We Ate the Road Like Vultures by Lynnette Lounsbury Read Free Book Online Page A

I’m the first to admit, though probably only to myself, that I really do believe I’m usually rightabout things, and my father assures me it’s only cos I’m sixteen and by forty I will be sure I know nothing, but the truth is I only enter into conversations about stuff I have read and thought about and prepared for and that I know my way around. Okay, so I was wrong about Bruce Lee, but honestly, I was more interested in uncovering the truth than finding him alive, and I found out enough to satisfy my curiosity and allow my thoughts of him to rest in respectful peace.
    â€˜I haven’t actually read Mein Kampf . And it’s probably more famous than anything Kerouac ever wrote. Isn’t it?’
    He smiled. ‘It’s hardly required reading for a good life. If you will lend me Carousel’s book I will read it. I would like to read it.’ He turned and started to walk and held out his hand towards me as he did. I wondered for a moment if he wanted to hold my hand, and I blushed again. All the rapid blood flow around my body was going to kill me.
    â€˜I will have some of that sunscreen after all please, Lulu. I don’t want to be eighty-seven with chunks cut out of my face.’
    I laughed and passed it to him. ‘It doesn’t matter much at eighty-seven anyway—my grandfather had a cancer the size of a walnut cut out of his nose, and by that age most of your face is overgrown to the point that you can lose a few centimetres of ear or nose and no one will notice. He looked just the same.’
    A few minutes later a big shiny truck pulled over next to us, a rare sight in that part of the world where trucks go to die. This one had four tyres the same size, both headlights and a huge almost-clean tray on the back with only two Mexican men sitting in there. It was the fourth or fifth vehicle we had seen that morning and most had a small village of people and chickens in the back so I had a moment of hope when it stopped and I tried to gesture that we’d really like a ride to town. The driver, a man with a truly Texan amount of oil in his hair and a flowing moustache, grinned gold teeth at me. He didn’t have to decipher my hand signals cos Adolf, ever the surprising one, rattled off a few sentences in fluent Spanish and got a round of cheers and grins from the whole gang. Evidently they wouldgive us a lift in the back but had to stop and do a couple of errands before they could drop us at the Catholic church on the other side of town, which was Adolf’s first port of call when finding the shrine of the saviour. How, in exact words, the Mexicans in the car actually said, ‘a couple of errands’, will forever perplex me but I didn’t think much of it until we were loaded in the bouncing tray and listening to one of them sing something haunting, and quite possibly dirty, to a battered guitar he was carrying. As I was listening my eyes wandered, I looked out over the desert that didn’t change much and at the town as it came into view so far down the flat road I knew it was still a few minutes’ drive, and then I saw the object on the floor behind the guitar player. It was a semi-automatic. Once again my grandfather’s love of weapons came in handy and though there was nothing antique about this shiny thing I knew what it was and that it wasn’t for protection against snakes or that general need Mexicans have to carry a beat-up rifle over their shoulders. And I knew we had to get off the truck, now. I leaned closer to Adolf and told him about the gun, butover the racket of the music and the road and the roaring old truck, he just smiled, humming his own tune to the music. I tried to gesture at the thing but pointing is a fairly universal language and soon both Mexicans were grinning as they realised I had spotted the weapon.
    The musician’s friend, a similar looking cliché of Mexican madness, pulled his own from the side of the