The fire was going well. There would always be a good log fire as long as the man who had promised to come and fix the windows stayed away. The wind came some of the time with a thin whistle through the gaps in the frames of the woodwork. The wind was enough to shift the curtains on the window nearest them, flutter what had once been heavy velvet. They were hunched over the table. Neither had spoken for a full quarter of an hour. They lit cigarettes, they drank, they dragged on the cigarettes, they slumped, they squashed the glow from the cigarettes into a filled ashtray.
There was the sound of a car on the gravel beyond the window, going slowly, as if feeling its way through the darkness of the storm night. The shorter man looked up. It might have been his training to have been aware of a stranger’s car. A local would have powered into the car park and snapped to a halt. For years he had been taught to be aware of what was out of place. No strangers came to a bar late on a bad night before the holiday season. His eyes seemed to clear. He looked past the head of the stag mounted above the wide fireplace with the fur manged at the neck, and past the smoke-darkened glass that protected the stuffed salmon that had been wild and caught thirty-eight years earlier and that encouraged the futile sportsmen who travelled up from London, and past the wide wing span of the preserved golden eagle which had lost most of its tail feathers at the party three New Year’s Eves back. He saw the turning lights between the moving drapes of the curtain.
The bigger man, the one with the whisky chasers, who called himself Rocky, muttered, ‘What you going to do?’
The shorter man swerved his eyeline back from the lit curtains. ‘Look for something else.’
Rocky snorted. He was from Glasgow. His accent was harsher than that of the men and women who had lived from birth in the cottages and bungalows beside the lock. ‘That’ll not be easy.’
‘I think I know that.’ He heard car doors slam shut, and then the sound of the car pulling away fast.
‘You’ll have another, ’course you will. Nothing to do but get pissed up . . .’
The shorter man nodded. He seemed not to care whether he had another drink or not. His nostrils wrinkled at the smell of dead fish and he wiped his tongue hard round the inside of his mouth to try to lose the taste of dead fish, without success. He was watching the door into the bar.
His training was always to watch a door for the entry of strangers, but the training was for a life that no longer existed.
Rocky lurched to his feet, noisily lifted up the empty glasses. ‘You’re a miserable sod, don’t you know . . . ?’
The shorter man watched the door.
It was seven days since they had left the Campeche quarter of the Old City of Havana. It would be their last place of calling, and if they were turned down again then they would be flying back to Cuba in failure. One of them, the one who led down the dark corridor of the hotel that ran past the reception to the door of the bar, slipped into his small wallet the receipt from the taxi driver. They were blank-faced, none of the three of them showed an expression of anticipation nor a fear of further failure. For each of them it had been a huge journey, beyond the limits of what they could have imagined before the funeral. They had gone the day after the burial of the man they had followed into exile so long before. And each of them, because they had been told it individually and then together by Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez, understood that they had been chosen for the mission of importance because older men, travelled men, Ladinos, had doubted the possibility of what they were charged to achieve, and wrung their hands and murmured the excuse and sidled away. The one who led, who spoke English the best, paused in front of the door that was marked ‘Bar’. They were each dressed in the same style, narrow shoes of thin black leather, white shirts and gaudy ties, and suits that seemed too large for their bodies. Each wore a wide-brimmed hat . . . They had flown from Cuba to Madrid, and been rejected. They had taken a second aircraft, sat stiff and belted in through gales and turbulence, to Frankfurt in Germany, gone to the address given them, and again been rejected. They had gone by coach to Louvain in Belgium and sat in an office that was decorated with photographs of smiling white men in combat uniform who carried machine guns and rifles and posed beside the bodies of dead black men, and again been rejected. They had taken a ferry boat across grey seas to England, and been sick before landfall, and had made their way to London, and been laughed at before they had again been rejected. Making their way out of the door of the London office they had been called back, and a name had been scribbled on a piece of paper and the name of a village and the name of a nearest town. They had thought, each of them, that after the rejection they had been played with by the broad-shouldered man with the paratroop emblems tattooed below the hair on his forearms.
But they had still taken the name of the man, the name of the village, the name of the nearest town.
A train had carried them through the day north from London to Scotland. A smaller train had brought them from Glasgow to Fort William, through bare mountains that were shadowed in cloud and rain and dusk.
A taxi had driven them on narrow roads from Fort William to the village, to a darkened shed beside a quay where the water whipped in storm waves. The taxi driver had been good to them, and taken the piece of paper with the handwritten name and knocked at the door of a small house and shown a woman the name and been given directions. The headlights of the taxi had found a caravan building, blacked out, and again the driver had found the nearest house and smacked his fist on the door and repeated the name.
The three men had sat, squashed close, in the back of the taxi, and seen the gestures through the rain running on the window.
They had been dropped at the hotel. They had paid, they had taken the receipt.
It was the last chance. The bar door was closed in front of them. They had travelled to Madrid and to Frankfurt and to Louvain and to London to find a fighting man. It was the last chance or it was failure.
