The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  “Yes, we know.”

  “Are we going to attack again?”

  “No. We’re pulling out.”

  Lucas and about fifteen rebels made their way out of the city into the hills, walking on footpaths into a rural darkness, following the sounds of feet breaking branches and plopping in the mud, until they began to see the first lemon radiance of dawn on the eastern horizon, and they heard a smattering of voices, mostly male, and they entered a clearing in the mountain brush, and Joe saw the shadows and heard the voices of about sixty men and women. Lucas and his comrades joined these rebels in sitting down on a patch of dirt to rest, and when the sun rose fully there was no reveille, no call to battle stations or orders of any kind, but rather more sitting around while the chiefs waited for information and debated what to do next. Joe took out his small notebook. Whole show was an unnecessary rout. And yet with zone quiet all p.m., no return was mounted. Sat around eating oranges, tortillas, smoking cigs, talking. Some FAL and M16 training but nothing very disciplined and poor guard mounted. Gotta do better than this to give folks a reason to come out and join the insurrection. Word spread in the camp of what had happened in the rest of the country: In the east, in Morazán, an attack on the barracks in the regional capital had fizzled out, and the compas in Chalatenango were on the retreat. The final offensive had been defeated.

  Lucas was ordered to slip back into the city. Unarmed and alone, again. Not for reconnaissance this time, but rather to return to the refrigeration workshop and hide out and await orders. Two days later, he walked to the post office and sent his father and his mother and stepfather letters, each topped with the code 1200, and in these letters he did not attempt to describe, in any way, the battles he had witnessed, the gunfire and the dead. He simply wanted to communicate the fact that he was safe. However, in the letter to his father he included the fourteen pages of notes he’d scribbled during the offensive. Just a few things I’d like you to take care of for a while, Dad. Field notes from a revolution. Joe expected his father would find his writing in these notes to be largely indecipherable, and he hoped Milt would not try too hard to read them.

  In Arizona, Milt studied the pages with the patience of the veteran entomologist he was: with a magnifying glass he was able to make out Yanira shot and Joe’s description of the rebel girl’s corpse, but not much else. There were many words in Spanish, but he knew of no Spanish speaker he could trust to help him translate something so sensitive—the notes appeared to be evidence of his son’s involvement with a rebel army fighting a government allied with the United States. Milt was worried by a few entries that were scribbled in tortured loops and lines, as if Joe had been sitting in the dark, or under fire when he wrote them. On other pages Joe’s scrawl resembled Milt’s own old-man’s knot-writing. Milt wondered what Cuart. San Carlos meant, and who M.E. was but he finally gave up and filed the notes away, as Joe had asked him to.

  * * *

  MILT TRIED TO BE especially thoughtful and precise when writing back. Now that he was retired he had taken to typing his missives to his son, without knowing that his ex-wife Virginia was doing the same thing. Both of Joe’s parents wrote long letters describing their daily lives in northern Arizona and in Champaign-Urbana, and during the next two months Joe spent living underground his letters from home were his chief source of entertainment.

  I still get tinges of loneliness now and then, which last for only a few minutes, Milt wrote. My gimmick for overcoming the feeling is to get in the pickup and take off to where there are people. I’ve discovered that all they need to do is talk, not necessarily to have any substance. I exchange comments over purchasing a doughnut with the man walking the dog, the coffee lady on the track in Buffalo Park. This morning I decided to walk down the road here and the former mechanic at Kmart recognized me and stopped to talk. It seems to work.

  His mother wrote: We ate at a reserved table at the Village dinner last night and Kathy said she felt like a “queen in the dining room.” Of course that will get her more invitations from Grandma and Grandpa. She will be here all day Monday and Tuesday and start school again on Wednesday. In the meantime, she’s gotten out all her second-grade workbooks … Your old friend Jane stopped by and brought us an apple pie last weekend when she heard our neighbor Mr. Love had died. Jane was one of his former girlfriends, a woman he met at an Urbana construction site. I am returning her pan with a raspberry yogurt cream pie in it for dessert this afternoon when we have lunch with her.

