The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  Fito began to speak casually, as if he and Joe were old friends, and Fito had just stopped by to say hello. “This room, Lucas. It reminds me of the one in my grandparents’ house. I slept on a bed like this one. Too small. But that room had a big dresser in it. Too big. It barely fit. And the room smelled of mothballs. On a farm.”

  “My grandparents were farmers too. I went there every summer. To Kansas.”

  “Kansas?” For Fito, the name possessed magical qualities.

  “Yes. With horses and cows and wheat.” Joe was proud of himself for remembering the word for wheat: trigo.

  “Corn,” Fito said. “On my grandparents’ farm.”

  “You learn a lot when you live on a farm.”

  “Sí. My father grew up on that piece of land. He never went to school, and neither did my mother, but…” A car passed slowly on the usually quiet street outside, and the shuffling of its poorly adjusted valves caused Fito to stop midsentence, and Fito studied the metallic sound, which was like two knives scraping together, and the menacing noise carried the possibility of his own personal apocalypse, of his death and the fall of the safe house, and the murder of Leopoldo and this good gringo. But then the car was gone and Fito resumed, midsentence, “… they learned to read and write and taught me and my brother, even before we started school. When we came to the city, they sent us to good schools. My brother and I both read Baldor’s Algebra, back to front. Learning was important to my parents.”

  Fito turned quiet. They heard Leopoldo in the workshop, taking something apart, and tossing a tool to the cement floor.

  “So are you sure you want to do this, Lucas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Joe talked about El Salvador and said he had seen similar inequality and injustice in his travels around the world. Nigeria, the children he’d cared for, and those who had died in his arms; the murdered prisoners of Vietnam. He talked about having a sense of personal responsibility, because he was a Yankee who had been raised in comfort while his government sent troops and weapons around the globe, and this last statement of his was the most “political,” Fito thought. Lucas never mentioned “class struggle” or “dialectical materialism” or any of the other ideas that Fito had studied when he joined the movement. Fito had come to understand that there was a scientific underpinning to the Salvador revolution. In the inevitable march of time each comrade was like an electron in the molecules that would produce a new epoch of human history. But to Lucas the Salvadoran revolution was more like a painting or a prayer. An armed act of beauty against evil. When Fito reported back to his superiors in the ERP, he summarized Lucas’s motives thusly: he was not joining them for “ideological” reasons as much as he was for “metaphysical” ones.

  “What he believes in is a universal idea of justice. He comes to collaborate with us. Because he doesn’t agree with the policies of his country. He’s a writer, a poet.”

  A week later, Mauricio the ex-pickpocket returned. He guided Lucas to an empty soccer stadium and dirt running track and told Lucas that he should run, to get in shape. Joe did so, and his smoker’s lungs began to betray him after two laps, but he kept on going. Thirty-eight, thirty-eight, I’m thirty-eight. One foot after another and here’s the kid Mauricio handing me some water, gracias, and run some more, and the kid is squinting up at the sun. No shit, it’s hot. It’s fucking hot. Five laps. From the dark room with refrigerators, out here into the burning hell of Central America. Fuck. Seven laps and now I’m sorta just shuffling along.

  When Joe had run nine laps, two small boys climbed up into the stands and clapped every time Joe passed, and when Joe had reached twelve laps the group had grown to four boys and Mauricio motioned to Lucas that they should leave, and they made their way circuitously through the city back toward the safe house.

  Many days passed this way, with Joe guided out to various locations to run and exercise, and to the post office to check for his mail, because they allowed him to write letters from home and to receive them.

  My new home is absolutely splendid! Joe wrote to his mother and Calhoun. He could not tell anything approaching the truth of his current situation, so he spun an elaborate fantasy. Could spit into the nearby river on a windy day. House built on a bluff four blocks from the beach. Made out of wood, walk-around balcony on two sides, with a hammock, of course. Has a funky swimming pool, and fat + useless ducks, butterflies + lizards + flowers. Real tranquil. Well, the tranquil part was true. Believe I’ll do a bit of gardening while I’m here. Either that, or purchase a case of gin and a Holy Bible. Guess I’ll be on ice about a month, which is fine with me. Got plenty of poems to scribble and seashells to pick up. Plus lots of half-naked village maidens washing clothes in the river! Mauricio mailed the letter, and ten days later when Joe returned to the post office with Mauricio, he received an answer from his mother.

