Put those guns away

They had put their guns away when I regained consciousness but my hands were tied. The edges of my vision blurred and I tried to shrug off the idea that this was some parallel universe I’d fallen into, it had all the hallmarks and few of the smells (not something that all travellers would pick up).We were in a bar but nobody seemed to consider that Ernesto and I were prisoners was in anyway peculiar, in fact we seemed to be a part of the company, propped and trussed as we were on a wooden bench at the rear of the establishment. A sweaty looking Indian in a buckskin top came over, cut the cable tie on my wrists and passed me a bottle of warm beer. “Drink and be strong!” he whispered. I drank whilst Ernesto slept on, pressed against my back and the wooden bar wall.

Over at the main part of the bar the bandits were smoking dope and passing a guitar from hand to hand. It was an old shiny Guild, slightly out of tune but no one seemed bothered. Each man would take his turn to pluck out a tune and sing in a Spanish/Anglo language based on MTV exposure and radio listening. Their efforts seemed earnest enough but none of them were able to recall all the words so songs petered out or verses were repeated in that awkward way that lifts any meaning out of the song and rendered the performance pointless. I was hoping that I could finish the beer unnoticed and then snooze while they sang and then perhaps some escape opportunity would open, particularly if they got drunk and silly. That didn’t look likely as one bandit made eye contact noticing I has come round. “Hey, you city boys play us a song or we get more angry!” I grunted and rubbed my head and mumbled about not being a singer, I added with what little enthusiasm I could muster that I was enjoying their music. “We want your Cohen songs!” cried the bandit, assuming that I was a player of some kind and that I could perform that kind of material. I may have passed out at this point.

Some far away place in the centre of my head I realised, or at least came to terms with the sad fact that within my repertoire there were no Leonard Cohen songs. I could remember some of the lyrics to Suzanne, whistle a few odd tunes and had various mental pictures of the great man but my knowledge was lacking. I was ashamed of my shallow experience, my missed opportunities to live and learn and more importantly listen. I simply hadn’t tried and perhaps (and this was the most difficult point to confess to) I’d secretly avoided bothering to get to know his material. A classic and perverse situation, remaining aloof and disconnected for some secret purpose trapped in my psyche and hidden from my wandering mind. All around me were bathing in the musical and lyrical warmth that he exuded and I was refusing to jump in, frozen in the changing rooms, unchanged. What had I missed? How much more of a rounded and fulfilled individual would I been had I just bought a few albums, even a greatest hits and sat down and listen to them. I could’ve avoided so much radio shit by just slipping on a CD in the car and opening my concrete ears. On one level I felt that my life had been wasted and I was now relegated to some lower league in life due to my serial ignorance and indifference.

The weight of my situation pressed down, my conversations were still-born, words came out from my lips but hit the carpet. There was no mutual pick up from my friends or the others around the bar. Even the alcohol’s fervent lubrication could not pull the right dialogue from my rapidly drying mouth. I was out of step with my own world. No mature and proper Leonard Cohen appreciation led inevitably to a doomed spiral of social exclusion and a deeper psychosis battened down with more alcohol. I felt like I could never return home nor hold my head up in any respectable musical or poetic company. I also expected to be hit at any moment.

The digestive system is both simple in principle and complex in how it operates. It can also move from passive to active in a very short period of time, mine is the typical, standard model. I woke again, this time I was being sick, a combination of stress, beer and one or two unpleasant and unwelcome knocks on the head. I was none the wiser on the Leonard Cohen material either, the good news was that the bandits (or whatever they were) had slumped into some kind of cartoon stereo typical sleep across the room. I nudge Ernesto, he was already awake but grunted.

Cat

MOT done, new springs, new shocks, higher emissions just make it. Now the cat's gone so time to make a few phone calls.

