We Ate the Road Like Vultures (7 page)

The big one smiled a slow long smile that turned his eyes into dragons and said something to his men. They went back to their own truck and pulled a cable from the front, attaching it to the underbelly of the capsized one and turning on a winch. It must have hurt as the truck came off him, cos Adolf gripped my hand like a vice and closed his eyes, tiny lines appearing around his full mouth. When it went over his feet and hit the ground I saw how deep in the sand-bank Adolf was buried and I had a flame of hope,
despite the sea-purple bruise on his stomach and lower chest and the twist of his kneecap. He pushed himself slowly to a sitting position and felt his legs a hand's length at a time, stopping at his knee and wincing as he pushed his loose kneecap back to where it should have been. I was trying to rip a bit of my T-shirt, which was suddenly all stout and industrial, when one of the cops threw him a dirty bandage from their truck. I didn't realise they had even moved, so focused was I on whether Adolf would die as soon as the blood flowed back into his body. I had seen enough medical shows, and even a cow caught under a fallen tree, to know that death could creep in at any second, even when you thought you were home free. I helped him lift his foot so he could bandage his knee and he smiled weakly, ‘It's a bad knee anyway, I did this skiing when I was fourteen and, once again, when I was seventeen. It will be fine in a week or two.' I pointed silently to his belly and he smiled. ‘Not even any pain, just a bruise. No yoga tomorrow.' I blushed as I realised he had seen me watching him.

The captain gestured to his men who pulled Adolf to his feet, not roughly, but without any care for his injuries, and dragged him to the back of their truck where they pushed and pulled his body up onto the tray. He lay back and was silent, asleep or unconscious, I couldn't tell. They dragged another body from the cabin, one with a conspicuous bullet hole in its forehead, and threw it into the back next to Adolf where they both lay still and twisted. I had that sudden wash of horror where you know you've done something stupid and you have no way of ever going back to the moment before you fucked up your world. I leaned forward and vomited, trying to get my tangled hair out of the way and wretching so hard I ended up on my knees.

‘Get up, girl and get in the truck or I will have them do it.' The captain had a tight sort of smile on his face. ‘I know you didn't steal from the bank. I know you didn't fire the weapons. I know a great deal about you. I'm not going to kill you, not even for being a stupid Australian girl.'

I snapped up at that cos there was no way he should know a fact like that, and we stared at each
other for a long time, his eyes with that disturbing glint, not quite evil but without goodness, and me with blood over my face and my hair everywhere and with as much mystery and dignity as I could muster. I shook off the other cop and limped over to the police truck which was so damn high I could hardly get in by myself, but I did it with the sheer force of the anger and fear I had inside me, and I wondered, as I sat back in the cigar-soaked seat, if there was any way I could possibly get out of this mess of Mexico and Germans and searching for Jack and Jesus. I wondered if our insignificant, ‘white person with lots of money and time for introspection', quests were the whole reason the world was a fucked-up mess—people like me stomping all over other people's secrets and lives and quests and making it all a sloppy pile of mud and piss. And then I fell asleep.

5

 

 

You did not shoot a bank worker or steal thousands of dollars. You did not fire on the police. But you were there. And that is stupid. Many of the most stupid people in the world were just…there.

 

 

T
HERE ARE DIFFERENT WAYS TO WAKE UP
around the world—the cows mooing up the path to the milk shed, the heat rising up from the ground in Africa, the sun pouring through the window in London, a bucket of filthy, watery, something-like-shit poured on your head in a Mexican cell. I sat up and tried to get the stuff out of my mouth and eyes knowing if I didn't I would be shitting the stuff myself for a week. A new but completely identical cop was standing at the door smiling, a different tooth missing, a shorter cigarette clamped in his lips, the same tattoo of a bare-breasted sigñorita on his forearm.

‘Levantense,' he gestured me out of the cell.

