Six Bad Things_ A Novel - Charlie Huston [34]
In the brutally air-conditioned room I take a shower, flop on the bed naked, and smoke cigarettes. Soon the last of the adrenaline seeps from my body and I fall asleep. I wallow in utter blackness until four hours later when my wake-up call sends me jumping at the ceiling to dangle by my fingernails like a frightened cat.
Cat.
Shit.
I miss my cat.
CIVILIZATION ON the Baja, such as it is, clings either to the long ribbon of Highway 1 or to the coast, demonstrating two principles of survival: that life can be sustained either by water or by cars. It takes about two seconds of travel time beyond the edge of Cabo to feel that you are passing through one of the more forlorn wastes of the third world, which is apt, because you are. At the ABC terminal I pay pesos for the first bus going north. It will only get me as far as La Paz, but that’s fine with me. I just want to get moving.
We roll up Highway 19 and I stare out the window at a landscape that puts me in mind of nuclear blasts. My brain turns on itself and I start thinking about all the things that can go wrong. It’s a long list and it keeps me pretty busy for the three hours it takes to get to La Paz.
I HAVE an hour to kill. In the cantina across the street from the depot I’m able to buy a few packs of cigarettes; Marlboro Lights as they don’t carry Benson & Hedges. The place is quiet, just a few other people waiting for the bus, and the mother and daughter team behind the counter. I get some coffee and blow smoke rings at the TV, where the news is playing. The sound is off, but I watch it anyway. So it’s really impossible for me to miss the moment when photos of Sergeants Morales and Candito are flashed on the screen with the caption my spinning brain can’t translate except for the words cimentar, which I’m pretty sure means found, and muertos, which any asshole knows what it means.
BAJA HIGHWAY 1 is more a theory than an actual road, an impossibly long and narrow strip that connects Cabo with Tijuana. Upkeep on the highway is constant, but hopeless. The substructure of the roadway is sand or shale or crumbling coastal cliff face. Erosion has the upper hand here. Crews work endlessly to maintain this lifeline, but it’s a losing battle and they know it. You can see it in their eyes when you pass them every hundred miles or so.
I have an aisle seat right up front where I can watch every oncoming vehicle that plows head-on toward us before veering to the side and scraping past. Hours of it have numbed me. All I can do now is twitch as the driver casually one-hands the steering wheel, balancing us on this rail of death as yet another semi slams by and rocks us in its slipstream. It’s only about a hundred and fifty miles to Constitución, but by the time we get there I already feel like I’ve been on the bus for days. We have a half hour to stretch while passengers get on and off. If I time it right, I can smoke about ten cigarettes.
There is only one other white guy on the bus. We make brief eye contact and he lifts his hand-rolled smoke toward me. It’s a joint. I shake my head and he turns and walks off a bit from the rest of the passengers to smoke. I wouldn’t mind a little toke, but I need to avoid falling into any casual conversations with people who might be able to identify me later.
I smoke three cigarettes, grab a bottle of water and a couple pork tamales from a vendor, and get back on board. An hour later we start to climb the coastal mountains that run up the edge of the Golfo de California. That’s where the ride starts to get really fucking scary. The 1 is still just as narrow and in the same state of disrepair, but now it twists and turns around safety-railless blind corners.