(Out now with Trident Press: https://www.tridentcafe.com/trident-press-titles/100ccs-corey-lof )

 

1.

The 45 continues through the flatlands, on and on, straightaways as far as you can see. The bike, in the top of fourth with its heaving, asthmatic growl, carries us through towns with names known only to those inside them and towns that aren’t towns, just huts and people where the speed bumps are, and through, heading south: cow pastures, swamp lands, another non-town, a young girl sitting at a fruit stand selling watermelons, an older woman selling watermelons out of a shack next door; both watching as we pass. There is a man standing in the middle of the road by the speed bump at the end of the non-town. He is the man of every non-town, standing at the non-entrance and non-exit, with a crate filled with bags of water and a dirty styrofoam cooler filled with Coca-Colas and fruit juices. He waves a string with empty pop bottles tied to it at us and at every passing car.

Down towards Honda the mountains crawl in from all directions. A woman sits on a milkcrate in the sun on the side of the highway with another milkcrate filled with limes beside her. It’s the same picture of uncertainty and sadness and beauty I see everywhere.

Everywhere I look things seem to be meandering, but time continues to move unilaterally, pushing us forward in spite of it.

 

What are we doing?

 

What’s that sound?

 

A life forms around this woman. I imagine a truck picking her up and a family welcoming her home, but that’s as far as I get. We don’t slow down. We pass her and leave her there, a piece of the scenery at our backs.

—

Xi needs to piss. We stop at a motel with a restaurant connected to it. Or maybe it’s a restaurant with a few rooms for rent. It’s hard to tell. It’s a small building with a big window where you place orders and an over-hanging roof, twice the size of the building, with tables underneath. Xi walks into someone’s room by accident while looking for the washroom. I buy a coke and some wafer cookies then sit at a table near the edge of the overhang, under a big TV.

Watching the news makes me sick. I distance myself with my notebook:

 

A pile of unused bikes and toys lies beside a group of siblings, who are staring up at the TV. 150 Dead—landslides in Peru, whole hillsides like waterfalls of thick brown running into whirlpools between highways, live cows spinning and kicking, eyes clogged with muck, entire cars picked up and washed away. It’s happening in Ecuador and starting in the South of Colombia: Mocoa taken in a single gulp. 150 Dead and 200 more missing.

 

“Think they’ll be where we’re going?”

“I don’t know,” I say. 

“That’s the south of Colombia and the west of Peru.”

I wipe wafer cookie crumbs from my shirt.

“Army, that’s where we’re going.”

“It’ll be fine,” I say.

—

We attempt to avoid Bogota and Medellin by leaving the 45 South in Honda for the 50 West with a plan to cut across then down through Manizales and Periera, both of which look like comparatively smaller cities on Google Maps. We stop in Mariquita. 

I follow Xi around in first gear while she stomps from hotel to hotel, scoffing at the prices. She’s in her green-and-white flowery pajama pants and faded waffle-knit long sleeve, wearing a fuck-the-world face and refusing to get back on the bike. This morning feels like a lifetime ago. We’ve been driving for eight hours. We’ve barely eaten.

We decide on a hotel at the same price as the first five or six we looked at, 45 thousand, with a pool we both know we won’t use. Xi curses the place, the town, the bike, our life, the fact we can’t make decisions and, even more so, the fact we must, but refuses to take another step.

In the room I keep my distance.

“Don’t hate me,” Xi says.

“I don’t hate you,” I say. “But I do want you to smoke a joint, have a shower, and relax so I don’t have to be afraid of you.”

I leave the room to grab a beer, and when I come back Xi’s in her underwear smoking a joint on the bed. I lay down beside her and turn on the cable.

Before she’s halfway through the joint, there’s a knock on the door.

“Answer it.”

“You answer it. I don’t speak Spanish.”

“I’m naked.”

“So am I.” I’m not, but I’m close.

