A Gringo Like Me

Peru to Bolivia - April 27th, 2010 (The Santa Catarina Pro - Day 5)

50 miles from the Bolivian border, everything changes. i look up into the rear vision mirror, specks of sheep blood on my cheek - blowback from the animal I had executed back in the mountains. As I touch the specks they smear into long reddish brown streaks over my skin, the smell of spilt copper fills the car. My hands have the faint odour of cordite to them, spend black powder. I looked down at the serial number of the berretta and wondered what this weapon may have done in the past. It dawned on me that I was now the last shooter, I started to wonder how many gringos like me now sat in the jail cells of South America slowly going mad. All of them had been pinned for the rap of some ancient fellony attached to the pistol they had bought in a back street market, there they sat, clinging to some ridiculous story of shooting a dying sheep in a field they could never point out on a map again, their only witness a shepherd girl who could not be found. It became clear - I needed to ditch the gun before I reached the border. Almost to the second of reaching this epiphany there was a faint 'pop' inside the car, a curl of blue smoke and the lithium smell of burning electrical components, the grinding whirrr of the car heater faded out to road static - I had blown the heater circuit. A quick check and everything else seemed fine. The indicators that I hadn't used for over 1000 miles - check. Radio playing endless pan flute solos - check. Air bag low pressure light - check...permanently illuminated, whatever. It was only a little after noon and already the temperature was dropping, sun racing low over the mountains. I wouldn't hit La Paz in Bolivia until nightfall, it was going to be near freezing - really going to miss that heater. I pulled over and tried to change some fuzes around, I screwed up the polarity and blew another one - just lost the headlights - fuck! I swapped the horn fuze over and got it right, so no heater and no horn in the middle of South America - as long as that low pressure warning on the airbag sensor was working I just knew I was going to be fine.

You can break a 9mm Beretta down into 62 components. I stopped at 31 - didn't have a small enough screwdriver to keep going. Next to me sat a pile of bolts, moving parts and the skeleton of the pistol. The yawning abyss of the Greater Andes fell away to one side, I rolled down the car window and threw a handfull of components over the edge - gone forever. There was probably an ancient tribe that lived down below in the valley of these mountains and constantly harvested the bottom of the cliffs for gun components. Over centuries they had reconstructed entire spanish cannons, fields of artillery. Composite weapons of 16th century Spanish flintlock rifles modified to fire 50mm ammunition with a laser range finder. A decade from now, the firing pin of my Beretta would end up in some monsterous bomb being wheeled across the border under the cover of darkness, bound for some doomed North American city.

5 kilometres later I sent a hail of 9mm shells into the valley via my car window. Minutes later the breach block and recoil spring flew into the void. Extractor pin, rear sight and barrel were next. I stopped the car to cast the pistol frame, I watched it sail over 1000 metres - out of view, it kicked up the faintest of sparks as it struck the flint rocks near a distant river stream in the underworld below me. Only a handfull of springs, bolts and pinds remainded, I threw them as a metal spray off the edge of a switchback, and then it was done, the weapon broken down across 10 kilometres of mountain range, a puzzle that would bever be completed. I slowed the car as the border approached, squat guards in badly fitting uniforms punctuating the no mans land between Peru and Bolivia. I cleared Peru with a stamp from a metallic franking amchine that left the page warm and textured, the faintest outline of Gran Sello del Estado smoking in my hands. it was a kilometre to the Bolivian border, this was no mand land, the black dotted line on the map than no one owned, no one administered - a grey moonscape brushed with the nightmare of South American wars and doomed empires. A pure white glove came down in slow motion on the bonnet of my car as the Bolivian Border guard motioned for me to pop the hood.

Abra la capucha Senor?