Road Fever (13 page)

“In Ushuaia.”

“Look at it this way: we’re aware of the dangers, we have our priorities straight, and we’re going to have fun.”

“Smiling planes falling out of the sky,” I said, “giddy gasoline bandits, riots, tire busters …”

“The open highway,” Garry said. “The song of rubber on the road.”

I looked out the kitchen window to our truck, which was parked on the sand a few feet away. It looked sleek, and the black and white paint scheme made it seem faintly ominous.

“Twenty-six days or less,” I said.

“Another victory for man and machine against time and the elements.”

“And it’ll be fun.”

“Fun,” Garry said, and he began telling me about a pamphlet he once saw as a teenager: something titled
Dating Dos and Don’ts
.

“The Do guy,” Garry said, “borrows Dad’s car, which was, I remember, a ’56 Buick. He pulls up at his date’s house and introduces himself to the parents. He has a wonderful time at the dance, takes the girl out for a soda afterwards, then drives her right home. We fade out with them standing on the doorstep.

“The Don’t guy borrows Dad’s car, pulls up at his date’s house, and sits there, honking the horn. He’s driving a ’56 Buick convertible. After the dance, we see him in the car, with the top down. There are people in the backseat and the guy’s driving so fast that his hair is streaming out behind him in the wind. He’s not even looking at the road. He’s completely turned around, talking to people in the backseat, and they’re going about a hundred miles an hour.

“ ‘Good clear night,’ ” he says. “ ‘Let’s see what this baby’ll do.’ ”

We both glanced out at the truck.

“It’s a ritual with me,” Garry said, “the way I like to start these record attempts.”

“What?”

“With those words: ‘Let’s see what this baby’ll do.’ ”

“But, I mean, the way you described it, the guy saying that is a guy about to die.”

“And then when we get to Alaska in twenty-five days, we say, with great dignity and a small degree of modesty, the words that will catapult us into history.”

“ ‘Where’s the nearest bar’?”

“No, no, no.”

“ ‘We need many women now’?”

“No. We say: ‘Another victory for man and machine against time and the elements.’ ”

W
HEN I AM CONFINED
to my home in Montana, there are high winds driving fierce ground blizzards, and the cattle lie dead in the fields, frozen stiff, with their hooves in the air. Or so it seems. Most anytime I leave home, however, the weather turns spitefully glorious. I become convinced I live in splendor and feel compelled to wonder, in a state of pitiful and romantic melancholy, why the hell I would ever want to leave.

At eighty miles an hour, the closest airport is half an hour away, over the Bozeman Pass, where Indians once attacked miners attracted to the Montana gold fields. And the miners, of course, sought to kill those Indians. One of the least obvious ways they did that was to slaughter the buffalo, to destroy, as General Sheridan put it, “the Indian’s commissary.”

It was quite early in the morning the day I left for the end of the earth. The sun had just risen, so that the east was on fire and the snow on the Bridger Range to the west was watermelon pink. The air tasted crisp and clean, and the cotton woods along the creek bottoms were just beginning their autumn blush. Pastel streaks colored the monumental dome of sky above, and a slanting shaft of sun illuminated a stand of aspen set in a pocketed groin of the mountain, so that the trees seemed translucent as they shivered in a slight breeze.

Leave this to get on an airplane? An airplane!

In Chicago, some months earlier, I had purchased a Banana Republic khaki shirt at Water Tower Place and wore it out of the store. Across the hall, there was a cutlery shop. I examined several survival knives which might be used to Zorro assailants. I needed one with a sheath that would fit inside my pants, a knife that felt comfortable in my hand,
one that was double-bladed and sharp. Perhaps the clerk was impressed with me: a guy who needs a close-quarters weapon and knows what he is looking for; a mild-mannered 007 kind of a guy with nice taste in shirts.

The Tekna diving knife seemed a good choice. It was flashy enough, a shining silver thing, and the sheath had a series of round holes in it so that it was very light. I felt the heft of the blade, did a modest Zorro, tested the edge by shaving a thin layer of nail off my thumb, then deftly slipped the knife back into the sheath and sliced off a small portion of my left index finger, which was stuck inside one of the holes in the sheath.

