We Ate the Road Like Vultures (12 page)

Fortunately life is the kind of merry-go-round that won't give time to mud-wallow. A group of lost tourists wandered in, gabbling away in rapid French and, moving past Chicco who was attached by the mouth to a bottle of tequila and a Mexican woman, were filled with hope at the sight of our pale faces.

‘
Est-ce que ce le bar est dans le film
Recherche le Paradis?' They asked me first, and it was too fast for my eighth-grade French so I shrugged and deferred to Carousel. They repeated the question and my heart, which had finally relaxed after being torn open, stuttered and sputtered and sank when I saw Carousel's face. He was translating
in his head. He replied slowly and with a bad American accent.

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

I was very still and my fingers were tingling with the fear of being wrong and fooled so I tried to find an explanation. Could you forget French when you got old? Could it suddenly become hard work? I didn't think so, but I pasted a smile on my face and accepted the drink they bought me without even tasting the sand in the bottom of the glass.

10

 

 

Believing doesn't make something true.
That's just pretty words.

 

 

I
WOKE UP IN THE BACK OF THE BOUNDING CAR
with my hair wrapped around Adolf's feet and my body still raging drunk and I can't remember who was driving but I do remember sitting up feeling dizzy in the wind and flipping back down to land on the better half of the German. And quite honestly his mouth was ripe and beautiful and it was, well, there, so I kissed it and he woke up and kissed me back, and it might have started something kind of interesting and contortionist if we hadn't been so drunk that we fell back asleep with our mouths suckered together.

And then we were in some town and hung-over and waving away clouds of our own funky breath and migraine, and we sat up and put our hands over our eyes while Carousel parked the
car and found us a hotel. It should have been easy but it wasn't cos there was a festival on, a local celebration of a saint no one had heard of, though the moment I made that comment out loud and the words swam around my dizzy head biting and slapping at me, I realised I was, as usual, wrong and Adolf knew exactly who the saint was.

Saint Angostura apparently. I may have got that wrong, there are translation difficulties between my lack of German and his Spanish readings of the second word of Jesus who wasn't crucified, but it sounded like that and I will continue to think of him as St Bitters.

‘Of course,' Adolf lit up and scribbled in his journal, ‘he was the man who saved Christ from the snake which had bitten him. He was given the gift of many, many children. And immortality. He is in Paradise now.'

‘Paradise? Isn't that another religion? You have to be making this stuff up.' I rubbed at my eyes, which were grinding against the back of my skull. ‘That beer was stronger than it tasted.'

‘Perhaps you are referring to the dozen shots of tequila you threw down between recitations of
the philosophy of Bruce Lee?' Carousel's words made the slow journey to my ears and then beat them senseless.

‘Fuck off, old person. You are supposed to be responsible. Why did you let me drink so much?'

‘Because I am not your fucking parent. Nor am I responsible. Name me a sixteen year old who has ever taken a lick of advice?' He sat back against the seat. ‘I guess we keep driving. You up to it, Adolf? Methinks Lulu should keep her blind and deaf self in the back seat, and Chicco may not return to us until the sun sucks the piss out of him.'

‘Of course.' Adolf leapt over the seat, giving me the usual, but still disconcerting, glimpse up his sarong and my headache notched up a volume as it was joined by a libido tsunami. He stood nimbly over the gearstick as Carousel began his superannuate climb into the back seat, a process that was complicated and glacial.

‘Less beer and your knees might work better.' I moved over to give him enough room.

‘Less mouth and your brain might, too.'

I looked past the halo of wispy white hair that flicked around his head in the dusty air and saw a silhouette across the street between two buildings that seemed familiar. Squinting and shaking my head to free my wits from the tangled tequila worm, I suddenly knew who it was. And why he was there.

‘Go. Now. Go.' I looked at Adolf, and it was a credit to the best part of him, that part that knew spirit and blood instinctively, that he understood my imperative and lifted Carousel bodily into the back seat and drove. The figure in the alley turned and watched me as I stared, my eyes hauling his towards me, and I knew it was not an accident of geography, but a hunt. We ripped a path through the town, a slow jagged tear through the throng growing for St Bitters, many wearing schlocky papier-mâché snakes around their heads and bodies, and I craned my neck out the back of the convertible, watching and waiting. He did not disappoint, and within the minute we were a pair travelling against the serpentine flow.

