by Joe Gannon
“Claribel.”
“Claribel, you and the others will be my nurses, okay?”
Claribel seemed dubious at best. The clock was ticking and this safe house was no longer safe.
“Do you know this man, Claribel?”
“Yes, doctora.”
“He a good man?”
Claribel looked around the room, around the house, around her life. “Yes.”
“Then help me save his life. God knows there’s few enough good men in this shit world, verdad?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now go through the aid kits, look for saline, plasma, and trauma bandages.”
“What should I do?” Gladys felt her control of the situation slip away, and with no death race to make to the hospital she felt lost.
“You!” Estela clucked. “Go clean yourself up, you look a disgrace.”
She let Jasmine lead her up the stairs to the master bedroom.
* * *
Gladys Darío did look a disgrace. She studied herself in the mirror. No, she thought, not “a disgrace,” but disgraced. She had the blood of one man splattered all over her face and clothes, and the blood of another man on her hands. She held those hands up. Coward. Stupid little girl. Cobarde!
She hadn’t meant to shoot, had she? The way he came at her. The blood, the slip, the lights coming on. That’d been Krill, firing up the generator. And she had just fired.
And now she’d killed him.
“Take your shirt off.”
Jasmine helped her peel off the bloody top.
“We still have to get him to a hospital.”
“And that still won’t work, Gladys. Think! Any man of fighting age showing up with a bullet in them is a guerrillero. At best he’d wind up in an army hospital and only then until he was well enough to be interrogated and killed.”
“They wouldn’t dare…”
“Dare what? Kill an American? You’re not Americans, not even Cubans. And I’m pretty sure Krill has alerted the escuadrones to your ruse.”
“We could get him to the embassy.”
“How? There’s a dozen checkpoints between here and there.”
“I can’t let him die!” She furiously scrubbed her bloodied hands.
“Oh my God, you shot him?”
Gladys looked into the mirror. She couldn’t look into Jasmine’s eyes. She scrubbed the blood off her face. “I’ve got to try.”
“There is an aid station not far away. We can get him there. It’s one of ours.”
Now Gladys looked into her eyes. “Ours? You’re…”
“A Farabundo? Of course. What did you think? I was a silly little rich girl?”
“You don’t look the guerrillera type.”
“I’m not. The technical term would be ‘spy.’ I’ve got impeccable right-wing credentials, and I travel a lot. A lot.”
Gladys looked at herself in the mirror. She was clean. Clean. And for the first time since she’d pulled the trigger she saw a sliver of hope. Of a future.
“How?”
“I’ll make a call, someone will come. We’ve got to go at first light, this house isn’t safe. The murder of the priests is rebounding badly on them. They’ll want Monkey Man and the others out of the country. We’ll take you and Ajax to the aid station, and you’ll be evacuated out of the city when our troops go.”
“When?”
“Well, I’m not a guerrillera,” she smiled a teasing smile, “but I think soon. The battle’s not lost, but it’s not going our way. We’ve taken parts of the city, but that’s all. We’re holding our own. But that’s all.”
“You’re losing?”
“No. We’ve made our point. To the government, and the gringos. Ten years of counterinsurgency and billions in yanqui dollars and they get this: total war. The cowboy Reagan is gone, your President Bush…”
“He’s not my president.”
“Then the American president Bush doesn’t have the ganas for endless war here. The Soviet empire is going, it’s a brave new world for the gringos, they can’t enjoy their victory over communism with a dirty war here. In a few months there’ll be peace talks. All this was to strengthen our hands before that happens.”
All this, Gladys thinks. All this?
“Okay. We do it your way.”
* * *
Back in the dining room Gladys found Doctor Estela had her own MASH unit going. She had two of Claribel’s girls holding bags with tubes sluicing into Ajax’s arms. A fresh bandage leaking a less than alarming amount of blood secured the wounds.
“Estela.”
“Well, now, Gladys, you look less like a side of beef.”
“How is he?”
