We Ate the Road Like Vultures

by Lynnette Lounsbury

  I thought of Adolf and knew he might be dead, that bruise on his belly spoke, even to my medical ignorance of internal injuries, and I doubted he was being seen by a doctor, but he was clearly not in good enough shape to be in this cell with me. Here was a man I barely knew and I was already devastated by his potential death, perhaps cos it was partly my fault, not a huge part, but somehow I knew it was me that had drawn a bank robbery upon us, not Adolf who would be more likely to win a foreign lottery and donate it to a rebel leader fighting for freedom against a corrupt government.

  The men were still watching me, whispering, though they stopped when a guard opened the cell door and pushed in a large tub of water and a bucket full of small ripped-up hunks of bread. I knew I shouldn’t touch the water but I dived for the bread as quickly as everyone else, kicking and clawing in a way I hadn’t imagined possible, until I felt a hunk in my hand and scrambled backwards, head down, to devour it in my corner. The tub of water sloshed all over the place in the melee, and a bloody fight erupted between two older men. Nobody came to stop it and no one in the cell bothered with more than curiosity as the men bit and tore at each other, screaming and cursing and finally moaning in pain. The larger man took a bite out of the smaller man’s eyebrow that left a gaping bloody wound, and the smaller man, blinded, curled immediately into a ball to protect himself from the rain of blows and kicks that followed. The larger man kept kicking the smaller man’s body and legs and back and head long after he was still. Only the sudden and putrid smell of shit let us know the moment he died and of course, cos I was in hell, nobody came to remove the body, it just lay there hour after hour in the middle of a crowded room that, despite being dark and made of thick concrete, was still hotter than most places on the planet, and whether or not the body started to decay, that sweltering pile of shit made our eyes run and, a few of the weaker of us, heave.

  To make my life even less bearable the whore, the toothless, matted black-haired whore, found herself another customer and, while they did move to the corner of the room and the room was very crowded, I could still hear, and, unfortunately, see, as she leaned against the wall, hitched up her skirt to reveal her skinny bruised buttocks and let him pound into her for the longest ten minutes of my incarcerated life. It was a car crash, I truly didn’t want to look but it was very hard not to, her head down and hair covering her face, his buttocks over the top of his sack pants clenching and pounding, his dirty hands gripping her hips and his breath puffing and panting in time with his lust. I had never seen anyone have sex outside a television screen and it was the most raw, sad thing I had witnessed, far less dignified than the man who was kicked to death on the floor and lay dissolving in his own acid shit. I watched a porn movie once and found it so terrifyingly sad that I cried, those girls with their wide-open, made-up faces begging for it with their mouths, begging for a quick death with their eyes. It turned me off sex for weeks. Well, maybe days, I am still a teenager, I think about sex most of the time though my bubble of lust and romance was being rapidly burst by the couple in the corner. He moaned suddenly and clutched her to him, rising like a cobra and collapsing onto her back so she had to hold tighter to the wall to keep herself from hitting the floor. He pulled himself out quickly, slapped her buttocks and handed her a piece of bread from his filthy pants’ pocket. Without letting the long hair reveal her face, she grabbed the piece of bread with one hand and smoothed down her skirt with the other, retreating to another piece of bare wall and sinking down to my level. I saw her eyes for a moment and she was angry. Angrier than most of the world knows about. I put my head down and let it rest on my knees, thoughts banging the sides of my skull. To fuck for bread she must have been in there for weeks and, since nobody knew where I was, I might be doing it myself in a few days. I felt nauseous for a whole variety of reasons and my stomach and bowels were starting to clench in that Mexican way. I knew if it got worse it would not be fear but some sort of gastric torment that would see me back over the toilet hole in a hell of a lot more distress than the piss had cost me. I tried to get a grip of myself, but when one of the younger men came over and squatted in front of me asking questions in Spanish, and touching my damp twisted hair with his hands, I panicked. I reached out and slapped his arm away. His friends laughed and whistled and he pushed me off my balance against the wall, one hand holding my shoulder down, the other grabbing my breast. I responded with the most violence I could manage, which was to vomit powerfully in his face and chest. He let go immediately, kicked me hard in the thigh and went back to his howling friends trying to brush off his clothes. The smell was hideous and I covered my face with my hands to try and get away from it before I threw up again. The smell of the dead body was still much worse, so I wasn’t vilified as much as despised, but I sat still and silent for so long I couldn’t tell if I slept or not. Finally the cell door opened and more water and a tub of beans was pushed through. The inmates ate it with their hands, protecting their places with slapping so nobody noticed when the guard grabbed my upper arm and heaved me out the door. I shook him off and walked, as best I could, in front of him while he sniggered and poked his finger into my back every few seconds. We reached a door and I waited for him to open it, which he didn’t, and we stood there for an interminable amount of time, his finger maintaining an unreasonable amount of pressure on my lower back and my mind wandering around all the dreadful and fantastical options of what could be behind the door. My sojourn in the Mexican penal system so far suggested it would be nothing of any solace or comfort.