The door opened. Because Rocky was at the bar, because the bulk of Rocky’s body was not between the door and himself, Gord’s hand fluttered with a trained instinct towards his belt. Just instinct. At his belt there was no pistol, no holster. His fist rested on the damp denim of his jeans and dislodged more of the dried fish scales.
Gord saw them come in.
As if to a signal they took off their hats. They stood inside the bar. Their features were a uniform. Dark hair cut short, wide-set ears, flattened noses that looked as if they were pressed against glass, long mouths with strong lips, high and forward cheekbones. Gord thought they might have come from a production line. Each of them was short in height but with the power of barrel chests. The tan on their faces was milk mixed chocolate. They stood, each of them, inside the bar with their hats held across their privates and they looked around them with slanted eyes.
The accent was Spanish, thick English and taught. It was the one at the back who spoke. ‘Please, Mr Brown? Mr Gordon Brown . . . ?’
Rocky swayed at the bar. ‘Who’s wanting him?’
‘I was told that here we would find Mr Gordon Brown . . .’
There was the mischief look in Rocky’s eye. The small boy, the big bully, fun in the schoolyard. ‘Well, you’ve found him.’
Gord chuckled to himself, dry. A hell of an awful day in the middle of a hell of an awful week. He anticipated sport. He eased back in his chair and readied himself for the show. Rocky put the filled glass in front of Gord, then turned to face them. Gord thought that he deserved to be amused.
The one in the middle, who would have been the smallest, not more than two inches above five feet in height, said, ‘We are from Guatemala. We are from the old village of Acul which is in the Ixil triangle region of the Quiché district. We live now in the city of Havana. Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez has sent us to find you, Mr Gordon Brown . . .’
The one at the front, an inch taller and older because he had grey smears in the black hair, said, ‘We want the help, Mr Brown. We want you to march with Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez when w
e go back to the triangle . . .’
The one at the back who carried a small attaché case, imitation leather and cheap as they come, dribbling with the rain, said, ‘We have come to find a fighting man, Mr Brown, one who will know the mind of our enemy. May we talk with you, Mr Brown . . . ?’
‘Be my guest,’ Rocky slurred.
Gord watched. He wondered what sort of place was Acul, what sort of village . . . They ignored Gord, as if he didn’t exist. They made for the furthest corner of the bar, and they stood in respect until Rocky had slumped down on a chair. Gord heard occasional words, the ones that were hardest on their tongues and which they seemed to speak the loudest. Once Rocky looked across at Gord and winked hard. The words that Gord heard were ‘atrocity’ and ‘genocide’ and ‘massacre’ and ‘revolution’. Gord knew a little of Guatemala. He hadn’t been to the Jungle Warfare School in Belize that was less than fifty miles from the Guatemalan border, but he’d known those who had, and it had been their job to learn the capabilities of the Guatemalan forces. He knew the reputation of those forces. From what he’d heard, ‘atrocity’ and ‘genocide’ and ‘massacre’ were not out of place, but ‘revolution’ was. That’s what he’d heard, way back . . . The smallest sat straight upright in front of Rocky and spoke as if he had learned by heart the proposition, and Rocky couldn’t help himself and spurted as a reaction half a mouthful of beer and chaser onto the table, and the one with the grey smears in his hair wiped the table with the sleeve of his jacket. Rocky was giggling into their faces and they showed no shock, none of them. The one who had the attaché case opened it and lifted out a heap of photographs, and Gord craned from where he sat to see them. He heard the peal of Rocky’s laughter, and he thought from what he could see across the room that the photograph on the top showed the naked body of a woman, and he thought he could see the scar marks on the body.
The baying now of Rocky’s voice. ‘Why not? Piece of cake, right? Walk straight in there? Bang, bang, bang, all over. We’ve won, fuck the bad guys. Count me in . . .’
He thought they realized. Surely they would have known by now that they were used for fun, an amusement and a sport. He felt shame.
He stood.
He had humiliated himself.
Gord said quietly across the room, ‘Go home, Rocky . . .’
He was three inches, minimum, shorter than his friend, he was fifty pounds lighter.
‘. . . Just take yourself off home, Rocky. Game’s over.’
He saw the puzzlement on the big man’s face and then the annoyance flickering at his mouth. Gord stood his ground with his hands easily on his hips.
Rocky went. He left a third of his big glass full on the table and a half of his chaser glass, but he went out of the bar and Gord heard him slip in the corridor and fall and then heard the vivid curse from the outer door when the weather would have hit him.
Gord went to the table where they sat.
‘I apologize . . . I’m Gord Brown.’
Each of them shook his hand. He cringed. They showed no anger. He asked them to show him their photographs. He was sobered by their dignity. He took Rocky’s chair, pushed aside Rocky’s drink, scoured the table with his handkerchief.
