The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  * * *

  ON HIS THIRD DAY HOME, he finally got around to opening the box that was waiting for him in the mail at Steve’s house. His manuscript, returned from the editing service, a box filled with flawless pages typed in a small and delicate font. He began to read his novel, or rather, a regurgitated and reprocessed version of what had been his novel. All his ellipses and repetitions had been shorn away, his run-on sentences tamed, as if by an especially finicky and meticulous barber. We have edited The Silver Triangle, began the letter from Katherine’s underling. We kept the original chapter 1—a bit more subdued now and with two long passages about Sunshine deleted. (Cabron is the main character) … Will it sell? We don’t know. It could.1

  * * *

  THE WEEKEND ARRIVED and Joe dedicated it to his niece Kathy. He took her to Crystal Lake park and told her to listen to the throbbing buzz of the cicadas. “It’s a love song. The cicadas are telling each other, ‘I love you!’” He led her into the big brick building that housed the university’s natural history museum, and showed her the skeletons of ancient sea monsters, and the stuffed and still seabirds, and a hairy bison in a big glass box. They drove beyond the city limits to a harvest fair with hog pens and poultry, cotton candy and arcade games. He looked at Kathy enjoying it all, her summer-lightened blond hair and cheeks reddened to the color of apples, and he felt his eyes filling with the mournfulness of a man gazing at a tangerine prairie afternoon for the last time. Beyond his niece, the flat plain, a silo jutting up on the horizon two miles away. As if all that talk of the round earth were a lie.

  Illinois. What does home mean? Is it always with you, do its people and its landscape live inside your brain forever? He studied Kathy and the other girls and boys at the harvest fair, through the Illinois dust that was covering his glasses, again, and he remembered peering through those same concave lenses at other boys and girls at that first big street rally in El Salvador. The dead girl, a corpse in a blue dress, in a city surrounded by volcanos, an un-prairie. And now Kathy was tugging him toward a carousel of live ponies, and he helped the attendant by lifting her up onto the animal and she rode behind a pair of sad equine eyes, and she smiled at him and waved and said, “Goodbye, Uncle Joe,” as she rode away and, “Hi, Uncle Joe,” as she came back. On the drive back home, Joe stopped when he noticed a dark line of clouds on the horizon. “Looks like a storm coming,” he said, and from the side of the road they watched distant lines of lightning striking the ground, and heard the delayed rumble of thunder, and for many years afterward when Kathy thought about her uncle she would remember sitting there, in the car, next to him, tasting the stormy air and looking at jagged white roots of electric light on the horizon.

  * * *

  THE NIGHT BEFORE Joe left for Central America he sat down in Steve’s living room and the two brothers drank Hamm’s beers and talked about cars and other inconsequential things, and the mood was light until Steve brought up El Salvador, and asked if Joe knew how long he’d be gone this time, because usually on his trips Joe had a plan for when he might come back.

  “No,” Joe said. “It might be hard to reach me. I might not be writing as often. I’ll put a code in my letters that means A-okay. It’ll be 1200.” This was a transponder code pilots used when they were flying in uncontrolled airspace, out of radio contact and using eyesight to find their way. “If I write 1200 at the top of my letter, you’ll know I’m flying in clear skies, so to speak. Tell Mom that too. Okay?”

  “Agreed.”

  Obviously Joe was hiding a lot about the dangers he was going to face. Why else would he put transponder codes in his letters? Steve imagined a near future with Joe incommunicado. Empty mailboxes and silent telephones. And I’ll be the one here, talking to Mom every day, trying to convince her that you’re okay. Questions I could ask, but not my place. What are you truly up to? All sorts of possibilities suggested themselves, most of them involving illicit acts. Steve’s only recourse was big-brother benevolence. “You know, Joe, if you want to settle down in Urbana, get your own place—well, I could set you up. I could help you get established. You want a job at the newspaper, I could help you with that. That guy over there owes me some favors. Or at the bookstore. If they don’t have a job open, I can ask them to create one for you. If you wanted to open an ice cream stand, I could get you a bank loan from this guy I know.”

