We Ate the Road Like Vultures

by Lynnette Lounsbury

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ I was instantly embarrassed. ‘I got kind of carried away. I’ll cover it up. The paint covers it up.’

  ‘No. No, don’t do that. I like it. I do.’ She gave me her wan smile. ‘I like it. And I can have whatever I want.’

  I grinned at her, ‘Yeah, you can. I’m glad you found this place. It’s very cool. And you don’t seem so…you know…’

  She tilted her head and closed her eyes at me. ‘Mmm. I’m sure it will catch up with me some day. The truth always does. But he won’t and that’s enough for now. I spent the first week in this house huddled in the corner of my room waiting for him to come and find me. Thinking about how he woke up angry with me and found out I had taken his money and followed me down here.’ She gazed out into the fade of the afternoon. ‘But I realised he’s not really coming. It’s not like a book. Sometimes dead people are just dead.’ She walked back down the hall, speaking softly over her shoulder as she left, ‘I like the tree, thank you.’

  I wandered down to the water where the sun had already set but was still throwing a few armfuls of light back over the horizon. I didn’t have a swimsuit with me, I didn’t even have any spare clothes, so I just stripped to my underwear, my grimy pants and bra looked as tired as I felt, and I swam into the water.

  It was warm and wonderful, even the dam on our farm didn’t get that warm in the middle of summer. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of waves and I figured maybe we were behind some sort of spit or something, I couldn’t see anything but horizon and the water was calm enough to lie on my back and think on the blackening sky. Rita’s words floated next to me, bumping against my flesh. Sometimes the dead are just dead. Was I the complete nutter to be there? Was I Adolf? I had read a couple of books and a couple of magazines and thought it sounded like the same person. And now I was in Mexico accusing someone of faking their own death. Do people do that? Do they pretend to die to get out of something they can’t take anymore? To get away from people who want something of them. Had Jack? Had my mother? Or were they just dead and I was the problem. The deranged ghost hunter. I had been wrong before.

  So why were they with me? Chicco and Carousel. If they weren’t Jack and Neal, why didn’t they laugh me out? It hit me very hard in that moment that I didn’t know what I was doing. I was in Mexico and I might have made the whole thing up in my head. And no matter what Jack said, believing isn’t enough, not if you can’t live in your belief. Not if you have to look at it from the outside.

  I would have to do something soon. We would be in Tijuana in the next day or so, if we weren’t gaoled or shot, and if we got there I had to keep on going somewhere. It was time to go home. Chicco and Carousel would turn around and consider the adventure a heart-quickener, and Carousel might write a story about it and that would be it. I would be forgotten and they would stop mentioning the Adolf miracle after a while and get back to eating beans and sitting in their super-chairs and filling the house with smoke and old person funk. I didn’t want to go. Life had been interesting here, it wasn’t ordinary or stuck on some sort of repeat like it was at home, with my father pretending he liked the parts of me that were like my mother, or me pretending I didn’t think he had killed her.

  I didn’t like the pretend of it all but I didn’t have any right to complain about it either cos I wrapped myself in my own pretends all the time. I had one hundred different ways of pretending I wasn’t half in love with Carousel and two cups full in love with Adolf. I floated and floated and it got darker, and a crowded bar of stars jostled all over the place bumping into each other in a way they don’t in Australia. I popped my head up every now and then cos I didn’t want to float back down the coast to Mulege and have to drive the fucking road again, but it was calm and I didn’t go far at all.

  I let my head sink back under the water, the salt stung my eyes and filled my ears and the stars bled into each other and I had a moment where I thought maybe it would be nice to sink into the water and end my story where it was. It was a good point to end at. I was safe. I was with people I liked. I think they liked me. And I’m not that easy to like, mainly cos I’m just not interested in most people.

  I was under the water, longer than I should have been, long into burning my lungs and eyes and getting dizzy and having to fight my own self to stay under, but it felt somehow like I should stay there. I’m not suicidal or that keen to die but I didn’t know what to do next and it seemed like a good point to call it and fade kind of softly into the night.

