The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done

by Sandra Newman

  “Señor,” John said, “I’d like to apologize for my colleagues. I think we’re all a little bit crazy today. I sure hope our antics haven’t caused offense.”

  The Guatemalans stiffened: mortally insulted. John had pointed out their cowardly submission to dishonor.

  9But then one Guatemalan – one of what the boys called Juan Does, who had no rank and no apparent role in the project, a hothead who’d been a keen advocate of anthrax at the fractious meetings, one Victor Caceres – stood up, crisp.

  He said that in the light of Mr. Moffat’s apology, his countrymen would overlook the slight to their nation.

  The Guatemalan higher-ups bristled, usurped.

  Caceres walked away from the table with the confident ease of a good-looking man.

  John followed him. They reached the door at the same time, and Victor held it open for John to pass. The door shut on the silent room.

  In the corridor, John said to him cheerfully, “Whew! Do we get away with that?”

  Caceres snarled, “They are pig cunts! Whores!”

  and when John laughed, the mad Guatemalan nodded, as if that entered neatly into his plans.

  They crossed the parking lot together, and John admired Caceres’s Mercedes sports car. It was a clear March day, like a June day in Texas, the moist heat good in the air, like a food. Parting, the men shook hands, and John got into his own car feeling fresh and excited, as if Victor had offered him a way out of his dilemma.

  Segue: to the point

  1Then John had a friend: or he had Victor Caceres.

  1.1They used to play poker. Neither man drank, John Moffat was relieved to meet another teetotaler. There was something in Victor’s rabid spiel –

  “I am a sadist, but this is a good thing in me.” “I am a great saint in my childhood.”

  “I am the only real man in this army, but I am a coward.”

  – that leavened John’s anomie.

  1.2Victor was anti-American, anti-left, just plain contrary.

  1.3The Indians were racially underdeveloped. The ladinos of his own class were Indians in suits. Guatemalan women were whores without exception.

  1.4“But I am a patriot of this disgusting country.”

  2Over cards, Victor peppered John with tales of massacre and torture: the women with their breasts sheared off; the children mutilated; all the men shot in front of their wives. Though some horror stories were the doing of Victor’s “friends,” and some disturbingly like the accounts of an eyewitness, Caceres would study John accusingly, wronged.

  “Who began this shit?” he would ritually demand.

  John would chirp to order: “The CIA.”

  And both men laughed, cheered by the frivolous sound of the catechism.

  3Once and only once, he met Caceres drunk. John was walking down the street, he heard a man screaming at him. Next thing he knew, it’s Victor spitting in his face. Shouting: America was shitting on his country, on the Madonna, John was a man of shit. Caceres pulled a gun, and had to be restrained by embarrassed friends.

  3.1The next day he sent John an expensive watch and a note of apology.

  3.2John thought that was real style.

  Beside the point: all tarnation

  His wife used to take his face in both hands and shut her eyes. She would run downstairs to meet him, whimpering like a pup. Sometimes when she was sleeping, he would finger-comb the pale blond hair between her legs. It turned dun when it was wet.

  He’d stopped drinking once and for all, after his last visit home. Little Ed had woken him at 6:00 A.M., they went down together to find Mom. She was lying on the couch with a bottle. Tipping it down like that was some escapade. “I just never do this,” she’d sworn, in a voice no one could believe. When the little boy tried to tug the bottle from her hands, she giggled and slapped his wrist, calling him jealous.

  He wrote: I would walk through fire for you, Elaine. I would lay down my life to spare you one solitary tear. Just you keep your spirits up, and I’ll be back to take good care of you and Ed before you know it. Cross my lonesome heart!

  – and put down his pen, and rubbed his eyes until he saw stars. The air conditioner chugged on, it had some thing, you couldn’t turn it off, he was getting pneumonia. He saw Lannie, twenty years old, at that Tex-Mex place on the coast. She wore a straw hat that made her look like she had long hair underneath. After lunch, they walked in the sand, and she threw the hat at him, saying, “Catch!” But it fell in the water and before you knew it

  1. July 4, 1971: Operation Pretty Boy

  7:00 P.M.