The clerk, to his credit, did not immediately burst into convulsive squeals of uncontrolled laughter. He impassively handed me a Kleenex from a box he kept under the counter for just such minor amputations.

“Maybe,” he said, handing me a knife in a solid sheath, “you’d prefer this model.”

I had blood on my Banana Republic expedition shirt and felt as if the remainder of my life would continue apace and not be filled with satisfaction or spiritual enlightenment. Someone once described this feeling of unease and perceived mortality as the sound of rat claws scrabbling at the edge of the universe.

That perception, a sickly syrup of regret, returned under the impossible deep-water blue of the Montana sky as I drove.

S
O, OF COURSE
, it was raining a sad, dirty rain in New York. Everything seemed dingy and polluted, though I’ve traveled enough to understand that my interior landscape colors the exterior.

Garry Sowerby was staying at the JFK Hilton with his wife. They were sitting on a made-up bed in their room watching the Miss America pageant on TV and Garry was making snide comments about the intellectual attainments of the contestants. He was more caustic than seemed absolutely necessary.

I sensed that he had also heard the scrabbling of those cosmic rat claws. We were unprepared. Someone was going to get hurt. South American perpetrators would laugh in the face of our four-inch knives. Bad guys would rip us open with Uzis. They’d use our own knives to carve rude messages into various portions of our anatomies. Nothing would go right. We would encounter unpleasant circumstances. My only reading material for the better part of two months would consist of a single ungrammatical sentence:

Remorse before the fact is a common preadventure sensation. There is an overwhelming sense that you left the water running in the bathroom. You have, in fact, neglected something so simple and self-evident that people didn’t see any reason to tell you about it: the Wall of Flames in Chile, for instance, or the Big Hole in the Earth that Swallows Trucks just south of Río Gallegos, the River of Acid, the meteorite Firing Range, the Living Dinosaurs …

Garry called his mother, who was taking care of Lucy and Natalie. He was about to travel to the end of the earth. Soon he might find himself in a situation where it would be necessary to Zorro gasoline bandits. That jittery thought, along with the pervading sense of regret, rendered him suddenly sentimental.

I imagine he saw, in his mind’s eye, an idyllic vision of New Brunswick: his parents’ home at Hopewell Cape, a house surrounded by flowers and set high on a green hillside above the Bay of Fundy. It is an airy place, where sunlight falls through large windows onto polished wood floors. One room is dominated by an old-style divan upon which there are dozen of antique dolls in their starched white dresses. It is in this sunny room, among the dolls, that Garry envisioned Lucy, dressed in lace and crinoline, waiting breathlessly for a call from daddy.

Lucy, in point of fact, was sitting in front of the television watching
Zig Zag
, a
Sesame Street
-type program. It was her favorite show and she was used to having her father call from all over the world.

“Dad,” she scolded, “
Zig Zag
’s on.”

“It broke my heart,” Garry said.

Garry told me that he had finally arranged for insurance which would be worth the carnet value of the truck in case of a complete loss. It had cost him $6,000 for sixty days, with a $5,000 deductible. The terms did not seem a vote of confidence in our planning, skill, or Latin America in general.

After Kellye Cash was crowned Miss America in a great spectacle of emotion and perfect teeth, Garry and I took the truck to the Flying Tigers cargo terminal at JFK International. It was a hardworking place, not clean, functionally inelegant, and the computers at every desk carried greasy finger smudges on the keyboards. We arranged to have the truck put on the plane. It would cost $13,000 to ship it to Buenos Aires. From there, we would drive to the end of the world, take a deep breath, turn around, and begin the long drive north.

When Garry started negotiating with Tigers, he was told it would cost $18,000 to airfreight the truck to Buenos Aires. He checked Lufthansa. It was less, but we had to go via Frankfurt. He went back to Tigers. With this sort of Ping-Pong negotiation, he got the price down to $13,000 for the truck and for us.

We still had a place for a logo on the truck—a prize position on the crash bar (and I wanted the growling Tigers logo for ram-and-drive-through ambush situations)—but none of the freight companies were interested in sponsoring us in return for such excellent placement.

Garry had decided that the crash-bar position that he had been saving as a negotiations ploy should go to Stanadyne.

“How come?” I asked.

