The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  A few days later Joe was at the university again, too early for there to be much going on, and he said hello to the few members of the Liga he encountered; they were in the office reading newspapers and typing up letters, and he left to see if he might meet up with that woman who wrote for The Nation. Two blocks from the university he saw a small armored personnel carrier, and thought little of it. Later that day, he was inside a store in the center of San Salvador when he heard a breathless radio report describing how National Guard tanks and troops were sweeping through the university, exchanging gunfire with the students and activists. The siege that followed lasted three days; Joe saw pictures in the newspapers of corpses of young people lying on the campus passageways, and when it was over the government announced that the University of El Salvador would be closed indefinitely. He felt compelled to write home again. Just a quick footnote to let y’all know I’m fine, in “peachy” shape in case you got the news about the military invading the university. Matter of fact took place about 15 minutes after I left. Don’t know how my friends made out, but it was rough. Thirty students were killed, the newspaper said. A crew of Dutch filmmakers was on the campus when it all started, and they captured the soldiers maneuvering between the Chemistry and Pharmacy Buildings and the School of Economic Sciences; and also dramatic, handheld shots of some of Joe’s “schoolteacher” friends running down the corridors, urging calm, and then one student running with bloodstains spreading across his shirt, falling to the ground and screaming out, “Lord, help me. Take pity on me, Lord.” Within months these images were being screened in Amsterdam and Copenhagen and Stockholm, and in American universities, where they were seen by audiences of sympathetic faculty members and their students, who were shocked by the full-color images of the young man’s chest wounds, and by the sounds of his moans as he slowly died, on camera.

  * * *

  THE CAMPUS REMAINED occupied by soldiers in the days and weeks that followed. Still haven’t gotten back to my Spanish classes at the university, Joe wrote home. Military might just figure on staying until the weeds grow tall. He returned to the streets for the next general strike, setting out from his San Salvador room on a torrid August day of blinding sun. In Mejicanos, he came upon a pair of toaster-shaped armored vehicles headed east, and he followed them, and soon heard the sound of distant gunfire, an exchange of automatic weapons that was more concentrated than anything he’d heard since coming to El Salvador. The firing became sporadic, but Joe kept up his forward march, for a kilometer, and then two, toward the scene of the battle. He removed his shirt and tied it over his head, and the people running away from the battle did double takes when they saw a bare-chested gringo walking in the opposite direction. Joe saw an armored personnel carrier retreating westward from the battle, followed by a military ambulance. Then he crossed two blocks that were eerily empty and arrived in the neighborhood of Cuscatancingo, at the Y junction of two streets—just in time to see a squad of rebels withdrawing to the east. They were gangly and young and their faces were covered, and they were wearing khaki pants and blue jeans, and T-shirts honoring a Texas football team and Coca-Cola, and they were carrying M16s, and they had enough training to engage in an orderly withdrawal, one man covering for another as they filtered down side streets and between buildings. In three minutes they were gone, and the residents of Cuscatancingo emerged from taking shelter in their homes and gathered in the street, and they sensed they were standing in a limbo between warring armies, and they felt the hot humid air around them shifting and rustling through the trees. They listened as four house sparrows jumped on the utility wires and began to cheep and chatter loudly, and the sound was soothing to them, and to some it seemed divine, or surreal, as if they were at the mercy of a great, demented storyteller who had transformed Cuscatancingo into his stage, and who could fill it with explosions or singing birds to fit his narrative whims. A group of pamphleteers appeared, passing out slips of mimeographed paper, and Joe joined the other people in the silent crowd in reading that the day’s actions were meant to pressure the government to lift the state of siege, reopen the university and release political prisoners, and to make other demands to which the dictatorship would never concede. One of the women passing out the pamphlets broke the quiet by giving a speech explaining how the people could not be crushed, and she continued speaking until a man of about twenty appeared behind her, a rebel fighter with a revolver on his waist; he placed his hand on her shoulder, and she stopped midsentence, and the man began to speak to the crowd.

