We Ate the Road Like Vultures Read online

  ‘Fuck me,’ Carousel growled. ‘You’re a right lunatic, you are.’

  I didn’t think that was very fair and was about to emphatically share my reasons for being there when his voice changed tune.

  ‘I think you’d better go now. We’re old men with not much time left and we can’t be responsible for a young, and quite obviously mad, girl.’

  ‘Your words say you want me to go but your voice says you want me to stay, so until the moose is cleaned off and you give me some answers, I’m here.’ I turned to Carousel and looked him dead in his wrinkled nondescript face. ‘Jack Kerouac?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was an exhaled groan from Chicco and the air smelt of their beer breath.

  ‘Why are you here and not in New York or something taking credit for those fucking great stories you keep writing? I’ve been reading them for a few years and then, well, I read your books and saw some things that sounded so similar. I did some more reading and I decided my suspicions were right.’

  ‘I’m exactly where I want to be,’ he replied with a steady kind of wry smile that said he was nervous as hell about all this but a bit resigned and expectant as well, wanting something, may-be even a bit of excitement in that dry place.

  ‘Surely I’m not the first person to figure this out?’ I knew I couldn’t be that smart, I was just a girl who read a lot of books and then milked dairy cows.

  ‘You’re the first to turn up here.’ Chicco laughed, ‘Other than a few locals who think I’m an ex-US president.’

  ‘That’s because you told them you were,’ Carousel said with disgust.

  ‘At least I don’t take advantage of the teenage titties.’ He smirked.

  ‘Now that’s just bullshit and you’ll give young Lulu an incorrect picture of my proclivities.’ He turned to me, still smoking. ‘I have taken a few lovers it’s true—but hardly as ‘barely legal’ as Chic would have you believe—they were no younger than forty.’

  ‘I don’t care at all about how you live and what you do, I just want to know why you’re pretending to be something you’re not, cos you never struck me as the pretence type, all that talk of truth and straight from the brain to the body and all that shit doesn’t add up to living in secret in the back end of nowhere.’ I watched Jack and could see there was some sort of nerve I’d struck on him somewhere.

  ‘Pretending to be dead, you mean?’ Jack snatched the smoking toke from Chicco’s curly fingers and took a long wheezing puff that ended in a doubled-up attack of coughing. ‘We are all doing that, sunshine.’

  ‘Don’t try and distract me with philosophy, I’m immune.’

  He coughed and smirked and glanced at Chicco in a shared amusement I didn’t get.

  ‘I was being literal, sweetmeat. I’m long past philosophising.’

  It took me a minute to figure what he meant and it struck me harder than any moose might have in a lifetime. They were both dead. Both of them pretending to be dead but out there living away, writing and drinking tequila and fucking Mexicans of every age and playing games in their own hacienda with dust and expensive furniture and more expensive beer. It took me slowly, I admit, cos I’d been so focused on finding Jack and talking to him about all of it and chastising his selfish hermit life that I had never thought they might, all of them, be here and I looked at the wrinkles, deep as those ocean trenches, and I knew them both.

  ‘You’re...? You’re…Neal Cassaday?’ I was whispering now, the ghosts were waiting.

  There was a crack at the window like Christ was returning and we all looked but me, being closest, I jumped back and found myself staring at the falling glass like some spell had been broken.

  ‘Ah,’ Jack murmured, unconcerned and nodded with an understanding I didn’t have. ‘I think Salinger found Capote. He’s gonna be one angry motherfucker.’

  I glanced back at the broken window in time to see the skinniest, dustiest, meanest looking elephant in that half of the world charging headlong, through the window, through the wall, trumpeting his bizarre truth to the world and ready to end.

  2

  What about the Mexicans?

  TURNS OUT THOSE WHITEWASHED STUCCO WALLS were quite a bit stronger than they appeared, all crumbly and such, and the elephant may have remembered himself on some plain in the African savannah, all glistening and mighty, but now he was nothing but a shadow in the Mexican sun and he knocked himself out cold on the next charge and lay in a rippled dust-pool in the sliver of shade that fell from the hacienda. One tusk, the only one that had survived that trip from Africa, a story that will plague my curiosity till I die, pointed straight up at the sky and gave me the fucking almighty finger for the havoc I had wreaked on his antlered fellow inmate of that weird world.