The top photograph was pushed towards him by the smallest man. A woman lying naked in her own blood on the steel trolley that had been pulled out from a refrigerated compartment in a morgue. Her arms were crossed in death to preserve the modesty of her breasts, but one hand had been severed at the wrist. A small square of cloth had been placed over her groin. The pale skin of the body was marked by contusions and slashes and bruises. Gord breathed hard.
He moved aside the top photograph. He saw a picture of a man laid out on a dirt floor and some of his face was obscured by the kneeling shape of a woman, and the focus on the camera had been sharp enough to record the tears on her cheeks. The shirt of the man had been opened to display the wounds that Gord reckoned were the work of a knife or bayonet. There was a bullet entry wound in the centre of the forehead. He felt the vomit rising in his throat, he had only drunk that evening and had not eaten.
There was the image of a child’s face, close up, rigid in death. He could not look away because he had played a game with these people, made his fun and amusement and sport from them. He owed it to them to hold the photograph in his mind. The eyes of the child had been gouged out of blood-dark sockets. The ears of the child had been sliced off. He could see because the cadaver’s mouth was open that the tongue of the child had been cut short . . .
He turned away. He was sick onto the floor.
From behind the bar the landlord watched him, said nothing.
Another image was slid in front of him.
He vomited again, his evening’s drink and his lunchtime’s sandwiches and he could taste the flesh of dead fish.
A photograph of a fresh-excavated grave with bodies half retrieved from mud and a woman pointing to a corpse and men standing around leaning on long-handled spades . . .
He knew where they were kept. He went from the table and out across the bar and down the corridor to the scullery beyond the hotel kitchen. He ran water from the sink into the bucket and he took the mop back with him. They sat in their silence as he sluiced the floor around the table. No word from the landlord at the bar. It was Gord’s work. He poured Dettol from a plastic bottle onto the linoleum of the floor, dosed it so that the smell of the vomit and of the dead fish was over-whelmed. He took back to the scullery the mop and the bucket and the disinfectant, and threw the contents of the bucket as far as he could into the night. He came back to the bar and sat in his chair.
‘I’m Gord Brown, what do you want of me?’
The dawn came in a grey haze off the sea waters of the loch. He walked the white sand of the beach. Where the incoming tide had not covered them his footprints showed the trek he had made back and forth from the rock cliff to the west, in the darkness, to the black mass of the seaweed field to the east.
The wind took the top from the waves, flecked clear white against the shadow distance. What did Gord Brown stand for? He had been told of an Indian people suffering under the boot of the military.
The cloud was sweeping fast from the shoreline across the road to the base of the mountains beyond. Where was the life of Gord Brown going? He had been told of a young man charged by a dying father to return to his own and to take with him a fighting man who would understand the mind of an enemy.
His anorak billowed open from the soaked shirt clinging to his chest. Was Gord Brown looking to a future? He had been told of the proletarian masses who waited only for the call to rise up in arms and of a victory that was inevitable.
Each time that he turned now at the extremity of his walk he could see them. They stood on the wind-stung sedge grass between the beach sand and the road in front of the hotel. Before they had gone from the bar to negotiate accommodation with the landlord, and he had come down to the sand to walk away the night hours and contemplate the proposition, they had talked to him in a language that was half damn funny and half damn pathetic. Funny and pathetic because ‘proletarian masses’ and ‘revolutionary struggle’ and ‘power of the people’ were old slogans, buried. But it was the dignity, sincerity, that was hard to mock.
They stood beside the road in the front of the hotel and waited on his decision.
If they had come a week earlier, before the fish had slid stressed into the dead hole . . . What did Gord Brown stand for?
If they had come six weeks earlier, before the farm had been put onto a stagnant market . . . Where was the life of Gord Brown going?
If they had come three months earlier, before the first signs of the sea lice on the underbellies of the salmon . . . Was Gord Brown looking to a future?
If they had come before he would have heard them out, smiled, shaken their hands, and told them to go lose themselves on the way to Acul village of the Ixil triangle region in the Quiché district, or anywhere.
He was, had been, a fighting man.<
br />
He was thirty-four years old. He wavered. He could stride to the west of the beach and climb the granite rock stones and go back to his mobile caravan home, he could slide across the seaweed mass to the east and go to the caravan and lock the door and strip the clothes from his body and sleep till it was time to go back to the farm and start up the suction pumps that drew the wasted fish from the dead hole . . . It was three years since he had seen a beaten people and turned his back on them, left them to the mercy of an army’s firepower.
He walked towards them.
It was ridiculous.
When he was close to them he saw that their faces showed no surprise that he came to them. It was as if they had not contemplated rejection.
Gord said brusquely, ‘What are you paying?’
The smallest man said, ‘We have no money.’
Scornfully, ‘You don’t pay?’
The man with the attaché case lisped, ‘What is the price of freedom? What is the cost of honour?’
Softly, ‘You reckon I come cheap?’
The Fighting Man (1993) Page 2