We Ate the Road Like Vultures (2 page)

‘And what the fuck was that?' he said, ignoring me like I hadn't walked in wearing a large intestine.

‘Mine went off,' the one with me huffed. ‘Took Capote with it.'

They burst into fits of laughter that so quickly evolved into coughing and hacking and spitting up mucus that I wasn't quite sure if it was laughter at all. But the callous nature with which they treated their guard moose rubbed my grit the wrong way and I stamped my foot, which of course I knew was childish as hell, but you do stuff like that without thinking when you are trying to make a point.

‘What the fuck are you laughing about? His head is on your doorstep out there you know—have some fucking compassion.'

They roared and expectorated in equal measure until the one beside me finally raised a grim-reaper hand to get my attention.

‘He'd been trying to knock himself off for months, ever since Chicco told him we weren't never gonna take him back to Alaska and he had to find a way to live with the snakes just like we did.'

Chicco was the one I had seen urinating outside and he was drinking some expensive imported beer, even though it was only nine in the morning, and the beer led me to believe my suspicions must be right cos, despite the house falling apart and their awful faded sarongs and kaftans, these men had money. These were men with royalties. I smiled because I was right and one of these men was the one I had been looking for, so I asked again, ‘Who are you really, and which one is Jack?'

‘I don't think a trespassing toddler like yourself, especially an ignorant colonialist, has any right whatsoever to march into a legitimate retirement home and ask anything.' The one beside me sat himself down in an enormous black recliner and spoke with such casual anger that I took a step back, smearing sandy blood and confidence on the wall.

‘You can't call this a legitimate nursing home when there is a bag of E on the table,' I stuttered, and realised I was sounding like a teenager and hated myself for being outnumbered and out-aged by about four hundred years.

Chicco answered me while the other laughed. ‘We wish we was that much fun, sweet-apple, but that there is Carousel's antacids. Last time I took E I didn't shit for two weeks!'

‘That was two weeks ago by the way…' Carousel said, while I wondered what sort of strange it was to have the name Carousel. ‘He's gonna blow like Capote any second.'

Chicco answered him with a fart that shook his chair, and the two of them sniggered again, and looked at me waiting for some sort of introduction I guess, or some reason to kick me the hell out into whatever ancient booby traps scattered the area. I guessed by the silence, and the less than friendly gum-smackings, that I was gonna have some questions fired at me soon and I'd sure as fuck better have some answers.

‘Nobody keeps antacids in a ziplock.' I was a little petulant now, on account of the stares and
the cut throbbing on my shoulder and the moose innards starting to stink in my hair as the heat got to them.

‘He's only allowed fifteen a day. I count them out and hide the rest.' Chicco was the most forthcoming and answered me, even though it wasn't a question, with such cheerfulness I decided simultaneously that I liked him the most and that he definitely wasn't Jack. At least that was the thought I started to think when their questions hit me in a united attack.

‘How in Mary's fucking name did you get out here from New Zealand, girl?' Carousel spoke over a fresh beer and through a smug smile that said he thought he was damn smart for figuring out my accent.

‘Did you ask your parents if you could do this?' Chicco waved his skeletal finger around as he spoke and eddies of dust danced over and round and through them like we were in the underworld and he was Hades. ‘You must be all of nineteen, apple. Why're you bothering with geriatric shits like us?' He leaned so far back in his
fat chair that the plushness wrapped the sides of his head in velvet.

‘You aren't as smart as you think you are, either of you. I'm sixteen and from Australia, if you listened properly, North Coast, dairy farm. And of course I didn't ask my parents. They wouldn't have let me come and I figure if I didn't ask them, I didn't disobey them—you know?' They seemed alarmed, like they were about to be surrounded by swarms of police and charged with just about everything, since they were eighty and I wasn't eighteen, so I put their fears to rest. ‘But its fine I didn't leave a note or anything telling them where I was going. And it's not like it's the first time I've gone off on my own mission either, I went to Seattle last year, hitched and bussed and flew and did my research and came home. They know I'll be fine.'

‘What did you do in Seattle?' Carousel's voice was calm, but a firm one you answered and didn't fuck around with, not like Chicco who found everything I said hilarious and made me feel comfortable but a bit of a freak.

