Road Fever (39 page)

Here we were in a country with no insurgencies; a country that had more teachers than policemen.

So who were these guys with the guns? Teachers?

The third man—younger than the other two—stood by the red truck. He wore a blue short-sleeved polo shirt that set off his brown leather shoulder holster and the wooden handle of a large revolver. Probably a forty-four. He never moved, and his eyes never left mine.

The man with the scar wore a light-beige rain jacket and there was a gun-sized bulge just under his left arm. He approached Garry, put his right hand into his jacket, and flashed a badge that was in his wallet along with a picture of the scar-faced man and some official-looking stamps. “Police,” he said.

The man checked our papers. A few minutes later, he handed everything back and apologized for the inconvenience. The officers said they were looking for drug dealers. We had aroused their suspicions: two bearded strangers in a big truck talking with people after midnight in an unsavory section of town. There had been objects passed back and forth: the seemingly surreptitious exchange of what the officers now knew were lapel pins and milk shakes.

The big man with the scar spoke good English and suggested that we not park our truck on the street. We told him that we were pushing on for Nicaragua anyway. Well, he said, that was going to be a problem. “If you take the Pan-American, you’ll drive for three hours and then be turned back.”

The highway to the north, he explained, was blocked by a rock slide that would take several days to clear. There was however, a back road.
It was gravel and dirt, very bad, but if we wanted to get to Nicaragua by eight the next morning, it was our only chance.

The man took our map from the suckerboard and, in consultation with the bearded man, traced a new route over a spiderweb of back roads.

“But look,” he said, “even here in Costa Rica, if you’re driving at night, don’t ever stop for someone in an unmarked car.”

“But you guys have an unmarked car,” Garry pointed out.

“We’re looking for drug dealers,” the man explained. “It helps,” he said, “not to look like a police officer.”

“But what would you have done if we tried to run?” I asked.

The man shook his head slowly, and in a negative manner.

“S
CARFACE
,” Garry said. “Guy tells us not to stop for unmarked cars. Don’t stop for anybody unless he’s driving a red pickup and has a badge. How are you supposed to know?”

We had found the Canadian embassy and picked up a manila envelope containing the letter from Honduras and the one from Nicaragua. I had opened the big three-ring binder that contained all our letters for all the countries we were driving through. Customs officers seemed to like to look through it, and the sheer volume of official correspondence, festooned with the great seals of various countries, often impressed them favorably. On the other hand, the Sandinista government in Nicaragua accused Honduras of harboring contra camps. If a Nicaraguan official saw a letter of recommendation from Honduras, we might be denied entry into the country. No friend of Honduras, the man might feel, is a friend of Nicaragua.

The letters were inside clear envelopes, one on one side, one on the other. I placed our letter from Honduras in one of the envelopes, between two letters from Argentina, so that it was reasonably well hidden.

We made coffee, but it turned out that I had not bought drinking water in Panama City. It was sparkling water. When you tried to make coffee with it, it foamed up like an experiment in the mad scientist’s lab.

It was beginning to get roto on the down side of the Mountain of Death, and we drank our furiously foaming coffee cold, without pleasure, for the caffeine. It was the essence of roto.

T
HE ROADS WERE BAD
and Garry was driving, as he had been since noon. It was now two in the morning.

“The road sign says eleven,” Garry said. “Aren’t we supposed to be on three?”

“I looked at the other map, the colored one. Three is marked eleven.”

“What’s the next town?”

“San Mateo. If we hit San Mateo, it doesn’t matter what the road is called, we’re going the right way.”

There was an unmarked crossing and both roads plunged steeply downhill.

“These maps,” I said, “say the road we want will run north.”

We checked the compass. The road to the left looked to run more generally north. We drove for half an hour and the road jigged east for a time, then jagged west, but it never turned south, which was mildly encouraging.

“If the Pan-American is closed,” Garry reasoned, “why don’t we see any traffic? Wouldn’t truck drivers know about this route?”

“Good point.”