‘Juarez?' Carousel looked at me.

‘The captain? Yep. In a Hummer. Your Hummer I think.' I watched the captain, who was having less luck with the snakes than we or Jesus had, and was pulling to the side to let the parade pass. ‘And I'm seventeen now. Remember.'

‘What?'

‘You said sixteen year olds don't take advice. I'm seventeen now. Maybe I'll ruminate more.' I kept my eyes on the Hummer until it faded with the town into a dusted silhouette and I turned around.

‘Didn't you pay him money to stay away?'

Carousel rubbed his crop of stubble which maintained far more colour than the hair on his head. ‘I did. I paid him a lot. But then we left and we took Adolf. He may have wanted more for the German or he may think we have left for good, and we have been what's well-known as a fucking pretty cash cow for the fullness of his career.'

‘What do you think he will do?' Adolf spoke over his shoulder as he drove. The sun had heated his thin shirt to intolerable levels in the last few moments and he pulled it off with one practised
hand. I sighed, even with gaol as a threat, all that milk and honey was in front of me. Carousel slapped my arm with the back of his hand, amused by my addiction.

‘I don't know. He won't kill me or Chicco. We are the money. He might turn in Lulu for her reward and maybe he'll leave the two of you out here in the sun. I don't know what the man wants, he is a pirate, sometimes they simply want to pillage people who think they are free. Keep driving and we'll only stop when we have to, and I think it's time for the two of you to get out of Mexico.'

Neither of us argued with him. I had no inclination to be back in Chillingham and even less to reinhabit a cell, so I decided to go with it, and Adolf, it seemed, had seen his Mexican miracle and was ready to move on to the next scheduled stop on his magical mystery tour. Even his game-face was a little concerned.

‘He spoke to me at the clinic. The captain.' Adolf didn't offer up information often, so we were instantly listening, except of course for the
snoring, scratching and twitching Chicco who mumbled incoherently but was generally comatose. ‘He said he knew why I was really here. And that he would allow me the medical attention if I told him what he wanted to know.'

It was testament to the sort of person Adolf is that he thought it was appropriate to leave the conversation there, and we waited long enough to realise he was in fact now singing to himself in Hebrew, and I lost the flimsy hold of my temper and yelled at him. ‘Finish the story, Fritz!'

He looked mildly confused and shrugged. ‘He wanted to know where Christ's gold was buried. He knows I am a scholar and thought perhaps I was also a treasure hunter.'

He had floored us again and it seemed no matter how I retrained my mind to encompass the oddity of Adolf, he found new ways to unsettle.

‘As in Indiana Jones?'

‘Ha. That's funny. I wanted to be Indiana Jones when I was a kid. They were some of the films my parents burned. No, I have studied a lot about the wandering Christ since I first heard the story, and
the captain had heard I was on a pilgrimage. That is all. There is a myth that Christ could turn the desert sand into gold and that he buried a great deal of treasure here for a time when the Mexican people might need it.'

‘How exactly have you studied it? What did you study?' Even Carousel, who usually embraced weirdness like a lost sock, was beginning to sound submerged in the wack. Adolf was as skilled at creating sexual tension as he was at diffusing reality and he kept talking as though the only questions he had to answer were the ones he asked himself. ‘I wouldn't be the one to find the treasure, I am not in need.'

‘Plenty of Mexicans are. How very religious to hide something people have no hope of finding,' I snarked. My parents' duelling Anglican-Pagan warfare had left me with no love of the mysteries of the gods.

‘They will find it when they need it most. The captain will not.' He grinned over his shoulder and drove a little faster, the Lady Cuda groaning and occasionally complaining of angina, but continuing to gnaw the road with gusto.

It was then that Chicco woke up swearing and swinging his head around to send drool and cuss words all round the car. ‘Fucking piece of unholy shit! He took my wallet. He took my money and he took my pants!'

