The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  Tell Momma all is well, I’ll be home whenever, and plant rhubarb in the spring garden, Joe wrote. I’ll keep in contact the best I can. So it’s 1200 until then.

  Eight weeks passed without a letter from him.

  20

  La Guacamaya, Morazán

  DUSK WAS HIS DAWN. Joe rose from fitful sleep and opened his startled eyes to the warm hours of the dying afternoon. Puta, I wanted to sleep some more. When he joined his fellow rebels to resume the march, he took his first steps with his eyes facing the slanted rays of the setting sun, seeing dragonflies and mosquitoes and spiders in the milky last light of a country evening. The color drained from the coffee fruit and the cornstalks, and the landscape became a shadow painting of tree branches and trunks, and the soft bellies and breasts of the mountains turned black and menacing. Joe felt exhilarated and very young, despite the fact he was older than everyone around him, and as he marched, the tadpole eyebrows and brown pupils and babyish complexions of the rebels’ faces disappeared too, and he listened to their shoes and boots flopping on mud and rocks. They marched at night to stay out of sight of the Salvadoran Air Force. Men with machetes up ahead cleared the path. Swish, issh. Clunk, clunk, crack. Even when they were slowed down by thick brush, Joe had trouble keeping up. He followed the warnings passed back from the front of the rebel column: “Look out, there’s a rock here.” “A tree branch.” He stumbled into a hole and twisted his ankle and marched slower still, and the peasants chuckled at him. “Se está quedando atrás el gringo.” Yes, I’m falling behind. Not used to walking blind. To a peasant the night path and the day path are the same path. I haven’t got my night legs yet.

  Their destination was the main rebel base in the northeast. Their column consisted of forty-five eager and underfed and perpetually hungry human beings who were surviving, in part, by eating roots the peasant soldiers dug up. Joe lost another notch on his belt but he still lumbered, big and clumsy next to the young men and women who bounced along the night paths like sparrows. One morning, as they prepared to sleep after a long day’s march, his new comandante, an erudite and tall man, told Joe with a sly grin: “You know, they say the optimal age to be a guerrilla is between twenty-five and thirty-five. I am thirty. Exactly the right age. You are not.” His nom de guerre was Sebastián and it was an open secret he was in love with one of the members of the column, a young woman named Máxima.

  At dawn their nightly march ended with the sight of pink light coloring the slopes of the San Miguel volcano, and its conical beauty reminded Joe of Kilimanjaro and allowed him to forget, momentarily, how hungry he was. When the moon rose over the volcano the following night, Joe saw a possum scurry up into a tree; he asked the comandante permission to shoot it so they could eat it for dinner. Lucas struck the animal in the head with a revolver, a single shot from a distance of five meters, and the rebel soldiers around him ooed and laughed in appreciation of his marksmanship. They returned to the march, and finally they unburdened themselves of the things they had carried during the long night. Joe set down the backpack that held his mostly unfilled notebooks and the rebel fighters around him removed the ammunition packs that were attached to their belts, most of them hand-sewn by their mothers from canvas scraps and nylon fabric. Then, for the first time in his life Joe ate possum, an exceedingly greasy meat that tasted like moist chicken. When they were finished the comandante poked a stick at the bones in the fire. “We’ll be entering ranch country soon,” he said. “So let’s find a cow to steal. A rich person’s cow. A bourgeois cow.” The sun rose above them, and the men and women of the rebel column rested with possum protein in their stomachs, and dreams of beefsteak in their heads, and they felt sleep welling inside them as the daylight grew brighter around them, and it was hot, even in the shade of the branches. They slept on the ground, on pillows of joined hands, alone with their memories of the march and the events that had brought them here, to this grove of trees with the sound of a river a few paces away. Branches and leaves and insects and pollen on the surface of the water, floating past.

  Comandante Sebastián crawled next to Joe, looked across the column of sleeping compas and began to whisper into Lucas’s ear—in English. “Lucas, can I tell you something?” His accent suggested New York City. “I need to tell you something.” And when Lucas gave him a confused look, Sebastián explained: “I lived in Newark for five years when I was a kid.”

  “No sabía,” Joe said.

  “You know that woman you see at the end of the column? The tall one? She’s my girlfriend.”

