We Ate the Road Like Vultures (10 page)

‘Are you going to shut the door?' I asked.

‘Why?' was all I got as he adjusted each limb into his seat and opened the beers. I lay my head back and looked up at the sea of sun above me and we took off down the dusty road leaving everything and nothing behind us.

Our first stop was the medical centre in the town, a building of brown death spots and moulding limbs and the place where our German was still waiting on the good graces of the devil. Carousel began the process of arguing with the nurse, while Chicco and I searched for Adolf. He wasn't hard to find, there were hundreds of people in the waiting rooms and hallways but
there were only three beds and only one blond saint so we pushed our way through the fractures and scabies and checked him out. He was asleep, his eyes dark and blue-red. He had a drip in his arm but there was nothing connected to it so, while more nurses joined the argument with Carousel, I slid it out of his skin. It woke him and he looked at me and smiled and it wasn't the sun-god smile of the day before but it was enough to rob me of speech so I had to nod and cough a few times before I could remember what we were doing.

Chicco was wrestling with the handcuff that held Adolf on the other side, but it was one of those plastic ties so it was cut in a few breaths.

‘Can you walk?' Chicco kept his voice low and scanned the room with the sort of furtiveness that captures instant attention.

‘I think so. I don't know.' Adolf tried to sit and managed a half-crunch, and I grabbed and wrested him into a sitting position, my arms sliding around his waist and gripping handfuls of his grubby blue hospital gown. Chicco pulled his legs off the other side. He groaned as his knee
was moved and I noticed they had done nothing at all to help his injury, not even a bandage. I pulled Adolf's arm around my neck and tried to lift him upright but I was small and he was huge and the physics defeated us. Chicco found a single crutch in the corner and passed it to Adolf and, with that under his arm, he was able to stand. We inched forward and I could see his face twisting to keep silent and felt the muscles in his stomach clenching. Once, he let out a tiny cough and a bubble of blood escaped the side of his lips and the sight of it sent my eyes straight to Chicco who saw it, too, and frowned. No one stopped us, but not a single person moved out of the way without a kick or a curse, and it took us ten minutes to make it to the door only a dozen metres away. We lay Adolf in the back of the Cuda and pulled up the roof. I slid in beside him and put his head on my lap. Carousel, seeing us through the window, conceded his argument with the nurses and joined us, roaring off at the sort of reckless, dangerous speed that wouldn't get us noticed in Mexico.

Adolf slept and we drove in silence, all of us muted by the tiny smear of red on his face and the
very long drive to Tijuana. We had the windows down, but it was hot and salted and hours passed before the sun finally granted us clemency. I pulled the bread from the bag at my feet and wrapped each slice around some dried beef and chilli and passed it around and it was delicious, like all road food is, and the darkness rose up on the lip-smacking and the slurping sounds of the water we needed to wet it down. Chicco fell into snoring on the last mouthful, but Carousel turned back to me, ‘We shouldn't stop. Can you drive?'

‘Farm girl. Course I can.'

‘I expected nothing less,' I heard his smile as he pulled over onto the side of the road, an area only slightly more potholed and rubbled, and we switched places. I dragged the rheumatoid fabric of the roof out of its cave and clipped it into place over the top of us while Carousel climbed into the back seat. It was a grunting and painful process folding his knobbled limbs in around Adolf's, but he managed it in the end, obviously comfortable enough to be asleep by the time I had the lady back on the road.

‘Second star to the right and straight on till morning,' he murmured, and fell asleep and I drove into a blackness that swallowed the moon and the road and small bites of my hope, and I felt a long way from Chillingham with all the nothingness and cactus around me.

I was settling into the soft humming of a melancholy peace my mother taught me, when there was a bang and thump and a slide and a whip-crack, something hit the front of the car and then slapped hard into the glass in front of my face. For a moment an eye stared back at me, an angry bloodshot eye, then rolled slowly over the roof and was gone. In the blackness behind me I saw nothing and the road ahead was, once again, silent. The car was fine so I drove on. Carousel stirred.

