We Ate the Road Like Vultures Read online

  ‘Now you can make love to the German and he won’t get arrested.’ Carousel swigged and winked at me.

  ‘Fuck off.’ I glanced to my side but Adolf had his maps on the bar and was showing the barman and another patron the shrines he had circled.

  ‘How did your mother die?’

  ‘What?’

  He didn’t ask it again and he wasn’t looking at me, but it hung there like Christmas lights and blinked waiting for someone to notice. I’m not really a talker, not a speaker of my own stories, it’s just not the way my voice wants to go, it cracks and stutters and gets tangled on its own insignificance. I didn’t want to tell him. Didn’t know if he deserved to know. But perhaps I owed him a story for his time and the upside-down I’d given him, or perhaps there is a time when everyone is drinking warm beer in a black cave and finds themselves answering questions that never see the light of the day.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  I drank more beer—watery, courage-less beer. ‘It always feels as though you weaken things when you talk about them, you know? They never sound as important, or as drastic as when they are happening over and over in your mind.’ I sighed a long sigh that emptied me. ‘My mum was real. Do you know those people? Ones that are strange and wild and absolutely live in their own world, odd and dreamy and…completely in it. You know?

  ‘Her parents were the original hippies to move to the mountains out there, near Nerang. Do you know Australia? It’s all rainforest and cattle farms where I grew up and back in the day there were communes and her parents had a kind of tribe. I didn’t see them much, they freaked my dad out and then they died when I was young, like six or seven. They had money but I don’t know where it came from and they built, with about thirty other people, this big place around a couple of huge trees, all made out of fallen branches, and Mum grew up there and never went to a real school, just a local school run by the Krishna people where they did a lot of craft, I think. Her name was Mireille and she had very long hair, blonde but a kind of pale blonde you don’t see very much, and blue eyes and really nice skin, pink and clean. She was always caught somewhere between laughing and crying, like the Lady of Shalott. Not me at all.

  ‘My dad grew up on a farm in the same mountains but he never met her until he came home from university. That’s the sort of guy my dad is—he has a masters degree in farming. He met my mum at some party and they fell in love at first sight and had me not enough months after that with a marriage squeezed in somewhere to make my dad feel less guilty. And then they found themselves in a house on a cattle farm and it was like, oh fuck, this is real, there is laundry and nappies and shit. My dad was suddenly surprised that my misty mother didn’t cook or clean or buy groceries, and literally did lie in the grass all day writing songs and poems and making daisy chains. And she was shocked to find out that my dad was a capitalist and worked hard and voted. So I grew up with my mum and dad both trying to save me from each other.’

  ‘Life is always tough when you let it get real. That’s for all of us.’ Carousel said, he didn’t look at me while he listened and I liked that. He gazed at the wood of the bar, so shined up with spit and booze.

  ‘My dad started to hate her, I think, really hate her. She used to wander off for days. Not tell him where she was going. Leave me, even when I was like two or three. He would get home late after the cows and find me crawling round the house. It was probably what her parents did, but they had like twenty other people who looked after the kid while they wandered. Once, I pulled down a picture and broke the glass and crawled all over it and there was blood everywhere. I can remember him just crying and crying. But I loved her. She was ethereal and wonderful. Like a fairy. And she loved to touch everything, including me, running her hands over everything all the time. By the time I was at school she was wandering off for weeks at a time, and we never knew where she went. I cooked for Dad and we pretended nothing was weird.

  ‘I think I was about ten when this new vet started coming around and she was exactly like my dad, a regular country girl, and they were in love in minutes. He was so secretive about it, but girls just know. We just know. And Mum knew, too, and I saw her break, she still loved him and hoped one day he would start wandering the hills with her. Anyway, once Dad had this girlfriend I started to find reasons to go away—like school camps and Scouts and holidays with other people’s families. And when I was twelve I convinced him to let me go to a summer camp in Colorado—you only have to be twelve to fly by yourself and I put thirteen on the camp application for good measure. And he let me. And Mum was fine with it of course, but I was surprised he didn’t put up a fight at all. I came this way for a month, waterskiing and rock climbing and all that American stuff kids do. I had a great time. So many girls were calling their parents and crying to go home, I didn’t call once. And then when I flew back, my dad and his girlfriend picked me up at Brisbane airport together, like they didn’t care if I knew anymore.

