We Ate the Road Like Vultures Read online

  She was absolutely stunned, like it was the last thing she had thought about and, on top of whatever problems she already had, I had opened another great can of worms.

  ‘Oh. Okay.’ She pulled it shut and looked around a little wildly and seeing, for the first time, the crazies that filled the bus. A few of them eyeballed her back until she sank low in her seat and stared at me.

  ‘If they steal my money, I’m not sure when I can get more. I’d be stuck out here with nothing.’ She was quiet, but sinking into that ditch between crying and hand-wringing panic.

  ‘The bank? There are banks in Mexico, too.’ I smiled to ease her worry.

  Her brow was tight and her mouth was bitten. ‘I don’t have a bank account, just the cash. I have two hundred thousand, do you think that will be enough to get me started down here?’

  She was honestly serious and, even though I waited for a crack in her naivety, waited for her to smile and let me know she was kidding and knew more about life than that, she didn’t.

  ‘It will be plenty in Mexico but most people down here don’t have much money, so I think you should put it somewhere safe for a while, rather than lugging it around in the backpack.’ I kept my voice as low as I could. ‘You stole the money, didn’t you? And now you’re fleeing to Mexico.’

  She looked so guilty I think she would have written and signed a confession on the spot if I had been a cop, although knowing now what I didn’t know then about Mexican law enforcement, I imagine the blue lounge suit would have been enough to throw her in the shit cell for a few days.

  ‘No. I didn’t. It’s my money.’ She was fervent and shrill. I put my hand on her arm quickly to calm her.

  ‘It’s okay, I couldn’t care less if you murdered someone for it.’ I smiled but it froze on my face when I saw her eyes widen with terror. Surely I didn’t nail that one on the head, too. ‘You didn’t actually kill someone for it? Did you?’

  She shoved her sunglasses back on her face with shaky ferocity and turned in her seat until she was staring at the headrest in front of her. I sat back, too, surprised beyond curiosity that this woman, who looked like a church pastor’s wife, could possibly have killed someone and stolen two hundred thousand dollars.

  We sat like that for about fifteen minutes. Not touching each other and staring at the frayed grey stripes of that same bus seat fabric they use around the world, except maybe once you get into Mexico where it turns into whatever scraps of fabric and leather and wood the bus owner has glued over the bare springs. Eventually she turned to me and said softly, ‘I’ll tell you what happened if you promise to think about not calling the police.’

  I had no intention of calling the police on her whatever the story. She could have murdered her own grandma and I’d still let her go. Police would want to know almost as much about me as her. But I did truly want to know her story so I nodded like a regular travellin’ girl and listened.

  Turns out she wasn’t a pastor’s wife, she was a hardware store owner’s wife. They had lived together in New Mexico for twenty-five years and she had lived there another fifteen before that, in fact she’d never left the state in her life. Her husband had been charming for about the first five minutes of their marriage and then turned her into his own personal slave, she wasn’t allowed to work, except at home. Wasn’t allowed her own money and wasn’t allowed to see her family. Once in the early years, when life hadn’t turned too bad, her mother had come over to visit, and Decklin, her husband, had come home early to find her mother there. The house was clean, the dinner cooked, everything had been in order, but the fact that she had been doing something without his knowledge made him so angry he banned her mother from the house. Once the technology was available he even wired the house with CCTV so he could watch her from his office at work. Being watched made her so clumsy and terrified, she was forever injuring herself and having attacks of the shakes. She wasn’t allowed to visit the doctor, and Decklin would bring home medications for her from one of his friends. He took her grocery shopping, bought her clothes for her and refused to let her wear anything colourful or beautiful in case she used it to seduce another man.

  At that point my face must have shown my disdain because she looked embarrassed.

  ‘I know I’m nothing to look at, honey, but you have to believe, Decklin was a very jealous man.’ She lowered her face.

  That wasn’t what I’d been thinking at all and I told her so, she really wasn’t ugly and I could tell at one point she might even have been quite something, but she had that Amish, bland kind of style that comes with adding nothing to the mix but soap and water. What I was really disgusted about was the fact that she had stayed.

