We Ate the Road Like Vultures Read online

  Carousel had perked up at the story and was leaning forward. ‘And by home we meant here to the ranch, we were never going to take them back to Botswana or Nome or fucking Sydney.’

  ‘Sydney? Who was from Sydney?’ I had been thinking that ‘ranch’ was an ambitious name for this puddle of dust when the mention of my home country forced the contemplation out of my head.

  Carousel smiled. ‘The kangaroo. He was the one who smoked the cigar. So addicted he’d jump his hind legs against the front door for hours until we lit one for him. I tried to help him quit, slowly and gently. Had him down to cigarettes and only three a day, but one week there was a dust storm and we couldn’t get into town and no one could get out here and we ran out of cigarettes. He went mad and bounced off into the desert. Haven’t seen him since. Been about a year now.’

  ‘Two, at least,’ Chicco snorted. ‘He was an ornery bastard, loved the heat. Hated the other two, even though they adored him. You could almost hear him cussing them when his ears went back and his huge feet went up to kick. I kind of miss the bastard actually.’

  Carousel continued, ‘Anyway we went down there with a half-dead truck we’d borrowed and planned to steal them in the middle of the night, and we’re old and slow as molasses, and three hours on we were still tugging the elephant up the back ramp and we misjudged his size and a tyre punctured on the truck when his weight hit. We were ready to leave him behind when the owners, greasy and mean as they come, popped out of the bar nearby screaming and threatening to kill us, and we went to take off in the truck when Chicco pulled out the biggest fucking gun I’ve seen outside Jerusalem, which I didn’t even know he had…’

  ‘Got it from a Mexican army general, had a basement full of such shit. Could’ve taken the head off Salinger if I needed to.’

  ‘Salinger’s the elephant.’ Carousel continued. ‘And Chicco pointed the gun at these two and told them he had only two bullets but each was gonna take out a ball full of guts and a brain full of nothing, and they stopped still and watched us haul that elephant into the swaying, bottomed-out truck and then we drove off. They never came after us and that little town would never sell us out. We’ve been here too long.’

  ‘And we spend a small fortune here.’ Chicco was pragmatic about Mexican loyalty and my week’s experience told me he was right, wealth was the only love source in that hungry place.

  ‘Well, that was the weirdest story I’ve heard in a while.’ I spoke far too soon cos I was cut off by the scratchy bell from outside the door. We all froze and listened. After a moment and a deep sigh Carousel pushed a button on the side of his chair and it whizzed him upwards onto his feet.

  ‘Fucking peak hour, twice in one day after not a peep in a decade.’ He looked stiff and old as he lumbered towards the hallway.

  ‘What about the Mexicans?’ I wondered aloud.

  ‘Back door—they know.’ Chicco sighed. Suddenly he grinned. ‘Hey—you get the door, Lulugirl! You get rid of whoever the fuck is out there at this time of night and you can stay in the spare room.’

  Carousel raised an eyebrow—more at the spare room comment than the idea, and smiled that tiny wry smile of his.

  My choices were obviously limited so I tried to hide my delight at the joyful prospect of a roof over my head for the night and headed past Carousel for the door.

  It shouldn’t be too hard to get rid of someone, even if they were here for the same reason as me, which was unlikely considering I was the first in a lifetime, surely anyone would be dismayed at the presence of a young girl and leave.

  By the time I opened the door I had my speech all prepared and my rhotic ‘r’s’ ready for a wild ride but what I saw was so far from what I had expected and what I heard was so much crazier than anything that had happened so far that I invited the visitor in to meet my grandfathers and promised him dinner and the spare room.

  3

  You have to keep believing what you believe, and there ain’t nothing like good travellin’.