“Put some clothes on,” she says, but she gets up anyway and opens the door, hiding her body behind it.

It’s a man. I don’t see him, and I can’t hear what he’s saying, but I know what it’s about. Xi closes the door and gives me an embarrassed look.

A couple years ago I would’ve assumed this feeling of being a child would go away, but I’m starting to doubt it.

“He says there’s no smoking in the room.”

“This isn’t decoration?” I point at the no smoking sign beside the bed.

“He seemed pretty pissed.”

“Obviously you aren’t allowed to smoke in here. It’s a hotel room.”

“Some hotel rooms come with ashtrays.”

“This one didn’t.”

“Are you pissed?”

“I’m not pissed.”

I am.

“It’s embarrassing,” I say.

“Come on.” She leans over the end of the bed.

“Makes me feel like a teenager.”

“I know.” She looks back at the door. “Now I feel weird about leaving the room.”

“I was about to go for a cigarette,” I say.

“We’re pieces of shit.”

“You’re a piece of shit. I haven’t smoked anything.”

“You suggested it.”

“Goddammit.” She’s already stoned. Everything is a joke.

“And now you can never leave the room.” She climbs onto the bed and builds a cage with her body over mine.

“I really want a cigarette.”

 

We fuck and it’s nice, but neither of us have eaten and I need a smoke. I pace the room, pick up the ukulele, play a few chords from “I Got You Babe,” one of the songs we’re supposed to sing at this wedding.

“They say we’re young, and we don’t know,” Xi sings in a whisper before catching herself.

“We won’t find out until we grow.”

Xi groans and pulls out her phone.

I fold over the end of the bed and try to kiss her leg, but she pulls away.

“Okay, fine. How about I never touch you again?” I trade the ukulele for the remote and flip through channels.

I settle on an investigative cop show, some crew of emotionally hardened, autistic detectives looking for a serial killer rapist they believe has three women held captive somewhere.

“That Makenzie girl is still at the ranch,” Xi says.

Makenzie is no-one, but I don’t know how to say I’m hungry. “You hate that chick, eh?”

“Why would you say that?”

“I get that feeling.”

“She’s annoying and has nothing of value to add, but I don’t hate her.”

“It’s okay if you hate her.”

“What’s your problem?”

“Nothing. I’ve just noticed. I’ve been around you with her; you can see the hate in your eyes.”

“Dios, I didn’t realize you two were so close.”

“We’re not. I’m not defending her, or telling you you shouldn’t feel the way you feel. I’m just surprised because I’ve never seen you so actively hate someone before.”

“I’m done talking to you.”

“It’s just a feeling I get. You can say you don’t hate her. Fine. You don’t hate her. Doesn’t change the feeling I get.”

She takes both her index and middle fingers and tries to push her eyes back into her skull.

“Why’d you point it out like that if you don’t hate her? ‘Makenzie is still on the ranch.’”

“I didn’t say, Makenzie is still on the ranch. I said, ‘That Makenzie girl is still on the ranch.’”

“That Makenzie girl.”

“It’s a fact. I was just stating it. Chucha. Sorry I said anything.”

“Me too.”

She turns away from me and towards the TV. There are two women in torn clothes, chained up in a barn. A drunk and burly man enters and smacks one of the women in the face.

“What are you watching?”

“A cop show.”

 

 

We grab breakfast at the same spot we had dinner the night before. I order cheese bread and Xi orders oatmeal. The bike’s parked in front of us on the street, leaning over onto the kickstand a little too far. Xi’s staring at it. I’m staring at her.

“You were in quite the funk last night,” I say.

“I didn’t like it much when you said you could ‘see the hate in my eyes.’”

“Man, you don’t like someone, I noticed, I pointed it out. I don’t see what the problem is.”

“Okay,” she says, and lets it drop.

 I keep staring at her and she keeps staring at the bike with our bag, her ukulele, her yoga mat—everything hanging off the side by a bungee cord.

