The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  “Where were you?” Carlos asked after the first night Lucas spent away. “Gringo loco, you scared the hell out of me.”

  “I have a deal for you,” Lucas said. “You leave me to be alone un poquito here in the town at night, and I won’t bother you with your girlfriend.”

  “But she said she doesn’t want to talk to me.”

  “Try again. She wants you to try again.”

  That night, in the darkness of the empty post office, Joe passed the shadows of undelivered letters and packages. It’s been ages since I’ve heard from home. I wonder what Mom is up to? Did she get my letters?

  * * *

  OF COURSE VIRGINIA told no one outside the family what Joe’s last letter said. How would she explain it? Speaking truthfully, she would have to say: He wrote to tell me he’s with math professors in El Salvador, armed with a butterfly net, and he says the army attacked him and his friends. No, it doesn’t make any sense. The fanciful statements in his letter were a silly dance around a truth he could not tell her. “Just Joe being Joe,” she told Calhoun. “He’ll explain it to us when he gets home.” Unfortunately, at the same time, she was continuing to clip stories about El Salvador from the newspapers. “Salvador Rebels Said to Gain Territory. Town Not Yet Retaken.” What was her son doing, exactly, with the rebels who were clearly the “math professors” of his letters? Probably he was tagging along in the rear. Like a kid on the edge of a playground who doesn’t belong to any one of the school cliques that hate each other, but watches them, amused, from a distance. She parried the question when it came up at dinner at the complex. “What’s your younger son up to?” “He’s in El Salvador, studying the war there.” “How do you study a war?” “I suppose you watch, you read, you listen—those are things that Joe has always been good at.”

  Virginia did not speak about Joe to Steve, other than to ask, after weeks had passed without another letter from him: “Do you know if your father has heard from your brother?” “No, Mom. I don’t think so.” The agreeable days of Illinois spring soothed her with sunshine and cool breezes. When she returned home with Calhoun to the Clark-Lindsey retirement village from her short, crosstown expeditions, she looked across Race Street and saw a grove of trees. She remembered Joe telling her, during his last visit: “I used to collect butterflies there. In those trees. See, Mom? University Woods.” Now she was living next door.

  * * *

  ONE MORNING AFTER BREAKFAST, Joe found Carlos in the town plaza, alongside Comandante Jonás, who was leaning over a map with several other comandantes around him. “There are one thousand five hundred soldiers getting ready to hit us from the south,” Carlos whispered. “But not today. Most likely tomorrow. First they are going to bomb us, with artillery. That’s what our intelligence agents have discovered.” Carlos pointed across the plaza lawn to a spot where said “agents” were gathered—a group of three boys and one girl huddled around three different captured army radios. “Those kids are from the orphan school up in La Guacamaya. They learned to listen to the army’s radio messages and decode them.”

  Rain was falling now in big, lonely globes, and several residents were trying to round up the cows that had been wandering through the streets. The lawn in front of the town hall became a corral, and some children chased chickens into the building itself, and also a pig with hooves blackened by parasites. Joe said out loud, in English: “I guess they’ll be dry in there. Guess it’s making a good use of city property.” He lit a cigarette and saw Santiago nearby, smiling, and wondered if the Venezuelan radio man understood English. No, Santiago was amused by the braided-hair girl of about seven who was chasing a turkey in circles, trying to coax it into the town hall as the rain thickened and became a percussive force that pounded the ground beneath Joe’s feet. Lucas and Carlos ran for shelter inside the church, with Santiago running after them, because the radio unit was already inside, preparing for its daily broadcast.

  An hour later, with the rain still falling, Santiago began: “This is Radio Venceremos, broadcasting on the twelfth day of the liberation of Villa El Rosario…” The radio audience heard thunderclaps, and the patter of rain, which many confused for radio static. Soon after the broadcast ended the army opened up with artillery fire. Distant pulses, like thunder. I am Thor, mortals tremble before me. The gunners on the other side of the river finally found the range and their shells began to land in Villa El Rosario, and the town erupted into a chorus of weeping children and screaming babies.

