The Fighting Man (1993) (42 page)

‘In my experience, luck has to be earned . . .’

The knife was in the small of the Civil Patroller’s back, held under his coat. The tip of the knife was against his flesh, beside the strength of his spine. He had not seen the face of the man who held his arm in a vice, tight and twisted under his coat, his wrist close to where the knife pricked him. He had never been in a schoolroom, never been favoured with education. The Civil Patroller was skilled at tree felling with a long-handled axe or a double-handed saw, and at ploughing a maize field, and at slashing down the sugar crop when he was taken on the open-backed lorry to the
finca
near Puerto San José for the harvest season, and at survival. With the tip of the knife beside the life core of his spine he did not struggle. They left the town through the shanty quarter. They were two more drunks reeling together, supporting each other, after the night of chaos celebration. As the morning light rose, the Civil Patroller was taken out from Santa Cruz del Quiché and across the fields and into the trees that dripped the rainwater.

The fires were damped. The cloud mist hung on the town. Wreaths of smoke eddied in the streets and alleys. The flames of the night guttered in charred homes and burned stores.

Gord walked between the buildings that had lost their roofs and the buildings that were pocked with bullet marks and the buildings that were holed from the rocket grenades. The smell was all around him, of old fire doused by rainwater, and the destruction was around him, and the death. Behind Gord the Fireman pushed the cart and the Street Boy helped him, and the Priest manoeuvred the wheelbarrow, and the Archaeologist and the Canadian covered the doorways and windows and side alleys with their rifles. He had lost the anger.

The anger had been when he was cold from the rain, when he had dressed again in the wet clothes, when the morning hours were drifting. The anger had been when he had found Zeppo and shouted at him that there was no time to be wasted, and when he had come across Harpo and exploded because the armoury was not cleared and the recruits were not screened, and when he had discovered Groucho and learned the food was not collected. The anger was lost as he wandered the streets of Santa Cruz del Quiché.

The anger was gone and with it the peace of Alex’s loving. The chill was on him.

He walked past the hardware store where the
Ladino
owner, an old man with whitened hair, had tried to protect his property of oil lamps and cooking pots and knives and plain china plates, and two looters were dead in front of the shop before the owner and his shotgun had been overwhelmed. He saw the bloodied head, the blood in the white hair, of the owner, and the shelves were already bare. There was no more to be taken.

Past the grain and seed store where a
Ladino
woman lay on her side in the doorway and moaned from the slashing cuts on her arms, and the sacks inside were cut open and emptied.

Past the corner onto the plaza in front of the church where the bodies of three policemen lay, and one had his fists frozen across his face as if he had not wished to see the last life-ending blow with the machete, and another covered his groin in death, and the last to fall had his arms outstretched as if he had appealed at the final moment for mercy.

Past the shuttered shop front where the previous afternoon liquor had been sold. A man ran from the shop and there were beer bottles in each of his pockets and he had pressed five more across his chest and he skipped the body of the shopkeeper and then turned as if in after-thought to kick the corpse. There were spirit bottles and beer bottles, broken on the pavement, consumed there when the shop had been stormed and the door broken in and the shutters ripped crazily away. The man running with the beer bottles would have been the last to find liquor in the shop.

Past the car that was overturned and burned through, the windows broken in and the petrol splashed inside and the bodies of a fleeing man and his wife and his two children petrified black.

Past the evangelical church, the Church of the Little Hill of Carmen, once clean built with pink painted boards and white painted roofing iron sheets. The walls were fire-blackened and the roof iron sheets had collapsed after buckling from the fire. The missionary preacher, six foot and two hundred pounds, had been felled at the doorway of the church he had attempted to defend with a walking stick, and the back of his leather boots and his Wrangler jeans and his check cowboy shirt were burned away by the fire’s spread.

Past the lampposts from which the bodies hung. Children played under the lampposts, and the game was to jump up and spin the heels of the hanged men so that the bodies swivelled on the twisted ropes that had come from the hardware store. The bodies were of the
orejas
, the informers, and were mutilated.

Past the bodies on the street . . .

It was what he had done.

Past the drunks who slept off the looted liquor . . .

It was his work.

Past the spinning bodies and the children . . .

He was numbed. He was cold. It was the fifth day of Gord’s week, and it was halfway through the fifth day and the column had not moved. He walked up the stairs of the hotel, picked his way over sleeping and snorting men. He went past the men who guarded the closed door to the first-floor room. Jorge was naked. He was naked and washed. He was sleeping. There was a baby’s calm on his face. The fifth day was lost.

Gord closed the door, went back down the stairs.

He went to check again on the security of the surrendered soldiers at the garrison’s barracks.

He wanted only to be back with his brother and his cousin in his village on the road between Sacapulas and Uspantán. The Civil Patroller yearned only to be home in the village where his father was buried. He wanted, yearned, to survive. Always the voice was behind him. All he saw of the man was the black cloth on an arm and a hand with neat nails and slender fingers. He sat against the base of the tree at the edge of a clearing where once maize had been grown and now the high weed grass had taken control and his arms were tied with twine around the tree. He had no thought of sacrifice . . . The voice was sickly sweet, sweet as the apple grown in the triangle, or the orange from the coast that ripened after the rain season . . . He thought only of survival. He looked at the photographs. The photographs placed on the lap of his waist showed the small man who held a single flower, and the man who mopped with a handkerchief at his forehead, and the man who shook the hand of the young leader . . . The voice was sweet gentleness, and a small bar of chocolate was given him, the paper taken from it, and the hand placing it between his teeth . . . He said that the young leader was always surrounded, that the man in the photograph who shook the young leader’s hand was always with him in the centre of armed men, that the man in the photograph with the handkerchief marched in the middle of the column with the machine guns and the mortars . . . He had swallowed the chocolate and the sweet kindness of the voice prompted him on . . . The man in the photograph with the single flower, he moved from the start to the end of the marching column, was in charge of the food and had no escort of guns. The Civil Patroller, bound to the tree, talked of the man with the single flower and hoped to assure his survival.

