We Ate the Road Like Vultures (11 page)

 

 

C
HICCO DROVE AND IT WAS LIKE RIDING A
centipede as it wove back and forth between the dirt on one side of the road and rocks on the other, and occasionally there were bursts of straight smooth driving when he was stoned.

In the back I sat still and silent in my small epiphany while Adolf, now formally clad in one of Chicco's sarongs with a bright silver cross hanging on his cinnamon chest, sang something in German that sounded horribly like it might be a praise song. Carousel was smoking out of the side of his mouth and typing with fury on a laptop that must have been the smallest device his ancient eyes could see, an expensive thing that leapt into the air with each pothole and danced
around with the joy of being out of the murky, humid hacienda.

I would have liked to sit and think for a while, it's not every day that you see someone brought back from death by a trickle of sandy water, and I like to ruminate with stealth on such oddities but it was, of course, not to be cos the decision that we would continue on to Tijuana, just for the hell of it, with this band of merry men, meant there was only ever going to be dramas. The thought bounced up and through the roof of my skull as Lady Cuda hit the only piece of road debris between here and Mulege, leapt skyward then fell back towards the earth with graceless resignation. Adolf, of course, had his seatbelt on but, I flew up and down and landed with my head in the well below Carousel's feet, my body shattering his inbred laptop and my foot extinguishing his cigarette by kicking it down his throat.

‘Motherfucker,' was all I could say, and I sat or lay or whatever the hell it was I was doing with my legs up and my head down, and I could hear Chicco's muffled laughter as the calm hands
of Adolf pulled me free by gripping my hips and pulling me upwards and outwards and backwards until I popped into his lap.

I could feel his voice. ‘You shouldn't say that, Lulu, think of your mother.' But I had been face-planted and upended and what came down was cantankerous, so I didn't want his truths in my hair. ‘She's dead. I can say what I want.'

Immediately I knew I shouldn't have said it cos, even though he was mostly concerned with picking tobacco from his teeth, Carousel heard and turned and focused on me with his sharp eyes, and I returned his look for far less time than I should have before leaping over the side of the car and popping open the boot. ‘I suppose you're too old to change that tyre, aren't you, Chicco?'

‘Far too old. But you enjoy it, lovely, and I'll spend my half hour squeezing out a piss.'

There was a tyre in there, thank God, and with Adolf's brawn and my instruction, we got it free and began the process of jacking up the heavy girl and messing with bolts that had settled in for retirement.

‘So when you mentioned that your parents knew you were okay, and then when you mentioned again that your parents had a reward for your safe return…were you referring to your dead mother?' It was Carousel and he was leaning up against the sun-sizzled car with a sort of rat-pack, beatnik cool that flustered my oil-smeared hands into searching for something to do and which were then trodden on by Adolf.

‘Shit. Ow.' I rolled a spare a few inches to the right. ‘No. I was talking about my father and my stepmother. You didn't want details. I didn't give them. My mother's dead. Died when I was twelve. Done.'

He made a humming noise that suggested he was insightful and I was repressed, and he was about to ask something else when I was excused by the whooping cries and the disturbing sight of Chicco leaping, laughing and pissing from above a flailing multi-hued sarong—urine spraying wildly in the air.

‘Look at this fucking racehorse!' he screamed. ‘That fucking magic holy water!' His pee dried up but his enthusiasm kept flowing as he stumbled
back and placed unwashed hands on Adolf's and my sweaty shoulders. ‘Haven't been able to piss like that in a decade. I'm healed. And I've Baja Jesus to thank for it.'

Adolf went back to tightening the bolts on the soft spare tyre and I began the process of convincing Chicco to let someone else drive.

‘Not a fucking chance. We are two hours from the best damn cantina you'll ever drink dry and I can get us there in half that. And there will be women. I want to see what else this baby can do.' He laughed at us and climbed back in the driver's seat, and there was nothing to do but let the octogenarian drive, and climb my stinking, fetid self into the back seat. Adolf reached across me to buckle up my fraying seatbelt, winking birds and bees at me as he did so, and I was unsurprised to find that his sweat smelled like maple syrup.

