The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  After a series of conversations and letters between Arizona, Illinois and Florida, Steve put Joe in touch with a woman, Katherine Reed, who edited long, narrative reports for the University of Illinois. She read his manuscript and told him The Cocaine Chronicles was “not a great title, it’s too generic,” and suggested he change it to The Silver Triangle, and she assigned one of her underlings to work on the manuscript. All the while, Joe tended bar in Pensacola, working with the television on, watching the world of his travels flash by during the evening news broadcasts. No one else in that smoky bar had been to Lebanon, seen the Congo River, or the mountain ranges that loom over Teheran. In what had been British Guiana, now Guyana, an American preacher led his followers into a mass suicide and mass murder in the jungle. Generals staged a coup in Afghanistan and a civil war had started in the rocky mountain passes Joe had crossed with Rebecca. Thousands of labor leaders and leftists had been murdered after a right-wing coup in Chile. Rifle and cannon fire were tearing up the apartments and office buildings in Beirut. French troops were fighting rebels in the country that was once called Congo, changed to Zaire. The Shah fled Iran, there was a coup in Grenada and another one in Bolivia, with tanks on the streets, and barricades and striking miners, and a helicopter firing on the people below. And in Nicaragua, a revolution led by a guerrilla army. Thin and slight men and women with baby-brown eyes trying to look menacing as they held M16s and old revolvers and hunting rifles. The Nicaraguan revolution unfolded on the wavy color lines of the television set in the bar, armies of adolescents marching along a highway, and of course he should be there, with them, living it. The rebels were in the capital, Managua, nearly victorious, and Joe was not there. He was stuck waiting for his novel to be edited, and suddenly the Nicaraguan revolution was over, triumphant, with red-and-black Sandinista flags flying in Managua, but now there was El Salvador, and a coup and a popular uprising, and even from thousands of miles away he could see how this fight was going to be bloodier than a dozen Nicaraguas. On the television, he saw a woman shouting into a megaphone. “Se siente, se siente, la línea combatiente.” I’m the only one in the bar who understands her. A massacre on the stone steps of a cathedral, soldiers firing at men and women crawling up the steps for cover.

  El Salvador. His sedentary writing months on the Florida panhandle had left him flabby, in no shape to hit the road again. So he started lifting weights and jogging along the beach, and he was returning sweaty and shirtless from one of his runs when he saw Mafalda standing on his porch.

  On a whim, she’d taken the bus down from Ohio, the state to which she’d moved some years before, to work at a university alongside a man who was for a time her husband. She was carrying a change of clothes in a small bag, and a jar of peanut butter that had sustained her during the long ride south.

  “My little tramp!” he called out.

  They embraced and Mafalda stepped back and took a breath and looked at him. He’s been in the sun too much. I see it around your eyes, in the texture of the skin on your forehead, your cheeks. But his torso, his arms, were firm, she soon discovered. Tight. She told him about her “gypsy” adventures hitchhiking across America, alone mostly. Inspired by and in tribute to Joe. Los Angeles to Vancouver. Ohio to everywhere. They spent several days together inside the Playhouse, emerging only to take long walks on the sand. At his insistence, she read several chapters of his book. Maybe the time for this kind of writing has passed, she said. “This is so male, so macho. It’s not a boy’s world anymore.” He pouted for an entire afternoon, but then he was his charming self again, and the next day he took her for a ride in his plane. Back at the beach house they saw a huge storm on the ocean horizon. Hurricane Frederic. The next morning the radio was announcing mandatory evacuations, and Joe told Mafalda she should probably head back home.

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll ride it out. Should be interesting.”

  He drove her to the bus station, and later he felt the last touch of her fingers as they slipped through his when they said goodbye at the door of the bus.

  Once the waves had nearly reached the house, I put my manuscript and your jar of peanut butter in a rucksack, ready to evacuate, he wrote to her later. But no go. The wind died down and the house still stands. Walked outside at dawn. Pensacola beach was absolutely wrecked. And a hangar door at Pensacola airport had squashed my … sniff!… pretty little plane. Insurance company plans to send me check for $5,900.

