The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  The next day Lucas sought out Jonás. “Comandante, I have a suggestion.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It might be better for me to go to the United States. I might better serve the revolution there. Is there a mission I could do for you there?”

  Lucas wanted to leave, which was not surprising. The comandante had been hearing complaints about the North American and his odd, solitary ways. “I need to talk to you because I can’t deal with Lucas anymore,” one compa had told him. “Lucas is completely out of line. He gets coffee when he wants, he gets cigarettes when he wants. And he acts like a child when he doesn’t get what he wants.” “Listen,” Jonás had replied. “Lucas is a gringo loco who needs his cigarettes and his coffee. He works hard to get them. Keeping his own coffee beans doesn’t make him an individualist. Let him be.”1

  * * *

  TWO DAYS AFTER LUCAS made his request to return to the U.S., Comandante Jonás found him at the radio station and said, “In October. You can leave then. Through Honduras, probably. It’s complicated. But it can be done.” He suggested Lucas might organize a speaking tour in the United States when he got there. But first, before leaving, Lucas would work with the radio compas to prepare a series of reports on the war from his unique North American perspective. Jonás also gave Lucas permission to write to his family to tell them he would be headed home soon.

  When Joe sat down to draft his next letter, it occurred to him that he might soon become a regular fixture on the rebel radio. The time had finally come, Joe decided, to be absolutely explicit about what he was doing in El Salvador.

  1200. Dear Mom + Calhoun, Steven + Family—Now this is definitely a letter I’ve waited a long time to write. Looks like I’ll be returning to the U.S. in about a month. Coming home! Some explanations are due, where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to. If Calhoun will get out his maps, you’ll find MORAZAN DEPARTAMENTO (like a province) on the northeast side of El Salvador. I started out my trip months back from San Salvador, was first in Departamento Usulután, then La Unión, Morazán, San Miguel and now back in Morazán. He explained how he’d gone underground after being momentarily detained in Usulután. About my friends, all those math scholars I’ve mentioned. It probably won’t surprise you folks (nor the boys at the post office) nearly as much as it did me the day I discovered that these guys in the hills are all revolutionaries, and that the reason they carry guns is because they’re guerrilla fighters. Not one to pass up a chance at some firsthand journalism, I quickly got out pen and paper and have been scribbling ever since. Kingston, Vietnam, Biafra, Bolivia—and now living with the insurgents of El Salvador. Whew! And busy I’ve been, day after day, writing like mad to keep a record of all that’s been going on. Yet I don’t want my jocular tone to give you folks a distorted impression of what it’s like here in the mountains. Much of the misery and tragedy the people of El Salvador are presently enduring is identical to Vietnam. But this time I’m with the victims. When the bombs fall and the mortar shells start flying, I’m as much a target as they are. And I’m as angry as hell about the raw deal they’re getting. U.S. bombs, bunches of U.S. military advisers, American helicopters, etc., etc. As a witness I couldn’t be closer to the nightmare realities because I live exactly like the guerrillas, share their food + tents, travel with them in columns, and often even go along with them on operations and when they’re shooting it out with enemy soldiers. He said he’d written 138,000 words in his notebooks about the Salvadoran people and their struggle and all the tragedies and acts of resistance he’d witnessed since leaving Urbana last September. He told them about the broadcasts he expected to make and said, Some of them will likely be reproduced in the U.S. and maybe excerpts will find their way into the U.S. newspapers. So if any reporters come knocking on the door, either tell them the truth or say, “Joe who?” Just don’t feed them any of my pancakes! If all goes well a month from now I’ll gladly grant them interviews in person and scowl at their cameras (providing they spring for beers). So set those cherry pies out to cool. All’s well and I’m coming home! Much love, J.

  The letter was postmarked in Honduras on October 30, 1981, and it arrived in Urbana on November 5, two months and two days after Joe dated it. After twenty-two years, this would be the last letter Virginia received from her youngest son on his bumming adventures.

