The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  After Lucas, the Sparkette’s remarks were brief and to the point: The revolution needed men and women. If I, a fourteen-year-old girl whose father was killed by the fascists can join the revolution, so can you. Then Danny Boy spoke, and said a few words about defeating the army. When he was finished the village youths began to chime in. Yes, I’d love to join you, said the handsomest of the youths, but my girlfriend “está panzona,” by which he meant not that she was fat, but pregnant. I have my studies in San Miguel to complete, said the smartest of the youths, who was the village college student. And we all have to work to support our families, said the others. Finally Danny Boy moved to the center of the field, and said, in effect, your excuses are not good enough. All of us want to go to school too, all of us have family responsibilities too, but there’s a war going on and it’s time for everyone who supports the revolution to put his body on the line. He said individual decisions must be made immediately, Joe wrote in his journal. The subject is closed. Fall in and let’s get on our way toward camp. All personal problems will be dealt with mañana. Danny Boy ordered all the young men to hand over the corvo knives most of them were carrying. Only one refused to surrender his knife, and Danny Boy turned tough with him. “What are you, an oreja?” “No, no, absolutely not,” the youth protested, and he fought back tears protesting his innocence, because to be called an informer was a death sentence. One of the compas snuck up behind him and disarmed him. The compa handed the corvo to Lucas.

  Joe and his unit marched away with the conscripts, with Danny Boy and five other compas using the beams of their flashlights to guide the young men and keep them corralled. We guarded them more closely than captured soldiers—because we knew it would be impossible to shoot them if they escaped. It was a long journey from town back into the hills. Upon arrival, the compas herded the youths into a house behind camp. At first light I went off on a milk run—I had a real hankering for some fresh cow’s milk and sugar. Upon my return, a few hours later, all the recruits were gone. What had happened? It seems they started begging Danny Boy to return to their homes, and he got disgusted and told them, “Leave, then. But we’ll be back there one day.” Joe later concluded his account of the shanghaied youths with these words in his journal: The whole caper was a flop. He sat with Danny Boy, who was the picture of a dejected and bitter bohemian. Around them, the compas were mocking the weeping mothers and whining young men from the night before, laughing. “We’re trying to act the way we think we’re supposed to act,” Danny Boy told Lucas. “The way we’ve been taught by all the strongmen who’ve ruled over us forever: kick the peasants in the butt, humiliate them, bend them to your will. But it turns out we can’t be that vergón. Maybe because trying to be vergón is the whole problem.”

  The next day Joe’s unit met a rebel column marching in from the sea with a supply of weapons. A shipment of rifles and ammunition from the rebels’ friends in foreign countries, and also an .81 mortar, and ten G3 rifles recently captured from the army. The leader of this unit had urgent orders to return to Morazán and to take a few of Danny Boy’s men with him. New army offensives were expected in the mountains. Danny Boy later approached Lucas and gave him the news in guerrilla officialspeak: “We’re going to reintegrate you into your former position of responsibility. In Morazán.” That night, before he left, Lucas sat around with Danny Boy and his men and felt nostalgic, and he began to sing to his rebel friends. A song for the young men who couldn’t bring themselves to kill the thieves or shanghai the village knuckleheads. In a revolution, you never know when, or if, you’ll see your friends again. Impulsively, I began dancing and strumming my M16, holding it by the sling like a concert guitar. A little Rod Stewart. “Patti gave birth to a ten-pound baby boy, yeah! / Young hearts be free tonight, time is on your side.” Compas loved it; or at least they seemed to as they keeled over laughing. Delighted to discover I still have some Zorba the Greek left in my soul.

  Before he left for the mountains, Lucas traded away La Cabrona, his beat-up M16, for a lovely if not exactly mint condition AR-15. On the march around the base of the volcano, back up toward Limetree, a scattered beat of fat water drops fell on the dusty roads.

  * * *

  18 APRIL. 6:00. Morazán … Oh shit … What am I doing back here in Morazán? Presumably awaiting the revolutionary apocalypse. All right, so be it. April, May, June—how long? Until the infinity of victory.