  Out of the church and into the air-raid trench. Joe and his comrades could thank God and the foresight of Comandante Jonás for this hole in the dirt. Being shelled was different from an air attack. You could see a plane attacking you, but an artillery projectile was invisible to the eye until it exploded. The gunner imagines me as a coordinate on the map, and he fires into the air seeing the trajectory as a diagram he projects onto the sky before him. Army lessons, Fort Leonard Wood, what every infantryman must know. The projectile blasts into the air, and falls toward me, whistling downward, minding Newton’s laws. A boom in the distance, brass and TNT detonating in the mud. Buuuaaam. Closer. Buuuaaam. Buuuaaam. Boom! The stone and mud architecture of the squat town trembled and murmured. And then an explosion so close Joe was deafened by the sound of cracking tiles and splintering wood, and moments later he felt a wave of heat pass over him, and he whispered to Carlos, “Nos van a vergear,” which was a crude Salvadoran expression for being killed and crushed that Joe liked, because it was derived from a slang word for penis. The shelling stopped. As their numb eardrums adjusted to the relative quiet, Lucas turned to Carlos and his eyes said, Do you hear that? Screaming. A girl screaming.

  They ran toward the town hall and saw it had taken a direct hit, and they stepped into the smoldering rubble and found a child covered in blood. A girl in braids. The girl with the turkey from before. She was painted with a red-black ooze of blood and entrails, and feathers too: the exploded animal parts of the pigs, chickens and turkeys that had been rounded up into the town hall. Lucas lifted her up and could feel her breathing, and he wiped the bloody feathers from her face and she opened her eyes, but at the sight of Joe’s open baby-blues she screamed: Joe’s eyes were emitting a piercing light, the cool and cruel glow of a world where girls like her were slaughtered alongside their farm animals. Lucas carried her out of the destroyed building, uttering the sounds American and Salvadoran fathers made to comfort their children. “Shush, shush, está bien, todo bien. Sin miedo, todo bien, shush, shush,” and the girl closed her eyes and cried very loudly. Lucas took her out onto the lawn, and when the girl opened her eyes again she saw a dead cow, several neat and bloodless shrapnel cuts in its flanks. Two, three, four dead cows more. She turned quiet. Maybe they’re just sleeping, she thought, and the idea comforted her as Lucas carried her away, still saying, “Shush, shush, todo bien.”

  * * *

  THE ARMY’S GROUND invasion began the next day, with the sound of distant gunfire to the south; the townspeople returned to their homes and locked their doors and shuttered their windows. Lucas joined the radio unit by the church, and there they saw Comandante Jonás. “Two weeks! We held this town two weeks! And thanks to all of you we told the whole world about it. Every day!” Now they would do what rebel armies did: head for them thar hills, and disappear into the verdant and muddy waves of unconquerable, mountainous Morazán. The months that followed were likely to be free of army invasions too, because it was nearly May and the rainy season would soon begin in earnest, with showers falling six or seven days a week until October. Here, as in other corners of the world, mud and the weather were the best defenses against invading armies.

  The holy rain is covering our retreat. Slip-sliding up and down. Swiiip. Feet up in the air, tumble down. “¡Puta!” Mud faces. Taste of mud. No chance the army will catch us, we can barely march ourselves. Two hundred villagers trailing behind us, with pots and pans, afraid the army will kill them all. An old woman with a cane. They made slow progress back toward
La Guacamaya, and it was almost dusk as they reached the last river they had to cross. Two weeks earlier, Joe had forded this same waterway when it was a half-dry stream of bare boulders, its current barely deep enough to cool his ankles on a hot day. Now it was a brown torrent filled with waves and whirlpools, and Joe worried as the compas ahead of him waded into it, carrying their M16s and their FALs and mortars high above their heads. Sure enough, the fourth compa in the line lost his footing and fell into the water, and the river carried him away. Ten meters downstream, the river wrangled the compa into a pool of churning brown liquid, and a fluvial riptide pulled him under, and there were urgent calls from both sides of the bank. “¡Se está ahogando! ¡Ayúdenlo!” The compa fought to keep his head up, and went down again with a gasp-gurgle, and Lucas tossed off his pack, and with his boots still on, he became Joe the Lifeguard, a superhero from the Heartland of the United States of America. He jumped into the current and swam toward the drowning man, and was soon close enough to grab him by the collar and lift his head up and out of the water. “I got you,” Joe said in English, and he kicked his legs against the water and paddled with his free arm and pulled the guerrilla fighter toward the edge of the river. My boots are still on, but if I could make it across the Ohio, this little river won’t kill me. Joe reached a spot where he could stand, and he gave the compa one more pull and brought him to his feet too. The rescued man took one deep breath of rainy air, and vomited into the river current. Lucas slapped him on the back to get the last of the water out of his lungs. “¿No sabes cómo nadar?” he asked.