“Navi nightmare time.”

“No, wait. There’s a sign for San Mateo up there.”

“Yeah,” Garry said, “but where are the trucks?”

T
HEY WERE STACKED UP
where the narrow winding road—all mud and loose gravel—dove through thick jungle foliage into the lowlands and Nicaragua. The drivers had set out flares: branches that they had broken off trees, doused in diesel, and set afire. We stopped in the back of a line of perhaps fifty semis.

Two of the big trucks, we were told, had had a mishap and were blocking the road. A small car could squeeze between them, but our Sierra was too big. We would have to wait. It would take twelve hours, at a minimum, before the road could be cleared.

We had to meet Chistita Caldera at the border in a little over five hours.

Garry fumed in silence. In the dashboard lights, his face looked feverish and, though it was cool enough for a jacket, he had begun to sweat copiously.

Suddenly he got out of the truck and walked down half a mile to the accident, carrying a flashlight. I made myself a cup of foaming roto coffee and when I had just about finished it, I saw Garry walking back uphill. He was moving fast, like an angry, determined man and I knew that we were going to go for it.

Garry folded our wide side mirrors into the truck. “We have,” he said, “about five inches of clearance between those trucks.”

“You measured it?”

“Eyeballed it.”

He put the truck into four-wheel drive, low. “The problem is,” he said, “that there are sheep guts all over the road. The stuff looks fresh and it’s slippery as hell. I don’t know why someone would do that, but there must have been a lot of animals. The road is ankle-deep in blood and intestines.”

Garry drove past the line of trucks, and the drivers, who had nothing better to do, followed us down to the metal narrows that Garry had eyeballed. Two trucks blocked the road and were sitting back-to-back, one on the uphill side, one on the downhill. It was a very steep section there, and we’d have to try to drive across the road, at a right angle to its direction of travel, in order to squeeze between the back ends of both trucks. It looked too narrow to me. Worse, we would be traveling across the hillside, over a slippery carpet of gore.

The truck drivers stamped around in the foliage and found an area where Garry could back up to get in position. A very large crowd had gathered to watch the show.

“You’ll never make it,” one man called.

Another bet we would. Money began to change hands in the light of burning branches. Garry took it pretty fast, afraid that the truck might begin to slide where the sheep guts were thickest.

We were through in twenty seconds. There were three inches to spare on my side and two on Garry’s. The truck drivers cheered: loud whistles and shouts in the jungle night.

W
E WERE IN LOWLANDS
. After sixteen hard hours at the wheel, Garry crawled into the back and tried to sleep. I was driving a fine, straight asphalt road that looked red in the headlights.

We stopped for diesel not far from the border. We wouldn’t be able to buy any in Nicaragua, where it was rationed.

Garry looked terrible.

“You know what we could do,” I said. “We could market this drive as a board game. Shake the dice to see if you can get to the border on time. Pick cards that give you all sorts of contradictory information. Drive over the Mountain of Death, dodge the Costa Rican drug police, and slide through sheep guts in order to, ta-da, enter the war zone.”

“I’m sick,” Garry said. “I have a fever.”

I felt his forehead. He was a little hot but his eyes were fever bright.

“You have a little fever,” I said.

“I wonder if it’s malaria?”

“No. It’s not malaria,” I said.

“I feel strange. Bad.”

He spoke in a strained whisper and his eyes were burning, wild things trapped inside his head. They moved in a way that had no relation to anything he was saying.

W
E ARRIVED
at the border early and had to wait two hours until it opened at eight. I spoke with some truck drivers who said that things were very good through Nicaragua. People all over were celebrating the Arias peace plan. It was a fine time to drive through Central America, a very good time, the best.

Garry couldn’t talk with anyone. He was walking back and forth, in the growing tropical heat, propelled by some internal demons that he wouldn’t tell me about.

A grandmotherly Costa Rican lady placed herself in front of him and struck up a conversation. I saw her try to give him something, but he waved her off.

Back at the truck, he told me what had happened.

