Road Fever (33 page)

“Why do you want to do this?” they asked, and “Do you think of yourself as a romantic adventurer?”

I told them the drive had been a dream of ours for some time. We were now making that dream come true, and maybe when people saw us, they would think of their own dreams, and they would work to make those dreams come true.

At the service bay, mechanics were changing the oil and the fuel filter. One of the mechanics, a man with a reputation as a crackerjack electrician, was working on the short in the console. He would attempt to rewire the windshield wipers back into their original circuit. Garry was watching the electrician work. Together, they pulled the console off and saw a tangled bird’s nest of multicolored wires running every which way to every device that we had added to the truck. Why someone thought a nonessential system, like an auxiliary fuel pump, should be wired into the same circuit as an essential system, like windshield wipers, has never been satisfactorily explained.

I was telling the press that our trip was an expression of Pan-American unity and friendship.

“It’s the dog’s goddamn breakfast in here,” I heard Garry scream. He and the mechanic were tearing at the wiring.

Our South American friends were helping make our dreams come true, I told the press. Ecuador was the most beautiful place we had seen, and our friends here were the most helpful. The Pan-American Highway was a ribbon of friendship connecting all of the Americas …

“Someone dies when we get back!” Garry shouted. He had a handful of wires and did, indeed, look homicidal.

*   *   *

W
E STORED THE TRUCK
at the garage, slept a few hours, and drove out of Quito before dawn. It was a beautiful, gracious city but Indian people in threadbare clothes slept on the wide boulevards under the glowing streetlights.

Our windshield wipers were working. People were living on the street in poverty, but by God, we had windshield wipers that worked. That thought tugged at my conciousness, but I refused to entertain it. I wanted to feel good and felt bad about feeling that.

J
OE
S
KORUPA
, who lives at sea level, had a fierce headache generated by the altitude. We were driving through an area of fertile farms. Indian women in colorful ponchos, lime-green slacks, and porkpie hats were already out hoeing in the potato fields. The houses were whitewashed adobe affairs with red-tile roofs and flowers in the front yard.

As we rounded a sharp corner, Garry had to brake for a cow that was standing in the middle of the road. We drove around the beast and it regarded us with bovine indifference.

“That’d be pretty hard to explain,” I said, “hitting a cow.”

“You couldn’t exactly say that it
darted
out in front of you,” Garry agreed.

And we started in on that idea, letting it get silly and stupid and all roto around the edges.

“Cows don’t dart.”

“It’s one thing you can say about cows all right. They’re piss poor in the darting department.”

“Don’t dart worth shit.”

This imbecilic conversation, punctuated by idiotic guffaws, continued for at least fifteen minutes until we heard Joe, in the back, moan loudly. It was a piteous sound meant to be heard over the roar of diesel engine and it meant, Guys, for the love of God, please.

Garry and I were struck silent. We had been inconsiderate. Still, we hadn’t really finished laughing about those darting cows and occasionally the bottled-up emotion came snorting up out of our noses. We were like children in church who can’t stop laughing.

“Shhh,” I said, “Joe has a hiddach.”

Garry fell into a phoney coughing fit, but Joe saw through him. “We get back to sea level,” he said, “and you guys are dead meat.”

B
Y THE TIME WE CROSSED
the equator, Joe was feeling better. Garry and I were elated.

“We’re in the Northern Hemisphere,” I shouted. “Nothing can go wrong now.”

“Don’t say that,” Garry pleaded.

Stamp this document, then that one. Stamp. Stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp. Uh, señor, this says that your truck is from 1988.

Yes, brand-new.

How can that be? This is 1987.

Well, it’s what we call a model year.…

Did you go into the future and bring this truck back? Ha, I made a joke.

And a very good one. But no, you see, in the United States …

There is a mistake on your carnet, no?

A mistake?

It says 1988 but it is 1987.

Oh, right. Very good you caught that: a stupid mistake. This is clearly a 1987 truck.

Just as I thought. Very good.

Stamp. Stamp, stamp, stamp.