  “We have a wounded compañero. He needs first aid. Does anyone here know first aid?”

  “Yo sí sé,” Joe said, and all eyes turned to the speaker of these three awkwardly phrased Spanish words, and to his unshirted torso and the long hair that flowed from underneath the shirt tied to his head.

  “You? Who are you?”

  “A gringo. A writer,” Joe said in Spanish. “I was a medic in the army.”

  The rebel fighter went by the nom de guerre Fito. He had small, mousy eyes and had grown up in the neighboring community of Ciudad Delgado, and he had known these same streets with the alert eyes of a child, and now he knew them with the analytical eyes of an underground political organizer. He was well acquainted with the community’s characters and lunatics, but the bare-chested Joe was a stranger, an apparition. Fito made a quick assessment of Joe and the danger of trusting him, and he said, “Vení,” and Joe obeyed and followed after him, and they slipped into the same zigzagging pathways the rebels had followed in their retreat.

  “He’s wounded in the leg,” Fito said.

  “Is he conscious?” Joe asked.

  “Yes. He is. He was when I left him fifteen minutes ago.” He gave Joe a small canvas bag, a first-aid kit.

  They walked into a warren of shacks, pathways that were like alleyways but only as wide as Joe’s outstretched arms; and then into the brush of a steep ravine, downward, turning their feet sideways to keep from falling, and all the while Joe tried to remember what he could from his medic training, all those years ago in Missouri. Kid I was then, dumb army games. Bullet wound, what’s the protocol? Pressure, elevate, cover the wounded man to prevent shock. Something like that. Deeper into the brush. You can die from a leg wound if it hits an artery. The city disappeared and they were in a green place, and Joe could see a grayish stream cutting through a chalky canyon, and Joe wondered how they could be in this untamed place because he had studied the geography of greater San Salvador and he knew they were still well within the boundaries of the metropolis. He heard a distant siren, and another, and a truck horn, and he felt the city above him, invisible, and he realized he was in an open green oasis that somehow existed in the middle of San Salvador, unseen to the city dwellers above. A place that captured the detritus from the city above, the wastewater, the discarded papers and the lost toys, the runaways and the fugitives.

  “Ya mero,” Fito said, and he turned to see if Joe was keeping up, and of course Joe was right behind him because he’d spent much of his life walking up and down wild and unknown places, for as long as he could remember. Daniel Boone was a man, / Yes, a big man! / With an eye like an eagle / And as tall as a mountain was he!

  “¡Miguel!” the fighter called out. “Aquí estoy.”

  “¡Fito!” a voice called back. “¡Aquí, aquí, aquí!”

  Fito pulled back branches and waded into them, and Joe followed, and finally Fito grabbed one last branch and they saw the wounded fighter, a teenager with bright brown eyes and thin hairs growing on his cheeks and chin, and bloody smears on his forehead.

  “Gracias a Dios,” the wounded man said.

  “Te vamos a arreglar bien,” Joe said, and the wounded man squinted up at him in confusion, not because he didn’t understand what Joe said, but rather because he was perplexed by Joe’s strange Spanish promise to “fix him” and by Joe’s bare and sweaty chest hairs and the shirt on his head, and his angelic blond mane, and he thought that maybe the appearance of this fai
r-skinned foreigner meant he was in a dreamspace, near death.

  “I’m going to die here, I’m going to die!” the wounded man yelled out. “¡Madre mía, no quiero morir!”

  Joe knelt down and pulled back the wounded man’s hand from his thigh, and examined the wound, from which blood was still flowing. This guy might go into shock any moment now. Joe took the wounded man’s hand and squeezed it, and he gently forced the man to lie down, saying, “Acostate,” in perfect Central American Spanish, and the wounded man obeyed. Joe opened the first-aid kit and found bandages and a bottle of expired hydrogen peroxide, and he began to slowly clean the man’s wound, which was covered with mud and coagulated blood, working with soothing strokes, like a mother wiping off a baby, Fito would think later. Joe studied the wound again, which was actually two holes through the thigh, each the size of a thumbprint, a line of bloody tears slowly seeping out from each one. Through and through. Must have just missed the femoral artery. Otherwise, he’d be dead already. Lucky bastard. Apply pressure for the moment.

