The Fighting Man (1993)

by Seymour, Gerald

  In the evening, as the dusk gathered on the clearing, it was talked through.

  Gord said, ‘We should bypass the block. Once we start shooting then we are running. We fire the first shot, and that is the beginning of the charge. It is not the right time.’

  Harpo said, ‘The people will not rise until they hear of us. Each time they hear of our strike then more will come.’

  Jorge said, ‘Where we find them, we kill them. We light the fire.’

  He was the outsider, the intruder. ‘So be it.’

  On the ground of the clearing Gord scratched with a stick and made a plan of the roadblock and the tents and the position of the communications radio and the siting of the machine gun.

  In the morning the play-acting would end.

  He lay on the ground and he wept.

  First time that he had sobbed tears since the rabbit that was his pet had been taken and eaten by Mrs McFarlane’s cat.

  The Archaeologist dragged himself away from the bodies and into the long grass and howled at the jungle round him, shouted his anguish. He was twenty-nine years old. It was the first time he had sobbed tears since the cat had come over the fence and into the yard of the prim home in Garden City outside Ames, the town on the Chicago and North Western rail line that cut the state of Iowa east to west. He had been eleven years old when he had last sobbed tears.

  The place was not like Tikal. There were no guides and no souvenir shops and no hamburger bars and no tourists round the temple pyramid. The place was where he had been most happy in all of his life. It was the place of the hidden civilization of the Mayan Indian dynasties that had lain lost, unmapped and unexplored, for a millennium. Trees rising to the light of the sun had towered over the pyramid construction, hiding it from aerial photography, protecting it from the abuse of the New World. He had found the place.

  The Archaeologist was on a year of sabbatical leave from the University of Minnesota.

  Sixty miles south-west of Flores which was the central city of the Petén region, near to the village of Chinajá, in a fly-blown coffee shop, an old Indian who had no teeth had told the Archaeologist of the place in the jungle depth.

  It was his own place. It had been his own place until that morning.

  With two Indians, good and solid men with the strength of oxen, he had made the camp late in the previous year. He had lived native, eating what his workers ate, dressing as they did and leaving his American-tagged clothes in his rucksack, learned their language. The power of modern government had bypassed this empty quarter under the high tree canopy. It had been his first visit back to Guatemala City since he had found the pyramid site and he had posted to his department at the University of Minnesota the records of seven months of archaeological detection, and he had returned. He was not to know who or what had broken the secrecy of his hidden life: a marked map left in the sleaze hotel in the Guatemala City backstreet; the driver of the Mitsubishi jeep who had brought him down country from Flores and dropped him at a roadside kilometre marker; the Indians who worked with him and who had returned to their villages while he was gone to the city.

  They had come in the dawn to his place. They had worn army uniforms. He had seen them, out of the corner of his eye, as they had approached the flattened ground where he slept alongside his Indian workers. Raised rifles, the long bursts of firing. Two bodies straddling his. He had spread his fingers, so carefully and such slow movements, into the wet warmth of their running blood and smeared his own chest, his own face. He had lain as dead. They had used crowbars and pickaxes to hack the stela writings from the face walls inside the cave entry of the pyramid. They had grunted, laughed, struggled to heave the slabs with the hieroglyphs away . . . Not daring to move. Cursing the flies that played at his nostrils. Smelling the death against him . . . Everything that could be carried was taken. Everything that he had so lovingly collated was taken. It had been hammered into him by his professor back at the Minnesota campus that he should maintain secrecy on all virgin sites because the dealers in New York paid fat fees for undamaged stelae, no detail of ownership and acquisition required by the clandestine collectors who hid artefacts in secret cellars behind electronic beams. Money talked loud in the world of the private collectors. The Archaeologist despised, more than any persons in the world, the ageing collectors hobbling down cellar steps to view what they should not have owned.

  Long after they had gone, he lay motionless in the grass in front of the pyramid.