  IF I WAS SURPRISED AT MYSELF FOR LETTING THE guy in, Chicco and Carousel were more so. They clearly believed me incentived enough, so they were silent as I brought down the hall a tall, young man so unearthly in his beauty he should have been on a billboard for some sort of underwear. I only came up to his bicep, which I noticed because he was in one of those shirts with the sleeves ripped out. He was tanned to the colour of Ironbark honey and his hair was white blond and long and straggly in that ‘Oops, am I bedraggled and phenomenal?’ kind of way. And if there is a way to describe his eyes, I don’t know it, and I’m not a writer so I’ll have to use a few clichés—like those rivers of ice up in the Scandinavian mountains, so light in their blue that they are more a reflection of the sky than anything of themselves.

  Now, I’m not a girl who falls all over the hot boys, I’m really not, but that said, in Chillingham, New South Wales, there are only about five boys with straight teeth and two eyes that look in the same direction, and four of them would be unaware of books being anything other than a printed guide for growing high quality weed. So I admit, part of the reason I didn’t send the guy away was that I needed a bit longer to look at him.

  And I was not the only one having a good old-fashioned stare—Chicco and Carousel were speechless in their recliners, ashy smoking joints loose in their gums. This was truly a man—though he might be too young to be called a man—who stopped time. And he was also a man who was used to this sort of reaction cos he waited until we all remembered to breathe and then smiled, revealing the sort of teeth dentists’ children have, and stopped our collective hearts again for a moment. Chicco whistled through his dentures.

  ‘So I see Lulu let you in. And I see why.’

  I stepped in quickly, cos I truly hadn’t let him in just cos I wanted to stare at him. ‘No, you don’t. I think you need to hear what this guy has to say. What was your name again?’ I hadn’t forgotten.

  He bowed his six-foot frame an inch or so and smiled again. ‘Adolf. I am Adolf Ruezinger. I am from Germany and I am travelling the world following the footsteps of Jesus Christ. I am looking for the shrine he left on his journey through the Baja.’

  And there it was. I had got a little of my own back on the smug bastards. They had nothing to say to that, they just sat silently until a piece of glowing ash fell and burned Chicco’s leg and he said, ‘Fucking hell. Adolf. And Jesus. I think this should be my last joint.’ He put the thing in an old tin can on the coffee table and gestured for Adolf to sit in the donkey chair—my chair. I frowned and pulled over another, even worse, from a murky corner of the room—the mule chair. Clearly I was no longer the most interesting thing that had happened in the last ten years. I was now the epitome of normalcy and the exploding moose and suicidal elephant were mundane next to the Calvin Klein Hitler smiling beautifully before them.

  And he spoke. His English was very good—only an occasional strange phrase that added to his luminosity. Carousel and Chicco questioned him to within an inch of his life but he answered with the sort of sincerity only Germans have—with no sense of irony or sarcasm and a genuine seriousness that makes you feel like you are flippant and flighty. And sixteen.

  Adolf was twenty and the only son of Neo-Fascist political activists—hence the name. It can’t have been an easy name to grow up with, even in neo-weirdo circles, but fortunately he was very intelligent—his words, not mine—and knew that not everyone shared his parents’ atheistic, racist, socialist and quite angry view of the world. At eighteen, when he had finished his home-schooling, he was spotted at a violent protest by an Israeli journalist, whose girlfriend was a modelling agent, and who offered him a modelling career in Israel. The most rebellious thing the child of Nazis could ever do would be a capitalist career working for Jews. He had not been back since.

  ‘I send postcards and I am very informative about where I am and what I am doing, but I think to them I am probably better dead.’ He smiled casually. ‘They might even try to kill me themselves!’ He laughed a
t this extra-ordinarily unfunny joke and kept going with his story.

  ‘I was not into the modelling. So boring and everyone was too friendly and strange.’ He looked for understanding and Chicco and Carousel nodded in what I guessed was fictional simpatico, but perhaps fame had made people too friendly and strange for them, as well. I nodded in ignorance.

  Adolf continued, ‘So I went and lived at one of the Jewish farms for another year. It was there that I learned about Jesus Christ and became a Christian.’