  “Thank you, Steve. But I’m not interested. Appreciate it, though. Truly.” Joe looked at the table and the empty cans. “How about one more beer before we call it a night?”

  Steve returned from the refrigerator with two frosty cans and the sense that he had done right by his brother, even if Joe had turned down his help. “Really nice spread here,” Joe said, looking around. “I’m proud of you, big brother. You’ve gone and made a man of yourself.”

  That night, Joe went to bed in Steve’s study but had trouble sleeping. He listened to the university’s FM radio station, which played songs that were long and obscure, and like messages from another world. “London Calling.” Samplings of garage-band Americana. No FM radio like this in San Salvador. Free form, a bit of this, a bit of that. Ska sped up into rock and roll. At 1:30 a.m., when Joe vowed to turn off the radio and go to sleep he heard the youthful-voiced DJ say, “Well, it’s time for last call. And tonight we have something special for you, Champaign-Urbana, in honor of all the good vibes brought to us by, well, by the brothers of this here group. Funkadelic. A gift from the music gods. Good night, Champaign-Urbana.”

  Suddenly the transistor radio on his brother’s studio desk was filled with the wailing and the wah-wah of an electric guitar. Two guitars: one keeping a rhythm, with six notes repeated at the pace of a prayer; the other playing a free-form solo, a wordless language describing a lifetime of ecstasies and mourning. Joe could hear the scratches on the record, and he imagined the needle and the turntable at the college radio station, and the guitar player’s fingers working the fret. Rapid-fire notes and slow vibrato. Funk. Psychedelic. Oscillations and feedback and the soul of a wounded but resilient people. Electromagnetic waves from African America. This is what I’m going to miss when I leave the United States of America. I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe, a voice sang. The buzzy speech of the Stratocaster track went on for ten minutes, and the radio was silent for five seconds, until the DJ said a single word: “Funkadelic.”

  The next morning Joe packed his few belongings into a half-empty duffel bag and carried it into Steve’s living room. Kathy had gone off to school, and Joe joined Steve in the front of his Chevrolet, and they drove to pick up Mom and Calhoun; when Joe got back into the car he sat in the rear seat next to his mother.

  As they approached the train station Joe said, “You don’t have to park. If it’s okay with you all, I’ll go in by myself. Just drop me off in front.” At other times, they had all stood together on the station platform. This time he wanted to be alone.

  “Bye, Steve,” Joe said from the back seat. “Bye, Calhoun. Mother.”

  “Well, son, don’t forget to write,” his mother said. “And don’t forget these.” A plastic container filled with cookies she had made the night before. So much more to say. Thoughts and advice. Unspoken. They reached across the back seat to hug each other, and Virginia placed a hand on her baby boy’s shoulder, and he opened the door and stepped out of the car a man of the world, looking weary behind his weak, forced smile, carrying burdens in his squeezed brow. He turned to look at them one more time and raised his hand in a half wave; the station doors settled behind him, and he was gone. Back into the envelope and the mailbox. She wondered how many months or years would pass before she saw him again.

  Virginia returned home, and for the next few days she lingered over the leftovers in the refrigerator. The pork roast dinner she had made for him. The extra, unused cookie dough. Such a gift, to be able to cook for your son.

  19

  Usulután, El Salvador

  IN NEW ORLEANS, Joe performed his revolutionary missi
on in ten minutes at a post office, picking up an envelope that had been mailed to him there, care of “General Delivery.” A legal-size envelope, rather thick, sealed with too much glue. On his short bus trip to the airport the salty gulf air awakened memories of his younger selves, and he felt a twinge in his lower body. When he reached the airport and checked in he had two hours to kill admiring the bare legs of the woman tending the airport bar. High skirt, hallelujah, God bless America and the sexual revolution. A good time was had by all. He began to write a letter home.

