by Joe Gannon
La gente humilde. He’d been reminded in Miami how such a phrase would not work in English, or at least not in America. The humble folk would seem condescending, an insult. Maybe salt of the earth was the correct translation. But what did that mean anymore? The discovery of salt, he’d read somewhere, its effect on stamina, the ability to preserve meats, had revolutionized human culture. Almost as much as those first ancient farmers who’d figured out how to cultivate maize in the Americas, or rice in Asia, wheat in Europe. Humble farmers.
But somewhere along the way someone had harvested more than someone else and he’d become the headman, then chief, king, emperor, presidente. And salt had become some base, common commodity you wouldn’t stoop to pick up off the ground. Salt of the earth. Wretched of the earth. Wretched salt of the earth.
He spotted Gladys and Claribel entering the side chapel and joined them. They flanked her on each side like the good and bad thieves had Christ on Calvary. They knelt as if in prayer.
Ajax slipped a fifty out and passed it to Claribel. She sniffed at it like it was thirty pieces of silver and she was no Judas.
“No money, I do this for Gladys.” She took Gladys’s hand. Ajax shot Gladys a look, she shrugged like, What? I inspire loyalty. “She was so nice to me in the bathroom. And she said she kicked Kiki in the balls.”
“Monkey Man,” Gladys explained.
“I like that name better. She said you wanted to cut his throat?”
“Well…”
“Well if you ever do I’ll give you fifty dollars, that fucking pendejo.” Claribel made a quick sign of the cross and muttered an apology.
“You want to know about Jimmy?”
“Yes,” Ajax said. “You knew him?”
“Professionally? No. But he was with Kiki sometimes. He and Jimmy came to the club I work at, he would party with us.”
“Claribel, what were Jimmy’s politics?”
She stiffened and flicked a Judas look over her shoulder.
Ajax pressed: “Was he with the Farabundos? Escuadrones? Gringos?”
“Shh. I understand. Jimmy had no politics, he liked partying and powder.” She sniffed, rather dramatically, Ajax thought.
“Did he go with girls?”
“Never. Kiki used to make fun of him: ‘Ni varón, ni maricón.’”
Neither macho nor fag.
“But he liked girls?”
“What does that matter? Lots of us like girls.”
Gladys sniggered, and Claribel gave her a look. A look.
“But Jimmy came out with one girl sometimes.”
“Did you know her?”
“Sure. So do you. Doña Jasmine.”
“Jasmine?”
“What, you think she’s such a lady?”
Ajax, in fact, did. “She partied with you?”
“Drank beer. She was slumming, checking out La Sucia.”
“The what?”
“The Unwashed,” Gladys explained.
“Claribel, do you know where Jimmy is? What happened?”
“The Farabundos, they killed him. He partied with the wrong people. They probably thought he was military, la cia. He’s dead. I saw his body. Kiki had me go take pictures. Pobrecito. It was terrible what they did to him.”
So that was where the morgue photos had come from.
“Claribel, do you think he could have been with the Farabundos?”
“Jimmy? Imposible, hombre. He was stupid.” She pointed at her head. “Ignorante, you understand? Like only gringos can be.” She turned quickly to Gladys. “Not all Americans, amorcita.”
Another look.
Suddenly something changed. The air, the vibe of the church altered. Ajax looked around and saw a squad of soldiers stroll in. They were heavily armed—automatic weapons, bulging ammo pouches, grenades dangling off their combat web. And to each man’s back was strapped a machete.
Weapons for the rebels, Ajax thought, machetes for the people.
But the arms they bore were nothing compared to the faces they wore. They’d painted themselves with camouflage sticks, like snipers used. But these soldiers had painted masks, and not Halloween masks but demons from Indian lore. One had a frog painted on his chin so it seemed to emerge from his mouth, another a dozen eyes all over his face, a third a vampire monkey with fangs. They reminded Ajax of the visages he’d seen in books about the Aztecs. Their executioners—those who’d cut out the hearts of uncounted thousands—would paint their faces to resemble demons so the souls of the dead would be too terrified to pursue them in the afterlife.
