The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  Werner brought his finger down on the largest country on the map, a huge splotch of red.

  “That’s Siberia,” Joe said. “I’ve never been there. Try again.” The boy brought his finger down in the southern hemisphere, and Joe cried out, “Africa!”

  Joe began to tell his stories of Africa. He did not describe the wars he had seen on that continent, but rather, the animals, the children and the mountains and rivers. He spoke of shepherds guiding goats across the steppes of Kenya, and of seeing ibises with their horns as long as scepters, and children playing at rolling hoops along the red-dirt roads with sticks. Werner pointed to other places, and Joe described boys diving for fish in Jamaica, and the way he saw two dogs circle and capture a sheep on the Patagonian pampa, and how there were hills looming over the ocean in Brazil where barefoot boys flew kites. Joe’s stories contained ocean waves and dogs and more children and their games, and they felt familiar to Werner, as if Joe had whispered them into his ears many times before. Joe shared more during each visit, and Werner eventually decided he too would one day travel to other lands beyond La Libertad and El Salvador. This idea stayed with him for many years after his brief friendship with Lucas ended, as Werner grew into young manhood. Eventually Werner came to see that he needed to leave El Salvador to have a better life, and he remembered Lucas’s stories when he took his first, long, dangerous journey, along rivers and in rail cars, through Guatemala and Mexico, and along the wide highways of the United States, through many different ecologies—deserts and cotton fields and orange- and rust-colored Appalachia. Finally, Werner reached Washington, D.C., with its white marble monuments and vast lawns and vistas. By then, the war in El Salvador was far in the past, and Werner could only wonder about the fate of the man he knew as Lucas, whom he had last seen the December before his twelfth birthday. Werner started a family in the American state of Maryland, and he began to forget the stories he had heard in the house in La Libertad. And then one summer his oldest, college-student daughter took a summer trip to Europe, and she sent him postcards from Prague and Warsaw, and she called him from Moscow in the middle of a Maryland night on WhatsApp, and he could see her on his telephone, standing in front of the Kremlin, the sun glinting off the onion-topped towers behind her, and at that moment Werner felt a strange doubleness: that he was once again a boy listening to Lucas tell stories of faraway places, and that he was a middle-aged man whose daughter was telling him about her journey to “el este más este.” And not for the first time Werner felt grateful for having met that American whose final fate he had never learned. What happened to the man he knew as Lucas was a mystery, unlike the fate of the two other Americans he had met in La Libertad during his boyhood and wartime years, Sister Dorothy and Jean Donovan, the religious workers who lived down the street.

  * * *

  JOE SAW SISTER DOROTHY twice more during his walks through La Libertad, but had never spoken to her, and he never met Jean Donovan. They were on the periphery of his quiet, underground existence. Nobody home but me and my mutt, he wrote to his mother. An ugly grumpy boxer who belongs to the owners. Needs braces on his lower teeth, and he ain’t too smart. One morning, a military operation unfolded in the hills above the city, and the next day Joe recounted the events in a letter. A bunch of local kids went up into the hills with slingshots to shoot at flights of migratory birds. This is a yearly custom. Some crazy peasant reported the hills were full of guerrillas. The military lobbed a couple of grenades, and scared the hell out of their own troops, who panicked and called in reinforcements. Hence the planes and tanks that followed. Nobody got hurt, but one little fat boy (11 or 12 years old) got captured with his bag of rocks and was marched away crying by a column of soldiers. Jesus, you’d think by now I could do a little better at picking my revolutions! At home in the United States, Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in the presidential election. Joe wrote to his Republican mother to express his opinion. Well, it’ll be goodbye to Jimmy the Hypocrite. But Reagan as President? Woe-is-us. A Hollywood stuntman for president?

  A month after the election, Sister Dorothy Kazel and Jean Donovan headed out in a white van from the same La Libertad street where Joe lived. They went to the airport in San Salvador to pick up two Maryknoll sisters who were returning from a conference in Nicaragua. On the trip back, somewhere near the airport, the four women were abducted by Salvadoran Army troops dressed in civilian clothes, and later raped and murdered, their bodies dumped in a countryside locale where the troops ordered some peasants to bury them. Within hours word had gotten out, and a dozen journalists and the United States ambassador were at the site, watching as the bodies were exhumed and pulled up with ropes from a shallow grave. Well, as you know by now from the news media, we had another real bad week, Joe wrote home. Two of the murdered nuns were gals who lived down the street from me. The padre from La Libertad, our town, flew back to the States with the bodies. As you might know, all U.S. military and economic aid to El Salvador was immediately cut off.

