The Fighting Man (1993)

by Seymour, Gerald

  When the bodies had been left at the morgue, when his duty was complete, the Fireman went home. In the room where he slept with his wife and his daughter, in the house that he shared with his mother and father and sister, he packed a small bag. The Fireman told his wife what he had heard. He kissed his wife in the privacy of the bedroom. He left her numbed and holding their baby. He walked to the Zona 4 bus terminal and bought a one-way ticket.

  Because nine men joined them, they started late and there had been the drawn-out farewells, and the arguments, and women had hung on to their sons, and children had clung to their fathers. They had nine recruits because of Jorge and the speech that he had made against the fire flames in the night . . . They needed the men and they needed the speed, and the two were unmeshed cogs in the charge that he demanded.

  His guts were loose from the coarseness of the drink and the richness of the cooked fresh pork meat. It was a humiliation to Gord that he had to stop once after the march had started and dig his small hole and squat over it.

  He chivvied and he kicked and he persuaded.

  In the fourth rest halt of the morning he was called forward.

  Zed, ahead, had reached the road and seen the men.

  The map showed Gord and Jorge that the road ran from Playa Grande to San Benito and then on to Chinajá.

  Zed led Gord and Groucho away from the rest halt and to the road.

  Where they reached the road there was a sharp left bend. Like the Sayaxché to Chinajá road the sides had been cleared. There was no vantage point. They lay on their stomachs on the wet grass and the rain ran from the leaves above and onto them. Gord could hear the voices of the men and he could see the upper bodywork of the grey-blue painted station wagon. They talked like waiting men, lowered tones as if all the time they listened, small laughter as if all the time they were keyed for the work ahead. The vehicle was pointed back up the road, where the map told Gord Playa Grande lay. There were four men and the rain streamed down onto them and they wore no hats and their shirts were plastered to their bodies and their jeans were dark blue from damp. Two carried Uzi machine pistols and one held a rifle across his chest, readied, and the fourth had what Gord recognized as a Colt revolver placed loose in his waist belt. Gord pressed his hand down through the grass and into the earth below and he ground his hand at the earth until the mud stuck to the palm and he wiped the smear of mud across his face and across his hands, and he did the same for Groucho, and he wriggled two, three yards further forward. He motioned for Zed to stay back. He was concerned . . . if the men were to stay long where they waited beside their vehicle then he must return to the column and lead them on a detour, and lose the time that was so precious to him. He wanted to be laid up outside Playa Grande by the evening because that was the village and the garrison that had been chosen. He lay quite still, which was his training, and once he fastened his fist into the shoulder of Groucho’s tunic as the man fidgeted.

  He would know the sound anywhere. A man who had been in the British army would never forget the engine whine of a Land Rover.

  The men on the road were alerted. They moved sharply. He guessed they were soldiers, perhaps paramilitary police. He thought they knew their work. Two had taken position behind the tail door of the vehicle and one was crouched in the cover of the forward wheel, and the fourth man, with the Colt in his waist, sauntered to the middle of the puddled road. It came round the corner. The Land Rover was swerving to avoid the potholes and coming slowly because of the tightness of the bend and the man with the Colt revolver blocked its path and waved it casually down. The shout rose in Gord’s throat and was stifled, and the weight of his hand pressed down onto Groucho’s shoulder and demanded his silence. The Land Rover stopped. He could see the broad smile on the man’s face and his relaxed arm hid the butt of the revolver. The man opened the door of the Land Rover. There was the explosion of movement. The man in cover at the front wheel of the vehicle throwing open his own door. The two men behind the vehicle sprinting forward. Gord saw the flash of the young woman’s hair and he heard her shout. She was dragged from her seat. A man on each arm and running her to the station wagon, and the cacophony of barking from the depth of the Land Rover, and her door kicked shut behind her. He saw the trapped dog leaping and clawing at the window of the Land Rover. So fast, Gord had the palm of his hand over the muzzle of Groucho’s Kalashnikov. They would not shoot. His other hand loosened on his own weapon. They would not intervene. His decision was made. He watched. The engine of the station wagon was gunned. The young woman, blonde hair, shouted at the skies and the tree line and the bend in the road. A garbled cry for help. He heard the mess of the words, English, incoherent, English. She was thrown into the back of the station wagon and there were two of the men piling in after her, and the station wagon accelerated past the Land Rover and raked it with a long burst of firing on automatic.

  The station wagon disappeared at the corner.