  * * *

  BEFORE LUCAS COULD START working on the radio station, he became seriously ill. An intestinal disorder. The shits, as it was known colloquially back home. He was hammock-ridden for two weeks, and came to know the rebel doctor quite well. The doctor was a Methodist from Northern Mexico who liked to talk about religion and flying, and he was delighted to learn that Lucas was a pilot—Joe showed him his license, which he still carried in his wallet. Even after he’d recovered Lucas still felt wobbly, and he confided to the doctor that he was worried that maybe all the drugs he had done over the course of his life (the opium, especially) had weakened his constitution, to which the doctor answered: “Possibly. But more likely it’s just that drug that brings all of us down eventually—old age.”

  By the time Joe felt fully himself the Radio Venceremos people had forgotten about Jonás’s instructions regarding the gringo Lucas: he would not be going home. The rainy season was ending, and the comandantes needed Lucas and every other man and woman who could be mustered, and getting out via Honduras was practically impossible anyway, given the troops massing in the north and the south. The rebel moles in the army had learned of a major army offensive being planned for Morazán and word from these spies soon reached the rebel comandancia: The army was preparing a two-pronged attack to squeeze the guerrillas out of their bases, and clear them out of Morazán altogether.

  * * *

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL DOMINGO MONTERROSA landed amid a crazed downward wash of wind created by helicopter blades, along with many other whirling aircraft that brought several hundred of his men to Perquín, the same town the rebels had held and occupied four months earlier. The town’s whitewashed buildings remained pockmarked with bullet holes, and the barracks the rebels had taken looked as if a Marxist giant had taken bites out of its cement walls. The paratroopers of the Atlacatl Battalion gathered on the grass of the town plaza, near the graves of the dead rebels and soldiers buried there in August; they absentmindedly stacked mortars and field packs near the patches of upturned soil. Their officers fanned out through the cobblestoned town and gave the local National Guardsmen lists of suspected subversives and subversive sympathizers, and these Guardsmen, in turn, pounded on doors. When they found men and women who were on the list, the Guardsmen briefly interrogated them and slapped them and pummeled them with their rifle butts, and they handed over the prisoners to the paratroopers, who took them to the edge of town and executed them with short bursts from their M16s, leaving their bodies to rot in the sun and the dry air, on a patch of highway between two cornfields. After a day of these operations, the officers of the Atlacatl Battalion took their lists, which contained the names of more people in other villages, and ordered their troops to set out on the march, southward, into rebel-controlled territory.

  23

  El Mozote

  “SEÑORA, MÁS RÁPIDO, POR FAVOR.” Or should it be “señorita,” since she’s so young? But that would be sort of an insult too, because … Speed it up, young lady, yeah, I know you’re carrying a load there. Hey, you, help her. Help her. Let me help you help her. Take her by the arm, and I’ll take the other, up and over this mossy rock, así, así, if she falls she might have the baby right here. Freckle-faced mother to be, icy river water at her thin ankles, holding my wrist with her thin arms, barely twenty I’d guess. We guide her spidery form over the stream. A big belly at the center of her stringy limbs, and me and her and this boy at the center of a line of two thousand people stretched out over this canyon, climbing down one side, and up the other. The comandancia and assorted rebel columns up ahead; the civilians here in the middle, with the code-breaking kids from the school to hel
p, and me, a bumming rebel named Lucas; behind us the radio station crew, burdened down with all their equipment, including the precious transmitter with its subversive transistors and diodes and dials. Very dangerous spot here, this river. Lucas and the pregnant girl reached the other side, and they stopped while the girl caught her breath, and Joe looked up to scan the high ground around them, and he worried the radio people might get ambushed here, and he yelled out, “Rápido, rápido, todos, rápido.” He watched the children from the school bound across the rocks, unafraid, at play, and then one boy stopped, suddenly, and looked up at the sky, and the entire line of crossing children paused too, and turned their eyes upward, as if they were obeying a command the first boy had transmitted via telepathy. Look! Before he saw the helicopters, Joe heard the cardiac beat of their engines. Death up there, above us, and Lucas took two steps back into the stream, to order everyone out. The helicopters disappeared to the north. They were high up and in a hurry, headed northward, nothing to fear.