“The bike is going to fall,” she says. “The weight is distributed unevenly.”

I shrug.

The bike falls and takes out the scooter next to it.
            “Mhmm, you see?” she says.

I stand it and the scooter back up, rework the bags, and no one is the wiser. We finish our breakfast in silence then get back on the road, my back to her face, her thighs at my hips and her arms around my waist.

 

The chain skips and we say nothing.

 

2.

We avoid the cities but must cross the unavoidable mountain range, the 3000 feet of incurred elevation. We pass through the Sunday crowds in Fresno, a colorful mountain town existing entirely on a 45-degree slope, up, up, past clusters of pine trees, and up. The turns in the road tighten, the oxygen thins. We struggle in second gear.

Our speedometer is broken but I know we can’t be going more than fifteen or twenty kilometers per hour. With every meter of elevation the engine slows. The temperature drops to what must be below zero, snow along the side of the road. The bike stutters but keeps going, barely. My breath fogs the visor of my helmet. I can’t feel my hands.

Xi suggests we stop and grab warmer clothes from the bag, but I’m afraid if we do the bike won't re-start.

“Is that a thing?” she asks.

“It feels like it’s dying.”

“If it dies, we’re dead,” she says. There hasn’t been another car or sign of life since Fresno.

“We’re almost there,” I say, not knowing where we are or where we’re going.

She pulls my sleeves down then slips her hands under my flannel.

I clench at the cold touch of her fingers, pinch them against me with my elbows. Sharp, shivering breaths. I drive one handed, the other between the buttons of my shirt, over hers, rubbing hers. Our bodies: stiff, rattling. And the bike: barely breathing. I hold onto it, and Xi holds onto me. I rotate hands and continue in a full-throttled crawl, up, seeing nothing but more trees and more snow materialize from the fog. For two hours. Only fog and numbness, our sharp breaths and the clattering of our teeth.

 

We crest the pass, and the fog clears. I spot a cluster of buildings in the distance, a restaurant, down the mountain a ways. I point to it with my left hand, all balled up in the sleeve of my flannel, and Xi rubs my stomach.      

 

We lean over our soup for heat, gulp down our coffees. Outside, we unpack our bags. We need to get to the bottom, where the pants and bulky items we thought we’d never need are. The rest, the miscellaneous—the hand wipes, a waterproof bag cover, the books, the shampoos, the phone chargers, the sandals we never wear—are spread out in the parking lot, thrown over the seat of the bike, or leaned on the tire while we strip down and add layers of clothing. Xi manages to put on three pairs of pants, two sweaters, a jacket, and a pair of thin gloves.

“I can’t bend my knees,” she says.

Warm from the soup and already forgetting what we drove through, I pick up a copy of The Pearl, by Steinbeck. I read the first few lines. Such solid writing, without flair. Will I ever have the confidence to let my sentences stand for themselves? Will I ever have a story with enough substance? Is it possible to pull substance from the meaningless diaries of a running pissant? Does volume count for anything—

“Army!”

“What?”

“Are you reading?”

“I’m thinking.”

“You want to get dressed?” She hands me a long sleeve and hoodie to wear with my flannel. I fit blue khakis over my jeans.

“Alright,” I say.

“Is it too much? I can barely move.”

“Can you sit?”

She does a curtsy squat.

“You’ll be fine.”

I repack the bag, strap it to the bike and walk to the store next to the restaurant to find some riding gloves. There’s a young boy working a sales stand out front. He’s quick to smile and suggests a pair of black gloves with a gray knitted pattern on the top of the hands and rubber studs on the palms.

He says they’re twelve thousand.

“Sure,” I say. But before Xi pulls her out her wallet, an older man comes out of the shop and looks us over. In English he asks if we like the gloves, then tells us they are twenty thousand.

They are warm and I need them, but Xi refuses to pay the gringo price on principle. “I am South American,” she declares telepathically with a bone cutting glare, but the clerk just looks back with a “So what? He’s not.”