  Joe read and reread these letters, and in the long silence in the safe house he had time to think about the person he was, Joe David Sanderson, son of Virginia and Milt, and how he possessed qualities inherited and learned from both. The silent observer that was his father, scientifically inclined, the thinker who relishes his solitude. His mother, among people, at the service of those around her. He remembered driving through the empty farm roads of central Illinois, and all the highways and footpaths and rail lines and air routes that led him to El Salvador, and not for the first time he felt he was the only man in the world who truly understood the love and the hurt in both places; in the prosperous north and the hungry south. He imagined his mother here, in El Salvador, baking a raspberry yogurt pie, and imagined taking Noodles to see the wonders of the Illinois State Fair. Cotton candy and faces covered with pink sugar, and the sawdust-covered floors of the Ag pavilions, and giant Illinois swine, corn-fed.

  Joe’s mind wandered and wandered.

  The cinder-block walls of this room, San Salvador outside. Alone, in a bed, remembering the eyes and the waists of his lovers. The drive-in, a boat in the Kingston Marina, the cabin, Jane, the hotels, the houseboat. It still works. Sleep. The dirt tossed on the rebel girl’s eyes, a scene from a horror flick, buried under a lawn. Dirt in my eyes too, one day, maybe. What bullets do to the flesh of boys and girls playing at war. Take me up into the hills and I’ll be an Indian and you’ll be the cowboy, and I’ll climb up into a tree and ambush you with an AR-15. Run away, run away. Follow the broad-shouldered woman leading a neighborhood into combat. I followed her like a boy. I’ve always been a boy. A boy up to this moment. A boy to the women who loved me. That’s why Jane slapped me in Chiapas: she saw the letter I was writing Mafalda. What an idiot I was. Now I can see.

  Rebel messengers arrived to deliver news that was mixed and contradictory. Fito said Lucas might ship out with a guerrilla column in the east next week. Afraid our postal service is going to get even more raggedy in the near future before it gets better, but so it goes, Joe wrote home. Everybody battening down the hatches in these parts, the usual tropical storm imminent … One thing I need to say: despite the deterioration of local scene, do not contact embassy. If I stub my toe, friends will contact y’all … A week passed and he wrote again. Just a quick note to let you know I’ll soon be on my way as scheduled, math books under my arm, ready to explore the fascinating world of Einstein. If only my old high-school teachers could see me now! Unsure which direction I’ll be heading, so be patient. Lots of possibilities have opened up for post-graduate work and I’m not sure which to take up: between my math studies and a little lepidoptery work in the boondocks I’ll be very occupied. After he sent the letter he was told he’d have to wait again.

  Word came that he would be needed for an intelligence-gathering operation. Lucas would do anything. He was prepared to walk through fusillades of machine-gun fire to escape this room.

  * * *

  THEY SENT HIM to the other side of the country. To the city of Usulután. His job was to scope out the main military base in town, for a future attack, and to get a general sense of the weaponry the army had at its disposal there. They figured a U.S. vet like Lucas would know what he was looking at.

  * * *

  JOE WALKED AROUND THE BASE, taking notes on two sheets of ruled paper ripped from a notebook, making a sketched map of the strongpoints at the edge of the base, lists of armored vehicles, maps of 90-mm-cannon emplacements. When he was done, he walked to a restaur
ant and met his two guerrilla contacts, Rigoberto and Pablo. They had just ordered a couple of steaks when suddenly an army sergeant in a metal helmet burst through the door, followed by two other soldiers, each of them taking three or four long strides into the restaurant, toward Joe’s table; the first grabbed Joe by the neck as he sat, flinging him to the ground wrestling style.

  “¡Hijueputa! ¡Documentos¡ ¡Enseñame tus documentos, hijueputa!”