‘I went to see someone,' I started, but saw he meant to hear the whole truth, so I sighed and told him. ‘I read a book of philosophy by Bruce Lee, you know the martial artist, and I did some research on him and decided he might not actually be dead, cos it was such a sketchy end to have, and I went to see his wife and talked with her about it. But turns out I was wrong and she made a few valid points and, besides, I checked the autopsy reports and saw pictures and stuff, so I was pretty sure before I paid my respects at his grave and went home.'

They glanced at each other and winced.

‘And what did your parents do about it all?'

‘Oh, well, they called the police and Interpol and all that, and put up posters and rung hospitals, but none of it worked because no one stopped me one step of the way and I waltzed back on home four weeks later and told them the story. I'm not saying they weren't mad as hell but they got over it and as soon as I wasn't grounded anymore I came here.'

‘Fuck me,' Carousel growled. ‘You're a right lunatic, you are.'

I didn't think that was very fair and was about to emphatically share my reasons for being there when his voice changed tune.

‘I think you'd better go now. We're old men with not much time left and we can't be responsible for a young, and quite obviously mad, girl.'

‘Your words say you want me to go but your voice says you want me to stay, so until the moose is cleaned off and you give me some answers, I'm here.' I turned to Carousel and looked him dead in his wrinkled nondescript face. ‘Jack Kerouac?'

‘Yes.'

There was an exhaled groan from Chicco and the air smelt of their beer breath.

‘Why are you here and not in New York or something taking credit for those fucking great stories you keep writing? I've been reading them for a few years and then, well, I read your books and saw some things that sounded so similar. I did some more reading and I decided my suspicions were right.'

‘I'm exactly where I want to be,' he replied with a steady kind of wry smile that said he was
nervous as hell about all this but a bit resigned and expectant as well, wanting something, may-be even a bit of excitement in that dry place.

‘Surely I'm not the first person to figure this out?' I knew I couldn't be that smart, I was just a girl who read a lot of books and then milked dairy cows.

‘You're the first to turn up here.' Chicco laughed, ‘Other than a few locals who think I'm an ex-US president.'

‘That's because you told them you were,' Carousel said with disgust.

‘At least I don't take advantage of the teenage titties.' He smirked.

‘Now that's just bullshit and you'll give young Lulu an incorrect picture of my proclivities.' He turned to me, still smoking. ‘I have taken a few lovers it's true—but hardly as ‘barely legal' as Chic would have you believe—they were no younger than forty.'

‘I don't care at all about how you live and what you do, I just want to know why you're pretending to be something you're not, cos you never struck me as the pretence type, all that talk
of truth and straight from the brain to the body and all that shit doesn't add up to living in secret in the back end of nowhere.' I watched Jack and could see there was some sort of nerve I'd struck on him somewhere.

‘Pretending to be dead, you mean?' Jack snatched the smoking toke from Chicco's curly fingers and took a long wheezing puff that ended in a doubled-up attack of coughing. ‘We are all doing that, sunshine.'

‘Don't try and distract me with philosophy, I'm immune.'

He coughed and smirked and glanced at Chicco in a shared amusement I didn't get.

‘I was being literal, sweetmeat. I'm long past philosophising.'

It took me a minute to figure what he meant and it struck me harder than any moose might have in a lifetime. They were both dead. Both of them pretending to be dead but out there living away, writing and drinking tequila and fucking Mexicans of every age and playing games in their own hacienda with dust and expensive furniture and more expensive beer. It took me slowly, I
admit, cos I'd been so focused on finding Jack and talking to him about all of it and chastising his selfish hermit life that I had never thought they might, all of them, be here and I looked at the wrinkles, deep as those ocean trenches, and I knew them both.

‘You're...? You're…Neal Cassaday?' I was whispering now, the ghosts were waiting.

There was a crack at the window like Christ was returning and we all looked but me, being closest, I jumped back and found myself staring at the falling glass like some spell had been broken.

‘Ah,' Jack murmured, unconcerned and nodded with an understanding I didn't have. ‘I think Salinger found Capote. He's gonna be one angry motherfucker.'

I glanced back at the broken window in time to see the skinniest, dustiest, meanest looking elephant in that half of the world charging headlong, through the window, through the wall, trumpeting his bizarre truth to the world and ready to end.

2

 

 

What about the Mexicans?

