The farm is, like Sayaxché, a kind of joke, though not so funny as the one-whore bit. Some years before in a canny exercise of graft, the Banco Americano Desarrollo, the leading development bank in the region and thus first among many in the economic villainy that maintains the status quo of death squads and inhuman poverty throughout Central America, all in the cause of keeping the USA safe from Communism and the killer bees or whatever, negotiated an agreement with the then chief of corruption in Guatemala, a president by the name of Ydigoras Fuentes; this agreement traded the rights in perpetuity to oil leases in the Petén in return for what the agreement called an aggressive US policy directed toward land reform and agricultural development, a policy that—behind a veil of wonderfully vague promises—actually promised only to establish one experimental farm, this being the one in Sayaxché. It employs thirty Guatemalans and is considered a model of sanitation and efficiency; land reform and agricultural development are, needless to say, still a good ways off.
Wellsir, DeVries and I are hot to trot on out to the farm and see what’s cooking, but Sherril tells us we’ll never make it…not in the daytime, anyway. Too many soldiers blocking the roads. She knows a way, however; if we wait until night, she’ll take us. It seems that while waiting for her tardy tour guide, she ran into a right-wing nasty from Guat City who owned a ranch downriver and was dumb enough to go for a jungle walk with him. All he talked of were the discos, Cadillacs, his many girlfriends, and she thought him a fool, not recognizing that such fools are dangerous. When he tried to put a move on her, she was forced to run away and lose him in the jungle, and so discovered a nifty secret route to Ye Olde Experimental Farm, which appeared to be heavily guarded.
There are journalistic ethics involved here, we realize. Should two guys who’re wise to the way of the world let this naïve Calgarette lead us into the mouth of hell at the risk of her all and everything? Probably not. But this is show biz, right, and so, rationalizing the shit out of the situation, we say, okay, honey, what an adventure we’ll have! We drink beers, watching oil trucks buck and hump in the Pothole of Death, and we wait for nightfall. Toward dusk I take a little walk with Sherril, tell her sad stories about the death of grunts, and am rewarded for my valorous past by several deep wet kisses and proof positive of her no-bralessness. “God!” she says, flushed and dewy with delight, as we stroll arm in arm toward the hotel. “God, I never expected to meet somebody like you in this awful place.” There is, I realize, vast potential here. Who says Canadians can’t kiss?
At this point it all stopped being a joke. It really hadn’t been much of a joke up until then, but this is show biz, right, and I just wanted to get you to here. I don’t know what to tell you people. I’m probably coming off in all this as wearing the moral superiority hat, but it’s only defensiveness. See, I’m just so used to waxing passionate and having you look down your noses at me as if to say, Interesting Specimen, or My Goodness, he’s certainly opinionated, or Yawn, boring, so the West is in decline, so what, know where we can cop some Ecstasy, or Jeez, I mean it’s too bad and all, but I don’t wanna hear it, I work hard all the livelong while that lucky old sun just rolls ’round heaven all day, and when I get home at night, I wanna kick back, pop a cold one, and be entertained. So what do I tell you people? I can’t argue with you. You either give a shit or you don’t, and nothing I say is going to change your mind. But if it’s entertainment you want, I suggest you take a walk around, say, the vicinity of Tolola in El Salvador, where you can see the intriguing results of a foreign policy that has Apache helicopters dropping forty thousand pounds of bombs on the countryside every month, repeating the tactic we used in Vietnam to destroy popular support for the VC (oh, yeah!), in this case, the FMLN, and in the process causing one-fifth of an entire nation to become refugees. It would be a most entertaining walk. See the empty towns littered with skeletons! See the curious collection of left hands rotting in a basket in front of the bombed church! See the village of legless men! If you liked The Killing Fields, you’ll love Tolola!
Seriously, folks, it will live in your memory.
The smell alone will make it An Experience.
But I digress. Maybe the fact is that in the United States it’s become easy to achieve moral superiority, even for fuckups like myself. In that case, I suppose I would do well to finish my story quickly and let you get back to your MTV.
