Road Fever

by Tim Cahill

  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.

  PSALM 91 VERSUS

  THE GASOLINE

  BANDITS

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  October 4–5, 1987

  GARRY 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.

&n
bsp; 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.”

  “Rotos.”

  And so we decided to sleep that night in Lima.

  WE GOT SEPARATE ROOMS and I took a shower, slept for three hours, and snapped wide awake. I was on that kind of schedule. Garry was at Viale’s garage, dealing with the short in the console. He also needed to telex Jane: where’s the letter of recommendation from the tourism ministry in Honduras? Would we have an escort through customs at the southern Nicaraguan border? Or had our trip to Managua earned us a pocketful of empty promises?

  It was just after dark and I strolled around the Plaza San Martin, outside the hotel, where Garry had met Graham Maddocks and learned the dirt-on-the-shoulder pickpocket trick. I bought a paper at a news kiosk and walked off through the teeming crowd. When I felt the tap on my shoulder, from behind, I was slow and didn’t clap my hand on my wallet or grab behind for the pickpocket’s wrists.

  Which was good, because it was the handsome young woman who had sold me my newspapers. She had left her kiosk unguarded and chased me half a block. I had forgotten my change. It amounted to about four cents.

  Another shower. We had dinner together—Enrique Viale, Joe, Garry, and I—and it was a real dinner in a real dining room with real food. Somehow it made me feel guilty.

  Another shower. The more news-oriented of the papers I had bought, El Comercio, reported that there had been over twenty-five armed assaults on interprovincial buses in northern Peru in the last thirty days. As we would be in northern Peru presently, the article was of uncommon interest. Last week, an Expresso Sudamericano bus had been stopped by nine machine-gun-toting assailants who had stripped all the passengers of their belongings, money, and jewelry. Two hours later another group of assailants got another bus.

  The other newspaper was a tabloid with a three-page picture spread about a woman boxer. In this age of equality, she dressed for the sport in Everlast trunks and gloves. Though I had a sense that the pictures weren’t the essence of accurate reporting or journalistic verisimilitude, I did admire one shot of the woman standing in mid-ring, her arms in the air, as in victory. She was bathed in something that looked like sweat and she had terrific breasts.

  EVERYONE WAS UP at five-thirty the next morning. We did not lock Joe Skorupa in the camper shell. He rode in the extended cab. The new freeway out of town took us past an area of abject slums and it seemed a cruel joke that these people’s misery was on such public display. On the hillside above, where affluent drivers could see it, there was a political poster, a full-face illustration of a thin-faced stern-looking man wearing glasses. The artist had evidently thought to make the politician appear to be a man of the future, willing to take harsh but necessary measures. Set as it was above a tangle of hard poverty, the billboard seemed badly placed. I thought: Big Brother is watching you.

  SOME MILES OUT OF LIMA, along the drear coastal desert, we dropped into a relatively fertile valley. There were orchards along a river, and the town was bustling with Sunday-morning activities. The houses were small, perhaps fifteen feet by fifteen feet, with dirt floors and low ceilings. They fronted the Pan-American Highway, and the sidewalks were only two or three feet wide. A man could step out of his house and be run over by a tourist from Des Moines.

  The streets were alive with strange bicycles: they had a single back wheel and a wooden basket on the front supported by two wheels. The bicycles could carry three people in the basket, or a load of firewood, or thatch.

  Bicycles were racing down the graveled side streets to a parade on the Pan-American. We passed a float—a jeep covered over in a white cloth—and there were dozens of little girls in clean white first-communion dresses riding and hanging on to the vehicle. They waved at us and to the townspeople who lined the street.

  In a less-affluent area of small mud houses, a beautiful dark-haired little girl of about seven was sitting in the basket of a bicycle and being pedaled frantically to the parade by a man I took to be her father. She wore a brilliant white dress, a kind of pointy witch’s cap covered over in rhinestones, and carried a wand with an aluminum-foil star on the end. She was holding tight to her hat and her eyes were wide with a kind of full-blown happiness you seldom see along the Pan-American Highway in Peru.

  * * *

  THE PAN-AMERICAN HIGHWAY is just not a viable way to see the best Peru has to offer. In Chimbote, the houses that lined the road were constructed of woven straw mats on poles. A port city, Chimbote smelled of rotten fish. It had a population of 185,000, and an earthquake in 1970 had terminally damaged its sewage system, so the place stunk of human waste and sickness.

