The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  * * *

  JOE SAW HIS OLD FRIEND, the head of the radio station, one of the few men in the rebel army who was as tall as he was. “Puta, Santiago, I’ve been wounded,” Lucas said. Joe’s Spanish had returned to him and he handed Santiago the ID of the dead soldier from the crossroads, and also the coins and bills in his pocket. “Here, buy yourself some cigarettes,” he said to Santiago, because even now Joe knew he might soon die. He might be the next compa to go in a hole dug by a burial detail. One of the rebels came up alongside him with the 90-mm gun, and showed it to him. See, Lucas, we got it. A wound to his side, just above the groin. He might not make it. No, no, no, I have to get back home. He might not make it, and this thought caused the water to evaporate from his mouth. “Agua, por favor, agua.” But they won’t give him water, he sees the doctor shaking his head. No water. Instead dabs from a wet rag on his parched lips, his reaching tongue. Más, más. And now they were carrying him, and he could feel meaty and taut biceps and triceps and wrist muscles holding him up, and he wished they could just lay him down, because the act of being carried was sending waves of pain from his wound. Into his groin, and into organs inside and below his ribs, and up his neck and into his head.

  Soy Lucas. My name is Joe. Time lost its meaning and his existence was a wound, jagged flesh, severed tendons, the pulse of singed nerve endings. How long had they been carrying him? Two minutes, five, ten? They placed him on a litter. The same one the corpse was on yesterday? The same one? The Mexican doctor, Doc J, was over him. Eduardo is his nom de guerre, but I call him Doc J. “This isn’t too serious, Lucas. Not at all.” The doctor knew that if he was back in his native Monterrey, Mexico, in the fully supplied emergency rooms and hospitals where he’d been a resident not too many years ago, they would sew up Lucas and drip blood into him, and he would almost certainly live and recover fairly quickly. But here there was no blood to give him, only a little plasma, and this made Lucas’s prospects very poor. He was so big, this man. Twice the size, it seemed, of the average compa. Doc J had a basic surgery kit, a few surgical clamps, and now he looked down at his patient, who was alert, not yet in shock. And the patient said, “Don’t worry, doctor. Don’t worry. I know you’re going to do your best to save me.” At that moment, and in the years that followed, the doctor understood that his wounded patient wanted him to be free of any guilt or remorse. The younger compas died afraid and confused, gritting their teeth and weeping, but this older man, this North American, he had seen as much life as a platoon of child compas. The doctor worked, and when he was done and looked back at the wounded patient, he remembered their camp conversations. The intelligent feel of those talks. About religions and about the science of flight. Chess matches. The bombardment began again, followed by the rain-sound of distant gunfire. The enemy was advancing toward them. “¡Alerta! ¡Alerta!” Time to move out. Joe heard the gunfire too, and the doctor’s words, “Move this one as delicately as you can.” Joe looked down across his body as he was lifted into a type of portable hammock. Two long bamboo poles holding up a net. He had seen many wounded compas carried in this way. An old man, very short, carried one end. And looking up over his legs, he saw another old man holding the other end. Peasants. Campesinos. Porters. They aid the revolution with the gnarled muscles of their shoulders and backs, and they carried the gringo, uphill and downhill, and he could hear them grunting. This one is too big. Too big for us. Yes, I’m five eleven in my socks. Too tall. They had tied the bag of plasma to one of the bamboo poles. “Keep it high,” the doctor said. But now they were marching downhill, and the bag slipped down. It was resting on Joe’s legs, and he slipped into shock and could not speak, and could barely see. He was very afraid. The burial detail. Darkness coming. The blanket of soil over me. Darkness here, darkness forever. In my room alone in the dark, afraid, Mom and Dad on the other side of the door. Mom and Steve and Dad. He was slipping away, but his mother became a lucid thought: the desire to write her one more letter. One more letter. Explain everything. The tip of a pen scratching words on paper, his words, to Mom. He would stay awake to write that letter, to tell her why he always left home, even though he loved her more than all the roads and all the countries he’d seen. Mom, it’s me, Joe.