  His father taught school in Ames, and the first weekend in every month his mother did the flowers for church. In his youth and his adulthood he had never struck a fellow human, and he would have hoped that he had never wished hurt to a living person. He had never played football voluntarily, nor baseball, nor hockey. He had no weight to his body, no muscle on his shoulder. No fool and no idiot, he could recognize the deep change that caught at his psychology. It was as if decency had died in him with the murder of the Indians, as if compassion had been extirpated from him with the stealing of the stelae. Just the span of a full day before, he would not have believed it was possible for him to lose decency and compassion. He wanted to strike and to hurt . . .

  He wanted to kill . . . He felt no shame in it.

  It was the voices that woke Gord. Half up from his sleeping bag and angrily scattering the mosquito net off his face and ready to hiss at them for quiet. He saw them in Jorge’s flashlight. Eff and Vee and Zed were back. The light moved on and there were four men diffidently standing behind them.

  It had begun . . .

  He turned away from them to regain his sleep.

  It had begun, the charge, and in the dawn there would be the first action.

  He had no knowledge of them and no hatred of them. Gord watched the young soldiers whose death he had planned.

  He tried to think only of the plan.

  Zeppo had argued. The pills had constipated his gut. Zeppo had wanted to be forward, and been refused, and had argued that the plan was crap. Eff and Zed and the village recruits they had brought, unknowns, were at the back. Gord had Jorge close to him on the rock mass and Harpo north of the block and Groucho south. They were not to fire until he fired. It was the way he had lectured them. If any of them fired before he fired then he would break that bastard’s neck himself.

  They would have wives and mothers and sweethearts. Over the V sight and the needle sight of the machine gun he could follow the soldiers. Two were wrestling in fun in the middle of the road. They were all conscripts, forced men, except for the corporal. Gord had not seen the corporal, and the flap of the tent with the communications radio was not yet opened.

  They had done him no harm.

  One was on the edge of the tree line, squatting in cover.

  They had done him no hurt.

  The two who had killed the passenger from the bus were hunched over a low fire and heating a tin.

  They had done him no wrong.

  The informer, without the hood with the slits, sat in the road, round-shouldered and head down and threw small stones at the spikes of the chain. They were all for killing. One carried back a bucket of water from the dribbling stream on the far side of the road. The call of the birds, in delight at the rising of the sun, was around Gord.

  There was the rush of breath in the throat of Jorge beside Gord.

  The flap of the tent with the communications radio broke loose, was thrown back.

  The corporal stepped into the light and was zipping his fly and coughing on his cigarette.

  The start of the charge. Gord had the weight of the machine gun tight on his shoulder. The beginning. He edged the barrel right to left and it covered the corporal and the communications radio. He squeezed on the trigger, waited for the explosion in his ears. Squeezed tighter . . .

  A toucan thrashed in the upper foliage for panic flight.

  A monkey family screamed and jumped in unison to make distance.

  Only the butterflies near to him showed no concern.

 
The sounds of the firing cascaded at the Archaeologist’s ears. He was drawn forward. He should have turned, run, like the toucan, and the monkey family. All night he had been on his stomach, sport for the mosquitoes, and at the first light he had started to move again in the direction where he thought the road cut the jungle. He would have known where the road lay if he had not blundered away from the pyramid site in the dusk. It was a compulsion that carried him forward, to the tree line at the edge of the cleared strip alongside the width of the road.

  He saw the bodies. Bullet ricochets puffed dust from the road stones and sang, and one of the bodies jerked then collapsed.