  “Máxima? No shit.”

  “Yeah. But she’s angry with me now. Because I yelled an order at her. Many orders. But one day soon we’ll be alone and together again. I’m telling you this because I have to tell someone. I’m going to write poems to her and win her back.”1

  Sebastián rolled away and tried to sleep with an arm and then a shirt over his eyes. Lucas knocked out quickly and snored. At the other end of the camp, Máxima snored too, small puffs next to the trumpets of the boys around her. How many kilometers today? Fifteen. Joe fell asleep, and into a sweaty dream with orange noon light glowing behind his eyelids.

  * * *

  THE NEXT NIGHT, marching through open fields, the rebel column stopped on the edge of a cattle pasture, and two guerrillas very quietly approached a cow and rustled it away, despite some sturdy bovine resistance. The rebel column and the purloined animal marched along a river, and Joe saw a wild horse wading in shallow water and his comrades stopped to admire it for the apparition it was, a yellowish-brown animal that glowed in the dawn light as if it were made of gold. Later they camped at the opening to a cave whose walls were covered with small and ancient hand-size paintings. With each night of marching they entered a landscape that was greener, and a light mist fell on them, and Joe was relieved to be cooled off after so many warm nights of sweaty marching and days of sweaty sleep. With more tree cover, they could march during the day. One afternoon they followed a narrow gravel road and entered a “caserío,” a collection of homes with cement and adobe walls, and roofs of thatched branches and leaves. The settlement seemed abandoned, until women and girls and boys emerged from the brush around these homes; they had been hiding and now they revealed themselves, a small community of very poor people, dressed in timeworn clothing that hung on them like laundry; they seemed to be a mix of indigenous Mesoamericans and Africans, with wide faces and full lips. Joe shook hands with a boy whose pants had rectangular patches at the knees and whose shirt was filled with finger-size holes.

  The only adult male in the village carried a machete with a curved tip, and Joe learned this was called a corvo. The man shook hands with Sebastián, speaking in a heavy rural accent Joe struggled to understand, and he led them up a short path to a cluster of singed adobe bricks and blackened palm fronds. “The army burned these houses down, Lucas,” Sebastián explained. “For collaborating with us.” Joe sensed that before the arrival of the army, the people here had lived in a deep and pure isolation. The children played games with rocks and pieces of string and ants, the way his father had in Kansas, and Joe was reminded of images he had seen of the poor during the Great Depression. This settlement had no electricity, and only a mud path connected it to the rest of El Salvador. The caserío existed in a state of timelessness, and this was disconcerting to Joe, because it ran against his notions of history, of the power of modernity to leave at least some trace in every corner of the globe. The army had taken away a young man from the village, Sebastián said, and he had not been seen since, and the soldiers had poisoned the wells and warned that worse would happen if the people did not tell them where the guerrillas were hiding.

  The rebel column left the village and headed north, and Joe saw two helicopters prowling ahead of them, and the comandante led them to the top of a small, wooded hill where they could hide and watch the enemy aircraft. Smoke began to rise from an unseen source two or three miles away, carbonous columns billowing upward from the lush forest can
opy in pulses, as if produced from the breathing of two giant animals with fire in their entrails. The rebels watched silently and impotently, and Joe looked at the comandante, and saw a fire alight in his pupils, and thoughts of retribution forming inside his New Jersey–educated brain, but orders were orders; they were to avoid contact with the enemy. They continued their march northward, toward the main rebel base; the comandante said they would be there in two or three days.

  When they paused their advance to eat, Joe began composing two letters: one to his father in Arizona, another to Mom, Calhoun and Steve in Illinois. Dear Papa—After twenty-five days in the bush I’m finally down to my last belt hole! Can count the weeks like tree rings. After several decades of learning to live off the land I’m faring well and still a tough old bird at nearly 39. He referred to the rebels he was with as “butterfly collectors” and described his adventures in the eating of reptiles, roots and marsupials. Granted, possum goes better with sweet potatoes and gin, but it was tasty all the same. He told his father how the army was burning the homes of the peasants, but he also described the flora and fauna he had encountered—a species of rattlesnake, a small boa called mazacuata, and what appears to be a rear-fanged viper called mica. Often incredibly lovely at night when the moon comes up—trees silhouetted along the mountain crests. The next day he resumed his letter writing by confessing to feeling old and run-down. Tough old bird or not, I’m suspicious that this just might be my last collecting trip. The knees and lungs just don’t function as well as they should. Weighed down with equipment, hungry + fatigued—sometimes reminds me of climbing Kilimanjaro. He kept up the patently nonsensical fiction that he was on an expedition with “math professors,” and also railed against the Reagan administration for continuing to fund the Salvadoran army. He summed up his days of marching with a reflection: I’ve come a long way, baby, from those 20-mile Lincoln Trail hikes I used to make in the Scouts with Troop 12.