  He heard water splashing around him. They were crossing a river. The rainy season hadn’t truly started yet. The river was low. The feet of the porters were plunking into deeper water. The two old men carrying him made it to the other side. They stopped to rest. And they set Joe down, and Joe rested too, because being carried was exhausting him. He listened to the trickle of water. He could not open his eyes, but he could hear the river, and then distant explosions, and then quiet, and then the river again. Flowing. If he could write a letter home, he’d say, Mom, Dad, I hear the river. Trees too. A gust blowing through the crackling leaves. I can feel the branches of a tall tree moving, its sway, all its leaves catching wind. Swish, swish. The water. Moving, trickling, just like home. Like the Sangamon. Insects drawn to the moisture. I can feel them. The music of water squeezing through paths between the rocks, the sound reaching his ears, turning dimmer. The music of the water.

  * * *

  WITH THE ARMY UNITS advancing toward them, the burial detail worked very quickly. They interred Lucas on the banks of the Río Sapo, still wearing his glasses. They tossed dirt over the arms folded across his torso, and saw dirt fill up the space between his fingers; but, as they did with other corpses, they looked away when it was time to cover his face. With shells beginning to fall nearby, they took a last look at the upturned dirt of the grave, crossed themselves and retreated eastward and upward, to higher ground and to parapets made from stacked stones.

  * * *

  LUCAS’S RUCKSACK, and all the written words inside, ended up in the possession of Santiago. The Venezuelan radio man looked at the words in black, blue and red ink. An entire book. Lucas’s story. On May 6, more than a week after he was buried, and when it was clear the army’s advance into the heart of rebel territory had been defeated, the rebels broadcast the news of Lucas’s death. One more compañero who gave his life for the revolution. Santiago had also retrieved Joe’s passport and was looking at it when he read Lucas’s real name over the airwaves for the first time. Joseph David Sanderson. The United Press International reporter monitoring the broadcast in San Salvador was a bilingual salvadoreño who had never heard the name Sanderson before. In the modulated distortion of Santiago’s transmitted voice, he heard “Joseph David Anderson,” and it was with that name that the death of the American who had joined the ranks of the rebel FMLN army was first reported in English.

  * * *

  OF THE PEOPLE in Urbana who were closest to Joe, it was his friend Jim Adams who heard the news first. Read out by an announcer on CNN. Jim called Steve, who telephoned the CNN headquarters in Atlanta. “I think my friend just heard a report about my brother being killed.” A very kind intern read Steve the text of the wire service dispatch from El Salvador: “Rebel radio reported yesterday; an American fighting alongside Salvadoran guerrillas; killed by government troops; Joseph David Anderson; age and hometown not available; died in the village of Poza Honda; first came to El Salvador in 1980; participated in the January 1981 ‘final offensive,’ before moving to rebel camps in Morazán province.” The first and second name together, the dates. It had to be Joe. Oh little brother, what happened to you? Joe, what have you done? I have to tell Mom. And call Dad. I have to tell Mom in person. Drive over there. Bring Carol and Kathy too, for support, to give her a hug. Steve drove across Champaign-Urbana in a daze, his family with him, and when Virginia opened the door and saw her older son, his wife and their daughter standing there, unannounced, on a Friday afternoon, with grim expressions on their faces, she knew it could only be one thing.

  “Joe,” she said.

  “Now, well, Mom, nothing has been confirmed.”