  26

  Crossing the Río Sapo

  18 April. 18:00. It was a long 12-hour jaunt for the last stretch but felt good and did well. Bath, clean uniform, no foot trouble. Lungs . Cigarettes . No raging farts or the shits . Enough starlight for the march . Stopped off for cakes and bread fresh out of the oven that tasted like granny’s sugar buns. One last 5-hour sleep on foot of mountains and at dawn we hijacked some trucks for the ride up here. Last downhill jaunt to free country was a breeze. Back in town, immediately went AWOL. Met up with old friends and we teamed up to terrorize the neighborhood: hot coffee, watermelon, scrambled eggs with onions, tomatoes, chili peppers. At the base in La Guacamaya he accompanied his squad of compas as they delivered their cache of new weapons. Compas were all tired but their spirits were high. The rebel army in Morazán had grown in his absence. Literally everybody armed, no shortage of weapons anymore—most were carrying two weapons apiece. My ballpark guess is that we’ve doubled the ranks of combatants in a single year. The next day he wrote: Everybody awoke this morning jubilant, effervescent. Definitely the smell of victory in the air. You can cut it with a corvo. Compas are so happy that it all might finally be coming to an end; they’re ready to die with few qualms. Myself included.

  His first days in camp he heard distant thunder but there were, as yet, no true rain showers. A helicopter flew over La Guacamaya and fired off a few desultory shots, and turned away, and the pulse of its engine grew dimmer and faded. Joe slept better than he had in the flatlands, waking up each morning covered with dew, comfortably cold, with no mosquitoes! he wrote. He marched from camp to camp on various assignments in his role as the “international press reporter” for Radio Venceremos, and tried to avoid actually being in the presence of the radio crew and their workspaces around the transmitter, because most of them were open in their disdain for him. They would get hold of some candies, or sweet bread, and share with everyone else but him. Go buy some with all those pesos you’re carrying, they’d say. Or: Why don’t you trade us from those cigarettes you’re hiding. Petty indignities suffered by the outsider. Lucas was a norteamericano pebble in their revolutionary shoe. But he went about his work without complaint. He’d seen so much death, so much life. The rebel camps felt like dioramas constructed for him to walk through, like the perfect, heavenly landscapes behind the glass in natural history museums. Crimson sunbeams illuminated him when he marched between camps in the morning mist, and at night, hundreds of luminescent insects danced around him. The lightning bugs were fantastic. The color of stars. “Ciérnegas.” All blinking, like strobe lights. New compas arrived, eager, disciplined and crafty, and he gave them nicknames. Silver Bullet (for his tooth) and Beaver (for his buck teeth). They were slimmer Salvadoran versions of the youngster he would have liked to be. I dearly regret not having a camera when I met the compa with a special pouch on his ammo belt for carrying … a goddamn slingshot! He’s got a 7.62 caliber Belgian FAL machine gun—and a slingshot! Ohmygawd! All these young guys in a fighting peasants’ paradise, with pretty young women there to share the adventure with them. Doris. Lucas took a photograph of her eating a mango and thought the image could become a guerrilla pinup. Later, Comrade Doris strolled through the camp lugging her M16—while wearing a new white dress. And the compas watching her squirmed, because she was beautiful and seventeen, and the top two buttons on said dress wouldn’t stay hooked, and one of the compas whisper-moaned, “Eso, eso, eso.”