  ‘My voice got all caught up then and I hated myself and how emotional I was, even after five years, and I wanted to be a storyteller who didn’t fall over flat into their own story. He said Mum had died while I was away. She was sick and hadn’t told us. She died and he had a funeral and buried her under this giant fig tree on our farm, and he never called or sent a message or anything. He didn’t want to ‘ruin my trip’. And his woman had moved into our house. I was only gone for one month. I asked him if Mum had said to tell me anything, or if she had left me a letter, and he said no, and that it was too sad for him to talk about it anymore, and he had asked the school counsellor to talk to me at school on Monday instead.

  ‘And I hated him then. Everything of my mum’s was gone when I got home. Everything. He said he buried it all with her, and I tried to dig it up one night and he caught me and changed his story and said he had burned it all. And I know she would have said something or given me something if she knew she was going to die. She loved me, she did.’ I coughed and tried to find the part of me that was still solid, I had never said my whole story into the air before and it hurt my throat. ‘I wonder, you know, if she might possibly not be dead? You know, she wandered away all the time? What if he told her never to come back, convinced her that she was bad for me or something like that. What if she is somewhere waiting for me to come and find her? Or maybe he killed her. I wonder that sometimes, too. Why would she die? She wasn’t like regular people, she never did anything unhealthy, she ate raw food and flowers and tree-root tea. So why would she die? I just…’ I didn’t know what words came next so I drank the last of my beer and used my last bit of resolve to get them past the back of my throat. And I was about to get up and go throw myself in the car to cry and be twelve again when Carousel turned towards me and put his willow-tree hands on either side of my face and pulled my head towards his until our foreheads rested on each other and he let me lean there for a while, until a couple of loose tears had dripped free and I could reassemble my spine. It was nice to lean into his age and steal a bit of vintage moxie before I had to open my eyes.

  Fortunately life is the kind of merry-go-round that won’t give time to mud-wallow. A group of lost tourists wandered in, gabbling away in rapid French and, moving past Chicco who was attached by the mouth to a bottle of tequila and a Mexican woman, were filled with hope at the sight of our pale faces.

  ‘Est-ce que ce le bar est dans le film Recherche le Paradis?’ They asked me first, and it was too fast for my eighth-grade French so I shrugged and deferred to Carousel. They repeated the question and my heart, which had finally relaxed after being torn open, stuttered and sputtered and sank when I saw Carousel’s face. He was translating in his head. He replied slowly and with a bad American accent.

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

  I was very still and my fingers were tingling with the fear of being wrong and fooled so I tried to find an explanation. Could you forget French when you got old? Cou
ld it suddenly become hard work? I didn’t think so, but I pasted a smile on my face and accepted the drink they bought me without even tasting the sand in the bottom of the glass.

  10

  Believing doesn’t make something true.

  That’s just pretty words.

  I WOKE UP IN THE BACK OF THE BOUNDING CAR with my hair wrapped around Adolf’s feet and my body still raging drunk and I can’t remember who was driving but I do remember sitting up feeling dizzy in the wind and flipping back down to land on the better half of the German. And quite honestly his mouth was ripe and beautiful and it was, well, there, so I kissed it and he woke up and kissed me back, and it might have started something kind of interesting and contortionist if we hadn’t been so drunk that we fell back asleep with our mouths suckered together.

  And then we were in some town and hung-over and waving away clouds of our own funky breath and migraine, and we sat up and put our hands over our eyes while Carousel parked the car and found us a hotel. It should have been easy but it wasn’t cos there was a festival on, a local celebration of a saint no one had heard of, though the moment I made that comment out loud and the words swam around my dizzy head biting and slapping at me, I realised I was, as usual, wrong and Adolf knew exactly who the saint was.