  Across the road from the Archaeologist was a cliff face of reddish-brown rock. There was a sharp shout. The shout was in the English language. ‘Stop firing.’ There was another burst on automatic, longer. He saw the bodies of the soldiers and he saw that two more soldiers stood, bolt upright, in the road with their hands raised. ‘I said to stop firing.’ A man stood on the top of the rock. He was dressed in filthy and torn camouflage trousers and a tunic of green-brown pattern that did not match the trousers. There was a strip of khaki cloth knotted as a bandanna around his forehead. The man carried a machine gun at his hip level, like it was a toy thing. If he had not heard his shout then the Archaeologist would have thought the man to be American, but he had heard the accent that he knew to be English. Another man, younger and Latin, armed with a rifle, had come to the Englishman’s shoulder and seemed to cuff it as if that were a gesture of congratulation.

  There were others moving onto the road, one was old and fat and bald and grinning, and one was old and short and hesitant, and there was an Indian running towards the two soldiers with their hands raised.

  The Archaeologist looked, in staggered disbelief.

  Gord was at the side of the road.

  It was for Jorge to lead.

  He watched the young man. He had checked the tents, empty. There was no threat now on the road. Jorge had his fingers in his mouth and whistled, a shriek, into the jungle. There were the bodies of the corporal with the cigarette crushed in his fingers, and of the informer, and of four of the soldiers. He saw Groucho cover the conscripts who had surrendered with his rifle held dramatically at his shoulder, and he saw Zeppo swagger towards the prisoners and kick the legs from under the nearest of the two so that he fell onto the road. Jorge moved briskly, what Gord would have wanted of him, and hurried to collect the soldiers’ weapons and Vee was with him and sweeping up the weight of the light machine gun and the mortar tube and then stowing the mortar shells into the webbing of his belt and then swathing his body in the ammunition belts from the machine gun. The light was growing, and the heat. The road to the north shimmered and the road to the south bent away at an angle. Gord strained for the sound of an approaching vehicle. It was the time of the charge . . . Jorge went to the prisoners. They were both now flat on their faces. Gord was far enough away from the prisoners to be detached from the pleading in their faces, but he saw it. He knew what had to be done and he felt a coldness. Jorge came to Gord. Jorge said that they could not cope with prisoners, but the prisoners were only village boys, that they could not be trusted but they were little more than children, that they could not be abandoned . . . Gord knew what had to be done . . . Harpo shot the first prisoner, and Groucho shot the other. It had been Jorge’s decision and it was the right decision and Gord hoped that Jorge took no pleasure from it.

  It was Jorge’s whistle that had brought forward those who had not fought. Zeppo led them across the cleared strip and onto the road, and Eff pushed and Zed pulled the cart, and the recruits were burdened down by all of the packs that had been left behind, and they had the weapons and the food and the transistor radio from the roadblock. They left the bodies to the fly swarms and to the ants. They pushed into the jungle beyond the rock mass.

  Not a hundred yards gone and already Gord, back-marker, was cursing for more speed ahead.

  Four hours after the road through the Petén, going north to Sayaxché, had been made a killing ground, the relief lorry from the garrison base at Chinajá reached the place. The fresh soldiers, as young as their conscript colleagues who lay in the light rain that was now falling, pattering on their uniforms, raked the jungle at the edge of the cleared strip with frightened gunfire. They loaded the bodies and the shredded tents and the smashed radio set over the tail of their lorry. They drove away at speed, their fear chasing them, north to Sayaxché.

  He was not satisfied with the pace of the march. He could not blame Jorge because Jorge did not have the fitness for leading at forced pace, and he did not have the training. Gord lectured them at the fifth rest halt.

  He would lead.

  He would cut the rest time from fifteen to ten minutes in each hour.

  ‘They will be confused because they will have thought this a safe area, but they are trained military and it will take them only a few hours, certainly by tomorrow, to get men into the area. They may try to throw a cordon round this sector, difficult but they will try, and they will set the cordon at a distance beyond what they estimate is our possible progress. We have to be beyond that cordon. We have to have moved faster, gone further, than they will think possible. Any man who slows the pace endangers not only himself but all of us. It was what you chose when you wanted to attack the block. We don’t go back now and we don’t lie up. It is too late for going back . . .’

