The Fighting Man (1993)

by Seymour, Gerald

  Behind the gates, a gardener splashed water from a hose haphazardly over the colour of the geranium beds. On the porch patio, a man lounged on a chair and read the day’s edition of La Prensa Libre and gazed at the photographs of the girls of elite society. Inside the front hall, a man had thrown back the floor mats and used a rush broom to sweep the dirt towards the front door and listened to Latin rock on Radio Conga, 99.7FM.

  The gardener and the man sitting and the man who swept the floor all heard the scream.

  The scream was muffled, carried from the basement of the villa and through the closed door at the bottom of the basement steps and through the closed door at the top of the steps and down the corridor that led to the kitchen and into the hallway. Colonel Arturo sweated, not because he felt guilt at the crying scream, but because the closed doors and the lack of ventilation built the heat in the basement. There was a body close to his feet where he leaned against the wall, a mess of rag clothes that were stained and limbs that lay awkwardly. There was breath still in the body, spurting and occasional. He watched the work of the young man whom he knew as Benedicto. It was the fourth time in that session that Benedicto had hooded the second Indian who lay full length on the floor. They had still not learned what they needed to know. Each time the hood was removed from the head of the Indian the question was asked, and each time they faced the dumb silence, and when they pulled back the hair to lift the head and cover it again with the hood then there was the scream.

  There had been three, one injured. The one who was injured was now a lost cadaver in the tree canopy of the forest of the foothills between the Cuchumatanes mountains and the Petén jungle.

  There had been two, but the one who now lay against the wall was beyond further questioning.

  The remaining creature was of importance to Colonel Arturo. He had the report from the troops lifted in the previous afternoon to the site of a crashed aircraft. The wings of the aircraft, severed and clear of the fire, had been examined. Recent paintwork had been scraped off but still there had been no insignia marks overpainted. It was important to Colonel Arturo to have the testimony of the Indians who had witnessed the landing then gone to scavenge the aircraft’s wreckage. He had assumed that the sight of a man spiralling down from the helicopter would have encouraged the survivors to talk of what they had seen, but he was incorrect in his assessment. They called the hood the capucha. The wrists of the Indian who lay in the centre of the basement floor were bound behind his back. His ankles were trussed. When the hood of latex rubber was over the head of the Indian then the young man, Benedicto, tightened a length of string around the neck of the hood and reduced the air supply, and he stamped onto the back of the Indian to make his lungs heave for oxygen that was not available. When the young man, Benedicto, believed that the Indian was losing consciousness then he loosened the string at the neck of the hood and drew it clear and turned the Indian’s head and splashed water from a bucket onto the Indian’s face. When the Indian had recovered, when he could breathe again, then the capucha was used the next time. If Colonel Arturo were to know who had landed, what they had taken from the aircraft that had successfully touched down, then the Indian on the floor and with his mouth bubbling in the water pools from the bucket must live.

  A dribble seeped from between the lips of the Indian beside the wall.

  There was a meeting that he was late for.

  ‘You understand the importance . . . ?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The information is . . .’

  A careless smile from the young man called Benedicto. ‘You will have what you need to know, my promise.’

  The hood was off. The water had been splashed onto the coarse pallor of the Indian’s face. The young man knelt in the water and whispered the question into the ear of the Indian. Colonel Arturo went out through the basement door and closed it after him. He climbed the steps and closed after him the door in the corridor that led to the kitchen. He heard the scream as he passed the man who swept the hall floor, and he heard the scream again as he stepped out into the sunlight of the porch patio where a guard swung his chair upright and stood in respect, and he heard the scream the last time as he walked across the tarmac to his car and stepped over the hose used by a gardener for his watering.

  There had been two days in which he could have gone to Zeppo, but Zeppo had found the honeycomb in a tree. The big man with the gut hanging across the trouser support of his belt had found the honeycomb in the crook of a tree.

  Gord could have told him. Gord should have told him.

  . . . Zeppo had lain two days in the blanket that was his bedding, wrapped around with a groundsheet, with the rain lightly dripping on him while his stomach bellowed in diarrhoea. He had lain for the two days, unmoving and moaning, except for the times when he found the strength to dive for the trees round the clearing where Groucho had dug the deep pit only for Zeppo’s use.

  Gord could have told him that a honeycomb was the certain way to the runs and the cramps, should have told him.

  Two days after he had come clean to Jorge that he did not know how to operate the TPO-50 flame thrower, after two days of sitting, brooding in the camp, Gord took three precious pills from his store.

  He crossed the clearing.

  He left his own side of the clearing, his stores packed neat and precise in his backpack that rested against the wheel of the cart, for the side where Zeppo and Harpo and Groucho had parked themselves. He had thought that Jorge would apply the ointment, work the reconciliation, and Jorge had turned his face from the problem, as if it was something men should be big enough to sort for themselves. Jorge was gone from the camp, had taken food for a day, had gone ahead.

  They watched him cross the clearing. Zeppo was sitting up, Harpo was crouched beside him, Groucho was opening a tin of Meals Ready to Eat.

  There was the growl rumble of Zeppo’s stomach.

