We Ate the Road Like Vultures Read online

  Nobody seemed very accurate with their high-powered weapons, thank God, and there was the stench of dust and gunpowder, and my sweaty hands had re-gripped Adolf’s and might never ever let go, and I wondered how the hell we both came together in a place like that and if my father would ever even know how I died or if he would go on hoping for decades that I would call home. I loved that feeling of owing nobody anything and doing whatever I pleased from morning till moon but when it came to it there was some old-fashioned kid in me who didn’t want her family to be crying into their pillows, and who wanted to see the familiar rocky path from the gate to the front door of the house I had lived in my entire life.

  I was starting to panic. On some level I always knew that trekking around the world by yourself involved a level of danger, but I was pretty careful to avoid weird people and dark places. I stayed with Christians or in free Buddhist temples, and when I had to pay, in a youth hostel. I avoided cheap hotels, I ate at truckstops full of burly men ready to protect a young girl with their lives and a steel pipe. In fact I’d had so few problems, I started to think myself charmed, a born roadster. And there I was on the back of a truck in the Mexican desert, pursued by cops and in a Rodriguez movie. My breathing started to catch and stumble and the dust suddenly felt thick and sticky in my mouth and eyes. I coughed and grabbed at the edge of the truck, I needed to jump no matter how fast it was going—I was dead there anyway, the fall might only involve a broken ankle or shoulder or neck.

  Adolf pulled me back and turned my face towards him with his hand. It was a big hand I noticed, dark gold on one side and just as filthy as mine on the other. He was serious but calm as Jesus Christ in the storm as he looked into my blinking wild eyes and said very loudly, so I could just pick it up over the rumble and fire, ‘Much worse things than this have happened. This is just a few minutes.’

  He said the last line three times before I wilted and sat still. It was his strangeness, as much as his words, that became my anchor—his weird view of the world and his calm way of travelling through it looking for ridiculous truth and imagination—it made me believe him. I smiled slightly, just a lift of my eyes. He returned to his examination of the men in the truck and, without telling me his plans, he inched forward, neither of them noticing in their equal focus—one on keeping his balance while firing, the other on keeping the bags of loot in place.

  With a speed that seemed out of step on such a laconic figure, Adolf crouched and leapt forward, lifting the left boot of the gunman and pitching him over the edge of the truck without so much as a shriek. I spun and saw the Mexican tumble like a weed and lie still and I was glad to have not been the first to fall. In the same instant Adolf had slid far enough forward to grab the gun that lay beside the other Mexican, pulling it out of reach and into his own hands. The Mexican looked at him in terror, but kept the bags in his grasp. I thought Adolf might shoot the driver or at least threaten him, but he pulled out the long magazine clip and tossed it over one side of the truck and the gun over the other. He pulled my head back down and we lay on the bottom of the bumping tray waiting for whatever the next hour of our lives would bring.

  ‘The gun?’ I tried to ask.

  ‘They will shoot us if we are armed.’ Simple. We didn’t have to wait long, only a few flashbacks of my childhood and a list of the many things I still wanted to do before I die—having sex being close to the top of the list, imagine dying a virgin? Though a drink of water was also high on my list. Things to do before I die: Drink a glass of water in Mexico, spend four days purging it and then get the fuck out of the country.