“Okay, fuck this,” Xi says and defiantly waddles across the street to another vendor set up in the gravel between a fork in the road. He has a section of fence covered in a variety of hats and gloves and is acting as a mannequin for his products, bundled up in a mix-match assortment: two different gloves, a beanie over some earmuffs. He unpins a few gloves and hats from the fence and holds them up to show how they’ll complement our sweaters, our eyes, our radiant personalities. I pick a pair of fingerless gloves with SK8 written on them in rubbery print. Xi asks if I’m sure and I tell her I’ll wear the print over my palms for grip. The gloves are eight thousand. They’re shit compared to the others, but it doesn’t matter. Xi plays the scene like theater, shoulders open to her audience across the street, voice projected. She waves the gloves in the air and hands the eight thousand over with a smile on her face.

The man and the boy frown and re-enter their shop.

Xi laughs, then points down the road and asks if it’s cold the way we’re going.  

The beanie over muffs shakes his head, no, “Veintiocho, veintinueve.”

It doesn’t matter. I keep the gloves. I keep the layers. Wrapped for the tomb, I walk across the street. I throw my stiff limbs over the bike and Xi follows.

“You keeping everything on, then?” I ask her.

“Yes,” she says. “Just go.”

—

With every winding turn comes a few more meters of descent, a few more degrees of warmth, a little more feeling in my body. The fog ceiling lifts. I open the visor of my helmet and let the warm air hit my face. Palm trees work their way into the greenery. The bike opens up, starts purring, all 100ccs. We ride it in fourth, following the 50 into the valley, barely feathering the brakes as we careen around the corners, which are opening up, each with an extended white-striped shoulder, making room for our deep lean, our knees barely off the ground. Every turn, from white line to double yellow, we tip back and forth down the mountain, into the warmth.

 

 

3.

We weave through Manizales traffic without stopping, continue on the 50, and trace the southern edge of the city to the 29 South, toward Pereira.

 

In Pereira, like in every city, there are a million wrong turns waiting. Not one exists in the wealthy suburbs, with their visibly marked streets and safe places to stop and pull out your phone. All million exist in the center, always.

We take one, enter the mayhem, the heat, the hectic torn up roads, the skeleton alleyways. We stop in a strange parking lot, both just off the busy street and completely hidden behind a non-descript building with non-descript doors spaced out like motel rooms. The parking lot is gravel. An old man sits on a milk crate near the middle of the building, watching over the doors.

Xi checks the map on her phone. I keep one eye on the old man and the doors while criticizing her google dependency. She asks if I can get us back on track.

“I do,” I say and point to the highway. “We need to stay parallel until we see an opportunity to get on.”

“Let me off the bike,” she says. “I’m dying.”

“You’re not dying.”

We both lose a few layers. I repack our bag and Xi walks towards the building.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to ask him.”

“You’re going to ask him?”

The man appears to not have slept for the past twenty years of his seventy-year life. His eyes roll back into his head as he considers the question: How to get to the highway? He says, “Ahí, o ahí... o ahí posíblemente.” Every ahí comes with a finger pointed in a different direction, each seeming to suggest we take an airplane. Xi leaves him with his hand pointing up at the sky and his eyes looking for something in the back of his head.

“You think you can get us back?” she asks.

“Yes.”

She gets on the bike.

“The highway is right there. It’s easy, we just have to get on it.” I pull out of the parking lot, away from the highway, make a left, and am almost hit by an oncoming motorbike.

“Vas contraflujo!”

“I know,” I say. “Now.” I make another left into an alleyway. A wispy haired man with the same vacant expression as the man guarding the doors sits on a step amongst some questionable puddles. I don’t see an exit.

“Army.”

“I’m cutting through,” I say, but the alleyway narrows and ends, and we cut through what feels like someone’s yard to get to the next proper street.

