The Fighting Man (1993) (3 page)

But they had still taken the name of the man, the name of the village, the name of the nearest town.

A train had carried them through the day north from London to Scotland. A smaller train had brought them from Glasgow to Fort William, through bare mountains that were shadowed in cloud and rain and dusk.

A taxi had driven them on narrow roads from Fort William to the village, to a darkened shed beside a quay where the water whipped in storm waves. The taxi driver had been good to them, and taken the piece of paper with the handwritten name and knocked at the door of a small house and shown a woman the name and been given directions. The headlights of the taxi had found a caravan building, blacked out, and again the driver had found the nearest house and smacked his fist on the door and repeated the name.

The three men had sat, squashed close, in the back of the taxi, and seen the gestures through the rain running on the window.

They had been dropped at the hotel. They had paid, they had taken the receipt.

It was the last chance. The bar door was closed in front of them. They had travelled to Madrid and to Frankfurt and to Louvain and to London to find a fighting man. It was the last chance or it was failure.

The door opened. Because Rocky was at the bar, because the bulk of Rocky’s body was not between the door and himself, Gord’s hand fluttered with a trained instinct towards his belt. Just instinct. At his belt there was no pistol, no holster. His fist rested on the damp denim of his jeans and dislodged more of the dried fish scales.

Gord saw them come in.

As if to a signal they took off their hats. They stood inside the bar. Their features were a uniform. Dark hair cut short, wide-set ears, flattened noses that looked as if they were pressed against glass, long mouths with strong lips, high and forward cheekbones. Gord thought they might have come from a production line. Each of them was short in height but with the power of barrel chests. The tan on their faces was milk mixed chocolate. They stood, each of them, inside the bar with their hats held across their privates and they looked around them with slanted eyes.

The accent was Spanish, thick English and taught. It was the one at the back who spoke. ‘Please, Mr Brown? Mr Gordon Brown . . . ?’

Rocky swayed at the bar. ‘Who’s wanting him?’

‘I was told that here we would find Mr Gordon Brown . . .’

There was the mischief look in Rocky’s eye. The small boy, the big bully, fun in the schoolyard. ‘Well, you’ve found him.’

Gord chuckled to himself, dry. A hell of an awful day in the middle of a hell of an awful week. He anticipated sport. He eased back in his chair and readied himself for the show. Rocky put the filled glass in front of Gord, then turned to face them. Gord thought that he deserved to be amused.

The one in the middle, who would have been the smallest, not more than two inches above five feet in height, said, ‘We are from Guatemala. We are from the old village of Acul which is in the Ixil triangle region of the Quiché district. We live now in the city of Havana. Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez has sent us to find you, Mr Gordon Brown . . .’

The one at the front, an inch taller and older because he had grey smears in the black hair, said, ‘We want the help, Mr Brown. We want you to march with Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez when we go back to the triangle . . .’

The one at the back who carried a small attaché case, imitation leather and cheap as they come, dribbling with the rain, said, ‘We have come to find a fighting man, Mr Brown, one who will know the mind of our enemy. May we talk with you, Mr Brown . . . ?’

‘Be my guest,’ Rocky slurred.

Gord watched. He wondered what sort of place was Acul, what sort of village . . . They ignored Gord, as if he didn’t exist. They made for the furthest corner of the bar, and they stood in respect until Rocky had slumped down on a chair. Gord heard occasional words, the ones that were hardest on their tongues and which they seemed to speak the loudest. Once Rocky looked across at Gord and winked hard. The words that Gord heard were ‘atrocity’ and ‘genocide’ and ‘massacre’ and ‘revolution’. Gord knew a little of Guatemala. He hadn’t been to the Jungle Warfare School in Belize that was less than fifty miles from the Guatemalan border, but he’d known those who had, and it had been their job to learn the capabilities of the Guatemalan forces. He knew the reputation of those forces. From what he’d heard, ‘atrocity’ and ‘genocide’ and ‘massacre’ were not out of place, but ‘revolution’ was. That’s what he’d heard, way back . . . The smallest sat straight upright in front of Rocky and spoke as if he had learned by heart the proposition, and Rocky couldn’t help himself and spurted as a reaction half a mouthful of beer and chaser onto the table, and the one with the grey smears in his hair wiped the table with the sleeve of his jacket. Rocky was giggling into their faces and they showed no shock, none of them. The one who had the attaché case opened it and lifted out a heap of photographs, and Gord craned from where he sat to see them. He heard the peal of Rocky’s laughter, and he thought from what he could see across the room that the photograph on the top showed the naked body of a woman, and he thought he could see the scar marks on the body.

