The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (11 page)

I left the party around the same time that a topless blond woman came walking across the bar, spraying a mystery liquor into people’s mouths with a squirt gun that looked like an AK-47. I thanked Ricardo and the club owner, shared a round of cheek kisses with the women at our table, and told Sky that I’d see him the next day at Ivan’s.

Except when I woke up late the next morning, Sky wasn’t at Ivan’s.

Look at you, Don Juan, I thought admiringly, and I left him a note before heading out to find coffee and an arepa.

I spent much of that day sitting at a sidewalk café, drinking bad instant coffee and working my way through a long magazine article in Spanish about the international flak that Colombia was taking over its military-base agreement with the United States. There was still no sign of Sky when I walked back to the hotel in the midafternoon. His cell number went straight to voice mail, and Ivan said that he hadn’t come around. I laughed it off, but after a couple more hours and a few more unanswered calls, my amusement started to drift into concern. I didn’t have Ricardo’s number, I realized, but somehow I had ended up with the club owner’s from the night before.

He answered after a few rings. Our conversation was stilted, but he told me that he’d last seen Sky and Ricardo getting into a cab together sometime after dawn. Was I sure he hadn’t come back to the hotel? Positive, I said.

“Then I’ll come get you,” the club owner told me. “We can go look for him.”

A half hour later, he pulled up to Ivan’s in a silver Camry with a prominent spoiler, which I’d seen parked outside the night before. In the passenger seat was a girl who’d sat at our table. Both of them looked worried. I hopped in, and they tried to reconstruct for me what they remembered of the wee hours. They spoke quickly and talked over each other, and it was hard for me to keep track of their pronouns. Sky had danced with a girl who they both agreed was crazy. Or maybe her boyfriend was crazy, I wasn’t quite sure. At some point, somebody had been slapped—possibly Sky, possibly the girl sitting in the front seat. Everyone was drunk, they said, and things got a little tense. That much I understood.

“Dios mio,”
the girl up front kept muttering, which made me more nervous than I had been. You don’t understand, she said, fingering the beads on her necklace—some people here will take advantage of a drunken gringo. Kidnappings still happened from time to time, and it occurred to me that everyone in town knew who we were, the famed traveling American journalists.
“Dios mio,”
the girl repeated.
“Dios mio.”

The club owner drove in what seemed like arbitrary circles, stopping occasionally to ask acquaintances if they’d seen a tall gringo matching Sky’s description. No one had. The two of them made a half dozen phone calls on my cell (the only one with minutes), asking revelers from the night before whether they’d been with Sky or Ricardo after the club emptied out. No dice there. After an hour of this, we headed back to Ivan’s and simply stood outside, deliberating. By now it was after seven p.m. We decided that I would wait through the night, and if we still hadn’t heard from
Sky by morning, we would go to the police. No one had any better plan.

The potential seriousness of the situation began sinking in with me, and two thoughts passed through my head in short succession:
I may not be leaving Honda anytime soon
. Followed closely by:
And when I do, it might be without Sky
.

And that, of course, was the moment that he and Ricardo chose to come wheeling around the corner.

“Heeey!” the two of them cried, clearly still in the waning throes of the previous night’s party. Both were disheveled, with dark bags under their eyes and overdue for a shower, but otherwise no worse for wear.

“Dios mio!”
cried the girl from the club.

“Dude, where have you
been
?” I asked.

“Hanging out with Ricardo, man.” Sky shrugged. He sat down on the hotel stoop with an exhausted grunt and ran his hand through his hair. “We ate some food, took a nap for a while, hung out at his place. Then we went and played pool. What have you been doing?”

I shook my head apologetically at the club owner, who was going through some version of the same thing with Ricardo in Spanish. Sky exhaled shakily, and undid a button on his dress shirt, which was already half-unbuttoned and stained with twenty-four hours of sweat.

“Bro, I need some sleep,” he said with a laugh, leaning back on his palms. “Oh, and also, I think I lost my cell phone.”

Ricardo must have sensed my exasperation, or he’d maybe just been told that we were several hours away from calling the police. He walked over and gripped my shoulders in a way that was meant to be reassuring, looking me squarely in the eyes.

“I am with him all of the day,” he said in English, his tone
somber. He shook his head slowly. “I am never stop watching him.”