  The ants moved in column across Zeppo’s legs, scurrying on the groundsheet that blocked their appointed route. He hadn’t seen the monkeys that were above them but could hear them tossing in the high branches. Bright lawn-green flies swarmed around the stinking hulk of Zeppo. He brought the pills because they were marooned while the diarrhoea was with Zeppo, and in the morning they would have to move forward and they could not travel with a passenger and they could not leave a man behind and alone. He could have, and should have, told Zeppo not to eat the honeycomb. They watched him.

  He squatted on his haunches beside Zeppo. He saw the paleness and tiredness of the man. He put the three pills, treble dose, on Zeppo’s tongue and he washed them down with water from his own water bottle . . . They should, none of them, have come. They were all, Zeppo and Harpo and Groucho, right for a coffee shop in Havana, for a hotel bar. They were none of them, Zeppo and Harpo and Groucho, right for a march in jungle conditions. He muttered something about one of the pills stopping a river in its tracks, and three of them blocking a waterfall.

  ‘You are an engineer. I am a soldier. I don’t know about compressed pressures, valves, ignition firing. I know that the flame thrower is an exceptional weapon that will take out defended positions, more important is that it makes fear. I know the circumstances in which to use it, how to get best value from it, but I don’t know how it works . . . What I want is your help . . .’

  Zeppo swallowed and smiled.

  ‘Listen, please, I have come here to try to help . . .’

  Harpo sneered, cold.

  ‘Listen, please, if we’re not together then we fail . . .’

  Zeppo closed his eyes, as if he was tired and wanted to rest.

  ‘Listen, please, you people are the most stupid bastards I have ever tried to work with. You’re out of condition, you are overweight. You are pig stubborn . . .’

  Harpo spat into the ground.

  ‘See if I care. I don’t care. I can walk away . . .’

  Groucho caught at his sleeve. ‘When you have given us the proof. Then . . .’

 
He turned. He walked back across the clearing. He kicked the wheel of the cart of the flame thrower.

  An hour later Jorge came back to the camp clearing. Jorge said that a mile ahead was the road and that on the road was a block. Jorge said that he had counted seven troops manning it.

  ‘Did you or did you not . . . ?’

  It was the third time of asking. Tom hadn’t known him long enough to be certain of it, but he did not reckon that the Country Attaché liked to ask a question, wait for an answer, a third time. It should have been done the first evening and while it was hot but the first evening the Country Attaché had been gone, down to Bogotá. Bogotá was where, Tom had learned, the Country Attaché spent damn near as much time as in Guatemala City. It was where the cocaine came from, where the packages were made, where the aircraft took off, where there was the best intelligence of flights staging through his own patch.

  ‘Was he pushed or did he fall? Did you or did you not see him pushed?’

  ‘I strapped him in,’ the Intelligence Analyst said, awkward. ‘I fixed the buckle on him.’

  Tom needn’t have been there. He had been flying the bird. Tom need not have been in the Country Attaché’s office. It was his kindness, his gesture, to the Intelligence Analyst that he had come. The Country Attaché had had a bad trip up from Bogotá, a delayed take-off and then turbulence that was fierce over the Salvador coastline. His temper said he’d been shaken, cocktail style.

  ‘The buckles can be opened by a dumb kid, that’s the way they make them. The last time I ask the damn question – did you see Arturo push him out?’

  ‘It’s the oldest interrogation ploy in the game,’ the Intelligence Analyst said. ‘When you have a multiple of prisoners you pitch one out of the helicopter to beef up the talk of the rest . . . He had one hand severed. He was buckled in good and tight, and he went flyabout.’

  ‘You didn’t see him pushed.’

  ‘Right, shit, correct. I did not see him pushed . . .’

  It had gone the way that Tom had thought it would go. He would have taken good odds that Arturo had played the helicopter game, what the vets in his old flying team said was standard practice in the bad, black Vietnam days. He would have bet on it and not been able to prove it. The Intelligence Analyst’s head hung. Tom thought him an honourable man and a caring man, and shot to hell. It was not about ‘human rights’, not about campus jargon. It was about goddamn decency. He thought that it was about middle America, white-front-fence America, tax-paying America, flag-respecting America, trying to do the decent thing, and put down like he was a college kid with a placard, and that was just not right.

  Tom said, ‘I’d like to add . . .’

  The Country Attaché’s anger blazed. ‘You correct me, you tell me I’m wrong. When you’re flying a helicopter then you look forward, you are not studying your passengers stowed behind you. You know sweet fuck on this, Schultz, better for all of us if you remember that . . . I am not going to the Ambassador to make fire over a matter not proved. Guys, this is a tough place, a shit country. Colonel Arturo is our liaison, and stays that way because I cannot raise hell without facts. Thank you for your time, guys, and learn to work with the asshole.’

  Tom followed the Intelligence Analyst out of the Country Attaché’s office.

  He went to his desk. He had the lists in front of him. No more thought of coca compounds, nor of precursor chemicals, nor of the bank accounts of the narco-traffickers in the Caymans and Miami.

  Big work ahead of him, high grade work.

