We Ate the Road Like Vultures Read online

  Adolf slept and we drove in silence, all of us muted by the tiny smear of red on his face and the very long drive to Tijuana. We had the windows down, but it was hot and salted and hours passed before the sun finally granted us clemency. I pulled the bread from the bag at my feet and wrapped each slice around some dried beef and chilli and passed it around and it was delicious, like all road food is, and the darkness rose up on the lip-smacking and the slurping sounds of the water we needed to wet it down. Chicco fell into snoring on the last mouthful, but Carousel turned back to me, ‘We shouldn’t stop. Can you drive?’

  ‘Farm girl. Course I can.’

  ‘I expected nothing less,’ I heard his smile as he pulled over onto the side of the road, an area only slightly more potholed and rubbled, and we switched places. I dragged the rheumatoid fabric of the roof out of its cave and clipped it into place over the top of us while Carousel climbed into the back seat. It was a grunting and painful process folding his knobbled limbs in around Adolf’s, but he managed it in the end, obviously comfortable enough to be asleep by the time I had the lady back on the road.

  ‘Second star to the right and straight on till morning,’ he murmured, and fell asleep and I drove into a blackness that swallowed the moon and the road and small bites of my hope, and I felt a long way from Chillingham with all the nothingness and cactus around me.

  I was settling into the soft humming of a melancholy peace my mother taught me, when there was a bang and thump and a slide and a whip-crack, something hit the front of the car and then slapped hard into the glass in front of my face. For a moment an eye stared back at me, an angry bloodshot eye, then rolled slowly over the roof and was gone. In the blackness behind me I saw nothing and the road ahead was, once again, silent. The car was fine so I drove on. Carousel stirred.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ He was asleep before he heard me.

  There was the tiny red glow of a cigarette butt bouncing back and forth in the wind on the bonnet of the Cuda and then it, too, catapulted off into the dark.

  ‘Roo.’

  7

  Dust and drag, Lulu—that’s all it is.

  Didn’t you read the script?

  ‘LULU.’

  I woke up. And kept driving, correcting as slowly as possible to try and suggest I had been grazing the left shoulder purposefully, the blackness disguising my movements only a little.

  ‘Lulu.’ It was Adolf’s wan face I could see in the dim light of the mirror, and it was the colour your tongue feels after it licks a stamp. I slowed the car and pulled over so I could turn around and then wished I hadn’t because those minutes might be the ones that kept him alive. He was dying.

  ‘We’re taking you to Tijuana. We’ll be there in a few hours.’ It wasn’t true, but it was on the same page as truth.

  ‘Have we gone past San Mateo?’ he whispered. ‘Yes, about an hour ago. We’ve been driving since we picked you up. Maybe five hours. Why?’

  ‘I want you to take me back there. To Andachires. Will you do that?’

  ‘No. We don’t have time to go back. What do you want? We’ll stop just up ahead. They’ll have stuff, a roadhouse or something. What do you need? If it’s painkillers, Chicco has one of everything in the back, I’ll get you something.’

  He lifted a hand slowly and smiled at me indulgently. ‘I need you to take me back. There is another holy place there, it is a healing place.’

  ‘What? Come on man, now is not the time for more of the Baja Jesus stuff. You have to know that isn’t true. You are literally going to die if we don’t get you to a proper hospital. Don’t give me any more of this bullshit.’ I turned around and started the engine up, it roared and belched back to life in a way that only men in their eighties could sleep through. The car lurched, and I saw Adolf wince in the mirror.

  ‘Lulu. Take me back there. It’s on my map, in my bag. The spring, take me to the water and I’ll be okay.’ He lay back having exerted all the effort he could and I saw that the front of his hospital gown was now soaked in a blood stalactite from his neck to his waist—it was literally dripping from his mouth. I swung the huge car in an instant U-turn that encompassed both lanes and several metres of desert. I heard the popping of agave and rationality as I leapt the car back on to the road and tore up the past like I could change it.