  ‘I stayed because I didn’t know how to leave.’ She nibbled on a neat, trimmed fingernail. ‘I was fifteen when I got married. I never finished school, never had a job. I’m pretty useless.’ She said it with a half-smile that showed how much she believed it was okay to say something like that. My English teacher, the self-appointed ‘self-esteem police’ would have made her write affirmations for six months.

  ‘Anyway, he would have found me and it would have been worse. He killed my dog when I went out searching for it once. He probably would have killed me.’

  ‘Did he…?’ I tried not to have to find the right words.

  ‘Rape me?’ She asked with a blush. ‘I don’t think you are allowed to say that when you are married. But yes.’

  It wasn’t even close to what I was trying to ask. I stuttered, ‘I meant, did he hit you?’

  ‘Oh.’ She was more embarrassed. ‘Yes.’

  We sat and were quiet for thirty or forty foot-ball fields of dust and then I thought I should do something or say something, but I’m not the hand-on-your-shoulder kind of human so I decided the kindest thing to do would be to lead her into whatever confession she was trying to make so she could feel better and go buy that Baja beach house. ‘So you took his cash and ran away?’

  She said nothing, but a fat tear ran down her cheek and then another and then her nose started to run, too, and I had to shift my gaze to keep from watching the snot going up and down while she sniffled.

  ‘I wasn’t brave enough for anything like that.’ Her sniffles were pig snorts now, and I was glancing around like a barn owl trying to make sure no one was listening to her and getting their long Mexi-knives out to take that backpack. ‘He told me to get something from the crawl space in the roof. He kept stuff up there but he had a bad knee and couldn’t climb the ladder. He was holding the ladder and yelling at me to hurry up and hand him the box he wanted, and I looked around up there in the dark and I saw…’ She coughed but had the good fucking grace to whisper. ‘…I saw these weights he used to use for weightlifting and I thought that it would be so nice to drop one on his head to make him shut up. And then I climbed down the ladder and when I got to the bottom I saw him lying there, face down with blood everywhere, and the black weight beside his head.’ She stopped breathing for a moment, and I kind of elbowed her to get her going again, cos this was becoming a better and a worse story with every word.

  ‘I must have done it. I thought that I didn’t but I must have.’

  ‘Dead.’ I said, to give her the impression I was contributing to the conversation and not spending the moments planning my affidavit.

  ‘I don’t know. I stood there for ages, then I had this thought.’ She stopped crying after that, wiped her nose, thank God, and sat up, pulling the backpack in tight. ‘I thought, well, I have a few hours before he’ll be up and around, if he ever gets back up, so I went to the desk and got the bank book, walked to the bank and closed our savings account. There was two hundred and twenty thousand dollars in it. They had to get extra cash, specially, from the branch across town, but they didn’t ask a single question, just got me to sign for it, like I was a bigwig, and handed me a suitcase. I took twenty thousand to the nursing home where my mother is and paid for everything for her, for the rest of her life. And then I bought some new clothes and g
ot on the bus. I read in a book that people go to Mexico when they do something wrong. I don’t know anything about Mexico, but it’s not far, so here I am.’ She looked at me and then back at the window. ‘I don’t want to talk anymore now.’

  ‘Okay, but I’m going to say something before I shut up.’ I knew I had to offer at least something to a person who knows nothing in a place where everyone knows more than that. ‘You should find a nice little town and buy a house and a shop or something. Don’t keep all that cash. Okay?’

  She never looked back at me again. I think her confession scared her with the truth that she couldn’t keep her own secrets, but I saw her nod a little and I figured I had done my bit, and when I got off the bus I touched her sleeping shoulder once, to give her a bit of good luck in a place with the same sort of soul as her husband.

  When I got out of the bath I was clean but I wasn’t shiny, and there were commotions all around the house until the gurgling pipes finally swallowed my dirt, I heard a thumping scrape up the hall like ghosts and chains were coming for me. The towel was all I had, so that, and my rat morass of hair, was what Chicco got when I limped into the hallway to find him, the fucker of Christmas past, pulling some ancient suitcase tied with a belt towards the door, thwacking it into the wall with every step and losing pieces of the plastic edge each time he did.