  Your research on jungle hammocks, native girls and gin sound very interesting to Calhoun. One of these days, I’ll ship him down there, she wrote. As always, she kept Joe abreast of the news from Urbana and Kansas. Her sister Marg had joined the Daughters of the American Revolution, and then Virginia did too, and she’d discovered that Joe’s great-great-great-great-grandfather Thomas Richardson had fought in the Revolutionary War; in the very first battles, in fact, “the Lexington Alarm.” Steve had obtained his pilot’s license, and purchased an airplane. Steve and his family are flying to Peoria this weekend. They will stay at a Holiday Inn and relax by the pool. Did I write before that Kathy swam 4,000 feet without stopping? We think she is quite a swimmer for an 8-year-old. Marg writes from the farm that they are having a very bad drought. Calhoun has recovered from his hernia operation and Blue Cross has paid for all but $90 of the $450 surgery bill. It sure is sad listening to reports of health-care bills. We are very lucky. Many retirees are going to die in debt. She closed with her usual admonitions. Take care, write when you can, don’t drink too much gin, and all that sort of stuff. We will just sit here waiting for your next letter.

  After another visit to the post office with Mauricio, Joe stepped inside the workshop and found Fito sitting on top of a meat locker, waiting.

  “We thought about your visa problem, Lucas,” he said. “We have an idea. We want you to bring some things for us from the United States. From New Orleans. Can you do this?”

  “Yes,” Joe said, and Fito motioned to Mauricio, who stepped nearer to them, and together the two guerrillas gave Joe some basic pointers on how an undercover operative of Revolutionary Army of the People should conduct himself in the field. Neither Fito nor Mauricio had ever been to the United States, but they assumed it had police agents and spies who monitored “suspicious” people. They gave Lucas a mailing address and phone number to use should he need to send an urgent message to El Salvador, and they told him how he should address this telephone contact, and how he should carry himself in crowded and public places, always keeping his eye on the front door. Joe might have found it all amusing, but he did not, because Fito and Maurico spoke with the severity of men who’d seen comrades die due to a lack of such discipline. They told him what it sounded like when someone tapped your phone, and how to check and see if someone was following you. They spoke for an hour and they made Joe repeat and recite all the instructions they gave him, and finally Fito stood up and said, “Buen viaje,” bon voyage.

  As Joe left El Salvador, he thought about the people who lived there, and the events he had seen, the killing and the wounded and the tanks and the soldiers and the dead, and the graves on the now-closed campus of the university. When he boarded a Pan American flight in Guatemala City and stepped onto a 747, he felt like Alice in Wonderland, and he consciously tried to avoid the seductions of the alternate reality taking shape around him. I am alien to all this. To the champagne the people around me are drinking, to the seductive wool wrapped around the torso of the stewardess.1

  * * *

  WHEN JOE ARRIVED IN CHICAGO, he remained on guard against the lure
of savory hot dogs and the fat floating on the pepperoni pizza. The sanitized spaces of North America, the smell of cleaning solvents. Was there someone watching me get on the plane in Phoenix, off the plane at O’Hare? He made note of the police officers on the Chicago L. Finally, he boarded an Amtrak train, smooth sailing and of course I am scot-free, unfollowed and unseen. The train worked its way free of the industrial lots, the rail yards, the trash heaps on the edge of the city, and Joe slipped into a reverie of reflection, and he saw all the life events that had brought him to this moment, and he felt a sense of purpose he had not felt in many, many years. As if he had been following some foreordained path. He was not a mere vagabond. All his travels had prepared him for this. His time in the army, even. The train passed through fading farm towns where station wagons and pickup trucks waited at the railroad crossings, and finally the train approached the Champaign station, and he saw the green and orange skyline of the city’s trees, the light refracting through the dust and the autumn-ing leaves, trying to seduce him into the trances of his boyhood. Sleeping in on Saturdays, maple syrup, and melted butter. Joe stepped off, and onto the platform. He felt the ghost of Karen, suddenly, unexpectedly. The day he left for college, eighteen years old.

