The Fighting Man (1993) (35 page)

‘If you are not decisive, if you do not go for the throat of this rabble, if you do not crush them,
now
. . .’

The hand of the general waved for him to be silent. He saw the old veins on the claw of a mottled hand.

A quiet voice, the passion exhausted. ‘I have asked the artillery to be brought forward from Escuintla, 75mm and 105mm, but I am told that too many men are under training for it to be an effective response force. I have asked for mechanized infantry to be driven in from Huehuetenango, M-113s and V-150s, and I am told that the personnel carriers are undergoing the annual maintenance programme. I have asked for the light tanks from the garrison battalion at Jalapa, M-41A3s, but I am told the road is washed out. My dear friend, we are a political army and we are in the hands of politicized officers, and politicized officers are content to wait until they see the fall of the coins. It is the time for the excuses of
pragmatists
. . . What do you want?’

No hesitation. Colonel Arturo stood forward on his toes. He felt his power.

‘I want command of the Kaibil battalion.’

‘He is my nephew.’

‘Full command.’

‘He is married to the daughter of the cousin of the minister.’

‘Full support.’

‘The officer you would replace has the connection to break you.’

‘Full command, full support. Let him try.’

‘You ask much . . .’

‘Or you will hang from a lamppost in front of the Palacio Nacional, or you will end your days washing dishes in a hotel’s kitchen.’

He saw the hostility of the adjutant. He wondered who was the uncle of the adjutant, who was the father-in-law of the adjutant. He owed nothing to any man. He had no
finca
in the Franja Transversal del Norte where the military commanders had scuttled for free land. He had no link to a construction company that built for the ministry. He had no villa on the shore of Lake Atitlán, no share of a hotel, no investment in car parks, no arrangement with the army’s bank. He knew none of the foreign businessmen of the American Chamber of Commerce, none of the Japanese car importers, none of the Taiwanese contractors. He was owned by no man.

He was told when he should report back, the next day, at what time in the evening.

‘If you fail then there would be nowhere you could hide . . .’

‘I want the command of the Kaibil battalion.’

Off the high ground, back amongst the tall forest trees of ceiba and pine, coming through paths that were bright with the
tamborilla
blossom beaten down by the rain from the trees. They skirted a village, they bypassed cleared ground. The breath was back in Gord’s lungs. The wilderness of the mountain was behind him. They were across the Sacapulas to Uspantán road, and there was the growing roar ahead. He had not counted, there had been no formality because the drive of the march’s speed had again been raised, but he had reckoned there to be a hundred men waiting at the roadside for them. There had been villagers with axes and with forks for turning the hay crop and with sledgehammers, there had been Civil Patrollers with their veteran bolt-action rifles, there had been tattered guerrillas who seemed to blink in the light of open ground, and a policeman in a soaked uniform, and more women and more children, and all running to catch the end of the straggled column. Gord could hold the speed of the march, just . . . Short of the Sacapulas to Uspantán road he had broken from the column, gone to the shelter of the bushes and opened the buckle of his belt and peeled his combat trousers down. He had squatted. The first time in two days, and the food that had been forced on him had blown through his gut. Not much of the paper left, and he did not have strength to dig the latrine hole that he had preached for in the Petén. He had dragged his trousers back up and looked down and seen the white parasite worms . . . He could hold the speed of the march now, just, because the Street Boy carried the weight of the machine gun.

The roar was in his ears.

It might have been the sickness, and it might have been the tiredness, or the effect of the parasite worms in his stomach, or the altitude.

He walked forward, towards the roar ahead, and his feet tramped as an automaton’s. The thought of his father, and what his father had said once, drunk, about making footsteps on life’s path. Heh, old man – heh, TeeJay – bloody great footsteps here. It squirmed in him, the opportunities missed between a son and a drunk. The old man, TeeJay, gone, dead, and the epitaph was a slurred reminder that a son should make footprints. Heh, TeeJay, if you’re watching, pray God you’re watching, these are hellish big footprints. All lost, the opportunities. TeeJay Brown had cut the passing-out parade at Sandhurst because a crown court case had run an extra day. TeeJay Brown had cut the short leave when he had called home after being accepted into the regiment because a detective from the Porn Squad was retiring and throwing a thrash. TeeJay Brown had cut the Sunday lunch when he’d travelled down to the suburbs after his first Irish tour because Features had demanded a rewrite. He wondered if there were any left of the old scribblers, who still told jokes about TeeJay Brown, recognized the footprints. He thought of his father, in what he thought was a sort of delirium, and in his mind were red-eyed detectives in church and scribblers who were snivelling. Too much missed . . .

They came to the Rio Negro.

The tree line of big pines reached to the rim of the gorge.

Fifty, sixty feet below them, the swelled river crashed and spumed and burst over the boulders.

There was a bridge seven miles, on the map, upstream and a bridge could be held by a dozen men, and would be held. There was a bridge, on the map, nine miles downstream . . . The high pines lowered above him and the cloud caught at the top branches, and below him the spray hung over the crashing power of the river. He sank to the ground. He did not know the answer.

Jorge looked for him.

It was the reflex.

Always he looked for Gord. Gord, with the solution. Gord, with the idea.

Hunched down. His little group around him. On the ground and his eyes closed and his head bowed.

For Jorge to decide . . .