  The actual war was, for the moment, a series of stories he heard from other compas. Apparently, we suffered a major reversal two weeks ago. Compas
were attempting to seize the warehouse in Jocoatique. Seven dead including platoon leader and my old pal Diego, the ex-soldado captured in Guacamaya. Many others wounded. They were supposed to attack at 4:00 a.m., seize mortars, withdraw. When the shooting started at 5:00 a.m., the enemy was already in position. Compas were surrounded. Ventina died outside the town, Diego in our hospital. Two rebel deserters, a man and wife who worked in the kitchen, had somehow ended up in San Salvador, and the army sat them behind a line of microphones at a press conference. They said they had seen no Cubans or Soviets among the compas but that there was one North American, a combatant who went by the name Lucas. Ha. So much for my invisibility. The legend of Lucas spreads. One of the new compas told him: “I heard you wasted a lot of ammunition in the battle at Gotera—and you wiped out an entire enemy squad.” “Exaggerations,” Lucas said, and later in his journal he wrote: They think I’m a killer in the closet waiting to be unchained. Planes had begun dropping leaflets in Morazán offering a reward for the capture of the top rebel outlaws. 3,000 pesos for Joaquín Villalobos, 2,000 for Jonás … 35 centavos for Lucas, Joe quipped. He might be captured and become a war trophy for the government; or killed, his corpse put on display for the international media. Gonna be a fine day, he wrote the next morning, after a rebel dance at which he sang a bit, again. Crashed out certain I was Bobby Dylan, and now I wake up convinced I am Hunter S. Thompson. Compa Lucas? Vanished without a trace.

  Lucas helped the radio crew dig a bomb shelter next to the rock escarpment that provided cover to the transmitter; a meter down into the soft ground they began uncovering bones. Very old bones. Hundreds of years old. A Lenca burial site. Lovely, well-preserved pot with vegetable-dye color and Picasso-like drawings of human figures, Joe wrote in his journal. The ground of Morazán. Burial grounds and battlefields. Out in the woods, not too far from the transmitter, one of the compas discovered an unexploded hundred-pound shell. The boys at our bomb factory are excited. They say they’ll fix small TNT charges to the side and use it to blow up a bridge, a radio tower, or fuck up an enemy convoy. Lucas marched over to watch the rebel explosive experts take it apart, very much aware that he was close enough to be killed if they screwed up. Isra deactivated the rear fuse, but just as I suspected there was a nose fuse as well. No problems, however. Helped lift the mother out of the hole we excavated around it. Rear stabilizer had markings that read: an-m103a1. 100 lb. tritonal. explosive. U.S. bomb. One of the compas shouldered it down the hill. Said we should paint FMLN on the nose and send it back to the store for a refund.

  While removing the unexploded bomb, one of the compas found a body decomposing in the woods, the skeleton of an enemy soldier. Animals had drug the lower leg bones and attached foot bones off to one side. Well-preserved skeleton still inside army shirt and khaki pants. A stained handkerchief lay across the belly, where soldier had been shot and obviously attempted to staunch hemorrhaging. Compas started giggling and I cracked that he looked like he could use a few extra tortillas and beans. Immediately felt ashamed. Imagine the soldier died a lonesome death, cut off from his unit. A painful and lonely death. We left and the compas said that maybe we should go back and see if we could find his G3. I just wanted to get the hell out, get away from myself and my shameful mockery. Joe thought later about the bodies at El Mozote, rotting into the soil. Eroded bones and eroded limestone, skulls decomposing in volcanic ash, wet earth, moisture, the tunnels carved by beetles and ants, insects eating away at flesh and fallen leaves. A man becoming compost. The rainy season was coming, and water would eat away at the soldier’s clothes, and his exposed cranium and his wayward leg and foot bones would be covered in mud, and buried deeper with each rainy season, until they became archaeological artifacts. Near the spot where the Lenca buried their peaceful dead, by the rock overhang, a natural shelter and gathering place.

  * * *

  NO BOMBS FELL on the transmitter site after the trench shelter was dug, and the hole became an object of curiosity for the many foreign visitors to the Radio Venceremos camp. A French photographer arrived and stood inside it, and he asked Lucas to use one of his cameras to take a picture of him as he crouched inside, a playful smile on his face. The French photographer and Lucas shared stories of Srinagar and the lakes and snow-covered slopes of Kashmir. Next Lucas met a German leftist writer; in the portrait Lucas took of her standing over the new trench, she gave the camera the rueful look of someone contemplating a great tragedy. A Salvadoran compañera arrived from Nicaragua, after many years in exile there; she brought the five-year-old girl she had been raising among the Sandinistas, and now this girl jumped in and out of the trench, at play. Lucas and the Salvadoran exile talked about the crazy revolutionary scene in Managua, which had filled up with European and American fellow travelers. She said lots of Europeans in Managua have taken to wearing T-shirts that say, “Yo no soy gringo.” Guess I’ll have to do up a T-shirt that says, “I’m a Yankee—eat shit baby.” The Salvadoran exile, and the French photographer, and the German writer all sat around the campfire with Santiago and Mariposa and the radio compas, and they listened to political talks and they held another dance, with cumbias blaring from a Radio Venceremos tape recorder.