  Now I’ve eaten so many durn cookies in the past 19 hours that I’m about to crumble. I must be the first guy who ever marched off to the Latin American wars loaded down with homemade cookies. Weeeeee! Well, it was a wonderful 2 weeks in the States. Sorry I was so inarticulate when we said goodbye, but I know you’ll understand. Forgot to tell you that my friends in El Salvador told me to be sure to say hello to y’all. I know they’ll be pleased (and surprised) to munch on a few cookies and brownies. As for me, that last Sunday nite supper ought to hold me for at least six months.

  Joe boarded a flight direct to Mexico City, and thence to San Salvador, and when he landed in that wartime capital the next morning he took a taxi, spotting National Guardsmen in force at several points near the airport. A state of martial readiness, as in Saigon, and a sense something awful could happen at any moment. In the center of the city he found a working public phone and called his contact and was told, “The entrance to the cemetery. We’ll be there in thirty minutes.” Forty-five minutes later Mauricio drove up to the cemetery gate in a dusty navy-blue Datsun. “Flor will be your new contact,” Mauricio told him, after he got in the car. “Lucky you.” He asked if Joe had the envelope, and Joe said yes and pulled it from his rucksack; Mauricio held it for a second and enjoyed the revolutionary mystery of its six ounces of weight and the American stamps and the United States address written on it, and smiled at it as if the power of the organized masses were somehow concentrated inside.

  Mauricio took Joe back to the refrigerator safe house, and Joe continued the long letter home he had started writing in New Orleans. He listed his location as San Salvador, Library, though the letter itself described a bucolic river setting and village maidens, a contradiction his mother and Calhoun did not fail to notice when they received the letter eight days later. Woke up this a.m. to the sound of the river and the buzzing of mosquitoes! After jogging the tide line, it was off to town this a.m. to count noses. So far, no one’s turned up. Almost noon and hopefully “Flower” will pick me up here at the “library” for “luncheon date” soon.

  The next morning, just after dawn, he heard a knock on his door, and before he could say “Adelante,” the door opened and he saw a short, fit woman with powerfully thick eyebrows, and brown-freckled cheeks and a round-tipped nose, and two black braids framing her face. “¿Lucas?” she asked.

  “Sí,” Joe said.

  “Vení,” she ordered, and Joe got up and stepped out of his room and into the refrigerator workshop. A group of five young men were coming in through the front door. More recruits from the college campuses and the reformatories, it seemed. Like good young troublemakers they brought a long wooden box into the dark space. They pried it open with a screwdriver and studied the contents: two M16s, a German G3, one automatic pistol and five .38-caliber revolvers. “It’s what they could give us,” Flor said. She was in charge and chose a weapon first: the automatic pistol, which she inspected, ejecting its cartridge expertly. After the rifles were claimed Joe was left with a .38 revolver.

  After some quick and rudimentary weapons instruction from Flor and another compa—“Don’t point it at me, pendejo!”—Flor announced the plan. They were going to ambush a local National Guard post that was perpetually understaffed (with but two soldiers), and liberate the weapons stored there. An hour later Lucas was on the other side of town, standing watch on a wide avenue, while Flor and the rest of the unit hit the post a block away. Joe heard a single shot, and a few moments later his new comrades were running toward him, carrying armfuls of freshly purloined M16s; they loaded them into a vehicle, driven by a compa who quickly sped away. At that moment, Joe saw a National Guard Jeep rolling toward them about three blocks away; he fired his revolver into the air, in the prearranged warning shot. Well, that feels pretty silly—and pretty useless. The Jeep slowed but was still advancing, so Joe/Lucas lowered his .38 and calmly aimed in the general direction of the Jeep. He fired one shot, though he was too far away to hit anything. He fired a second, and the two soldiers inside stumbled out and crawled away.

  Lucas began to walk backward, to join the other compas, and he heard one of them yell “¡Puta!” A National Guard truck had pulled up a half block behind the Jeep, and five soldiers were jumping out, and the young compa alongside him opened up with his M16, thank God, a sideways rain of covering fire. Joe fired a third shot and in this fashion Lucas and the compa protected the retreat of the remaining members of the unit, who dispersed into alleyways and later hid their weapons and walked across town, back to the safe house separately. Two hours later Joe knocked on the metal door of the safe house with the prearranged signal, and the door opened and he stepped inside. Flor beamed and he saw dimples under her freckled cheeks for the first time, and she said, “Todo un éxito.” It took Joe’s nervous and exhausted bilingual brain two seconds to remember that éxito meant success.