9

 

 

Je ne sais pas mais la bière est gâtée et le tequila magnifique.

 

 

C
ANTINA. SALOON. DIVE. PLACE OF ILL-REPUTE.
Mexican gaol. Complete shithole. We had to walk down and under and into a cavernous mouth of a door to get to the cantina into which Chicco had sprung as soon as the car had slipped to a stop in the space that may once have been the rest of the town. It was dark and lit with grubby bulbs and the pilot lights of cigarettes and pinball machines, and the eyes that gazed up to greet our descent had the pin-pupil look of cave dwellers. We must have been interesting to them, we must have seemed like some odd white Brady bunch of a family, but they glanced for no more than the long minute it took Carousel to descend the rheumatic stairs and hoist himself onto a stool at the bar.

Nobody stopped me from entering so I did, and we sat in a row at the bar, the white hair, brown and blond, all unwashed, road-tangled and thirsty. And there was nothing to quench our thirst but beer and water and the beer sounded safer so we drank it warm and flat. Adolf was drawn into conversation by the barman who rattled something in Spanish and pointed to the elaborate Celtic cross he wore around his neck—the symbol of the death Christ escaped by leaving on his world pilgrimage, Adolf had told me. This explanation also confused the barman and they soon argued in a complicated to and fro of language barriers and religious ideologies. Chicco was at a table in the corner with both of the establishment's women, ladies of dubious figure, beauty and intent, who were swilling the bottle of tequila he had purchased while listening to the stories that he told them in a Spanglish that would have confused anyone of any race.

And so I sat with Carousel and sipped slow distasteful sips and we looked at each other occasionally in that uncomfortable first date kind
of way, where you don't know where to let your eyes fall or what to say. A flash hit me.

‘What's the date?'

‘March.'

‘It was my birthday the other day. I'm seventeen.' I had almost forgotten about that and it was not a thing a girl should forget, seventeen being what it is, one moment closer to the end of Interpol searches.

‘Now you can make love to the German and he won't get arrested.' Carousel swigged and winked at me.

‘Fuck off.' I glanced to my side but Adolf had his maps on the bar and was showing the barman and another patron the shrines he had circled.

‘How did your mother die?'

‘What?'

He didn't ask it again and he wasn't looking at me, but it hung there like Christmas lights and blinked waiting for someone to notice. I'm not really a talker, not a speaker of my own stories, it's just not the way my voice wants to go, it cracks and stutters and gets tangled on its own
insignificance. I didn't want to tell him. Didn't know if he deserved to know. But perhaps I owed him a story for his time and the upside-down I'd given him, or perhaps there is a time when everyone is drinking warm beer in a black cave and finds themselves answering questions that never see the light of the day.

‘Why do you want to know?'

‘Why are you here?'

I drank more beer—watery, courage-less beer. ‘It always feels as though you weaken things when you talk about them, you know? They never sound as important, or as drastic as when they are happening over and over in your mind.' I sighed a long sigh that emptied me. ‘My mum was real. Do you know those people? Ones that are strange and wild and absolutely live in their own world, odd and dreamy and…completely in it. You know?

‘Her parents were the original hippies to move to the mountains out there, near Nerang. Do you know Australia? It's all rainforest and cattle farms where I grew up and back in the day there were communes and her parents had a kind
of tribe. I didn't see them much, they freaked my dad out and then they died when I was young, like six or seven. They had money but I don't know where it came from and they built, with about thirty other people, this big place around a couple of huge trees, all made out of fallen branches, and Mum grew up there and never went to a real school, just a local school run by the Krishna people where they did a lot of craft, I think. Her name was Mireille and she had very long hair, blonde but a kind of pale blonde you don't see very much, and blue eyes and really nice skin, pink and clean. She was always caught somewhere between laughing and crying, like the Lady of Shalott. Not me at all.

