The Fighting Man (1993) (12 page)

In the darkness hours, the principal streets of the city are given over to the slow cruising cars of the police, and to the thieves and muggers and pimps who prey on the stupidity of tourists who have not read and heeded the warnings. Wide pavements are emptied by the fall of the sun.

In daylight hours, the big
avenidas
, and the
calles
that cross them in a grid system, choke with the pollution of snarling motor vehicles. The big Mercedes power by to drop men at the offices of import-export companies, and their women at the smart shops and the hotel restaurants imported from North America. The beggars are out in the daylight, and the hawkers, and the hustlers.

Dawn is the finest hour of Guatemala City’s day, when the clear light ripples on empty streets. The criminals have gone, the beggars have not arrived. Only at dawn is there a peace in Guatemala City.

As the crow flies, 105 miles from the capital, across mountains and foothills and swamp jungle, an aircraft had landed and an aircraft had crashed, and the city knew nothing of it.

The city woke with the dawn.

A Fireman dressed as quietly as he was able in the airless room that he shared with his wife and his small daughter, in the house that he shared with his mother and father and his sister. He left the family asleep as he went to work on his bicycle . . .

An American Archaeologist, a lecturer on a year’s sabbatical leave from the University of Minnesota, dressed urgently because he must be at the airport by seven to hitch the lift back to the site in the Petén . . .

An Academic, a doctor of mathematics, searched his wardrobe to find a clean white shirt to wear the next day with his charcoal suit, and when he was dressed for the university (older and drabber clothes) he went in his stockinged feet from the bedroom, and had not kissed his wife because she would have told him, as she had screamed the night before and as she would again that evening, that it was idiocy for him to expose his safety by attending his student’s funeral.

A Street Boy, thirteen years old, woke on his pavement pitch near the Ritz Continental hotel, and began rhythmically to sharpen his four-inch-blade flick-knife on the concrete kerb. He had no need to dress as all the clothes that he owned were worn against the night’s cold . . .

A Priest of the Catholic faith dressed in the cell room he had been given for the night at the national seminary, and packed his bag, and worried that he would be late for the bus that would take him back to Nebaj . . .

A Civil Patroller, from the country away from the city, dressed outside the hung sacking that was the door of the shanty house, swaying and falling from the alcohol of his brother’s wedding party, and knew that he would have to run if he were to be in time for the bus going north to the Ixcán . . .

An elderly Canadian, three weeks after his arrival from Kingston in the province of Ontario, dressed methodically in a pension room, and planned another day of searching for the grave of a murdered grandson . . .

The capital city of Guatemala stirred, in ignorance that 105 miles away, across mountains and foothills and swamp jungle, an aircraft had landed and an aircraft had crashed.

Gord understood. Nobody translated for him. He would have been an idiot if he had not understood.

Zeppo wanted out.

It was not quite fifteen minutes since they had landed, and not quite eleven minutes since they had watched the crash. They had been close to the explosion site, and close was a risk because of the ammunition and the flailing tracer rounds. They had crawled on their stomachs as near as they had dared. The plane was gone, the crew and their colleagues were gone, the cargo was gone.

Zeppo wanted out.

In Gord’s view, if Zeppo had climbed onto Echo Foxtrot, refuelled and revving power, then Harpo would have followed him, and Groucho might just have tried to ride a wing to get clear.

Zeppo wanted out and he stood in front of Jorge and he had blustered and shouted and waved his arms. Gord had kept back, and he hadn’t asked Vee to translate for him. Gord had nothing to contribute. The reality was sharp enough for him, and was a high column of smoke going to cloud that might carry rain later in the day, and was the still occasional detonation of ammunition. The intervention that had mattered had been that of the pilot. He had come from his cockpit, left his propeller turning, and said maybe two dozen words. Zeppo was still shouting at Jorge and Jorge was in front of him and with his hands easily on his hips, and when Zeppo was blown out, when the tears were in his eyes, then Jorge had talked to him.

Gord turned his back on them.

He started to carry the discarded empty petrol cans from below the wings of the aircraft and took them, four at a time, to the jungle edge and threw them as far as he was able so that they crashed from sight.

He was walking away towards the tree line when the Antonov started its run. He didn’t turn to watch the acceleration through the beaten grass. He walked back up to the tree line and savagely hurled the cans as far as he was able. When he returned for the last load, the aircraft lifted off, sudden like a startled bird, and scraped the tree tops. Gord bent to pick up the final four cans. The wings dipped each way, starboard and port, a salute. It was gone away over the tree line.

Just an emptiness around them. Just the call of birds and the grate of insects. The sun was lifting fast.

Zeppo was sitting on the grass and his head was pulled down onto his chest and Harpo knelt beside him and seemed to whisper comfort to him.

The first day, the sun not yet up, and he wondered if they were already beaten. He stiffened, straightened his back. He could have screamed into the growing light and the tree wall around him. Gord walked towards the hut at the end of the airstrip, and Jorge went with him.

‘Why didn’t you let them go?’

‘Wasn’t my decision. He was light on fuel anyway, wouldn’t take the extra weight.’

‘Everything that we said we needed, it was the minimum.’

Jorge said, ‘He wanted to go and he is important to me. He is an engineer. You think I want to start out without an engineer . . . ? I said he could go. I said that everyone could go but that I would stay. I said that even if I was just one man, with just one rifle and just one bullet, I would stay.’

‘I hear you.’

They reached the hut. The ammunition and the weapons were piled outside the open door, and the cart for the flame thrower. Jorge took Gord’s arm and led him into the dark of the hut. He saw the food on the floor and the disturbed bedding.