‘When I go to the Palacio Nacional should I wear a suit or should I be in military uniform . . . ?’

Gord sat on the floor of what had been the officers’ mess room in the barracks. The dirt was caked on him. He looked across at Jorge, at the washed face and the scrubbed hands and the sleeked hair.

‘. . . I think it is important to consider what impression I make on the foreign diplomatic corps. Castro was always in uniform, Ortega too, I think that was wrong . . .’

Jorge lounged in the easy chair, and Groucho smoked a cigar, and Harpo poured from the Scotch whisky bottle, and Zeppo drained his glass for more. Gord sat hunched on the floor and there was the weight of the belts of machine-gun ammunition on his shoulders and the tightness of the webbing harness and the pull of the grenades on his tunic.

‘. . . I don’t want to appear only as a fighting man, I want to represent the voice of the people. The ordinary people have been crushed by the militarization of Guatemala. We have to mark the change. I think a civilian suit. When I spoke tonight I was trying to denote that shift . . .’

A speech in torchlight. Jorge lit by the flicker of fire. Talking in the Quiché dialect. The clenched fist raised and the baying of support from across the depth and the width of the plaza.

‘. . . I thought I spoke well, what the ordinary people wanted. I need your advice, all of you, a suit or uniform . . . I think I should speak with the Americans first, alone, and then address the general diplomatic corps . . . Gord, when do we get to Guatemala City?’

He did not raise his head. Gord’s head was bowed. ‘It is for you to decide when we resume the march.’

‘Gord, you disappoint me. Gord, you have no cause to sulk. You cannot really believe we could have moved out of here last night. We go in the morning.’

Said slowly, ‘Before dawn.’

Jorge smiling, ‘When we are ready. Please, Gord, it spoils you when you sulk.’

Said evenly, ‘If we have finished talking about
clothes
, could we now discuss the route . . . ?’

He could smell the soap on Jorge and the lotion on Harpo’s and Zeppo’s shaven cheeks and the talcum powder on Groucho. The map was brought out. Gord crawled across the floor. The map was tattered now and torn on the folds. They would go across country. They would avoid the town of Chichicastenango and the villages of Saquitacaj and San José Poaquil and Quimal. The contour lines showed a narrow-cut gorge west of San Martín Jilotepeque, east of Comalapa. It was twenty miles to the gorge. Gord told them they should reach the gorge before darkness the next day . . .

‘Agreed.’ Jorge turned away from the map.

Groucho carefully folded away the map.

Gord went out into the night. A whole day lost, the fifth day of his week, a day with the protection of the cloud and the rain. Lost . . .

15

‘How many times do I say it, the group must be together. Where is . . . ?’

Drifting from the shanty town homes on the edge of the town. Leaving the ruin and the smoke. Tramping from the church spires that rose to meet the dropped cloud. They were going into the tree line. The marching army and its followers at last straggled clear of Santa Cruz del Quiché. Gord was near to the back of the fighting strength of the column.

Two men at the side of the track wrestled for the possession of an electric fan. Shit . . . An electric fan, and they were Quiché villagers, and there was no electricity that he had seen in the villages of the Cuchumatanes mountains, and it was so bloody cold, wet, that the need for a cooling fan draught was zero nil. Shit . . . Did they think they could carry an electric fan all the way to Guatemala City, to the Palacio Nacional, and then walk back with it to a village that had no bloody electricity? He lashed out with his fist and one man released his hold and cowered, and one man ran with the electric fan from Gord’s arm reach.

The Archaeologist said, ‘Perhaps he is further up the line.’

The Canadian said, ‘Perhaps it doesn’t matter where the hell he is.’

Gord driving the men ahead of him, pushing on. An Indian was dropping back and was weighed down by the bulk of the seed sack on his shoulder, and Gord took his knife from the sheath on his webbing and slashed the sacking and spilled the seed onto the track. Pushing on . . . Two men fighting for the right to have the whisky bottle, half drained, and lurching in their anger into each other, and missing with the swung blows, and Gord had wrung the bottle from them and thrown it crashing and spurting liquor into the rich green of the undergrowth. Pushing on . . . A man in front of him fell out of the column and bent and vomited the night’s alcohol onto the wet grass. A man showed another the diamond ring he had gained in the night and held it warily so that it would not be snatched from him. He thought that if he walked with Alex then she would have deflected the anger, but she was behind him with the followers and he would not see her until the evening, until the gorge. Or he could have deflected it if he had walked with the chirping warmth of Eff and Vee and Zed, but they were ahead, gone on to scout the way to the gorge . . . The rabble army, grumbling and miserable, hung over and sated, strung out and shambling, pressed south.

The Fireman, who heaved the cart, sweated on his effort, was immediately behind Gord. They had crossed a dirt road that stretched empty either side of them into the low mist.

‘They have to want it for themselves, you cannot do it all for them.’

Gord cursed. ‘Christ . . . If you have no discipline . . .’

‘We can get there, to Guatemala City?’

‘We lost a day . . .’

‘What is there for you, if we get to Guatemala City?’

Gord smiled, bitter. ‘A bath and a bottle and a plane out.’

He heard the Fireman’s confusion. ‘You would not stay?’

‘For what?’

‘Is it true that you have taken no money? That is what they say . . . Would you not want to help to build the new nation?’