  Joe walked into the station and he heard Fito’s voice whispering to him: Careful, Lucas. He found a pay phone and called home.

  “Hi, Mom, guess who?”

  18

  Urbana, Illinois

  JOE TOLD HIS FAMILY he would stay for two weeks, and then go back to El Salvador. Think of this as my holiday visit, he said. “It’s Christmas in September,” he told his mom on the phone from the train station. That first night he collapsed on a rollaway bed inside the small “study” his brother Steve had added to his new home in Savoy, just outside Champaign, a room that was twice the size of the space in which Lucas had slept for a month in San Salvador. In the morning, Joe opened his eyes fully to the dry fall daylight, and to the rows of accounting binders his big brother kept here, and his ears filled with the sound of Steve in the kitchen making breakfast before going off to work, because it was a weekday. He heard his niece, Kathy, in the living room. “Can I say hi to Uncle Joe again?”

  “I think he’s asleep.”

  “Awake!” Joe yelled.

  “Go say hi then. But hurry, because we have to get you to school, young lady.”

  Joe went alone that evening to have dinner with his mother and Calhoun, and it occurred to him that he had never sat down for a meal at his mom’s home with a secret as big as the one he carried now. I am Lucas. Virginia caught the amused upturn of the corner of his lips at the dining room table. Teenage Joe, inside the body of a man of thirty-eight. And then he turned older and looked preoccupied. The things he describes in his letters, the stories I clip from the newspaper. Bodies left to rot in the trash dumps. Battles in the capital city. We won’t speak of any of that now.

  “We’re surprised you came back to us, Joe, what with those naked village maidens you were living with,” Calhoun said.

  “The maidens are nice,” Joe said. “But this pork roast is sexier.”

  Calhoun expounded on their new residence, the Clark-Lindsey retirement “village.” Trimmed lawns and park views, and the vans that delivered dinners to some of its residents, and Joe half listened as Calhoun continued with his survey of the benefits of retirement living, and Virginia looked across the table and saw Joe’s distant look, and she felt the effort of an especially difficult concealment. When they get to a certain age, you can’t force them to answer your questions anymore. When was that? When they’re eight or nine. Eleven.

  In the living room after dinner, she presented Joe with her latest batch of clippings from the Tribune and The News-Gazette, the dramatic events in El Salvador as recounted by correspondents for the Associated Press and United Press International, all gathered in a file folder. He opened it and said, “Thank you, Mother,” and looked at the rectangles of newsprint, and began to read, and he perused the action shots of National Guardsmen and bandanna-faced protesters and the portrait of a priest who had been assassinated, and a thumbnail map showing the location of a village where sixteen people had been killed.

  “It’s awful there, Mom,” he said, suddenly. Joe thought of an image he’d seen back in El Salvador, a photograph in the local tabloids, more horrible than any of these clippings. The corpse of a woman whose killers carved the initials of a death squad into her chest. The letters E and M, the lines cut by a pocketknife, he guessed. Something he could never describe to his mother.

  “So why are you going back, son?” Virginia asked, and to both of them the question seemed especially bold and direct.

  “Because I’m needed there.”

  “Virginia, you forgot to serve your dessert,” Calhoun interrupted. “Joe, she made this wonderful cherry crunch. In your honor.”

  Virginia turned to look back at the table and the kitchen. “Oh. How could I forget?”

  Joe closed the file folder as his mother stood up and returned to the kitchen. They never discussed El Salvador again.