  An almighty bang, a jolt and a swerving catapult into a group of shrubs ended our trip. The truck went sideways, tilting to send us sliding into the hard edge of the tray before it lost traction completely and landed on its side. I could feel the rocks and gravel through the metal which, moments ago, had been thick enough to stop a bullet and now seemed to be eroding beside my head. Bits of dry grass and dirt spun up around my eyes and I had to close them. The truck kept skidding and spinning on its side for what seemed longer than my life so far, until finally we hit the scrub with a jolt that flipped me out across the dirt which ripped into my jeans and skin and tangled my hair, and I cut my forehead open on a rock. Blood immediately dripped into my eyes and while I had stopped moving and there was no real pain anywhere inside my body, I couldn’t see anything at all and there was a burning stinging sensation on every part of my exposed skin. I had a brief thought that this might teach Adolf to wear a T-shirt, and then I was jolted into a tight ball by the sound of gunfire only metres away. A single shot. Another. A third. Mexicans yelling in angry Spanish, that fluid garbled language full of curses and angst. Another shot. A scream of pain. I tried to wipe my eyes without drawing attention to myself. I was about ten metres from the truck and I was under a tiny covering of bush. I could see the police truck next to the overturned truck with its punctured tyres and spinning rims—flurries of cash, mostly American notes, fluttered around in the air like a Las Vegas heist film. I could see the Mexican from the back of the truck, half of him jutting out from underneath the fallen tray, his head somewhere underneath, his feet limp and lying apart. One foot was twisted around the wrong way and pointing upwards. I could see another body in the cabin, through the dust, slumped down near the ground. The other man, the driver I think, was being dragged by his long hair towards the police truck. One arm struggled, the other hung limp by his side, dripping blood that joined a long ooze coming from a large wound in his belly. It looked like a gunshot—clean, round and red with thick blood on his dirty white shirt. His struggling was feeble, and when two of the police started to kick him and beat him with the soft rubber sticks they carried, he moaned and moved but could barely resist. Soon he was still. Another man climbed out of the police truck and scanned the scene. He was youngish, maybe in his thirties, and big, but not in the soft fat way of most older Mexican men—like a fighter. He was not nearly as dark as the other policemen, more a creamy colour, strange for a policeman, most of the ones I had seen were well-cooked by the sun, where he seemed only slightly singed. He had those quick eyes that dart around and see everything, the ones that don’t just see but understand, and I knew he would spot me as soon as he turned this way. I tried to shove myself further under the scrubby brush and that was when I discovered that while I may not be injured, I was certainly hurt, everything ached and stung and I didn’t make the fluid movement I envisaged but a jerky noisy gesture that drew his eyes even more quickly to my hiding place. Our eyes met, mine covered in blood, his peering over the sunglasses he had lowered onto his nose, and I saw a man that terrified me, a man who did whatever he wanted. He said something low and terse to the other cops who looked in my direction and took several seconds to locate me under my layer of dust and branches then leaped towards me, lifting me to my feet by my shoulders and showing me exactly where every small hurt was in my tumbled body. I probably could have walked but I wasn’t going to make it easy for them, I don’t know why, I should have been cooperative with the police in the hopes of some sort of fair chance to explain myself, but I didn’t like them, they were brutal and I had some strange angst against them that made me belligerent. One of them thumped me in the back of the leg with his knee urging me to move faster, and it really hurt, causing me to twist sideways and, without thinking, kick him in the leg with my other foot, a stupid thing only a person used to a law-bound police force would do. I instantly regretted it cos he dropped my shoulder and belted me across the top of my back with his stick. The officer was watching. I could see him from under my arms which I wrapped around my head and I kicked out as much as I could, but two men were too much for me and soon I was huddled in a ball trying to keep the blows to my upper back, which were certainly meant to hurt, not kill. He finally said a few words and they stopped and hauled me back to my feet. I was badly winded and hacked and coughed for breath as quietly as my dignity allowed, though I was terrified and I knew I was so far away from everyon
e, and any sort of real law, that they could shoot me in the back of the head, or the front of the head for that matter, and leave me there until some archaeologist found me in a millennia and studied my demise like they study the Ice Man. There was still no sign of Adolf though I tried to search for him without showing them what I was doing, my hair hanging down and covering my bruised face and, of course, the tears I most certainly didn’t want the policemen to see and which, despite my best efforts and every mental curse, were working their way through the sand and grease and down my cheeks.

  The police captain’s English was so perfect and unaccented I had no idea where he’d learned it, not American or British, no trace of Spanish in it at all.

  ‘Your friend is underneath the truck.’