Then he and the others climbed into the metallic Camry, and with a farewell honk they sped off, leaving the illustrious gringo journalists slumped outside of the Hotel Turivan.

“Mr. Brian?”

Ivan’s voice woke me from a sound sleep the next morning. He was standing again in the doorway to our room.

“Sorry to bother you, but I think there is someone waiting for you outside.”

I opened my eyes groggily. Oh, sweet Jesus, I thought, not again. It was Groundhog Day, and I was Bill Murray, and I was never, ever leaving Honda.

Lucas waddled behind me as I shuffled to the front door, where the head of the chamber of commerce was standing with his hat in his hands, the morning sun reflecting off his bald head. He wore round glasses and had a white mustache that drooped a little at the corners, like a Latino Wilford Brimley.

The chamber head wished me good morning and asked if Sky was also available. Still sleeping, I told him, without adding that Sky would probably be sleeping all day. So the chamber head spoke slowly, knowing that my Spanish was far inferior to Sky’s. He had made a mistake, he said, and he was very sorry. The boat to Girardot was actually going to cost roughly three times the amount he had quoted us. He sincerely regretted his error. It was a very nice boat, however, and it could leave in two days’ time. Possibly three.

The sun was a huge exposed bulb that protruded from the
grain silo of the shuttered old brewery. I squinted and shaded my eyes as I thanked the man, took his cell phone number, and said I would discuss it with Sky. The minute that I shut the heavy wooden door, Thompson’s words from the beer barge rang in my ears: “You get what you pay for … and I ain’t paid.” Both he and Márquez made their journeys up the Magdalena inside of eight days. Sky and I had been following the river for two weeks now, and there was no telling when we would get back on the water. A bus ticket to Girardot, meanwhile, cost less than another night’s stay at Ivan’s hotel, and it could get us there by lunchtime. I sat down in the cool of the courtyard and asked Lucas what to do. He tucked his beak into his mottled brown feathers and sighed.

“Mr. Brian?” Ivan came around the corner from the front room, where he’d overheard my conversation with Wilford Brimley. “I can help you get to Girardot.”

Ivan understood the quest, he said. Who wouldn’t want to float the historic passenger route of the Magdalena? He had a small wood-and-fiberglass lancha, better suited for scenic spins around Honda than a hundred-mile journey upriver and back, but it would be his pleasure to make the trip with us. He would charge us only for the gas, he said, and leave his housekeeper behind to staff the hotel and feed Lucas. We could leave the very next morning.

It was an act of pure generosity, and I was touched. When I shook Ivan’s hand, a broad grin spread across his face, like he’d been nervous I was going to say no. Thank you, I told him. We couldn’t ask for a better guide. He was happy to do it, Ivan said. It would be an adventure.

It wouldn’t be fair to blame everything that happened next on Sky’s Casanova gallantry—or on the mesmeric curves of his Honda heartthrob—but both of them got us
off to a late start the next morning. While Ivan and I stood holding our bags, Sky put us off for two hours while he ran around town, arranging to have flowers delivered and a song dedicated to his crush on Ricardo’s radio station. I tried to keep the wait in perspective: after five days in Honda, if one flurry of last-ditch courtship was the price of a ticket out of town, then I was happy to pay it.

It was past noon by the time we lifted anchor, but the day was cool and clear. All three of us were in high spirits, never mind the delay. Ivan brought along a boy he called Sardino to help him man the boat, and Sky and I laughed while we answered Sardino’s wide-eyed questions about
los estados unidos
. The tiny motorboat bucked like a rodeo mule as we plowed through Honda’s rapids, and by the time we reached the city limits, we were all soaked and a little bit giddy.

A few hours upstream, we stopped for gas at a riverside village called Ambalema. Near the docks was a ramshackle cerveza stand, and the three of us sat down for beers while Sardino went off to fill a half dozen gas canisters. Ivan pointed across the water to the far shore.

“On that side of the river was my grandfather’s farm once,” he said, “before the
narcotraficantes
came in the 1990s.”

