Road Fever (42 page)

It was not safe to drive in Honduras at night. It was, according to an American embassy official I had talked to, not safe in Honduras at all. The embassy was located atop a hill and there was little evidence of a military presence. Honduran security guards admit you into the building, and then the marines take over. The man I talked with was blond, about thirty-five, and could not, he said, assist us in any way. He strongly suggested that we forget the entire project. He told me this from behind a pane of bulletproof glass, and from my point of view his features were vaguely distorted. He was a man who was slightly out of focus.

There was a casino at our hotel. A large sign at the entrance to the gambling hall featured the silhouette of a handgun. A thick red line slashed diagonally across the gun. “No pistols in the casino.” It was the sort of gay, madcap sight tourists can expect in Honduras.

W
E WERE ON THE ROAD
at five-thirty the next morning. A man in a yellow Toyota truck saw us studying a map and asked if we wanted directions out of town. If we were going north, we could follow him.

The road was very good, lined on either side by pine trees, and it was too early for traffic. We crested the mountains that surround Tegucigalpa and drove down into a valley where the sun was just burning away an early-morning fog.

Fifty miles later, the man in the Toyota signaled that he was turning down a dirt road. We stopped to thank him for his help. He was,
he said, an Israeli, working in Honduras for a year as an agricultural consultant. He wouldn’t renew his contract. Honduras, he said, was too dangerous, too bloody.

I thought he was talking about soldiers, guerrillas, violence in the streets, but he was referring to the stretch of highway we had just driven. Almost every day he saw mangled bodies, or blood on the pavement. “Traffic,” he said, “is murder.”

H
ONDURAS
is a country of mountain ranges. We drove through some cuts in the road where the rocks were a deep, burnished red. There was a large graceful lake called Yojoa, surrounded by green mountains. In the flatlands, between ranges, men on horseback led packstrings of mules. The mules were loaded with bananas to be sold in the markets of the mountains. They would be purchased by men in blue jeans and straw cowboy hats who herded cattle for a living.

T
HE OFFICIALS
at the Guatemalan border were particularly impressed with a letter from their director of immigration. It suggested that people fully cooperate with us. The fact that the director of immigration was the brother of the president of Guatemala was also helpful.

Our destination was Guatemala City, a mere twelve or thirteen hours of driving. We might have pushed on, driven all night, but that would have put us in Dallas a couple of days early, and waiting around in motel rooms made Garry vomit.

The road out of the checkpoint dropped into a reddish sandy-brown desert of scrub brush and stunted trees. Then we rose into the central highlands, climbing up to Guatemala City, another capital set in a mountain basin, this one almost a mile high. We were crawling along behind creeping oil-burning trucks.

I was daydreaming, listlessly, imagining, for some reason, a time in the distant future:

The world is a dismal place. The Amazon forest has been decimated. The trees that once absorbed the carbon dioxide humans pour into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels are gone. The carbon dioxide now simply floats to a certain level and hangs above the earth, like an encircling pane of glass. The planet is a blistering greenhouse.

Meltwater from the polar ice caps has raised sea level over one hundred feet. There is no more Central America. Instead, there are the Central American islands: the island of Tegucigalpa, the island of Guatemala City, the Costa Rican island of San José.

I see people in the poor sweltering shacks of the Amazon desert.
Many of them believe the past was a golden era of enlightened men. Some of them talk about the Lost Continent of Managua. They study its books of ancient wisdom:
Fidel Castro Presents Three Ways You Can Improve Your Village
.

O
N THE HIGH TRAFFIC-CLOGGED ROAD
above Guatemala City, we drove by the scene of a bad accident. There was glass on the pavement, sharp knifelike shards of it floating in a tremendous amount of blood. Four or five motorcycle policemen were working the scene, which was under a large billboard that read,
CEMENT IS PROGRESS
.

We checked into a hotel and had dinner with Ricardo Pennington, a GM dealer who ran a business called Fuertequipo. While Pennington’s mechanics swarmed all over the truck like ants on a broken watermelon—they changed the oil, the oil filter, the fuel filter—we ate dinner at Rodeo, a steak house where patrons sit at picnic tables and listen to a live steel-drum band.