  I was in the shower, having told the old demons I was not going anywhere with moose and plaster on me and that if I didn’t hurry and wash up I was gonna stick my arms out to the sides as I set hard and they’d never get me out the damn door. Chicco thought I was a funny ‘daddyfucker’ and told me where the bathroom and towels were. The bathroom was as clean and new as any five-star hotel and the towels were plush and thick, but the tiny warped closet they were nestled in was splintered and pulling off its hinges, and for the life of me I couldn’t get the damn thing open without bracing against the back wall and after, I had to kick the fucked-up thing shut. These people were such a quirky mix of rich and poor that I couldn’t really figure if they’d made it, or not. Any part of the house they actually had to use was made of the best and most expensive, like the massive thousand-jet spa bath in the corner, and the extra high padded toilet for guys who couldn’t, for fuck, sit any lower than hip height and ever expect to leave their shite behind. And yet the rest of the house was peeling apart and falling in on itself. The bathroom roof was mouldy and dipping a bit in the middle like it was gonna slowly and heavily fold down on me while I was standing in the bath with a handheld jet squirting moose brain down the huge gurgling drain. The bits that mattered, on me and in the bathroom, were clean, and the skin creams and medicines and laxatives, which were locked in the glass-front medicine cabinet, looked expensive. Even the shampoo was some medical miracle that would apparently Rapunzel me if I used it regularly. It felt kind of like they had carefully decided what mattered and what absolutely didn’t and would have nothing to do with Column B. Toilet paper? Matters like fucking heart medicine—sixteen-ply silk, spun personally by light-skinned Indians. Denture paste? A reason to keep eating—forty-five dollars printed on the sterling silver box. The bathroom door? Optional, unpainted, one hinge missing, hung, impotent and shrivelled in the hallway. Walls? Painted a crisp white in 1920 and that’ll bloody well do them!

  I tried to find something to wear in my ripped bag and settled for underwear I’d only worn once and the only T-shirt that hadn’t been moosed—a red Che Guevara number that I’d bought for five pesos in the last town. It was a bit ripped, both by the explosion and whoever originally owned it, and it smelled like weed and flatulence, but since the whole house mimicked that scent anyway I decided it must be Mexico in general—all those fucking black beans—and I pulled the T-shirt over my head. It ripped a little round the neck and I looked in the faded, black-spotted and cracked mirror above the shining porcelain sink and saw a tragic, frizz-haired little girl. Pathetic. I’d only been away from home a week and already I looked like I’d hookered my way into the gutters of the Third World—just like my stepmother promised me would happen if I ‘wandered off again’. I hadn’t of course, I’m still a virgin, if blow jobs don’t count, which I don’t think they do cos they certainly didn’t do anything for me, and I can’t imagine any money being worth that—I’d rather beg at a church, something I’ve found to be very effective in my wanderings. Ask some fat Father for food and he’ll get you a few nights with a nice family and all the middle-class grease you can eat. Being the skinny, bone-addled type, I inspire sympathy on a dime, especially if I pull my long hair up and look fourteen and don’t let on tha
t I’m not some sad step-daddy-fucked teen running from a junky mum and vanished father. If I tell the truth—which I only did once, not my name of course, but that dad was a millionaire beef cattle farmer on a thousand-acre property in the fertile green hills of northern New South Wales—I get lectures on honouring my parents and how fucking worried they must be. Okay, Father Rick didn’t swear, but the lecture was long, and involved him telling me to wait while he called the police, and I had to run like fuck on fire to get to the next train station and as far away as I could. That was the last trip though, on my way up through Oregon to Seattle. This trip, I had been much better at covering my tracks and leaving a million written assurances for my overprotective parents that I would be fine and I would be away no more than a couple of months and I’d gotten ahead in all my school work, even reading next term’s novel which was a piece of Austen shit. No Kerouac for my school, my teacher said it wasn’t literature.