Replacement

As the great grey ghost of ongoing fiction and random South American adventure and courageous lies is asleep, the real Mr Cougar is laid low. An offside spring, a track rod end and a shock absorber are the uncounted costs but their added value will soon be known. All these parts were damaged by the ungracious and poorly maintained West Lothian roads. It has been a difficult two days.

Tomorrow a new day dawns and I'm hopeful of a reunion and then the return of the replacement. The Cougar should be back, silent and stable on the road and demonstrating decent and legal emission levels along with at least 53 weeks of MoT. I hope.

No1 in a series of 1

Wine 2.5 Cougar parked in Jasper, Alberta.

Cougar Street

Inexplicably we are on a break, the threads will be picked up, the debris collected, meanwhile I have to explore.

Bonanza

We take more breaks, a caravan sits by the road side. A white body of faded painted signs and a dusty board with a blown away menu. Travelling is looking out of the window, peering through the windscreen dust and swallowing the unchanging dry air until the next meal stop arises. We take two Coca Colas from the wrinkled owner and sit on a plastic chair under the solitary parasol. The flat plain stretches over to a blue tinge of distant mountain, maybe fifty miles in the haze. The Coke hit’s the spot and our eyes close in the heat as we respond to the inner cooling. I feel that somehow I should urinate by the heat and sweat make it a rare occurrence, I feel like I’m drying out from the inside, desiccating and warping with leather intestines and a canvas stomach.

My eye twitches open as I sense a movement. Armadillo. It shuffles across my line of vision about forty feet away, big armoured back oblivious of us and starts to dig at the edge of the parking area. Claws grabbing the dirt, searching for grubs, fleeting and hungry and wild in a dull place. The caravan owner comes out and he is carrying a shot gun, the breaks it’s back and plops in two cartridges ready to blast the Armadillo, “bastards!” he cries and takes a shot. The ground explodes beside the poor animal and Ernesto and I jump to our feet. “Is that how you deal with everything here?” He ignores us and drops the gun barrel while looking out across the landscape.

The sky is a straight ahead blue with those fizzy white edges but in the east is a cloud, a cloud no bigger than the fist of a man. My eyesight is remarkable or am I just imagining this tiny cloud as some kind of pattern piece on the plain background of the worlds ceiling. As I stare at the cloud it grows, coming nearer, spinning and forming a shape. I focus on it’s wandering and vaporous heavenly signature. Now it is also making a noise, that’s because it is a Beechcraft Bonanza, flying low and looking for all the world like it’s about to land on the plain behind us.

I can see the caravan man looking at the oncoming aircraft. He stares at it like it’s a Zero at Pearl Harbour and to my horror lifts the shotgun to his shoulder. He gathers the aircraft into his sight and follows it’s line with the barrel. The Beechcraft angles over a little as the pilot struggles against the warm, rising air. Ernesto and I are frozen, dry mouths aching to shout, tired limbs aching to move.

No shots are fired, thankfully and the aircraft lands. Who are these people?

Escape

The police were rough and unsympathetic, a man was dead, the bar and café were trashed, the locals had scattered and there were two strangers corralled out in the car park. We explained ourselves, showed our papers and pointed at the parked car. The police shone torches in the dark and threatened us with questioning and being transported somewhere else for identity confirmation. The café owner was also part of the melee, complaining about damage and custom and reiterating that he had no idea who anybody was. At one tense point the seemed to be blaming us but then shifted in his version of things to Pete who appeared to be some kind of itinerant and opportunist criminal type who arrived and operated from here a times.

My head was sore and I was still trembling, I was sitting on a box by the entrance, the waitress who had plugged me appeared with a tray of drinks, somebody had had an idea to make amends, perhaps covering for all I knew. We accepted the whisky (as it turned out to be) and began to discuss where we could spend the night. The waitress (Rosa) pointed to the bunkhouse and mentioned a price. The police liked the idea of us remaining by the crime scene so we hobbled over hoping to find some rest. As we entered the door the lights of the ambulance arrived and Pete’s body was carted out and away. The police remained for a while as we lay on the rough blankets and stared at the light patterns on the ceiling. Sleep eventually came disguised as loss of consciousness and the cumulative effects of drink, both piled down on me bringing a selection of film noire dreams and dark corridors, none of which led anywhere.