  You heard Caceres’s car radio coming from, about a mile away. It would come up until you thought it couldn’t get louder. Then it got louder.

  And he could sure as heck hammer on a door.

  John opened up to him and that was his mistake. The fellow was drunk as a skunk.

  Caceres told John he was coming out for a ride.

  “I don’t think so, Vic,” said John. “I’m kinda pooped. Plus I gotta get back to the office. The big night, I’m manning the phones.”

  “No,” Caceres said, and put his hand inside his jacket. “Hurry up.” He produced the pistol idly, and looked back over his shoulder at the empty hallway.

  “Are you threatening to shoot me, Victor?” John said, as if that was the most remarkable thing.

  “I will shoot you here, I will shoot you there. Come for a ride.” He waggled the gun in John’s face to demonstrate. “Bang bang,” said Victor Caceres. “I threaten you.”

  7:15

  Well, why he ever got in the car in the first place, mad dog Victor and the way he drove alone enough to kill you with a heart attack, the colonel calling at eight-ish from Panama to say when the planes went, he had an hour, supposed to be on call, the big night, but now the fool was heading God knew where, clean out of town.

  The mountains stood warding off the huge gleam of sunset. Behind, the city dissolved in its brown pollution.

  “Well, any time you feel like saying where we’re going, I’m listening.”

  “You don’t like my car?”

  “Any time.”

  “You don’t like my company?”

  “Any time.”

  7:30

  In the swooping pasturelands, pale and tilted till they hiked up into a horizon: John smoked and bided his time. Looked ahead at the darker jungle slopes. Too near for his liking.

  So sudden it flashed, they came up on a line of jeeps pulled up on the side of the road. They idled, the wind bore a streamer of gray exhaust. Victor hit the brakes, and my dad’s heart started going, he could hardly think what to do for his heart. All Victor’s stories ran through his head: the ride out of town, the men waiting. It was always the genitals cut off. The soles of the feet.

  He braced back into his seat. His head went ten to the dozen. No cover: too many guns.

  Victor honked the horn in passing, picked up speed again. Jeeps full of little Indian soldiers, all crammed together. Like boy scout troops. Somebody honked back, there was an arm waving.

  Craning back, John saw the jeeps pull, laboring, into the road. They all fell into line behind.

  My dad tried: “Look, now, I sure wish you would tell me what all this is about.”

  “Indians in uniforms,” Victor said, waving dismissively. That sent my dad wild.

  “This may seem like a joke to you, Victor, but I won’t stand for it! You hear me? I want to know! And I want you to turn this car around before –”

  Victor pulled out his gun and pointed it at my dad without looking.

  Neither of them said anything for a long time. Finally Victor put the gun back in his holster.

  Victor said, “Momostenago.”

  7:45

  And he continued, “You will enjoy this town very much. It is pure Guatemala, but a very important mistress lives there, so we have all the comforts of your home, of course my home is not comfortable. My car is not comfortable enough for you, I am ashamed of my car in Americ
an eyes. But you will see, we have a paved road all the way for Momostenago. Electric light, everywhere. The water from the sink.”

  Momostenago was the target for Pretty Boy. John had guessed they were going there, but then he hadn’t liked that guess. He said slowly, “Okay.”

  Victor said, “We go to see the mistress.” And he pronounced, in a careful, altered tone, as if it were the Latin name of a disease:

  “Fernanda.”

  Then he asked my father to pass him his bottle, and my father obliged. It was tequila with a worm. The worm jiggled with the bumps in the road.

  “Well, you tell me what she’s still doing there,” my father said, hearty.

  Victor secured the bottle between his thighs. My dad was already saying Whoa when Victor’d got his gun out.

  And the bumps in the road. The muzzle wavering. Finally finally Victor put it back. But John went on waiting for the shot, he couldn’t put it out of his mind. He couldn’t look away.

