The Fighting Man (1993)

by Seymour, Gerald

  Gord thought he saw tears run in the sweat streams on the engineer’s cheeks.

  ‘. . . He was a fine boy. He made the ultimate sacrifice of his life because he believed that the armed struggle was justified.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We should stop earlier tonight. I will need the time while there is still daylight to look at the flame thrower. I will help you to fire the flame thrower.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The Englishman held out his hand to him, and he ignored it.

  The passion was in his voice. ‘I tolerate you because you are useful, and because I want to see them burn.’

  Too easy to weep . . .

  She had been in darkness since they had taken her. Over her head for the bumping ride in the station wagon had been a sack that stank of damp maize cobs. She had heard the shouts when the station wagon had finally stopped, military shouts. She thought they had brought her to the garrison camp at Playa Grande. Off the tail of the station wagon and left to fall into the mud puddles. Dragged to her feet, her arms pinioned behind her back, pushed forward. Hands clutching at her to hurry her and fingers tugging at the lightness of her T-shirt and once groping at the waist of her jeans. Running and stumbling, tripping on a step. Along the length of a corridor that echoed from the scrape of their boots. Pitched down concrete steps, and her knees scraped and her lower lip split. They had taken off her hood and shone torchlight into her face so that she was dazzled, and untied the pinions binding her wrists. Tasting her blood as the door slammed. Still the darkness around her. She understood. Nothing was an accident in this country. Everything was activated by orders from a higher echelon. An order for her to be arrested, an order for her to be detained, an order for an interrogator to travel from Guatemala City, an order for her to disappear, an order for a grave to be dug in the night hours. She understood. She had seen the bodies.

  Too easy to cry . . .

  Just before they broke the hold of the jungle.

  Alone in his thoughts . . .

  Gord was back-marker. The dog growled.

  His thoughts had been jumbled between the young woman and the flax-blonde hair and the scream in fear for help, and the action they would fight in the morning. The dog growled and turned to face back down the trail they had used, and Gord followed the eyeline of the dog as it stood its ground, but its tail was wrapped down between its haunches and close to its lower belly.

  They were followed.

  He crouched low so that his chest was against the dog’s shoulder and the weight of the machine gun was across his bent knee. He ruffled the collar of the dog to calm it. He waited . . . The sounds behind him of the advance of the march died. The hackles of the dog were up . . . He saw the cat. There was the low growl of the dog, frightened, and there was the hissed spit of the jaguar cat. Its ears were flattened back and the far tip of its tail switched. The jaguar came on. Gord thought they trespassed on its route. It was an old cat, male, and it had no fear of them, only annoyance that its preserve was invaded. It came to a dozen paces from them. The muscle ripple ran in its shoulders. He thought that the dog was the reason that the cat stalked them on the trail. It had stopped. He saw the amber gold of the eyes. He could smell the foul breath of the cat. It was as long as the dog, and as tall. If it had sprung, Gord was calculating, then he would have used the barrel of the machine gun to ward off its weight. He saw the pride of the beast, and the arrogance, and he saw the slashing teeth of the beast. God, and it was magnificent . . .

  And it was gone.

  It was gone, gliding, into the cover of the undergrowth beside the trail.

  The tremble had taken him and he hurried forward to rejoin the column of march and the dog shivered beside him.

  They broke the hold of the jungle.

  For the last hour of the march they moved fast. They skirted the maize fields where the harvest had been taken and the ground had been dug for new planting. They saw smoke columns ahead of them. Clear of the protection of the jungle the rain fell harder on them and the smoke merged fast into the sprawl of the low cloud. Once they froze, all of them, and the dog stood motionless amongst the trees, as women went by on a track carrying under black umbrellas their bundles of wet cut wood. They could see the red tiles of more substantial buildings and the tin roofs of the shacks. Where Jorge called the halt it was possible to identify, between trees, the limp fluttering of the red and white and blue flag of Guatemala.

  It was good for them, the rain.

  They could see down into the village of Playa Grande. The rain would blur the vision of the sentries that were posted around the garrison’s camp and it would keep men and women and children in their homes. On the road into the village they saw a military truck pass and they saw a work party returning with shouldered spades and pickaxes.

  They ate what Groucho gave them.

  They were quiet while they ate.

  No need to tell any man that in the morning he must fight for his life and for the life of his enemy. Gord left his own canteen of Meals Ready to Eat for the rain to fall in while he rummaged in his backpack for the half-sack of dog food and the metal bowl.