I dragged myself out, finding new horrors in the twisted muscles of my back and neck before
forgetting them entirely as he slapped me hard on my arse. He led me down a narrow corridor between a row of six or seven cells. They were small, dirty and dark, and each had only one person crouched or lying on the floor, silent and bloodied. The silence lasted only until we reached a large iron door at the end of the hallway, and when he opened it I was assaulted by the roar of almost one hundred people crowded into a huge room, another cell, yelling and pushing, some women but mostly hard and drunken men. The wave of fear that kept lapping around me swelled and washed me backwards, and I would have run if the guard had not planted a large hand squarely on my back and pushed me into the cell. I turned on my front foot to see him closing the door and I yelled back at him, ‘Hey, my friend, the German, where is he? Is he okay?' But the door was shut and I was alone with one hundred people in a Mexican jail, all of whom, except the twenty per cent who were comatose and the two people fucking on the floor in the far corner, were looking at me with faces full of disdain.

I put my head down and worked my way over to a sliver of empty wall, leaning back and sliding down until I was in a squat near the floor. I didn't sit directly on the floor cos there was a trail of liquid from a toilet hole in a corner that traced its way across most areas of the cell leaving an acrid scent of urine to burn nostrils and eyes and making it impossible to sit. The couple in the corner, a middle-aged man and a woman who could have been twenty or fifty, had finished their wrestling match and she was smoothing down a faded colourful skirt and moving to offer her services to the next group of men, though no one took her up on it that time, perhaps for lack of money, or perhaps the wet stain on her skirt was enough to turn them away. I would have been happier to have them watching her than their new object of interest, me, and I kept a careful watch through the hair I let tumble over my face as they talked about me and made lewd gestures.

I wondered where all these people came from, what they did, if they had done anything other than get drunk or piss-off the police, and if I
would be here for long. I knew I would eventually have to use that toilet and the more I thought about it the more the tiny urge to urinate became a pressing need and then a consuming thought and eventually, my life's calling. I watched four or five men go over to the corner and piss, most of it missing the small concrete hole, but I hadn't seen a woman there yet. Most of the women were wearing billowing skirts, nice discreet tents, better than my jeans, which would have to be around my ankles for me to manage. I couldn't remember pissing in front of anyone in years, even female friends. Finally I knew, it was piss in the hole or wear it down my legs for however many hours, days or years I was to be in here. I stood and made my way through the crowd to the hole as discreetly as I could, but being the only non-Mexican person, I drew everyone's eyes as I dropped my jeans with trembling hands and tried to squat over the hole with any sense of poise, dignity and simple balance. I failed in all three and at one point in the cascade and had to put my hand on the floor to steady myself, possibly contracting both HIV and cholera. I don't think
anyone got any sort of look at my bag of tricks but my bare arse garnered the attention of perhaps eighty people, and the sheer pale glow of it inspired the sort of awe usually reserved for weaponry and wealth in that part of the world. One man grinned at me with both of his teeth showing and clapped as I finished and stood and pulled everything up and trying to cover up as quickly as possible. I smiled wryly and bowed to my audience who responded with scorn and disgust, though one group of three men examined me in a way that reduced me to primal terror and I stumbled back to my bare patch of wall and huddled down into a ball, hoping they would stay where they were.

I thought of Adolf and knew he might be dead, that bruise on his belly spoke, even to my medical ignorance of internal injuries, and I doubted he was being seen by a doctor, but he was clearly not in good enough shape to be in this cell with me. Here was a man I barely knew and I was already devastated by his potential death, perhaps cos it was partly my fault, not a huge part, but somehow I knew it was me that had
drawn a bank robbery upon us, not Adolf who would be more likely to win a foreign lottery and donate it to a rebel leader fighting for freedom against a corrupt government.