I turn left, towards the highway.

“Here we go,” I say, driving slowly. I make my way through the sea of motorbikes to the right side of the road, looking for an onramp. I drive, slowly, up onto a bridge and over the highway.

“There’s the highway,” I say.

“Here we go,” she says, as we cross the highway and re-enter the city.

“We’ll get there.”

“We’re fucked.”

“We’re not fucked.”

“We’re driving away from the highway.”

“To find another place to get on.”

“Another? Pull over and let me check the map.”

“We don’t need the map. The highway is right there.”

“Exactly.”

“Paciencia amor,” I say and make a right into another wall of horns.

“Contra!” The bike stalls and we’re swallowed by traffic going the opposite way. I hold the clutch and attempt to walk us out backwards. I put my foot down and a passing bike grazes my leg. I wait, I breathe. I take a step and a handlebar clips our bag. Curses whiz through our helmets, horns flare up around us. 

“Stop the bike,” Xi says. “I’m getting off.”

“You can’t get off the bike here.”

“I’m getting off.”

“Just wait.” The traffic opens and I push the bike to the curb.

“Stop the bike.”

“The bike is stopped.”

“I’m getting off the bike.”

“You want to get off the bike here?”

She looks around. It’s pure city core. Everyone and everything in sight seems to creep towards us.

“Okay, start the bike.”

“Do you want to pull out your phone and check the map?”

“Now you want the map. Start the bike and I’ll do it while we drive.”

 

Leaving the city, we tour a few kilometers of hooker-hotels: Cherry’s and Candy’s, eighteen thousand for three hours-type places, Playboy bunnies and glowing neon. We stop at a small shop for a cigarette and a coke. Xi pisses while I smoke. When she’s done, she joins me beside the bike and waits while I finish my cigarette. I look at her, but she looks away. She shifts her weight from one foot to another, makes a face like she is whistling but doesn’t make a sound. The air is light.

Through the city and over the mountains—I feel like we’ve made it.

She looks at me and smiles. The smile is tight and sarcastic, lonely without an eye-roll.

“We’re the worst,” she says. I laugh and she leans her face in my chest. “Why do you make me so crazy?”

“I don’t mean to,” I say.

“I know you don’t. I just hate being lost.”

“You do?”

“You know I do.”

“Can’t tell.”

“Yes, you can.”

 

We look at the map. We’re over a quarter of the way to Lima. Two and a half weeks out from the wedding. Two and a half thousand kilometers. Less than two hundred a day.

“I want to spend the night in Salento,” Xi says, taking a drag from my cigarette then making a face like she regrets it.

“It’s going to be like Mariquita, but worse,” I say. “It’s touristy. It’s going to be expensive. It’s out of the way.”

“We need a mechanic.”

“I’d rather a nowhere town.”

“Army, I’d like to stay here.”

“Do you want to live here and work here? ‘Cause it’s going to cost us all our money and we’re going to have to get jobs.”

She holds up her hand between us.

“I want to say something,” she says. “And I don’t want you to confuse it for a joke or think I mean the opposite.”

“Ok.”

“You’re not funny.” 

 

We end up on a dirt road, south of Salento. A rocky, pothole-ridden mess. The bike sounds like a cup of dice and I notice not only the skipping chain, but grease from the front suspension spattering my leg as I drive.

“You see?” she says, meaning “We should be in Salento right now, having a warm shower, sleeping in a comfortable bed, but instead we’re here.”

And the bike is falling apart.

And I’ve packed the bags wrong.

And Xi’s riding up on me.

And I’m straddling the gas tank.

I stop and repack the bike. Xi’s got more room, but the bag’s still moving. She rubs my belly, but I know what's coming.

“The bag’s moving,” she says.

“I feel that.”

“Makes me nervous.”

“Nothing we can do about it now.”

“Should we stop at a mechanic’s?”

“As soon as we can.”

“When do you think that’ll be?”