  There was a rock tunnel outside Chimbote, and in the cool darkness Garry said, “Maybe when we come through, we’ll be back in Kansas and it will all be a horrible dream. We’ll wake up and realize that there is no place on earth where everything stinks and people die because nobody thought to fix the sewage system.”

  I sought to defend Peru. I had last visited in 1977, and had spent little time in Lima or on the Pan-American Highway. The road, I said, is a major artery, a way out, and it attracts poverty and hopelessness in the same way that the U.S. border with Mexico does.

  No, the Peru I loved was a couple of hundred miles inland, over one of the sixteen-thousand-foot passes through the Andes, and in the forested slopes above the Amazon jungle, the land the local people call “the eyebrow of the jungle.” It is humbling to walk the steep trails of the eyebrow. An elderly Peruvian woman, bent double under a load of firewood, can outwalk any gringo marathon runner.

  The mountains of the eyebrow rise to ten thousand feet, and in those high cloud forests can be found the remains of the Inca civilization, and, farther north, pre-Inca cultures, like the Chachapoyas. Most Peruvian archaeology is performed on the Pacific side of the Andes, in the desert, where logistics are not such a headache, where access is easier.

  When I brought back maps and schematic drawings of cities my friends and I found in the eyebrow, professional archaeologists dismissed them with a wave of the hand. These pre-Columbian cities included hundreds of circular stone houses, covered over in jungle. There were larger habitations, probably civic centers or fortifications, located nearby, on commanding ridges.

  But there are ruins everywhere in Peru, one distinguished archaeologist pointed out.

  Yes, of course, it’s part of the country’s charm, but had the professor ever visited these ruins in the eyebrow?

  No need to, nothing significant there.

  It seems suspicious to me that every single archaeological site in Peru that academics consider to be significant is located in the coastal desert or on the western slope of the Andes, accessible from the Pan-American Highway.

  And I suppose that if I were an academic archaeologist nearing retirement, I wouldn’t want to hear about discov
eries that could invalidate my scholarly papers, my theories, my years of teaching.

  So there are ancient stone cities, covered in cloud-forest vegetation, dreaming, undiscovered, on the peaks that drop down into the vastness of the Amazon.

  The eyebrow is a forbidding land, virtually roadless, relentlessly steep, and not particularly providential. Local Indians may never have seen a white man before, and they speak Quechua, not Spanish. It’s hard to get around.

  That has always been the case in the eyebrow. In 1541 Gonzalo Pizarro, half brother of Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of the Incas, set out to find cities of gold rumored to exist on the eastern slopes of the mountains. The expedition included two hundred Spaniards and four thousand Indians. The local Indians directed him to the groves of spice trees and the wealthy cities he sought: sure, you bet, Gonzalo, the city of gold is a mere ten days march over a dozen ten-thousand-foot-high ridges. There were no groves of spice trees or cities of gold, of course, but the Spaniards never came back to discuss the matter. Which, in essence, is what the Indians had in mind.

  One of Gonzalo’s lieutenants, Francisco de Orellana, left the expedition and pushed down one of the rivers in a search for provisions which didn’t exist. Rather than try to make it back up the steep forested slopes of the eyebrow, de Orellana chose to build a raft and float to the sea down the great river he named Amazon.

  Gonzalo and his men were forced to eat their horses and dogs. A year later, he stumbled back into Quito, with a handful of men. Over four thousand of his people had died.

  These days, the eyebrow may be a somewhat more dangerous place than when I visited it. Our walk from the nearest road had taken us several days over a well-trod trail. One day, from a slope far away, we heard whistles and shouts. Several hours later, we encountered a mule train headed out to the road. Twenty mules, each of them carrying 150 pounds of dull gray coca leaves, were being driven through the mountains by a group of ten men.

  The leaves were grown on slopes leading down to the Marañón River, one of the source tributaries of the Amazon. It was a perfectly legal procession. The coca leaf—not the cocaine that is made from it—is a legal stimulant in Peru, and there are some who insist that no work would ever get done east of the Andes if it was outlawed. The drug helps workers endure cold, hunger, and exhaustion. A chew of coca, in eastern Peru, is the Indian equivalent to a coffee break.