Road Fever (29 page)

The road was paved but in such bad condition—so riddled with deep and dangerous potholes—that driving was a nightmare. We were slaloming along the Pacific Ocean on headlands fifteen-hundred-feet high and more. Old riverbeds ran down to the sea, and we dropped into these steep valleys through a series of tight switchbacks. The valley floors were narrow, and then it was another fifteen or twenty miles of uphill switchbacks to the high plateau above where the road ran straight for fifteen to fifty miles. Each and every one of the plateaus was shrouded in a gelatinous fog. Work the switchbacks, crawl through the fog. Garry was right: the fog was ignorant.

On the plateaus, some of the rivers held water, but the bridges were rickety, patently unsafe, and most of the big trucks turned off the road and followed the riverbed for as much as a mile, looking for a shallow crossing. At some places, I got out and waded the river, just to be sure. When I got back, one of the big semis would be waiting behind me, and the driver would follow me through. Other times, I would sit behind a semi, and when the driver came back from the river, his pants wet to mid-calf, I’d follow him through.

Often we passed a few words together, these drivers and I. The words were obscene and concerned the fog. Sometimes, rounding a corner over a fifteen-hundred-foot drop-off, the lane would narrow against a cliff face. In those places, our truck and a big semi couldn’t pass. I’d stop, and the trucks would stop as well. I couldn’t actually see the big trucks, only the yellow foglights shining in my eyes like a nightmare predator. One of us had to back away, let the other through, and there was no macho posturing. These narrow turns were matters of life and death. Whoever had the easiest backup took it. Often the drivers flashed me a V-for-victory sign. It occurred to me that there were very good drivers doing a very hard job. I came to respect them.

There were occasional towns, mud huts lining the narrow Pan-American Highway. We were looking at monuments to poverty so grotesque I imagined people literally starved to death in these towns. Outside one of them, I rounded the first bend of an “S” curve and saw something that squeezed at my chest like a vise. On the cliff wall ahead, written neatly in white paint where every driver had to see it, was large angry graffiti that read,
WE ARE NOT ANIMALS
.

It is sometimes easy to let calluses form when confronted by starve-to-death poverty, to become callous. In these towns, there would be the odor of sewage and sickness. Men moved slowly, and projects were started and abandoned.

Well-fed foreigners sometimes think of these people as sluggish, lazy, dull-witted, little more than animals. The truth is, they had been hungry all their lives. It was the constant ache of malnutrition that set such a sticky, hopeless, slow-motion pace in these poor towns along the coastal desert.

T
HERE WASN
’
T MUCH
in the way of a sunrise. The land was covered over in grainy sand, the cliff faces and hills were the same color, the fog itself was sandy brown, and when we passed the ocean, it rolled up onto a dirty beach in gray sand-colored waves.

Garry was up, going through his usual case of post-sunrise blahs. Along the beach, a wind off of the Pacific had piled a series of dirty gray dunes across the highway. A man dressed in rags and two small children in the filthiest clothes imaginable shoveled at the sand, clearing a lane for traffic.

It was the custom to stop, to give them a few pennies for their work. It was also clear that they only worked when they heard the distant sound of cars or trucks. They apparently lived in a nearby hut on the beach that was built of irregular pieces of driftwood, wired and tied into the semblance of a dwelling.

Garry thought the man and his children looked “stunned,” a word he reserved for that slow-moving hopelessness you see in the faces of the very poor.

“Stop,” he said.

Garry got out of the truck and opened up the camper shell. He took out several boxes of the freeze-dried food we weren’t eating and tried to give them to the man. The ragman backed away, afraid of some kind of a trick. I stepped out and tried to explain that this was food, that all you needed to do to eat it was add hot water. The man stared at me.
He didn’t know what to make of all the foil packages we were trying to give him, and needed to puzzle it out. He looked, for a moment, like a man trying to add up a lot of long numbers in his mind.

Garry had given the children milk shakes, and they were drinking them with pleasure, smiling brightly for the first time, so that I felt, through my fatigue, as if I might begin to cry.

I
DROVE
while Garry drank the concoction of one part instant Nescafe to one part water that we still called coffee.