  The door swung door swung open and I was pushed into a small and bare office with a hanging light bulb that glazed the room in brilliant yellow and the captain from our arrest was sitting lazily back in a blue plastic chair, one foot resting on the other knee and bouncing slightly in a dangerously ready rhythm. I walked fully into the room, prepared for the worst, to discover he was not alone. There was another chair in the corner, another dangerously taut body, another contender for my soul. Carousel.

  I sagged with relief, knowing that no matter his wrath at my hunting him down like a snow leopard, he wouldn’t wish me dead or raped or even to sit any longer in a room full of death and shit. I met his eyes for as long as I dared and knew my only role was to keep silent, something I am not good at or particularly fond of but which, I have discovered, when confronted with a lack of basic human rights, is everyone’s best option. I had learned in the last hours that the way to survive the horrors of life was not, as my movie-going, book-reading career has taught me, to smart talk and bravado my way through. It was dumb luck, sure, but it was silence more than anything, acquiescence, humility and, taking-it-smilingly-up-the-arse, that saved people from holocausts and tyrannical regimes and Third World jail cells.

  The captain smiled and spoke with his teeth tight and his accent smooth, a cigarette burning in his mouth the entire time and moving only slightly. ‘There are many, many things you are learning, Lulu, aren’t there?’ He waited and nodded with a type of approval at my downturned face. ‘Yes. Learning that there are different ways of doing things. You were stupid. You did not shoot a bank worker or steal thousands of dollars. You did not fire on the police. But you were there. And that is stupid. Many of the most stupid people in the world were just…there. Isn’t that right, Mr Carousel?’

  I raised my eyes a little at the name, though Carousel said nothing, his face stone.

  ‘Your first time in Mexico and you are put in jail. For aiding a robbery. A crime in which several people died.’

  At that I jerked up my head and he smiled at me. ‘Mr Ruezinger?’

  He watched me slowly, his eyes grazing up and down my torn and bloodied clothes, the shit and piss on my shoes. He settled back into his chair and stared sideways at me, a long lean look that smelled and touched and tasted me.

  ‘You think you are more than just a tiny part of a very big engine, don’t you, Lulu? You think it because you are twelve and you think it because you are white. You think that as you wander
around the planet everything else simply wafts in and out of your life, everything is here just for you. You don’t consider that you are the very small toe on a large body, and you don’t think that for a small toe you are an arrogant presumptive and stupidly dangerous one who would be better locked away so the body can keep living.’

  It was soft but I said it, I couldn’t help it. ‘That’s a bit harsh. I just got a ride on a truck. That’s all. I didn’t…’

  ‘Do not speak.’ He was quieter than me when he said it but he looked at me with such a strength that even my pride was silenced.