  Nothing was ever confirmed. Joe’s rebel friends did not write to her, she received no official statement from her own governm
ent, or from the United States Embassy. The most eloquent and convincing evidence of Joe’s death was the absence of his letters. Joe had always written home from his travels. Funny letters, bawdy letters. Letters in which he spoke of being lonely, hungry. Describing sunsets in Laos, babies in Africa, house fires in Peru, hurricanes in Florida. Letters telling her when he would be home. In the days and weeks that followed she looked at the mail carrier as one looks at a mortician. Instead of a new message from Joe, the mailman brought condolence letters. From old friends of Joe’s, from friends here in Urbana. A nice note from Roger Ebert, the dear. At dinner, she silently clasped hands with Annabel. But she never held a funeral for her son, or a service, how could she, without his body, without him. She never learned how he died or where he was buried. The local newspaper called, but she could not speak to them. Steve did, and the newspaper ran a picture of Joe that Steve gave them; in Nicaragua, a smiling tourist shot. The hunk in the sunshine. “Local Man Dies Among Leftists in El Salvador.” When Virginia finally talked to her ex-husband on the phone about it, the old tensions between them returned. He blames me. How could he? He doesn’t say it, but the tone of his voice implies it. “Well, now we won’t have to worry about Joe anymore,” she answered back, because for years she had lived with the daily suffering, the idea that he might not return home, and now that nightmare had come true. Her baby boy. Smart and curious. Needing protecting. Needing to be fed. Let me cook for you, Joe, the things you like. Sitting at my table. A boy, eating hearty, growing. The man he became, rudderless but with so much joy, fighting off his loneliness by moving, one place to the next. Years, decades. His life of discoveries, and his desire to share them with me. He went to all those places so he could tell me stories. Beautiful boy I dressed in blue overalls that matched the color of his eyes. The man he became. Storyteller. I was his most loyal reader, it made him happy to write to me. I can feel it in these letters. My shoeboxes filled with his envelopes. Letters to me. Courageous boy, setting off on his own down the Sangamon River, across the oceans. I accepted it, I saw the beauty in his wanderings. I understood you, son.

  I loved you.

  I love you.

  The unshakable, recurring thought that he might be alive, somewhere, out there. That it would all turn out to be one last, big prank. That he might walk up to the door. That a letter from him might arrive in the mail. One more envelope, the address in his handwriting, and the words on the first page. Dear Mom.

  * * *

  SANTIAGO STORED THE CONTENTS of Lucas’s rucksack in a safe place: Joe’s journal, and a few pages ripped from a small notebook, and a few articles he had written. When the rainy season had set in and the army’s latest offensive had ended, he entrusted Lucas’s writings to a compa courier. Santiago was looking ahead. He was building the archive of the revolution every day. Tapes of their broadcasts, photographs, typed-up scripts, and news articles. Lucas’s writings would be gathered into this larger archive, stored in a safe place, far from the war. The young man carried the pack on his back, following routes Lucas and many other compas had followed, away from Morazán, around a volcano to the flatlands of San Miguel, around and through army checkpoints, hiding the notebooks under mangoes and plantains, and then to the coast, and finally the Gulf of Fonseca. The courier handed the package to a fisherman who was sympathetic to the revolution, and that fisherman, who had ferried many messages and weapons and people across this waterway for the rebels, launched his skiff at night, hidden by mangroves, and made the quick trip across the ocean waves to Nicaragua.

  For the years that followed, Joe’s writings remained in a file cabinet in Managua. In a proto-archive kept by friends of the Salvadoran revolution. Lucas’s writings were stored in a protected place, as were the letters Joe wrote to his mother, which she filed and moved to plastic boxes. Joe’s accounts of his travels endured in these pages. All the wondrous and weird incidents he had seen, and his memories of the rivers and the mountain ranges he had crossed, and the suffering and the human resilience he had witnessed during his two decades bumming. In these pages, Joe remained the living man he was, the writer who hoped to make art from it all. The sentences he scribbled, the metaphors he crafted, the people he met and described. Rants, anecdotes, soliloquies, observations, translated words, scenes. Preserved in his Illinois cursive, on sheets held together with staples and steel spirals, or folded inside envelopes. On paper resisting humidity, fungi, moths and silverfish. His words, waiting to be read.

  NOTES

  1. Urbana, Illinois, U.S.A.

  1. So here I am, reading a novel about me. And for some reason, the fictional me is a little kid. Well, you can only expect strange things when you’re in the hands of a Guatemalan dude, which is what the Author of this book is, despite the bald eagle on his passport, and the native English that flows from his tongue. My travels taught me that the Central American people are as friendly and romantic a lot as you’d hope to meet; they also possess a lovably dark sense of wit. And without those qualities, no writer would be able to tell my story.