Morning came as a shock and the dream time and recent murder blended into unreality. Through the grimy window I saw how the car now sat alone in the dusty car park but the tin chimney on the café was spouting white smoke into the dawn. There wood some coffee and food and those little glimpses of civilisation might help our self inflicted and bullet ridden headaches.

In the café we ate a steak breakfast, the owner personally preparing it and assuring us that whilst shootings were rare these days (and this one had been exceptional) there was no need now for us stay, the police had all the information they needed. I also assumed that they had the contents of Pete’s wallet and that was most likely a big help to them in deciding on how to proceed with the case. We thanked the owner and tipped him a few dollars and decided to put as many miles as we could between ourselves and the village, San Pedro.

The road from San Pedro was a long and featureless straight. Red trucks and tractors headed East on the opposite side but we seemed alone in our intent to head West. The telegraph poles counted down a hundred miles or more without any of the monotony breaking or revealing any aspects of the land’s secrets.

Gun fight

Pete sat back on the basket chair, burped and lit up another cigar, he began to use the cigar as a pointer. He pointed to the barman who dutifully came over, “Armadillo!” said Pete. The barman turned quickly, fiddled behind the bar and returned with a dark brown bottle and there shot glasses. “This” said Pete “will complete your education, this is the spirit of the Andes and the elders.” He poured us a shot each and in almost automatic mode the three of us clinked the glasses and swallowed the unspectacular looking drink. It was a burning, muddy, dirty spirit, forged with an acid heat that treated the back of the throat like a familiar and unfriendly razor. Ernesto smiled in a broad, uncontrolled grin, “she is the spirit!” It was good and I could tell Pete sensed our tongues loosing, our guards dropping and a potential launch pad for his business opportunity ramble to open up.

We drank three more each in quick succession, Ernesto seemed most affected, eyes glazing slightly and speech dropping. Pete was smoking and talking and I was trying to keep tabs on the barman who I decided to mistrust. I also became aware that in the corners of the room, bar or café or restaurant various shapes had taken up lodging, human shapes. Pete’s words were flowing forwards with various money making schemes, gold mines to invest in, archaeological sites to loot, pre-Colombian art deals and drugs of many kinds. Ernesto looked like he was listening but he was tired and on the way to drunkenness, I was growing in the grip of paranoia. We were here drinking like Scottish tourists with an obvious crook in a slowly expanding criminal universe a few hundred miles from home in the rain.

Like on some incoming tide the room was filling with assorted floating farm workers and bobbing truck drivers. A few candles and oil lamps had been lit to supplement the dim electric bulbs that hung over the bar area making the place only more sinister. I decided, as I drank to respect Pete a little more, listen and then look for a good opportunity to bow out to the motel at the back where I thought we’d rented a billet. Pete was babbling about the economy and the police and Ernesto was responding with one of his idealistic political arguments. Then, with no warning that tide of workmen suddenly broke over us, a group of figures appeared in front of our table blocking out the light and so applying a wild and contrived sense of theatrical drama to the evening - but with no humour. There was a crack of a gun and a searing flash of yellow and white and smoke. Furniture tumbled, hands, feet and fist flew as I spilled left and Ernesto spilled right. In the middle Pete was collapsing like a pierced balloon and gasping, he‘d been hit. There were bottles flying from somewhere and I felt a sharp pain in my wrist as my weight fell upon it as I skidded across the floor. Looking up I saw the shape of Ernesto head out the back door and in a split second I was there with him. Behind us thirteen kinds of chaos were unfolding as two other shots rang out sending a cruel percussive crack of sound into the back of my head, but I wasn’t going to stop running.