‘What the fuck was that?' He was asleep before he heard me.

There was the tiny red glow of a cigarette butt bouncing back and forth in the wind on the bonnet of the Cuda and then it, too, catapulted off into the dark.

‘Roo.'

7

 

 

Dust and drag, Lulu—that's all it is.
Didn't you read the script?

 

 

‘L
ULU
.'

I woke up. And kept driving, correcting as slowly as possible to try and suggest I had been grazing the left shoulder purposefully, the blackness disguising my movements only a little.

‘Lulu.' It was Adolf's wan face I could see in the dim light of the mirror, and it was the colour your tongue feels after it licks a stamp. I slowed the car and pulled over so I could turn around and then wished I hadn't because those minutes might be the ones that kept him alive. He was dying.

‘We're taking you to Tijuana. We'll be there in a few hours.' It wasn't true, but it was on the same page as truth.

‘Have we gone past San Mateo?' he whispered. ‘Yes, about an hour ago. We've been driving since we picked you up. Maybe five hours. Why?'

‘I want you to take me back there. To Andachires. Will you do that?'

‘No. We don't have time to go back. What do you want? We'll stop just up ahead. They'll have stuff, a roadhouse or something. What do you need? If it's painkillers, Chicco has one of everything in the back, I'll get you something.'

He lifted a hand slowly and smiled at me indulgently. ‘I need you to take me back. There is another holy place there, it is a healing place.'

‘What? Come on man, now is not the time for more of the Baja Jesus stuff. You have to know that isn't true. You are literally going to die if we don't get you to a proper hospital. Don't give me any more of this bullshit.' I turned around and started the engine up, it roared and belched back to life in a way that only men in their eighties could sleep through. The car lurched, and I saw Adolf wince in the mirror.

‘Lulu. Take me back there. It's on my map, in my bag. The spring, take me to the water and I'll
be okay.' He lay back having exerted all the effort he could and I saw that the front of his hospital gown was now soaked in a blood stalactite from his neck to his waist—it was literally dripping from his mouth. I swung the huge car in an instant U-turn that encompassed both lanes and several metres of desert. I heard the popping of agave and rationality as I leapt the car back on to the road and tore up the past like I could change it.

I knew the town he'd mentioned, it wasn't too far, and I knew that if Adolf had to die on my watch, and it looked increasingly as though he might, that it should be on his terms. We ate the road like vultures, remorseless and insatiable and dragged the town towards us with a purity of will. I pulled the lady Cuda into the smudge of a town and turned to ask Adolf for more directions. He was out. But not dead. Chicco was stirring in the passenger seat and farted out the last of the night at me. Carousel was snoring. I leapt to the back of the car and got the map from Adolf's pack, turning it round and round to find my bearings and to discover which of the small
neat circles was his chance at life. The Spring of Living Water was three miles away but there was not a road or a track to show me how to get there. I looked around for anyone to ask but it was barely dawn and there was no movement from arse to the horizon. I pulled my army knife from the back pocket of my jeans and examined the compass embedded in its side. It was miniscule and likely to be cosmetic but I leaned over it until I found north and then turned the map to match—northeast. I looked up. There was nothing out there but dirt and death and the stretching fingers of the sun, but I'd already made the decision and there is no arguing with me, so off we went, the wheels whirring and spinning as the sand got softer away from the edge of the road. It surprised me how bumpy it was off the road given that it looked completely flat in every direction, but there were new levels of discomfort to be plumbed and I mined them thoroughly, jouncing everyone so hard that both the venerables woke up and even Adolf released a moan.

‘Where are we?' Chicco wiped a viscous snail of drool from his stubbled chin and shonked a man-sound in his throat that women can never replicate. I ignored him and kept up my death race.

Carousel was busy with the dying youth draped over him, and I saw his face change from the looseness of sleep to the tight frown of fear that strangled his voice.

‘Lulu—why are we here?'

I didn't answer him either, because I didn't have answers and any words would have been too many.