  The women had been planning to continue their ministry of hymns and Bible verses and parables in El Salvador, teaching the locals that Jesus was a prophet of social justice who believed hunger was a sin perpetrated by the rich upon the poor. The photographs in the San Salvador tabloids showed their bodies, still dressed in long, modest skirts and high-buttoned blouses, being dragged like dead livestock from the hole in which they’d been deposited. Joe tossed his newspapers on the kitchen table and opened a beer and daydreamed about the nuns and their final hours. National Guard officers giving the orders, more than likely. Dispatch the four American outsiders, squash the uterine menace of their Christian practice. Grunts carrying out the orders with their fists, their erections and their semen, on a roadside near the airport. Many other victims, in police stations and army barracks where the national flag flies, with its brave blue stripes and the masons’ triangle on the coat of arms. Sister Dorothy, I saw her here. Her final moments playing out in the headlights and carbon monoxide cloud of her hijacked vehicle, at the mercy of men who maim and penetrate.

  A few days later, Joe traveled to San Salvador to pick up his mail and meet briefly in a park with one of the comrades, who said they were planning a “big action,” for January, before the new United States president came to power and could restore military aid to the country. He told Lucas to report to his San Salvador contact in two days. Afraid I can’t go into much detail, but, as they say, the situation is “deteriorating rapidly,” Joe wrote home. I’ll keep checking with my math professors for the usual weather reports.

  * * *

  LUCAS AND HIS FELLOW rebel grunts waited listlessly an entire morning, in a safe house in a middle-class neighborhood with sunshine streaming between the daisies in the curtains. Finally, a mustachioed comandante arrived. But instead of orders, he began with a speech about “contradictions” and “social forces,” reading from notes he’d written in pencil on a piece of graph paper; he puffed at a cigarette and blew the smoke away from his face. There are fifteen of us here in this living room, the comandante said, and maybe ten thousand more in other safe houses and in camps outside the city and in the provinces. When our barricades go up and we take this barracks, and that one, a spontaneous upswell of the masses will follow, overwhelming the enemy, and the enemy’s battalions will dissolve, and the junta will head for the airport and fly off to Miami or Buenos Aires. That’s the idea: a final offensive. The comandante explained these things and licked the bottom of the black brush on his upper lip. He had the whiff of some kind of official revolutionary training. A year of instruction in explosives and guerrilla tactics and spycraft in Havana, maybe. Joe had heard stories.

  For the final offensive, Lucas graduated from a revolver to a hunting rifle. Pretty much everyone else had an automatic weapon. M16s, AKs, a Galil. His unit was to be one of several operating in Mejicanos. The hour of the offensive was being brought up by a day. In fact, it had already started in Morazán, in the northeastern part of the country, and in Chalate
nango to the north. Rebel radio stations were broadcasting from the mountains: “At five this afternoon, at points all across the country, the General Command of the revolutionary forces launched their final offensive against the criminal regime. Compañeros! The hour of national liberation has arrived. We call on the people to raise barricades and provide water to the people’s fighters. We call on the people to establish local authorities to replace the corrupt officials. The insurrectionary moment has arrived…”