“One ornery son-of-a-bitch. My husband the colonel would’ve liked him. I’ve saline going into one arm and plasma into the other. But he needs blood. Do you know his type?”
“No.”
“Well, we’ll go with O positive, the universal donor. As long as he doesn’t have some freakish type he should be alright. I assume you’ve got a plan to get him out of here?”
“Yes,” Jasmine said.
“Call some of your Farabundo friends?”
“How did you…”
Estela cackled like the wise crone she appeared to be. “You youngsters. You think you invented everything!”
“Gladys.”
It was the smallest of croaks, but froze them all. Ajax’s eyes were open.
“Ajax! Ajax! Yes! It’s me. I’m here!”
“Gladys. Water.”
Estela shook her head. “Water’s no good for you. I need your stomach empty. Suck it up, young man.”
“Gladys.”
“Yes. I’m here.”
“Krill…”
“He’s dead. Dead.”
Ajax smiled, tried to raise his hand to her face. “You’re a good man, sister.”
Tears sprang to her eyes.
“The Needle…”
Gladys pulled it out of her belt. “Right here, Ajax, right here.”
“Did … you … use it…?”
“I did. I got him.”
Ajax seemed to try to shake his head, but it just lolled around on his neck. “Too bad. Didn’t want…”
“It’s okay, I got Krill.”
“No…” He pointed his finger over her shoulder. “The boy … the boy … the boy…”
38
Ajax died sometime that night. But he didn’t mind, he didn’t mind at all. Death was a rewrite of bad chapters.
He and Amelia Peck had a farm in Miami. Great tentacles sluiced down from the clouds and filled their cistern with the purest of water. They grew pages of poetry on trees like giant knitting needles and every day he would harvest some verse to bring home. Amelia would meet him at the door of their house and their pet jaguar would rub up against his legs and nuzzle its head in his lap while Amelia brewed a few stanzas. He would set the rest out to dry on long racks made of bone, and they’d bring them to market on the backs of manatees. Don Johnson, just down the road, would drop by to seek their advice on the next episode of Miami Vice. And they were blessed with children! He and Amelia had a dozen of them. He worried, true, that they were all headless monkeys who would stump around without hands or feet, bumping into doors and walls while they frolicked. But he couldn’t help laughing. Amelia assured him it was “just a stage” and they would grow up to be fine young primates who would pick the nits out of their heads when they were old. That’s what she said to him, “We shall grow old together.”
The only thorn in paradise was the Night Rider who came in the dark, crying, “Bring out your head! Bring out your head!” and shooting pyrotechnics into the sky, rockets whooshing great tails of flame. How he dreaded that. Each time he felt the pull of that siren voice, wanted just once to see him—that gore-spattered phantom. They would all—Amelia, the children, the jaguar—pile into bed and their weight would hold him down. Keep him safely in the afterlife. His life.
But each night the ghost stayed longer, drew clos
er as the fear grew in their house. Until that one horrible moment when the Night Rider galloped in—his rockets set the drying poetry aflame, burned the bone racks to ash and the poetry trees to hard steel. Their house caught fire and a great hole opened in the roof, the sky. One by one they were sucked out of his arms into that void—the jaguar, the headless children, and finally Amelia. He tried to hold on, had her hand in an iron grip. Don’t let go, she cried. But he felt her slipping away. He couldn’t hold on. “Ajax don’t let go. Don’t let go!”
* * *
“Let go, Ajax! Damn it let go!”
Ajax snapped open his eyes and shot up in his hammock. The pain in his chest seared his brain and he fell back. He saw Gladys and shut his eyes to the world.
“No! No, no, no, no, no, no! Let me go! Let me go!”
“Ajax, you’re breaking my hand.”
“No! NOOOOOO! LET ME GO!” He threw his head from side to side, trying to fling himself back to his life in death, the life he wanted. “Let me go!!” He kept his eyes screwed shut but hot tears flooded his face. One more moment, please! A lifetime’s worth of grief released like the great flood, but it could not drown this world of flesh and blood.
“Let me go, let me go, let me go.”