  I knew the town he’d mentioned, it wasn’t too far, and I knew that if Adolf had to die on my watch, and it looked increasingly as though he might, that it should be on his terms. We ate the road like vultures, remorseless and insatiable and dragged the town towards us with a purity of will. I pulled the lady Cuda into the smudge of a town and turned to ask Adolf for more directions. He was out. But not dead. Chicco was stirring in the passenger seat and farted out the last of the night at me. Carousel was snoring. I leapt to the back of the car and got the map from Adolf’s pack, turning it round and round to find my bearings and to discover which of the small neat circles was his chance at life. The Spring of Living Water was three miles away but there was not a road or a track to show me how to get there. I looked around for anyone to ask but it was barely dawn and there was no movement from arse to the horizon. I pulled my army knife from the back pocket of my jeans and examined the compass embedded in its side. It was miniscule and likely to be cosmetic but I leaned over it until I found north and then turned the map to match—northeast. I looked up. There was nothing out there but dirt and death and the stretching fingers of the sun, but I’d already made the decision and there is no arguing with me, so off we went, the wheels whirring and spinning as the sand got softer away from the edge of the road. It surprised me how bumpy it was off the road given that it looked completely flat in every direction, but there were new levels of discomfort to be plumbed and I mined them thoroughly, jouncing everyone so hard that both the venerables woke up and even Adolf released a moan.

  ‘Where are we?’ Chicco wiped a viscous snail of drool from his stubbled chin and shonked a man-sound in his throat that women can never replicate. I ignored him and kept up my death race.

  Carousel was busy with the dying youth draped over him, and I saw his face change from the looseness of sleep to the tight frown of fear that strangled his voice.

  ‘Lulu—why are we here?’

  I didn’t answer him either, because I didn’t have answers and any words would have been too many.

  ‘We should be closer to the ocean than this? Where are we?’ Chicco was awake now, turning his face from left to right trying to figure his bearings. He looked at the sun and narrowed his eyes. ‘Andachires? Am I right?’

  I was scanning the horizon for something, I could be three feet from a spring and never see it out there, so I needed to watch with every part of me that believed impossible things before breakfast. And it was there, waiting, as everything was, for Adolf—a small pile of rocks that faded up on me like the mischievous hope that tickles at you when you know you should tread firmly on its head.

  It took them longer, but they saw it too, and said nothing until we had stopped the car. We weren’t the strongest of trios and we had to tug and pull at Adolf’s broken-up body to get it out of the car, it was cruel but we had no other way. They put his arms around their shoulders and limped him over towards the shrine. I wandered around the shrine which was nothing but stone and no marker or sign of a cross or anything to say that Jesus had once paused here between trips to Jerusalem and Tasmania. But what was worse was there was no water. We sat Adolf next to the shrine and propped him upright against it, but he was so near gone there was nothing to do but stand back and be still. And Chicco struggled with that, and had to fumble for a cigar and a match, and ended up pacing, his sarong dragging a circle on the ground, but I stood like a column in a cathedral and Carousel stood beside me and held on to me with his stillness, and we waited because it was too much to believe that someone like Adolf would die in the desert.

  ‘He won’t die.’ I said it and knew it was a lie, and Carousel answered me even though he didn’t have t
o.

  ‘Dust and drag, Lulu—that’s all it is. Didn’t you read the script?’

  And he took his sweet time and he scared the shit and tears out of me, but the god that Adolf believed into existence gave me a nod and a wink for falling for the joke, and the water hissed up out of the sand and washed around Adolf and around our feet, and there was a tiny geyser of maybe a foot that lasted for ten minutes. And we watched it with hope rising around our knees and then our hips and finally our throats until Adolf opened his eyes and smiled that dangerously innocent smile and stood up looking down at the water that was still pooling around his feet.

  ‘Ah, you found it. I knew you would, Lulu.’ He looked at me for too long and the blob of salty fear wobbling on my eyelid fell and I tried to swipe it before it betrayed me. Chicco’s whoop and splash took our attention and we watched as he pulled himself down into the last of the bubbling water and drank handfuls of the stuff. It was already vanishing back into God and the desert and soon there was nothing but a damp spot to mark the miracle.