  Yes, it was a guerrilla Woodstock up here in Morazán; the last days of hippie freedom before the bad trip of another army invasion. It was as good a time as any for Lucas to press his case with the comandantes. Will I be allowed to leave now? Can I return to the United States and serve the revolutionary cause there? St. Pete and Sweet Willy just left for Europe. Why can’t I leave for Illinois? Yancy was the political officer Lucas had to ask first; Yancy would send his request back up the chain of rebel command, eventually up to Jonás and the Juggler.

  I said, “Yancy, there’s this old saying that in the revolution all comrades are equal, but some are more equal than others.” And on that note our session began, Joe wrote later. Hot and heavy from the get-go. “All right, I’ve been waiting 8 months for a salida, I assume the answer is still the same, but I believe I deserve an explanation. At this point, I’m more interested in the explanation than I am in leaving.”

  Yancy could not look me in the eye. Seems my case had been on his mind. He said I was “personalizing” the issue. Other people and activities took priority. We were at war and circumstances sometimes prevented the orderly resolution of problems, etc. I said the administrative capacities of the FMLN left something to be desired. But more importantly, I highly resented the aura of desconfianza1 that had settled over the situation. Yancy quite rightly rejected any blame for former treatment but insisted desconfianza did not exist. If for some reason I was under suspicion the question would have been settled long ago; interrogation, investigation, termination with a “tiro” (bullet). Unimpressed, I persisted. I played hard-core during the entire session and I believe he suddenly realized he was dealing with someone 15 years older, who was totally disinterested in ass-kissing or power quests. I told him I was quite content with my new job as combat correspondent, and I wasn’t even sure if I still thought I should leave, or be more useful afuera.2 The party was happy with my work, he said. “No one else here can do what you’re doing.” I said I understood we were here to make a peasant revolution and that the headaches were enormous. Yancy said that if it was decided that I would have to stay permanently, he would have no hesitation to tell me so. He started playing the revolutionary tough guy again, not realizing I eat tough guys for breakfast. But I respect the guy—he’s doing the best he can. In the end, I believe we cleared the air somewhat, and will have no future difficulties working together. Faith renewed.

  Lucas ended by telling Yancy he wanted his manuscript back and returned to him, and that Yancy should have someone dig it up for him. Yancy said he would do so; privately, however, Yancy was a bit taken aback at the request. In the rebel army, no rank-and-file soldier ever gave a political officer an order. The gringo Lucas was very bold and direct, and it occurred to Yancy that his counterparts in the Salvadoran army suffered someth
ing similar when dealing with the U.S. advisers in their midst. What was that old saying? French is a language for talking to lovers, Spanish is a language for talking to God, and English is a language for talking to employees. Lucas speaks to me in Spanish that is like the English that has never left him. Lucas was also guilty of egocentrism: my journal, my cigarettes, my freedom to do as I wish. Now this bon vivant is inside our reality, our invention, our improvisation. He doesn’t know we communicate our desires to each other with our eloquent silences, by that which is implied but unspoken, by forcing our adversaries to watch us suffer. It’s our Salvadoran way of being that holds the movement together. Lucas can’t see this, but I can’t blame him for it. He gives of himself. He is a generous comrade. It would be so easy to let him go. Not my decision. We’re keeping him here to be one more line in our Salvadoran poem, to be a punch line in our Salvadoran joke, a character in a Salvadoran nightmare. Poor Lucas. I would so much like to spend time with you elsewhere, outside this revolution. You would like me much more. And I could tell you everything I cannot tell you now.