The Scared Stiff Read online

  There’s only the one paved road, coming into town, running straight through it to the river, where it becomes a thick-planked wooden dock flanked by a fish market and gasoline storage tanks. The other streets in town are packed dirt, parallel to or perpendicular to La Carretera, “the highway,” which is what the locals call the main drag. None of the other streets are named.

  The Tobón house, painted fuchsia at my expense when Lola and I got married and at last beginning to fade, thank God, was two blocks to the right of La Carretera and one block from the river-bank. Two stories high, built on stilts, its exterior walls vertical wood planks, its ground floor is partly enclosed to hold the freezer and hot-water heater and some guns and fishing poles and Madonna, the brood sow. The open part of the downstairs contains boats and stray concrete blocks and pieces of automobile and the vertical lines of plumbing. The family lives upstairs, in a number of airy connected rooms.

  The trip from the airport took just under two hours, so when we drove into town, around four-thirty, the shadows were deep black and stretched out long from right to left ahead of us, making the sunny parts of town even brighter and more intense. Then we turned off onto the Tobóns’ street and our only fellow traffic was dogs, mostly parked in the middle of the road. Arturo honked and yelled and laughed and steered around the dogs, who knew him and therefore ignored him, and parked beside the fuchsia house. In the sudden silence I could hear Madonna grunting her complaints the other side of the fuchsia wall beside me.

  “Mi casa…” Arturo said, and grinned at me, and raised an eyebrow, and waited.

  “… es su casa,” I said, and pointed at him.

  “And don’t you forget it! Come on, let’s have a beer.”

  We collected our luggage and went around to the outside staircase, to see Mamá and Papá crowded together in the doorway at the top, two short wide people grinning broadly and yelling at us in Spanish. Up we went, and dropped our luggage so we could be hugged and kissed, and then picked up the luggage again to take it to “our” room, a small corner storage room that was converted, sort of, to a bedroom whenever we’d visit. There we changed into shorts and tops and went back out to be handed our first beers.

  We sat in the living room, a big airy space that got some morning sun but was cool and shady the rest of the day, soft breezes moving through the glassless windows in two walls. Arturo had gone to another room, but now he came back, carrying a white legal-size envelope. “Here you go, Felicio,” he said.

  With a flutter of excitement, I opened the envelope. The one piece of paper inside was thick and folded in thirds. I unfolded it, and looked at the birth certificate of Felicio Tobón de Lozano, born to Lucia Tobón de Lozano on July 12, 1970, in Mother of Mercy Hospital, Sabanon, Guerrera. Father, Alvaro Tobón Gutierrez. Birth weight, six pounds, one ounce.

  We’re going to do it, I thought. This makes it real.

  Arturo laughed and whacked my shoulder. “Monday,” he said, “we’ll go up to San Cristobal, get your driver’s license.”

  “Make me legal,” I said.

  Arturo thought that was very funny.

  5

  San Cristobal, like Sabanon, is a river town, but then again they’re all river towns in this part of the Americas. Until the bulldozer was born, the rivers were the only roads through the jungle. San Cristobal is built on the Inarida, another Orinoco tributary, larger and slower and greener than the Guiainacavi. It’s a border river, with the neighboring nation of Colombia across the way.

  Our first goal Monday morning was the government administration building on the Avenida de los Americas downtown, a broad two-story gray concrete box with a veranda stretched along the street side. The building is, of course, air-conditioned, and right now I needed air-conditioning. I needed to dry my upper lip.

  Arturo and I made our way down the long central hall to the men’s room. There I dabbed my upper lip with paper towels until it was dry enough so Arturo could apply the spirit gum. Then, eyeing myself closely in the mirror above the sink, I attached the mustache.

  It was bushy and dark brown, my mustache. I had bought it in a theatrical supply store in New York. Starting tomorrow, I would grow a mustache of my own. I couldn’t have started it before now, but I needed photo ID right away.

  “Looks great,” Arturo said, peering over my shoulder at the mirror.

