The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  * * *

  FIRST ROUND LANDED short a few meters on dirt tailing below trench. Adjusted sights to 200 yards and continued. Next round splattered the soldier in the mug with dirt and rocks and the third creased his steel pot with a visible streak of sparks. The soldier falls, truly something to see. His pal popped up and I started snap firing. Was all over the guy. He either ducked or got hit and never showed again. At least one other soldier kept firing on us from left side of trench. I started talking to him. “¡Cabrón de mierda! ¡Ya culero! ¡Venga pendejo!” It was very bad Spanish, the voice of a foreigner heard suddenly in a battlefield in provincial El Salvador, and all who heard it never forgot it. Cabrón de mierda didn’t mean anything, no Salvadoran would ever say that. Surreal. Comical. The accent you can’t quite place. Lucas kept on firing. Had the range down fine and kept on his case. Comfortably positioned, adequate stock rest. Would simply remain sighted in on trench line, take up trigger slack, and as I saw top of steel pot raising up, would swing over on him before he could get off a shot. Sometimes he’d literally jump into the air and fire off a wild burst in our general direction, but I rarely gave him time to aim. While I was switching clips, a compa to my left (from another squad several hundred meters away) would take over with FAL. Suddenly noticed a soldier moving, hunkered over, scampering across the knoll to the topmost enemy position, probably a pillbox. Didn’t even readjust sights, just started blasting away. Was on him immediately. Soldier immediately went to his hands and knees as I kept on firing, maybe hit, maybe not, but disappeared. Shortly afterward another guy came from the same direction, also hunched over. Dropped him on the move. He never made it to the trench or pillbox. Seemed to have crumpled on his side, then on his back. “¡Ay Chihuahua!” I yelped. “¡Cayó uno! Mirá, por encima de este cerrito. ¡Hijue puta!”2 Could see the body outlined on the ridge. Got out the AE-1 and its telephoto for a looksie. Soldiers in lower trench were leaving us completely alone. Hillside still obscure in the early a.m. light but could make out the form of not only the one body, steel pot lying upside down nearby, but what looked like a second body in the background several meters away. Reported what I saw to Che, took three pictures, put camera away, and reloaded clip to continue on soldiers in the trench. Didn’t occur to me until later that the photo-taking was—I guess—something of a snuff-movie reflex. And I was not surprised many more hours later not to feel any qualms—such as I did during that first ambush where the chance of my actually having hit any of the soldiers was quite slim. I didn’t feel elation, yet a sense of satisfaction, a job done. Felt better at having killed an enemy soldier than if I’d missed killing an enemy soldier. And maybe the slightest hint of anger. As if to say—all right, if I’m stuck here in Morazán, then goddamnit I’ll be a guerrilla combatant and to hell with everything. Later on the compas would laugh and joke about me hollering “¡Ay Chihuahua!” They said they could hear the soldiers yelling back, “Come closer, you Cuban faggot!”

  * * *

  AFTER LUCAS KILLED AT LEAST that one soldier, and probably the second, and maybe a third, he began to take fire from his right. The army had maneuvered some troops to attack his position, and to drive the guerrillas back from their assault on the hillside and its pillboxes. One guy kept playing jack-in-the-box until I caught him on the spring. Pulled the trigger just as he reached the zenith of his jump. Either tickled his ribs or came damn close. But they were working on us again with real enthusiasm and I was down to 75 shells and suddenly enemy on the right really opened up on us. Squad to our rear positioned on the other knoll said the soldiers were making an advance from the barracks and breaking through. They couldn’t cover for us indefinitely. Compas started to leave the firing line. Che told them to cover our right but they were rapidly losing interest. A retreat was looming. Understandable but heartbreaking. The army of teenagers seeing it ain’t gonna be so easy attacking a fixed position, a collective survival instinct kicking in. One compa with an FAL even worked his way over to Che and said he was too shaken to keep fighting. Che was enraged and yelled at him to get his ass to the rear. I kept working on the trench, Che and a few other compas worked on the right flank, but it looked like we’d soon get boxed in. Che started pulling his compas off the line. Lucas covered the retreat; he was the last man back across the creek, through the farm and back into the hills beyond.

