The Fighting Man (1993) (20 page)

The rain ran on their heads and their shoulders and gathered in their laps, fell heavy from the upper leaves. They were together in a small circle as they ate the gruel meal of dehydrated powder mixed with rainwater. It was not possible that Jorge did not realize the tension volcano growing but he set himself apart from it. Jorge talked quietly of his father, of the legend. A soft voice, touching the mystic, and they heard him in quiet.

Gord let it ride until the meal was finished. He could not see their faces . . .

He whipped them.

‘Right, that was just fine, and that was an indulgence, and out of indulgence comes complacency. If any of you believe that anything that has been achieved so far is meaningful, then you are totally
wrong
. We are nowhere and have achieved nothing. We have the first of the rains, and the wet season, I reckon, is our best chance. The wet season gives us two advantages. We are going for high ground, and the rains and low cloud will reduce the hours fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters can operate. We need them grounded by weather, most particularly when we leave jungle conditions. On the high ground, in bad weather, the roads will foul up, wash away, they will have problems moving armoured vehicles . . . We are on a charge. We always have to be further forward than they believe it possible for us. That is the basis of the military operation . . .’

He heard Harpo’s snort of derision.

‘. . . And there is my personal position. I can turn round now. I can leave you here,
now
. I can walk across the Petén and I can cross into Belize. In Belize I will get from my own army a good bath and a hell of a good meal and as many cans of beer as I can drink. I can get a flight back to Britain any day I want it. If I do not hear it from each and every one of you that I am wanted, that I will be heard, then I am
gone
. I want to hear it . . .’

The Archaeologist muttered, nervous, ‘Not my place, but it’s a hell of a way to run a revolution . . .’

A silence. The mosquitoes droned in flight around him.

Jorge said, ‘You are wanted.’

The coughing shriek of a wild turkey.

Zeppo said, sour, ‘You should stay.’

The stampede flight of a pheasant.

Harpo said, grudged, ‘We can work together.’

The dripping rain spattered a drumbeat.

Groucho said, hesitant, ‘We are as one man.’

Six guerrillas joined them in the morning. They were skeletal thin, their clothes were rags and they wolfed the food that Groucho gave them.

Gord took the lead, set the pace faster.

He read the digest of the interrogator’s report.

The vantage point had been from behind trees, their vision had been incomplete.

Colonel Arturo scanned the single sheet of typed-up paper.

The first plane had landed, two wings on each side. There had been eight men who had come from the plane. They had unloaded boxes. There were guns in the boxes. There had been three Indians amongst the men, and three more who were old and
Ladino
, and one who was young and also
Ladino
. There had been one last man, one who had worked the fastest to get the boxes from the plane. The last man was European white. The subject under interrogation had known that he was European white because he had once worked on an oil drill under a German engineer, near Sayaxché. The subject under interrogation could tell the difference between a European white and
Ladino
stock. A second plane had crashed on attempting to land.

The fist of Colonel Arturo was clenched on the sheet of paper. He wondered how the man he had seen, splashed down, regaining consciousness, questioned, hooded again with the
capucha
, breathing broken, had come to make so factual and chronological a statement.

He telephoned an office in the G-2 behind the Palacio Nacional.

No, he was told, it was not possible to question further the subject of interrogation.

He tried to call the office of the Chief of Staff, gone to a restaurant party for his wife’s birthday. He called the office of the Director of Intelligence, gone to the Army Club to play tennis. He called the HQ of Army Command, Petén region, and was told the brigadier was not available.

He swivelled in his chair. His chin rested on his locked fingers. He stared up at the wall map that displayed the chinagraphed symbols denoting the location of the country’s armed forces. He had placed on the map an orange-headed pin at a spot south-east of the Santa Amelia
finca
, and a second orange-headed pin on the Sayaxché to Chinajá road.

The excitement had worn.

The Archaeologist struggled to hold the pace that was set. The Englishman was merciless to him. When he slipped back, when the Indians who manhandled the weight of the cart with the tubes came past him, when the old
Ladinos
elbowed him aside, when he was at the back of the column, then he felt the shove of the Englishman’s hand or the weight of the boot into the seat of his trousers. He would have thought that he was in good condition, and he was wrong.

Impulse had taken him into the jungle to follow the group and he had tracked them for six hours while he had dragged for the courage to close on them. The impulse was long gone. His breath sagged, the muscles in his shins and thighs ached pain, his arms and body were scratched raw. With each step that he took, weighed down by the rifles and mortar shells that he carried, so the decision of the impulse became more binding. There was no going back . . . The straps of three rifles cut into the flesh of his shoulder and the burden of the mortar shells bowed him. As the moment of impulse drifted more distant, and the sense of excitement thinned, the Archaeologist found himself drawn more closely to the silence of the Englishman who bullied the column forward.

At each rest halt he slumped down beside the Englishman.

At each stop he sat close to the Englishman, a dog at a master’s feet, like when he’d been young and his parents had owned the cross Labrador and spaniel bitch and the dog had sat the winter evenings against him. He would settle beside the Englishman and watch him at his work, checking his backpack straps, cleaning his weapon, poring over the frayed map, boots off and socks off and massaging his feet.

He spattered the questions.

‘I’m really interested, Gord, why you’re here . . .’

‘. . . Is it politics brought you, Gord, would you be a liberal . . . ?’

‘. . . Eight men killed back on the road, does that bother you, Gord . . . ?’

‘. . . Your family back home, do they know you’re in Guatemala? What do they think . . . ?’

