The Fighting Man (1993) (48 page)

‘. . . Hope that’s useful material for you, colonel . . .’

He should have written, and he was mending. He didn’t have the name, and he was shipped back for convalescence. He didn’t have the name and he didn’t have an address, and he was mending back at the base at Fort Rucker, Alabama. He had never written and tried to find an address, never made the thanks that were deserved.

‘. . . Heh, Tom, you were down in the Gulf ? You didn’t get to hear of this crazy mother?’

It was behind him, writing letters, finding addresses, making thanks.

‘There were half a million down there. No, I didn’t get to meet them all . . .’

It was easy to lie, as it had been easy not to write and search and thank.

Tom Schultz said he was going for sleep, going to sack in. There was a sleeping bag stowed in the Huey bird, and he’d have the whole of the hatch area to stretch himself. He’d try, but he doubted that he’d sleep . . .

He wanted to be back in Garden City, outside of Ames.

He wanted to be home on the campus at the University of Minnesota.

He wanted to be gone because he could no longer control the fear. The fear was new to the Archaeologist, a creeping and growing paralysis. The fear came because the heart was gone from them. Garden City, outside of Ames, was the shrinking dream. Garden City was white walls and the regimented lines of the apple orchards, and the big grain silo, and the best farmland on God’s earth and it was safety, it was beyond his reach and growing further distant. The march was meandering, going west and going east and cutting back, and wading in the more casual eddies of the rivers to lose the track beaten by their feet. He thought the march was going nowhere, not going back to Garden City, outside of Ames. And the campus at Minnesota was drifting further, another dream, losing clarity. The campus was a service apartment, and a good woman that he nearly loved, and the company of colleagues that he enjoyed. The campus was home and it, too, was safety.

Now they were not going forward . . .

It was the sense of helplessness that fuelled the fear. The helicopter was with them. They had walked through the night, and they had rested up for only three hours while the dawn was coming, while the bright-plumed birds chorused the coming sun beat, and they had moved off again into deeper forest under the high canopy of big trees, and the helicopter had come and found them and circled them. The helicopter was the flame in the fear, fanned the fear and gutted it. The helicopter was the destruction of his courage and the cause of the fear. They could not fight back, and that was the helplessness. Going forward he had felt invincible, protected from incoming fire, going back and harried by the unseen helicopter above the tree canopy he was collapsing to the fear. It would be not in their time, and not in their place. It would be the ambush. It would be the curtain of bullets. It would be death as it had been for the Academic.

He did not think he could go on.

The Archaeologist did not know how he would find the strength to tell Gord. He dragged the cart, and the Street Boy was beside him with the wheelbarrow. Going nowhere, going away from the Garden City outside of Ames and the campus at Minnesota, going with the helicopter, going to death . . .

The strength of the march flaked.

The weapons were thrown down. The uniforms taken from the camps and bases and barracks were stripped off. There were some who went to Jorge before they left the march and kissed him or stood in respect in front of him or hugged him. There were some who came first to Gord. There were some who clasped Alex’s hand and cried. There were some who left the march without a gesture of friendship, scuttling from the track. It was the helicopter that broke them . . . always the helicopter was with them. The women had gone with the children. No more fresh laughter in the march, no more the shouting of small shrill voices. No more the colour of the women’s clothes and the dancing movement of butterflies in the dark shade of big trees.

The march struggled on towards the high ridges of the Cuchumatanes.

‘I saw it once,’ Arturo said into the face microphone. ‘I saw it once at the docks in Puerto Barrios. I think my father had gone there for something to do with his work, and it was the holiday from school. Perhaps I was difficult with my mother, perhaps it was necessary for me to be occupied. I went with my father to Puerto Barrios. I had the time to go down to the docks to see the ships unloaded and the cranes operating. The rats were coming down the ropes of a small tramp ship. It was one of the ships that took sugar up to the Gulf of Mexico and brought back grain. The ship had come in from Galveston in Texas with the grain and it had been unloaded. Perhaps there was nothing to keep the rats, perhaps they did not like to sail back to Galveston and eat sugar all the way. The rats were coming down the ropes that tied the ship to the docks. What you always hear is that rats will leave a ship that is doomed. I used to wonder for a long time, after I had seen the rats, whether that ship ever made it back to Galveston. I mean, it is necessary to give rats a degree of intelligence. You think it possible that rats could know if a ship is going to sink? Maybe, maybe not, maybe rats just don’t like sugar . . .’

They veered in the headwind that buffeted the flight of the Huey. He looked down. There was a long tree line and then the wide earth-brown scar where the logging had cleared the forest. He looked down onto the slow-moving column of people below him, and if he looked ahead and away past the American’s helmet, he could see another column. Earlier, when they were first above the earth scar of cleared ground, he had seen two more columns.

‘. . . It is what you said. It is about domination. We have frayed the nerves of them. We have broken their heart. It is because you are with them that they have disintegrated. Just rats, and trying now to find a place of safety in the warehouses of the docks. Even rats, simple-minded rats, uneducated rats, have the instinct to survive . . .’

All through the flight, from the time they had first locked again onto the beacon signal, the disintegration of the march had been clear to see below them. He had binoculars, German-made, 6 × 30, and he could see the faces of the men and women under him, and the children. He saw not a single weapon, and not a man in uniform. He watched the debris columns edging away from contact with the grape seed of the rebellion.

‘. . . I think tomorrow will be right. You Americans, do you give us any sensitivity? Any intelligence? We are only
Guatemalans
. . . I could have hit them yesterday, the full force of the Kaibiles against them. The rat in the corner fights hard, but the rat that has an escape will run. I would have taken casualties if I had hit them yesterday and I would have made “martyrs” of the vermin. I can collect the escaped rats at any time I wish, with poison, with gas, with terrier dogs, with an old shotgun. I can wait a week or a month or a year to hunt out the escaped rats. That is sensitivity, yes? That is intelligence, yes . . . ?’