  And now up the scrubby hillside. “Vos, vení,” he calls out to a boy. “Vos, también,” to a second boy. He appoints them personal escorts to the pregnant señorita. Help this young woman to the top of the hill and I’ll give you a medal. The Illinois Medal of Valor. And the boys scamper down to grab the spider girl and guide her up the hill. Good, she’ll move faster now, and finally Lucas joins the tail end of the column, the schoolchildren, and marches up behind them, and he thinks that this is an undeniably noble place to be, guiding children to safety. Saint Joe the Valiant, and if this isn’t a character in a book … But who cares about literature now? Not Joe. No one. Everyone wants to live. To breathe.

  * * *

  THEY REACHED ANOTHER EXPOSED PLACE. The bald top of a hill. Here, the pregnant girl plopped down to the ground on her bottom, and Joe stopped to take in the view, the tops of pine trees and mango trees, and the villages below, and a rising drift of black smoke. “El Mozote,” one of the boys called out. The enemy was setting fire to El Mozote. “¡Están quemando El Mozote!” At the sound of these words, the pregnant girl rose to her feet and saw the climbing black pillars of smoke, and she put a hand over her mouth and began to cry, and her weeping infected the older woman at her side, and the children too. Oh my God, oh my God, they are burning the village, and a boy of six fell to his knees, and closed his eyes, and began to pray. A murmured plea. Espíritu Santo. The boy was summoning the Holy Spirit and several adults fell to their knees around him. Joe wondered what forces the Holy Spirit could marshal, what brigades, what cannon fire. We have to keep moving, can’t stay here, on this hilltop, visible to the aviation. “Seguimos,” Lucas called out. Everyone to their feet, up, let’s go, and the praying people completed their final signs of the cross, the tips of their fingers drawing the planks that held up the crucified prophet. Cross my heart and hope to die, yeah, yeah, let’s go, let’s get a move on. Back down, into another valley, and across the highway. The Black Street, they call it. Another dangerous spot, another potential ambush. Let’s run across now. Quickly, back into the safety of the brush. We march at night. Easier for me now, because I have my night legs. A crescent moon rose above them.

  They reached the safety of a silent hillside, 3:00 a.m. The spider girl rested on her back, and an older woman, one of the kitchen cooks, leaned over her to help, and the mother-to-be opened her legs, and in fifteen minutes of pushing and grunting and muffled screams, a boy slid out, covered with life juice, the thick umbilical cord slithered around his leg. Lucas handed over his knife for the older woman to slice said cord, and as she did so he saw the newborn’s swollen scrotum. Totally normal. Joe had learned these things in Biafra. Boys come out with puffed-up genitals, announcing their gender with an exclamation of the flesh. Here I am, world! With all my testosterone loaded and ready to go. Look out, gimme some room! First born, primogénito. The girl is weeping and laughing at the sight of her child. A few minutes later a compa found Lucas and whispered in his ear: “The army captured the transmitter.” He murmured the names of three dead compas. “The army caught them crossing the river. Ambushed them. And then crossing the Black Street too.” Defeat. Radio Venceremos will be off the air. Escape and defeat. Santiago and most of the radio compas made it out. We’ve been squeezed by the army’s pincers, but not squashed.