  ‘You have wreaked havoc across the globe. There’s a price on your head girl, almost $200,000 for information about your disappearance, you have thrown yourself uninvited into Mr Carousel’s life…and, yes, I fucking know who he is. I have read more books in my life than you will ever open. Mexico is hot and poor—not stupid. You have walked into a world he has paid well for, a privacy I have always helped him keep and because your face is on every television screen and every police bulletin across the world, you have put that world at risk. I could use $178,000 myself. My town could use it. Perhaps you owe some of that to the bank?’

  My face twitched involuntarily when he said the amount and I felt wry amusement. My fucking parents. I shook my head and smirked.

  ‘You think this is a funny story do you, Lulu?’

  I almost spoke but caught myself and waited till he waved me permission.

  ‘My parents put up the money, didn’t they? They aren’t worried about me. They aren’t even searching for me. They’re just pissed that I left and want to get back at me.’

  He seemed unimpressed and shrugged.

  ‘The money. It’s my money. It’s the exact amount of money in my investment account. From my cattle. They think I’ll come home if my money is at risk. Bastards.’

  Carousel smiled and the captain frowned and looked at me through reptile eyes. ‘You have that much money? How is it they can give it away if it is your money?’

  ‘I breed cattle. And when you are twelve you have to have a parent’s signature to invest money.’ I looked at him smugly for a moment, remembered who I was speaking to, and put my head back down. A thick knot of hair hung in my eyeline with a burr that tangled up and around most of the right half of my head, and I had a strange feeling that I would never brush my long hair again. My hair hadn’t been cut in five years and was the only part of my appearance that I spent any time on at all, by that I mean I washed it and conditioned it and brushed it every day, something that took about thirty minutes of my time and used up everything I could emotionally allocate to my body without being disgusted with myself. I knew my hair was fucked.

  ‘Perhaps you deserve to lose your money.’ He smiled at me again, that horrible tiny slit.

  ‘I’ll make more.’

  ‘Whoring yourself in my jail?’ Same smile.

  ‘Somehow.’

  Carousel coughed, either a signal to me to shut the hell up or remind the captain of some previous conversation, cos he watched me only a moment longer then sat up.

  ‘You are too much of a bother for me, Lulu —I don’t need you in my jail to be found one day by the American press. And Carousel has offered me his own bounty on your head, which happens to be more generous that your little trust fund anyway. So you are free to get the fuck out of my jail, town and country in the next two days, or I will shoot you in the back of the head and throw you to the coyotes.’ He stood up and left the room. I turned immediately to Carousel.

  ‘Adolf?’

  ‘Local doctor took him in, they may have to fly him to Tijuana yet. Internal injuries, mostly unconscious. Let’s get out of here before the captain changes his mind and shoots both of us.’

  ‘You gave him that much money?’

  He smiled broadly. ‘I pay him almost that every year to keep my home ‘safe’. He’s Mexican. The rest of the world doesn’t intimidate him, it barely interests him. He’s the biggest shot in this part of the world and now he’s one of the richest. He can afford his desert philosophy and angst. He probably pocketed most of that bank heist as well.’

  Carousel led me by the arm through several identical corridors until we reached a final iron door and stepped out into the heat and dust and eye-roasting freedom. A beat-up yellow cab waited for us.

  ‘Only cab in a thousand miles. He charges like a motherfucker.’ Carousel opened the door for me, slid in beside me and promptly fell asleep against the window, sun filling his wrinkles with gold and turning his hair into a wispy halo. I leaned against his shoulder and fell asleep myself, happy to be shit-covered, bruised, virginal and free.

  6

  There ain’t no road trip without a car that loves the road.

  I DIDN’T WAKE UP FOR LONGER THAN IT TOOK to stumble into the hacienda, swallow whatever pills a concerned Chicco thrust into my hands, and fall onto my filthy face into the huge bed. A second before I slept I noticed that someone had made it up with fresh sheets and I felt a moment of self-condemnation that I had ground such a variety of human effluence into their crispness. Then I slept. And slept for what must have been days of my life cos when I woke it was exactly the same time of day that I had fallen asleep, the bright holy glare of mid-morning—and yet, when I looked in the gilt-edged mirror that hung by the door, I was thirty years old, dirt in my sun wrinkles making them seem deeper than the shit I had just managed to crawl out of.