 

 

T
URNS OUT THOSE WHITEWASHED STUCCO WALLS
were quite a bit stronger than they appeared, all crumbly and such, and the elephant may have remembered himself on some plain in the African savannah, all glistening and mighty, but now he was nothing but a shadow in the Mexican sun and he knocked himself out cold on the next charge and lay in a rippled dust-pool in the sliver of shade that fell from the hacienda. One tusk, the only one that had survived that trip from Africa, a story that will plague my curiosity till I die, pointed straight up at the sky and gave me the fucking almighty finger for the havoc I had wreaked on his antlered fellow inmate of that weird world.

I was in the shower, having told the old demons I was not going anywhere with moose
and plaster on me and that if I didn't hurry and wash up I was gonna stick my arms out to the sides as I set hard and they'd never get me out the damn door. Chicco thought I was a funny ‘daddyfucker' and told me where the bathroom and towels were. The bathroom was as clean and new as any five-star hotel and the towels were plush and thick, but the tiny warped closet they were nestled in was splintered and pulling off its hinges, and for the life of me I couldn't get the damn thing open without bracing against the back wall and after, I had to kick the fucked-up thing shut. These people were such a quirky mix of rich and poor that I couldn't really figure if they'd made it, or not. Any part of the house they actually had to use was made of the best and most expensive, like the massive thousand-jet spa bath in the corner, and the extra high padded toilet for guys who couldn't, for fuck, sit any lower than hip height and ever expect to leave their shite behind. And yet the rest of the house was peeling apart and falling in on itself. The bathroom roof was mouldy and dipping a bit in the middle like it was gonna slowly and
heavily fold down on me while I was standing in the bath with a handheld jet squirting moose brain down the huge gurgling drain. The bits that mattered, on me and in the bathroom, were clean, and the skin creams and medicines and laxatives, which were locked in the glass-front medicine cabinet, looked expensive. Even the shampoo was some medical miracle that would apparently Rapunzel me if I used it regularly. It felt kind of like they had carefully decided what mattered and what absolutely didn't and would have nothing to do with Column B. Toilet paper? Matters like fucking heart medicine—sixteen-ply silk, spun personally by light-skinned Indians. Denture paste? A reason to keep eating—forty-five dollars printed on the sterling silver box. The bathroom door? Optional, unpainted, one hinge missing, hung, impotent and shrivelled in the hallway. Walls? Painted a crisp white in 1920 and that'll bloody well do them!

I tried to find something to wear in my ripped bag and settled for underwear I'd only worn once and the only T-shirt that hadn't been moosed—a red Che Guevara number that I'd bought for five
pesos in the last town. It was a bit ripped, both by the explosion and whoever originally owned it, and it smelled like weed and flatulence, but since the whole house mimicked that scent anyway I decided it must be Mexico in general—all those fucking black beans—and I pulled the T-shirt over my head. It ripped a little round the neck and I looked in the faded, black-spotted and cracked mirror above the shining porcelain sink and saw a tragic, frizz-haired little girl. Pathetic. I'd only been away from home a week and already I looked like I'd hookered my way into the gutters of the Third World—just like my stepmother promised me would happen if I ‘wandered off again'. I hadn't of course, I'm still a virgin, if blow jobs don't count, which I don't think they do cos they certainly didn't do anything for me, and I can't imagine any money being worth that—I'd rather beg at a church, something I've found to be very effective in my wanderings. Ask some fat Father for food and he'll get you a few nights with a nice family and all the middle-class grease you can eat. Being the skinny, bone-addled type, I inspire sympathy
on a dime, especially if I pull my long hair up and look fourteen and don't let on that I'm
not
some sad step-daddy-fucked teen running from a junky mum and vanished father. If I tell the truth—which I only did once, not my name of course, but that dad was a millionaire beef cattle farmer on a thousand-acre property in the fertile green hills of northern New South Wales—I get lectures on honouring my parents and how fucking worried they must be. Okay, Father Rick didn't swear, but the lecture was long, and involved him telling me to wait while he called the police, and I had to run like fuck on fire to get to the next train station and as far away as I could. That was the last trip though, on my way up through Oregon to Seattle. This trip, I had been much better at covering my tracks and leaving a million written assurances for my overprotective parents that I would be fine and I would be away no more than a couple of months and I'd gotten ahead in all my school work, even reading next term's novel which was a piece of Austen shit. No Kerouac for my school, my teacher said it wasn't literature.