  Lucas’s unit arrived in Mejicanos by car and truck, speeding through intersections as they drove toward their first target: a local police station. When they arrived, neighborhood kids were already inside, and one or two rebels entered, and Joe watched as the kids ran out with typewriters and batons and revolvers and telephones, and many more rebel fighters joined them and fanned out across Mejicanos, in their jeans and untucked plaid shirts and old soccer jerseys. Joe saw a rebel fighter of about eighteen, who he later learned was named Yanira, wearing an olive-drab shirt captured or stolen from the Salvadoran Army, and a blue bandanna tied around her neck, and a brown cap, and ammunition carriers on her belt. The neighborhood people gawked, because her face was round and striking, and because they had never seen a woman holding an automatic rifle before. Another woman, a comandante, appeared with a bullhorn and pointed its coned speaker up in the air after climbing the hood of a car. Tita was her name, and she couldn’t be more than twenty-five, Joe thought, although she had the deep voice of a matron or a mother superior. More people came from the surrounding streets. Now they were a crowd, standing in liberated territory, staring at Comandante Tita and her wide shoulders, with an M16 set over one of those shoulders, and Joe felt as if he were inside a movie where a flying saucer descends from the heavens with beams of multicolored lights, and an alien emerges bathed in an ethereal glow, and the stunned populace gazes up at the space creature in wonder. Comandante Tita announced they were going to move slowly toward their next objective, the San Carlos army base, and whoever wanted to join could. A dozen men and boys stepped forward and took assorted rifles and handguns from a selection arranged, swap-meet style, on a blanket on the ground. Two neighborhood kids with identical mouse eyes, brothers, picked up revolvers and fell in behind Lucas. He began to hear shots fired in the distance; other units had begun the attack on the San Carlos base. Joe and the men and women around him marched with the pace of cautious felines, and within ten minutes they had reached the base, which was surrounded by white walls and a wrought-iron front gate.

  An uneven barrage of single shots popped from the rebels’ a-little-of-this-and-a-little-of-that arsenal; from puny pistols and M16s and a beautiful new Belgian FAL, and Joe felt exhilarated, even though the attack felt more symbolic than real, since none of his comrades were actually advancing into the base. This is no way to defeat an enemy in a fixed and fortified position. What’s the plan? Finally, an order: Lucas, move back, be the retaguardia, watch for any enemy reinforcements, and within fifteen minutes a toaster-shaped armored personnel carrier was rolling toward Lucas’s position, and there was nothing to do but to slowly pull back, and the two brothers who had been following Lucas dropped their revolvers and ran down an alley and disappeared. Joe and his comrades moved away from the army base in hurried crouches, like Groucho in a Marx Brothers flick, until they found a roadway that was not under fire.

  His unit began a general retreat northward, on streets that rose into more affluent sections of the metropolis, where families lived behind walls, in compounds tended by platoons of maids and gardeners. Word came down the line: We are headed to a new objective. Nearby. The compa directly in front of Lucas introduced himself. His nom de guerre was Fideos, and Joe thought that was an interesting moniker with which to go into battle.

  “Do you like noodles?” Joe asked Noodles, who smiled and said, “Of course.” Joe and Noodles followed the line of soldiers along wide and empty streets, and finally into the open spaces of a kind of villa with big lawns and white buildings. “Qué lindo esta quinta,” Fideos said. “I never thought I’d be inside one.” A bullet whistled over their heads, and Lucas and Fideos dropped to the ground seeking cover. The rebels were being ambushed by a sniper. A soldier. No, a security guard Joe could see in the distance, firing a weapon from the roof of a small building. The sniper slipped away and Joe heard a scream-wail behind him. Yanira had been shot. “¡Ayúdenme! ¡Ayúdenme! ¡Ayúdenme!”

  She’d been shot in the chest, and before Joe could step forward to offer first aid, another compañero was doing so, a medic Joe called Doc Holliday in the notes he wrote later, because he was carrying two revolvers in gunslinger belt holsters. Immediately, and without any prurient hesitations, Doc Holliday removed Yanira’s blouse and scissored off her bra and treated her wound. Blood oozing from her torso, just below the ribs, and Doc Holliday held her hand and soon two other compas had fashioned a stretcher from some blankets taken from the residence, which Joe now learned belonged to José Antonio Morales Ehrlich, one of the heads of the four-headed civilian-military junta ruling El Salvador. From his obsessive newspaper reading Joe knew that Morales Ehrlich had married into one of the biggest landowning families in the country, and that his two adult sons had been in the guerrilla army. “¡No está! ¡No está!” Morales Ehrlich was not in the house. As Joe processed this information, the shooting started again: a group of police officers were attacking from another roof, and the compas returned fire and one of the cops fell and the others disappeared, and Joe followed some anguished voices out into the driveway of the compound and found two compas crouching over a comrade.