‘My dad grew up on a farm in the same mountains but he never met her until he came home from university. That's the sort of guy my dad is—he has a masters degree in farming. He met my mum at some party and they fell in love at first sight and had me not enough months after that with a marriage squeezed in somewhere to make my dad feel less guilty. And then they found themselves in a house on a cattle farm and it was
like, oh fuck, this is real, there is laundry and nappies and shit. My dad was suddenly surprised that my misty mother didn't cook or clean or buy groceries, and literally did lie in the grass all day writing songs and poems and making daisy chains. And she was shocked to find out that my dad was a capitalist and worked hard and voted. So I grew up with my mum and dad both trying to save me from each other.'

‘Life is always tough when you let it get real. That's for all of us.' Carousel said, he didn't look at me while he listened and I liked that. He gazed at the wood of the bar, so shined up with spit and booze.

‘My dad started to hate her, I think, really hate her. She used to wander off for days. Not tell him where she was going. Leave me, even when I was like two or three. He would get home late after the cows and find me crawling round the house. It was probably what her parents did, but they had like twenty other people who looked after the kid while they wandered. Once, I pulled down a picture and broke the glass and crawled all over it and there was blood everywhere. I can
remember him just crying and crying. But I loved her. She was ethereal and wonderful. Like a fairy. And she loved to touch everything, including me, running her hands over everything all the time. By the time I was at school she was wandering off for weeks at a time, and we never knew where she went. I cooked for Dad and we pretended nothing was weird.

‘I think I was about ten when this new vet started coming around and she was exactly like my dad, a regular country girl, and they were in love in minutes. He was so secretive about it, but girls just know. We just know. And Mum knew, too, and I saw her break, she still loved him and hoped one day he would start wandering the hills with her. Anyway, once Dad had this girlfriend I started to find reasons to go away—like school camps and Scouts and holidays with other people's families. And when I was twelve I convinced him to let me go to a summer camp in Colorado—you only have to be twelve to fly by yourself and I put thirteen on the camp application for good measure. And he let me. And Mum was fine with it of course, but I was surprised he didn't put
up a fight at all. I came this way for a month, waterskiing and rock climbing and all that American stuff kids do. I had a great time. So many girls were calling their parents and crying to go home, I didn't call once. And then when I flew back, my dad and his girlfriend picked me up at Brisbane airport together, like they didn't care if I knew anymore.

‘My voice got all caught up then and I hated myself and how emotional I was, even after five years, and I wanted to be a storyteller who didn't fall over flat into their own story. He said Mum had died while I was away. She was sick and hadn't told us. She died and he had a funeral and buried her under this giant fig tree on our farm, and he never called or sent a message or anything. He didn't want to ‘ruin my trip'. And his woman had moved into our house. I was only gone for one month. I asked him if Mum had said to tell me anything, or if she had left me a letter, and he said no, and that it was too sad for him to talk about it anymore, and he had asked the school counsellor to talk to me at school on Monday instead.

‘And I hated him then. Everything of my mum's was gone when I got home. Everything. He said he buried it all with her, and I tried to dig it up one night and he caught me and changed his story and said he had burned it all. And I know she would have said something or given me something if she knew she was going to die. She loved me, she did.' I coughed and tried to find the part of me that was still solid, I had never said my whole story into the air before and it hurt my throat. ‘I wonder, you know, if she might possibly not be dead? You know, she wandered away all the time? What if he told her never to come back, convinced her that she was bad for me or something like that. What if she is somewhere waiting for me to come and find her? Or maybe he killed her. I wonder that sometimes, too. Why would she die? She wasn't like regular people, she never did anything unhealthy, she ate raw food and flowers and tree-root tea. So why would she die? I just…' I didn't know what words came next so I drank the last of my beer and used my last bit of resolve to get them past the back of my
throat. And I was about to get up and go throw myself in the car to cry and be twelve again when Carousel turned towards me and put his willow-tree hands on either side of my face and pulled my head towards his until our foreheads rested on each other and he let me lean there for a while, until a couple of loose tears had dripped free and I could reassemble my spine. It was nice to lean into his age and steal a bit of vintage moxie before I had to open my eyes.