  He didn’t know how you asked a man, was he really planning to kill you.

  8:30

  The jeeps had long since fallen behind, John had lost sight of the dust their tires raised. Then they hit the brink of jungle, a change of light like a dive into deep water. They lost the radio station and sometimes Caceres sang himself.

  Sometimes Caceres talked, beguiling the time.

  He told my father the jeeps were there to contain the people, to prevent them from fleeing in the wake of the alarming planes. “We keep them together, under the plane,” he said, raising his bottle to the sky. “We tell them to breathe deeply in. It is bad for your theory of warfare, but the Guatemalan people are not allowed to escape. One escapes, the good mood of the General is ruined.”

  Then he looked at John and raised his eyebrows as if they were sharing a joke. John laughed like a stupid toady.

  “Yeah, it’s not so good for the point of the exercise,” John said. “Supposed to be too dangerous for the Army, your guerrillas, right?”

  “No one escapes,” Victor said. “So we send our Army without telling our wonderful American allies. But now you are here.” He nodded to himself as if this was the key to the matter.

  They had rolled up the windows against the insects. There was still sunlight in sparks overhead, but the road was dark. The road was deeply pitted, and the expensive car bounded deftly like an animal. Then the trees thinned to show the gathering night and then cleared to cultivated land as

  9:00

  they drove into a Guatemalan village like every Guatemalan village was: thatched huts, spindly crops, half-naked children who stared and then ran. A burro hefting its head to bray. Weeds flowering in the dirt road.

  But smack in the middle stood a tidy white clapboard house. It had red shutters and screen windows, a tarred and shingled roof. It was like any house from a suburban development in Iowa. Caceres drove right up to it, until the headlight beams shrank and focused on the pale siding.

  “We are here,” he said, suddenly animated and glad. He punched my dad in the shoulder as if congratulating him. He pointed at the house and introduced it: “Fernanda.”

  My dad got out of the car just like, people get out of cars. Mostly that house was too normal. And Caceres strode ahead, like he was late for a party, excited. He pressed the bell and laughed, singing: “Ding dong!” He beckoned John impatiently and John tried to smile.

  The important mistress opened the door.

  She was not a mistress. She was the farthest possible cry from a Latin mistress. A somber dark woman in a tank top and slacks, she held a hardcover book half-closed on her thumb. She had a broken nose, concave and skewed, and one of her eyebrows stopped at a deep scar. Overlooking Victor, she introduced herself to my father, with a measured courtesy, testing the waters.

  He said, “John Moffat,” beaming to reassure her. She checked his clothes again and decided, apparently, there was no knowing. Then she turned to deal with Victor Caceres.

  She gave him a wry, affectionate sigh: you washed up at my door again! Her eyes found the tequila bottle and she shook her head.

  My father realized how long it had been since he had seen an intelligent, fearless woman. He realized the “important mistress” was Victor’s, and that Victor was a complex man, and my father had been vindicated in his trust of him. They would all three get in the car. Plenty of time to get clear of this doomed place.

  Victor shoved the woman in the chest. She staggered back still smiling, and stepped to one side to let Victor come shouting into her house.

  9:10

  He swore in Spanish, for her ears: and she laughed and applauded him. He stamped into the dark room and back to the entryway, his boots clopping undramatically on the heavy tiles. He called suddenly to my dad, “Electric light!” and hit a switch. When nothing happened, he berated Fernanda again, and she laughed as if he was telling jokes, pressing the book to her stomach.

  “Light, light, you see?” Victor said, pointing to a light bulb hanging from the ceiling. He shrugged as if he was deeply sorry to disappoint my dad in any way. He explained, “Electricity sometimes cuts. A short time only.”

  At last Fernanda went and fetched a lit candle. She used it to light more candles, one here, one there. My father followed her spotlit, musing face as the room came to light in flickering pieces. A bookcase, two unmatched chairs, a table with aluminum legs and a cracked formica top. The walls had been painted inexpertly, a clouded orange.