  The wounded fighter was a woman of about nineteen, with the big eyes of an Egyptian pharaoh and mestizo skin imbued with the red sheen of coffee beans still on the tree. Joe stepped back and watched Doc Holliday try to treat her, but it was no use. She’d been struck in the neck and was dying very quickly, blood rushing up from her mouth and onto her chin. Twenty minutes later Joe took a small, hand-size notebook out of his back pocket to describe what he’d seen. Dead in the driveway wearing khaki pants, soft khaki shirt, black T-shirt, no shoes, relig. string charm around neck (black) + badly painted pink nails. Expression was mixture of seriousness and serenity. Noodles was shaken when he saw. Noodles and the dead girl had been part of an ERP unit that had been based in the mountains outside San Salvador; maybe he was in love with her, or maybe they were like brother and sister, because now Noodles began to weep and say, “María, María, no.” Joe watched Noodles cry and finally he placed an arm on the fighter’s shoulders, and gave him the kind of manly squeeze he’d rarely given any male, and Joe said the first thing that came to mind: It’s okay to weep. “Llorá, hombre, llorá, porque es muy triste perder una amiga así.” The sound of Lucas’s English-accented Salvadoran Spanish settled Noodles down, and the two men crouched together on the lawn of the mansion where one woman fighter had been wounded, and another killed. More rebels arrived, and they milled about the lawns of the quinta, looking at its white-washed buildings and its octagon-shaped windows with stained glass depicting pale cherubs playing trumpets. Two compas returned from the main house with shovels and started digging a hole in the lawn between the guesthouse and the swimming pool to bury the girl fighter. The dirt under the grass was soft and the compas were quickly done, and they lowered the rebel girl into her grave. Joe caught one last glimpse of her fingernails, and realized he was wrong: they were not “poorly painted,” but rather scratched off. In battle, perhaps, while firing her M16. Maybe one day they’ll invent a nail polish to withstand the rigors of combat. Stupid thought. My crazy brain. Dirt covering her face now, her eyes, forever buried, how fucking horrible. Jesus, a dead girl soldier, will someone tell her parents? Suddenly two domesticated geese came waddling through the lawn, pets of the family that lived here. One of the rebel fighters, a short peasant man, very calmly reached down and grabbed one bird and snapped its neck, and caught and killed the second one too. He put them in a sack and draped it over his shoulder.
r />   * * *

  THE QUINTA WAS FILLING with comrades from various units of the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo, and from the Fuerzas Populares de Liberación and from the Partido Comunista de El Salvador, this last group being, despite its name, the most conservative group in the rebel alliance. Lucas saw people he recognized from the university when he was still named Joe, and they walked over and put an arm around him and said, “Qué bueno verlo,” while the burial detail finished its work.

  A bit later, Joe overheard other rebel fighters give an update on the general situation: in the city below, the army had retaken Mejicanos up to the market, but not the bus terminal. Joe could see helicopters circling over that part of the city, but in others the helicopters had been driven off by rebel fire. Joe wandered over by where the chiefs were gathered, debating what they should do next. As he approached, the comandante with the thick mustache looked at him and said to the other chiefs, “Let’s send Lucas too. He’s the perfect scout.” And then to Joe, “Lucas, vení, te necesitamos.”

  Lucas was to slip back down into Mejicanos and give an appraisal of the enemy’s strength, and any pockets of resistance. He surrendered his weapon and he took off his shirt and tied it over his head. Back to my demented-hippie routine. Back into bullshitter mode. Joseph Sanderson. I am just a lost gringo, señor. They told me there were pretty women in this country but now I see there is a war. I am very frightened. Or, as we say in my country, “freaked out.” Can you point the way back to the Marriott for me, please?

  Joe walked down into the empty city. There were no troops. Not a soul on the street, like Champaign-Urbana on a Sunday evening. Everyone inside their homes behind locked doors. A curfew’s been declared. At one corner, he saw a boy and a girl sitting in their doorway, making brass mountains from the shell casings they’d found. Shuttered businesses. He walked into the heart of Mejicanos and did not see a single soldier or police officer, and he marched briskly back up to the quinta and found a reduced group of rebels, including the chief who had sent him to do reconnaissance. “It’s quiet down there,” Joe said. “No army, nothing.”