  I was so busy listening, the words took several seconds to register as information, and then I glanced groggily around until I saw Adolf’s feet sticking out from underneath the bent-up side of the truck and they were still and perfect, just like the Wicked Witch of the West except with his white sandshoes, those strange things that managed to stay clean in the brown desert, unlike the ruby slippers. I pulled myself from the grip of the policemen so suddenly that they just stood there while I fell to the ground and started to try and dig him out, sand slipping through my fingers and falling back around his legs as fast as I could pull it out. He was deep in the soft sand and I couldn’t help hoping it had somehow cushioned his fall. I ran to the other side of the truck and there he was, face up and barely a scratch on his naked chest and face, looking so peaceful he may have been asleep, and I felt the deepest terror that if I touched him to check his pulse I would make him dead, my fear corrupting his immortality.

  There was no such fear in the Mexicans, one of whom kicked Adolf’s chest with force. Adolf opened his eyes, blinked and tried to sit up, though the truck was over his waist and he immediately fell back. I started to push the truck, which moved not even a quarter of an inch under my body weight, and I swore as loudly as I could at the police, ‘You dumb fucking cops, help me with this. You’re supposed to be helping people, aren’t you? Not fucking killing them.’

  The big one smiled a slow long smile that turned his eyes into dragons and said something to his men. They went back to their own truck and pulled a cable from the front, attaching it to the underbelly of the capsized one and turning on a winch. It must have hurt as the truck came off him, cos Adolf gripped my hand like a vice and closed his eyes, tiny lines appearing around his full mouth. When it went over his feet and hit the ground I saw how deep in the sand-bank Adolf was buried and I had a flame of hope, despite the sea-purple bruise on his stomach and lower chest and the twist of his kneecap. He pushed himself slowly to a sitting position and felt his legs a hand’s length at a time, stopping at his knee and wincing as he pushed his loose kneecap back to where it should have been. I was trying to rip a bit of my T-shirt, which was suddenly all stout and industrial, when one of the cops threw him a dirty bandage from their truck. I didn’t realise they had even moved, so focused was I on whether Adolf would die as soon as the blood flowed back into his body. I had seen enough medical shows, and even a cow caught under a fallen tree, to know that death could creep in at any second, even when you thought you were home free. I helped him lift his foot so he could bandage his knee and he smiled weakly, ‘It’s a bad knee anyway, I did this skiing when I was fourteen and, once again, when I was seventeen. It will be fine in a week or two.’ I pointed silently to his belly and he smiled. ‘Not even any pain, just a bruise. No yoga tomorrow.’ I blushed as I realised he had seen me watching him.

  The captain gestured to his men who pulled Adolf to his feet, not roughly, but without any care for his injuries, and dragged him to the back of their truck where they pushed and pulled his body up onto the tray. He lay back and was silent, asleep or unconscious, I couldn’t tell. They dragged another body from the cabin, one with a conspicuous bullet hole in its forehead, and threw it into the back next to Adolf where they both lay still and twisted. I had that sudden wash of horror where you know you’ve done something stupid and you have no way of ever going back to the moment before you fucked up your world. I leaned forward and vomited, trying to get my tangled hair out of the way and wretching so hard I ended up on my knees.

  ‘Get up, girl and get in the truck or I will have them do it.’ The captain had a tight sort of smile on his face. ‘I know you didn’t steal from the bank. I know you didn’t fire the weapons. I know a great deal about you. I’m not going to kill you, not even for being a stupid Australian girl.’

  I snapped up at that cos there was no way he should know a fact like that, and we stared at each other for a long time, his eyes with that disturbing glint, not quite evil but without goodness, and me with blood over my face and my hair everywhere and with as much mystery and dignity as I could muster. I shook off the other cop and limped over to the police truck which was so damn high I could hardly get in by myself, but I did it with the sheer force of the anger and fear I had inside me, and I wondered, as I sat back in the cigar-soaked seat, if there was any way I could possibly get out of this mess of Mexico and Germans and searching for Jack and Jesus. I wondered if our insignificant, ‘white person with lots of money and time for introspection’, quests were the whole reason the world was a fucked-up mess—people like me stomping all over other people’s secrets and lives and quests and making it all a sloppy pile of mud and piss. And then I fell asleep.