“Joe Boissonneault has been real helpful. And he gave me a bulletproof vest.”

“I got one from a literary agent,” I said.

“Why would a literary agent need a bulletproof vest?” Garry asked. He didn’t understand the publishing business. Not even a little bit.

We went back to the Hilton, slept for a few hours, taxied back to the airport, paid our freight bill, and loaded the truck onto the plane. It was a 747 and there were metal rollers all over what had once been the passenger compartment of the plane. Between the rollers were thick rubber wheels. Cargo is loaded onto pallets, then forklifted onto another pallet that hoists the freight up a sloping escalator to the cargo compartment, where men roll the loaded pallets neatly into the plane. The truck was put on with no difficulty. It was surrounded, on all sides, by great columns of fifty-five-gallon drums containing insecticide.

Garry and I had first-class seats in the upstairs bubble. There was no door between the cockpit and the cabin. Passengers on the flight, aside from Sowerby and myself, included an on-board mechanic and a pricing agent for Tigers who said they take a lot of horses to Argentina. He was used to horses and their handlers. We described ourselves as international rally drivers.

Cargo planes are generally scheduled to take off and land at slack times, especially at major airports. We took off at four in the morning.

The inside of the cockpit was not shiny clean. There was a pencil sharpener on a shelf and it was grimy, in the way that a pencil sharpener in a factory foreman’s office might be grimy. No need for shiny-clean planes. You wanted something that would fly and you didn’t need to convince passengers it would fly because it was clean. The plane, according to the pilot, had 60,000 hours in the air. (Let’s see, divide by 24 in a day for, uh, 2,500 days, divide by 365 days in a year to get, holy
shit, damn near 7 years in the air. Seven years 30,000 feet above the surface of the earth. No wonder the pencil sharpener looked tired.)

We took on more freight at Miami where a cargo agent from Flying Tigers said that the plane was also making an intermediate stop in Manaus, Brazil, and that it was his impression that we would need visas. Mine was expired. He clicked his tongue.

“But we’re only there for an hour or two,” I said.

“This is a cargo flight,” he replied. He was a black man with a slight Caribbean tinkle to his speech. “Let me put it this way, mon: do you drive your car without a spare tire?”

So it was a nervous flight over the Amazon jungle to Manaus. How could I have forgotten to renew my visa for Brazil? I would be deported, flummoxed before we even got to the starting line.

A
MAN WHO IMAGINES
he has visa troubles will find the carpet of jungle flowing below a plane ominous. Natch. The trees—Garry said it, but everyone does when they see the jungle from the air—the trees looked like giant stalks of broccoli, closely spaced, oddly placed. It was very colorful in a green sort of way, which is to say, while everything was green and seemed to stretch out beyond imagination, there were a lot of different shades of green. There were small ponds and lakes and shiny-black forest rivers that generated their own small pockets of clouds so that the whole of the jungle seemed to be steaming.

There were roads down there, roads I’d driven in the rainy season which, the locals say, lasts four hundred days a year. Blue-black clouds, the color of a bad bruise, congregate in the sky and conspire for several minutes. Lightning, striking internally, gives these clouds a garish neon aspect. They are bullying, operatic, Wagnerian clouds, all low, ominous rumbles and thundering crescendos.

The rain starts with surprisingly large drops, with fat globules of water the size of a quarter, an apple, a cantaloupe. Soon enough, water simply falls in sheets, and the sound is that of a big river at high water. Even at midday, a rumbling twilight descends on the forest. Streams form and cross the road, or flow down the right-of-way, or puddle up in large lakes anywhere the land sinks. It is a strange, dark-green, sub-aqueous world.

The road I drove was a red clay strip scraped out of the forest. There were pockets of greasy gumbo mud and holes full of sick tomato soup, all of it half underwater so that the brakes—slick with gumbo—refused to operate in the conventional sense. The surface of the road was a sort of muddy red quicksand, and it seemed wise to drive fast, to surf the
red glop. There was a sense that stopping could be fatal, that the vehicle would simply sink beneath the surface of the earth. The perceived necessity to drive fast and the complete lack of brakes combined to produce a provocative sense of impending doom. I had never before worried about being buried alive while driving thirty miles an hour. Usually, in a car, there are other things to worry about.