  Vee whispered the translation to the new recruits. They were scrawny men but they could cope with the pace he wanted and they held the weapons that had been given them as if they were gold plate, and one of them had Zeppo’s backpack slung on its big straps so that it rose low on his haunches. He thought Harpo was going to speak . . .

  ‘No debate. You can argue when you are in Guatemala City. We will march an extra hour tonight, until it is too late to see ahead. There will be no talking on the march. Movement and distance are critical. Load up . . .’

  He felt a desperate tiredness in his legs and an ache in his lungs and the flies played round them and there was no time now to send any of the Indians out to search for garlic roots. He stood sharply upright. He had to set the example. He had not wanted to take it away from Jorge because Jorge was the leader, and Jorge looked up at him and nodded his agreement.

  A snap of breaking wood behind him.

  His hand went fast down to the ground to where the rifle was, beside the machine gun. They were on an animal trail, perhaps a pig’s track. He used signs. The flat of his hand held out, no movement. The finger across the lips, no word.

  It was a weed of a man.

  There was no height on him, no weight to him.

  The moment he would have seen the rifles aimed at him . . .

  ‘Don’t . . . no, help me . . . don’t shoot me,’ he blurted.

  It was English, American-spoken. Gord said, ‘In the name of God, what . . . ?’

  ‘Followed you . . . tried to kill me . . . would have. I saw what you did. I saw it at the roadblock . . . Where are you going?’

  ‘Who needs to know?’

  ‘They stole the stelae . . . I saw you kill the soldiers. I want your help . . . Where are you going?’

  Gord grinned. ‘I’m told we’re going to the Palacio Nacional, Guatemala City. It’s what I’m told.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m told it’s for a revolution.’

  ‘Count me . . .’

  ‘Stop babbling . . .’ The grin was gone from Gord. Playtime was over-extended. ‘If you are smart, lose yourself. You saw nothing, you heard nothing, you know nothing. Go and hitch yourself a ride, get yourself to Guatemala City, buy a ticket out. Forget, Mr Stranger, what you saw and heard.’

  ‘Please . . .’

  Gord said, cold, ‘Go home and write a letter to your local paper, and tell the readers that Guatemala is an unhappy place. Leave it at that.’

  ‘For what they did, I want revenge.’

  Gord said, ‘I am losing time, I have one thing to tell you . .
.’

  The man blazed back at him, ‘Revenge.’

  ‘I am trying to say it so that an imbecile will comprehend. Death warrant, got me? Bad news, got me? High probability of pain and tears, got me? So, do me the favour of turning round and getting lost soonest.’

  The panted answer, defiant. ‘I want to help you to kill them.’

  He stood his ground. He had not backed off. It was Gord who buckled.

  ‘Can you shoot?’

  It was ridiculous. He saw the torn clothes of the man. It was grotesque. The man had no strength, and the glasses on his face were cracked in the right lens and the left arm was twisted so that the frame hung askew down his nose. It was pathetic. His sneaker shoes were shredded. There was blood dried on his face, smeared.

  ‘I am an archaeologist from the University of Minnesota. I have never fired a gun in my life . . .’

  ‘If you screw us I will break your back, that is not probability but certainty.’

  Gord led.

  There would be three minutes’ less rest time at the next halt.

  ‘You are a shit woman, you know that?’

  ‘There is no requirement, captain, for abuse,’ Alex said quietly.

  ‘You are a shit woman who comes here to interfere.’

  ‘I am accompanying the lady. The interference is the obstruction shown to her.’

  ‘You are a shit obstinate woman. You have no business in Playa Grande, no business in Guatemala.’

  She was dogged. ‘The lady seeks the information that your government says should be freely available. The lady seeks the information . . .’

  ‘You are a shit woman, because you have an education and you come here amongst these simple people and you confuse them. You bring trouble here.’

  ‘She seeks the information, captain, as to the location of her husband’s grave . . .’