  * * *

  JOE LEARNED LATER that an advance squad of the rebel army, led by Willy the Joker, had fought some fifty meters into the perimeter of the airbase. Facing stiff army resistance from about eighty soldiers, and a looming counterattack, they too were forced to withdraw. Another unit, carrying a brand-new rocket-propelled grenade, had attempted to fire it at an armored personnel carrier; but the RPG failed to go off. The column to which Lucas and El Che belonged assembled on the highway outside San Francisco Gotera, awaiting orders from Comandante Jonás and taking stock of their losses. Modesto had been killed in Francis’s group, Armando shot through the right arm (broken bones and bad hemorrhaging and pain). And Jacobo? Lost and presumed dead. Another compa fallen from GI Billy’s lads. Edwin, Orlando wounded. Oscar shot through the foot. Revolutionary roulette was certainly turning up a lot of our numbers. But was Jacobo really lost? “We should send someone to recover his FAL, at least,” a compa in his unit said. No one stepped forward. There were signs of doubt and disorder. Several of the peasants detailed to stretcher duty and one of the local guides had disappeared: Just went on down the road, never to be seen again. When Comandante Jonás appeared, a compa approached him and said, “We’re all here and ready to go. Send us anywhere but home.” For Joe, given the carnage, the gung-ho rebel seemed a bit crazy. A magnificent display of soothing solidarity and loyalty. Someday after the victory I’ll recommend the lad as our Minister of Recovery Programs for Revolutionary Lunatics. But El Che didn’t see the sense in a new attack, and neither did Joe. Suddenly, our army looked like what it was: a ragged bunch of 17-year-old farm boys, dressed up as guerrilla fighters. Che’s children seemed an ill-prepared bunch to be going up against this fortress town. He wasn’t going to send them back in as cannon fodder. This was the Che who other platoon leaders would speak of with admiration for his personal “concern” for his boys, that they always have fresh fruit and anything else available and would himself go and do the gathering if need be.

  Rather than turn back south for a renewed attack on the city, the rebels congregated in clusters in the riverine and hilly landscape north of San Francisco Gotera. Some descended into a grove of mango trees and emerged with sweet fruits to eat. Che started eating mangoes, I started eating mangoes, we got into an interesting conversation about mangoes, and by the time we reached the creek and irrigation canal everybody was casually turning their backs on the war to eat mangoes. Our band of guerrillas didn’t look much like soldiers anymore, but at least they didn’t look like panic-stricken soldiers either. Joe spotted the compa who had told El Che he was too scared to fight with a line of juice dripping down his chin, laughing with some other compas who were recounting their morning’s exploits by drawing three-dimensional battlefields in the air with their sticky mango-juiced fingers. The army soldiers at the airbase fired some mortars in the rebels’ general direction, even though by now they were out of range. I guess they figured that they might get lucky and kill that “Cuban” they had heard earlier, and some of his friends.

  The rebel army moved on, to another creek and finally to open fields intersected with more irrigation canals, and populated with cattle. Terrain strikingly similar to outskirts of Saigon, in the Gia Dinh area, Joe would write later in his journal. They met a group of sugarcane farmers who had small ovens to make candies, but the army had burned their cane fields and they had few sweets to offer us. These farmers hated the army, but didn’t seem to place much trust in the rebels either. An army helicopter flew very high overhead, speeding quickly northward. A Huey. UH-1. Workhorse of the bellicose skies. Another echo of Vietnam. That war, this war, many wars rippling across t
he lushest lands of the globe.