This whole stretch of river was effectively a war zone then, Ivan said, and as we slaked our thirst, he told us candidly about the bad old days of the ’90s and beyond. Industry might have abandoned the Magdalena around the time of Thompson’s journey, but the narcotraffickers who came to prominence afterward still saw the river’s value as a transportation corridor. One of Pablo Escobar’s closest captains controlled this stretch for a time, Ivan explained. When he died, there were rumors of money and weapons hidden around Ivan’s grandfather’s farm. Some pretty unsavory types passed through, searching for loot that was never
found. Then the paramilitaries came in, and they picked up where the narcos left off, taking over abandoned farms and moving money and drugs up- and downriver. Ivan had an uncle who hung on to the family farm for as long as he could, until the only people left in the area, Ivan said, “were all full of nerves and delusions.” Finally, the uncle gave in and sold the farm cheap.

The bartender chimed in as he passed out another round, remembering a time when he wouldn’t have crossed the river for fear of his life. Ivan nodded. President Uribe had gotten rid of the narcotraffickers, he said admiringly, and anyone who criticized the US–Colombia alliance didn’t understand the difference this had made in the lives of many rural Colombians. Both Ivan and the bartender had enthusiastically supported the amendment permitting Uribe’s second term, and had it been possible, they said, they would have given him a third term too.

Our couple of beers turned into three or four, and the bartender brought over a complimentary round of aguardiente. Ivan bought a beer for Sardino, who laughed and tried to tell us he was seventeen, then admitted to being fifteen, then twelve. When I asked Ivan why we hadn’t encountered any of the vicious insects that Thompson had described so vividly, he grinned and told us that Uribe had gotten rid of those, too. We laughed and traded shots. All around us, the peaks of the Cordillera Oriental rose up amber against the sky.

By the time we got back on the water, everyone was feeling great. Sky’s wooing and our impromptu happy hour had put us hours behind, so Ivan cranked the outboard, and we sped upriver in the fading sunlight, enjoying the encroaching mountain scenery. At our approach, the elegant
garzas
rose up from their perches among the reeds and came to rest on
the nearby branches, drifting upward with all the grace and urgency of tissue paper caught in the wind.

We were fifteen miles shy of Girardot when Ivan’s engine suddenly made a sound like something out of a blacksmith’s workshop, and the boat went into a full-tilt clockwise spin. Sardino scrambled to kill the motor. Sky and I reflexively grabbed the oars. Mine barely skimmed the surface of the water as the lancha leaned hard to starboard, listing skyward at a forty-five-degree angle. Ivan grunted loudly at the wheel as he tried to straighten us out.

“Towards the shore!” he yelled. As the boat slowly regained its equilibrium, Sky and I paddled hard across the current, straining to keep the fast-moving water from sweeping us back downstream.

After a tense few minutes, we dropped anchor next to a rocky beach, where everyone simply sat still for a while, catching their breath. A transom bracket had cracked, leaving the outboard motor dangling uselessly from the stern. As Ivan and Sardino examined the damage, Sky and I clambered ashore, shaking off the river spray and our aguardiente fog. He could fix it with rope, Ivan said eventually, but our speed was going to suffer something fierce. Late as it was, there was no way to make Girardot by nightfall.

The map suggested a small village nearby, but no one could remember whether we’d passed it already, so we motored a short distance upstream, keeping our eyes on the banks. Instead of a village, we came to a small farm plot on the east side of the river, where a somber papaya farmer and his family were sitting outside in the encroaching dusk. They eyeballed us silently as we approached and dropped anchor. None of them seemed to know quite what to make of the ragtag crew disembarking from this tiny boat. Sky and I nodded hello, and Sardino offered a tentative wave.

Ivan waded ashore and consulted with the farmer for a few minutes, then came back to say we’d been offered food and hammocks for the night. We all clambered out of the boat and shook hands, changing into dry clothes and settling in with the family on a set of wooden benches and mismatched patio furniture.

The farmer’s wife brought us coffee and plates of
pollo con arroz
, and we tried to make chitchat while we ate. Our host was a large, impassive man, and heavily inked. On one arm I saw a graceful Pegasus taking flight; on the other was a hairy and grotesquely detailed spider. He’d been in the Colombian military once, he explained slowly, but now he raised papayas here on the Magdalena and drove a cab a few days a week in Girardot for extra cash. A handful of related families lived there on his farm, a sort of
cooperativa
. When Sky asked why he left the military, he was quiet for a moment, chewing on a forkful of rice.
“Violaciones de derechos humanos,”
he finally muttered. Human-rights violations. And that pretty much put an end to that conversation.