Ricardo, who spoke good English, often drove to the United States, and he didn’t advise traveling at night through Mexico. Taxis, he said, have lights on the roof and it is easy to mistake one for a police car. The lights on the police vehicles, however, revolved; the ones on the taxis did not. “If someone tries to pull you over at night and his lights don’t revolve, don’t stop. You’re going to get robbed, or worse.”

If we were stopped by police and detained for no discernible reason, it was best to tell them that we didn’t have much time and ask if it was possible to pay “the fine” on the spot. Ricardo taught me the Spanish word for fine. Five bucks was usually enough.

W
E WERE UP
before dawn and beat the traffic out of Guatemala City. We were driving on a good fast road, through a lush valley that was lined, on one side, with a spectacular range of perfectly conical volcanoes. It was a brilliant, sunny morning, not too hot, and I found myself rehashing something that had happened in Sincelejo, Colombia.

We had pulled into town late in the evening and driven through traffic-strewn streets. A motorcycle pulled up alongside the truck. Sitting behind the male driver was a young woman wearing a long purple skirt and a white blouse. A breeze blew her skirt high up on her thighs and she pulled it back down. The woman glanced up at the truck, saw me staring at her, and blew me a playful, meaningless kiss. She had wonderfully large, almost Eurasian, eyes. Some congenial confluence of races had blessed her with an olive Polynesian complexion.

I don’t know: maybe other people have noble sexual fantasies.
Maybe they don’t have them at all. Better men and women than I can probably drive for weeks through various foreign countries without the consolation of a proper companion of the opposite sex. They don’t suffer unbidden and undignified sexual fantasies. They contemplate the dialogues of Plato and concentrate on the road.

The woman on the motorcycle and I made love in the most astounding locations, and we did it constantly, without surcease. She was, of course, educated in a convent. She had much to learn about the physical aspects of love and was always eager to learn more about the physics of copulation in, say, a hammock. I am, in my fantasy, a masterful lover.

I felt an obligatory twinge of guilt—a voice from the past; my own personal radical feminist, circa 1972—and told myself that there was a
reason
for meditating on a sexual relationship as it might be conducted in South America, with a South American woman. These were the very countries that gave us the word
macho
after all. I would, yes, examine this strain in myself to better understand my Latin American friends. I was indulging in a kind of contemplative sociology. It would be best, then, if I had some social position, if I were, for instance, rich and powerful. A patron.

I am now married to this woman I first saw on a motorcycle in Sincelejo.

We live in a large white house with flowers all about. I have sired several delightful children. When local people talk about me, they do so in folkloric phrases.

“The handsome gringo is very rich and he has a beautiful wife.”

“Do not think of the handsome gringo’s wife, Juan. You must never think of the wife of the handsome gringo.”

And then the handsome gringo and his beautiful wife were making love underwater, wearing scuba gear.

On the shoulder of the road, a hundred yards ahead, a boy was mounting his bicycle. His dog—I assumed it was his dog—capered alongside. It was a medium-sized black-and-white mutt that I knew would run along beside the boy’s bike and give Garry, who was driving, fits. There was a three-quarter-ton pickup truck ahead of us and a bus coming fast in the other lane.

I saw all this, but, in my mind, the handsome revered gringo and his beautiful insatiable wife were experimenting with a rather contorted position under a warm tropical waterfall in a forest alive with birdsong.

“Oh shit,” Garry said.

I heard it before I saw it: an obscene crunching of bones. The boy’s dog came out from under the back wheels of the three-quarter-ton truck, already dead, its back twisted nearly double. The dog bounced once, four feet into the air, then spun off onto the shoulder of the road.

No one stopped and we didn’t either. What could you say to the boy:

We’re sorry someone ran over your pet.

Traffic is murder.

There are no old dogs on the Pan-American Highway.