  “Puchís, hombre, no es nada,” Joe said, while he was squeezing and holding the wounded man. “Relajate.” This command and Joe’s squeezing, and his lighthearted repetition of “no es nada,” caused the wounded man to obey and relax and finally Joe took the bandages and some gauze from the kit and very thoroughly and methodically dressed and wrapped the wounds, and brought a sense of order and care to this moment in the ravine, and this further calmed the wounded man and the fighter Fito too, who had been worried that Miguel would bleed out. “We’re going to cover you because you might feel a little cold and we want you to be comfortable,” Joe said, and he removed the shirt from his head, and placed it over the wounded man, whose nervous, rapid breathing began to slow into a regular rhythm. “He needs to rest a bit, and then you can move him,” Joe said to the fighter. “But he’ll be fine.”

  “Gracias,” Fito said, and he told Joe they would leave Miguel for the moment, and that other compañeros would come to carry him to a place of safety, and he spoke to Miguel and said goodbye, and Joe shook the wounded man’s hand, and he heard Miguel whisper, “Gracias, brother,” and the sound of the English word brother caused Joe to raise his eyebrows and laugh, and he walked away, following the fighter Fito on a march upward, out of the ravine.

  Halfway up, Fito stopped and turned to Joe and asked, “What do you want?” By this question he really meant: Is there something I can give you, in thanks? And: Why are you here?

  “I want to help,” Joe said. “I want to be a part of the revolution.”

  Fito turned and continued his march upward. This is very intriguing. This norteamericano speaks directly. They reached the place where the pamphleteer had addressed the gathering, which was deserted now except for two boys of about six who were playing a game that involved jumping over the two-foot-high street barricade of boards and bricks that was left over from the battle fought earlier in the day. Fito remembered the deliberate and patient way Joe had dressed Manuel’s wound. When you’re in a movement long enough you realize that each day is an improvisation. You build a revolution with what you have, what falls to you. The many different talents people have. The street urchin’s ability to spy the police officer around the corner; the savvy peasant who can find the trail through the brush or the pool of drinking water; the bookworm with the sudden courage of a lion. The stranger with deep compassion; the older man who can dress a wound and march up and down a ravine and not get winded.

  Fito told Joe to meet him in two days at a restaurant near the center of San Salvador called ComaRápido. EatFast. “If I’m not there at twelve, then come back the next day.”

  “Está bien,” Joe said.

  “Don’t tell me your name. I don’t want to know it. Pick another name that I can call you.”

  Joe thought quickly of an appellation that had been bouncing around in his head. Lucas. As in Lucas McCain, “the Rifleman” of the TV show of the same name. A kind man who was also handy with a firearm. A fair, good man. An American. And a marksman.

  “Lucas,” Joe said.

  “Lucas,” Fito repeated, and he grinned back at Joe. “That’s a good name.”

  I am Lucas. Mi nombre es Lucas.

  17

  Mejicanos

  THE CLOCK MOVED PAST TWELVE and Joe paid for and ate two pupusas, garnishing them with cabbage slaw, as per the local custom. At 12:26 p.m., the guerrilla fighter named Fito entered through the door in a freshly laundered polo shirt, looking like an office stiff eager to get a burger. Fito walked toward the booth where Joe was sitting and said, “Seguime,” and Joe followed him to a table in the back where the restaurant was emptier. After a minute or so of sitting and listening to the sounds of the restaurant, Fito began to speak. “If you want to work with us, you need to know how we operate.” By “we” he meant the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo, or ERP. They were not a “front,” or a “movement,” or a “league,” like the many other organizations Joe had seen operating in San Salvador, but rather an “army.” The People’s Revolutionary Army, with all the discipline that name implied. I’m going to have to come up with another code word in the letters to Mom and Calhoun. I can’t call them “schoolteachers.” I’ll call them “scientists.”