  “No,” the compa answered, he did not know how to swim.

  Lucas looked up at the young rebels gathered on the riverbanks, who had been watching. “Do any of you know how to swim?” he asked the rescued man.

  “I don’t think so.”

  The rest of the guerrilla column made it cautiously across, grabbing a rope one of the comandantes had ordered strung across the channel. Joe Sanderson, lifeguard, stood on the riverbank nearby with his boots off, ready to jump back into the water to rescue them if need be.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT, as they warmed their soaked selves around campfires, Lucas found the rebel commander he had seen at the river crossing. His name was Bracamontes, and he was a former peasant, quieter and more unassuming than the other commanders.

  “Comandante, can I speak with you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Well, I know you are a comandante, and we have to follow your orders. And I don’t mean to tell you how to lead us. But I have to tell you something. A suggestion I have.”

  “We’re all here to learn, Lucas. Any information makes the revolution stronger. What is it?”

  “We need to teach these compas to swim.”

  Two weeks later, during a break in the rain, with the sun out but the local river still high, Lucas marched his first group of students to a still stretch of the Río Sapo where the water was deep enough to dive into, and as wide as your average American backyard swimming pool. He told them to remove their shoes and roll up their pant legs, and Lucas himself took off his purloined National Guardsman’s uniform, and the unshirted sight of him provoked giggles among the compas, because few of them had seen such an abundant display of chest hair. A caveman is going to teach us to swim. “Primera lección es flotar,” Lucas said, and that made sense to his young trainees: first, you float. Lucas took the first compa into the water, a young man with two hairs growing from the center of his chest. Like an Illinois preacher performing a baptism, Lucas forced the compa back-first into the water. “Relax, relajate, tranquilo,” Lucas said, and he held the compa on the water, and the young man’s hair was a black nimbus in the clear water: to Joe he looked like some teenage mestizo Christ, brown and beatific, a warrior now a child again, in my arms. I let go and he floats. See that, compa? The little fat you have in your skinny body will keep you from drowning. He held all fifteen of his students in the same way, watching the water lap up against their cheeks, their tawny eyes shifting back and forth. Are you going to let me sink? Fear, wonder. I float. And now a woman fighter, wide-faced and chestnut-cheeked and nineteen, and Lucas will not stare as the river water covers her blouse and the form of her torso. Moss particles slithering in the liquid over her neck and along her clavicle, her raven mane of corkscrew curls rising and falling in the water. Stretch out your arms, Ofelia. You next, María. Floating Furies. Now let’s learn to paddle, stretch out your body, I’ll hold you this first time. His swimming course lasted four days. He and a few other swimmer compas taught one hundred other compas how to swim. That’s it, very good, you’re swimming now, you’ll be safe in the water next time, and listening to his accent, and remembering his rescue of the rebel in the river, many of the compas felt very fortunate to have this gringo teaching them something so essential, so basic to their survival.

  * * *

  “AGRICULTOR” WAS THE expression Comandante Bracamontes used to describe himself to the city folk who were coming to Morazán in greater numbers. A farmer, a tiller of the soil. As the revolution gained momentum in Morazán he was beginning to meet, for the first time, large numbers of foreigners too. A radio operator from Venezuela, a doctor from Mexico. A Colombian journalist. And Lucas, the norteamericano, who carried an air of mystery around him that was greater than all the other foreigners put together. Lucas had a way of looking at you. As if he were sizing you up, as if he knew things you did not know and found them amusing. Bracamontes was therefore not surprised when Lucas asked him, after the swimming lesson, “Comandante, why are you a comandante? What are your qualifications?” No Salvadoran compa had ever dared to ask him such a question.

  “Well, I’ve been with the movement a long time,” Bracamontes said. “Before that I was a farmer. So I imagine you could say I don’t have educational qualifications.”

  “I’m just interested in how you become one.”

