The Fighting Man (1993) (40 page)

He walked away from the pandemonium mad house.

He drove away from the building where lights burned on each floor. He could imagine the earlier blow in the
estado mayor
, as the generals and brigadiers and colonels had gathered under the loudspeakers slung from the ceiling of the War Room and listened to the staccato reports, which would have lost coherence as the panic had grown, of the crumbling of the perimeter defences of the garrison’s barracks at Santa Cruz del Quiché, as the fire had come closer. He could imagine the dead crackle, lifeless static, and the silence of the War Room when contact had been lost. He had no fear of becoming a body on the garbage dump with the dogs pulling at him and the vultures pecking at him and the kids turning over a corpse to see if it still wore a ring . . . He drove to the American embassy, the concrete bunker behind the high railings where in the morning the queues for the visa forms would be stretching far down 7a Calle.

He had the man pitched out of bed.

Kramer blinked in the bright light of the lobby hall.

‘Is it that bad, shit . . . ?’

Kramer stood in his slippers and pyjamas and he held a cold cigar end as if for comfort.

‘. . . I don’t know why you came to me . . .’

Kramer wore a wool dressing gown with the logo on the back of the Cincinnati Tigers wrapped tight round him for warmth.

‘. . . You want SouthCom people in here? Sorry, forget it . . . You want marines in from Honduras? Sorry again, forget it.’

‘I want the flier,’ Arturo said.

The last sniper had taken a position in the cemetery. He had used a high-powered rifle but had not possessed an image-intensifier sight. He had taken targets when they were silhouetted against the fires round the field of stone crosses and marble Virgins. The flame thrower had burned him out, flushed him clear from the vault beside the big stone that commemorated the nineteenth-century family of a
Ladino
merchant in the dyes of cochineal and indigo. When the sniper had run from the flame spurts the machine-gun hail had cut him down.

Gord saw him fall.

Jorge was beside him. ‘Finished.’

He heard the vibrancy, excitement, of the word. Gord said bleakly, ‘Finished? Of course it’s not finished, it is finished at the Palacio Nacional . . . You have to do your talking piece fast. Well, don’t hang about for it, man. We have to get the food, we have to get the armoury, we have to get the new men, we have to move on . . .’

Astonishment. ‘Gord, do you not understand?’

‘We have to move on and out from here . . .’

‘Do you not understand what is happening in the town?’

‘We have to keep the drive going.’

Jorge snapped, ‘We are very
grateful
to the great man who always can tell us what to do. Now, I tell you, I am going to sleep. I am going to sleep in a bed. In the morning, when I have slept, then we will talk about going forward . . .’

‘One block in their time, their place, and it is over. You have to maintain the speed.’

Shouting into the rain night, at Jorge’s back. Turning to the group around him for support and gaining nothing from the Archaeologist and the Fireman and the Street Boy and the Civil Patroller and the Priest and the Canadian, and nothing from Alex Pitt. Raking back over the faces and it came to him, sudden, that a secret was held by them and denied to him. Slashing over the faces and demanding the explanation. They were the group, they were together, there were no secrets. They had been an hour at the cemetery before the sniper’s position had been identified, before the fire had burned him from his shooting place. He demanded to know . . . They led him. The group was sombre and the secret was held, but they took him and they showed him. He knew the secret before they came to the place. The nozzle on the centre of the cart had blocked, the one whose job it was to keep the flame thrower going, working, had not been there to clear it. Delay, Gord swearing, the Archaeologist and the Fireman trying to do the work that was not theirs to do, covering the secret as Gord had cursed . . . They led him to the small sandbagged redoubt. It was close to the gate of the garrison’s barracks and the redoubt had been sited to provide a field of fire across open ground to the main road running south to Chichicastenango. He had been a dear good man, Gord thought. He wore the same shoes as when they had found him sitting at the side of the road between Playa Grande and the climb into the Cuchumatanes mountains. He wore the same raincoat, and the same little beret lay in the glistened mud beside the bloodied face. He did not know his name, only that he had been an Academic at the University of San Carlos in Guatemala City. It had been their secret while he had cursed them and sworn at them, and while he had belched the fire to flush out the sniper. A great sick and personal pain. He looked down onto the ragged corpse of the Academic. He thought, fleeting, that the power of the group had been broken.

He walked away from the place.

He walked out into the dark rain-sodden fucking night, out onto the open ground between the sandbagged redoubt and the road running to Chichicastenango.

She followed him and the dog was with her.

The responsibility gouged him, the death of a dear good man who had no business in a fighting column on forced march.

He sat in the mud of the ploughed field.

She knelt beside him.

The weakness trembled in him. He drove them all forward. He felt as if he preyed on them all.

She took his head in her hands, he felt her fingers on his face.

He had destroyed the belief in her, the belief that was non-violence, and she had killed a man that he might live. She had beaten the head of a man into the cobblestones that he might live.

She kissed him.

14

She kissed him and she pushed him away from her and down to the ploughed mud. She eased astride him, sat over him, and her hands came from holding his head that sank in the field mud, and she started to strip his upper body.

On the road, travelling, she had known the men had thought of her as the ‘bicycle’.

There was a belt of machine-gun ammunition slung over his right shoulder and under his left armpit. She freed it and slung it into the darkness. She took the belt of machine-gun ammunition that was over his left shoulder and under his right armpit, worked if from his body, discarded it, and then the belt which was shorter and which had hung over both his shoulders and dropped to his waist. All the time that she had known him, since she had first seen him on the parade ground area at Playa Grande, he had been wrapped in the belts of machine-gun ammunition, and she freed him.