It was after he had eaten his breakfast, two eggs scrambled and orange juice and good coffee, that the Canadian found what had been done to the tyres of the Shogun four-wheel drive. It was a good jeep, the best that he had been able to hire on his three visits to Guatemala. He didn’t rage and he didn’t swear and he didn’t weep, because it was his third visit to Guatemala and he had learned, hard, that anger and cursing and crying won him nothing. The four tyres had been slashed, and the spare. They had not been punctured so that they could be repaired, they were in ribbons as if wide-blade knives had been used on them, and there was no place in Chichicastenango where a man could buy five new tyres for a Shogun four-wheel drive. It would have been the kid’s birthday . . . it would have been the end of the road . . . it would have been the day they dug in the cemetery. They should all have been waiting beside the jeep for him to finish his breakfast, the men who were to dig, and the coroner from Santa Cruz del Quiché, and the attorney from Guatemala City. It was his third journey to the country, it was the trip on which he had at last believed he had identified the grave of the kid. So the kid was stupid, so the kid had messed a potential career, so the kid had bummed in Central America, but the kid was his grandson. The kid was his grandson, and a fool and a messer and a bum had the right to something better than death in a police station and burial in a clandestine grave. There had been no-one waiting beside the Shogun four-wheel drive when he had come from eating his breakfast in the small dining area of the Posada Santa Marta, but the plainclothes men of the Treasury Police were across the road, lounging in the rain, watching him. It was the goddamn fear . . . He knew about the fear in goddamn Guatemala . . . The men that he had hired to dig, and for whom he had bought corn liquor the night before, would have seen the slashed tyres and gone home. The coroner that he had worked a month with for the paperwork of exhumation, and bribed well, would have seen the tyres and driven away down the rain-soaked road to Santa Cruz del Quiché. The lawyer he had now known with meetings and correspondence for three years, and who had had in the last week a live bullet round in his post box, would have turned his car for a return to the capital. No chance from the hotel of an international call, difficult enough with shouting to raise Guatemala City, no chance of getting Kingston, Ontario. And a poor call it would have made, better that his wife was left in her ignorance . . . There was a room in the bungalow that was behind the Irish pub in Kingston, set back from the marina frontage, and the room was as it had been when the kid had gone. The room had the fluffy bears and the aircraft model kits and the hockey photographs and the school textbooks, and his wife would probably have been in there that morning and said the prayer that she always said when she sat on the kid’s bed . . . No, he hadn’t known where Guatemala was when he had first gone down to the travel agent to book a ticket, three years back. Yes, he knew about Guatemala now. His son, the kid’s father, his son said that the living had to live. Not his son’s business because his son was divorced, and an engineer on a bulk carrier, and had long before failed to make a home for the kid, passed the role of parent to the grandparents of the kid. His son said that the kid was dead and that throwing money after finding a grave was waste. He was in his seventy-first year, and he had a mortgage now on the bungalow, first time in eleven years, and the mortgage had paid for a private detective and the lawyers and the correspondence and three trips down to Guatemala. The mortgage money had tracked the journey of the kid, his grandson, through the Mexican border post and into Guatemala at the La Mesilla frontier check. The mortgage money had found the Indian woman who remembered the kid in San Rafael Petzal, smoking, and found the storekeeper who remembered the kid at San Cristóbal Totonicapán, drunk, and found the priest who remembered the kid with the beggars outside the church at Nahualá, destitute. And big money, what the bastard would have earned in a year, for the policeman who remembered the kid running from the soldiers at Chichicastenango, stoned and drunk and destitute. There was a police station at Chichicastenango, where the kid would have been killed. The killings were plenty that year, and there was a cemetery, grass-covered, unmarked, on the road out to Santa Cruz del Quiché, where the kid would have been buried. He would have driven that morning out to the cemetery, with the gravediggers and the coroner and the attorney, if the tyres of the Shogun four-wheel drive had not been slashed . . . It was the girl who washed the glasses in the bar, pretty little Indian girl and no shoes on her feet, out of sight of the plainclothes policemen across the street, who told him of the rumour, of the spirit who had brought the fire.

‘Where are they?’ The fist of the general, driven by his anger, smacked the desk.

‘We do not have a precise position.’

‘What is precise? Is “
precise
” that you do not know?’

He had been at school with the G-2 officer. He played bridge with the officer. His wife rode with the wife of the officer.

‘It is the weather . . .’

‘So you do not know where is a rabble crowd of illiterates, vagabonds, peasants . . . ?’

The G-2 officer flushed. ‘You have to understand the circumstances. There are difficulties of transport, there are problems of communication. It is impossible to have reliable people where you need them. There are reports, only reports, of an incident near to the Sacapulas to Uspantán road, reports of the killing of some Civil Patrollers – there were tracks. Maybe them, maybe fewer men . . . around the whole Ixil triangle area . . . it is alive with peasants on the move . . . if it is them then they will find the Rio Negro across their path. There are bridges and they are defended. The river is in spate.’

‘What do you tell me?’

‘If they wish to come south, towards Santa Cruz del Quiché, and we are full battalion strength there, then they must force a bridge, they must identify their position.’

The general eyed the G-2 officer. He could goad men, drive them. His staff officers, hovering behind him, clung at his words. He had goaded men forward, driven them, in the days of the bad casualties of Victory ’82. ‘They cannot cross the Rio Negro other than by bridge where they will be identified, you promise me?’

The silence. The staff officers in the room considered the price of a promise. It was said, not proven, that once the general had, himself, shot dead with his pistol a platoon commander accused of abandoning a road junction to the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres, shot him first in the testicles then in the head.

The silence, then the deep-drawn breath of the G-2 officer. ‘They cannot cross other than by bridge, and the bridges are guarded . . .’

Axes and machetes had cut down the great pines.

Two ant swarms of men, swinging the axes, hacking with the machetes, had brought low the two great pine trunks that had a century before taken root at the rim of the gorge above the rambling torrent river.

Each man, swinging his axe and hacking with his machete until the spark had gone from his strength, had reeled away, and another had taken up the attack.