by Tom Epperson
He has a nice view of the village of Jilili because most of the trees on the hillside have been cut down. He sees around thirty houses built on stilts, with ladders and wood sides and tin roofs; brightly colored clothes hang from lines on the porches of some of them. Many of the houses are on fire and are sending up black smoke. A white sand beach separates the village from the river. Small boats are pulled up on the beach, and extending into the river is a narrow, rickety dock. At the end of the dock a man on his knees is facing a soldier with a rifle. The man’s arms are lifted in a supplicatory way. The soldier puts one bullet into the man’s forehead. The back of his head is blown off and the man topples into the water.
Other bodies are in the water. Five helicopters are on the beach. Soldiers are everywhere, running along the beach and shooting at people who have taken to the river and are trying to swim away, moving methodically through the village and shooting anything that hasn’t been shot already, dogs, pigs, goats, chickens, children, searching each house for anything worth stealing and then setting it on fire. Roberto recognizes the unit the soldiers are with because of their distinctive floppy recon hats and the green and black camouflage paint they’ve put on their faces. It’s the 1st Special Operations Battalion, a so-called counter-terrorist unit that’s inevitably described in the media as “elite.” It was once led by General of the Armed Forces Horacio Oropeza when he was a mere colonel and it remains his particular baby.
Roberto hears the electronic whirs of Daniel snapping pictures but neither he nor Roberto nor anyone else has uttered a word, indeed it’s all Roberto can do to breathe, as he watches the massacre unfold beneath him. Maybe it’s becoming boring just to shoot people because the soldiers are finding more creative ways to kill. An elderly couple is soaked with gasoline from a red aluminum can and is set on fire. The man and woman stumble around and scream and then fall against each other and for an awful moment in the middle of the flames they seem to be dancing and the watching soldiers laugh and then they collapse. Half a dozen young men with their hands tied behind their backs are led to three large logs in a rough triangle that seems to serve as a community meeting place. They’re forced to kneel and lay their heads on one of the logs. A tall soldier with rippling muscles takes his shirt off, picks up a sledgehammer, and proceeds to smash in the heads of each of the men with a single blow. Other soldiers cheer and clap as if they’re watching an amazing feat by the strongman at a circus.
Down on the white sand beach, two soldiers are standing in front of a very pregnant girl, her hands resting protectively on her bulging stomach. One of the soldiers is holding a machete. The other soldier grabs the girl’s T-shirt and pulls it off over her head as she struggles with him, and then the first soldier’s machete flashes in the sun as he swings it forward and slashes open the girl’s belly. Her scream is like an ice pick piercing Roberto’s ear, and then the soldier strikes her again making an X and her baby spurts out in a fountain of blood and amniotic fluid and plops at her feet in the white sand.
Roberto hears a sob and thinks it comes from Lina but when he looks sees tears streaming down Ernesto’s face. His hands are gripping his rifle tightly.
“Let me kill them, Lina,” he says. “Please.”
“We can’t, Ernesto,” Lina says. “There’s too many.”
“Fucking smoke,” Daniel says.
Most of the houses in Jilili are on fire now and smoke’s beginning to obscure the view. Daniel scans the slope in front of him.
“I need to get closer,” he says, and now he points to a rotting tree trunk thickly covered with vines about a third of the way down the hill. “There. That’s perfect.”
“No, it’s too risky,” Lina says, but Daniel ignores her, going into his camera bag for a different lens.
“Daniel,” she says, “we have plenty of pictures.”
“Forget it,” says Roberto. “He’s not going to listen to you.”
Daniel slings the camera bag over his shoulder. He moves quickly in a crouch down the hill through knee-high grass wearing his absurd cap. Roberto looks at the soldiers in the village but fortunately, none of them casts a glance upwards and Daniel reaches the cover of the tree trunk.