  Joe put the letters back in his rucksack, down underneath the extra ammunition he carried there, because there was no place where he could send a letter from, of course, no mailbox, no stamps for sale by the roadside in this war zone. At the end of each day’s march he wrote a little more. He told his family the spirits of his comrades had lifted because they were entering territory that was, for the most part, “liberated,” and he described how groups of children came out to meet his band of “math professors” as they entered each village. The children marched alongside them, a rebel column in miniature, carrying sticks and “mini-machetes,” laughing and walking stiff-armed, like soldiers in the movies, following the column through each settlement and then on the paths that led away from them.

  Joe and the rebels entered the department of Morazán and in one morning they covered twelve uphill kilometers at a leisurely pace, and they arrived at noon to a series of footpaths in an expansive mountain valley. A squad of guerrillas was there to greet them, a scout party from the main rebel base; their ranks included a boy of about sixteen, and a woman in her late twenties with a rosebud mouth who wore a tight white blouse with an M16 slung over her shoulder and two ammunition belts arranged over the burned-brown skin of her upper chest, and Joe felt weird and weak pangs of arousal. Lucas was tongue-tied in her presence, but he was going to make the effort to talk to her just the same, when suddenly they heard voices yelling from the nearby caserío, followed by the increasingly clear and loud sound of propeller-driven airplanes approaching. The woman fighter stared suddenly into Lucas’s blue eyes as if they were responsible for bringing the Salvadoran Air Force upon her, and she turned and ran, sprightly, up the path, and Sebastián found Lucas and yelled at him, “Vos, quedate aquí,” and Joe understood that he was to join the civilians in taking cover in the trenches that had been dug nearby. Bombs fell into the forest and exploded, close enough to be felt as a kick-your-ass thud in the soil of Lucas’s trench. A P-51 Mustang flew lower over the valley and unleashed several bursts of cannon fire. American army surplus, a World War II relic. Thanks, Rosie the Riveter. Dropping ordnance on huts and cornfields. The air assault and a firefight in the valley below him lasted three and a half hours, and except for his glimpse of the Mustang, it was a largely acoustic event for Joe; his only job was to keep the group of old women and toddlers in the trench next to him calm. The planes disappeared and the shooting died down and he watched army helicopters descend toward a point near the bottom of the valley, and then quickly rise up and disappear to the northeast. That evening, Joe took a few moments to add a summary of the day’s events to his letter to his mother and Calhoun.

  Got attacked yesterday (not quite everybody loves math professors!). First by airplanes, a bombing and strafing run—then by govt. ground troops. The peasants immediately mobilized and little kids no older than 7 or 8 were running around with small machetes, cords of rope, tiny canteens, etc., etc, to help out the guerrillas. Well, if it’s the little guys against the big guys, I’m all for the little guys. Anyway, the govt. troops got their asses kicked. We could see the choppers moving in to evacuate casualties. So as locations go for studying mathematics, we’ve picked a real ducky spot!

  Their march continued into the high country of El Salvador’s alps, and they reached a ridge with many layers of mountains visible on the horizon, and Sebastián said the farthest one was in Honduras, and when they began to march again the comandante fell back toward the end of the line and talked to Lucas/Joe, and he explained how the Ejército Revolutionario del Pueblo had been working here in Morazán for a decade, building a network of supporters that included several Catholic priests, and peasants who became key members of the organization. “That’s why we’re the toughest guerrilla army in El Salvador, Lucas,” he said in English. And then he switched to Spanish to say: “We were smart and planted roots here. We didn’t have the arrogance to arrive suddenly and surprise the people and expect them to support us.” As the rebels approached the next settlement they saw a thin, welcoming column of cooking smoke rising in the air, and when they met the people who lived there they were greeted with tortillas and beans, and warm atol to drink.