  I wobbled to the bathroom, making myself queasy with my own stench, and ran into Chicco on the way. He swore at me good-naturedly and gripped my shoulder with his gnarled hand. ‘Fuck me. You smell like the arse end of the devil.’ He held it a long while and smiled a mysterious smile, concern on his forehead, then he let go and walked past me, hobbling down the dimly lit hallway.

  I filled up the tub in the corner and poured in some bottled miracle for rheumatic joints that I discovered in the pharmaceutical cabinet, and sank into the water. I lay down until water flooded my ears, and thought. It was one of those times when I was so struck by the feeling of my own pointlessness that I felt nauseous. I’m sure it happens to everyone, but I’ve noticed it the most when I am doing nothing, when exciting and dangerous and important goings-on are finished and the next business hasn’t started yet. I am still. I feel small and plastic. Perhaps the magnitude of the importance of the day before in my life’s timeline of events was such a peak that the moment in the bath was a great trough. Either way, I felt sick with my smallness, lumps of it sticking in my throat. I couldn’t think of a really good plan from here. I had never thought much past finding Jack, imagining that everything would fall into place once I had discovered something important. I wondered if great discoverers had felt this—‘Oh, look, that land mass on the horizon—I’ll call that America. Now what?’ ‘Dear Diary, have split the atom, feel small, sad and useless.’

  Not knowing things drove me mad, like itchy mad, until I would get up in the middle of the night and search for answers on the internet so I could finally sleep. It’s why my father got internet way out on our property in the first place. To stop me riding the quad bike into town and using the kiosk that sat in an over-lit corner of the service station, the only place within twenty kilometres that was open all night. I had wondered for two years if Jack Kerouac was still writing, I read everything of his I could get my hands on, researched his life, read reviews and essays and biographies and, when I still couldn’t sleep, hiked clear to Mexico looking for him. Now I knew. And now I knew nothing.

  I sank my head under the water and held my breath as long as I could. I thought about the last bus I had caught before the Mexican border and how I had sat with so many people with nothing interesting to say. I talked a bit to everyone who sat by me. I like to talk and I like to listen to stories even more, and there were so few people with anything to tell, which felt disappointing. I had imagined everyone on the road could tell a story. Some only spoke Spanish, so their stories were lost to me, and some didn’t want to talk, but most
were going somewhere to see a relative or take a holiday and had no more to say than that. They wanted some cheap drugs, cosmetics and warm weather.

  About ten hours into my trip I was sitting by myself when a woman got onto the bus, a bus mainly occupied by sweaty Mexican men, so I was her obvious choice and she took it bringing an expensive and spanking new backpack with her which seemed out of place next to her blue lounge suit. It was a bright sky-coloured soft suit in what looked like fine wool and felt like cashmere when she sat next to me. Too warm for the weather, but very beautiful. She had dark glasses on but when she took them off I could see she was about the same age as my mother, my stepmother anyway, about her mid-forties, but instead of looking young, like most American women her age, she seemed tired and worn with no makeup, no hair dye, nothing to make herself attractive except the blue suit.

  I said ‘Hello’ and she nodded but didn’t talk for a long time, hugging the backpack to her chest and staring past me out the window, so I asked her if she wanted the window and she quickly shook her head. ‘Oh, no. Sorry, I was just looking at the scenery.’ The scenery was nothing but dirt and swirls of dead leaves and dust and rabbit bones. But the scenery in her backpack was more riveting cos when she opened her bag to get a bottle of water I saw dozens of rolls of cash in there, a couple of apples, water and more cash. I pulled the top shut. Now I’m a cash traveller myself, but never that much and I know better than to open a bag full of dirty money on a Greyhound bus.

  She turned to me quickly.

  ‘You need to keep that shut. You really do. I’m not the most streetwise person on the planet but that’s asking for trouble,’ I whispered to her.