  * * *

  JOE BEGAN HIS NEXT DAY with a visit to the office of his brother, Steve, in the Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Illinois, Steve’s new fiefdom, where he managed a troop of staffers, distributing dollars and requesting appropriate documentation from professors and maintenance men. Joe saw an attractive young secretary in a print dress of crazy autumn colors, but he did not flirt with her, but instead was mesmerized by a device on her desk; a humming computer terminal, its glowing amber letters reflected in her hazel eyes. She typed onto a keyboard and lifted up a telephone receiver, and brought the receiver to rest atop a metal box that was the size of a large book, and she pressed several more keys on her keyboard, and the box began to squawk and squeal. The box was talking into the receiver, connecting the computer to the telephone line, and Joe felt childlike and guileless before this new invention.

  “It’s called a modem,” she explained. “We use it to connect to the network.”

  “The network?”

  “It’s a circle of computers, all connected to one another. We use it to send our reports to the central administration. And they send reports to us and to Springfield.”

  The box continued its squawk-squeal, and a living string of amber letters materialized on the screen, moving left to right like a tiny locomotive, and Joe looked at the phone line, and realized it was carrying information, and for the rest of the day he was disturbed by the idea that data was traveling on wires back and forth across the university and across the state and country. Obviously, this new technology could be used by “el estado,” the State, the powers that be; by the FBI and the CIA and the Department of Defense, to control and monitor, and he remembered Fito’s lessons about security, and the letter Fito had given him to mail. A missive with a San Francisco address, which he had deposited into a mailbox in Los Angeles. Sealed. A rebel communication that would be carried to its final destination by waddling American mail carriers in quaint gas vehicles. On the way back to El Salvador he was supposed to pick up an envelope in New Orleans, and carry it on his person back to San Salvador, but the enemy had satellites and now “modems” to carry information, to listen and to spy and transmit. His paranoia was heightened when he went to drink coffee with Steve and his brother explained how the university was beginning a new initiative to fully computerize administrative records, and how Mom was lucky and smart to have retired when she did.

  Later that day Joe had lunch with Jim Adams inside the old offices of the long-defunct newspaper Joe had once delivered, The Courier; it had just become a restaurant, of all things.

  “So what’s going on in El Salvador, brother,” Jim asked. “Is it as bad as it looks?”

  “Worse, much worse.”

  Joe quickly changed the subject. Jim Adams was a helicopter pilot now, in addition to being a fireman, and they talked about flying, and how Steve was becoming a real ace of the air too, and wh
ile Jim explained the ins and outs of helicopter piloting Joe remembered what it was like to be in the air, all-seeing, above speeding automobiles and farmers in their fields, and he thought of all the eyes in the sky, the ears and the data on the telephone lines, and at that moment a white man in a white shirt with a breast-pocket pen holder appeared at the restaurant door. He looked at Joe directly and purposefully, and took a seat across the room. A man of about Joe’s age, with a thin mustache.

  “Something wrong, brother?” Jim asked.

  “I wonder if I’m being followed,” Joe said.

  “What?”

  “I think I’m being monitored. Last night, when Steve’s phone rang, I answered it. I heard a click. It’s what you hear when they’re tapping your phone.”

  “That’s crazy. Nobody wants to tap your phone, Joe.”

  “Sure they would. The CIA, the FBI. Fuck, I don’t know, all sorts of people.”

  “Because you were in El Salvador?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  Jim looked at his old friend and remembered the assorted drunken excesses of their youth, and Joe’s lonely ramblings when he returned from long trips. A human being can’t keep traveling forever; now it’s finally caught up with him. Maybe he’s done too many drugs. Stuff we can’t get here in Champaign-Urbana. Or maybe it’s drugs he’s dealing, maybe he’s bringing this crazy powerful stuff here.

  “You mixed up in something, Joe? The cops looking for you? The mob?”

  “The mob!?” Joe shouted, and everyone sitting at the adjacent tables turned to look at him, and he snort-laughed and his sudden amusement infected Jim. The waitress brought the two laughing Urbana townies their hamburgers, and the suspicious man at the table was joined by a woman, and she squeezed his hand.