There was a light-filled moment for Chicco between when he woke and when the three bottles of tequila he had drunk turned around and bitch-slapped him backwards into his seat. He let out a groan and his eyes sank downwards into a set of folds not unlike those of that puppy that sells toilet paper.

‘Lord Almighty.' He rubbed at his head. ‘If he can heal the wounded Johnson can he not keep the fucking black morning birds at bay? Where are we? How much did I drink? Where are my pants?'

‘I've never seen you wear any pants.' I snorted at him. ‘You slept with the old tarts, that's where your wallet is, slipped in between the folds of those saggy tits.'

He beamed at me.

‘Where are your teeth?' I smugged back.

‘Aw, shit. And I didn't bring another pair. No
teeth, no pants, no money. Just like the sixties, eh?'

He threw it back at Carousel who smirked and passed him a cigar.

‘Gum that, Commodore. It'll send the blackbirds skywards at least.'

‘And I say again, where are we?' Chicco slurped the cigar into his mouth.

‘Fastwards to Tijuana, my friend. We have to get these two clear of the border. The captain is after the German and possibly the girl as well.' Carousel left out the bits that defied explanation.

‘The captain? Juarez?' Chicco puffed on his cigar which was falling loose and whichways in his toothless lips. ‘Well, you're royally fucked young cats, aren't you, that's not a man who's likely to give up.' He said it with a smile though, and I think, since he knew with pecuniary surety that he wasn't going to be pissing in the corner of a filthy cell, he quite liked the excitement. Not that pissing in public had thus far proved to daunt Chicco appreciably.

‘He's driving your Hummer. Looks like he's
been up at your place. Pity there weren't more landmines. Or more wild animals.' Carousel said, and Chicco looked at him for a moment with an intent I couldn't decipher and his nose wrinkled with distaste. ‘Now that ain't right. You can't re-steal a car. There has to be some sort of code amongst thieves. That dumb bulldog was rightfully mine.'

I laughed and so did he and then he had to pick his flaming cigar out of his lap where it had seared his sarong. We kept on driving to the sounds of smoking and Jewish humming and, finally, the receding drumbeat of my hangover. I took deep breaths of the air as we split it and, as my brain rinsed off, I remembered the bar and that I had told Carousel everything of my secrets and a sick discomfit filled me up, then I remembered the worst of it and turned immediately to the man beside me.

‘Can I ask you some questions?'

‘Questions?' He was looking out the side into the horizon.

‘Jack questions.'

He answered with cowboy care. ‘No.'

‘And why not?' I leaned back into the corner between the old beige leather seat and the door-frame facing him as best I could.

He looked at me languidly. ‘Maybe I am James Carousel of New York, and I live here in Mexico because it is hot and cheap and the weed is plentiful.'

‘You said you were Jack.' I was sweating from the heat, little beads on my back and behind my knees glued me slowly to the car with my own stupidity.

‘Maybe I am Jack Kerouac and my French is archaic and Canadian and I didn't have a goddamn idea what those teenagers were saying. Maybe. Maybe I told you what you wanted to hear because you are a very strange wild thing and I wanted to look at you a moment longer.'

‘Phh, wild nothing, don't try and say flattering things to me, cos that is not at all what I find to be wonderful. Maybe if you had said I was whip-smart and found you out when no one else could, I'd be moved, but don't give me any of that ‘mad ones' rubbish.' I snorted and rolled my eyes
and happened to glance to my right to discover a hunking Hummer on our tail.

‘Shit, he's back. Do you think he is really trying to find gold buried in the desert?'

Carousel shrugged. ‘I won't discount it, people believe what they want to believe and they'll die for it. If the captain believes it, and it's obvious Adolf believes it, that's enough belief to make a fact.'

‘Horseshit. Believing doesn't make something true. That's just pretty words.'

He looked at me. ‘Did you not just see a Nazi Jew Christian saved from death by a puddle of water in the desert? I didn't believe it would save him. But I think maybe you did.'

I was unconvinced and the Hummer was within earshot. It was newer than the Cuda and its roar sounded pretend. ‘It's still a theory full of holes.'