  I dried my hair with the towel and tried to brush it with an old guy’s comb I found on the sink, but the teeth were so close together I ended up with a fuzzy great knot around my shoulders. I pulled my fingers through it a bit, but gave up, tying it back up into the functional knot of all my travels, and I walked out and into the living room with plaster and moose still on the floor and great chairs and ancient men. It had changed in the hour I spent in the bathroom and some huge-arsed Mexican momma was turning lamps on and setting those soft-bottomed trays for each of the men to eat where they sat. It smelled like beans but it had that tinge of the divine that mixes with food when you can’t remember the last thing you ate that didn’t make you burn. She was laughing and speaking in fast bouncing Spanish and Chicco was constantly smacking her ample butt as she went past his chair, and she clearly loved the attention even though she was only about forty and they were twice her age. I walked in hesitantly, wondering not only if they were annoyed that I hadn’t nicked off yet, but if they even remembered me. My grandpa had a short-term memory of about fifteen minutes by the time he reached the twilight zone and I could be in his apricot nursing home room telling him all about European football and lean down to get something from my bag, or walk out to get a cup of coffee and when I came back he’d have no idea I had even been there—‘Hey Lulubelle!’ he’d shout in that deaf old man screech, ‘Nice to see you, love, how’s school?’ And then twenty minutes later we’d do it all again. The good part was that I only had to find about three things to talk about and I could repeat them if necessary. I couldn’t bullshit him because he was completely sane and he’d call me on it immediately, but whatever I did say was gone in a few seconds.

  They hadn’t forgotten me though. Carousel and Chicco—who insisted I call them that—nodded and gestured to a broken-down chair full of escaping donkey straw. The housekeeper gave me a disapproving, if not scathing, glance and begrudgingly scraped some extra beans out of the pottery dish onto a plate for me.

  ‘Well you’re a walking fucking cliché, aren’t you?’ Carousel smacked through a mouthful of beans. I think he meant my T-shirt so I ignored him. ‘Got a thing for dead men, huh? Dug him up yet?’

  I gave him the finger, which was as mature as I could be bothered with, and ate my beans. It wasn’t nearly enough and I sat watching them eat massive servings of beans and tomato salsa and whole jalapeños and antacids like it was their last meal, which I supposed was understandable at their end of life, but I was a growing girl and the Mexican witch just sat quietly adding extra beans when they wanted more and ignoring my Oliver Twist self on the donkey chair. They had eaten in silence, concentrating on getting food on their spoons and then across the seven shaky miles to their mouths, when Chicco finally looked up and saw me sitting and shrinking into holocaust starvation. He smacked a hand down on the old girl’s leg and said, ‘Bonita sweetie, don’t be jealous, honey, she’s my grand-niece. Give her some more beans.’

  That made a huge difference because she turned to me in shock and then smiled a great Mexican-mother smile at me and piled my plate so high with everything I thought I might never leave my seat again. It was fantastic—I could taste the dirt in the beans, that salty dry scent of sand that pervades everything out there, and the heat in the tomatoes that made them so ripe they busted open on the vines. It was red and thick and spicy and I loved the way it made my mouth heat up and swell, and I ate three of the peppers and even the seeds before I noticed them all watching me.

  ‘What?’ I said, but it sounded like I was swimming through beans.

  ‘You’re an odd one.’ From Chicco.

  ‘Remind me a bit of my daughter,’ a murmur from Carousel. ‘Your eyes.’

  ‘Or your great granddaughter?’ Beans tried to escape the corners of my mouth but I licked and sucked and bit them back in.

  ‘Fuck you.’ He laughed heartily.

  The woman passed out some sugary pastry and they ate it in companionable silence, seeming happy to slop and spray powdered sugar from loose lips to werewolf eyebrows. Finally the plates were cleared and goodbyes muttered and kisses accepted and their cook left with a small smile and nod for me as I stayed in my chair, unsure if I was to be offered a place to sleep or a swift sharp word out the door. They took their time picking bean skins and pastry from their dentures with a wicked-looking toothpick for Carousel and, in Chicco’s case, a bayonet the length of his forearm. He stared at me and I knew he was expecting some sort of comment, so of course I said nothing, and finally he begrudged me a win and spoke first, and of course it was not serious but was all jokes and mocking.