  It changed me, it really did. My hair is dark brown like the mustache, and my eyes are dark, my nose snub, my jaw firm. Normally I look like almost any kind of American ethnic from Greek to Puerto Rican — I’m mostly black Irish, actually — but with this mustache I looked absolutely Guerreran.

  Pity I couldn’t sound Guerreran. Well, we’d deal with it.

  The Motor Vehicle Department was farther down the hall, a doorway on the left. We went in and found that the room stretched away down to our right, beyond a chest-high counter. Two lines of people stood patiently waiting their turns in front of the two clerks behind the counter.

  To our left, a chest-high shelf contained forms and pens, the pens chained to the shelf. Arturo and I went there, me bringing my new birth certificate out of my pocket, and Arturo chose a form and filled it in. When he was done, I signed it, with the new signature I’d been practicing the last two days: Felicio Tobón de Lozano. Then we joined one of the lines.

  This first line took twenty-five minutes, during which I was sharply aware that I still had not quite broken any law. I could still back out of this, grab Lola, hop a plane, go back to Long Island, find some other way to solve our problems. (There was no other way.) But once I got to the counter, it would be too late.

  Suddenly I was sure my mustache was slipping. I nudged Arturo, and when he looked at me I wiggled my mouth at him, to ask, Is it okay? He frowned massively, not getting my meaning. I touched two fingertips to the mustache, which felt very strange and bristly there, as though I had a woodchuck attached to my face, and he still gave me blank looks, so finally I leaned close to him and waggled my eyebrows as meaningfully as I possibly could and muttered, “Okay? S’okay?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said.

  The couple on line ahead of us turned sadly away from the counter, and I could tell from their expressions they’d just had the experience universal in Motor Vehicle Departments the world over: they’d been sent home for more forms.

  We stepped forward, and I gave the clerk my cheeriest smile along with my form, but then I felt the mustache strain against the flesh as I smiled, so I dialed down to mere comradeship. Meanwhile, beside me, Arturo had gone into the spiel.

  It isn’t going to work, I thought. Somewhere in this building are policemen, heavily armed policemen, and all of a sudden they’re going to rush into this room and grab Arturo and me and drag us away to some basement somewhere and beat us with rubber truncheons they got from the CIA until we tell them everything, which will take about nine seconds. How could we possibly have thought we could get away with this?

  While I was struggling to smile, and to keep my panic down inside, Arturo told our story to the clerk behind the counter. What he said was: I had laryngitis. I’d been working in Mexico for years and knew how to drive but didn’t have my Mexican driver’s license anymore, and was going to become my brother Arturo’s partner in his taxicab business, but had to have a license first, and couldn’t wait for the laryngitis to clear up before coming in to apply, because I have this big family to take care of, which Arturo (winking at the clerk) has no intention of supporting. And here’s my form, filled out and signed. And here’s Arturo’s driver’s license and his cabby license.

  The clerk looked at my form. He looked at me; I coughed. He turned the form over, made a red X on one line, and slid it toward me, along with a pen. “Sign here,” he said, too fast. I understood some of what people said, and most of what I read, but generally people talked too fast for me.

  I signed: Felicio Tobón de Lozano. I did it fluidly, easily, as though I’d been doing it all my life. I returned form and pen to the clerk, and he
compared the two signatures as though that would tell him something.

  Without waiting to be asked, I brought out the birth certificate and opened it on the counter. The clerk looked at me, looked at the birth certificate, lowered his head over it for a minute, and then said, “Gracias.”

  I moved my lips, nodding, and put the birth certificate away.

  Next was the eye chart. I saw the clerk gesture toward it, as he spoke to the both of us, and I knew exactly what he was saying: “If you can’t talk, how can you tell me what letters you see?”