‘We should be closer to the ocean than this? Where are we?' Chicco was awake now, turning his face from left to right trying to figure his bearings. He looked at the sun and narrowed his eyes. ‘Andachires? Am I right?'

I was scanning the horizon for something, I could be three feet from a spring and never see it out there, so I needed to watch with every part of me that believed impossible things before breakfast. And it was there, waiting, as everything
was, for Adolf—a small pile of rocks that faded up on me like the mischievous hope that tickles at you when you know you should tread firmly on its head.

It took them longer, but they saw it too, and said nothing until we had stopped the car. We weren't the strongest of trios and we had to tug and pull at Adolf's broken-up body to get it out of the car, it was cruel but we had no other way. They put his arms around their shoulders and limped him over towards the shrine. I wandered around the shrine which was nothing but stone and no marker or sign of a cross or anything to say that Jesus had once paused here between trips to Jerusalem and Tasmania. But what was worse was there was no water. We sat Adolf next to the shrine and propped him upright against it, but he was so near gone there was nothing to do but stand back and be still. And Chicco struggled with that, and had to fumble for a cigar and a match, and ended up pacing, his sarong dragging a circle on the ground, but I stood like a column in a cathedral and Carousel stood beside me and held on to me with his stillness, and we waited
because it was too much to believe that someone like Adolf would die in the desert.

‘He won't die.' I said it and knew it was a lie, and Carousel answered me even though he didn't have to.

‘Dust and drag, Lulu—that's all it is. Didn't you read the script?'

And he took his sweet time and he scared the shit and tears out of me, but the god that Adolf believed into existence gave me a nod and a wink for falling for the joke, and the water hissed up out of the sand and washed around Adolf and around our feet, and there was a tiny geyser of maybe a foot that lasted for ten minutes. And we watched it with hope rising around our knees and then our hips and finally our throats until Adolf opened his eyes and smiled that dangerously innocent smile and stood up looking down at the water that was still pooling around his feet.

‘Ah, you found it. I knew you would, Lulu.' He looked at me for too long and the blob of salty fear wobbling on my eyelid fell and I tried to swipe it before it betrayed me. Chicco's whoop and splash took our attention and we watched
as he pulled himself down into the last of the bubbling water and drank handfuls of the stuff. It was already vanishing back into God and the desert and soon there was nothing but a damp spot to mark the miracle.

Carousel walked forward and took Adolf by the arm and said to him in his low salty voice, ‘I like your wandering Jesus, he's got a traveller's sense of timing.' He smiled wisdom, and his own dental miracle, and pulled his dancing friend from the vapour.

I looked at Adolf for a moment wondering what the right words were to say to a man who was squashed by a truck and saved by a geyser and who looked so much like an angel with the morning sun behind him that he could make a Christian of the Dalai Lama. I said nothing and I let him lean over me and kiss the side of my mouth that wasn't cynical and I embraced a sudden belief in his God.

Chicco was trying to leap and sing like a revival paraplegic but he was singing like a drunkard. ‘Lulu my girl, I've been healed! I was old and constipated and thirsty, and now? I'm no
longer thirsty!' He laughed and tried to spring into the air and I laughed to watch his sandals lift a little over an inch from the ground.

Adolf smiled at him and said to me, ‘I have to say thank you.' He walked back to the shrine and knelt beside it to pray and with the sun behind him I took a moment to focus on his gilt silhouette. As my eyes adjusted I noticed what I had failed to notice before. He was still wearing the bloodied, sodden hospital gown and it was open down the back. And he was naked underneath. Again. And while again, he saluted the sun, the three of us watched him with awkward grimaces.

And Carousel put his hand on my shoulder and said softly. ‘The mad ones will always give you what you never asked for.'

‘I asked for nothing.'

Carousel laughed at me. ‘You asked for everything, Lulu. You asked for stars.'

‘And he's giving you the moon,' Chicco threw over his shoulder as he heaved himself into the back of the Cuda.

‘Come along, disciples, the road smells lonely.'

8

 

 

I had been face-planted and upended and what came down was cantankerous, so I didn't want his truths in my hair.