On the road, moving with the New Age travellers, working the Social Security system, tight-held in the community, she had been available. There had been Johnny the Music who made the sounds on the lute, carved and strung for himself, that had seemed beautiful . . .

She took the hand grenades that were buckled to the buttons on his tunic pockets, cold and wet in her palms, and tossed them away behind her. She unfastened his belt and worked to pull from him the webbing straps that held his water bottle and his food canteen and the double-bladed slashing knife and the pouch that secured the two magazines of the Kalashnikov bullets. He seemed not to move and not to respond to the pulling, tugging, dragging of her fingers. She could not see his face, but each time that she had lost a machine-gun belt or the grenades or the webbing she came lower to him and found his mouth and kissed the life into it, her life.

There had been Johnny the Music, and Deke the Pony whose tresses of hair had reached to the small of his back and who gathered them at his nape with an elastic band and who had put the farmer with the riding crop in the river . . .

She took the heavy anorak with the bloodstains from his shoulders and she ripped at the buttons of his tunic and she pushed up his vest above the nipples on his chest. She knew that she would do it all for him, because that was the way to bring back the life in him. The mud was around her and the rain was above her and the wind was against her. She soothed the palms of her hands over the length of his chest. The mud was smeared on him, an ointment. She wished that she could have seen his face but the darkness denied her, and she could only touch his face and learn the new contours of it with her lips and her tongue against the ears and the eyes and the nose and the mouth of the man to whom she tried to give the new life.

There had been Johnny the Music and Deke the Pony, and the Van Man who had built himself a home of wood and corrugated iron that was riveted to the back part of his old Land Rover pick-up, and there had been others who had come to her vehicle in the nights and others to whom she had gone, because she was
available
. . .

She took his trousers down from the wasted place that was his belly. She led his hands under the quilt of her coat and under the thickness of her sweater and under the smelling tightness of her T-shirt and onto the looseness of her breasts. Cold hands, as yet without the life, holding the hang of her breasts with a shyness. She thought that he must have the life that she could give him. And the body beneath her shivered in the spasm of wet and nakedness. She used her fingers and the nails that she bit to keep them short to return the life to the man. She was over him and dropping onto him and guiding him and kissing the rain away from his ears and his nose and his eyes and his mouth.

When her mother and her father had brought her home in the big BMW car, the same day they had taken her to the doctor. It was just a precaution, her mother had said. It was bloody necessary, her father had said. She had still been docile and she had submitted to the tests for ‘anti-social disease’, as her mother had described it, and ‘bloody AIDS’, as her father had said, and pregnancy. She had not been with a man since . . .

She loved the life back to him. With her fingers and then with her muscles she stirred the life again in him. She did not care that she had no contraceptive. She took the bareness of him into her. The life came again.

There was the warmth in her, his hands on her breasts.

There was the drive of him in her body.

There was the tongue of him in her mouth.

It was the fire that seduced her. She had not been with a man and not felt the want of a man since she had come off the road, and the fire now caught her. She was over him and punching down onto him, and the fire was in her mind, the fire that snaked and ran and caught and destroyed. There was the power of the fire in her, and the burning in her. She clung to him. She sank on him.

When it was over, too fast for her and she did not care, when she felt the slackening of the grip of the hands on her breasts, when in her mind the fire died, she rolled off him.

The rain fell on him.

The mud was cloying against him.

She hadn’t loved Johnny the Music, nor Deke the Pony, nor the Van Man, nor the others . . .

What she thought, she loved Gord Brown.

She heard the hiss and spit of new wood thrown on a fire. The glow of the built fire came to her. He lay beside her and his eyes were closed and the breathing under the whiteness of his chest was steady. She thought she had given him again the life, her life. The fire glistened the wet on his body and caught the mud smears on his skin. She took his hands from her breasts and she pulled back up her jeans and fastened the belt on them, and she felt again the old cold. She turned to the fire. They were sitting there, around the fire. They were thirty paces from her. The group watched over him and she could see the silhouette against the fire of the cart and the wheelbarrow. She stared back at them, defiant. They were sitting crouched round the fire, watching him as if to guard him, and her dog was with the group and she heard it moan for her.

She said softly to Gord, ‘When we get to Guatemala City . . .’

The man she loved was sleeping and naked and spattered by the rain.

They stood over Tom as he dressed.

They offered him no explanation.

They had pulled the clothes he would wear from the hangers in the wardrobe and from the shelves in the chest.

He hooked himself clumsily into his combat fatigues. Enough impatience at his slowness for the Country Attaché to bend and lace the boots, and for Kramer to check the loading of the magazine in his Glock automatic pistol.

They marched him out, like he was a prisoner on close escort, and Kramer kicked the door of the room shut after them. Coming out of the long sleep and the big shame and his right eye was half closed and there were abrasions on his chin. Tom limped between them on the corridor and down the stairwell.

In the rain, the wind tugging at them, they hurried along the path between the ornamental flower gardens.

An armed marine admitted them through the front door of the residence.

The Ambassador waited for them in the residence lobby. He had the printout sheets in his hand and the speech prepared. Tom saw the squashed cigar butt in the crystal ashtray on the table beside the flower display. It was the cigar size that Kramer now lit. They had been there before him to settle business. He thought it was the big carpet job, a government official drunk, a DEA man loose in the cat quarter, a Federal man spilling to a local that his father sold spiv insurance and his mother screwed round.