  Easy; we’d worked that out. Arturo told him, more or less, “You tell him what line to read, and he’ll write the letters down.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  The clerk found a scrap of paper and slid it over to me, with the same pen as last time. He said something too fast for me to catch, and I looked at Arturo’s left hand. He was to my left, leaning forward, forearm on the counter, left hand dangling down, now showing four fingers, the thumb tucked in out of sight. So: fourth line of the eye chart.

  I looked at it. I wrote A F D E P G, turned the paper around, and pushed it and the pen back to the clerk, who looked at the letters, turned to look at the eye chart, nodded, and made a notation on the form.

  There were a few questions, which Arturo mostly dealt with. Twice he turned to let me know I should answer, the first time nodding just slightly (I nodded), the second time not nodding (I shook my head).

  Now all that remained was the road test, and for that, we were told, the wait would be between two and three hours. We could reserve a place without waiting on line, so we went and had lunch and then returned to the same building, where Arturo led me to a different room, a waiting room lined with uncomfortable green plastic chairs screwed to the floor.

  And here, the worst of it was, I couldn’t read. Arturo had bought a newspaper on our way back from lunch, but that was no help to me. So I just waited it out, and eventually Arturo stood up, which meant my new name had been called. I hadn’t recognized it.

  Apparently, in Guerrera, the job of road test inspector is given to policemen when they’re too old to be policemen anymore. This fellow was ancient and leathery inside his brown uniform and looked mostly like an old saddle. He was also short-tempered, maybe because his shiny teeth were so ill-fitting or maybe because it had been too long since he’d had a rubdown with saddle soap. He seemed to believe that one symptom of laryngitis is deafness; once Arturo explained my problem, this guy yelled every instruction directly into my right ear, with a great clacking of those teeth, which up close sounded like castanets.

  We rode in the Impala, in which I’d already done some driving to acclimate myself. The inspector sat beside me, Arturo in back, leaning forward in a companionable way, forearms crossed on top of the front seat. His right hand rested on my left shoulder, to give me the signals we’d worked out. A tug to the left meant turn left, to the right meant right. A push down meant stop, a pull back meant park. Four fingers tapping on my shoulder meant go faster, a smooth sideways caress meant go slower.

  It worked very well, except that my right ear would never be the same. It was a short road test, eight blocks or so, and there we were back at the admin building, where I angle-parked with such smooth savoir faire that even the inspector was impressed. Most Guerrerans park by ear.

  Armed with the inspector’s form, back we went to Motor Vehicles, where we were led through the opening in the main counter and back to the fellow with the camera, where once again Arturo explained my disability. The guy shrugged, not caring; as Arturo told me afterward, what he said was, “So what? This isn’t a sound camera.”

  Impatiently he gestured for me to stand with my toes on the white line on the floor. I did, and faced the camera. Arturo stood behind the cameraman, who gave me instructions, and Arturo did whatever he said: Step forward, lift his head, brush back the hair on the right side of his head. I echoed Arturo’s movements, and flash! the picture was taken.

  Now it was another half hour on the same line in front of the same counter, but when we finally got to the same clerk there was nothing to it at all. We handed over our documents, he handed back a temporary driver’s license consisting of thick blue paper folded in half to make a little book, and we left.

  Outside, Arturo said, “We had our choice. Either they’ll mail it to us, or we come back in two hours and pick it up.”

  Two hours would be four-thirty; not long from their closing time. I said, “What did we decide?”

  “Hermano,” he said, “if you mail something in this country, that means you don’t care if you ever see it again. I said we’d come back in two hours.”

  •

  Two hours and five minutes later, I walked out of the Motor Vehicle Department for the last time, with my brand-new laminated driver’s license in my pocket. “Shall I drive?” I said.

  Arturo stared at me. “My car? You kidding me?”

  I was, actually. I got into the passenger seat, and as we drove out of town I took out the driver’s license and looked at it. That face. That signature. That seal of official approval.

  It was so easy. And already I looked like somebody else. Already I was somebody else.

  I liked that fake mustache, in the picture, and I was very reluctant to remove it; I’d already grown used to having a little furry pet under my nose.