  Of course it doesn’t work that way and my body beat my mind on this occasion and I gasped up into the stars and it was pitch dark without even a moon. Since there wasn’t anything else to be done I crawled out of the water and headed back up the beach towards the light of the house, which was not far away despite my hours of floating around. There were a few trees which wavered around in the wind and made it eerie, and the absolute dark had me tripping up the grass and roots along the edge of the sand. I made it back to the place I had first started swimming and searched around for my clothes. The light from the house was too far away to help and I ended up on my hands and knees feeling around for my jeans.

  Then I saw him. A figure standing a few metres away near the tree. I knew it was a man by his shape and I knew he was not one of mine. My stomach sank and turned, but I was determined not to have him chase me around the beach in my wet underwear.

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked with as much volume as I could muster but it still sounded low, weak and waterlogged.

  He said nothing, and didn’t move, and for a half-moment of relief I thought it might be a tree and I was just a fool, but then a tiny red flare appeared near his head as he inhaled on a cigarette and my relief desiccated.

  I didn’t know what to do so with one hand I kept feeling for my clothes while my other hand kept me steady in a squat, ready to sprint for the water. I figured I’d have a better chance of swimming away than running, I’d like to see anyone outswim an Aussie girl. Finally my hand reached my clothes and I inched closer, slipping my shirt over my head as quickly as I could and struggling silently as it bunched up on my wet and sandy skin. It would be almost impossible to get my jeans on without incapacitating myself for half a minute so I left them in the sand beside me.

  The cigarette glow flicked on and off with a long slow consistency and my fear grew, simply cos of my ignorance. It could be some local peeping Tom who was watching me swim with his amazing night vision, or it could be the fucking captain, and that was the conclusion my adrenal was coming to. Finally I gave in and stood, beginning an inching walk that skirted the figure but got me closer to the house and that was, of course, when he finally spoke.

  ‘Do not run.’

  It was him. I would have remembered his voice well into senility but now it would loiter in my nightmares as well.

  ‘You need to listen to me carefully or they will simply believe you were lost to the ocean.’

  There was not a scrap of disbelief in my mind and I stopped and faced him.

  ‘Answer my questions very quietly and quickly, and do not lie to me.’ He took another suck and the sweet strong tobacco hung between us. ‘The German. Is he insane?’

  It was not the question I had expected but it was a legitimate one, though surely it hadn’t brought him across the desert and through a car wreck to find us.

  ‘I don’t think so. But I’m not really sure. He has some interesting…uh, beliefs about stuff. About Jesus stuff.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Was the only response to my answer and the figure moved a step closer. The move brought with it a grunting sound that had me searching my memories for a reference, not a cough or clearing his throat, a kind of hack. ‘The men, where are you taking them?’

  ‘Me?’ I was surprised. ‘I’m not taking them anywhere. They are taking me to Tijuana, to go home. We were busting Adolf out to get medical treatment, but, well, he’s okay now.’

  ‘You are going home?’ It was his turn to sound surprised. ‘What arrang
ement have you made?’

  ‘What? I have a return ticket. I’ll just get a bus up to Los Angeles.’ I wasn’t sure what he was getting at.

  ‘With the men. Mr Carousel? What arrangement is in place? You will keep their secret?’ He sounded completely different all of a sudden, panicked, like he was scared of me. I didn’t want him to be scared of me, that would be a reliable way to find seawater washing through my bullet holes. He moved closer making that same weird sound as he did. I moved back and found myself a tree to lean against and grip uselessly. His thickly built shoulders hit the light and a smudge of it fell across him. He had a gun in his left hand but he was using it to hold his right arm against his chest. He was injured, that was the noise I kept hearing. Pain.

  I will admit to not caring in the slightest if he was hurt but I instinctively asked, ‘Are you okay?’

  He snorted my concern out to sea. ‘My arm is broken, the car. The stupid German.’

  ‘You were going to kill us.’