These soldiers were not hiding, they were not afraid of the afterlife either, yet the masks were disguises that would prevent anyone from identifying these soldiers once the paint was off.
They strode through this holy place, this refuge, to remind this huddled mass in the cathedral of their martyred archbishop that while their priests told them they might make a Heaven on earth, these soldiers were from Hell.
Claribel whimpered. “Atlactl.” She knelt down so low her forehead touched the floor. Ajax looked around, all of the hundreds there suddenly got to praying real hard, kneeling, dozens of hands flying, making signs of the cross, and all eyes were not on the cross which bore Christ, the son of God, but on the floor.
The Atlactl (At-la-cat-l) Battalion was notorious, meaning they scared the shit out of everyone. Ajax felt a little twinge in his own balls. In a country long synonymous with slaughter, the Atlactl had carried out the worst massacre of the war. He’d read about it in the Nicaraguan press, hell, even the New York Times had covered it. The Atlactl was raised as a special counterinsurgency unit, only the best of the best had been selected and sent to the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, for the kind of first-class training third-world soldiers only dreamed of. Drilled in the most state-of-the-art weapons and tactics, the Atlactl had also been schooled in human rights, and the need to win the hearts and minds of the people to defeat the insurgents. A thoroughly modern military unit recruited and trained by America as a sign of its commitment to defeating communism in Central America.
And on pretty much their first mission they’d committed the single worst atrocity since the generalissimo’s genocide. El Mozote.
Atrocities are a funny thing, Ajax knew, for those not directly touched by them. In Nicaragua, for all the war and the tens of thousands of dead overthrowing first the Ogre, and then battling the Contras, there had been few actual atrocities other than war itself. When people read about children’s heads dashed against rocks, and pregnant women’s wombs ripped open, their brains go into a kind of protective shutdown—the information is processed like the images of a movie, instead of in that part of the brain that copes with actual sensory stimulus.
Ajax recalled that once, in high school back in North Hollywood, his English teacher had had the class read a memoir by a Hungarian teenager who’d survived Auschwitz. Upon arrival at the camp, the author recorded, he had been marched by a massive flaming pit, as big as a football field, filled with burning bodies. The author reported how he, as a teenager himself, watched camp inmates pour barrels of diesel into the pit to feed the fire, while other inmates hurled the bodies of recently gassed children into the flames. All this in his first hour in the camp.
For two days Ajax’s teacher had read this section out loud to the class and had the students read it aloud to each other. Eventually his classmates, mostly working-class Mexican kids, but a few Anglos, had protested, complained the author was rubbing their noses in it, and the teacher too. But Ajax had understood: the reality of the evil was so unfathomable most of the students had flipped a switch in their brains and talked about the hellish images as a literary choice by an author, a metaphor for hell on earth, rather than the plain and simple recitation of literal facts their imaginations could not assimilate.
The teacher had also assigned an essay, the students had to write a letter to their “family” back in Hungary explaining how to pass the selection process at the camp, and th
us “survive.” Ajax had written his “family” persuading them that as none would survive, they should all kill themselves and die with dignity in the arms of loved ones. He earned his only ever A+.
It had taken the Atlactl an entire day, twenty-four infinite hours, to slaughter the people of El Mozote. Massacres like that are the opposite of a sinking ship, he thought. On the ship it’s always women and children first, the “most vulnerable” to the boats, and the men must face the worst alone. In a massacre it is the men who are killed first, and the women and children face the worst, because the very act of murdering all the men unleashes a bloodlust in the killers so profane it is a seamless segue to the smashed skulls and butchered bellies of the most vulnerable.
The entire town had been wiped out as thoroughly as that boy’s Jewish ghetto had.
Ajax watched the soldiers make their rounds through the cathedral—the Stations of Humiliation—not strutting like peacocks, but striding like panthers. They went by the food tables, where the altar boys folded their hands and dropped their heads like the Eucharist was passing. One of soldiers looked into a pot of simmering beans and gobbed his spittle into it.