  “You haven’t been organized before?” Fito asked, by which he meant had Joe ever been a member of any other revolutionary fronts or movements.

  “No.”

  “Well, when you operate underground, the way we do here in the city, you have a very disciplined structure,” Fito continued. In other words, Lucas wouldn’t be able to drift freely around San Salvador the way Joe had been doing, because after a day of conversations with his comrades, and questions placed to a member of another organization, Fito had learned that Lucas was known as the gringo who floated around the city, and who had helped here and there with the groups based at the now-closed university. “I need to know if you’ll accept this kind of discipline.”

  “Yes.”

  Fito told Lucas that his next contact with the organization would be tomorrow at a San Salvador bus terminal. He would be guided to a safe house where he would likely have to stay for some time; Joe nodded and said he understood. His only problem was his Salvadoran visa, which expired in one month. Would he need to have a valid visa if he went underground? Joe removed his passport from his pants pocket and placed it on the table, and Fito picked it up and opened the pages, and for the first time he glanced at Lucas’s real name—Joseph—and he chuckled as he looked at the ridiculous number of stamps inside it, most of them from South American countries. Peru in red. Chile in blue. A big stamp from Brazil: Visto. República Argentina. Bolivia. He saw the manic, improvised life of a free man wandering across borders, chasing a personal ambition.

  “Let me think about your visa problem,” Fito said. “For now a camarada will meet you at the bus station tomorrow.” Fito stood up and left Lucas at the table, and Joe wondered if he had become a member of the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo in the conversation that had just unfolded, or if more tests and questions awaited him.

  * * *

  “HOLA, LUCAS.” His contact was a young man of about twenty-two with a long, avian neck, and a wry, knowing smile. As if he had heard a funny joke about Joe. Follow me, at a distance, the young man said. His name was Mauricio and at a very young age he’d been a pickpocket and a petty thief, and once he’d escaped from a prison for boys in the aftermath of an earthquake that had somehow, mysteriously and mythically, unlocked two prison doors. Today he was valued for his ability to sniff out the presence of police officers, soldiers and informers, and was thus the perfect man for this job of escorting Joe through the city to the safe house without being followed. They entered an industrial district, near San Salvador’s largest cemetery, and Mauricio opened a metal door and Joe stepped into a shady space, and when his eyes adjusted to the weak light Joe saw he was in a room filled with refrigerators. Tall and short contraptions, and long ones for storing a side of beef, an
d boxes with wheels for carrying ice cream. They walked through this hoard of steel, aluminum and tin, and reached another metal door that led to a room that was just big enough for Joe to stretch out his arms, and here there was a bed, which was just long enough for Joe to lie down flat, and Joe threw down his duffel bag. He met the shop owner, whose name was Leopoldo. Rest, Leopoldo said. After a goodbye from Mauricio, Joe stretched out on the bed, which was covered with dusty wool blankets that scratched his arms and tickled his nose, and he opened the book he was carrying, Darkness at Noon.

  When Joe shifted onto his stomach after a chapter of reading, he looked down and saw a bloodstain on the cement floor, and then, underneath the bed itself, fragments of a bandage. The same bandage he’d wrapped around the wounded man in the ravine.

  * * *

  IN HIS FIRST TWO DAYS of self-confinement, Joe spoke a handful of sentences with the repairman Leopoldo, who provided him with two uninspired but hearty meals each day, and he read Darkness at Noon three times. He wandered into the refrigeration workshop often and noted that there were no doors keeping him locked inside, and that he could leave anytime, though of course he would be giving up a chance to join the movement. So he stayed inside, obediently, and didn’t ask the laconic Leopoldo any of the questions he would have liked to ask, and finally on his third day in the room he heard a knock on the steel door of his tiny bedroom and opened it to see Fito.