  In the last light, Gord tied the dog to the wheel of the cart, and he moved out with Jorge and Zed. There was a spread of light around the gate of the garrison camp to guide them forward. They had covered, as the crow would have flown, forty-eight miles from the landing strip where the Antonov had put down, and it was just the beginning . . . The guerrillas worked to clean their weapons, and he heard Groucho and the Archaeologist arguing history, and the villagers had taken the perimeter watch, and the campesinos cleared the debris of the meal for burying in a pit and then would dig the latrine hole, and Zeppo was kneeling beside the cart, with the dog’s body against him, and taking the screwdrivers that Harpo passed him.

  As they moved away, left the faint noises behind them, Gord could hear the gentle whistling of Zeppo, perhaps a hymn and perhaps an anthem, busy at his work.

  Jorge whispered, ‘We will light a fire here, Gord, and the fire will be seen the length and the breadth of Guatemala . . .’

  The image locked in his mind, himself and a sergeant and a gaggle of troopers from the regiment, perhaps in the dunes of the Gulf, perhaps in the hedgerows of Armagh County, perhaps beside a darkened road on exercise in Germany . . . He, the officer, muttering about seeing fires and lighting fires, and the sergeant belching derision and the troopers giggling ridicule. The blood ran warm in him. It did not seem wrong from the youth of Jorge. No derision, no ridicule . . .

  Just the beginning.

  Sometimes running low, sometimes crawling in the slithering mud, they went towards the lights at the gate of the garrison camp.

  Nothing, of course, to be found in the pages of La Prensa Libre or El Grafico, but they practised self-censorship for survival and so were worthless to him. Nothing, of course, broadcast on Radio Conga 99.7FM nor on Radio Fiesta 98.1FM but their news bulletins only carried military stories authorized by the High Command. It was rumour and he wished to believe it.

  The Academic sat in the vastness of his office in the mathematics block of the University of San Carlos, and on his desk, beside the computer console, lay a single sheet of photocopied paper. The lights burned dully in the office and beyond the window were the hurrying shadows of the last of the students leaving the campus. The Academic had been offered the rumour by a junior lecturer, specializing in mathematics and theoretical physics, who had been his student a decade before. He had read the sheet of paper many times, and the ash from his continuous cigarettes flaked on the message. The junior lecturer had been told the rumour by his girlfriend whose sister was married to a doctor whose brother worked on the staff of the Petén Military Zone Commander. He wished desperately to believe the rumour. The Academic could recall it, the last time that a young man had sat with three other students in tutorial on the worn easy chairs across the room from the desk, and he had congratulated him on his work, praised him, and he had gone to his burial.
The officer on the staff of the Petén Military Zone Commander had told his brother who had told his wife who had told her sister who had told her boyfriend of an action on the Chinajá to Sayaxché road in which many soldiers had been killed. He believed the rumour, and he believed also the further rumour that follow-up operations were severely hampered by adverse weather. He believed the rumour, wanted to, because of the sheet of paper on his desk.

  ‘. . . We alert you. Your movements are being strictly monitored by the commandos of our heroic front, and they have strict orders to end your life. We want your head. We are only a few hours away from the great demonstration to our beloved people that our front fulfils justice and makes it prevail against terrorism. Our weapons are already over your body . . .’

  There was his own photograph, taken at the previous year’s graduation day ceremony, sellotaped to the bottom of the sheet of paper. The sheet of paper had been on the floor, pushed under the door, when he had returned to his office from his last class of the day. He believed the rumour . . . He tore the sheet of paper into small pieces, dropped them in his ashtray, and he stubbed out the last of his cigarettes. In the spidery hand of a man more familiar with the computer console, he wrote a note for the junior lecturer offering him the permanent use of his library and his research work, and he finished with the flourish of an apology for any inconvenience caused. He locked his office for the last time. He walked across the campus and politely asked a doorman to open up for him the padlock on the door of the law faculty. He was considering, as he walked along an empty corridor, what clothes he would take, and how to tell his wife that she should take the train in the morning to Puerto Barrios and then the bus to the Honduran border. He chided himself that he was not more logical. A sad smile. First he must tell his wife to go to their branch of the Banco Guatemala in Zona 13. The walls of the law faculty were slogan-daubed. He had come to read the poem of Otto René Castillo, subversivo. He read the poem that was painted on the wall to help himself to find the courage . . .

  ‘One day

  the apolitical

  intellectuals

  of my country

  will be interrogated

  by the simple

  man

  of our people.