“I need a cigarette,” Ajax decided, and got off his knees.
“No, Ajax … Martin!” Gladys reached for him, but Claribel seized her hand.
“Please, Gladys. If they find out I’m a puta they’ll take me to the barracks.”
Ajax marched over to the soldiers. His one unrestrained pleasure in life had once been the Marlboro Reds he’d extorted from a cigarette smuggler in Managua. He’d kept himself in plenty of them in the Honduran jail, but smoking didn’t go with the catatonic opossum so he’d given them up. He was jonesing for one now.
“Oye! Soldados! Anybody got a cigarette? One of you guys must have a Marlboro Red!”
As one, the soldiers turned on him, shocked, it seemed, that anyone would address them at all, let alone bum a smoke.
“Hey man, I know you guys!” He scanned the soldiers and found the one with a lieutenant’s bar. He reached out to the officer and pinched the patch on his shoulder. “Atlactl, right? You guys are bad-asses!”
The lieutenant pulled his shoulder away as his men encircled this fool.
“Who are you?”
Ajax stuck his ORDEN card in the officer’s face and kept prattling to the soldiers.
“Man, if we had you in Miami we could’ve gotten rid of Castro and all them communist hijos de putas long ago. And their whore wives and retard children too, right? Now who’s got a Marlboro and I don’t mean them Mexican knockoffs, they’re shit. You, teniente?”
The lieutenant was none too pleased, Ajax was pleased to see. But in the hierarchy of El Salvador one crazy-ass death squad civilian outranked one bloodied uniformed officer. Reluctantly, like dipping his hand into a pile of shit, the lieutenant reached into his pocket, drew out a pack of Winstons, and shook one loose.
“Not my brand.” Ajax took the butt, set it loosely in slightly pouted lips.
And just stood there.
The four-hundred-plus refugees packed into the church, Gladys on her knees, Christ on his cross, and Romero in his painting all seemed to hold their collective breath for possibly the longest five seconds ever recorded.
Then the lieutenant relented, yielded, surrendered—he took out his Zippo and flipped it into fire. Ajax still waited, the cathedral still held its breath, until the officer held the flame under the cigarette. Ajax inhaled, held the smoke in his lungs—the nicotine and cornucopia of chemicals rushing through his blood until he felt that glorious buzz of the first butt of the day. The people themselves seemed to exhale as one and slip Medusa’s gaze. Ajax even clocked some actual movement: Gladys leading Claribel to an exit.
And then Ajax languorously exhaled straight up so that the smoke hung in the ripe, humid air like a cloud, and then descended around the lieutenant’s head like fog settling around a pumpkin. The cathedral and its congregation held its collective breath, again. Even Claribel stopped her hasty retreat.
Ajax looked at the burning ember, flicked his head. “Not bad. Hey!” He turned on the rest of the squad like he’d had a brainstorm. “You soldiers must be hungry! YOU!” he screamed at the altar boys behind the food table. “Serve these heroes some victuals, you fucking morons!”
The altar boys stayed immobilized in seeming prayer, terrified, Ajax knew, that he was the only one who had not seen the communal pot fouled.
“Fucking retards!” Ajax looked to the lieutenant for comfort, stuck the butt in his mouth, and dished up a heaping plate of beans and tortillas. He held it out to the officer.
“You hungry, Lieutenant?”
Ajax swished the tortilla in the beans and wolfed it down.
“Fucking shit. But what do you expect from peasants? Better than nothing.” He offered the plate to the soldier who’d gobbled the beans.
“You?”
The lieutenant turned his gaze away from this crazy-ass fucker as if he’d never even seen him. He passed his eyes over the congregation one more time, to make sure everyone still looked away, and then slowly strolled out with his patrol.
Ajax kept the butt in one hand, and fed beans into his mouth with the other as he followed the soldiers a few paces.
“Hey, Lieutenant!”
He stopped, but would not turn around, just rotated his contemptuous face over a resentful shoulder.
“Leave me a butt, for later. Fucking terrorists got all the stores closed, communist sons-of-bitches.”