  ‘What?’ I had no energy to finish my thought, but he knew, and he showed me three real teeth and a dozen toilet bowl ones, and said, ‘Road trip, my sweet. Fuckin’ road trip! Pack your booties and your tooties, it’s about time we hit that sweet black for one last hurrah.’

  He struggled his load out the end of the hallway to the courtyard and I followed him, still with my towel, to find Carousel was doing the same, pulling a suitcase, smaller but no less archaic, towards the stables that lined up behind the grassed-over courtyard and leaned slightly to the left.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Oh, don’t give me that, little Lulu, you go get your revolution on and get ready.’

  ‘Cos the train’s a comin’?’ I was sarcastic and more than a bit confused, but didn’t want to ask the only important question which was—am I going with you? Carousel narrowed the hoods of his eyes, and must have felt one small touch of pity in there for me, cos he put me out of my misery.

  ‘Pack your bag. We’re going to Tijuana. All of us.’

  I still didn’t move but I had to change my grasp of the soggy towel, which was so surprised that even it started to go weak about the knees.

  Chicco laughed at me. ‘We can’t leave the Angel Gabriel to the Mexicans, honey. We are gonna drive on up there and take some prisoners.’

  ‘And by that you mean, we’re going to take Adolf?’ My heart was quite impressed by this prospect, I must admit, and for all the surprises of the last three days this one was the one that made it squirm. ‘On the bus?’

  ‘Buses be damned. Buses ain’t no real road trip.’ Chicco dropped his case on the ground and it popped open to reveal a sarong and a few more of his endless supply of Hawaiian shirts nestled around bags containing enough pills to have us a well-stocked pharmacy. ‘We are taking the car.’

  ‘But no pants?’ I grinned. The bug was kind of catching and even Carousel couldn’t stop a smirk from pulling his face in all kinds of directions.

  Chicco laughed again. ‘Pants be damned as well.’

  I limped back to my room as fast as the towel and my over-bruised, pruned-up body would take me, pulled together the stinking shreds of my backpack and found a T-shirt to pull on with my jeans which, despite a day of musty air from the house, still reeked of shit and criminals. I bent to peruse my hair in the grey mirror and decided the only thing to be done for now was to roll it up, wrap it like child and rock it to sleep. A road trip with Jack and Neal. There were no words. Well there were, actually, dozens came to mind, but ‘fuck yeah’ was going to have to do it, cos I heard them arguing about the rusted door hinges and wouldn’t have missed the cutting of the ribbon for dinner with Kurt Cobain.

  I ran with one Converse on and the other in the air, my socks having slit their wrists while I was bathing, and I found the two men bent at the waist trying to raise the bolt that locked the bottom of the heavy wooden doors.

  ‘Out of the way, Gramps.’ I laughed at them coughing and pulling themselves back to vertical. I yanked the bolts up—no mean feat I must say, the door must have been in place a few years or so—and I swung it open. It opened on embarrassment and sweaty disappointment. What girl wants to open the door on a beatnik road trip to see a shiny black Hummer in front of her? ‘What the fuck is that? You should be ashamed of yourselves.’

  Carousel looked completely blank, as if he might have never seen the car before in his life, but Chicco laughed up his left lung and admitted guilt. ‘Ha. I forgot all about that thing. Stole that. From that southern cartel, remember they came up here banging on about taking Fernando’s shit? They were in the cantina in town and I was thinking, why the fuck not? I didn’t even know if I could get something like that to start so I tried. And it did. And I drove it up here and locked it up and never thought about it again. Ha. Couple of years ago now.’

  ‘Where’s the Cuda?’ Carousel was unfazed by grand theft auto.

  I tried the other door. It swung onto an empty stable of wispy dried straw begging for incineration. The last door stuck when I tried to open it and I had to throw my sore and twisted shoulder against it.

  ‘What’s behind door number three, Miss Lulu?’ Chicco joined me and added his useless strength to the pushing. Finally it swung open and I beamed, cos that was more fucking like it.