The baying now of Rocky’s voice. ‘Why not? Piece of cake, right? Walk straight in there? Bang, bang, bang, all over. We’ve won, fuck the bad guys. Count me in . . .’

He thought they realized. Surely they would have known by now that they were used for fun, an amusement and a sport. He felt shame.

He stood.

He had humiliated himself.

Gord said quietly across the room, ‘Go home, Rocky . . .’

He was three inches, minimum, shorter than his friend, he was fifty pounds lighter.

‘. . . Just take yourself off home, Rocky. Game’s over.’

He saw the puzzlement on the big man’s face and then the annoyance flickering at his mouth. Gord stood his ground with his hands easily on his hips.

Rocky went. He left a third of his big glass full on the table and a half of his chaser glass, but he went out of the bar and Gord heard him slip in the corridor and fall and then heard the vivid curse from the outer door when the weather would have hit him.

Gord went to the table where they sat.

‘I apologize . . . I’m Gord Brown.’

Each of them shook his hand. He cringed. They showed no anger. He asked them to show him their photographs. He was sobered by their dignity. He took Rocky’s chair, pushed aside Rocky’s drink, scoured the table with his handkerchief.

The top photograph was pushed towards him by the smallest man. A woman lying naked in her own blood on the steel trolley that had been pulled out from a refrigerated compartment in a morgue. Her arms were crossed in death to preserve the modesty of her breasts, but one hand had been severed at the wrist. A small square of cloth had been placed over her groin. The pale skin of the body was marked by contusions and slashes and bruises. Gord breathed hard.

He moved aside the top photograph. He saw a picture of a man laid out on a dirt floor and some of his face was obscured by the kneeling shape of a woman, and the focus on the camera had been sharp enough to record the tears on her cheeks. The shirt of the man had been opened to display the wounds that Gord reckoned were the work of a knife or bayonet. There was a bullet entry wound in the centre of the forehead. He felt the vomit rising in his throat, he had only drunk that evening and had not eaten.

There was the image of a child’s face, close up, rigid in death. He could not look away because he had played a game with these people, made his fun and amusement and sport from them. He owed it to them to hold the photograph in his mind. The eyes of the child had been gouged out of blood-dark sockets. The ears of the child had been sliced off. He could see because the cadaver’s mouth was open that the tongue of the child had been cut short . . .

He turned away. He was sick onto the floor.

From behind the bar the landlord watched him, said nothing.

Another image was slid in front of him.

He vomited again, his evening’s drink and his lunchtime’s sandwiches and he could taste the flesh of dead fish.

A photograph of a fresh-excavated grave with bodies half retrieved from mud and a woman pointing to a corpse and men standing around leaning on long-handled spades . . .

He knew where they were kept. He went from the table and out across the bar and down the corridor to the scullery beyond the hotel kitchen. He ran water from the sink into the bucket and he took the mop back with him. They sat in their silence as he sluiced the floor around the table. No word from the landlord at the bar. It was Gord’s work. He poured Dettol from a plastic bottle onto the linoleum of the floor, dosed it so that the smell of the vomit and of the dead fish was over-whelmed. He took back to the scullery the mop and the bucket and the disinfectant, and threw the contents of the bucket as far as he could into the night. He came back to the bar and sat in his chair.

‘I’m Gord Brown, what do you want of me?’

The dawn came in a grey haze off the sea waters of the loch. He walked the white sand of the beach. Where the incoming tide had not covered them his footprints showed the trek he had made back and forth from the rock cliff to the west, in the darkness, to the black mass of the seaweed field to the east.

The wind took the top from the waves, flecked clear white against the shadow distance. What did Gord Brown stand for? He had been told of an Indian people suffering under the boot of the military.

The cloud was sweeping fast from the shoreline across the road to the base of the mountains beyond. Where was the life of Gord Brown going? He had been told of a young man charged by a dying father to return to his own and to take with him a fighting man who would understand the mind of an enemy.