Off we went, trudging through the jungle, following Sherril’s perfect denim-clad butt through the slimy night air. It took us almost two hours of steady humping to reach the farm, vampire mosquitos, creepy scuttlings, and when we spotted lights shining through the foliage, we crept up to the margin of the jungle, went flat on our stomachs, and peered through a bed of ferns. Personnel carriers with M-60s mounted on the rear, about a dozen altogether, ringed a one-story building of white stucco: the farm office. The lights proved to be spotlights and were aimed at a field of what appeared to be agave…though God only knew why anyone would want to cultivate agave. About fifty or sixty soldiers were visible, and none of them looked to be having big fun; they were all on alert, fanned out in front of the office, their guns trained on the field. It was very weird.
I don’t know what we would have done. Nothing, probably. No way I was planning to get any closer. The chances are we would have gone back to town and done a little investigative reporting. But free will did not turn out to be an option. A few minutes after we had reached the farm I heard at my back the distinctive snick of an automatic weapon being readied for fire, and then a voice telling us in Spanish to lie with our faces down and our arms spread. Moments later, we were hauled to our feet, blinded with flashlights, and, despite crying, “Americanos, Americanos,” we were herded roughly by a group of soldiers toward the farm and into the office building. Laid out in the dirt beside the door was one of your basic Central American vistas: a row of bullet-riddled naked bodies. The soldiers hustled us past the bodies before we could get a good look at them. Sherril started to object, but I pushed her along, whispering for her to keep quiet. Inside, we were met by another basic CA element, your sadist officer, this one a major named Pedroza who would have scored high in a General Noriega look-alike contest: the pitted skin, the vaguely Oriental cast to the features. He gazed dreamily at us, visions of cattle prods and Louisville Sluggers dancing in his head; his eyes lingered upon Sherril.
It may seem that I was leaping to conclusions concerning the major, but not really. He had attained high rank in one of the most conscienceless and brutal military forces in existence, and one does not do that without having caused a world of torment; his face had the cruel sleekness of someone who has indulged in torture and enjoyed it. There is a slowness, a heaviness, attaching to such men, a bulky slovenly grace like that of an overfed jungle predator, one whose kills have come too often and too easily. To anyone who has seen them in action, they are inimitable; their evil dispositions as manifest as are their beribboned and bemedaled chests.
Pedroza asked us a number of questions and was, I believe, about to begin getting physical, when a distinguished silver-haired man in his early fifties entered the room. On seeing him, I felt greatly relieved. He was Duncan Shellgrave, a vice president with the development bank. His nephew was a friend of mine, and I’d stayed at his house in Guat City on a couple of occasions.
“What the hell’s going on here, Duncan?” I said, hoping aggressiveness would establish some tenuous spiritual credential.
“Just take it easy, Carl,” he said, and told the major in Spanish that he’d take care of this.
The major, with a despondent sigh, said, “As you will,” and Shellgrave led us into the adjoining office, a white room with a window of frosted glass and an air-conditioned chill.
“We’re having a little problem,” Shellgrave said, favoring us with his best loan-denied smile, indicating that we should take chairs. “I’m afraid you’ll have to sit it out in here. Otherwise Major Pedroza will be quite annoyed.”
There were two folding ch
airs; I left them to Sherril and DeVries, and perched on the edge of the desk. “What kind of problem?” I asked.
Another smile, hands spread in a show of helplessness.
I should tell you a story about Shellgrave to illustrate his character. A week after the Nicaraguan revolution, which I’d covered for a number of leftist rags, I was passing through Guat City when I ran into Shellgrave’s nephew and he suggested we take dinner at his uncle’s; he thought it would do his uncle a world of good to hear the straight shit concerning the state of affairs in Managua. Well, we got to the house, typical American paranoid chic with guard dogs, high walls topped with broken glass, and lots of electronic security, and when Shellgrave heard I’d just come from Managua, he said, “My God! You’re lucky to be alive. They’re slaughtering people in the streets down there.”
I knew that this was absolutely not the case, but when I attempted to persuade Shellgrave of this, he put on that bland smile and said, “You must not have seen it. They were probably steering you away from the action.”