Across the border into Colombia. Stamp, stamp, stamp. Occupation? Mother’s maiden name. Marital status? Stamp. Stamp, stamp, stamp. Carnet? Rip, stamp, stamp. Stamp, stamp, stamp.…

A mere four hours of this and we were in Colombia where we were met by two men from GM Colombia, called Col Motors or Colmotores. Santiago Camacho wore a blue jacket, jeans, loafers, and wore his black hair moderately long. He had the quick smile of a ladies’ man and walked with a confident swagger.

The other man, Luis Nieto, stood by the truck while we spoke with Santiago. He had close-cropped dark hair, a nose that had been broken at least once, and he carried a small black suitcase in one hand. People passing by would look at the truck, as they always did, everywhere, and Luis would look at the people and then they wouldn’t look at the truck anymore.

Santiago said we were to follow him to the port of Cartagena and that the drive would cost us two days.

“Two days,” I said, amazed. It didn’t look that far on the map.

Well, we would stop at night between about midnight and five in the morning, Santiago explained.

“Because it’s dangerous to drive at night?” I asked.

“Not at all,” Santiago said.

*   *   *

B
UT OF COURSE
it is dangerous to drive at night in Colombia. A travel advisory from the U.S. State Department in my clip files read, “Because of sporadic guerrilla activity, travel in certain areas may be hazardous. Before venturing into rural areas, check with the nearest U.S. Consulate.…”

The clip file was bulging with newspaper articles which indicated that Colombia was either a vigorous country of extremely high-spirited adventurers or a nation on the verge of anarchy. “Ranchers and peasants in rural Colombia are arming themselves with more and better weapons to resist attacks from leftist guerrillas,”
The Miami Herald
said. The guerrillas kidnap ranchers, engage in extortion, and harass rural business people. The ranchers were buying Uzi submachine guns. A government official thought this sort of thing could escalate the spiral of violence.

Which seemed to be true: members of the Patriotic Union—a political party representing the leftists and born out of a 1984 guerrilla-government effort to reintegrate armed rebels into civic life—were being assassinated at an alarming rate. In the last two years, 375 members of the party had been shot to death by unidentified gunmen.

There were three groups of rebels: ELP, M-19, and FARC M-19 had, for a time, been at war with the Medellín drug cartel, but the drug lords had taken to disemboweling the leftists and hanging the corpses in trees outside the homes of the victims’ families. There was an uneasy truce at present.

FARC, previously on good terms with the cartel, was now engaged in a miniwar with drug traffickers for control of plantations in the eastern jungles.

The previous week, one clipping read, a rebel land mine killed three government soldiers and wounded eleven others. Meanwhile, rival gangs of emerald traffickers killed twenty-three people and injured twenty-four during a war for control of the precious stones.

And last year eleven thousand Colombians were murdered, making homicide the country’s leading cause of death among males aged fifteen to forty-four.

In the area of the country we were presently driving, a lot of trucks were being hijacked. It was easy to see why.

The road was a good two-lane blacktop with ample shoulders, but the pitches were steep through mountains rising to seven thousand feet. Along the sheer hillsides, there were scars where the mud and rock had simply given up to gravity and fallen away from the land. The roads writhed painfully through this wounded land. The turns were
sharp and continuous. Our tires screamed through them: Garry was pushing hard and we were doing no more than thirty miles an hour.

Santiago and Luis were out ahead in another Chevy that looked like a Monza but was called a Classic. It was red and had an automatic transmission. Santiago was driving, pushing the gutsy little gasoline engine hard, and when he passed a truck, he’d hold beside it for a while and then we’d see his arm shoot out the window and make a graceful circle: come ahead, come now.

If there was a car coming, he’d make a motion like patting a dog on the head: stay back.

“The guy,” Garry said, “is a great driver.”

Sometimes Santiago would circle us forward, then quickly pat the dog on the head: come ahead, ahh, sorry, not now boys, we got certain death up here.