The lieutenant made an invisible signal, and the last man in line fished a beat-up pack of Camels from a pocket. He shook one loose, but Ajax slipped the whole pack out of his fingers.
“Thanks, bro.”
And strolled back to the tables. He felt the congregation’s eyes on him. Some watched, befuddled by the miracle of a man who’d not been executed for the worst crime of all: insolence. Others looked on with smiles in their eyes, they knew when bullies had been bested. Yet more would not look at all, afraid of the man more powerful than the murderers of Mozote. Ajax stopped at the food tables where the frozen altar boys showed signs of thaw. He held out the plate. “Please, señores, I’d like some more.”
* * *
Claribel slipped her tongue into Ajax’s mouth and lightly ran it under his upper lip.
“You, loco, get freebies for life!” She playfully pinched his nipple.
“Gracias, amorcita.”
She turned to Gladys, touched her face. “You’ll call me, won’t you?”
“Of course.”
They pecked each other on the cheek, but Ajax saw Gladys give Claribel’s left nipple a pinch. The puta moaned and dashed down the steps and out of sight. Gladys had a strange half-smile on her face.
“What was that?” he said.
“What?”
“That!” He made a crab pincer.
Gladys just shrugged.
“Wait a minute. Es lesbiana?”
“Something wrong with that?”
“No, Gladys, but, you know, she just offered me freebies for life.”
Gladys shook her head. “Jesus, after what you just pulled in there I have to explain to you that prostitutes are always faking it?”
“No! But … she goes with men.”
“Faking it!”
“Okay, claro.”
“Now, you want to tell me why the fuck you just almost got yourself and maybe all of us killed?”
Ajax shrugged. But some of the refugees leaving the church passed close by to them, whispering “Dios te bendiga.” God bless you.
Gladys pulled a face. “Fucking Saint Ajax. Do you want to get martyred?”
Ajax pointed at his left leg where the Needle was strapped to his calf. “I would’ve got the spitter first.”
“Lot of good that would’ve done.”
“Shine, señor, shine?” A scrawny gawky boy with quick eyes, faster hands, and a shoe-shine box was bent down in front of them with Ajax’s boot up and a brush going ov
er the leather before he or Gladys had realized it.
“Oye, muchacho.” Ajax lightly flicked the kid’s ear. “Ve te.” Get outta here.
“No, señor, please. ‘If a man cannot see his face reflected in his shoes, then he has no soul.’ Saint Thomas Aquinas said that.”
Ajax smiled. “Really?”
“He is the patron saint of shoe-shine boys.” The kid held up a cheap, paper scapular hung around his neck, but it depicted Christ’s resurrection.
“That’s not Thomas Aquinas.”
“Who can afford medallions in an economy like this?” The kid flung his hands into the air. Then touched a finger to his nose. “But when I hold the scapular, I pray to my patron saint.”
Ajax was disarmed—the little shit was good. “Alright.”
The kid went to shining and Ajax switched back to English.
“What do you make of Claribel’s story? Young Peck the party animal?”
“She was telling the truth.” Gladys seemed defensive.
“I know, but it doesn’t jibe with his letters home to his folks. ‘Kind of a lefty firebrand,’ his father said, but he’s a great pal of these death squad Charlies?”
Gladys grunted.
“What?”
“Maybe it runs in the family.” She blanched as soon as she said it, and held up her hands. “Sorry, Ajax. But those Republican pendejos in Washington, would they have believed Amelia was, you know…”
“Fucking a Sandinista?”
“I was gonna say having an affair with a minion of the Evil Empire.”
Ajax looked down at the shoe-shine boy, his hands flying like a magician’s over Ajax’s once scuffed, dirty boot. He could almost see his reflection.
A stolen season. Star-crossed lovers. The obvious clichés had occurred to him even in the moment of greatest passion, while he’d moved his brown, calloused hands over Amelia’s pale, flawless thighs. Of course Romeo and Juliet were just a couple of bratty rich kids. Still, like them it had ended pretty much in death all around. Except for Ajax.