  He phoned Katherine Reed, the editor, and she said the work on his novel would take at least three months more. No, Joe Sanderson isn’t going to wait here in Florida and miss another revolution. He began planning a trip to El Salvador. The road never failed to disappoint, to uplift, to give him a sense of purpose. Se siente, se siente, la línea combatiente. One era was ending and another one was beginning. In Iran, an angry mob had stormed the United States embassy in Teheran and taken hostages, and a sense of powerlessness and outrage drifted across the United States, until assorted yahoos began to beat up swarthy men in U.S. cities, chanting “Fuck Iran” as they did their vengeful work. The world was bloody and aflame on his television, while pelicans glided over his Playhouse porch, and country music crooned on the radio at the bar. Soon he would travel beyond the reach of these broadcasts, beyond American AM and FM, beyond UHF and VHF, into the true world of the tropics, where men and women, and boys and girls carried revolvers, and peered over the tops of bandannas, their young eyes leading them into battle.

  While you read this, I am imperishable, somehow more alive than I have ever been …

  —Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

  III

  The Part About the War: Lucas

  16

  San Salvador, El Salvador

  AFTER TRAINS, AIRPLANES and buses through New Orleans and Mérida, Mexico, Joe arrived in Guatemala City, where a state of siege and curfew kept the streets empty after sundown. He entered El Salvador and walked around a border town a bit, and crossed paths with two National Guard soldiers in smartly tailored uniforms and steel mushroom-top helmets who took long, stiff strides holding rifles with fixed bayonets. Leather shoes, polished to a mirror shine, pressed wool. Joe fell in behind them. These guys would arrest me if they knew the subversive thoughts in my head. He slipped into the town market, out of the sun, into the shade and the many sudden tastes in the cooler air. Wet sawdust, plantains, mangoes, charcoal fires. In the corner, between beams of light streaming through the roof, he saw a woman standing over a steaming tin pot that was as big as his mother’s old washbasins. She was fair-skinned, with cheeks reddened from the fire beneath her, which she stoked with pieces of wood, and she stirred the contents of the pot by moving a wooden spoon in one slow oval after another, like some meditation on the eternity of women’s labor. He stepped toward her. “Buenas tardes.”

  “En quince minutos, joven,” she said. “Quince minutos más.”

  “¿Le molesta si espero, señorita?” he asked. Just a couple of days back in Latin America, and its courtesies were already part of his way of being. Not just, Can I wait, but rather, Does it bother you, señorita, if I wait?

  “No,” she said with a smile. “No me molesta para nada.”

  She had not stopped stirring. Atol, they called it. A corn drink. In every glass, a fog of maize particles, kernels stripped from ears grown on hillsides, gathered and ground by this woman’s long fingers. She had set-apart eyes and every move she made, every glance she gave him, seemed practiced and deliberate and effortless. He could sense the textures of her story, the village it returned to, the dirt roads. Cornfields, here they’re called milpas. The odd things you remember. Her spoon made waves in the syrupy surface of the liquid, and as Joe stood watching her she thought about all the other foreigners who came through this border town, and how none had ever stopped to keep her company like this. Company is good. His eyes. Set into skin browned by the sun, they emitted the piercing blue light of a distant world. “¿De dónde viene?” she asked.

>   “Estados Unidos,” Joe answered. “Illinois. Cerca de Chicago.”

  She looked down at the liquid in the pot, and she could feel and see the atol thickening, how the waves she was making with her spoon were becoming stiffer, like the ridges she cut into the wet sand at the beach as a girl. She stopped. “Listo,” she said, and she took a plastic cup and a ladle and served him, and when he reached into his pocket to pay, she said, “No, gratis,” and he smiled back at her, which was like a kind of payment, to see a stranger’s handsome face brighten in that way. The first cup of forty, or fifty. And for the rest of the day and week, as she sold her entire batch and the next one she made, and the next one after that, the woman thought that Joe had brought her good luck.