“How,” I wondered aloud, “do we get so filthy driving? I mean, we both had showers in Chile, and now we look like hell. I think we scared that guy back there.”

“Couple of gringos get out of the truck looking like they just walked fifteen hundred miles through the jungle and start throwing foil packages at him. We look bad.”

If you’ve lived for several days on three substances—jerky, milk shakes, and coffee—it becomes evident that coffee, as we made it, is an extraordinarily strong drug. Garry was brightening up by the minute.

“When I was nine years old,” he said, “a guy came to Moncton in a fifty-nine Mercury station wagon. It had a black bubble on the top where the guy could stand up and do exercises. Turned out the guy hadn’t been out of the vehicle in two years. Or maybe it was five years. There was some sort of a bet that if he could stay in there for some impossible amount of time, he’d get a hundred thousand dollars.”

“This was a vision that warped your life,” I said.

“It made a big impression on me. He was locked in his car forever, like us on this trip.”

“The fog,” I said, “was bad last night.”

Garry did a quick calculation: “We made three hundred sixty miles in twelve hours.”

“Was it that hard because of the road and the fog, or is it us?”

“Couldn’t be us,” Garry said. “What day is this?”

“Friday.”

“No. Thursday.”

“Wait.” I needed to figure it out on my fingers. “Tuesday we left Ushuaia after three hours of sleep. Next night we got five hours in Chile …”

Garry began counting himself.

We concluded that it was the fifth day of the drive and that it was Saturday.

“The days and nights run together,” I said.

“What I like,” Garry said, “is when I put my sunglasses on the dash at sunset, then—and it doesn’t seem that much time has gone by—the sun rises and I take those glasses off the dash and put them back on.”

“H. G. Wells,” I said.

“What?”

“In
The Time Machine
, the guy goes into the future so fast that the days and nights seem like the flapping of a great wing. That’s what it’s beginning to feel like to me, night and day, the flapping of a great wing.”

Garry took over the driving and I decided to stay up for a while. We both felt giddy and talkative. The coffee I made was a great pile of instant, barely wetted down enough to dissolve.

I told Garry about the graffiti I had seen the night before: we are not animals.

“We,” said Garry, referring to the two of us, “are not men.”

I thought briefly of Al Buchanan outside the House of Pork in Santiago, and the wino that he had pointed out to illustrate the meaning of the day of the
rotos
.

“We are not men,” I said, “we are roto.”

“We’re filth,” Garry said.

“We’re dirt,” I shouted, “we’re slime. WE ARE ROTO!”

“And we have to pick up Joe Skorupa in Lima. Like this.”

“Garry,” I said, “Joe wrote me a nice letter before I left. Said he was looking forward to this, and that he thought it would be the adventure of a lifetime.”

“Poor son of a bitch.”

“Sit all cramped up in the cab of the truck. We haven’t got anything to eat. We don’t even have a pot to cook in. We gave it away in Chile.”

“Wait,” Garry said. “Didn’t you buy some bread in Arica?”

“It’s in the back. It’s stale. Hard as a rock. Roto bread.”

“We’ll pick this guy up, shove him in the back with the sour-milkshake smell, and give him a hunk of stale bread. EAT IT! There’s water back there, too. The windows are caked with mud, he won’t be able to see out, but he’ll have bread and water. The adventure of a lifetime.”

We were laughing and giddy and exhausted and exhilarated all at the same time.

“WE SPENT,” Garry screamed, “THREE HUNDRED FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS TO BE LIKE THIS!”

I took the pad from the suckerboard and wrote in large letters:
WE ARE NOT MEN, WE ARE ROTO
.

Garry and I couldn’t stop saying the word.

“Roto coffee. You eat it with a spoon.”

We were like very young children who have discovered a moderately naughty word and feel compelled to say it every few minutes.

“Poop.”

“You’re the poop.”

“You’re a big poop.”

“You’re an even bigger poop.”

Garry and I were five years old, going on four. We were laughing so hard we might have been in a state of infant ecstasy.

“We are,” Garry said, “on a roto run.”

“In our roto wagon.”