  “By fighting. For many years. Since back when all we had was revolvers and machetes and bombs we made from cans. A man came here from the city. He made contacts with the priests here. When I joined there were twenty or thirty of us in these villages. What about you? What makes you think you can be a compa, up here in the mountains fighting with us?”

  “I know how to shoot well. I know the M16 very well.”

  The conversation led, inevitably, to a marksmanship challenge. With several other comandantes and compas watching, Lucas and Bracamontes found their way with their M16s to a guarumo tree on the edge of a clearing. Joe tapped the perfect cylinder of the trunk with the palm of his hand, and then took his pocketknife and carved an X at about the height of a man’s chest. They walked away from the tree, Lucas secretly counting the paces, and when they were one hundred meters away, Lucas stopped. We’ll be lucky to hit it from here, Bracamontes thought, it’s too far. “Usted primero, comandante,” Lucas said. Bracamontes lifted his M16 and he fired three shots and was very proud of himself when the third glanced off the cylinder of the trunk with an audible swick that left a mark they could both see.

  “Muy bien,” Lucas said.

  Joe lifted up his M16 deliberately and remembered, as he always did when he had a weapon in his hands, his father’s instructions back in Illinois. And basic training in Fort Leonard Wood. A memory in your hands and fingers. Control your breathing. Very gentle on the trigger. Daniel Boone was a man, / Yes, a big man! / With an eye like an eagle … Lucas fired one shot that struck the tree trunk dead center, two inches below his X. And then a second that hit inside the X’s two raised arms. And a third that struck the X dead center.

  “¡Puta, Lucas! You win!”

  Joe lowered his weapon and said with a grin: “You aren’t ready yet to be up here in the mountains, comandante. You just wounded the enemy in the ribs. You have to hit him in the chest.”

  The gathered compas studied Lucas, and gazed again at the distant, wounded guarumo tree, and they saw the American in a new light. Of course he hit his target. It’s because he�
�s a Vietnam veteran, because the gringo army trained him to shoot at communists. It was as if an American comic-book hero, drawn in primary colors and carrying a futuristic weapon, had suddenly emerged from the dots on a printed page. A GI. This is why they rule the world.

  “Next time we’re on the march, I want you next to me, Lucas.”

  “Sí, comandante.”

  “But let me ask you one more question,” Bracamontes said. “The most important one I can ask. Why are you here?”

  The question carried notes of both curiosity and suspicion. “I’m representing the people of the United States of America,” Lucas said, and he suppressed a chuckle at the sound of his voice saying this. He’d been practicing this speech in his head for months. Lucas explained that most people in the United States had no idea what was happening in El Salvador, nor would they be able to pinpoint the country on a map. If the North American people had seen the bombing of the villages, the kidnappings and the killings going on here, they would be lining up to volunteer to come and fight with the compas like he was. “But the average North American has no idea. He’s just concerned with getting by every day. With sending his children to school and paying his bills on time.” As he spoke, Joe thought of his brother, of Jim, of Jane the construction worker, and Linda sitting on the bank of the Ohio River, and the pictures of her parents in Chicago, and of all the faces of the people who’d carried him on his hitchhiking adventures across the roads of America, squinting as the sun warmed their windshields. Joe tried to explain to the compas his country’s work ethic, and the poverty there. South Texas. Louisiana. Mississippi. Having visited many countries of the world, he did not think of the people of the United States as more cruel or selfish than people elsewhere. They believed in individualism, yes, but they were generally generous toward strangers. And they believed in fairness and equality before the law, even if they didn’t act on those ideals all the time. “The typical gringo believes in, as we say in English, ‘Giving everyone a fair shake.’” After much bumbling in Spanish and English and pantomiming, Lucas found the words to explain what this meant: “The same opportunity to succeed as everyone else.” If the average norteamericano came to El Salvador, he would see that the people of El Salvador were not getting “a fair shake.” Lucas said he was here in Morazán because the Salvadoran people deserved better, and he said these things in his Spanish idiolect, a mishmash of La Paz, backwoods Colombia, San Salvador and of the squeaky Illinois tenor of his nasal English. After twenty minutes, he was done, and the compas nodded, and many saw the United States in deeper textures. They watched their gringo silently as he lit a cigarette, and a few noticed that his hand was trembling.