“Your friend’s going to get all of us killed,” Lina says, but Roberto thinks there’s a certain amount of admiration in her eyes as she watches Daniel peer cautiously over the trunk and then resume taking pictures. Roberto hasn’t been making notes because he’s been unable to tear his eyes away from the phantasmagoric scene. Not that he’s likely to ever forget any of it.
Smoke drifts over the top of the hill and stings his eyes. It’s becoming quieter down below. Soldiers are walking around with nothing to do, no one to shoot. A large black dog comes running through the burning village in a panic. There’s the rattle of a Galil on full automatic, and the dog turns into a tumble of blood and fur, and then it’s quiet again.
Roberto’s relieved it seems at last to be over. The soldiers will get back on their helicopters and fly away, leaving a village with no inhabitants. Can it really be they’ve killed everyone in Jilili except for the woman and her son? But now Roberto sees a survivor, a teenage girl, being dragged along by several soldiers. Their painted faces are laughing and smiling. She’s struggling and defiant, which only makes them laugh more. She’s pretty, with long dark hair. Probably the prettiest girl in the village, which is why she has lived this long. They drag her away from the houses and up the hill. Roberto starts to become alarmed because the soldiers are coming their way, but then they pull her behind a thicket of small trees and shrubs. They’re out of sight of the other soldiers but in plain sight of the four on the hill and Daniel behind the tree trunk. She’s wearing a shirt and shorts and they start pulling them off and she fights them and gets slapped. They rip off her underwear and she bites one of the soldiers and he punches her in the face. She goes down hard and just lies there, knocked cold, and then after a few seconds she raises herself on one elbow and looks around dazedly. Meanwhile, the guy who hit her is unbuckling and unbuttoning and unzipping, and now he drops his camouflage pants and gets on top of her. The other soldiers await their turn, watching, smoking, commenting on the action.
Roberto looks at Daniel. He’s lying on his side, taking pictures around one end of the trunk. He’d hang by his knees from a trapeze to get a shot if that’s what it took. Roberto sees that Lina and Ernesto are watching the rape, but Roque is intently gazing up into a tree, as if he’s observing a bird or a monkey. Roberto looks up into the tree but doesn’t see anything.
The soldier finishes with the girl and stands up, refastening his pants. Another soldier steps forward, but the girl suddenly jumps up and starts to run. She’s running up the hill, straight toward the tree trunk behind which Daniel is hiding. The soldier whose turn it was takes off after her, as the other soldiers laugh and urge him on.
Daniel is scrunched down behind the trunk, and Roberto sees he’s looking up toward him.
“Shit,” Lina says, and she and Ernesto aim their rifles at the soldier.
Roberto watches the girl running naked through the grass. Her long hair makes him think of Teresa telling him about when she was a little girl and she would run and her hair would stream out behind her. The soldier charges up the hill after her, his arms pumping. His hat falls off. His head’s been shaved and his scalp’s been tattooed and with the green and black paint on his face he looks like some creature that has just come out of a black abyss.
Roberto looks back at Daniel. He’s shocked to see what seems to be a gun in his hand.
Roberto’s praying the soldier reaches the girl before they get to the tree trunk. He almost catches up with her but stumbles a little and she pulls away, but when she’s only about eight or ten meters from Daniel, the soldier grabs her. They go down in the grass together. The soldier hauls her up and she fights him, scratching and kicking. He grabs her by the hair as he pulls a machete out of its sheath, and Roberto hears Lina gasp as the soldier beheads the girl with four
whacks.
The girl’s body, spouting blood, falls in the grass, and the panting soldier turns around and holds the girl’s head up for the other soldiers to see. They curse at him and call him names for spoiling their fun but they’re also laughing and the soldier, grinning and blood-bespattered, throws away the head and begins to walk back down the hill.
Roberto looks at Daniel. What the fuck is he doing with a gun?
Roberto takes his glasses off and cleans them. As if the images he’s seen might somehow still be clinging to the lenses.
He hears a helicopter.
