Road Fever (37 page)

“Ought to be tying up in Panama City in a couple of hours,” Frank said.

At nine that evening, the
Stella Lykes
was in port. Longshoremen began working immediately, and we waited for them to off-load the truck. Frank, who hadn’t been around for some time, emerged from the crew’s quarters wearing an iridescent gold suit, gold boots, and a wide-brimmed gold hat. He carried a polished wooden walking stick with a gold handle. On board, Frank was a man who wore T-shirts and faded jeans.

“You boys ought to come along,” Frank said.

“We need to be sure they off-load the truck.”

“Be a shame,” Frank said, “to miss the flatback factory here.”

“Next time, buddy.”

An hour later the container carrying the truck was unloaded and trucked over to a large customs shed. Garry and I stood on the pier, shaking hands, and I assured him that nothing could go wrong now. We could clear customs in a couple of hours tomorrow, head north, and have the record in our pocket inside of two weeks. About that time, Frank appeared out of the darkness, flanked by two Panamanian policemen. He seemed to be under arrest.

“Forget my shore pass,” he explained.

We followed him back onto the
Stella Lykes
. “Maybe you boys want to go into the lounge, have a drink,” Frank said.

“We’re driving tomorrow,” Garry said.

Frank shook his head: negative on that.

“What?” I asked.

“See, you boys shoulda come with me. I met this girl. She was a master of tongue fu.”

“Frank, what are you saying about driving tomorrow?”

“I’m saying you ain’t gonna be doing any. This girl, she could …”

“Frank!”

“Well,” Frank said, “it seems that, uh, tomorrow is, well, it’s a national holiday here. National Revolution Day. They tell me customs don’t work for sure, not on National Revolution Day.”

N
ATIONAL
R
EVOLUTION
D
AY
, I suppose, is an occasion of great merrymaking in Panama. I can tell you that customs officers do not work on National Revolution Day.

We were staying in a hotel in Panama City, just off a major road flanked almost entirely by bank buildings, twenty and thirty stories high. Swiss bank. Bank of this country, bank of that. In the distance,
down the empty streets, I could see a pair of golden arches. It could have been a street in any major North American city—indeed, the official currency in Panama is the U.S. dollar—but everything was closed and there was no one on the streets. It was like an Ingmar Bergman film, with ceiling fans.

My room had a TV and I watched CNN for a while. Bork would not be confirmed for the Supreme Court, the Minnesota Twins had won the American League pennant, there was a hurricane approaching Florida. I lay there in bed and the same news kept happening: Bork, Twins, hurricane.

Garry called from his room, which was next to mine.

“Wouldn’t it be terrible,” he said, “to be in jail?”

Bork, Twins, hurricane, Bork, Twins …

Our rooms were on the third floor. Across the street was a three-story pink apartment building badly in need of paint. There were no windows in the building: balconies, which could be closed off by a curtain, opened up into a combination kitchen and living room. I could see women cooking dinner and men sitting shirtless on the balconies, drinking beer. The walls of the building were covered with graffiti:
CHANGE NOW
, the words read, and
ENOUGH
!

I assumed that these messages had reference to General Manuel Noriega, head of the Panamanian Defense Forces, the man who ran the country.

Just outside my room, sitting on the sill of the hallway window, were two men in their thirties wearing white polo shirts with alligators on them. They had been there all day, sitting beside the kind of white suitcase used to carry a computer. The suitcase was open, and some sort of electronic listening gear was arranged to pick up conversations from the “change now” apartments. The men were sitting out in the open, in a public hallway, and didn’t seem to care who saw them.

Sure, we listen in on the conversations of private citizens. So what?

I
T WAS A HOLIDAY
, and there wouldn’t even be a riot. Riots only happen on workdays. This is a rule.

On our last trip to Panama, there had been the electric threat of riots in the streets. The middle class wanted badly to get rid of Noriega who they saw as increasingly bad for business. The fact that he had had political opponents murdered and dismembered did not endear him to the people I met, and his reputation as a drug profiteer was an embarrassment.