  The irony of becoming a Christian at a kibbutz was not lost, even on me, and we waited with naked impatience for him to get to the rest of the story. What it seemed had happened was that a young Israeli couple had picked up on his complete ignorance of anything remotely spiritual and spun him a huge tale about the life of Jesus and his travels all over the world. They had shared the secrets of the journeys of Jesus that had been left out of the Bible and even given him locations of special shrines in places such as Tajikistan, Laos and of course the Baja. He even mentioned the miracle Jesus performed on the island of Tasmania in Australia. What they hadn’t expected was for Adolf to be so drawn to the story of this Jesus—a man who escaped his awful parents who kept telling him he had to save the Jews and be crucified—and travel the world telling the truth: that we save ourselves by escaping evil and doing good wherever we go.

  Carousel asked kindly if anyone had ever given Adolf a Bible, or told him that perhaps this was not the complete story of Jesus Christ.

  Adolf nodded knowingly. ‘Oh, people are always trying to put me right, but I have heard the truth now. I know how the world has tried to change the story of Christ. My friends let me in on the secrets and the truth, and I will not be easily fooled.’

  The last part of that statement left us all speechless and, in the face of such guileless fucking gullibility, we all just sighed and smiled.

  ‘Good for you, boy.’ Carousel finally coughed. ‘You have to keep believing what you believe, and there ain’t nothing like good travellin’.’

  Chicco was still silent, gently shaking his head from side to side.

  Carousel’s chair hoisted him to his feet and he stretched wearily. ‘I think that story has earned you a bed for the night, young man. Come with me. And you, Lulubelle.’

  ‘It’s Lulu.’

  ‘It’s whatever I fucking want—because it’s my bed.’ He didn’t smile out loud but I heard it in his voice so I followed him down the hall. He took us to a huge room, one that clearly hadn’t rated a makeover, one that had a four-poster bed about the size of a regular Mexican house. It was made with the dustiest sheets I had seen outside of a Dickens adaptation.

  ‘Here you go then.’ And he had his revenge on the two young’uns who had imposed so mightily on his hermitage.

  ‘One bed?’ I asked, horror and embarrassment rising up with the beans. I couldn’t. Not with him.

  ‘Yep. It’s all we got. And don’t worry. It’s big enough, you won’t even see each other once the lights are out. Oh, except the lights don’t work so you’ll have to use a couple of those candles.’

  Adolf was unfazed. ‘Thank you so much, Mr Carousel. You have been extremely hospitable. Lucy and I will be okay here.’ He turned to me and I stumbled into the wall. Pulling a silver cigarette lighter from his pocket, he reached out to light the candles.

  ‘It’s Lulu,’ I said and mouthed ‘Fuck you’ at Carousel who laughed out loud that time and walked arthritically back down the hall.

  I watched him until he was out of sight, nervous to face my first night in bed with a boy. I clenched my fists, angry at my own stupidity. Well, if I could tramp across the world and sleep on the side of the road in this criminal country, I could sleep in a big soft bed with a German supermodel. I would be philosophic about it. I would be professional. We were two travellers, two searchers—we were far beyond worrying about sexual tension. I turned around to see him pull off his last piece of clothing. He looked at me, completely naked, and smiled.

  ‘Goodnight, Lulu.’ He climbed under his side of the covers and turned to the wall.

  I gagged, said something about needing the toilet and rushed out of the room. Fucking hell. I did actually need to go by the time I reached the toilet, and as I wandered tentatively back towards my boudoir I heard Carousel and Chicco still talking in their lounge. Chicco was speaking and I leaned in closer.

  ‘Well, I thought we had met the strangest people we would ever meet years ago, but by fuck, those two are the weirdest fuckers I have seen yet.’

  I was horrified. He thought I was as mad as Adolf. The thought of it clung to my skin and I crept fully clothed into the smallest part of the largest bed in Mexico.

  4

  Age is just a change of outfit.

  I WOKE UP FUCKING EARLY AND THE SUN WAS over the sand and the nude boy was gone. Thank God for that mercy. If I had to see his muscled stomach and, well, the rest of him before I faced the day, I might actually retire from the world the same way the old guys had. I got out of bed fully dressed, I didn’t have anything left to put on so I stayed in the same clothes and wandered out to the lounge room. It was as dark and dusty as ever and the two of them were up, or had never left their chairs, but I guessed by the way they had on different frayed kaftans that they had gotten up and already had enough of the day. They were snoring in their chairs, their feet up and a pot of cold coffee on the table. I wandered past to the kitchen.

