’re going to see an archeological dig. History right in front of us.”

  “I’d rather see a bed right in front of us.”

  “Just get some sleep in the car. It’ll take a couple hours to get there. You’ll be fine by the time we get to the dig site.”

  Despite Freddy’s encouragement, I found it impossible to get any sleep. Every driver in Lima was a stock car racer with a death wish and Louis was no exception. He jostled and jarred and abused his breaks till they howled like a beaten dog.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad, however, if the constant throbbing in my head from both my hangover and my head literally pounding against the window each time Louis cut off another car trying to get in his lane was all I had to worry about.

  We had just reached the highway outside Lima’s city limits. Louis was jamming the accelerator passed the final toll booth that opened up to clear desert roads, when he slammed a fist against the dashboard. Louis continued slapping at the dashboard and steering wheel, speaking soft words to his SUV as he did, when the vehicle rolled to a stop. Our angry hostel owner had no choice but to pull the SUV over to the side of the road and pop the hood.

  A strange feeling hit me then. I had resigned myself to suffering through hangover-induced misery the entirety of the day. Even if I’d had access to a bed I’d probably not be able to get any sleep. And since Freddy simply wouldn’t shut up about how great seeing an archeological dig would be, I’ll admit that I was warming to the idea. So I was pretty pissed thinking that we’d already spent half the morning getting this far just to turn right back around because of car trouble.

  “Don’t worry,” Louis proclaimed, tousling the hair of the little girl sitting next to her mother in the front seat, “The battery is just dead. I will call a mechanic and he will bring us a new battery.” Louis gave the middle-aged mother a good smack on the behind as he walked away from the SUV, dialing a mechanic with his cell phone.

  After perhaps ten seconds of sitting in the SUV that was steadily turning into a sauna under the mid-morning sun, I shook the hangover out of my head with a vigorous neck-popping and leapt out of the vehicle.

  “Christ I could use a…” I said, looking around at what surrounded the highway and toll stop.

  “Use a what?” Freddy asked, hopping out to stand beside me, donning sunglasses and taking an equally inspective look at the countryside.

  “I don’t know. Food, water, a smoke. Something. I don’t know what I need; I just know that what I am right now feels twisted and pickled.”

  “There’s a little stand up ahead.”

  “Good. If it’s a front for a place that will stab me, call Grant and have him stab them back.”

  “What are you talking about? What makes that stand look like it’s a front for people who want to stab you?”

  “Looks like a stabbing-friendly place,” I said, spelling out imaginary letters in the air as if they were written above the stand, “‘Welcome lost travelers, hungry tourists, and people who want to stab Joe Stevens.’”

  “It says ‘Drink Coke.’”

  “Same thing.”

  The stand was not, in fact, a stab-Joe-Stevens-friendly location. It was hardly a location at all, but a collection of dried wooden planks stacked together with what seemed the minimal amount of nails necessary to form a shack. The store window was little more than a gap at the front that formed a shelf where snacks and drinks were displayed.

  I followed the advice of the sign proudly tacked to the shack’s facing and bought a Coke, along with a small bag of nacho cheese chips. The half-dressed child working the shack’s counter seemed incredibly excited to provide the food, which I quickly realized had passed its expiration date, and kept looking up at me with a gap-toothed smile.

  Smiling back, I thanked the kid with the best “Gracias,” I could muster, which pretty much extended the limits of my Spanish skills.

  “Look at all that,” Freddy said, pointing at the endless desert before us, “It looks like Mars.”

  “I don’t think Mars has discarded chip wrappers and coke bottles,” I said, pointing at the windblown trash that lay where we stood at the edge of the road, “Maybe it’s like Arkansas Mars.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Arkansas Mars: the Red-neck Planet…”

  “Joe.”

  “You wake me up early after too much pisco you have to deal with the bad puns.”

  “Are you seeing this, Joe? Just look over there.” Freddy pointed to the other side of the road. Back toward the city, passed piles of garbage and dust-laden heaps of discarded appliances that did not detract from my redneck Mars imagery, lay stacks of desert slums. There were literally piles of shelter-like buildings over the dry flatland, homes made out of discarded building materials or pieces of rusted truck trailers.

  “I’ll bet you there’s a thousand people that live there,” Freddy said.

  “And that if Louis had a map of this place he’d highlight an X on that spot so we’d stay as far away as possible,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t want to stay away from there. Those are real people, Joe.”

  “Real people who would strip you for all you had, Freddy.”

  “Don’t be so pessimistic.”

  “Not pessimism. Just fact. And me not wanting to get stabbed, which is usually the central compass of where I do and do not go. Thought we’d already covered this topic.” I munched on a chip and drank my soda, feeling a little better despite the heat.

  “Easy to say when you’re eating chips and drinking a coke,” Freddy noted.

  “They’re both passed their expiration date,” I replied.

  “I’m trying to be serious here, Joe.”

  “So am I. This coke expired six months ago.”

  “Always with the jokes when I’m trying to have a serious conversation.”

  “Look, look I get what you’re saying. That sucks. That really sucks, those people living there. I really feel for them. But you walking over and telling them you feel sorry for their situation would not help anything.”