  The engine sound was fainter. The dog roared in the closed interior of the Land Rover. He took his hand from over the muzzle of Groucho’s rifle. He saw the bitter anger on Groucho’s creased face.

  ‘You let it happen.’

  ‘It wasn’t the place . . .’

  ‘You let the Death Squad take her.’

  ‘You don’t question me . . .’

  ‘She was English, your own.’

  ‘It’s not important . . .’

  ‘Do you not have a soul?’

  Gord said, grim, ‘It would have screwed us . . .’

  He went forward. He sat on the road beside the driver’s door of the Land Rover. He spoke quietly to Groucho, told him what to do, and Groucho climbed across the bonnet of the Land Rover and reached to open the driver’s door and then lay on the bonnet. The dog came out fast and it circled Gord and its bark hammered at his ears. He crooned to the dog, as he had when he had first met the Rottweiler that had guarded the fish farm when it was run by the manager who had been replaced by big Rocky. The barking died. The dog came to him. He had no fear of the dog. He held his hand out to the dog’s nostrils and felt the hot breath on the skin of his knuckles. The dog whimpered. He held the dog in his arms and tried to soothe its fear with the gentleness of his voice. He sat in the road and the dog seemed to cry to him and he told Groucho to clear the Land Rover. There was a handbag and a crumpled envelope on the floor with a page of a letter in it, and there was a half-sack of American-produced dog food and a tin bowl. There was a brightly coloured camper’s rucksack and when Groucho rummaged in it he found blouses and T-shirts and two pairs of jeans and spare boots and a woman’s change of underclothes. He ordered Groucho to leave the clothes and the rucksack in the Land Rover.

  Thirty minutes later the column crossed the road.

  The dog was beside him. Gord was at the back, cursing them for slowing to gawp at the abandoned Land Rover, pushing them on towards Playa Grande.

  8

  They had no trust for him. Colonel Arturo sensed their suspicion.

  ‘You accept the information I offer you, or you do not . . .’

  He stowed the map, neatly creased, back into his briefcase. He shared, in common with most of the senior Guatemalan officer corps, a fervent dislike of Americans.

  ‘. . . You take advantage of the information, act decisively, or you do not . . .’

  He could have listed with the stubbed fingers of his hand the occasions in his life when that dislike had erupted. His father, with a young family to rear, sacked by the American manager of a United Fruit Company banana plantation, accused of theft from petty cash . . . At the Escuela Politecnica, the officers’ training college at San Juan Sacatepéquez, an American Ranger sergeant, one of the last before they were withdrawn, had humiliated him in front of a class of peers because he had failed to put together, blindfolded, the working parts of a rifle . . . In the mountains, north of Huehuetenango, in a bad firefight, the American-supplied helicopters had been unable to fly with close support rockets because the supply of spare p
arts had been banned . . . At the Kaibil base of his battalion, in Quetzaltenango district, the visit of a ‘fact-finding’ group from the American Congress, and the persistent and disbelieving questioning on the lies of human rights abuses . . . In the airport at Miami, flying in with his wife and daughter, subjected to rudeness and delay by the American immigration officials . . . At the parade of Army Day, sitting at the back of the VIP stand, the civilian-suited officers of the American military group from the embassy laughing and sniggering through the march past, yawning and talking through the address of the Chief of Staff . . . He had no love for Americans, and Colonel Arturo thought they recognized his feelings.

  He believed now that he had confused them.

  They were around him in a half circle. There were two chairs taken to the right side of the Country Attaché’s desk, the one he had learned was the Chemist and the one who was the Treasurer. To the left side of the Country Attaché, forehead furrowed, was the Liaison from SouthCom in Panama and beyond him was the Airwing agent. They seemed to weigh what he said, and were unable to make the balance.

  The confidence brimmed in Colonel Arturo. ‘I do not understand your hesitation. The Chief of Staff himself gave me the most explicit instruction, I was to offer my help to you for twenty-four hours in every day. I do not understand why you hold back, gentlemen . . . I offer you information that can only have the result of diminishing in some slight way the flood of cocaine upon which your country seems so dependent. I offer you an operation of total discretion. I would only be the guide. You would search the finca. You would destroy the laboratory. You would make any arrests that were justified. If you are not interested then you should say so . . .’

  The Country Attaché shrugged, like he was boxed.

  ‘It’s worth a try . . .’