  It was a similarly strange room. A brand new fridge with one of those ice water dispensers—how they got it there I couldn’t imagine—a broken-door stove with some sort of rodent nest inside, and a brand new gas cooktop above it. The bench had a shiny new microwave, a few pots, pans and plates, most of them local pottery, and the most expensive retro coffee machine I had ever seen. It was brass and resembled a time machine, which was actually appropriate. I tried to figure it out but it was in Italian so after a few useless button pushes I gave up and went out the back door into a courtyard and an extinct garden.

  The courtyard was square and had what appeared to be horse stables on the back side, while the house wrapped around the other three sides. It could have been beautiful and still was, in a faded nursing home kind of way, a bit like the pictures I’d seen of Pompeii. It was an enormous house, probably ten or so rooms and a few entertaining rooms as well, but the guys had clearly ignored any part of it they didn’t need, so a few stable doors and window frames were hanging loose and chinks of stucco were missing in a sort of chequered pattern around the place. The garden was long dry grass with a couple of spinifex stuck in it, like burrs on a shaggy dog, everything was that dry green-grey colour except… I hadn’t seen him before but there he was. Adolf was performing some hybrid of prayer, meditation and yoga, but fortunately for my sanity he wasn’t as naked as the night before. I say ‘as naked’ cos I wouldn’t really call him clothed either, in the scrap of fabric he had tied around his waist like a skirt or a loincloth. He looked all glistening and golden in the early sun, which was still hot enough to fry steak, and he reminded me of a slave boy in some politically incorrect epic about Egypt or Rome, or even more like the Greek god Hermes who had winged feet and all the goddesses used him to send messages. He was bowing to the ground and chanting under his breath, and I thought I might like to introduce him to my Baptist Aunt Thomasina, who would have set him straight on what was Christianity and what was tainted with the stain of Eastern mysticism. And then, when he got all the way down to the ground, I realised he wasn’t wearing anything underneath that skirt, and I blushed so red that the big old Mexican sun had nothing but admiration for the fullness of my colour, and I turned quickly to get out of there and ran straight into Carousel, nearly tumbling the two of us backwards into a Boojum that had sprung up between the tiles on the floor. I caught him and he grabbed my arms and we ended up standing face to face, so close it was the strangest moment I think I’ve had—and that includes the back-end view of the bowing Greek god. I suddenly saw through all the wrinkles a
nd sun spots and grey eyebrows to the man whose soul I had read so much of. It wasn’t a Lolita thing or anything, just a realisation that age is just a change of outfit and, if you look carefully, the energy underneath is the same. I think he saw it too, because he did that downcast, sideways grin and squeezed my shoulder as he whispered, ‘I don’t care if he’s Jesus Christ himself—there are some parts of him I don’t fucking need to see!’

  I finally laughed and realised the truth, I was seeing Adolf’s perfect skin but not through it to the fact that he was a nut case and it was fucking funny that he had his naked arse in the air doing yoga for Jesus Christ in Mexico. I tried to snigger it back inside so he wouldn’t hear, and we had to hurry back into the kitchen before it all exploded out of me. We laughed for a moment, then had one of those looks you have sometimes with people who remind you we’re all really the same. I had one once in a service station near Brisbane. I had been to the toilet and when I tried to get out the sliding doors and back to the car they wouldn’t open, so I stood there and then kind of danced and jumped to get the doors’ attention and eventually they opened just a crack, and as I tried to sneak through they closed on me, trapping me with my elbows stuck out to keep myself from being crushed. I looked over and saw a Greek businessman paused mid-burger, watching me and smiling so widely, with barbeque sauce on his mouth, that he looked like my best friend in the world, and we had that moment where we really saw each other and laughed together.

  ‘Coffee?’ Carousel pointed at the machine.