  Carousel walked forward and took Adolf by the arm and said to him in his low salty voice, ‘I like your wandering Jesus, he’s got a traveller’s sense of timing.’ He smiled wisdom, and his own dental miracle, and pulled his dancing friend from the vapour.

  I looked at Adolf for a moment wondering what the right words were to say to a man who was squashed by a truck and saved by a geyser and who looked so much like an angel with the morning sun behind him that he could make a Christian of the Dalai Lama. I said nothing and I let him lean over me and kiss the side of my mouth that wasn’t cynical and I embraced a sudden belief in his God.

  Chicco was trying to leap and sing like a revival paraplegic but he was singing like a drunkard. ‘Lulu my girl, I’ve been healed! I was old and constipated and thirsty, and now? I’m no longer thirsty!’ He laughed and tried to spring into the air and I laughed to watch his sandals lift a little over an inch from the ground.

  Adolf smiled at him and said to me, ‘I have to say thank you.’ He walked back to the shrine and knelt beside it to pray and with the sun behind him I took a moment to focus on his gilt silhouette. As my eyes adjusted I noticed what I had failed to notice before. He was still wearing the bloodied, sodden hospital gown and it was open down the back. And he was naked underneath. Again. And while again, he saluted the sun, the three of us watched him with awkward grimaces.

  And Carousel put his hand on my shoulder and said softly. ‘The mad ones will always give you what you never asked for.’

  ‘I asked for nothing.’

  Carousel laughed at me. ‘You asked for everything, Lulu. You asked for stars.’

  ‘And he’s giving you the moon,’ Chicco threw over his shoulder as he heaved himself into the back of the Cuda.

  ‘Come along, disciples, the road smells lonely.’

  8

  I had been face-planted and upended and what came down was cantankerous, so I didn’t want his truths in my hair.

  CHICCO DROVE AND IT WAS LIKE RIDING A centipede as it wove back and forth between the dirt on one side of the road and rocks on the other, and occasionally there were bursts of straight smooth driving when he was stoned.

  In the back I sat still and silent in my small epiphany while Adolf, now formally clad in one of Chicco’s sarongs with a bright silver cross hanging on his cinnamon chest, sang something in German that sounded horribly like it might be a praise song. Carousel was smoking out of the side of his mouth and typing with fury on a laptop that must have been the smallest device his ancient eyes could see, an expensive thing that leapt into the air with each pothole and danced around with the joy of being out of the murky, humid hacienda.

  I would have liked to sit and think for a while, it’s not every day that you see someone brought back from death by a trickle of sandy water, and I like to ruminate with stealth on such oddities but it was, of course, not to be cos the decision that we would continue on to Tijuana, just for the hell of it, with this band of merry men, meant there was only ever going to be dramas. The thought bounced up and through the roof of my skull as Lady Cuda hit the only piece of road debris between here and Mulege, leapt skyward then fell back towards the earth with graceless resignation. Adolf, of course, had his seatbelt on but, I flew up and down and landed with my head in the well below Carousel’s feet, my body shattering his inbred laptop and my foot extinguishing his cigarette by kicking it down his throat.

  ‘Motherfucker,’ was all I could say, and I sat or lay or whatever the hell it was I was doing with my legs up and my head down, and I could hear Chicco’s muffled laughter as the calm hands of Adolf pulled me free by gripping my hips and pulling me upwards and outwards and backwards until I popped into his lap.

  I could feel his voice. ‘You shouldn’t say that, Lulu, think of your mother.’ But I had been face-planted and upended and what came down was cantankerous, so I didn’t want his truths in my hair. ‘She’s dead. I can say what I want.’

  Immediately I knew I shouldn’t have said it cos, even though he was mostly concerned with picking tobacco from his teeth, Carousel heard and turned and focused on me with his sharp eyes, and I returned his look for far less time than I should have before leaping over the side of the car and popping open the boot. ‘I suppose you’re too old to change that tyre, aren’t you, Chicco?’