What did stop me running was the kitchen girl, screaming and shouting and waving a tray like a tennis racquet. She thinks I’m responsible for something and catches me square of the side of the head as I fly past. It is a stunning blow and propels me sideways into the wall and across the floor of the corridor (I think it’s a corridor), then it’s another blow, same tray, same head. My face hit’s the floor and a black sheets descends. I feel strangely grateful, I am either dead, shot, concussed or drunk, perhaps all four, perhaps some fifth state, the nature of which I know nothing about.

The darkness doesn’t last as long as I’d wish, headlights and rain wake me. I’m lying in the car park. Behind me I’m aware of people jabbering and moving and a distant police siren wails closer and closer.

Anonymous vegetables

“I don’t like spiders and snakes!” thankfully there were none, just a dark corner in the back of the café where a man sat, alone. We ordered a cup of coffee and browsed the menu. As we sat down the man looked up and then looked down. He was erring on the side of portly, middle aged, wearing a linen suit with all the usual crumples. His tie was loosely hanging from his neck like an upside down noose, his shirt collar was swearing at him and the rest of the room and he was in the middle of setting up a significant sweating self irrigation system. He was reading a paperback book and smoking a long thin cigar, in the mirror opposite his reflection was smoking a paperback book and reading a long thin cigar, if only I thought.

The coffee was South American muddy, it may even have been African, depends on pirate travels and broken axles. The man had stopped reading but was still smoking, long thoughtful draws resulting in grey blue rings and circles of exhaled puff. He began to look across, moving in slow motion like some heavy lizard, his eyes seeming to scan across the floor and furniture, over our table and then over to us. Two travellers hiding behind the pale coffee. He produced a squint smile that smacked of pain and irritation and then he opened his mouth and spoke. “You guys need to talk to me if you know what’s good for you.”

Gangster cliché I thought and a tad scary, he’s some old con man, bored, looking for easy prey and not finding it in us, two slippery, tired and hungry road rats with an entire days pedigree (almost). We shuffled over and sat with him, perhaps he’d have a story and that story, once started could live on with us and join the great pool of stories that lives in the collective consciousness, never written, occasionally spoken, often changed, the true living bible and lost testament. Three lives.

We talked for a while, his offer was muling, a stupid idea and we told him so and he became angry. We decided to tame him by ordering dinner, sharing it with him and by stealth getting information on mule routes and methods. Then we could either engage with them or avoid them, travel knowledge is power, at least over the highway and the mud slide. He spoke east west and coast to coast until the food arrived, Ernesto noted the place names and road numbers, they may be real, they may be made up.

There was rice, green anonymous vegetables, orange anonymous vegetables, pink meat and oily liquid with a roll of hard unleavened bread. We three were hungry men so we ate and conversed, the suited man ate but still smoked, odd and off putting, like sex with socks on or swimming in a hat. His name was Pete apparently.

Lovely Bones

We spilled out of the car eventually and the daylight flooded in. A girl with bottled red hair and miscellaneous piercings sat at a desk. She pointed to the price list and began to talk in a thick Spanish and a thin English version of international soundscape. We must have looked a sight but we handed money over and thanked her in return with body language. She picked up a phone and said a few quiet words into the mouth piece. Ernesto whispered a joke about oral sex as she got up and ushered us through a doorway. "Don't touch the bones" she said, "don't touch the bones."

Dead engines

For those of you who don't know, don't really know or really don't care; I can see dead engines. Ernesto, Claudia and the rest do not possess this twisted gift, I struggle with it, it's use and the inherent responsibilities of having this weight to myself. Sometimes I think that this pain will never end, then I wake up, with a start, sweating and realise that though I have been sleeping, perhaps for a very long time, none of this is a dream.

Roadkill Ford

Everything is everywhere at all times and matter cannot be destroyed, it is all on a journey to somewhere unspecific, we may for a time join it as it travels and as our paths run in parallel. This 1983 Ford Sierra is a reminder of...1983 I suppose.