“He makes fifty thousand dollars a year as head of the Defense
Forces,” one executive told me. We were having lunch at an exclusive club overlooking the Pacific. “So how come he owns at least three houses worth a million dollars each?”

The executive had picked us up at our hotel in an expensive four-wheel-drive vehicle. He apologized for being late, but he felt there would be a riot that afternoon—perhaps the government would fall—and he thought that it would be wise to take his money out of the bank. Just in case. The cash was stashed in the back of the vehicle, in a large leather suitcase.

As we drove to the club, past the row of banks, I saw hundreds of people standing in line to make similar withdrawals. Workers were putting plywood boards over the plate-glass windows of the banks in preparation for the afternoon’s riot.

Did the executive expect to participate?

Sure. He’d stand behind barricades and wave a white flag, the symbol of opposition. He’d pound pots and pans like everyone else. That is, if a riot developed.

Were there a lot of wealthy executives rioting in the street?

Yes.

That afternoon, there had been a heavy tropical downpour and the riot was postponed. It was to erupt several days later, after I left. There had been a sense, then, that the general could not survive.

Now, two months later, the opposition seemed dispirited. Noriega was too cunning, too clever. He was entrenched.

F
OR WANT OF ANYTHING BETTER
to do, Garry and I went to the hotel restaurant for an early dinner. It had been an excruciating afternoon.

“This,” Garry said, “is the worst day of my life.”

We discussed the possibility of going out. There were any number of enterprising nightclubs all over the city. On our last trip, we had been to an art deco bar where women on stage, dressed in crossed bandoliers and little else, did a close-order drill with toy rifles to the music of the “Colonel Bogey March.” All the customers in the place were men in suits who seemed to consider the drill the apogee of classy eroticism. Forever afterward, whenever I wanted to make Garry laugh, all I had to do was whistle the opening bars to the “Colonel Bogie March.”

Which is what I did at dinner. Da-da, da da da dat dat dada.

“We can’t,” Garry said.

“I know.”

“I can’t stand this,” Garry said. He was actually suffering.

Which is the final irony of the adventure-driving business: on a down day, it is wise to sit in the hotel room, alone—Bork, Twins, hurricane—on the off chance that you could get into some kind of unexpected trouble just walking around. The essence of our adventure was to avoid adventure at all costs.

Garry called from his room.

“I just threw up,” he said.

T
HE PHONES
in Panama City worked just fine. You could dial an international call from the hotel room. At five-thirty the next morning, Garry was speaking to Jane in Moncton. Could she please get in touch with the Canadian embassy in Costa Rica? Find out if there was any word from Honduras? The director-general of the Institute of Tourism there, Melissa Valenzuela-Treffot, had promised us a letter of recommendation to smooth our passage through customs. It had been three months since we talked to her. Where was the letter?

We were waiting on another letter from Mayda Denueda, the director of international promotion for the Nicaraguan Institute of Tourism, called Intourismo. (Yes, the Nicaraguan Institute of Tourism.) Another woman, Chistita Caldera, who worked for Intourismo, had made a vague promise to meet us at the southern border of that country. Could that be confirmed?

Jane had been working on these matters but there had been no one at the Canadian embassy in Costa Rica yesterday. It had been a national holiday there as well: Columbus Day.

One other thing: Jane said that GMC expected us in Dallas at nine next Monday morning for a press conference. The public-relations firm organizing the event was adamant. If there were a bunch of reporters waiting for us and we didn’t arrive on time, or at all, it would look very bad indeed. Our absence could be blamed on the truck and not on the fact that, for instance, we were enjoying a few carefree days in some Central American jail. Or that we had been shot and were hiding in the jungle, bleeding and without food.

No, the public-relations firm’s thought was that our absence at the
press conference might be attributed to mechanical failings in the Sierra. “In its first real-world test,” the nightmare AP wire copy might read, “a GMC Sierra driven by a team seeking a world speed record on the Pan-American Highway failed to appear as scheduled today in Dallas. Spokesmen for the automotive giant could not explain why the Sierra, newly redesigned at a cost of 2.8 billion dollars, could not be present at the press conference that had been scheduled for almost a week. ‘We don’t know where the truck is,’ one obviously bitter executive said, ‘but one of the drivers has kids, and we know where they are.’ ”

Jane was being pressured: could we promise, absolutely, to be in Dallas six days from now?