He passed a line of three lumbering trucks. “Roto one, roto two, roto three …”

“Roto-ed ’em.”

“Roto-ed ’em good.”

We were laughing and shouting and not making any sense at all. I realized, at that moment, that Garry and I fully understood each other. We could handle anything the Pan-American Highway had to throw at us. We were roto and men who descend into rotohood at the same time in the same place, only inches away from each other, are forever brothers.

Roto.

Garry horsed the big truck through central Lima and parked outside the Hotel Gran Bolívar at 5:00
P.M
. on the dot, precisely as we had promised. Joe Skorupa was not there.

G
ARRY GUARDED THE TRUCK
while I ran into one of Peru’s most venerable hotels—
in my condition
—and inquired, hysterically, after the whereabouts of a guest named Joe Skorupa. He was registered, I was told, but was now out having a late lunch with …

Late lunch?

The desk clerk found the concierge for me, and together we sat at the man’s desk and made phone calls to restaurants inquiring after Mr. Skorupa. Lima is a town of five million souls: how many restaurants could there be? Skorupa was supposed to be packed and ready to go at five.

The concierge, an elderly gentleman with a dignified air, was dialing frantically, caught up in a quick burst of contagious Zippy’s, when he looked at his own watch and informed me that it was not yet five. It was, in fact, four in the afternoon.

It can’t be, I told the man. Here, look at my watch. 5:00. On the nose. See? See! I couldn’t be an hour fast because I had set the watch in southern Argentina and …

Oh.…

I had neglected to consider the fact that Lima is one time zone west of Ushuaia.

We were an hour early.

Garry walked into the carpeted lobby and stood under the chandelier, looking for me. Well-dressed guests glanced at him, surreptitiously, and adjusted their paths so they didn’t have to walk near this
apparition. His eyes, in a civilized setting, were frightening: they seemed to be sunk deeply into his skull and surrounded by bruiselike circles, which set off the blue of his irises so that he appeared to be staring in a kind of fixed madness. His movements were jerky.

Skorupa, he said, had arrived. He was outside with the truck. Garry looked at me strangely. I wondered if I looked as bad to him as he looked to me.

Joe Skorupa, a handsome young man sporting a dark mustache, wore neatly pressed slacks and a clean polo shirt. He was staring into the cab of the truck where there were mounds of jerky wrappers and milk shake cartons and a note on the suckerboard that read,
WE ARE NOT MEN, WE ARE ROTO
.

The last time he had seen the truck, in Moncton, it was shiny clean, with logos all over. Now it was caked in filth. The last time Garry and I had seen Joe, we were men, not roto. Joe looked a little shocked about the situation. Were filth and insanity part of the adventure of a lifetime?

Worse, Garry and I were jabbering at each other in our own mad language: what the hell, Skorupa must have wondered, did it mean to go with the Zippy’s, forget Zorro, and just roto the damn gasoline bandits. Was
Popular Mechanics
paying him nearly enough to deal with this situation?

Joe, who is nothing if not a reporter, made a perceptive observation.

“You guys,” he said, “look like shit.”

He regarded us with a combination of shock and pity.

Enrique Viale, the director of a Lima auto-service center and Stanadyne representative in Peru, was standing with Joe. He concurred with the reporter’s thoughts. It was a long haul to Ecuador and by the time we got there, the border would be closed anyway. We’d have to sleep somewhere. It seemed to him that we needed sleep here and now. Viale had a garage with a security guard where we could safely park the truck.

Garry considered the idea. The wiring on our console was shorting out anyway. On the last run into Lima, the pump that fed diesel from the big auxiliary tank into the factory tank had shorted out. Garry had crawled into the back, crushing milk shakes on the way, and filled the factory tank through some combination of skill and magic that required the use of a jumper cable. Maybe we could get the short fixed at Viale’s garage.

Garry and I excused ourselves and talked.

“Tim,” he said, “maybe they’re right. When I saw you in that hotel lobby, it was strange. People looked like they were afraid of you.”

“You mean, I looked bad.”

“As compared to normal people.”

“The normal people,” I pointed out, “avoided you, too.”

“I’m afraid,” Garry said, “that we look like dangerous crazies.”