  “I wasn’t going to do that,” Freddy said, kicking a brown rock that rolled into a pile of sun-bleached papers, ‘Too far to walk to anyway.”

  “We saw places like that yesterday. Saw places like that on the taxi ride to Miraflores,” I pointed out.

  “And here we are, Americans with enough privilege that we buy chips and soda while pondering the plight of others.”

  “You see every slum and get depressed into stopping and you won’t travel very far, Freddy.”

  “Just look at it, though,” Freddy said, staring at the mangled slums, too far away to discern shapes of people moving about but too close not to discern the hopeless plight of those unfortunate enough to call this home, “Just look at it.”

  “You looking for a solution?” I asked.

  “I’m just looking.”

  “No, you’re looking for a solution. Otherwise why would you stop to look at all.”

  “I…suppose that makes sense.”

  “Why did you want to come on this trip anyway, Freddy?”

  “I wanted to go see Egypt.”

  “Alright then. Say you saw a slum like that in Egypt, which, by now there’s probably worse places than what we’re looking at. I know you’ve researched the crap out of Egypt so you know places like this exist by the dozen in over there. If you’ve got some white guilt going on because you’re vacationing in a place where people live on selling expired chips to tourists then why did you plan on exposing yourself to it?”

  Freddy didn’t reply. He just stared, taking in a deep breath.

  “Rhetorical question, Freddy, just think of it as a rhetorical question,” I said, patting Freddy on the back.

  “Why did you come with me?” Freddy asked.

  “Experience. Wanted to see something exciting.”

  “And now you’re looking at it. Absolute poverty sure i
s interesting isn’t it.” Freddy kicked another rock, watching it roll into the same pile of paper and chip wrappers. This time it broke the pile apart and sent pieces of trash fluttering across the sand and rock flatlands between us and the slums. Thousands of bags of chips and empty soda bottles rolled about the surface of redneck Mars.

  “You’re asking me what good can come of people like us? Something deep, or meaningful.”

  “I guess.”

  “Philosophical musings and half-hearted sympathy,” I said, pointing at Freddy, “Is exactly the kind of emotional justifying that makes people like us feel better about people living like that.” I pointed at the slums.

  “You don’t feel terrible?”

  “Sure I do. I feel sick about it. And I don’t ever want to stop feeling terrible about it.”

  “You can’t do anything then. You do something, make their lives better, and feel better.”

  “They don’t care about how depressed their horrible lives make you feel, Freddy. They just want their lives to be better.”

  “So the answer is to just ignore them? That’s a horrible way to go about life.”

  “That’s not it at all.”

  “Then what is? What do you and I do about things like that when we don’t have the power to do anything about it but look across the sand and eat chips?” Freddy asked. Just then, Louis called to us from the SUV. The mechanic had arrived with a new battery and they were ready to go.

  I patted Freddy once more on the back, and put my empty bag of chips and empty coke bottle in the trash can, sharing a smile with the child who worked at the stand. “Let’s go,” I said.

  The rest of the ride to Caral went by in relative silence. Freddy was still sitting in contemplation, watching the desert pass by and trying to pretend like it was interesting. I was busy hitting my head against the window each time Louis jolted around a slow-moving car.

  The SUV swerved off the highway about two hours later, passing through a small town full of people. It looked like a microcosm of the slum we’d seen in Lima, this tiny village that dotted the edge of the middle of nowhere. Children came running when they spotted our SUV but stopped once Louis drove the car right through the shallow river that lined the slum’s border.

  “I thought we went rafting yesterday,” I exclaimed as the SUV swam through the waters and smooth stones. The river was broken up into several streams, like fingers spread across the desert, and the vehicle dove up and out each time. With each plunge I was certain I’d find a cable or wheel floating down the river, or even that half the SUV would snap off and get gobbled up by as-yet-unseen crocodiles.

  I expressed such worries to Freddy. He insisted that there were no crocodiles in Peru.

  I countered that perhaps they were tiny crocodiles, too small to yet be discovered.

  Freddy, then, insisted that there was no such thing as tiny crocodiles.

  Making up all sorts of imaginary names for increasingly fantastical creations of crocodile-like animals that would surely devour us in that river, helped pass the time as we approached the dig site. Finally, Louis parked the car and let out a sigh of relief.

  “We’re here,” Louis exclaimed, exiting the car with the rest of us.

  Practically leaping out of the SUV and donning my sunglasses, I was struck by the still, desert-like conditions all around me. Again, the image of Mars, though this time cleaner than it looked in Lima, struck me. All visible terrain save the land near the small river was absolute desolation, while green stripes of grass and low trees snaked along the shallow river’s shore.

  The entrance where Louis parked was flanked by little huts where information about the dig site was kept. The huts were made out of dust-aged bamboo, and a skinny archeologist with a tan vest-jacket that looked like a cross between a military fatigue and a tool belt approached us with a smile.

  This military-like figure was to be our guide. And he didn’t speak a word of English. Of course this didn’t stop him from going into a lengthy explanation of the history of Caral and its significance in the development of civilization.