“This lady,” he said, “had the world’s kindest face. Did you see her?”

“Yeah. She did have a kind face.”

“She asked what we were doing and I told her. Well, she looked at me. I’m standing there, I haven’t changed my shirt since Panama, I’m sick, I can’t talk. She figures I need money. She tries to give me a five-dollar bill. It was all crumpled up in her hand.”

Garry was very shaky and his eyes glistened.

“Jesus,” he said.

The small act of kindness had hit him like a blow and he was still reeling from it.

“I thanked her,” he said. “I told her I didn’t need any money and showed her pictures of my kids. It was all I could think of to do.”

He ran his hand through his hair and said, “The basket case shows pictures of his family.”

Garry looked north, into Nicaragua.

“Goddamn it,” he said.

G
ARRY
’
S ANTIPATHY
toward Nicaragua and Nicaraguans was puzzling. Our reconnaissance trip to Managua had been difficult, to be sure. The city, a graceless lowland steambath that is all of fifty feet above sea level, was a mosaic of empty lots and rubble piles interspersed, now and again, by habitations and office buildings. It was hard to get around. Managua had been decimated in the earthquake of 1972 and had never been rebuilt, though ruling General Anastasio Somoza and his family profited hugely from relief efforts.

In Managua, trees and grasses grew out of piles of debris and rubbish, and the concept of numbered addresses had little meaning. Letters to people in Managua are labeled with reference to various landmarks, like this:

The telephones generally didn’t work. Sometimes, I dialed twenty or thirty times over the space of an hour to get another party in Managua itself. A single page of telex cost an outrageous $36, U.S.

We stayed at the Intercontinental, one of the centers of social life in Managua. There were sometimes Sandinista officials in the bar. It did not seem to be a bar in a war-torn country where drinking and coupling and laughing are matters of some serious import. In the Intercontinental bar, there was a sense of serious import, and nothing else. No one laughed, ever. It seemed the most joyless place on the face of the earth.

Inflation was running at 1,200 percent. Nicaragua’s money was
useless outside the country and not much good inside. The government needed valid currency to purchase foreign goods, so anyone visiting the country was required to cough up $60, U.S., upon entry. This bought 240,000 córdobas, which you got in hundreds. You could always tell the American citizens who had just flown in. They had huge córdoba bulges in their pockets and they wore skulking looks of guilt.

They had, doubtless, just read a little pamphlet in English that every American was handed sooner rather than later. It was a history of U.S. involvement in Nicaragua. The United States marines had occupied the country and propped up a corrupt government, on and off, from 1912 to 1933. In the last five years of the occupation, General César Augusto Sandino had fought the Americans, who were in the process of installing General Anastasio Somoza, father of the earthquake profiteer, as supreme commander of the Nicaraguan National Guard.

Sandino was captured by the guard and killed in 1934. The Somoza family, supported by the United States, used the national guard as a personal army. By 1978, the family owned over half the land in the country and had a hand in most of the larger businesses.

In 1978–79, there was fighting in the streets. Anastasio Somoza, the second son of the U.S.-installed general of the same name, was ousted by a coalition of groups calling themselves Sandinistas, after Augusto Sandino, who, pictures in the Nicaraguan embassy in Argentina suggest, had been somewhat cross-eyed.

The U.S. had occupied the country and supported the corrupt Somoza regime. So there was plenty to feel guilty about standing there drinking a beer in the Intercontinental bar with a pocketful of córdobas that you couldn’t spend because the hotel wouldn’t take them. Hotel bills had to be paid in dollars.

I met a Catholic priest visiting from San Francisco. He was, he said, on a fact-finding mission. He wore civilian clothes and was full of compassion for the poor and dispossessed but I thought he lacked the reporter’s instinct. The fact finders, I learned, a dozen of them, were ferried around in a government-owned van. They could ask the driver to stop anywhere.

“Some of the houses,” the priest told me, “are very poor. And our translator will ask the people in them any question we have. Just anything at all.”