  Joe said in Spanish he couldn’t produce his documents with a hand on his neck, and the sergeant grabbed him by the belt and shirt and lifted him up and hustled him outside, knocking over two tables more on the way out. He pushed Joe down onto the half-paved sidewalk outside, handcuffed him and reached into Joe’s pockets. As he pulled out Joe’s wallet, the two pages of notes slipped out and fell onto the gravelly ground before Joe’s eyes. A death sentence as soon as the sergeant read them and realized what they were. He heard the sergeant standing over him tell a private, “Agarrá esa mierda,” but before the private could comply and retrieve the sheets a truck drove past, just a few yards away, and Joe’s notes were sucked up in the vacuum created by the truck’s undercarriage, and the incriminating sheets were lost in a cloud of windblown street trash. The sergeant lifted Joe to his feet, and pushed him into the back of a truck, next to Rigoberto and Pablo, and Joe had time to realize that despite the miraculous escape his notes had made, the three of them would soon be executed anyway. What a way to fucking go. Be a stoic sonofabitch and don’t give away anything. This will hit Mom hard. She’ll have to tell Kathy. The look on their faces, oh fuck, fuck.

  Fifteen minutes later, after some rude questioning of Joe and a few slaps and kicks of Rigoberto and Pablo, the sergeant seemed to accept Joe’s explanation of his presence in Usulután. I was just hitchhiking across the Pan-American Highway, trying to get to Honduras, and these two young guys started talking to me. I always like to make friends on the road. Which way is the bus station, I should be on my way.

  * * *

  THE ERP HONCHOS shifted Lucas from safe house to safe house on the outskirts of the cities of Usulután and San Miguel, where he stayed with groups of other city folk preparing to join a rebel column in the mountains. A university student, a nurse, a doctor from Mexico who was slightly younger than Joe. They were cared for by working families loyal to the revolution. Joe had time to write three different letters recounting his recent, brief detention in Usulután. To Steve: Was sitting in a restaurant with “friends” when shit hit the fan. Machine guns. Cuffed and jugged, then inexplicably freed. Usually these are one-way deep-six trips so I figure everything from here on out is extra, a luxury, on the house! I done used up my nine lives long ago. To his father: Luck finally ran out last weekend, then immediately swung back in my favor (getting adept at clinging to the rebounds!). Picked up at gunpoint by the local Tonton Macoutes, cuffed, then inexplicably released (with apologies). However, one glimpse of Satan’s red cape was all I needed.

  Joe was more cryptic in his letter to his mother and Calhoun: I sure hope you folks are taking it as easy as I am. Haven’t put in a lick for days. What happened is this: the Welcome Wagon finally got around to paying me a visit (silver bracelets are a special item for strangers these days). However, I’m a busy man—places to go and people to see—so I quickly declined their gracious hospitality … and promptly used an old ticket on the Underground Railroad. Well, I must say compared to the old Civil War routine in Kansas and elsewhere this is a really classy setup. Get my a.m. coffee and cigarettes, stuffed with food, daily newspapers, radio/TV, the works! The conductors are top-notch, accommodations at all stops are excellent (sometimes I even get to wash the dishes and swat the kids), so all in all I couldn’t be in better hands … Shall bring y’all up to date soon as me and my pals get our fill of chasing butterflies in the boondocks. A week later he wrote a new letter. Hmmm. This getting pampered like an old dowager has its limits. Getting bored and restless but can’t budge until the train’s ready to move. Play card games and whatnot with the kids and they beat me every time! Kathy didn’t teach me a durn thing. His next letter to Steve said he was in the eastern third of the country, where dozens of bridges have been blown out and roads cut, and where much of the populace had been without power for weeks.

  In Illinois, the Sanderson family received these letters and were quietly and privately alarmed. But they placed great value on keeping their composure; there was rarely any weeping, complaining or raised voices in any Sanderson household. They rarely, if ever, panicked about anything. So they did not call one another to agonize over Joe’s recent brush with the authorities of a murderous regime, or try to piece together what exactly Joe might be up to in his Latin American war zone. At their next gathering, at Steve’s place for dinner, Calhoun was the only one who brought up the subject.

  “Your brother, in his last letter to us, he said something about ‘the Underground Railroad.’”

  “Yes, he told me the same thing,” Steve said. “I’m not sure what he means by that.”