  Saint Angostura apparently. I may have got that wrong, there are translation difficulties between my lack of German and his Spanish readings of the second word of Jesus who wasn’t crucified, but it sounded like that and I will continue to think of him as St Bitters.

  ‘Of course,’ Adolf lit up and scribbled in his journal, ‘he was the man who saved Christ from the snake which had bitten him. He was given the gift of many, many children. And immortality. He is in Paradise now.’

  ‘Paradise? Isn’t that another religion? You have to be making this stuff up.’ I rubbed at my eyes, which were grinding against the back of my skull. ‘That beer was stronger than it tasted.’

  ‘Perhaps you are referring to the dozen shots of tequila you threw down between recitations of the philosophy of Bruce Lee?’ Carousel’s words made the slow journey to my ears and then beat them senseless.

  ‘Fuck off, old person. You are supposed to be responsible. Why did you let me drink so much?’

  ‘Because I am not your fucking parent. Nor am I responsible. Name me a sixteen year old who has ever taken a lick of advice?’ He sat back against the seat. ‘I guess we keep driving. You up to it, Adolf? Methinks Lulu should keep her blind and deaf self in the back seat, and Chicco may not return to us until the sun sucks the piss out of him.’

  ‘Of course.’ Adolf leapt over the seat, giving me the usual, but still disconcerting, glimpse up his sarong and my headache notched up a volume as it was joined by a libido tsunami. He stood nimbly over the gearstick as Carousel began his superannuate climb into the back seat, a process that was complicated and glacial.

  ‘Less beer and your knees might work better.’ I moved over to give him enough room.

  ‘Less mouth and your brain might, too.’

  I looked past the halo of wispy white hair that flicked around his head in the dusty air and saw a silhouette across the street between two buildings that seemed familiar. Squinting and shaking my head to free my wits from the tangled tequila worm, I suddenly knew who it was. And why he was there.

  ‘Go. Now. Go.’ I looked at Adolf, and it was a credit to the best part of him, that part that knew spirit and blood instinctively, that he understood my imperative and lifted Carousel bodily into the back seat and drove. The figure in the alley turned and watched me as I stared, my eyes hauling his towards me, and I knew it was not an accident of geography, but a hunt. We ripped a path through the town, a slow jagged tear through the throng growing for St Bitters, many wearing schlocky papier-mâché snakes around their heads and bodies, and I craned my neck out the back of the convertible, watching and waiting. He did not disappoint, and within the minute we were a pair travelling against the serpentine flow.

  ‘Juarez?’ Carousel looked at me.

  ‘The captain? Yep. In a Hummer. Your Hummer I think.’ I watched the captain, who was having less luck with the snakes than we or Jesus had, and was pulling to the side to let the parade pass. ‘And I’m seventeen now. Remember.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said sixteen year olds don’t take advice. I’m seventeen now. Maybe I’ll ruminate more.’ I kept my eyes on the Hummer until it faded with the town into a dusted silhouette and I turned around.

  ‘Didn’t you pay him money to stay away?’

  Carousel rubbed his crop of stubble which maintained far more colour than the hair on his head. ‘I did. I paid him a lot. But then we left and we took Adolf. He may have wanted more for the German or he may think we have left for good, and we have been what’s well-known as a fucking pretty cash cow for the fullness of his career.’

  ‘What do you think he will do?’ Adolf spoke over his shoulder as he drove. The sun had heated his thin shirt to intolerable levels in the last few moments and he pulled it off with one practised hand. I sighed, even with gaol as a threat, all that milk and honey was in front of me. Carousel slapped my arm with the back of his hand, amused by my addiction.

  ‘I don’t know. He won’t kill me or Chicco. We are the money. He might turn in Lulu for her reward and maybe he’ll leave the two of you out here in the sun. I don’t know what the man wants, he is a pirate, sometimes they simply want to pillage people who think they are free. Keep driving and we’ll only stop when we have to, and I think it’s time for the two of you to get out of Mexico.’