The men were still watching me, whispering, though they stopped when a guard opened the cell door and pushed in a large tub of water and a bucket full of small ripped-up hunks of bread. I knew I shouldn't touch the water but I dived for the bread as quickly as everyone else, kicking and clawing in a way I hadn't imagined possible, until I felt a hunk in my hand and scrambled backwards, head down, to devour it in my corner. The tub of water sloshed all over the place in the melee, and a bloody fight erupted between two older men. Nobody came to stop it and no one in the cell bothered with more than curiosity as the men bit and tore at each other, screaming and cursing and finally moaning in pain. The larger man took a bite out of the smaller man's eyebrow that left a gaping bloody wound, and the smaller man, blinded, curled immediately into a ball to protect himself from the rain of blows and kicks that followed. The larger man
kept kicking the smaller man's body and legs and back and head long after he was still. Only the sudden and putrid smell of shit let us know the moment he died and of course, cos I was in hell, nobody came to remove the body, it just lay there hour after hour in the middle of a crowded room that, despite being dark and made of thick concrete, was still hotter than most places on the planet, and whether or not the body started to decay, that sweltering pile of shit made our eyes run and, a few of the weaker of us, heave.

To make my life even less bearable the whore, the toothless, matted black-haired whore, found herself another customer and, while they did move to the corner of the room and the room was very crowded, I could still hear, and, unfortunately, see, as she leaned against the wall, hitched up her skirt to reveal her skinny bruised buttocks and let him pound into her for the longest ten minutes of my incarcerated life. It was a car crash, I truly didn't want to look but it was very hard not to, her head down and hair covering her face, his buttocks over the top of his sack pants clenching and pounding, his dirty
hands gripping her hips and his breath puffing and panting in time with his lust. I had never seen anyone have sex outside a television screen and it was the most raw, sad thing I had witnessed, far less dignified than the man who was kicked to death on the floor and lay dissolving in his own acid shit. I watched a porn movie once and found it so terrifyingly sad that I cried, those girls with their wide-open, made-up faces begging for it with their mouths, begging for a quick death with their eyes. It turned me off sex for weeks. Well, maybe days, I am still a teenager, I think about sex most of the time though my bubble of lust and romance was being rapidly burst by the couple in the corner. He moaned suddenly and clutched her to him, rising like a cobra and collapsing onto her back so she had to hold tighter to the wall to keep herself from hitting the floor. He pulled himself out quickly, slapped her buttocks and handed her a piece of bread from his filthy pants' pocket. Without letting the long hair reveal her face, she grabbed the piece of bread with one hand and smoothed down her skirt with the other, retreating to another piece of bare wall
and sinking down to my level. I saw her eyes for a moment and she was angry. Angrier than most of the world knows about. I put my head down and let it rest on my knees, thoughts banging the sides of my skull. To fuck for bread she must have been in there for weeks and, since nobody knew where I was, I might be doing it myself in a few days. I felt nauseous for a whole variety of reasons and my stomach and bowels were starting to clench in that Mexican way. I knew if it got worse it would not be fear but some sort of gastric torment that would see me back over the toilet hole in a hell of a lot more distress than the piss had cost me. I tried to get a grip of myself, but when one of the younger men came over and squatted in front of me asking questions in Spanish, and touching my damp twisted hair with his hands, I panicked. I reached out and slapped his arm away. His friends laughed and whistled and he pushed me off my balance against the wall, one hand holding my shoulder down, the other grabbing my breast. I responded with the most violence I could manage, which was to vomit powerfully in his face and chest. He let go immediately, kicked me
hard in the thigh and went back to his howling friends trying to brush off his clothes. The smell was hideous and I covered my face with my hands to try and get away from it before I threw up again. The smell of the dead body was still much worse, so I wasn't vilified as much as despised, but I sat still and silent for so long I couldn't tell if I slept or not. Finally the cell door opened and more water and a tub of beans was pushed through. The inmates ate it with their hands, protecting their places with slapping so nobody noticed when the guard grabbed my upper arm and heaved me out the door. I shook him off and walked, as best I could, in front of him while he sniggered and poked his finger into my back every few seconds. We reached a door and I waited for him to open it, which he didn't, and we stood there for an interminable amount of time, his finger maintaining an unreasonable amount of pressure on my lower back and my mind wandering around all the dreadful and fantastical options of what could be behind the door. My sojourn in the Mexican penal system so
far suggested it would be nothing of any solace or comfort.