  “What did he say?” Freddy asked as we gathered about the archeologist’s hut.

  “I think he said guapo,” I whispered back.

  “What does that mean?” Freddy was dancing on his toes, tilting his head as if to try and hear the explanation better. No matter which ear he pointed at the archeologist, though, he still could not understand the man’s Spanish. “What are those buildings anyway?”

  There was a wall made out of tan-colored stones that blocked our view of the dig site proper. From the dusty parking lot the archeologist led us to a stairway that went up and over the wall. Here we had to stop and pay to get in. But first, the archeologist had more to explain about the buildings whose tips we could barely see from our low perspective on the wrong side of the wall.

  “I think he said edificio. That means building,” I said.

  “How do you know?” Freddy asked.

  “Edifice means building. That’s just common sense. Kind of like how salsa means salsa.”

  “Just shut up, Joe.”

  The archeologist, not understanding English but seeing that Freddy was exacerbated, leaned forward and stumbled through the words, “Old city.” He smiled, incredibly pleased with himself, and led us to the staircase.

  “Wow. It’s an old city. How insightful. We might as well go home now cause we’ve learned all we can,” Freddy grumbled as he followed the fat Argentines up the stairs.

  “Ah, just have fun with the view while we’re here. You can read about it on Wikipedia when we get back to the hostel,” I said.

  As we crested the stairs and reached the site of the dig itself I immediately froze upon viewing what lay before us. Imagine some science fiction story set in a long-lost Martian civilization, where an astronaut explorer gapes at the crumbling pyramids and once-proud buildings that spread out before him on a dead, H.G. Wells-inspired plateau. That’s what Caral is. But with fewer astronauts. And a lot fewer Martians.

  A dozen pyramids were spread out in perhaps two square miles of the desert city. The archeologist led us on a sandy pathway, describing each building we passed. One building was for the royalty, one for sacrifices. The pyramids were religious or governmental buildings, places where only the most important people lived and worked. The actual people of Caral lived in homes that were further away from the hills where the pyramids sat and in buildings that must not have survived the five thousand or so years since the city´s founding.

  The archeologists had found bodies all over the place, but despite all the things they found there was no way of knowing the culture, habits or even language of the people who’d founded this cradle of mankind. Many of the ruins were intact enough to give an impression of their use and actual shape. Many others had crumbled. There was so little rain in this area, however, that weather had not eroded much of what was made out of brick or cut stone. There was even a carving left out in the open, since there was so little risk of water washing away this historic work of art.

  Louis helped translate some pieces of what the archeologist said, and pointed out that no one knew why the people left. There was simply no evidence that people lived here less than three thousand years ago. Whether it was political drama, drought, or micro-crocodiles that had scared the residents off, no one knew. The only thing remaining were the five thousand year old buildings that were big enough to weather the harsh sun, sand and wind of the heated landscape.

  Freddy fell into a hole by the big pyramid.

  Okay, so maybe that requires a little more explanation.

  There’s these big holes, right? They look like graves. Louis translated the archeologist’s explanation that these were digs where people thought there would be graves. But the archeologists ended up digging a bunch of holes with not a lot to show for it. Square-shaped holes of this kind were all over, and only a handful of them had actually uncovered anything.

  And, okay, maybe it was my fault that
Freddy fell into the hole.

  “You think there’s any rooms left?” I had asked as we stood at the edge of one of the crumbling pyramids.

  “The group’s walking on, Joe,” Freddy said, wanting to hear about the twin set of smaller pyramids sitting about a quarter mile down the sandy archeological path.

  “Yeah, but I want to see if there’s any rooms.”

  “Joe you can’t look for rooms; this is a dig site.”

  “Look, there’s steps right there. Perfectly safe. I’ll just use the steps and walk around for a bit.”

  “Those steps are five thousand years old!”

  “And they’re in excellent condition.”

  “No they’re not.”

  “They’re in…”

  “Look,” Freddy said, “Normally I’m all for investigating things of historical interest. But this is important land to these people. Nosing about would be like sneaking into George Washington’s house.”

  “You and I did that when we went to Mount Vernon,” I pointed out, walking up to the pyramid and wondering the best way to climb up its crumbling edifice.

  “That’s different, Joe, that’s our country. As Americans we’re obligated to sneak into places we’re not supposed to.”

  “Well then go whistle yankee doodle to distract them while I climb this pyramid.”

  “Joe, you’re not, don’t, gah!”

  And that’s when Freddy fell into the hole. He didn’t see it. And it wasn’t his fault, not really. But he was pretty upset, nonetheless. He did find a cool piece of rock and a shard of pottery down there, which was cool. The archeologist was so pleased at Freddy’s knee-scraping discovery that he totally ignored the fact that I was about to climb on top of an historic structure. And I was so happy that Freddy had found something interesting in the hole that I wasn’t mad at him for preventing me from climbing on top of an historic structure. Win-win.

  And so with the sun still high in the early afternoon light, we headed back to the SUV, dusting the sands of Caral from our shoes. Loading into the car, Freddy and I commented on how great the trip was and how happy we were to have woken up so early to see the ruins.