  Neither of us argued with him. I had no inclination to be back in Chillingham and even less to reinhabit a cell, so I decided to go with it, and Adolf, it seemed, had seen his Mexican miracle and was ready to move on to the next scheduled stop on his magical mystery tour. Even his game-face was a little concerned.

  ‘He spoke to me at the clinic. The captain.’ Adolf didn’t offer up information often, so we were instantly listening, except of course for the snoring, scratching and twitching Chicco who mumbled incoherently but was generally comatose. ‘He said he knew why I was really here. And that he would allow me the medical attention if I told him what he wanted to know.’

  It was testament to the sort of person Adolf is that he thought it was appropriate to leave the conversation there, and we waited long enough to realise he was in fact now singing to himself in Hebrew, and I lost the flimsy hold of my temper and yelled at him. ‘Finish the story, Fritz!’

  He looked mildly confused and shrugged. ‘He wanted to know where Christ’s gold was buried. He knows I am a scholar and thought perhaps I was also a treasure hunter.’

  He had floored us again and it seemed no matter how I retrained my mind to encompass the oddity of Adolf, he found new ways to unsettle.

  ‘As in Indiana Jones?’

  ‘Ha. That’s funny. I wanted to be Indiana Jones when I was a kid. They were some of the films my parents burned. No, I have studied a lot about the wandering Christ since I first heard the story, and the captain had heard I was on a pilgrimage. That is all. There is a myth that Christ could turn the desert sand into gold and that he buried a great deal of treasure here for a time when the Mexican people might need it.’

  ‘How exactly have you studied it? What did you study?’ Even Carousel, who usually embraced weirdness like a lost sock, was beginning to sound submerged in the wack. Adolf was as skilled at creating sexual tension as he was at diffusing reality and he kept talking as though the only questions he had to answer were the ones he asked himself. ‘I wouldn’t be the one to find the treasure, I am not in need.’

  ‘Plenty of Mexicans are. How very religious to hide something people have no hope of finding,’ I snarked. My parents’ duelling Anglican-Pagan warfare had left me with no love of the mysteries of the gods.

  ‘They will find it when they need it most. The captain will not.’ He grinned over his shoulder and drove a little faster, the Lady Cuda groaning and occasionally
complaining of angina, but continuing to gnaw the road with gusto.

  It was then that Chicco woke up swearing and swinging his head around to send drool and cuss words all round the car. ‘Fucking piece of unholy shit! He took my wallet. He took my money and he took my pants!’

  There was a light-filled moment for Chicco between when he woke and when the three bottles of tequila he had drunk turned around and bitch-slapped him backwards into his seat. He let out a groan and his eyes sank downwards into a set of folds not unlike those of that puppy that sells toilet paper.

  ‘Lord Almighty.’ He rubbed at his head. ‘If he can heal the wounded Johnson can he not keep the fucking black morning birds at bay? Where are we? How much did I drink? Where are my pants?’

  ‘I’ve never seen you wear any pants.’ I snorted at him. ‘You slept with the old tarts, that’s where your wallet is, slipped in between the folds of those saggy tits.’

  He beamed at me.

  ‘Where are your teeth?’ I smugged back.

  ‘Aw, shit. And I didn’t bring another pair. No teeth, no pants, no money. Just like the sixties, eh?’

  He threw it back at Carousel who smirked and passed him a cigar.

  ‘Gum that, Commodore. It’ll send the blackbirds skywards at least.’

  ‘And I say again, where are we?’ Chicco slurped the cigar into his mouth.

  ‘Fastwards to Tijuana, my friend. We have to get these two clear of the border. The captain is after the German and possibly the girl as well.’ Carousel left out the bits that defied explanation.

  ‘The captain? Juarez?’ Chicco puffed on his cigar which was falling loose and whichways in his toothless lips. ‘Well, you’re royally fucked young cats, aren’t you, that’s not a man who’s likely to give up.’ He said it with a smile though, and I think, since he knew with pecuniary surety that he wasn’t going to be pissing in the corner of a filthy cell, he quite liked the excitement. Not that pissing in public had thus far proved to daunt Chicco appreciably.