  ‘Perhaps I would kill you or the German, but I was protecting the men. They pay me to protect them and I wouldn’t let a girl force me to break my promise.’

  ‘Protect them? From what? Me?’ I was beginning to think the entire world was mad, all of it mad and mental and full of strange beliefs in stranger things.

  ‘You plan to expose them don’t you?’

  ‘Oh. That. No, I don’t, not anymore,’ I sighed as I realised I had brought all this trouble on everyone. ‘I don’t even think it’s really them anyway. I think we’ve both made a mistake.’

  He seemed to relax a little, if a man holding a gun and a shattered limb has the capacity for relaxation. ‘I can assure you they are real, I have done my inquiries, they are exactly who they claim to be and I have sworn to protect them from the United States Government as long as I can. For a price.’ He added the last part reluctantly, as though there was the smallest part of him that felt bad for taking hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to protect two old beatniks from what was really just the press, not the government. Unless it was the IRS, that might make sense.

  ‘Well, as you can see I want to give Mr Kerouac and Mr Cassady no trouble at all. I am going back to my home and they will go back to their homes and Adolf will do whatever he does and you can go back to protecting them.’ I was starting to relax a little myself and imagined, with all my foolishness, that this was as bizarre as the encounter could get.

  ‘Who is Mr Kerouac?’ He was suddenly on his guard again.

  I tensed. ‘Jack? The writer. Mr Carousel.’

  ‘Carousel is only his alias.’ He sounded confused and we finally had some common ground.

  ‘I know. His real name is Jack Kerouac. He is a writer.’

  ‘What? He is Harry Longabaugh. The Sundance Kid.’

  I was tranquilised. I could hardly make my mouth bend around the words. ‘As in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?’

  ‘Yes. The outlaws.’

  ‘Are you kidding me? That’s a fucking movie! It’s not real. Did they tell you that’s who they are?’ My voice rose and I hushed it, though I didn’t know why.

  ‘Not from the movie, you stupid girl,’ he snapped at me, his accent thickening as he became antagonised. ‘The real outlaws.’

  ‘Wasn’t that like hundreds of years ago? They couldn’t possibly be them. They’re dead.’ It had crossed my mind that I might have already met the strangest person I would ever meet in Adolf, but I was proven wrong in a mere week with this man’s—this brawny and, I had thought, quite sharply intelligent man’s—belief that he was harbouring Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

  His mouth moved slightly in the darkness and next to the glow of his cigarette I could see a small flash of white teeth. ‘They only wanted you people to think they were dead. Where do you think all their money came from?’

  ‘Uh, royalties? From writing books?’

  He actually laughed and it wasn’t the unpleasant maniacal sound of the crooked cop killer I had imagined, but a pleasant laugh from a man who thought I was stupid. ‘Books? Nobody makes any money from writing books! It is from robbing trains. You are such a young girl. Go back to Australia.’ And with that, another long guffaw and a pained grunt, he walked away into the dark and left me standing there.

  There was nothing else to do but go back to the house and so I did, still in a cloud of dubiety that the last twenty minutes had actually taken place in any realm other than my overtired mind. I flicked open the screen door on the large room that Rita had turned into a dining room and found Chicco and Carousel, all bathed and their wrinkles freshly pressed, sitting around bowls of birria and flirting with the blushing cook. They stared at me and in that moment of silence Adolf walked into the room and joined them.

  Carousel coughed and wiped his mouth with a napkin. ‘I see I am now the only one with a predilection for wearing pants.’

  I glanced down and sighed when I realised my jeans were still on the beach, I pulled my T-shirt a little lower. ‘Sorry. Forgot them. I was too busy trying to find Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.’

  They snapped up at that, and Carousel immediately looked past me out the door.

  ‘The captain?’

  ‘Gone. After I told him I wasn’t here to turn you in to the US police.’