He stepped outside. He took a rifle from the pile, and a magazine, and he broke out an ammunition box and started to load the magazine, and his eyes raked the green shades of the tree line.

She woke in the small room.

Her room was at the back of the Peace House.

Alex Pitt woke because the German boy had stumbled down the corridor for the lavatory.

She shook her head, tossed her hair. The taste of the alcohol was in her mouth, and the smell of it was on her body. It was not often that the volunteers threw their own party, no outsiders. The Swede had wrecked the party. The one with the glasses and the sunburn and the face pimples. The Swede had been clumsy, slurred, with the mix of
aguardiente
from the sugar cane and Gallo beer. She hadn’t slapped him, or punched him, but she had pushed him hard away when he had groped his hand under her blouse. He’d fallen, he’d cut his head, he’d needed two stitches. End of party.

The German boy had disappeared down the back corridor with the American girl. The American boy was with the Spanish girl. It would only have been her and the Swedish boy who had slept alone. And Alex Pitt would bloody well decide, herself, who she took to bed . . .

A disaster.

They would all have rated the disaster as her fault.

She dressed fast.

She dressed in her best T-shirt and skirt. It was the blue T-shirt and the full flower-patterned skirt that was in the photograph she had sent last month in her letter to her mother and father. She had few enough clothes and would wear her best T-shirt and best skirt again for the funeral the following day.

It would be a bad week at the Peace House. The American boy and the German boy would side with the Swede, who would wear his scar like a reproach to her. The American girl and the Spanish girl would not understand why, after a party, she had not done what everyone did – go to bed with who was available. Before she was dressed in her best T-shirt and best skirt, she had already decided that she was better away for the week, that she would take the Land Rover and head for the mountain foothills. The far foothills of the Cuchumatanes range were where she was happiest, her and her dog.

She would go straight from the funeral.

Alex Pitt was in her second year as a volunteer of Peace Brigades International. She funded herself. She wrote to her father when she needed money, for the Land Rover. She accepted no expenses from the headquarters in Toronto. The work for which she had volunteered, and in which she believed quite passionately, was non-violent protection of the weak and abused in a vile society. The volunteers targeted those at risk from the Civil Patrols and the Death Squads, put themselves alongside those in greatest danger. A man who complained, a woman who protested, and whose life was therefore at hazard, would be accompanied by a volunteer. Her presence was her force, because she carried no weapon. By her presence, body to body with a man or woman in danger, she could hope to deter the violence of the army or the Civil Patrols or the Death Squads. Those who commanded the army and the Civil Patrols and the Death Squads would be loath to bring down on their heads the wrath of a foreign government if a volunteer were beaten, knifed or caught in a killing burst of automatic gunfire. It was a frail shield that she walked behind. It was a bluff, and Alex Pitt knew it. Each of them in the team were frequent visitors at their embassy. It would be known by those who tracked her and her colleagues, in the station wagons with the smoked windows, that the embassies both cursed them as interfering blow-ins and admired them for their dedication. Not enough hours in the day, not enough days in the week for the volunteers to stand beside the many who were at risk.

In the kitchen, alone, amongst the emptied bottles of
aguardiente
and Gallo beer, amongst the plates that had not been cleared, she ate her breakfast.

She heard the motion of the bed in the German boy’s room.

The hardest thing for her, in her world of non-retaliation and non-violence, was to accept that the men of the Death Squads enjoyed immunity.

They had found the track that a wild boar had made. The track meandered between the wide tree trunks and avoided the thickest of the nets of clinging vine. The sun was climbing but the denseness of the upper canopy filtered out the light and they moved in a shadow world. The heat stuck to them. No wind penerated from the skies that were hidden from them. It was good going as long as they had the track made by the wild boar, but at the first river that ran north to south the boar had veered away along the bank. They could wade the river which was low at the approaching end of the dry season, the depth of water was not much above Gord’s thighs, and not much above the waists of Eff and Vee and Zed. They had been moving for two hours when they reached the river, and the crossing took them more than half an hour and the cart was murder, and then there was a rest of fifteen minutes before they loaded up again. There had been no need to talk it through. The rota that they worked was obvious. When they left the river it was necessary for a path to be found. It was not possible to cut a path, because a cut path would be too easily visible to the men of a follow-up military search.

Gord and Jorge took it in turns to twist and crawl forward and to ease back the hanging vines and to bend away the clinging scrub, make a way for the cart. There was a chance of a follow-up military search because they had left behind them a burned-out Antonov and a hut from which squatter Indians had fled. Gord and Jorge alternated the lead, and the role of the backmarker on their short crocodile column.

There was a road, a narrow red strip on the map, west-south-west on the compass, that was twelve miles from the landing strip. The road was the first target.

‘Shoot.’

The Country Attaché leaned back in his chair, swept them with his cheroot smoke.

‘There’s a cattle
finca
in deep Petén. South of Sayaxché, it’s near to the Pasión river . . .’ The Intelligence Analyst stood by the map, pointed. ‘. . . The Brits had a radar trace this morning in Belize, thought it was two aircraft coming across from Honduran airspace, contour-flying, into Guatemala. That area up there is littered with strips. We’ve a CI at the Santa Amelia
finca
, he heard aircraft, didn’t see them. Said it was a landing run. Might have been two runs. There’s another strip about five miles south and east . . .’

‘Worth taking a look.’ The Country Attaché eased his chair straight.

The Chemist said, ‘It’s shit awful country up there, would be a good place for them.’

‘Should go up there, stooge around a bit, get to know it better.’

The Treasurer said, ‘We pay that creep at Santa Amelia too much, way too much. Be glad to check the credentials. If a plane’s not been in, then he’s off the roll.’