  Caceres rapped the table with his fist, watching it rock on uneven legs. A candle toppled and he looked at Fernanda triumphantly, not catching it.

  She said something arch, and my father interrupted:

  “Look, Victor, we really got to be getting on.”

  Victor turned to him with the crazed glee of a master of ceremonies, raising his arms. “I am a man of fate!” Victor trumpeted. “What will I do?”

  My father tried: “You’ll tell your friend what’s going on, and we’ll get out of here, it’s nine-fifteen. It’s nine-fifteen.”

  Victor pulled his gun. This time my father groaned, rolling his eyes at the waste of time. But Victor fired.

  There was the moment when everyone jumped, then the plaster dust and everyone unharmed. Fernanda sneezed and Victor giggled, delighted.

  Now Fernanda swore. She called in a high, furious voice, called a word three times that sounded like:

  “Kreesa-lees! Kreesa-lees! Kreesa-lees!”

  A door banged open. Out marched the children.

  First a little pint-sized girl, no more than three years old. She didn’t call hello to anyone, she just hurried, she knew her business, which was to vanish fast as she knew how. The thing that held her up was her big brother.

  The boy had something wrong with him. Big, like those people are, somehow. And he had a hunch – how retarded people often do, just messed-up top to bottom. One of his wrists was tied to his little sister’s waist with a stout rope.

  He was twice the girl’s size, but he minded her. Never looked at his mother, at the strange men, the gun; just feasted his eyes on his sister, with a docile grin. She muttered to him, in a low efficient voice. Not Spanish: some Quechi-what-have-you Indian tongue. As they went outside, she shoved him in the back, and he barked like a seal and clutched his rope with a kind of fond respect.

  Caceres stared after them and his whole face gathered into nausea. He glanced at Fernanda as if she had wronged him. Her face too was bleak, brooding on some memory.

  Then she looked up clearly at John and asked him if he understood Spanish.

  He said he knew a little. She told him to go outside.

  Victor crowed and waved bye-bye at my father. “Go! Go! Everyone go!” he cried and with one step he had his gun in Fernanda’s face. He grabbed her by the hair. Then he was wielding her head like a gun, pointing it at John Moffat as he caroled on.

  The woman continued to tell John to go, though her voice was strained and her mouth had set into a non-smile of fear.

  My fath
er stood like a stupid rock. He would have loved to go. He said,

  “Victor. Look at me. You know at ten o’clock –”

  Victor howled and

  An Essay on the Futility of Earthly Love

  My real parents, Victor Caceres and Fernanda Espuelas, met as university students. Fernanda was the only child of a doctor, a member of the sparse Guatemalan middle class. Victor’s family came from the ruling elite: but were disgraced and dispossessed by their support for the left-wing leader Arbenz, who was toppled by a CIA-sponsored coup in 1954.

  Though reduced in fortune, Victor’s family still enjoyed the fierce loyalty the very wealthy extend to the members of their class. The sons obtained sinecures: the daughters married well. Their radical sympathies diminished neither their cachet nor their own snobbery.

  The closest Victor came to a political conviction was a burning resentment that his father could not afford to send him to college in the US.

  Fernanda, on the other hand, embraced Marxism with the fury of the very young.

  Yet Fernanda and Victor met and fell in love unwisely: with the disregard native to just-nineteen. He paid lip service to her beliefs, she flattered herself she had convinced him. When he explained that his family’s position meant he couldn’t actively participate, she argued with him, earnest and foolish. Their pillow talk was of disguised priests, forbidden books, battles in the mountains kept secret by the ruling class. There was real work to be done – she whispered, hot against his neck – lives to be saved.

  And with time, with the easy valor of inaction, Victor began to see himself as a future Che, a warrior, redeemer to his bitter family.

  But when she became pregnant, his family’s position meant he could not marry her.

  The love story ended there. They parted, he drank to his satisfying guilt.