Well, let’s see: all we had to do was endure an unspecified amount of time in Panama City’s document hell getting the truck out of a locked metal box in the port. Once on the road, we had to whip through six borders and twelve sets of formalities. One of those borders—the one between Nicaragua and Honduras—was a war zone.

The public-relations firm wanted a definite yes or no, today.

Hey, no problem. We’d be there, nine Monday morning, sharp.

Jane said she’d call the Canadian embassy in Costa Rica and tell them we’d be there sometime in the middle of the night. Garry said he would call her back from the hotel once the truck had cleared customs.

L
UIS
P
AZ
C
ÁRDENAS
, the director of Industrial Equipment and Motors in Panama, took us on our tour of document hell in Panama. He was a calm, dignified man who expected to retire in nine months. There was a statue of the Virgin Mary on the dashboard of his car, and he drove slowly, carefully, to the various buildings housing various officials who needed to stamp, initial, and restamp our documents. Luis did everything slowly and carefully: there was not a germ of Zippy’s disease in the man and he may have been the most cheerfully efficient individual we met on the whole trip.

The document that we had to have attesting to our good character? Could we have that now, on the spot?

Ahh, no, never, señor. It was an important and complex document that generally took two days to validate.

Two days?

With the help of Luis, we got the document in two hours.

“You know,” Luis told us as we drove through Panama City at about fifteen miles an hour, “I once went to Japan on business. I had never
been out of Panama, not even to the United States. I arrived in Tokyo on a Sunday morning, and my Japanese associates were supposed to pick me up that afternoon.

“I wanted to go to Mass. I looked in the phone book in my hotel room and found something that looked like a Catholic church. Then I checked the address against a subway map of the city. I took the subway, then asked a policeman to direct me to the church. I used sign language. I folded my hands in prayer, and the policeman thought I was looking for a temple, so I made the sign of the cross. He understood that. I asked how long it would take to walk there. I made a walking motion with my fingers and pointed to my watch. The policeman took my arm and indicated a fifteen-minute segment on the face of my watch.

“When the Japanese picked me up at the hotel that afternoon, they were amazed that I had traveled halfway across the city, gone to Mass, and gotten back to the hotel without any help at all. That was the one big foreign adventure of my life.”

He paused and said, “Of course, it’s nothing like what you’re doing.”

“No,” I said, “it’s exactly like what we’re doing.”

“Anyway,” Luis said, “I understand what it means to have someone help you in a foreign country.”

W
ITH THE SEEMINGLY UNHURRIED HELP
of Luis, we cleared customs and assembled a Russian novel’s worth of paperwork in the hours between six in the morning and noon. Six hours to write War and Peace.

Back at the hotel there was good news from Moncton. Chistita Caldera would be waiting for us at the southern border of Nicaragua. The letters from Nicaragua and Honduras had arrived at the Canadian embassy in San José, Costa Rica.

Garry said that it looked like we’d arrive at the embassy in Costa Rica sometime between midnight and four in the morning. How would we pick up the letter? Jane had thought of that. There was a night guard at the embassy gate. He would have the documents in hand.

W
E PULLED OUT
of the port and I stopped at a large North American-style supermarket to buy more bottled water. Then we drove over the bridge across the Panama Canal and headed for the border, 220 miles to the north.

Garry said, “Let’s see what this baby’ll do.”

“Part two.”

*   *   *

P
ANAMA
, for all its trouble, is not a dirt-poor country. Along with Costa Rica, it shares one of the highest standards of living in Central America. This was reflected in the roads, which were straight, well graded, and very fast. Panama’s population is comparatively small and there was very little traffic, which was good for us because it was now one in the afternoon and our information was that the border closed at five. Either that or eight. No one knew for sure. It seemed a good idea to get there before five. If the border was closed and we had to stay overnight, we’d lose our escort through Nicaraguan customs. Chistita would be waiting for us there at eight the next morning.