  * * *

  HE ARRIVED AT the shuttered city of San Salvador at night, the storefronts covered in steel and spray-painted leftist slogans. Juicio a los criminales represores. Apoyo total a la lucha popular. The next morning he emerged from his hotel to a sunny day. Probably snowing on the plains back home. Here, the evergreen cones of volcanoes on the horizon, looming over a metropolis of everyday Latin American commerce. Vendors in straw hats and baseball caps scurrying down the street. Maybe I’m the only gringo tourist in the entire country. The first night he went to a nightclub with a mirrorball and many empty tables and no one dancing, and fell in with four burly young Americans with a military bearing and biceps-squeezing shirts: Marines assigned to the U.S. Embassy. Two of the Marines had been in Teheran a year before the takeover. “Iran was hot. But this place is hotter than a two-dollar revolver.” The revolution did not seem imminent when Joe walked around town, and after two days he went out to the Pacific coast and met seven Americans who’d come for the waves. Looking for a revolution and what do I find: a damn surfer colony, he wrote home. As the surfers performed their hip-swerving dance and tumble on the foamy seawater, a local group of ragamuffin boys and girls sat on the beach and clapped and gestured and hopped on the sand, and for Joe there was something at once satisfying and deeply disappointing in the act of watching the children as they watched the surfers. I came looking for a war but instead I found what I always find: scraggly kids. The young tribe that follows tourists everywhere. He walked up to them and asked, jokingly: “¿Dónde está la revolución?” and they looked at him wide-eyed and fearful and ran away. The next morning he picked up a newspaper and saw a big march was planned in San Salvador for later in the week, so he headed back to the capital.

  * * *

  JOE STEPPED OUT of his San Salvador hotel and a half block away he saw the line of marchers. Thousands of people, suddenly, on streets that had been completely empty the night before. Ordinary working people, and young men and women with the inquisitive eyes of college students, marching behind banners held by many hands, as wide as the avenue. Red and black, white letters, acronyms he is not yet able to decipher. FAPU. LP-28. The raised fists of men dressed in faded polyester blends. MASAS the sign says. The Masses, as in the crowds and barricades of Victor Hugo’s Paris. A romantic notion of how history is made. Joe sees faces covered in bandannas and understands immediately that they are disguising themselves against the government agents and their cameras. He sees this because he has deeper, road-bum vision now. A woman smiles at him, and he knows it’s because he’s a gringo “in solidarity” with the cause. In a demonstration, all are equal and all belong. I am a representative of all Americans. A gringo among them, tall and grinning. My body added to the sum of marching bodies. The sum is the point. Never been in a crowd this big. We fill up four, five, six city blocks. There is a metaphor that describes the way we are packed into these streets, plazas and parks. A swelling sea of secondhand shirts and straw and paper hats. A tide of marching limbs in bell-bottomed blue jeans, rising from the street onto the sidewalks. FOR A REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNMENT. More slogans. LA UNIDAD POPULAR ES INVENCIBLE. Here and there a young man with a firearm, clumsily hidden. A little revolver in someone’s pocket, an M16 wrapped up in newspaper. Twenty years on the road and finally I land in a revolution.

  Joe heard the beat of a snare drum and in the distance some recorded hurdy-gurdy music. He could see the National Palace a few blocks away, its Greek columns. Someone pointed up at a tall office building. “¡Soldados!” There are soldiers up there. “Keep your discipline, compañeros! Stay calm!” He heard the air-splitting crack of a rifle shot, followed by three more, and then a volley of shots, and he ran for cover and so did all the people around him. A mother running with her son. Joe looked up and could see a soldier aiming downward from the roof of a building, the recoil of his rifle. A kid with a revolver crouched behind a lamppost, the student with the M16 was unwrapping it. “Keep your lines!” a voice on the megaphone says. “¡Calma!” Joe was leaning against the steel grating of a storefront, and the street had emptied except for six or seven young men, a proto–guerrilla army. They resembled a bunch of guys from a neighborhood performing some sort of drill. Performing it poorly. A Mauser, a little automatic pistol, an old hunting rifle, very old. Joe was scared for them because none of them seemed to have fired a gun in anger before. They all started to rush forward, and Joe followed them, and turning a corner he saw a woman lying in the street, facedown, and also a girl nearby, her hands splayed upward as she lay on her back. He ran toward them.