It’s another Black Hawk, coming in low over the river. It swings around then settles down on the white sand beach near the other helicopters. The rotors come to a stop and an officer jumps out. Roberto can tell he’s high-ranking because of his entourage, buzzing around him like worker bees around the queen. He’s met by another officer, presumably the commander of the unit, who starts talking fast and gesturing in different directions. The high-ranking officer is a burly man wearing camouflage fatigues and a black steel helmet. He looks familiar.
“Roque,” says Roberto, “can I borrow your binoculars?”
He looks through them at the officer as he strides away from the beach and toward the village, accompanied by his buzzing bees. Yes, it’s General Oropeza, as he thought. In a way he’s not surprised to see Oropeza walking past burning houses and bloody corpses. Supposedly he thinks he leads a charmed life and no bullet can harm him, and he’s famously beloved by his men for his willingness to expose himself to the same dangers that they face. But in another way, it is a surprise to see him here because tremendous luck is always surprising. Roberto’s not sure if Daniel has recognized Oropeza yet but he sees that Daniel’s taking pictures of him, and placing the commanding general of the Armed Forces at the site of a massacre that’s just been perpetrated by his own soldiers will be the biggest story of Roberto’s career, bigger even than the interview with Memo Soto because not only could it bring down Oropeza but it could stop the Sri Lanka option from being carried out in Tulcán.
“It’s Oropeza,” says Ernesto. “That son of a whore.”
He aims his rifle at the general.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Lina says.
Ernesto’s rifle moves very slowly as it tracks the general’s movements.
“Let me, Lina. It would be so easy.”
“No. We’d never get out of here.”
“I don’t care.”
“We’re not here to kill a general, we’re here to help Roberto and Daniel. That’s our mission.”
Perhaps his life really is charmed, Roberto thinks, as he watches Oropeza through the binoculars.
* * *
After a quick tour of the village, the general rises in his helicopter like a god returning to the sky. The other helicopters follow, the five on the beach and the five that landed in the field where the woman was working with her son. Her name is Conchita. Conchita and Pedro walk down the hill with Roberto and Daniel and Lina and Roque and Ernesto into the hell that was once Jilili. It doesn’t take her long to find her husband, lying on his back in a relaxed attitude except his chest has been ripped open by gunfire. She finds Carlos, her other son, on the outskirts of the village, hanging from a tree with three other children. He looks about five or six. He’s wearing a blue, red, and yellow Superman T-shirt. Ernesto and Roque cut the ropes with knives and lay the children down side by side.
Other people have begun to come out of the forest where they were hiding to look for their loved ones or to see if they can find anything worth saving in the smoking ruins of their houses. Daniel is taking pictures and so is Lina, with her cellphone. Roberto wanders with them down toward the river. They see two vultures feeding on a body and they chase them away. They walk toward an area on the white sand where it looks like buckets of blood have been dumped. The girl who had her baby cut out of her is lying there. Before she died, she managed somehow to grab the baby and is holding it against her. The baby is dead too. It’s the most terrible thing Roberto’s ever seen. Daniel raises his camera, but then changes his mind. He turns away and lights a cigarette. But Lina takes a picture with her cellphone.
“We have to document everything,” she says, “it’s important.”
Roberto hears the growl of a motor and looks out at the river. A boat is coming into view. In it are the twins, Jesús and Pepe, and their green load of watermelons. They must be from Jilili. Roberto’s hoping at least some of their family members are still alive.
He hears a helicopter. It’s not an unknown tactic for the Army to return to the scene of an operation in hopes of catching survivors by surprise. Roberto, Daniel, and Lina begin to run. The sand sucks at their boots then they splash through a little stream that cuts through the beach and then they run into the shade of some trees. Roberto crouches down, breathing hard, and looks out at the river.