  5

  You did not shoot a bank worker or steal thousands of dollars. You did not fire on the police. But you were there. And that is stupid. Many of the most stupid people in the world were just…there.

  THERE ARE DIFFERENT WAYS TO WAKE UP around the world—the cows mooing up the path to the milk shed, the heat rising up from the ground in Africa, the sun pouring through the window in London, a bucket of filthy, watery, something-like-shit poured on your head in a Mexican cell. I sat up and tried to get the stuff out of my mouth and eyes knowing if I didn’t I would be shitting the stuff myself for a week. A new but completely identical cop was standing at the door smiling, a different tooth missing, a shorter cigarette clamped in his lips, the same tattoo of a bare-breasted sigñorita on his forearm.

  ‘Levantense,’ he gestured me out of the cell.

  I dragged myself out, finding new horrors in the twisted muscles of my back and neck before forgetting them entirely as he slapped me hard on my arse. He led me down a narrow corridor between a row of six or seven cells. They were small, dirty and dark, and each had only one person crouched or lying on the floor, silent and bloodied. The silence lasted only until we reached a large iron door at the end of the hallway, and when he opened it I was assaulted by the roar of almost one hundred people crowded into a huge room, another cell, yelling and pushing, some women but mostly hard and drunken men. The wave of fear that kept lapping around me swelled and washed me backwards, and I would have run if the guard had not planted a large hand squarely on my back and pushed me into the cell. I turned on my front foot to see him closing the door and I yelled back at him, ‘Hey, my friend, the German, where is he? Is he okay?’ But the door was shut and I was alone with one hundred people in a Mexican jail, all of whom, except the twenty per cent who were comatose and the two people fucking on the floor in the far corner, were looking at me with faces full of disdain.

  I put my head down and worked my way over to a sliver of empty wall, leaning back and sliding down until I was in a squat near the floor. I didn’t sit directly on the floor cos there was a trail of liquid from a toilet hole in a corner that traced its way across most areas of the cell leaving an acrid scent of urine to burn nostrils and eyes and making it impossible to sit. The couple in the corner, a middle-aged man and a woman who could have been twenty or fifty, had finished their wrestling match and she was smoothing down a faded colourful skirt and moving to offer her services to the next group of men, though no one took her up on it that time, perhaps for lack of money, or perhaps the wet stain on her ski
rt was enough to turn them away. I would have been happier to have them watching her than their new object of interest, me, and I kept a careful watch through the hair I let tumble over my face as they talked about me and made lewd gestures.

  I wondered where all these people came from, what they did, if they had done anything other than get drunk or piss-off the police, and if I would be here for long. I knew I would eventually have to use that toilet and the more I thought about it the more the tiny urge to urinate became a pressing need and then a consuming thought and eventually, my life’s calling. I watched four or five men go over to the corner and piss, most of it missing the small concrete hole, but I hadn’t seen a woman there yet. Most of the women were wearing billowing skirts, nice discreet tents, better than my jeans, which would have to be around my ankles for me to manage. I couldn’t remember pissing in front of anyone in years, even female friends. Finally I knew, it was piss in the hole or wear it down my legs for however many hours, days or years I was to be in here. I stood and made my way through the crowd to the hole as discreetly as I could, but being the only non-Mexican person, I drew everyone’s eyes as I dropped my jeans with trembling hands and tried to squat over the hole with any sense of poise, dignity and simple balance. I failed in all three and at one point in the cascade and had to put my hand on the floor to steady myself, possibly contracting both HIV and cholera. I don’t think anyone got any sort of look at my bag of tricks but my bare arse garnered the attention of perhaps eighty people, and the sheer pale glow of it inspired the sort of awe usually reserved for weaponry and wealth in that part of the world. One man grinned at me with both of his teeth showing and clapped as I finished and stood and pulled everything up and trying to cover up as quickly as possible. I smiled wryly and bowed to my audience who responded with scorn and disgust, though one group of three men examined me in a way that reduced me to primal terror and I stumbled back to my bare patch of wall and huddled down into a ball, hoping they would stay where they were.