I assured him that I’d been all over the streets; I’m no chump for the Sandinistas, but as revolutions go, Nicaragua had started out as a pretty clean one, and nothing like Shellgrave had suggested was going on. Still, I wasn’t able to convince him. The fact that I’d just come from Managua seemed completely irrelevant to him; he gave his CIA informants ultimate credibility and me none. It didn’t suit his basic thesis to believe anything I said, and so he didn’t. He wasn’t stonewalling me, he wasn’t playing games. He simply didn’t believe me. Men like Shellgrave, and you’ll find them all over Latin America, they have a talent for belief; they know they’re right about the important things, the big picture, and thus they understand that any information they receive to the contrary must be tainted. They thrive on the myth of realpolitik, they dance with who brung ’em, and their consciences are clear. They are very scary people. Perhaps not so scary as Major Pedroza and his ilk, but in my opinion it’s a close call either way.
I knew there was no use in badgering him for details; I stared at the white walls, tried to cheer up Sherril with a wink and a smile.
DeVries started questioning Shellgrave, and I told him, “Don’t waste your time.”
He got angry at me for that; he pushed back that blond forelock that drove all the girls at the University of San Carlos to delirium, and said, “Hey, you may have burned out, man, but not me. This is more than a little hinkey here, y’know. This is some bad shit. Don’t you smell it?”
“The man”—I pointed at Shellgrave—“is not responsible. For him, heaven’s a room with a view of Wall Street. He doesn’t know from hinkey. He’s eaten so many people he thinks it’s normal.”
Shellgrave’s smile never wavered; he may actually have been pleased by my characterization.
“See there,” I said to DeVries. “He’s fucking beatific. He knows the empire’s crumbling, and that it’s his sacred duty to hold on to the last crumb for as long as he can.”
But DeVries, God bless him, was a believer; he kept after Shellgrave, though without intelligent result.
The shooting began about ten minutes after we’d entered the white room. Caps popping, that’s what it sounded like above the shuddery hum of the air conditioner, and then the heavier beat of the M-60s. Sherril jumped to her feet, and Shellgrave, smiling, told her not to worry, everything was all right. He believed it. He wanted us to believe it. For our own good.
“So what’s that?” I asked him. “The sound of Democracy in Action?”
He shook his head in bemusement: I was an incorrigible, and he just didn’t know what to do with me.
The screaming began about three minutes after the shooting, and Shellgrave’s reaction to this was not so calm. He stood, tried peering through the frosted glass, and that failing, started for the door, stopped, then went for it and locked it tight.
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “Everything’s all right.”
Sherril said, “What is it? What’s happening?”
Her face was the color of cheesecloth, and her hands were twisting together; DeVries, too, looked shaky, and I wasn’t feeling so hot myself.
“Yeah, what is happening?” DeVries asked Shellgrave.
Shellgrave was standing at the center of the room, his head tilted up and to the side, like a man who hears a distant call.
The screams were horrid, throat-tearing screams of pure agony and fear; they were either drowning out most of the gunfire, or else there weren’t as many people firing as there had been. Then somebody screamed right outside the window, and at that Shellgrave bolted for a filing cabinet, threw it open, and began stacking papers on the desk. I picked one up, saw the word mutagenic before he snatched it from my hand.
I still believed we were going to survive, but my faith was dwindling, and maybe that was why I decided to live in ignorance no longer. I shoved Shellgrave hard, knocking him to the floor, and began leafing through the papers. He tried to come at me again, and I kicked him in the stomach.
DeVries and Sherril came to stand beside me. I couldn’t make much sense out of the papers, but they appeared to outline a project that had been going on for twenty years, something to do with a new kind of food and its effects on a local settlement of Indians, who—being severely malnourished—had probably leaped at the chance to eat the shit.
“Jesus Christ!” said Sherril, staring at one of the documents.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Wait!” She began going through more of the papers.
Shellgrave groaned, said, “Those are classified,” and this time it was DeVries who kicked him.
There was a sudden intensification of gunfire, as if the tide of battle had turned.