  * * *

  IN THE DAYS that followed the rebel columns engaged in a series of forced marches, and each night another group of civilians stayed behind or slipped away. To hide in the mountains, or to seek out friends in other villages. Until finally the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo became a lean military unit, unburdened by civilians, marching faster across rugged terrain. Across a field of sharp igneous rocks, up and over the side of a volcano. Southward, toward the lowlands. They crossed rivers and entered caseríos where they were fed tortillas and candy, and Lucas watched as two compas on the march argued over a cigarette for two hours, and then he listened to their whispered words of mourning. “He was shot in the head. He fell, we carried him.” “Chilayo and Javier too.” “No, no, it can’t be.” “We saw him turn white. So, so pale.” They marched past coffee trees, and a peasant woman fed them fresh milk from the cow she was walking. In half moonlight they sprinted across the Pan-American Highway, between army patrols, trying not to make too much noise with their boots and their packs, tiptoeing over the asphalt, like children sneaking past their parents’ bedroom. Often they slept during the day and marched at night, joining God’s nocturnal creatures; the possums and the jaguars, the owls and the bats. We’re headed to the sea, Lucas was told. To the Pacific and the southeastern front. No shit? We’re going to walk all the way from the mountains to the coast? In four days? Yes. A new transmitter is waiting there for us. The air tasted wetter and hotter, and they walked through cotton fields and saw their first palm trees, and they watched the fronds catch powerful breezes, and they marched into these winds and one morning before sunrise their march ended at a ridge; the first light of the day revealed a vast plain before them, a gray looming mass, and several of the peasants in their group stared at this apparition as if they’d reached the end of the known world. They watched in wonder as the plain became speckled with reflected light. “¿Qué es eso?” “¡El Pacífico!” Joe was in the presence of young men who had never set eyes upon the expanse of the ocean, boys who knew only mountains and river valleys, and he watched as the knowledge of the existence of the sea fell upon their faces. We fought a revolution for you to know this, compañero, to bring you from the muddy milpa of your harvest to see this. The waves the conquistadors rode to reach this land across the curving planet. “It’s like the biggest river you could ever see, all dammed up!”

  The rebel unit walked one more day along the coast, and met another guerrilla band that lived and battled here, and there were embraces between old friends, and news from the north was shared. They stayed a day with the coastal fighters of the southeastern front, and heard from them of terrible happenings transmitted via CB radio from Morazán. The army had murdered many hundreds of people in the villages of what was once rebel-controlled territory. Word had come from the compas who covered the retreat: Not just one massacre, but many. El Mozote. La Joya. Arambala. All gone. Everyone. No puede ser. The boys who’d just seen the ocean for the first time began to cry, because these were their villages. After they wept, and after hours of quiet shock and mourning, a vengeful anger took hold of them, a desire to climb away from the ocean, back into the mountain fastness, and to fall upon the murderers. Soon enough the order came. We march northward again, back to where we came from. With a new transmitter now. A louder voice. They’ll hear us in Mexico and Costa Rica with this. Compañeros, we need to be back in Morazán by Christmas to start broadcasting. To tell the world what happened up there, in the villages. The next day Joe and the rebels marched again, from whence they came. A marcha forzada. What is a forced march? Just a fast march. That’s all it means. Double-time, urgent, take no time to rub your weary feet, your abused hamstrings and calves.
Upward, back into the battlefields of thinner air, home to good people. The baby boy born under my watch. Sweep out the evil that poisons his land. They marched back into the heights of Morazán, with a new radio transmitter that was riding first-class, as it were, on the back of a burro. And when the guerrillas stopped, it wasn’t because they were exhausted (although they were); but rather because the radio-hauling burro needed to rest. On the slopes of a volcano, after crossing a river, after hoofing it across the Pan-American Highway. Good donkey, loyal four-legged compa. He did not complain, he only chewed, puffing his exhaustion through his nostrils, until the rebels reached the ashy landscape of their mountain home, assembling their armies again on high ground, to counterstrike at the government troops waiting below.

  * * *

  ON CHRISTMAS DAY, the rebels reentered their abandoned camp at El Zapotal, and Radio Venceremos broadcast again. Santiago took to the microphone to speak of the massacres that had taken place in Morazán, and promised more information in the days to come. Four days later, the rebel armies marched an hour to attack and quickly overwhelm the army troops occupying the rebels’ old base at La Guacamaya. Turned tables. Joe in the rear, with Jonás. Now it’s the army that runs, and we are their pursuers, chasing them away from the mango trees and the parapets of gathered stones. Ten army soldiers were killed, and seven surrendered, and Lucas stood next to Comandante Jonás as he interrogated them in the wake of the battle. “The lieutenant is the last one left back there,” one of the soldiers said, his eyes cast down at Lucas’s boots and the tops of his green socks. “He said you’d kill us all if we surrendered.”