  Until about halfway to Sabanon, that is, when heat and sweat and wind finally did their job, and all at once the mustache fell like a woolly caterpillar into my lap. It was about to blow out of the car when I grabbed it and put it in my shirt pocket.

  I could hardly wait to grow my own.

  6

  On Tuesday, the day after I got my new driver’s license, I reverted to tourist mode; Lola and I got into the back of Arturo’s Impala, he became the cabby, and off we all went to San Cristobal again. Yesterday I’d worn my scruffiest old black chinos, a white open-collared short-sleeved shirt that had seen better days, and heavy black sandals without socks, because yesterday I was Felicio. Today I wore a bright red San Francisco 49ers cap, a lavender Ralph Lauren polo shirt, brand-new khaki shorts with a tan leather belt, high white socks, and black-and-white sneakers the size of apartment buildings. I’d started growing my mustache but had disguised the fact by not shaving at all, which is what tourists do the first two days of vacation, before it starts to itch.

  Lola, beside me, was an edible vision in a white sundress, white sandals, white turban, large gold hoop earrings, deep red lipstick, and very dark large sunglasses. When she laughs and shows those sparkling teeth, strong men have been known to faint.

  For much of the trip, Lola regaled Arturo with the local gossip she’d picked up yesterday. She was just the visitor, but he was male, so she would learn more dirt in a day than he would gather in a year. For my benefit, they did all their dishing in English, but I knew none of the people involved, so it hardly mattered. The basic idea seemed to be that people cannot keep their hands off each other.

  There was one woman in the stories, named Luz, apparently one of the cousins, who appeared in so many of the adventures, causing so much mischief in so many directions, that I finally asked just how many Luzes there were in the family, which made both Arturo and Lola roar with laughter.

  “Just one!” Arturo assured me.

  “Just one too many!” Lola cried.

  In San Cristobal, on Avenida del Liberación, a too-narrow parallel street just one block east of the main Avenida de los Americas, we had our choice of four American car rental agencies, one Brazilian agency, and two locals. They all offered the same basic VW Beetle (or bigger cars if you wanted, which cost more and don’t fit anywhere), and the prices varied depending on how much the companies spent on advertising back home. The local agencies, which barely had advertising budgets big enough to include an appearance in the San Cristobal Yellow Pages, were the cheapest, and of them Arturo thought Pre-Columbian Rent-A-Car was the most reliable, so that’s where we went. Arturo dropped us off in front of
the office, I made a show of paying him — it was a show, but he never gave me the money back, so I’m glad at least I underpaid — and the two of us opened the sparkling glass door and went inside.

  Air-conditioning, since the customers are tourists. The office was a tiny cubbyhole in a street of narrow storefronts. In this front room, there was barely space for the old wooden desk, the nice but chubby girl behind it, and the two wooden chairs in front of it. A bulletin board on the side wall contained charts, keys, folders, and all sorts of things that I’m sure were meaningful to the girl, if to no one else. The rear wall contained filing cabinets, calendars, a clock, rather forlorn color photos of Guerreran tourist attractions, and a closed wooden door.

  The clerk gave us one look, smiled, and greeted us in English. We responded in kind, told her what we wanted, and sat down. And now my old ID was possibly being used for the very last time: my driver’s license — the American one — my passport, my VISA card. I filled out some forms, signed Barry Lee with my usual flourish, and the girl asked if Mrs. Lee would also be a driver.

  “No,” I said. “My wife doesn’t like to drive away from home.”

  “I get nervous,” Lola said, with her sunniest smile, and it seemed to me obvious that nothing on earth could make this woman nervous.

  When I slid back over to the girl the form I’d filled out, she turned to the closed door behind her and yelled, “Jorge!” and almost immediately the door was opened by a dark sweating man in a dirty undershirt and dirty work pants. He also had a droopier, scragglier version of my mustache.

  The girl rattled off some directions at this fellow with the brisk bark of a drill sergeant. He listened without any visible reaction, and when she was finished he shut the door again.