My fantasies of sex and power died with the dog, and at the very same moment.

H
OURS LATER
, in Mexico, the incident was still haunting me. Garry said, “What if it had been a child?” and then we didn’t say anything for several more hours.

The border formalities on the Mexican side had gone quickly. We were stopped for a second customs inspection at a roadside checkpoint half an hour into the country. And half an hour after that, two police cars pulled us over for another document check. Ten miles later we stopped for a roadside agricultural inspection and traded jokes with the fruit police.

All the officers accepted lapel pins. All were professional, polite, and there was never a time when I felt a bribe was in order. Mexico was not living up to its reputation as the most corrupt, bribe-ridden society in all of Latin America.

Several hours into the country, traffic died down to a trickle and the road was a two-lane blacktop, as good as any county highway in the United States. The land along the Pacific coast was heavily forested and vultures soared over the highway, looking for road kills.

We turned east, onto a highway that would take us over a range of low mountains to the Atlantic coast. At the intersection, there was a police checkpoint.

The land was bare and sandy. A thirty-mile-an-hour wind drove the heat before it like a blast furnace, and the two officers manning the checkpoint belonged in the Mexican version of
Deliverance
. They were living stereotypes, every gringo’s nightmare: two genuine steenking bach Mexican policemen.

The older of the two was a short man with a mean sour face and one gold tooth in the middle of his mouth. His uniform shirt was rumpled, stained with sweat, and was buttoned in such a way that his belly button was visible. He had no holster for his revolver and wore it inside his pants.

The other officer was a tall, stooped man with dull, uncomprehending eyes and a slack face. He wore a sweaty gray T-shirt that had once been white. The officers wanted to see our passports. They wanted to see the lengthy document we had filled out at customs. The short man, who seemed to be in command, reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pair of reading glasses. The lens on the left side had been shattered in a starburst pattern.

The tall man leaned over the shorter one’s shoulder and together they examined the single sheet of paper.

“You will,” the short officer said, “need to show me an inventory of everything you are carrying in the truck.”

This, we knew from our reconnaissance trip, was not true. Still, we had the document and gave it to the man.

It must have been infuriating.

The officers already had their lapel pins, but, I saw, they didn’t want to settle for mere pin money. Garry and I were well ahead of schedule and pretended not to understand. It was a chance to stand and stretch, to look around a little bit, to torment these officers with shrugs and dumb questions.

“Why can’t we go? Everything’s in order.”

The tall man walked around in a circle, scratching his head and muttering to himself. The short officer stared at us with his one shattered eye. No words were exchanged for at least five minutes. The hot dry wind kicked up a minor sandstorm. It would be much more comfortable inside the checkpoint guardshack.

“Go,” the man with the bad eye said finally. “Go now.”

We waved and thanked the officers, who were, at that very moment, pulling over a pickup truck carrying three rusty fifty-five-gallon drums.

The land became more fertile as the road rose into the mountains. “The tall guy back there,” Garry said, “what do you figure his IQ was?”

“Thirty-four, thirty-five, around there.”

“He looked like somebody who ought be called Igor.”

“I don’t believe they were real policemen,” I said. “A guy with a perfect starburst in his glasses? C’mon. I think they’re from the Mexican Department of Tourism. Their job is to give visitors something to talk about.” I saw, in my mind’s eye, a travel documentary featuring these officers. “And so,” I said, “as the sun sinks slowly in the west, we bid fond adieu to our new friends …”

“Igor and the Cyclops.”

*   *   *

T
HERE WAS A LINGERING
golden sunset across the fields and we were following a truck with a large name painted across the back:
RENEGADE
. The truck was running a straight-through muffler, and it was terribly loud. In all of Latin America, only Mexican truck drivers run these deafening mufflers. Some of the Mexican trucks, however, were no louder than our own.

Garry advanced the theory that noisy trucks belong to bachelors. “When they get married,” he hypothesized, “they have to shut their truck up. That way the road hookers and women of the night can tell who’s available by the sound of their truck. It’s like a sign of virility or something.”