  Joe was on his third tortilla and his second plastic cup of atol when a new squad of rebels appeared, and then another; many friendly embraces followed. He had arrived at the main rebel base, which was not a single camp, but rather a collection of small camps spread throughout a patch of highland forest and brush. “Bienvenido a La Guacamaya,” Sebastián told Lucas. “Follow me, there’s someone I need to introduce you to.” They walked through a forest of thin trees until they came upon a copper wire stretched along the branches above their heads, and then an outcrop of rock with a kind of cave beneath it and a table adorned with a red flag and the letters FMLN. A thin man with a thick black beard, and who was as tall as Joe, stepped forward to greet them and shook hands with Sebastián. “Lucas, this is Santiago. The famous Santiago of Radio Venceremos. Santiago, this is Lucas, the gringo you heard about.”

  Santiago was a Venezuelan radio man who had worked with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, one of the thousands of foreigners who had traveled to that country to lend support to its victorious revolution. He had then come to El Salvador to place his radio experience at the service of the Salvadoran armed struggle, and now he showed Lucas the main instrument of his work: a Viking Valiant radio transmitter, made by the E. F. Johnson Company of Waseca, Minnesota. Vintage equipment, from the 1950s. Joe’s brother, Steve, gadget man that he was, would have loved seeing it. With this small steel contraption, which resembled a bread box with dials and needles affixed to its face, Radio Venceremos was broadcasting to all of El Salvador, an hour or two every day. The enemy had already tried several times to silence the transmitter with ground invasions and aerial bombings. “The war in this region has become, in part, a war over this transmitter,” Sebastián explained, and Joe marveled at the ability of such an antiquated instrument of American technology to cause havoc in the strategic calculations being made in San Salvador, and in the U.S. Southern Command in Flori
da, and at the Pentagon, and the State Department and the White House in Washington, D.C.

  After a short discussion about radio frequencies and North American politics, Lucas asked Santiago if there was a way to get a letter to the United States, because he knew his family would be worried about him, not having heard from him for several weeks now. Santiago said he thought there might be. The next day, after consulting with one of the comandantes, Santiago said yes, a courier would be leaving for the south soon and taking several letters, and Joe finished the two letters he had started while on the march.

  I’m presently gnawing on a chunk of raw brown sugar and a lovely blue and orange hairstreak seems to have the same idea, he wrote to his father, describing a butterfly that had landed on his dessert. Have learned that the pattern here is that the army gets their asses kicked by our people, then go on a rampage in the countryside taking it out on the peasants. Such classic stupidity. He noticed a lizard lifting its head up nearby, and added, A coffee-colored skink just crawled up to my hideaway, so I’d best pause to say hello. Much love, J.

  To his mother and Calhoun he wrote that he was happy at his new digs, high in “territorio libre.” Plenty of food, pleasant sleeping at night, and among friends, so I’m quite content. Just hope that this crap gets done with in the near future. Got a real terrible hankering for an ice-cold beer. Once the shooting stops, I’ll likely be able to return to the U.S. for another visit, but I won’t know for sure until later. All’s well! Much love, J.

  In the days that followed, the guerrillas based in La Guacamaya and the narrow valley of the Río Sapo launched an attack on the village of Villa El Rosario, and briefly occupied it, holding off an army counterattack, and during this time Joe’s two letters home remained in a tin box in the rebel camp, unmailed, until finally there were a few days of calm and one of the local peasants sympathetic to the cause received the order to carry a small stack of letters to a post office distant from rebel territory. The courier walked and took buses for three days and sixty kilometers to the town of Santa Rosa de Lima, in the department of La Unión, where she purchased stamps and deposited the letters in three different mailboxes over the course of two days. These delays and peregrinations meant that Joe’s letters, which he had finished writing on April 12, 1981, did not reach the post office at Santa Rosa de Lima until April 27. They were postmarked there, on that day. The one addressed to Virginia and Calhoun arrived at the Clark-Lindsay retirement village in Urbana on May 6.