  ‘How come you haven’t been raped and mugged and murdered, little Lulu? All that way by yourself. From the border down it’s all buses and hitching and nowhere to stay.’

  ‘I can be nondescript,’ I said, by way of explanation. ‘I don’t really have a memorable face, not too pretty, not ugly, not blonde, not tall, not fat, but not crazy thin either.’ It was true. I’m pretty in a basic kind of way I guess, my skin is a little tanned and I don’t have pimples or freckles or shitty teenage skin, but I’ve got nothing about me that stands out, nothing you’d say that was weird or wild.’

  They were unconvinced so I kept going.

  ‘And its not like I’ve been sleeping in the gutter outside a saloon or anything, I have money.’ Again with the mocking eyes. ‘Okay, not millions but I have plenty.’

  ‘Stealing from Daddy?’ Chicco coughed from the minute slither of smoke that wafted above the match he had used to light his giant cigar. When he gathered himself he shoved the great fat thing into his mouth and kept quiet.

  ‘No. Of course not. I don’t need to steal. You’re not the only one with residual income. I kept a calf my father was going to put down a few years ago, born with short legs and ugly markings on it, and it grew up into one of the best stud bulls in the state. I let him out five or six times a year to shag cows and I take a ten per cent stake in any stud bulls sired by him. I get cheques for about five grand a month and I don’t have to do anything. I’ve invested some of it in my own breeding program and I have three more bulls growing on Dad’s farm—except I bought a couple of fields off him, so I guess it’s my farm as well.’

  They were shocked and actually confused and I realised they were really old snobs about stuff like cows and farms, and I hadn’t expected that. ‘Don’t look at me like that, not everything in the world is about books and politics and literature. Someone has to breed your steak.’ And they were sheep for a minute, with wiry embarrassed heads downcast with sun spots beaming off the top in a weird code of secrets from stars and gods.

  ‘We weren’t mocking you, Lulu,’ Chicco tried to be soothing, like some grandfather, and raised his thin hands towards me in what was most likely meant as supplication, but felt more like he was telling me my time had come. So much so, I leaned back in the chair and got a rusted nail pressing into my back—crucified by a fucking Mexican chair.

  ‘I kind of figured you for a writer, that’s all.’ Carousel had a way of talking with his face down and watching o
ut the side of his hooded eyes at me, reminding me I could read all the books I wanted but he was still a stranger who I had only ever looked at from a distance and through clouds and rain at that. ‘Coming all this way—I just thought…didn’t think of bulls.’

  ‘Yeah, well I didn’t expect you to be so fucking ancient, which is stupid I realise, laws of aging and time and all that, but I only ever read about you being young and mad and wanting everything at once and it felt a bit like me and here you are all old and wanting nothing anymore and it makes me feel a long way from where I thought I was going.’ I looked at my pastry and didn’t want it anymore. ‘I’m more of a reader than a writer. Which isn’t as cool, I know, but the world needs readers even more than it needs writers cos you all write so fucking much and expect the world to lap it up and here I am just wanting to read… and ask you a few things, and find out why you are hiding in this weird purgatory and not wanting to get on with the next life or hell or heaven or wherever the fuck is waiting for you to hurry up and kick the bucket.’

  They were silent in their huge recliners and I thought they might want to know what my questions were, or what my intentions were, but it seemed they were actually going to fall asleep and leave me sitting there all night as the desert got colder and colder, so I changed the subject and asked my most pressing question, before it was too late and it would haunt me endlessly.

  ‘Why do you have an elephant and a moose? In Mexico?’ I corrected myself as quickly as I could, ‘Why did you have a moose?’

  Chicco relaxed and laughed. ‘It’s not as wild a story as I wish it was, but we were in town one night about a decade back and there was a travelling show, kind of a poor spic version of a circus, with these guys who had bought up the leftover critters of any zoo they could find and smuggled them over the border. He was making them do the sort of tricks no one really thinks is clever, like standing on a ball or letting a monkey ride on their backs or smoke a cigar or whatever, but they were so lost and flea-hounded that we thought it was the funniest thing we’d seen this side of seventy and were determined to free the animals and get them home.’