* * *
Not for the first time Gladys watched as Ajax had awoken with a start and cried himself back to sleep, or coma. Gladys looked at the young guerrilla doctor, who shrugged her shoulders—He’ll wake or not. Gladys freed her crushed hand from his and stroked the thick stubble on his face. She sat down and opened a book of poems by Roque Dalton to read to him again, as she had every day for the last seventy-three days.
“You’ll like this one: ‘The captain in his hammock…’”
39
Ajax awoke into this life long after dark. Gladys’s sleeping head was on his stomach, her hand on his chest like she was clocking his heartbeat. His throat was parched, his voice box caked. He had a look around. He was in a hammock, in a tent. Twenty or so other hammocks hung around him, their occupants making weird shadows cast by Coleman lanterns. From somewhere he heard a guitar play, three or four voices singing sweetly to a song he thought was by Silvio Rodriguez, the Cuban cantante. FMLN camp, he thought, had to be. If he was where he remembered and what had happened, happened, then no death squad Charlies would be singing revolutionary love songs.
He lay there for a moment, feeling his chest rise and fall, feeling air fill his lungs, his heart beating, his life being lived. It had all been a dream. He chuckled at the memory of the monkey-children stumbling around. But the laugh stuck in his throat as he recalled the feeling of Amelia’s hand slipping from his. Just a dream.
He put his hand on Gladys’s head, rubbed a strand of hair between his fingers, just to make sure, one last time. He was alive. His wound was healing. He could feel it, a tightness where the bullet hole puckered as it closed. Her wound would take more salve than his.
“Gladys.”
A little snore escaped her. He tickled her nose. She sat up.
“Fuck!”
“That an adjective or a noun?” he croaked.
“Ajax! Thank God, thank God, thank God!”
“Water.”
She fumbled for a canteen with a bamboo straw and he took a long, slow pull on it. It took a moment for his throat to open and he let it go down slowly so as not to choke himself.
He took another drink and held the water in his mouth, let it sit there a moment. The delightful feel of the liquid set off a chain reaction of nerves zinging through his body, like revelry awaking a camp of dead-tired soldiers. He swallowed.
Life. It felt good.
He looked into Gladys’s eyes, her face held an expression that seemed a little broken.
“Situation report, Lieutenant.”
She smiled at that.
“We’re in Usulután. On the volcano. About a hundred miles southeast of San Salvador. We’re with a unit from the ERP,” the People’s Revolutionary Army, a faction of the FMLN. “Been here five weeks.”
“Five weeks?”
“We spent four on Guazapa.”
“How long?”
“Seventy-three days.”
“Jesus fucked a goat.” He held up his hands. “How do I look?”
“Like a skeleton. We’ll fatten you up now.”
Ajax tried to remember. “Monkey Man?”
“You got them all. I set his place on fire. Burned real good.”
“The generator gas.”
“Yep.”
“Krill?”
She nodded her head a few moments, as if replaying that night. “Dead.”
“Good. The girls? Claribel?”
“They got home safe. Claribel’s here. She took the pledge.”
“She did?”
“She spent so long taking care of your ass they made her a nurse. She’s a full-fledged compañera now.”
“Good. Good for her.” He rubbed his wound. “How did you…”
“I found Jasmine and Estela in Krill’s trunk. Estela did it all.”
He thought a moment. It was all coming back to him. “She was a doctor.”
“Hell of a doctor. Jasmine got us to a rebel aid station, the Gs took us to Guazapa and then here.”
“Jasmine. She’s a Farabunda.”
“Yep.”
“Makes sense.”
They fell into an awkward silence, each seeming to study some other part of the tent than the one they were in.
“Ajax, I…”
“Gladys, I don’t need to discuss anything else right now. Do you?”
She nodded, yes. “No.”
“Good. Me neither.”
Another silence.
“You fucking shot me.”
“I fucking shot you. I am so sorry, Ajax I … I…”
“It’s alright.” He waved a hand. “Okay. Don’t go on about it now.”
“Okay.”