  They will be asked

  about what they did

  when

  their nation was slowly

  extinguished,

  like a sweet and gentle fire,

  small and alone . . .

  . . . apolitical intellectuals

  of my sweet land,

  you will not be able to answer.

  A vulture of silence will devour

  your entrails.

  Your own misery

  will gnaw at your soul.

  And you will be silent,

  ashamed of yourselves.’

  He thanked the doorman, gave him two quetzals, and heard the door of the law faculty slammed shut and padlocked behind him. Before the Academic drove away he looked a last time, and wistfully, back at the darkened buildings of the San Carlos University. He had believed the rumour.

  The light shone into her face.

  ‘Good evening, Miss Pitt. I am sorry if you were asleep. I apologize if I awakened you. It was the problem of the weather. I was able to fly only as far as Cobán. Dreadful conditions. I tell you, in truth, I feared for my life. Then by road, not possible without four-wheel drive. You know, it has taken me sixteen hours from Guatemala City . . . In order that we should not misunderstand each other, Miss Pitt, may I explain a few small matters. The men who took you, Miss Pitt, state quite categorically that there were no witnesses. You were travelling in an area close to the Mexican border which is one of the last areas where the EGP guerrilla group operates. You were, Miss Pitt, a victim of those guerrillas, probably taken for their sexual gratification. That is how the minister will explain it to your ambassador, and they will take a glass of sherry and they will express their mutual surprise that you had shown such folly in driving alone in an area of difficulty . . .’

  There were tears in her eyes from the light. The voice of an unseen young man, caressing her.

  ‘. . . Further matters to be explained, Miss Pitt. You came to Guatemala, to interfere. We are a proud people and we do not permit outsiders to tell us how we should govern our lives. I said that we should have a conversation, I sincerely hope that is possible. In your ignorance, Miss Pitt, you will have contacted a lunatic minority who seek the overthrow of the state. You will have been flattered by their attention, they will have been gratified by your interest. I want to talk about them, Miss Pitt. There are many organizations which offer a front of respectability but are, in truth, no more than runners and couriers for the subversive campaign waged with brutality against the people of Guatemala. I want the names of those you have met, I want the dates and the times of your meetings, I want the addresses of the safe houses that were used . . .’

  She blinked back at the light. She ground her fingernails into the flesh of her waist, tried to turn her mind from the smooth softness of the voice.

  ‘. . . There would be doctors who treat subversives when they have been wounded, there would be trades unionists who call the strikes with lies and false promises that hinder the economic development of Guatemala, there would be lawyers who advise on how our constitution can be manipulated, there would be women who claim their men were killed by government forces when we know they were the victims of the subversives. I want the names, Miss Pitt, of all those you have met who perjure themselves and defame our country. I hope for a pleasant conversation, Miss Pitt . . .’

  The fear welled in her. The light burned at her.

  She had seen the wounds on the bodies, and the blood.

  It was the flying that Tom Schultz had been trained for.

  The weather was what the veteran instructors at the Army Primary Helicopter School talked about in the dining area, made jokes of. At the Primary School at Fort Wolters in Texas, and later at the Advanced School at Fort Rucker in Alabama, the old men liked to frighten the recruits with bad weather stories.

  Right from the time of the first whine of the starter motor and the thrash of the transmission through the turn of the big rotors it had been dumb weather to be up in. And if it had not been that Colonel Arturo was his passenger then Tom would have aborted the flight, done it there on the apron at La Aurora, and the Intelligence Analyst wouldn’t have complained, nor the Chemist. It would have been sensible, prudent, to have aborted the flight, and he had the squat little bastard to thank for their being up and belted in the storm winds. He was trained for this flying; the flying was freedom, challenge, the beauty in his life and the passion, the only goddamn glory that he knew.

  The roads went in the valleys, and he had to stay in the valleys because the goddamn mountains were hazed in the rain cloud. He went a hundred feet above the road from Guatemala City and out north to Salamá and they were low enough over the town for him to see the Indians ant-like on the scaffolding covering the facade of the old church. From Salamá to Cobán, and lower because the cloud was thicker where the metal road finished. He hovered a full minute at sixty feet above the plaza of Cobán and his rotors were below the height level of the cathedral’s towers. A shit bad twelve miles from Cobán, hugging ground like it was combat flying, over the coffee fields, with the wind growing and the wipers spearing the rain off the glass. Picking up the valley of the Chixoy river and diving on it and flattening out over the flood water.