The flier never spoke. The flier concentrated on his controls and held the bird steady against the winds.

When he had seen the flier in the dawn, before the helmet had masked his face, he had thought he had seen a great tiredness, as if the man had not slept.

‘. . . We take them tomorrow, what is left of them. We take the baby whore Ramírez, and the rabble that is with him, tomorrow, and the Englishman that came with them.’

They flew on. They banked over the perfection of the beauty of his country. The rats never looked up at the helicopter above them, walked for the road that would lead them to Santa Cruz del Quiché and Nebaj and Playa Grande and the villages of the mountains and the communities of the jungle. Such peace below him.

He called Gord back to him.

He pushed the cart alongside Gord.

The Archaeologist from Garden City outside of Ames told Gord of the old couple in the white-walled house that backed onto the apple orchards and faced the grain silos, and he told Gord about the girl on the campus at the University of Minnesota.

‘I want to see those old people. We’re being shepherded onto a killing ground. I want to see that girl and have a life with her. We’re being pushed into a butcher’s yard. It’s not my usual language, Gord, we’re
fucked up
. Gord, you’re never going to make that frontier, and that’s not just me talking. When we turned we had up of three thousand people. Christ, man, we haven’t thirty . . . I don’t want to be on that killing ground in that yard. I heard what you said to Jorge, and I think he’s a fine and naïve young man, and you said that you were going to take him home. Gord, that was
shit
, high-grade quality. I’m going on my own, don’t think I haven’t thought it round, because I reckon that my best chance at ever seeing Garden City again, ever being on campus again. I admire your commitment, and I admire what you have achieved. I’m not brave and I am not a hero. Sorry, but now I put myself first and last, and I want out . . .’

All through the morning the Archaeologist had been resurrecting the courage, and the goddamn man didn’t argue. He felt limp, yellow. He tore off the combat camouflage fatigues. He dragged on the blue jeans and a red shirt, and his torn old sneaker shoes.

‘Good luck.’

‘If I get home I will tell people . . .’

There was the fist on his sleeve, quietly laid there. A torn and bruised and calloused hand.

‘Do something more for me.’

‘Spit it . . .’

Gord going to Jorge. Gord taking the map. Gord bringing the map to him. Gord pointing. Gord taking the pocketbook from his tunic and writing on the paper that had been soaked and was now stiff dried. Gord tearing the sheet of paper from the pocketbook. Gord folding the paper methodically to the size of a postage stamp. Gord taking his hand, holding it.

‘Again, good luck . . .’

He had seen on the map where the road was. He went to kiss Alex and she turned her mouth away from him, as if his lips would have the bad taste of defeat, so his mouth brushed her cheek and the lobe of her ear. He thought it was upwards of two miles to the road.

He touched the cart, gazed down at the tubes. Where the old paint was off it, the rust was getting to the cart. It was bruised, bent and scarred. The right axle might not last much further, and if the right axle went then that might just be the end of the cart. If he ever made it back to Garden City outside of Ames or to the campus at Minnesota then he would tell his parents and his girl that he had pushed the damned contrary cart halfway across Guatemala, and he would tell them that the fifth day of a man’s week had been lost . . .

He walked away hard.

Alone, going towards the road, he felt a freedom from the fear. The Archaeologist never looked back.

They were going slow.

The tiredness ripped at them.

The helicopter was with them.

Gord had taken the cart. He dragged the cart and he had the two machine guns and the machine-gun ammunition, and his backpack, and he had the grenades. He did not know what was the further use for the cart but he could not bring himself to abandon it. It was as if he were fused to the flame of the cart, as if the cart were now a part of his being. He had brought the cart in and he would take the cart out. The cart was himself . . . They came to a wide dirt road and they waited and they listened, and they were all flopped down on the drying and steaming forest floor. They watched the empty length of the road and were back from the strip that had been cleared.

He felt for Jorge. Jorge was the wound in him.

Gord had heard all the fine words of Jorge at the grave of his mother and in the plaza at Nebaj and in front of the church facade at Santa Cruz del Quiché. Fine words that were nothing. The young man’s endeavour had collapsed.

He lay beside Jorge and there was the throb of the helicopter behind them, above them, to break the silence.

‘We’ll go all night. We’ll shake the bastard off us tonight. I will take you out, Jorge, I promise. It is cutting and running and quitting, but you have to get out. I don’t bloody like it, nobody likes cutting and running and quitting, but it is the only gesture that is left to you. You have to deny them the
satisfaction
of capturing you, killing you. That’s the only gesture that is possible to us. You can deny them that small victory, capturing you and killing you. If you want to be a trophy, a head on the wall of the ministry, then you turn and face them. You shouldn’t give them the last pleasure of gloating on your head.’

The bitter murmur. ‘And you save yourself . . .’

‘I will get you out, you and everybody.’

They crossed the road. They ran. They chose the moment when they thought the helicopter had turned away. The cart stuck in the rain ditch beside the road, and Gord dragged it and swore and cursed and he heaved it out of the ditch and through the cut brush where the side had been cleared. He went back to help the Street Boy with the wheelbarrow, and it took the two of them to lift the wheelbarrow across the ditch, and he went back again to help the Canadian who shook off his hand, cussed, and crawled from the depth of the ditch . . . The sounds of the helicopter were more distant, going off station. They would lose the bastard, lose it because he had promised . . . They came across the road,
everybody
. Alex with her dog that stayed now shoulder to knee with her, and Zeppo who had the wounded Eff lifted on his back, and Harpo who had the arm of the limping Vee slung over his shoulder, and Zed who was in pain from the chest wound near to his left armpit, and Groucho.