Road Fever by Tim Cahill

Peruvian Investigative Police.
    Better yet, I spoke some Spanish. Garry had only a smattering. And I could write a book about our Pan-American run, sell it to a publisher, and Garry could use that contract to attract the associate sponsors he needed to realize a profit on the venture.
    We shook hands on our collaboration at the end of the ALCAN 5000. That was the only contract we ever had.
    B Y D ECEMBER OF 1986, Garry had put together a proposal out of his basement office: a press kit that emphasized his experience, the backing of GMC, and the public-relations benefits that would accrue to potential sponsors. According to Garry’s notes, Firestone, Uniroyal, and Goodrich had declined sponsorship. He made a note to hold off sending out another fifty proposals until the first of the year. The proposalswere glossy, professional, and they cost twelve dollars apiece. Six hundred dollars.
    Which meant, in essence, that Lucy would get a lump of coal in her stocking for Christmas, and Jane, pregnant with their second child, would get a tender hug. On the other hand, why send out the proposal so that it arrived three or four days before Christmas when it was likely to get buried? Why not get it to the various offices first thing into the new year, when the executives were fresh, more likely to look favorably on a new venture.
    And that decision generated a trip to the bank, which was not in Moncton but two hundred miles away in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was the bank Garry dealt with on his other projects. Garry had met Jane there in the late seventies. For Maritimers, Halifax had been something of what San Francisco was to American young people a decade earlier.
    The long drive to Halifax was a good time for reflection. Garry spoke into a tape recorder he’d brought along for the purpose. “There’s Amherst, Nova Scotia, where I used to go as a kid. My dad installed windows in storefronts there and he used to take me and my twin brother, Larry, with him when we were kids. It’s the first town in Nova Scotia, Amherst, and you come over a rise, it’s just sitting out there, like a fried egg on a marsh. I saw my first blacks there. We didn’t have any in Moncton, and they seemed terribly exotic and exciting.”
    Years later Garry would find himself traveling through places where everyone was black and few had ever seen a white man. Children wanted to touch him, and he let them examine him as if he were an animal on the sales block. He understood the impulse.
    Garry Sowerby “grew up with this story about how one time my dad was working in Amherst and these guys came at him and he decked three of them on Main Street. I don’t know if the story got stretched or not, but the word around Amherst was, ‘Don’t screw with glaziers from Moncton.’ ” That’s what travel was about: strange exotic people to meet, new friends, and a hint of danger. “Now that I think about it,” Garry said, “those runs down the windy twisting road to Amherst in my dad’s fifty-three Mercury two-ton glass truck were my first road trips.”
    Garry’s mother worked at a department store in Moncton, “which was great for Christmas because she would do all the shopping on Christmas Eve, after the store closed and the prices on everything dropped to rock bottom.” Garry and his brothers always had nice gifts.And now Garry was driving past Amherst to Halifax, to borrow money so that he could provide proper gifts for his own family on his way to setting a world record.
    An officer at Sowerby’s Halifax bank, Sue Bain, understood his operation and considered him a bona fide and secure investment. With the GMC contract in hand—the automaker owed him a $42,000 retainer—Sowerby negotiated a loan for $25,000, Canadian.
    It was enough to send out his proposals, take care of Christmas, buy tickets to Peru and Bolivia, fly to London to confer with the
Guinness Book
people, and still have a bit left over to fly to New York or Chicago or Los Angeles in