  Joe wrote a blasé letter home that said he was safe and bored in El Salvador. The only hint of the firefight was in the two words he gave as his location: Dodge City.

  * * *

  HIS REBEL FRIENDS, Joe soon discovered, employed the same method to plan their revolution that he used to write his novels: make it up as you go along. And so, just days after his first taste of true “action” (at last!), they told him he needed to get out of San Salvador immediately. He’d been seen on the street, a conspicuous gringo, firing a revolver no less. They sent him to the port city of La Libertad, the last tourist spot left in El Salvador, a place where it was still normal to see a wandering North American.

  * * *

  JOE WALKED THE FINAL BLOCK toward the address the compas had given him, and he saw another American walking toward him. A woman of about his age, with wind-catching bangs of unkempt blond hair and a cross dangling from her neck. She gave him a knowing and somewhat goofy smile that seemed of the Midwest. They walked past each other without saying a word, and he found the address, a very common-looking house with bars over the windows, and he knocked on the door, and stepped inside, not knowing that he was going to spend three very boring months there, doing little more than listening to the radio and writing letters home, and talking to the elderly man who ran the house, and the man’s grandson, and going out to the nearby beach to take long and pointless walks along the sand.

  * * *

  JOE’S MOTHER HAD GIVEN him a letter from Mafalda during his brief stay in Illinois; it described a strange, free “gypsy” life, in which she inhabited a tent outside the city where her children lived with their father. Now he wrote back to her, beginning with nonsensical descriptions of village maidens, along with mentioning the 7,000 dead this year in El Salvador. He said he was in the company of new friends. Who knows what they’re up to? I don’t ask, I don’t get involved, he wrote. Why shit, honey, I’d live in a whorehouse, search for diamonds, or smuggle cocaine, anything, before I’d become a goddam revolutionary.

  Reading in Ohio sometime later, Mafalda wasn’t impressed. His letters were empty of true emotion, or feelings expressed for her. Joe Sanderson was at play in the world, in different countries, but always in the same place in relation to her: a voice inside an envelope. Once upon a time we were kindred spirts. You taught me to love the wandering free woman inside me. But now? This relationship isn’t going anywhere.

  She did not write to him again.1

  * * *

  EVERY DAY THE OWNER’S eleven-year-old grandson Werner arrived with food for Joe, and for a dog who lived in the spaciou
s two-story house. Joe was free to wander the city, but given his semi-clandestine status, he did not seek out friendships, or hang out at bars, and he lamented the fact that he did not feel like writing a novel because this would be the perfect place to do it. He was inside a book plot now and had no idea what might happen next. At varying intervals he traveled to the post office in San Salvador to pick up his mail, which often included a thick envelope from his mother with U.S. newspaper clippings about El Salvador; sometimes they had been opened, clumsily, by a police officer or mail spy. He returned to La Libertad and waited for Werner’s daily visit, which came every afternoon at about three. Werner had coloring and features that suggested Morocco, and Joe began to try to engage him in conversation, which was difficult because the boy was clearly afraid of him, and Joe sensed Werner knew he was a guerrilla fighter in hiding.

  “Do you know why I’m here?” Joe asked the boy one day.

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m circling the world. I stopped here because I’ve seen so much I needed to rest. This is the calmest place I could find. Do you know how many countries I’ve been to?”

  “No.”

  “About seventy. I think. Maybe eighty.”

  Werner narrowed his Arab eyes, as if he thought Joe might be taking him for a fool. On his walk through town the next day Joe found a stationery store that also sold textbooks and school supplies, and he purchased a small folding map of the world and brought it back and when he saw Werner he opened it up.

  “I’ve been almost everywhere on this map,” Joe said. “Pick a spot, and I’ll tell you about it.”