The trucks, even the best of them, were moving ponderously on this serpentine roller coaster of a road. We followed one semi down a pretty perpendicular hill and he was going so slowly that our speedometer didn’t even register. The driver, certainly in his lowest gear, was tapping his brakes every thirty seconds, holding them for perhaps five seconds and then letting go. The truck was probably overloaded—I imagined the driver was carrying at least twenty tons—and if the vehicle got away from him on a grade this steep, he would go screaming to the bottom of the hill and be horribly crushed by his own cargo. The grind of the brake pad against the wheel echoed off the scarred hillsides. It sounded like the moaning of a large wounded animal.

The truck, I couldn’t help but notice, was going no faster than a man could walk. An ambush could be a one-man affair: jump up on the running board with a gun and discuss the matter with a man who couldn’t take his eyes off the road or his hands off the wheel.

J
UST AFTER SUNSET
, we came screaming around a corner that led into yet another blind curve, but in the middle of this one there was a disabled truck carrying a load of logs. There were no lights or flares, and we didn’t see it in the dark. Santiago slammed on his brakes and the little Chevy stopped about two feet from a projecting log.

Both Joe Skorupa and I knew that, on a steep downhill grade, our four- or five-ton vehicle was never going to be able to stop. We were going to smash into the back of the Chevy, drive it into the logs, and kill Santiago and Luis. But Garry hit the brakes full on and he stopped with inches to spare.

Garry was delighted and talked with Joe about GMC antilock
brakes and real-world capabilities and the wonders of this Sierra, which wasn’t just a truck anymore. It gave me a hiddach.

We passed through too many military checkpoints to count. In the darkness, we’d switch on the dome lights so the soldiers could see us. Coast up to the guns with our hands where everyone could see them. Sometimes the soldiers simply waved us through. Sometimes they spoke with us for less than a minute. Sometimes they pulled us over.

“God, I hope they don’t have a pit,” Garry said, “anything but the pit.”

When we were stopped, Santiago and Luis came back and talked to the soldiers. Luis showed them some sort of identification that seemed to impress them.

The road took us through a few towns and the streets were narrow, just wide enough for two trucks to pass. The sound of music boomed out of the open doorways of the crowded bars, and couples walked the streets, hand in hand. Everyone, it seemed, was socializing in the cool of the evening.

I saw a black woman with a rather astonishing figure standing in the doorway of a pool hall. There was a bright yellow light behind her, and I could see the shape of her legs through a thin bright-red skirt. A man standing beside her whispered in her ear, and she raised her fingertips to her lips to cover an involuntary smile.

I was contemplating this charming scene when a white Jeep carrying four municipal policemen in green military uniforms cut us off, forcing Garry to stop. I stood there with my hands in the air, smiling happily, while yet another teenager held an automatic rifle at my neck. I was getting awfully sick of this scene.

One of the officers searched the cab while Santiago and Luis talked with the man who seemed to be in charge. The guns came down after a tense few minutes and the officers began checking documents. They seemed especially impressed by a letter we had from the Colombian ambassador to Ecuador: “Please afford all possible cooperation to Garry Sowerby and Tim Cahill …”

“Good,” the officer said. “Go.”

He saluted us.

But it had been another Psalm-91 situation: a fast stop and lots of guns.

I pulled the map off the suckerboard.

“You know what the name of that town was?” I asked. I was probably shouting. Bad stops always made us loud and giddy. “Buga!”

“Buga?”

“BUGA!”

“Then,” Joe Skorupa suggested, “those guys were the Buga men.”

Joe, it seemed, was becoming slightly roto.

“They checked under the front seat again,” I said.

“They always look under the front seat,” Garry replied.

“They see those jerky wrappers.”

“Figure us for jerky junkies right off.”

Joe Skorupa, newly roto, thought that we could kick the habit. “Just go cold jerky,” he said.

He was taking brutal revenge for those darting cows.

W
E PULLED INTO THE TOWN
of Pereira about midnight and were promptly stopped by two motorcycle policemen who listened to our story and took us directly to our hotel. They rode little dirt bikes with small engines that sounded like the buzz of mosquitoes against the throaty roar of our big diesel. Last night a press conference, I thought, today a motorcycle escort.

We went to sleep at twelve-thirty and were back on the road in four hours. On the way out of town, we were stopped by two more teams of police on dirt bikes: the mosquito patrol.