  Carousel smiled, too. ‘There ain’t no road trip without a car that loves the road. 1967 Plymouth Barracuda.’ He gazed at me and was all dream-swamped for a moment. ‘Hope it still goes.’

  It didn’t. Which wasn’t a very big surprise for anyone with a car that old and which had been sitting in the heat and sand and dried horse shit of that stable for five years without even a glance, so we pulled up her skirts and took a look and, as far as I could tell, it was just the battery and Carousel agreed with me. The Hummer still worked when Chicco started it, roaring like a wounded wolverine, so we used the jumpers from the back to give the Cuda some CPR, and she groaned a few times, farted out the last half decade’s indigestion, and roared back at the Hummer, her old-lady anger silencing the shiny thing and lowering his gaze. We left them there to make love for a half hour while I raided the kitchen to find some road food, coming away with a sack of bread, three or four cans of beans and some dried beef. I even found a few dried chillies hanging from the roof. We wouldn’t be good company but with Chicco’s arsenal of antacids we would be happy.

  We filled the trunk with our meagres and I climbed over into the open back. There wasn’t much leg room but the leather seat was as wide as a daybed and I settled in sideways and told the men to hurry up before Adolf died of Mexican medicine. Carousel unhooked the Hummer and left me alone with it in the dark as he pulled the big old lady out of the stables and into the light. She winced a couple of times but held her own against the shimmer and the fervour, and settled into a throat full of hum while we waited for Chicco. He finally tumbled through the open house door with three beers in his hands and made the foolish decision to try and climb over the car door rather than opening it. His heart was in it, I’ll give him that, but his heart hadn’t conversed with his hips for some time, let alone taken a moment to chat with his knees, and all that happened was a collision that caused him to drop one of the beers onto the rocks. He watched it fizz away. ‘Well, you’re underage anyway.’

  ‘Are you going to shut the door?’ I asked.

  ‘Why?’ was all I got as he adjusted each limb into his seat and opened the beers. I lay my head back and looked up at the sea of sun above me and we took off down the dusty road leaving everything and nothing behind us.

  Our first stop was the medical centre in the town, a building of brown death spots and moulding limbs
and the place where our German was still waiting on the good graces of the devil. Carousel began the process of arguing with the nurse, while Chicco and I searched for Adolf. He wasn’t hard to find, there were hundreds of people in the waiting rooms and hallways but there were only three beds and only one blond saint so we pushed our way through the fractures and scabies and checked him out. He was asleep, his eyes dark and blue-red. He had a drip in his arm but there was nothing connected to it so, while more nurses joined the argument with Carousel, I slid it out of his skin. It woke him and he looked at me and smiled and it wasn’t the sun-god smile of the day before but it was enough to rob me of speech so I had to nod and cough a few times before I could remember what we were doing.

  Chicco was wrestling with the handcuff that held Adolf on the other side, but it was one of those plastic ties so it was cut in a few breaths.

  ‘Can you walk?’ Chicco kept his voice low and scanned the room with the sort of furtiveness that captures instant attention.

  ‘I think so. I don’t know.’ Adolf tried to sit and managed a half-crunch, and I grabbed and wrested him into a sitting position, my arms sliding around his waist and gripping handfuls of his grubby blue hospital gown. Chicco pulled his legs off the other side. He groaned as his knee was moved and I noticed they had done nothing at all to help his injury, not even a bandage. I pulled Adolf’s arm around my neck and tried to lift him upright but I was small and he was huge and the physics defeated us. Chicco found a single crutch in the corner and passed it to Adolf and, with that under his arm, he was able to stand. We inched forward and I could see his face twisting to keep silent and felt the muscles in his stomach clenching. Once, he let out a tiny cough and a bubble of blood escaped the side of his lips and the sight of it sent my eyes straight to Chicco who saw it, too, and frowned. No one stopped us, but not a single person moved out of the way without a kick or a curse, and it took us ten minutes to make it to the door only a dozen metres away. We lay Adolf in the back of the Cuda and pulled up the roof. I slid in beside him and put his head on my lap. Carousel, seeing us through the window, conceded his argument with the nurses and joined us, roaring off at the sort of reckless, dangerous speed that wouldn’t get us noticed in Mexico.