  “And he sounded well when you talked to him on the phone,” Virginia said. “What was it, a week ago?”

  “Yes. The same. For those five minutes.”

  Virginia waited, but Steve added nothing more. She read his face and saw a big-brother annoyance with his little brother. Steve and Virginia were powerless to do anything to help Joe other than to send him money when he asked for it, and now he made a point of saying he didn’t need money at all. Underground Railroad? Butterflies? Boondocks? Virginia allowed herself to wonder where Joe might be at that precise moment, a Sunday night in Illinois and a Sunday night in El Salvador. Was he being smuggled into a countryside without bridges or electricity? Who exactly were the math professors? If Virginia had been the type to vent her emotions, she would have begun by complaining about the childish tone of Joe’s letters. His lighthearted descriptions of violent and deadly encounters. She understood it was his way of telling her not to worry. But she was clipping the newspapers and watching the news every day: no other Republican woman and member of the Daughters of the American Revolution in central Illinois knew as much about El Salvador as she did. This is a very, very serious situation, but he plays the jaunty boy in his letters to me. If they could kill four American churchwomen they could kill anybody. I didn’t think I could be as annoyed with him as I am now. But keep him close. Continue clipping news of battles and executions from the newspaper, and send them to El Salvador. Tell him about the spring planting, the news from Kansas. About his niece who never stops asking about him.

  * * *

  THE NEXT LETTER Milt received from Joe began, I continue to wait for the next train to leave my deserted island, and Milt was annoyed, because trains don’t leave islands. That’s a mixed metaphor, son. Joe was more forthcoming in his letters to his father, though he never did explicitly say he was with the guerrillas. Joe was with a family that supported the rebels, as far as Milt could tell by reading between the lines. His companions included a girl of eleven and her mother, who were about to join the revolution too. The girl and her mother recounted stories of burned villages and army patrols and hiding from the bombs of the Salvadoran Air Force, Joe wrote. Joe mused about what he should take on his journey into the boondocks, by which Milt understood the mountains, because all guerrilla armies fought in mountains. Books? Of course. Which ones? I finally came up with a Spanish/English dictionary. And rather than additional books (Spinoza, Blatchley’s Coleoptera, etc.) I opted for three empty notebooks: a few sparse journal entries mixed with poetry ought to be adequate to maintain sanity, along with being economical weightwise. In all, my “worldlies” have been reduced to ten pounds of non-essentials that I will happily chuck in a pinch! Actually the only crucial items in my possession will be (1) glasses and (2) El Salvadoran butterfly net, by which he meant his weapon, Milt gathered. Otherwise, naked as I came, naked I can leave! Oh yes, plus about $40 tucked away someplace.

  After twenty years on the roads of the world, Milt
’s son had reached an exalted bumming state. He was traveling exceedingly light, with no need for cash, while having the absolutely most glorious adventure an American lover of free peoples could imagine. Had any other American achieved such heights of hitchhiking excellence? No, Joe was the champion. These thoughts brought a smile to Milt’s face that stayed there as he walked through Buffalo Park in Flagstaff. He marveled at the fact that his son, who was approaching forty, could be in El Salvador and remember a book as obscure as Blatchley’s Coleoptera, a 1910 survey of the beetles in the state of Indiana. It was a foundational text of Midwestern entomology and Milt remembered Joe as a boy sitting on the living room floor with Dr. Sanderson’s copy, studying the pages filled with species names and drawings of thoraxes and abdominal segments and spiky insect tibias and femurs.

  * * *

  JOE’S NEXT LETTER to Steve said he was setting off on the “Underground Railroad” with his “math professors” in two days. He gave a set of instructions for Steve and his mother for mailing future letters to El Salvador. They were to write to a “Leopoldo” at an address in the capital. If possible they were to address their letters in longhand, and a variety of longhand. Don’t use my name on the envelope address. Stagger mail rather than sending always on the same day of the week, he wrote. Sorry for the nonsense, but I don’t want to get my friends in trouble. Joe said he would likely not be able to write as often as the two or three letters a week he’d been sending.