  ‘Far too old. But you enjoy it, lovely, and I’ll spend my half hour squeezing out a piss.’

  There was a tyre in there, thank God, and with Adolf’s brawn and my instruction, we got it free and began the process of jacking up the heavy girl and messing with bolts that had settled in for retirement.

  ‘So when you mentioned that your parents knew you were okay, and then when you mentioned again that your parents had a reward for your safe return…were you referring to your dead mother?’ It was Carousel and he was leaning up against the sun-sizzled car with a sort of rat-pack, beatnik cool that flustered my oil-smeared hands into searching for something to do and which were then trodden on by Adolf.

  ‘Shit. Ow.’ I rolled a spare a few inches to the right. ‘No. I was talking about my father and my stepmother. You didn’t want details. I didn’t give them. My mother’s dead. Died when I was twelve. Done.’

  He made a humming noise that suggested he was insightful and I was repressed, and he was about to ask something else when I was excused by the whooping cries and the disturbing sight of Chicco leaping, laughing and pissing from above a flailing multi-hued sarong—urine spraying wildly in the air.

  ‘Look at this fucking racehorse!’ he screamed. ‘That fucking magic holy water!’ His pee dried up but his enthusiasm kept flowing as he stumbled back and placed unwashed hands on Adolf’s and my sweaty shoulders. ‘Haven’t been able to piss like that in a decade. I’m healed. And I’ve Baja Jesus to thank for it.’

  Adolf went back to tightening the bolts on the soft spare tyre and I began the process of convincing Chicco to let someone else drive.

  ‘Not a fucking chance. We are two hours from the best damn cantina you’ll ever drink dry and I can get us there in half that. And there will be women. I want to see what else this baby can do.’ He laughed at us and climbed back in the driver’s seat, and there was nothing to do but let the octogenarian drive, and climb my stinking, fetid self into the back seat. Adolf reached across me to buckle up my fraying seatbelt, winking birds and bees at me as he did so, and I was unsurprised to find that his sweat smelled like maple syrup.

  9

  Je ne sais pas mais la bière est gâtée et le tequila magnifique.

  CANTINA. SALOON. DIVE. PLACE OF ILL-REPUTE. Mexican gaol. Complete shithole. We had to walk down and under and into a cavernous mouth of a door to get to the cantina into which Chicco had sprung as soon as the car had slipped to a stop in the space that may once have been the rest of the town. It was dark and lit with grubby bulbs and the pilot lights of cigarettes and pinball machines, and the eyes that gazed up to greet our descent had the pin-pupil look of cave dwelle
rs. We must have been interesting to them, we must have seemed like some odd white Brady bunch of a family, but they glanced for no more than the long minute it took Carousel to descend the rheumatic stairs and hoist himself onto a stool at the bar.

  Nobody stopped me from entering so I did, and we sat in a row at the bar, the white hair, brown and blond, all unwashed, road-tangled and thirsty. And there was nothing to quench our thirst but beer and water and the beer sounded safer so we drank it warm and flat. Adolf was drawn into conversation by the barman who rattled something in Spanish and pointed to the elaborate Celtic cross he wore around his neck—the symbol of the death Christ escaped by leaving on his world pilgrimage, Adolf had told me. This explanation also confused the barman and they soon argued in a complicated to and fro of language barriers and religious ideologies. Chicco was at a table in the corner with both of the establishment’s women, ladies of dubious figure, beauty and intent, who were swilling the bottle of tequila he had purchased while listening to the stories that he told them in a Spanglish that would have confused anyone of any race.

  And so I sat with Carousel and sipped slow distasteful sips and we looked at each other occasionally in that uncomfortable first date kind of way, where you don’t know where to let your eyes fall or what to say. A flash hit me.

  ‘What’s the date?’

  ‘March.’

  ‘It was my birthday the other day. I’m seventeen.’ I had almost forgotten about that and it was not a thing a girl should forget, seventeen being what it is, one moment closer to the end of Interpol searches.