  Adolf sat down and listened, flickering his eyes back and forth between us. Carousel relaxed and Chicco laughed. ‘That was one of the finest moments of storytelling in my entire life—the glory days of Butch and the Kid and how we robbed the capitalist Americans blind and faked our own deaths. And he ate it up, especially after I gave him my screenplay to the film signed by Paul Newman himself.’

  ‘And how did you do that?’

  ‘I ordered one from a bookstore and signed it ‘Paul Newman’—just like on the ranch dressing bottle.’ Chicco was heartily amused by his own genius.

  ‘How can he possibly be so stupid as to believe that?’ My jeans were forgotten and I sat at the table leaning over towards him and begging for some explanation that might make sense. Chicco chortled at me, ‘Everyone has their stupid, Lulu, you just have to find what it is.’

  And with that we ate our birria, spiced gently by Rita for our weak mouths, and talked about other regular things for the rest of the night. At one point we even sang songs to each other with a banjo Rita had found in one of the rooms which, of course, was played skilfully by the endlessly perfect Adolf. And when it was all done and I couldn’t stay awake any longer, I lay my head on Carousel’s shoulder and slept there, and it was the best sleep of my crazy-magnet, stupid-filled life.

  12

  How many times can a man die?

  sWE REACHED TIJUANA TWO DAYS LATER AFTER spending an entire day on the beach in our underwear and sarongs and blue lounge suits. We were salt-crispened and sun-ripened and quite happy by the time the Cuda jounced us into the city and pulled up next to the badly decorated bus terminal. Chicco paid Rita more than was needed and she refused cos she didn’t need it and they giggled coyly at each other and Chicco promised to ‘drop by’ again soon.

  Adolf and Carousel went into town to get food and came back with a new T-shirt and bag for me, and I now had the proud Mexican flag emblazoned over my chest and all of my things, which consisted of a few tattered scraps of this moose-gutted journal, my cash roll and my passport, in a tidy bright red tapestry sack. Adolf pulled his giant rucksack out of the trunk and loaded it onto his back and I remembered the moment he told me he would come with me.

  We were swimming in the too-warm ocean, with too little clothing and far too great an audience, and his hands found my waist under the water and pulled me close enough to kiss. And yet he didn’t kiss me, he just pulled our heads side by side and whispered his curious accent into my ear, ‘You know there is a shrine I have not visited in Tasmania. That must be close to your farm. Maybe I will come home with you.’

  And of course I whispered back between my goosebumps, ‘Yep, its walking distance.’

  So we st
ood flanked by buses, the young facing the old, and we all had nothing to say. I didn’t want to go, but I was able to. Chicco reached to shake Adolf’s hand and found himself enveloped in a broad hug. By the time he reached me his eyes were full of tears that ran between his wrinkles like a pinball.

  ‘You’ll have to come visit me,’ I said, as he hugged me tight.

  ‘I hate to say the words, Lulu, but I’m too old for that. You might need to come back to us, maybe, once, you can do it without the threat of an international kidnapping charge.’

  I smiled. ‘That’s not till next year. You might be dead by then.’

  He laughed, ‘How many times can a man die? I think I’m done with all that malarkey. And the Plymouth Barracuda will need another outing by then.’

  It was time to say goodbye to Carousel, and I stood in front of him unable to speak. He tilted his head back and sideways and looked me up and down.

  ‘I thought you were such a little thing when I opened the door, Lulu, and you seem so big now. Don’t even think about coming back out here until you do what needs to be done.’

  ‘And what is that?’ I didn’t need to ask. I knew.

  ‘You go find your mother. She’s probably starting to think you aren’t coming.’

  I launched my arms around him and could barely think about buses and planes and leaving. ‘I love you, Jack. You know that?’ Whispers were all I had, so I kissed his brown leather and gave him a couple of my tears.

  ‘I know.’ He finally held me back at arm’s distance. ‘I have something for you. A souvenir. Show and tell.’ He pulled a book from the glove compartment and handed it to me. It was brown, thumbed and grizzled, and it was Satori in Paris. I opened it and he had signed the inside page: Find your own goddamn satori, Jack.