  Colonel Arturo clapped his hands. It was the intention of those who had appointed him that he should worm his way into the confidences of the Drug Enforcement Administration agents serving in Guatemala. So difficult for G-2 to learn the workings of the DEA’s distrustful and secretive Intelligence Analyst. Small favours, small gifts. The gentle prising open of a door, overheard conversations and dropped words. Beyond the DEA, through that door, were the men of the Central Intelligence Agency and beyond them were the men of the Military Attaché’s office. The smile wreathed him.

  ‘Excellent . . . I hope we have success . . .’

  He offered them the location of a deserted finca in the extreme south-eastern corner of the Franja Transversal del Norte. The co-ordinates placed the finca halfway between the village of Playa Grande and the town of Cobán. He offered them, in their distrust, intelligence information of a laboratory used for the transforming of the raw stirred coca paste into crushed cocaine powder. It was his intention to own them.

  The flier hesitated. ‘The weather’s not great.’

  ‘I am sure that an American military aviator can cope with the meteorological conditions of Guatemala . . .’

  ‘Take-off at seven?’

  Colonel Arturo’s laughter rang in the Country Attaché’s office. ‘If you wish to be as late as that . . .’

  The dog was always close to him and the pace Gord set was cruel.

  He had no charity that day.

  Gord Brown had been taught well how to force a march forward. He had done it himself on the Brecon mountains of Wales when he had been tested on the induction course, and he had been on the same mountains to watch over recruits striving for selection to the regiment. As then, he heard the fatigued moaning of men pushed to the limit of pain. On the course for induction and selection there had been men who had dropped back, preferred the lorry ride return to base camp and the fast journey to the barracks for the shower and change of clothes and the railway warrant ticket away to the units they had tried to leave. The dropouts would have blisters for a week, stretched muscles for a month, and the sense of failure for a lifetime, but they had been given the choice to fall out. No choice for Zeppo and Harpo and Groucho who were bent under the load weight of their backpacks, and no choice for the Archaeologist who tramped in the torn sneakers and who sometimes cried in pain, and no choice for Jorge who gritted his teeth and flared his lips and refused to complain, and no choice for the villagers and the one-time guerrillas and the men and youths from the jungle camp. There was no choice; a man who fell back was a lost man. He played a game with them. Gord told them of the inevitable military reaction. There would be cordons behind them, and search areas, there would be roadblocks, and there would be the interrogators of the intelligence units and there would be the torture cellars . . . It was the game that fuelled the fear and pushed them on.

  Playa Grande, where there was a garrison, was ahead.

  He pushed and pulled the pace of the march because he had seen the face of the young woman in terror. He shoved and he dragged them forward because he had heard the cry for help. It was his agony. No dream, no nightmare, because the proof was the dog at his knee. The face and the cry belted his mind, and the anger tore at him.

  He had seen Groucho talk to Zeppo, a panting whisper at a rest halt, and he had seen Groucho with Harpo, and Groucho with Jorge.

  Gord was allowed to force them and slash them with abuse when they slowed. He was not challenged.

  At the mid-afternoon rest halt, double the length of the hourly breaks, while most flopped, while Groucho busied to produce food, he rifled the handbag. The dog was pressed against his body. The half-sack of meal and the dog’s steel bowl were strapped into the top of his backpack. The jaws of the dog were beside his hands as they searched the handbag. He thought that the dog bonded to him because he had the handbag . . . There was a plastic ID card of Peace Brigades International, and he read the name of Alexandra Clementine Pitt . . . There was a passport with a photograph that showed a grudging stare of rebellion in the face of a teenage girl who wore a school tie. From the date of birth he saw she was twenty-six years old and the passport had been issued when she was seventeen, and he imagined a private school’s trip to France, and there was the visa stamp for entry to La Aurora, Guatemala, that was dated back to the previous August . . . There was a ring of keys . . . There was a letter from home.

  It was an intrusion.

  He read the letter.

  Gord had no business with the letter.

  Good headed paper, a village address outside Taunton in Somerset. Below the address were the names of Hugh Pitt, LLB, and Jennifer Pitt, JP, and his eyes darted to the bottom of the reverse side . . . ‘Stay safe, Daddy sends his love. Of course I do. Very proud of you. Kisses, Mummy’ . . . Gord read the letter that had been written by a local Justice of the Peace, married to a country solicitor. The fucking mission was never permitted to take second place to crap emotion, shit sentiment. It was what he had learned in the fucking regiment. The mission was priority. He read about who had come to dinner, where they had been for drinks after church, the health of the man who cut their lawns, the daffodils in bloom on the drive, the convalescence of an aunt. Groucho came to him with the food bucket, foul mashed gruel, and caught him in the letter. He swept the letter back into its envelope, deep into the handbag, with the keys and the passport and the ID, and zipped the top of the bag shut. When he ate, struggling to swallow the food, the dog had its front paws on either side of the bag.