  The government’s inspectors were in next week to check the inventory of DEA station, Guatemala City. As he had seen in St Louis, a government inspector dissatisfied with the inventory could break a station chief, like he was dried wood. He was on the engine spares list, held in the lock-up area out at La Aurora. A government inspector was more important than knowing whether a kid had been pushed, or fallen, from the open hatch of a Huey bird, no argument.

  He was deep in his inventory lists.

  The Treasurer had told him that it was hassle for all of them if one slipped up. The Treasurer wanted to know each last paperclip that was not accounted for so that the cover excuse could be manufactured. Apparently, two years back, the DEA team’s oldest jeep, bad steering and worse brakes, had gone over the edge of a hundred-foot ravine off a rain-damaged track up in Totonicapán district. Tom guessed that jeep would have been loaded down with paperclips and everything else that could not be accounted for in the inventory. It was the way of government service . . .

  ‘You take it personal?’ The Intelligence Analyst stood behind him.

  Tom said softly, ‘It’s just a job . . .’

  ‘It can be hell and it can be great.’

  ‘The bastard pushed him.’

  ‘Sunny Guatemala, Tom, where life comes on a discount. They say that for twenty-five dollars you can get a man killed here. It’s that sort of place . . . Listen to me, and this isn’t meant unkind, it wasn’t necessary of you to have gotten involved, it wasn’t clever. You’re best staying with the flying.’

  ‘If you’ll excuse me, I’ve a heap of paper.’

  The rain had cleared. The jungle steamed in dampness. It had been a short and overwhelming thunderstorm, vivid sheet lightning.

  Harpo was better than Gord had rated him.

  They had taken a position on a great rock mass and they had crawled forward under the vine and ivy covering of the rock, and they looked down from the edge of the cliff onto the road. The road was beaten stone and ran straight as far as they could see, right to left, and there were water pools in the potholes. The block on the road was not immediately in front of the rock mass but about seventy-five yards right of it. The rock mass gave them the best vantage point and the height to cover the block and to see what approached from either north or south. Harpo was better than Gord had rated him because he had moved quietly, steadily, on their approach to the road, crawling the last hundred yards. It was good work for a man of his age and his size, and Gord acknowledged the quality. They lay on their stomachs and the network of vine and ivy filtered the sun that fell on them. They were through the tree line and they relied on the vine and ivy for concealment.

  The ground either side of the road, twenty yards back from the beaten stone, had been bulldozer-cleared. It was standard in counter-insurgency warfare to hack back foliage from beside a military route. He thought the soldiers, seven of them, had been dropped by lorry, had been abandoned on the road for several days’ stay because they had pitched tents on the cleared ground and they had no wheeled transport. The soldiers rested in the sunshine. Their confidence was on show. No sentries were out down the road, neither to the north nor the south, nor back against the tree line. The transistor played loud Latin music. Through an open tent flap, Gord saw the communications radio, and an aerial had been draped from the roof of the tent. Three of the soldiers, as they ambled on the road, carried Israeli Galil rifles. There was a light machine gun with a bipod mount, there was a small mortar, and more rifles lay haphazardly on the ground near the tents. They had laid a chain of spikes across the road.

  From the high rock Gord heard the engine before the soldiers. Butterflies hovered close to his face, parrots called in the tree line behind him.

  He studied the place for the potential of a killing ground. It was Gord’s way, his training. He had known a killing ground in the South Armagh district of Northern Ireland, and in the interior of Iraq, and he had tried to help the Shia of Karbala choose the best ground for killing.

  He thought it was the engine of a bus. Coming from the south, it roused the camp. The lethargy was slung off the soldiers. A soldier lay behind the light machine gun. Two of the soldiers took a theatrical position in the centre of the road, posturing authority. Gord saw the bus.

  The bus was ancient, multi-coloured, and a haze of fumes followed it. When it was a hundred yards from the spiked chain on the road, when the soldiers in the road were waving their authority at the driver for h
im to slow and stop, one of the troopers was gestured by the soldier who wore a corporal’s stripes back to the largest of the tents. The bus halted in the centre of the road. A soldier shouted through the driver’s window. The passengers, men and women and children, spilled from the door of the bus down onto the road. The passengers were all Indians. Gord saw the jumble of straw hats and bright blouses and skirts, and he could hear the crying of children. The passengers were lined up at the side of the road. A man, civilian clothes, had been brought from the largest tent. He was hooded but Gord could see, just, the eye slits in the hood. There were two soldiers inside the bus to search it. The hooded man was escorted by the corporal along the length of the line of passengers and near to the end of the line he stopped and he pointed, and Gord saw that the man who was recognized crumpled the moment before the soldiers dragged him clear of the line. He thought it was routine. The bus was searched, the passengers were screened. The bus was loaded again. The hooded figure was taken back to the tent. The spiked chain was pulled back and the bus drove away slowly, coughing a cloud of diesel. The man who had been marked out was kicked as he knelt beside the road, then taken across the cleared ground to the edge of the trees. Gord had no need to watch. He heard the cocking of the weapons. The man who had been marked was shot not more than forty paces from the rock mass where Gord lay with Harpo.