  The cane farmers made coffee for the rebels. While I chatted and smoked and swilled coffee with St. Pete, the brigadista girls promptly fell asleep. Reina, the little girl I fell in love with over Xmas, mouth open, shirt open, lavish cleavage open to the sweaty sunshine, little farmyard pigs rooting around, threatening to drag her off. Wake up, little Susie, wake up. Time to get on the march again. The army was said to be advancing toward them, very half-heartedly and cautiously, having gotten their butts kicked pretty well too, but creeping northward nonetheless. Lucas’s unit marched on a ridge above the “Black Street” roadway that ran from San Francisco Gotera to Honduras. Thought I spotted a line of enemy creeping toward highway 400 meters to the rear. Advised Che and he said to open fire. Told him I still couldn’t be sure of target. Turned out to be a column of black chickens. Soon complete disorder set in. There were stores on either side of the highway and the compas descended on them, one by one. St. Pete brought me cigs and warm Cokes, and I teased a lovely barefooted campesina maiden with a blond-haired child. She and neighbors said they wanted to do us up a batch of tortillas, and stores started giving away sodas and practically anything the compas requested. The day’s battle was over and Che and the Whale better get used to the idea. Moving northward, into rebel-controlled territory, Lucas and his column found a woman cooking beef in a caserío, as if she’d been waiting for their arrival. Unburnt and juicy; the señora knows exactly what she’s doing. Some flor de elote soup, while she ground me a ¼ lb. bag of coffee (20 centavos) and listened to me describe the battle we’d fought in Gotera. Finally stumbling in twilight back to camp through the arroyos, the kid next to me trying to bum a peso off of me, and recalling every “gringo” (i.e., European) who’d ever set foot in Morazán since he’d become an organized compa. He’s maybe 14 or 15 and he says his brother is “too afraid” to join the guerrillas—but his brother is all of 9 years old! Meanwhile compas yelling and grab-assing, telling combat lies with lonesome radio-love songs in the background, and chirping crickets and frogs too. Some life. At this rate I’ll turn 40 in a guerrilla camp in Morazán.

  As Lucas marched the final kilometer toward camp, a compa named Freddie marched behind him, still holding the FAL he had not put to good use at San Francisco Gotera, looking at the soles of Lucas’s boots in the dying light. Freddie vowed that next time he faced the enemy he wouldn’t be so afraid. He’d be as brave and focused as the American he’d seen firing at the pillboxes, screaming war yells that made everyone laugh.

  * * *

  FREDDIE WAS SEVENTEEN and he wanted to make it to the end of this war, doing his part to defend his family and the people of the mountains. In the years that followed, he fought in many more battles, until the peace treaty was signed and the hated National Guard and the Treasury Police and the Atlacatl Battalion were all dissolved, and the rebel army disbanded too, and he went back to his life on the plot of land in Morazán his family owned. By then he was twenty-six, and he got married to a woman named Juana, and started a family, and like most peasants in Morazán they were as poor after the war as they were before it. Freddie’s wife traveled to the United States to find work and send back money, and she found employment in a desert city called Phoenix, and for years she sent back pictures to Morazán of herself standing in rocky desert gardens, and on the phone she said one day the temperature was predicted to reach fifty degrees Celsius, and Freddie did not understand how human beings could live in such conditions. In her phone calls, and her occasional letters, his wife described the United States as a sterile and mean place. When Freddie tried to imagine what it was like to live there he couldn’t help but remember the gringo Lucas, and the battle in which he had seen Lucas kill at least two soldiers.

  Lucas, the good gringo. Who came to my country to kill people with North American precision. Not to defend his family or his land, as Freddie and his Salvadoran comrades did. For Freddie, the war made sense only as a blood-fight between Salvadoran brothers. Why had Lucas come to fight? What was his home like, how did he learn to shoot like that? Freddie borrowed a peso from Lucas once and never paid it back, and twenty-four years later, when Freddie went to the money-transfer place in San Francisco Gotera to pick up the dollars his wife had sent him (because by then the U.S. dollar was the official currency of El Salvador), he stared at the gringo presidents on the bills, and he worried about Juana being there, in that country where people were born with guns in their hands, apparently, learning to hit bull’s-eyes with every shot. A country with so much wealth, a country that held his wife as a prisoner-maid, because she could not simply travel back and forth to El Salvador at will; many years had gone by without seeing her, and they were growing older, separately. Freddie wanted his wife home, and despite the still-loving sound of her voice on the phone every two weeks, he was afraid she might never come back. And sometimes he wished that Lucas was still around, to explain this one last thing about his country, the United States of America. He’d ask Lucas: Will your country ever let my wife go?