Another silence.
“You must be hungry.”
“You fucking shot me!”
“I fucking shot you! I still can’t believe it, Ajax. Ajax. I … I … I don’t know how to explain, what to say.”
“Amoooooorrrrrrrrrrrrciiiiiiiita!”
Claribel saved them from the awkward bent of the conversation, gliding in, trilling her Rs, still sexy even in an olive-drab T-shirt and ill-fitting fatigue pants with an old .38 clipped onto her belt. She kissed Ajax on the mouth. Long and deep, did that thing with her tongue under his lip.
“You fantastic man! You’re alive! I told Gladys so, but she’s been hanging on to you like a puta on a lamppost! Haven’t you, amor?” She gave Gladys’s nipple a pinch and blew her a kiss. “You must be hungry.” She gave his balls a good shake. “What do you want? Anything at all, Claribel is here.”
Ajax laughed so hard he fell into a coughing fit and hacked up seventy-three days’ worth of phlegm. When he was done spitting it out he felt good, back in his body, but weak as a baby. Or a headless monkey.
“I am hungry. For food, at the moment, not wanting to limit future options.”
“Dessert when you want it.” Claribel gave his ball sack another shake. “I’ll feed you now. But first—you two have already gotten through the part where you’ve forgiven her for shooting you, yes?”
Ajax smiled. “Yes.”
“Good!” Claribel kissed him again. “Because this one! With the moping and the crying I might as well have become a nun as a revolutionary! Can you walk, varón?”
“Let’s try.”
* * *
He couldn’t. It would be a few days before he fully got his legs back. In that time he had a stream of visitors: once again his reputation had preceded him. Monkey Man, he learned, either did or did not actually kill the padres. But he was a known and much despised hijo de puta, and his killer was a welcomed guest. The camp commander, known simply as El Ocho—his seven predecessors having perished in the final offensive—was an old man of twenty-seven. He knew of Ajax and made him feel we
lcome. He showed Ajax on a map the setup of the camp: he was in the main hub, which was connected by jungle trails to six satellite camps. Father Ellacuría, it turned out, had been right: within days of the rebel offensive ending, both sides had negotiators in Caracas and a cease-fire at home.
Life was good in a rebel camp, so long as that truce held. They lacked for nothing, but then really didn’t have anything either, a rather genteel poverty. January was cool and dry in El Salvador and he recalled from his own days that as long as you weren’t up to your ass in mud or down with dysentery, rebel life could be like camping—but with machine guns and mortar fire. They had plenty of food, but it was only rice, beans, and tortillas, laced with whatever meat your unit could beg, borrow, or butcher. Ajax was counted amongst the wounded so got a goodly portion of a humble whole, topped off with extra rations from Claribel of actual beef.
“Get your strength back, amor,” she’d tell him.
He wanted to ask where she got it from, fearing she was running some secret black-market of hand jobs for beef, but he did feel like he was coming back alive. Not waking up, but turning back on. He could feel parts of his brain kick back in, and each day that first week after the dream, the dream faded and faded until the moment and the meaning and the feelings became too disjointed to make sense anymore.
Claribel had come to fetch him the second morning with a wheelbarrow souped-up with bicycle tires and handlebars. The camp seemed divided into two: those who played baseball and those who played fútbol. There were big communal kitchens, open-air schools, and parade grounds full of new recruits learning to march or field strip an M16 blindfolded. It would have seemed a socialist outing if Ajax had been the only one in a wheelbarrow. But the field hospitals took up the most room and the dozens of injured, maimed, and the still dying to judge from the burial details, reminded the Farabundos of the cost of their “successful” offensive.
It was a few more days until he could walk without dizziness. He spent that time listening to the radio, catching up on the outside world. And what a world! Every single country of the Eastern Bloc had overthrown their communist masters—most without bloodshed—and half a century of Cold War was over. Even the Soviet Union, that other great colossus to the north, was falling apart. The world as he knew it, hell, as everyone knew it, was toppling into an undefined future. Much like himself.