‘. . . A revolution and going all the way to the centre of Guatemala City, real or just joke talk . . . ?’

‘. . . Gord, this is an army country. Can you win? Is winning something that can actually happen . . . ?’

‘. . . Is it that you saw something that was wrong and wanted to change the wrong . . . ?’

Never an answer. Sometimes a slow smile, sometimes the slap at a fly in irritation, sometimes a quiet curse of annoyance. He had a girlfriend, a good but on-hold relationship, in the psychology faculty on the campus at Minnesota. They used to talk through her study work . . . and he could not read the man, and he didn’t think his girlfriend could have done better. He’d hack it, too right . . . in time he’d break the silence wall . . .

On the last march session of the day, as they pitched ahead in the falling light, they came to the cleared space.

Groucho told Gord that it was a place of the Communities of Resistance. Scattered through the space were small huts of rough-cut wood walls and with wide leaves stacked as roofing. Not a person to be seen, not an animal, not a chicken, and the quiet hanging in the dusk, and the rain falling heavier through the canopy.

Groucho told Gord it was a camp for a community which had fled the army and made new homes in the secrecy of the jungle. Jorge had gone forward, only Zed with him. With hand motions, back at the edge of the tree line, Gord gestured for the others in the column to fan out. They were all wary. Jorge had left his weapon in Zeppo’s hands and walked unarmed to the centre of the clearing. There was a half-kicked-out fire smouldering in front of a hut. There were worn paths. There were filled buckets of water near Jorge. There were children’s clothes strung from a vine line and still dripping from their washing. There were a dozen huts that Gord could see, maybe more that were masked from him, there were corral fences of cut thorn to hold animals, there was no sound and no movement.

If the planes found the place, Groucho told Gord, it would be napalm bombed, if the soldiers found it they would level it and herd the community back to the new secure villages.

Gord motioned for the others to stay back. He held the machine gun across his hip. He moved lightly on his feet towards Jorge. A few minutes and the darkness would have enveloped the place, and they had walked well the last part of that day, and they needed their food and their sleep. He felt almost a sense of anger that they had happened across the place and now the food and the sleep would be delayed.

‘Jorge, we don’t have time. We should move through. We should keep on going. We should . . .’

He was falling.

He was going down. The earth rushed at him.

There was the shrill screaming around him.

Panic movement, tipping and tumbling. The screams piercing at him.

The machine gun was wrenched from his hands as the rim of the hole cracked against his elbows.

The pigs were in flight, scrambling from the pit and scratching at his body, jumping from the hole, and his face was filled with the wing feather beat of the chickens. He heard the laughter echo around the cleared space. When had he last heard laughter? The loud laughter of Zeppo and Harpo, and the giggle of Groucho, and the squeaked chuckling of the Indians. He blazed in his fury. His fury was his humiliation. The laughter pealed in his ears, louder and gayer. He was shouting for quiet. It was the breaking of discipline, it was the loss of control. The pigs had fled, the chickens had flown. He pulled the pencil torch from his tunic pocket. He bent below the snapped mass of branches that had been covered by an inch of earth to hide the tunnel hole. He shone the torch into the recess at the bottom of the hole. He saw the child that clutched, as if it were a nursery toy, the piglet not older than a week. He saw the wide eyes of more children. He swung the torch. A crouched man held a knife. A woman drew a swaddled baby closer to her bosom. Gord turned the torch again. He shone it into the fullness of his face and he smiled into their fear. He offered his hand to the man with the knife. He jacked himself up out of the hole and he reached down to help out the man who held the knife.

There were calls in a language he did not recognize, and there were sharp whistles that aped the jungle birds.

The clearing in the last light was filled with men and women and children emerging from the tunnels, and animals that had been hidden in pits, and chickens sprouting from the ground.

Groucho came to Gord and he still grinned, and he carefully wiped the earth filth from Gord’s trousers.

The Archaeologist was at Gord’s side. ‘Because of these people, and people like them, is that why you came?’

The captain at the garrison camp at Playa Grande sat in his office and dully turned the pages of a newspaper and thought of his girl who was in Guatemala City, and awaited a response to the signal he had sent to the offices of the G-2. The signal requested orders as to what should be his response to the activities of a shit woman of Peace Brigades International. The captain knew in which village Alex Pitt stayed that night.

The major of G-2 murmured, ‘If nothing were seen . . .’

‘On the open road,’ Benedicto prompted.

‘If it were at a place without witnesses . . .’

‘Alone on the open road.’

‘If it were in an area with evidence of subversive attacks . . .’

‘Foreigners are warned that the villages around Playa Grande should not be visited.’

The major of G-2 scratched gently at the hairs in the lobe of his ear. ‘If it were possible to interrogate, to trace the lines of contact, to search deeper into the network of involvement . . .’

A chilling and hollow laugh. ‘A person taken into custody, interrogated, is a witness.’

‘If . . .’

Gord had said to the Archaeologist, quietly, would he be so kind as to leave him alone.

He sat on the edge of the cleared area and his back was to the jungle and the machine gun was across his lap, and the cart was behind him with its angles gouging at his shoulders.

There was a fire of leaping tongues in the centre of the cleared area, heaped high with wood. A pig had been killed, its throat cut with a knife after capture in a stampede chase. Meat slices were cooked over the fire, skewered on long sticks. They had drunk the fermented maize brew. Gord thought it was the atmosphere that Jorge would have wanted. There was a marimba frame that was played, the beaten tubes making a throbbing and compulsive music, not like anything he had heard.