We Ate the Road Like Vultures by Lynnette Lounsbury

arse-kicking he got right there in front of kids and women and hanging sacks of vegetables. When he was unconscious and unrecognisable they finally picked him up and dragged him to the police truck where they tossed him in the tray and left a trail ofblood dripping through the market. I had a feeling we were fucked. This became certain knowledge when the first bullets hit the back of the tray. They didn’t penetrate but then the police were still a couple of hundred metres behind us. We threw ourselves to the floor and lay as flat and as far back as we could. Well, three of us did. Guitar player lay there with us, loot in his grimy hands, but the other bandit stood up and, swaying back and forth with the motion of the truck, he sprayed a steady stream of bullets at the police. I wasn’t sure who to barrack for—the bandits who had kidnapped us or the police who were both our hope of rescue and potential death.
    Nobody seemed very accurate with their high-powered weapons, thank God, and there was the stench of dust and gunpowder, and my sweaty hands had re-gripped Adolf’s and might never ever let go, and I wondered how the hell we both came together in a place like that and if my father would ever even know how I died or if he would go on hoping for decades that I would call home. I loved that feeling of owing nobody anything and doing whatever I pleased from morning tillmoon but when it came to it there was some old-fashioned kid in me who didn’t want her family to be crying into their pillows, and who wanted to see the familiar rocky path from the gate to the front door of the house I had lived in my entire life.
    I was starting to panic. On some level I always knew that trekking around the world by yourself involved a level of danger, but I was pretty careful to avoid weird people and dark places. I stayed with Christians or in free Buddhist temples, and when I had to pay, in a youth hostel. I avoided cheap hotels, I ate at truckstops full of burly men ready to protect a young girl with their lives and a steel pipe. In fact I’d had so few problems, I started to think myself charmed, a born roadster. And there I was on the back of a truck in the Mexican desert, pursued by cops and in a Rodriguez movie. My breathing started to catch and stumble and the dust suddenly felt thick and sticky in my mouth and eyes. I coughed and grabbed at the edge of the truck, I needed to jump no matter how fast it was going—I wasdead there anyway, the fall might only involve a broken ankle or shoulder or neck.
    Adolf pulled me back and turned my face towards him with his hand. It was a big hand I noticed, dark gold on one side and just as filthy as mine on the other. He was serious but calm as Jesus Christ in the storm as he looked into my blinking wild eyes and said very loudly, so I could just pick it up over the rumble and fire, ‘Much worse things than this have happened. This is just a few minutes.’
    He said the last line three times before I wilted and sat still. It was his strangeness, as much as his words, that became my anchor—his weird view of the world and his calm way of travelling through it looking for ridiculous truth and imagination—it made me believe him. I smiled slightly, just a lift of my eyes. He returned to his examination of the men in the truck and, without telling me his plans, he inched forward, neither of them noticing in their equal focus—one on keeping his balance while firing, the other on keeping the bags of loot in place.
    With a speed that seemed out of step on such a laconic figure, Adolf crouched and leapt forward, lifting the left boot of the gunman and pitching him over the edge of the truck without so much as a shriek. I spun and saw the Mexican tumble like a weed and lie still and I was glad to have not been the first to fall. In the same instant Adolf had slid far enough forward to grab the gun that lay beside the other Mexican, pulling it out of reach