  * * *

  JOE ARRIVED IN CAMP, CLEANED his rucksack and sorted its contents. The usual post-op ritual, second only to the stream shower in importance. The next day, after a cool river bath, he sat down to write in his newest journal notebook, the one he’d begun with the declaration, A new phase begins. He reflected on the battle at San Francisco Gotera and the performance of the two competing armies, government and rebel. From what I saw, the army soldiers were badly trained, poorly prepared for combat. Overall strategic defense of Gotera was excellent, however. Somebody, maybe those crew-cut gringos, had spent time at the drawing boards. Defended well or not, really amazed that we still had so much room to maneuver on the killing ground. Communication and military coordination on our part was certainly adequate enough to prevent the compas getting massacred, but not good enough for effective offensive tactics and maneuvers. A decent showing that promises improvement with experience. I await the next operation with more confidence than I felt going into battle Sunday a.m.

  Joe added a description of his own role in the battle of San Francisco Gotera, and afterward he thought of the dead soldiers. Two. Or three. Saw the two through the telephoto lens, snapped the shutter. Snuff pictures. When he woke up the next morning, and the morning after that, Lucas wondered if the civilized version of Joe Sanderson was dying, because he’d slept like the big healthy Illinois man he was. Unbothered by images of corpses or sounds of gunfire, his happy slumbers were filled with a restful silence and a uniform blackness.

  25

  San Miguel

  TWO HUNDRED FOUR THOUSAND WORDS. In three filled-up notebooks since joining the rebel army, and one he’d hidden in the house in La Libertad. And the seventy pages of the new one he started before the attack on Gotera. About seven words per line, thirty lines per page, all in cursive. A numeral in a circle at the top of each page, the date and year and often the hour at the top of each entry. The text? A cast of characters that was as big and diverse as in a Tolstoy tome or a Cecil B. DeMille flick. Armies and villagers moving across the landscape. Comrades killed, babies born. New guys and gals always coming in. Juggler. Sebastián. Noodles. Doc Holliday. New towns and cities and the code names he gave them: Limetree, Borealis, the Big M., Ulster. As if El Salvador were the setting of a folktale or an epic poem.1

  After a brief respite at the rebel base, Lucas was back on the march again. All the more reason to keep his load light. Fewer notebooks, more ammo. The three filled-up journals in his pack had become too heavy to carry into combat. He’d started the current one just before heading off to the battles in and around San Francisco Gotera. The previous volumes he gave to Yancy, the man now in charge of the Radio Venceremos archives: tapes, photographs, written articles, Santiago’s daily broadcast journal. “Right, your book, your famous book. Am I in it, Lucas? I hope you make me handsome and smart.” Yancy placed the gringo’s notebooks in the wooden crate that stored other precious documents, and the weight of that paper did
not burden Lucas on his new mission.

  Through a series of orders in which one comandante had overridden another, Lucas ended up with El Che again, with fifteen misfit soldiers from other units, culled together to head southward to reinforce the southeastern front. Before leaving Limetree, Joe shot the breeze with the rebel quartermaster, and traded La Virgencita for an M16. I am now master of a Sweet XVI I’m calling “La Cabrona,” he wrote in his journal/manuscript. Forestalk had been shot up in Vietnam, left over with the rest of the weapons tonnage from the GIs’ hasty departure. Thanks to the ways of the world and its wars, it ended up here, in Morazán. But the innards work just fine, so now it’s me and La Cabrona. He wrote his next entry the following morning. 1 April. 08:15. Finally got the boots off after a hellish 12-hour march. Bottom of my feet feel like they’ve been massaged with a pile driver. Sore back, weak knees; hell, this poor old lonesome guerrilla is just six weeks short of turning 40. But Jesus, we covered a lot of ground.2

  * * *

  VIRGINIA HAD STOPPED clipping news stories about El Salvador. Something about the sight of those newsprint rectangles and squares piled up, and her inability to send them to Joe frustrated her. Joe wasn’t receiving any correspondence from his family: that had been clear for several months now. After she stopped clipping, she wrote one or two more letters, and then she stopped, not out of spite, or from a sense of hurt, but rather because it seemed to be a wasted effort. Not writing to him made the distance between them wider. Then Steve got his letter; and Milt got his, which she heard about through Steve. A year since Joe’s received a letter from us. Repeats what he said in the last one I got: He wants to come home. But can’t. He apologizes for the delay but gives no explanation.