“God,” said Sherril weakly, and dropped into Shellgrave’s chair.
“Tell us, damn it!” DeVries said.
“I think,” she said, and faltered; she drew a steadying breath. “I don’t believe this.” She looked at us hollow-eyed. “Mutants. The food’s worked terrible changes on the second generation. The brain tissue’s degenerated. The children of the ones who first ate the food, they’re idiots. There’s some stuff here I can’t understand. But there’ve been changes in the skin and the blood, too. And I think…I think they’ve become nocturnal. Their eyes…” She swallowed hard. “They’re killing them. They’ve stopped feeding them, and they can’t eat anything else but the plant they grow here.”
I kneeled beside Shellgrave. “And now they’re trying to kill your ass. That’s them outside, right?”
He was having trouble breathing, but he managed a nod; he pointed to the papers. “Burn ’em,” he wheezed.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Sure thing.”
It suddenly struck me as being metaphorical, us being in that cool white room, insulated from the screams and the gunfire and the monstrous dying that was happening out in the humid heat of the jungle. It was very American Contemplative, it was the classic American circumstance. All my years of filing horror stories, stories that had nothing of the bizarre technological horror of this one, yet were funded by equally demonic evil, stories that ended up in some city editor’s wastebasket…I guess it was all this that allowed me then to editorialize my own existence. This was, you see, a particularly poignant moment for me. I realized the horror that was transpiring outside was in character with all the other horrors I’d witnessed. I’m sure that reading this as fiction, which is the only way I can present it, some will say that by injecting a science-fictional element, I’m trivializing the true Central American condition. But that’s not the case. What was going on was no different from a thousand other events that had happened over the previous hundred and fifty years or so. This was not the exception, this was the rule. And it displayed by its lack of contrast to other horrors the hideous nature of that rule. The excesses of United Fruit, the hellish sadism of men such as Torrijos, Somoza, D’Aubuisson, and thousands of less renowned minions, the slaughters, the invasions, the mass graves, the dumps piled
high with smoldering corpses, cannibalism, rape, and torture on a national scale, all thoroughly documented and all thoroughly ignored, all orchestrated by a music of screams like that now playing…this was merely part of that, a minor adagio in a symphony of pain, the carrying-forward of a diseased tradition.
I understood that whoever won this battle would have little sympathy for journalists, and in this DeVries was way ahead of me. He’d dug out a pistol from the paperstorm of Shellgrave’s desk, and after sticking it in his belt, he picked up a folding chair, told us to head for the trees, and then swung the chair at the window, clearing away shards of frosted glass. I clambered through, helped Sherril out, then DeVries—he had a folder of pertinent papers in one hand. After the coolness of the room, the fetid heat nearly caused me to gag. Glancing at the field beyond the office building, I spotted dozens, no, hundreds of dark and curiously twisted naked figures scampering through the agave; some were kneeling and tearing at the leaves, and there were bodies scattered everywhere, many showing bloody in the spotlights—the sort of flash Polaroid that takes about a second to develop fully in your mind and stays with you forever after, clear in all its medieval witchiness and savage detail. It was about fifty yards to the trees, and I thought we were going to make it without incident; all the screams and shooting were coming from the front of the office building. But then there was an agonized shout behind me, and I saw Shellgrave, who had struggled out the window, being dragged down by a group of the twisted figures. Blood on his face. The next moment more of those figures were all around me.
Since the spotlights were aimed toward the field, it was fairly dark where we were, and I never did get a good look at our attackers. I had the impression of something resembling a hard bumpy rind covering their faces, of slit eyes and mouths, and punctures for nostrils. Even for Indians, they were tiny, dwarfish, and they couldn’t have been very strong, because I’m not very strong and I knocked them aside easily. There were, however, a lot of them, and if it hadn’t been for DeVries I’m sure we would have died. He started firing with Shellgrave’s pistol, and, as if death posed for them a great allure, they left off clutching at me and Sherril, and they went for DeVries. I grabbed Sherril’s arm and bolted for the jungle. We were about sixty or seventy feet in under the canopy when I heard DeVries scream.
The Ends of the Earth Page 58