  2. To my salvadoreño brothers and sisters reading this: You see? My mother, your mother. No son tan diferentes. They cook, they worry, they work. Mine in the garden by the barn, walking past curtains of green corn; yours using a metate to grind the corn. My mother was from a farm town that had its own wars, its own massacres buried in its history, believe it or not. We had our Bleeding Kansas, you had your 1932. La misma mierda, the same burning merry-go-round, as far as I can tell.

  3. Interesting. I loved Mom, but I never made her a character in my books. When I wrote my novels, my heroes were all confident and bumbling American men (like me). I’ll admit, now, in hindsight, to being a chauvinist pig. (A girlfriend or two did call me that.) I was a product of my age. We Americans are different, now, as a people. Better in some ways, and worse off in others.

  2. Champaign, Illinois

  1. Sorry. I can’t help myself. This writer, he’s being too subtle for my taste. I was always pretty direct when it came to writing. So I’m gonna let you in on something that’s pretty obvious to me, and to my Salvadoran friends, and anyone else who knows how my story turns out: All this shooting is going to come in handy later. One day when there’s something bigger than squirrels to shoot at, and when the “squirrels” start shooting back at me, so to speak.

  2. My brother still has the newspaper clipping: “On the program, Joey will display part of his collection of more than 400 butterflies.” It’s true, I liked being famous. It’s this sort of tall feeling, very pleasant and light. The Author wants to be famous too. He hopes this book will make him famous. It’s a powerful drug, and once you get a taste, it will make you do crazy things.

  3. And they’re still there! My own little scientific legacy. Even the silver-spotted skipper I caught at the beginning of this novel. See? The Author wasn’t making that up. Not entirely.

  3. Piatt County, Illinois

  1. My brother told the Author that I always identified with “the underdog,” which was maybe his polite way of saying people who were not “white.” But I thought the point of a novel was to make the hero (me) look heroic. Where is this going?

  2. Reading this, you all might think we were sedated, or that we’d all taken some sort of innocence potion. But the Author, not being one of us, is being a little too respectful in telling our story. Lots of other, bad stuff was happening. Mostly involving hard drinking, schoolyard sadists and guys who didn’t care when a girl said no. And of course that confounding race thing that no white people ever talked about. I knew all this, of course. Or I sensed it. So I went into my own little world, which is what this next passage coming up is all about.

  5. Chicago. Mexico City

  1. Jim Adams told the Author this story. The Author sees it, I think, as my first act of rebellion. In a city that had no graffiti whatsoever (imagine that), we were going to shock everyone with a symbol of the secret force no one ever talked about in our polite Midwestern town. Sex.

&nbs
p; 2. My high school graduation present was an entire country and me in it all by my lonesome. Any surprise I ended up addicted to the road later? First road-bumming lesson: Feed myself and stay out of trouble. Second: Take in the sights, and make friends quickly.

  3. Next bumming rule: Don’t be afraid to get a little lost.

  6. Gainesville, Florida. Hanover, Indiana

  1. I guess this is what you call foreshadowing. Being a good literary character, I foreshadowed my own future story by seeking out those anti-communist Cuban fighters. If they had invited me on one of their ships to join their army, I would have, in a heartbeat. I was a Republican then too, so the story would have been totally different, and I’d probably be writing this novel myself, from a condo in Miami.

  2. Of all the advice I ever got about writing, only Harlan Hubbard’s truly made sense to me. Go out and live. Drift down a river. Scribble down some notes. For better or worse, that’s pretty much the way I worked for the rest of my life.

  7. Terre Haute, Indiana. Clarksville, Tennessee. Miami

  1. And now, at last, the true bumming begins.

  8. Maroon Town, Jamaica. Kingstown, Saint Vincent. Imbaimadai, British Guiana

  1. Bumming Commandment One: If someone offers you a free place to sleep, take it with a smile. Don’t sneer or make a face, even if the accommodations ain’t exactly ideal.

  2. My first time under arrest! And definitely not the last. The Author, I take it, is happy to see me locked up, with the taint of crime hovering over me. Give the hero an edge, let his beard grow a bit, make him a bit of a rascal. Yeah, I get it. Plus, this actually happened.