His anorak billowed open from the soaked shirt clinging to his chest. Was Gord Brown looking to a future? He had been told of the proletarian masses who waited only for the call to rise up in arms and of a victory that was inevitable.

Each time that he turned now at the extremity of his walk he could see them. They stood on the wind-stung sedge grass between the beach sand and the road in front of the hotel. Before they had gone from the bar to negotiate accommodation with the landlord, and he had come down to the sand to walk away the night hours and contemplate the proposition, they had talked to him in a language that was half damn funny and half damn pathetic. Funny and pathetic because ‘proletarian masses’ and ‘revolutionary struggle’ and ‘power of the people’ were old slogans, buried. But it was the dignity, sincerity, that was hard to mock.

They stood beside the road in the front of the hotel and waited on his decision.

If they had come a week earlier, before the fish had slid stressed into the dead hole . . . What did Gord Brown stand for?

If they had come six weeks earlier, before the farm had been put onto a stagnant market . . . Where was the life of Gord Brown going?

If they had come three months earlier, before the first signs of the sea lice on the underbellies of the salmon . . . Was Gord Brown looking to a future?

If they had come before he would have heard them out, smiled, shaken their hands, and told them to go lose themselves on the way to Acul village of the Ixil triangle region in the Quiché district, or anywhere.

He was, had been, a fighting man.

He was thirty-four years old. He wavered. He could stride to the west of the beach and climb the granite rock stones and go back to his mobile caravan home, he could slide across the seaweed mass to the east and go to the caravan and lock the door and strip the clothes from his body and sleep till it was time to go back to the farm and start up the suction pumps that drew the wasted fish from the dead hole . . . It was three years since he had seen a beaten people and turned his back on them, left them to the mercy of an army’s firepower.

He walked towards them.

It was ridiculous.

When he was close to them he saw that their faces showed no surprise that he came to them. It was as if they had not contemplated rejection.

Gord said brusquely, ‘What are you paying?’

The smallest man said, ‘We have no money.’

Scornfully, ‘You don’t pay?’

The man with the attaché case lisped, ‘What is the price of freedom? What is the cost of honour?’

Softly, ‘You reckon I come cheap?’

The oldest man smiled. ‘Mr Brown, you would have our gratitude.’

It was five days since he had been able to see the summit of Sidhean Mor, where the eagles flew, where he had climbed the previous year to be close to the nest where the big birds reared their young on an escarpment ledge. He would have liked to have watched them again, the big birds. He could not see the steep slope walls of Sidhean Mor.

Gord Brown was death on the move. He had worked all the previous day and into the evening, and then he had drunk and thrown up, and then he had paced the beach through the night. Nothing seemed to him now to be ridiculous.

He started to walk towards his mobile home and the three Indians from Guatemala trailed after him.

The landlord of the loch-side hotel had been awake for more than an hour.

His dog had woken him, yelped for attention from the kitchen, and he had heard the outer downstairs door of the hotel being opened, the bolts being ground back. He stood at the west-wing window while his wife slept behind him. He had thrown on a sweater and his heavy wool dressing gown, and he used the binoculars that he kept beside the window to watch most mornings for otters in the seaweed at the eastern end of the beach. He had been able to see them, the three of them, standing on the grassline between the road and the beach, and he had been able to follow the restless pacing passage of Gord Brown across the sand. In the bar he had been able to hear little, but the landlord had the wit to know that a proposition had been put by these stunted little beggars from wherever to the man who played at being a fish farm labourer. He had seen Gord walk over to them, talk briefly with them, and now he watched as Gord led them away to the right to where the mobile home was parked in the old stone quarry. If he had thought his wife knew more about Gord Brown than he did himself then he would have roused her, but she didn’t; none of them in the village knew about the outsider who had come to live amongst them fifteen months back, other than that he had a past. The landlord knew that Gord Brown had a past that was obscured because the man steered every conversation away from his life history before he had come north and west to the peninsula that jutted towards the islands off this Scottish coast. The villagers, and he counted himself among them, rated themselves as having a rare talent at probing any blow-in’s history, and all would have admitted quite total failure with Gord Brown. Not rude about it, not aggressive, just determined that the past was private and staying that way.