  Gord saw that Zeppo watched him. Zeppo was licking round the rim of his bowl.

  There had been another girl, so long before, working in danger, and in her London flat there had been left, carelessly, letters from a mother who had written the mundane routine of life as if that were a protection against the reality . . .

  ‘Move it. Hurry your bloody selves. For Christ’s sake, snap together. Get loaded.’

  They went forward. The cart wheels of the flame thrower, pushed and pulled and dragged by Vee and Zed, were ahead of him, squealing and complaining. They were learning from him. All had watched him and now copied him. They worked round obstacles, rather than tried to crash them, they twisted and duc
ked to avoid the clutches of the hanging vines, they no longer dragged the thorn scrub off them but tried to unpick the barbs, they searched more keenly for animal tracks. Going better and going faster . . .

  There were daffodils alongside a tarmacadam driveway that led to the home of a young woman whose terror he had seen and whose cry for help he had heard.

  Zeppo was ahead of him and waiting for him and the sweat sheen glistened on his body . . .

  . . . The sweat poured from his face and it ran on his cheeks and his nose and his lips and his chin.

  That morning, the first time, he had hunted for a length of string, and the string was now around his waist and holding his trousers at his hips. It was as if his gut had shrivelled.

  And he could hold the pace that was set.

  He let the Englishman come level with him.

  ‘Walk with me.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I was told . . .’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘. . . I was told that you could have shot the pigs of the Death Squad.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘. . . I was told they took a woman.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They took an Englishwoman.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was told that you did not shoot because that would have endangered our march.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They could go now only in single file. He was ahead of the Englishman. He stopped when the Englishman stopped and bent and freed the dog’s shoulder hair from the thorn tangle.

  ‘What you did was for us.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And now you feel only the pain of it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That is your commitment to us.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They hustled forward.

  Zeppo talked.

  ‘. . . I was an engineer and I lived in Guatemala City. I was married. We were blessed with a son. We lived humbly because everything that we had was spent on the education of our son. We sent our son to the Colegio Americano, because we wanted the best for him, half of the teachers were from the United States. From the Colegio Americano we enrolled our son at the University of Francisco Marroquin. At the University of Franciso Marroquin there was none of the radicalism of the San Carlos campus. It was a place of study . . . My son was with the brightest and most privileged young people of the country. He took a degree in social sciences, with honours. He could have worked for the Civil Service . . . We had made great sacrifices for his education. I cannot tell you why, but he went, two weeks after his graduation, and we never saw him, nor heard of him again while he lived. It was six months after he left us that the judiciales came to our house. It is twelve years ago now, and I remember it like it was this dawn. The Security Police came into our house after breaking down our door with hammers. We were made to sit in our night clothes, watched by guns, while our home was searched. He had joined the guerrilla movement. He had become one of the compañeros of the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres. The officer of the judiciales told us that he was the commander of a unit, and he was captured. It was only later that I heard how my son had died. The small unit that he commanded had made their base in the high forest near to Cotzal which is in the Ixil triangle. He was held at Cotzal and his fingers were amputated, and they flayed some of the skin on his body and then he was tied to a tree near to the gate of the soldiers’ camp. He was tied to the tree for five days and four nights and the flies and the mosquitoes and the insects crawled in the blood of his wounds and on the flesh where his skin had been stripped. Later, I was told in Cotzal by a woman that after my son was dead an officer had urinated in his mouth. He was my son . . . I had never, before, supported the movement of revolution. I had no politics. I worked as an engineer in the factory of the Marlboro cigarette company. Politics were not a part of my life. We are not responsible for our children, we cannot choose the way they care to follow, but he was my son . . . It was the death of the mind of my wife. I heard in Cotzal of the father of Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez. I crossed the mountains and I came to the village of Acul and I told the father of Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez that I would fight alongside him until I died . . . Just words, because together we went into exile. I am fifty-eight years old. I am blessed to have the chance to honour the promise I made to the father of Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez. He was a fine boy . . .’