He can see the helicopter now. A Black Hawk. Hovering above the water not far from the boat. The twins look up at the helicopter as the wind from its rotor beats down on them. Suddenly its machine guns open up. The melons begin exploding, geysers of water are shooting up all around the boat, Roberto sees the head of either Jesús or Pepe explode like one of the melons. In ten seconds it’s all over. The Black Hawk flies away. What’s left of the melons, the boat, and the boys drifts slowly towards the sea.
* * *
The yellow boat sticks close to the bank after they leave Jilili. Maybe if another helicopter happens by, they’ll have time to get in the jungle before they’re spotted.
It might as well be a boatload of mutes for all the conversation that’s going on. Daniel smokes. Lina writes in a notebook. Roque steers the boat. Ernesto looks at the river. And Roberto watches a hawk gliding against a background of billowy white clouds. He tries to imagine that he is it. A feathery, bony, ferocious thing, gazing down on its domain of river and trees. He’ll never leave this place, he is this place, the atoms of the jungle endlessly forming and reforming themselves into this or that, a monkey or a plant or a fish or a hawk. It doesn’t matter much what he is at any particular time, he’s been everything and will continue to be everything. And he dreamily floats over the river.
Pain pulls him out of the sky and back to the boat. He looks at his right arm. It’s covered with red swollen bites. It’s had a tough time of it. The kids in Tarapacá last night, the ants today.
Lina sits down beside Roberto, and takes a look at his arm too.
“Wow, they really bit you.”
“Yeah.”
“The best treatment for ant bites is wild honey. When we get to Diego’s, we’ll put some on.”
“So who is this Diego guy?”
“He lives in the jungle. It’s very remote. No other people around except Indians who still live like Indians; they wear loincloths and hunt with blowguns and bows and arrows. It’s wonderful there. The forest is full of animals, the trees have never been cut. He used to make money from tourists, they would come there and stay, it would be a real jungle adventure for them. We were trying to develop an ecotourism industry, lots of rich Europeans and Americans and Australians would come here, but the fighting has ended all that.”
“Yeah, Roque was telling me he used to be a tourist guide.”
Lina glances back at him.
“Poor Roque. Now he guides people like us. People with guns.”
“How come Roque doesn’t have a gun?”
“He’s not really one of us. He’s not a member of the TARV. He’s too gentle. Too kind.” She sighs. “I love Roque. He’s like my little brother. I wish I could get him away from this.”
“He told me he doesn’t want to leave.”
“I know. He’ll die here. Like the rest of us.”
* * *
In about an hour, they reach the confluence of the Gualala and the Maniqui. Roque swings the boat around, and they head up the murky brown-green river. It’s much smaller than the Gualala. On either side, the jungle is near at
hand.
A large brown and white bird flies over the river. It reminds Roberto of a seagull the way its wings cut through the air. It plunges into the water, and comes up with a wiggling fish in its talons.
“Roque,” says Roberto, “what kind of bird is that?”
Roque watches it fly into a tree.
“An osprey.” Now he holds out his binoculars to Roberto. “Here.”
Roque slows the boat as Roberto observes the osprey through the binoculars. It holds the fish down with its talons and tears chunks out of it with its curved beak.
“Fishermen watch the osprey,” Roque says. “They go where it goes. That’s where the fish are.”
Roberto looks at Roque’s fancy Leica binoculars. He wonders how Roque could possibly afford them.“These are nice,” he says.
“Two Australians gave them to me.”
“Yeah?”
Roque nods. “They were very old. Over sixty. One of them wrote books and the other was a movie director. I showed them the jungle for two weeks. I didn’t have binoculars then. Before they came my boat turned over, and I lost my old pair in the river. And then about two months after they left, a package came for me in the mail. It was from Australia. I opened it and it was the binoculars. I couldn’t believe it. I was so happy.”
“They must have thought you were a very good guide.”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. But they spent a lot of money and came a long way. They wanted to see the jungle and learn about it, and I did my best to help them.”
“Did they speak Spanish?”
“No. I speak English.”
“Really? How did you learn?”