  The girl’s eyes were fixed in a sleepy squint, and she had the befuddled expression of a child who’s already inside the first strange scenes of a dream. She wore a cobalt-blue dress covered with blood from the waist down. Joe became the medic he was in Biafra, and he placed a hand on her throat; she had no pulse. He turned her over and saw a bullet hole in her lower back. A school ID slipping from a pocket in her dress. Thirteen years old. Luz Esmeralda Falcón. He walked over to the woman and saw an entry wound to her neck, and a stream of blood that had flowed into the street and toward a gutter. She also had no pulse, though her expression was more of a grimace, as if she were suffering an unpleasant bowel movement. The last moments of their lives, their final thoughts, written on their faces. As he crouched next to the dead woman and the dead girl, he felt as if someone were standing over him, looking at him, and that he was living inside the head of this other person, a confused and sickened Illinois man with a girl’s blood on his fingers; an earnest son, a former Boy Scout and newspaper-delivery kid transported to the sunshine of El Salvador, on a street next to a utility pole, looking up at the crisscrossing wires over a dead woman and child, still and lifeless, looking for the son-of-a-bitch sniper who shot them, while the trickle of blood around them was becoming a coagulating pool, a crimson mirror, until finally a shouting female voice from a megaphone shook him out of his trance.

  “¡No tengan miedo, compañeros!” The voice meant to rally the demonstrators, but her words were absurd. Don’t be afraid. Across the street, he saw a boy of about six huddled against the steel doorway of a shuttered storefront. On the street itself, protesters were carrying the wounded away from the place where the shooting was taking place, and now Joe found himself moving toward the gunfire, in a crouch-walk and then a crouch-sprint. The shooting stopped as he reached the steps of the cathedral. He saw more bodies. Five, lined up. A television news crew pointing a camera at him. Among the five dead he saw two young men with wispy mustaches who looked like brothers; a boy covered them in the black-and-red banners they had been carrying. People were moving away from the plaza, to the north and west, and he followed them for a block, and then there was a sudden fusillade of gunfire behind him, and Joe heard bullets hitting the light posts and felt plaster crumbs strike him on the cheek. He ran one more block to his hotel and banged on the locked door, and a trembling desk clerk let him in.

  * * *

  FIVE DAYS LATER, he was back in the coastal town of La Libertad, amid the sea breezes. The killing in San Salvador seemed far away. When he entered his old hotel, one of the surfers he’d met before spotted him in the lobby and said, “Hey, dude, we saw you on TV.”

  Joe wrote a letter to his mother. In
the aftermath of his recent brush with mortality, he imagined her seeing images of the dead on the six-o’clock news. His mission, as it had been so often, was to amuse her with a good tale, and let her know her son was okay and unharmed, despite having witnessed the public murder of approximately forty-five people.

  Your son, the TV star, he began. After so many years since showing my snakes and butterflies on that kids’ program I finally made the big time. You’ve probably been hearing a bit about all the fighting here. Well, it was pretty grim. A massacre on the central plaza. I was there. And according to friends here on the seacoast, I made the evening news. There I was, ambling across a park and in front of a cathedral where a lot of bodies were lying, with both hands and my usual stack of newspapers on top of my head. The National Guard was posted nearby, and sportingly enough they didn’t open up on me. There was still a lot of ducking sniper fire before I made it out of there. Real unfriendly. Didn’t even allow me time enough to tell ’em I’d been in the National Guard myself! The people on the streets were students, workers, country folk, trying to fight an army with pistols and shotguns and a few machine guns. Lots of them retreated to the university, where they promptly got surrounded by the army. Snuck in the next day to see how folks were doing. Everybody had been fighting all night, pretty tired and hungry, but not too many wounded + dead. Medical students had things pretty well under control so there wasn’t much I could do except share cigarettes. Finally the army backed off so everyone could go home.