The Fighting Man (1993)

by Seymour, Gerald

  She rose from the body, peeled herself off it.

  She wept against the wall. There was the murmur of the Priest’s prayer. The dog held the still leg of the body.

  When all the tubes on the cart were filled they joined the swarm heading for the garrison’s barracks.

  It had been a pig day for Colonel Mario Arturo and the evening was worse.

  He prodded the jeep slowly forward. The lieutenant, codenamed Benedicto, was behind him and standing braced against the roll bar and clutching an Uzi.

  The road had been good to Sumpango, difficult to Chimaltenango, and then the problems. There were floods on the road between Chimaltenango and Zaragoza requiring them to stop and take advice on which track to proceed over, two hours lost. There had been a landslide between Zaragoza and Tecpán Guatemala, and he he had had to go into a village and stir the men out at pistol point to come with their spades and clear a way for him, two more hours lost. After the flood and the landslide, beyond Tecpán Guatemala, they had hit the first block on the road, a tree felled. A small convoy of lorries, four, filled with conscripts, led by an officer without balls, had been parked up short of the fallen tree, nervous. More shouting, more yelling for some action, more organizing, and the tree had been dragged aside. Two more trees across the road before Agua Escondida. More convoys held up, more jams. A pattern emerging to Arturo. Each time between Tecpán Guatemala and Agua Escondida that he found a tree down, the road blocked, there was high and forested ground above the road. Each time he had to berate an officer into deploying his men, always conscripts and frightened, up and through the forest above to comb it for an ambush site, and only when the hillside was pronounced clear could he kick more men and the vehicles forward to heave aside the block, four hours lost on the Tecpán to Agua Escondida road.

  The light was failing into grey mist when they crawled to the Los Encuentros Junction, and there they had lost the three lorry convoys, going for Quetzaltenango and Huehuetenango. They had gone north, the Santa Cruz del Quiché road.

  One more felled tree, three miles south of Chichicastenango, and it had required them to edge to a precipice slope, stones spinning down from under the wheels, as they had rounded it.

  Another man might have turned back, another man might have claimed the importance of an evening meeting with the general commanding G-4 (Logistics). He had pushed on. Getting up speed through Chichicastenango, scattering the silent crowds in the dark streets, belting through the town and on towards Santa Cruz del Quiché. It was the way with him, to drive himself forward.

  They were at the checkpoint.

  The checkpoint was three miles south of his destination, Santa Cruz del Quiché.

  He was dazzled by the stream of car and van and lorry headlights approaching him.

  It was a column of flight.

  And amongst the cars and vans and lorries he saw the mass of struggling people, women pushing prams with suitcases stacked, men carrying children and bundles, boys and girls dragging along a precious pig or goat. There were soldiers in the mass. Soldiers were running alongside the cars and vans and lorries, some without weapons, some still armed.

  The sergeant at the checkpoint shouted. ‘They came to the town, they came with the fire.’

  In the lights of his jeep he watched the rampage of the approaching soldiers. ‘Stop them.’

  Derision on the face of the sergeant. It was flight, it was fear. The fire was behind them. The sergeant turned away. The sergeant showed that his concern, in the darkness and the rain, was to break the log jam at the checkpoint. The sergeant ignored a ranking colonel, fool and idiot.

  Arturo had reached for his own Uzi. He would have fired into the running, panic-driven soldiers, but a fist behind him had belted his arm and thrown up the short barrel. The volley of the shots cracked high into the night. The soldiers were past him, split by the bonnet of the jeep, running. They would not have stopped unless he had shot them down, each last one of them would have kept running until shot. He threw the Uzi down onto the seat of the jeep and turned and the lieutenant loosed the grip on his arm. The log jam was broken. A civilian lorry broke clear. Arturo could see into the back of the lorry as it passed him, lit by the following car. Only a moment, but he saw the casualties in the back of the lorry. He saw the burned faces and the burned bodies. He shuddered.

  He said quietly, ‘You know what you have to do?’

  Calm on the face of the lieutenant. ‘I know.’

  The lieutenant hitched onto his shoulders the backpack that held the radio.

  Arturo said, ‘To wherever you call me, I will come.’

  He saw the lieutenant go. A tall but slight figure, in black, disappearing into the advancing mass of the flight.

  He started the drive back to Guatemala City. He had seen the fear that was carried by the fire.

  When the shooting had started, when the fire had come, the Canadian had without fuss slipped off the bed where he was resting and crawled underneath it. The bed in the first-floor room of the Posada Calle Real was in the far corner to the window of the room, and the Canadian had settled himself on the tiled floor against the wall. He rated that as the most sensible place to stay until the shooting stopped. The Canadian was in his seventy-first year and it was close to half a century since he had last heard close-quarters fighting.

  When the shooting had finished in that part of the town, near to the plaza, he hitched into his windcheater, and put on the tartan cap that he always wore when it was cold or wet, and he went down the stairs of the Posada Calle Real and out onto the street. At home, back in Kingston, Ontario, when he went walking with his wife, to exercise the Labrador dog, he took a stick to ease the age in the joints of his hips. He had no stick now, and he hobbled along the streets, rolling his stride to lessen the pain.

  He did not wish to be a nuisance . . .

  Three visits to Guatemala and he knew enough of the language to make himself understood.

  Half an hour after he had left the Posada Calle Real he found the Englishman.

  He had been directed, then tugged, then pulled, towards the place where he found the Englishman. He had expected a military man, a good uniform. He had anticipated that he would meet a man surrounded by a staff and with radio communication to co-ordinate a battle. He had thought he would meet organization and control . . . The man looked as though he had come from the gutter. There was a gaping hole at the cap of his right boot and the socks were through and he could see the flesh of the toes. The trousers were ripped equally at each knee. The tunic jacket, under a quilted anorak, was blood-splashed on the chest. The man was unshaven and the rain smeared his beard and the mud dirt matted it. The man sat on a petrol can near to the gate of the garrison’s barracks, there was a group around him and in the group was a young woman who stroked the shoulder of a big dog. In the circle of the group, beside the sitting man, was a cart-carried flame thrower and a wheelbarrow piled with an air cylinder and jerry cans. Hell no, not what he had anticipated . . .

  ‘Excuse me, sir, I apologize for the interruption . . . Are you the man with the fire?’

  A soft voice, wearied. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you the leader?’

  A hesitation. ‘No.’

  Big breath. The short pain spasm in his hip. ‘Where do I get to join?’

  A slow smile, lovely to him, cracking the beard and the dirt. ‘Are you quite sure . . . ?’

  It was because of the pain spasm in his hip that he flared. Should have had the operation last fall, but the money for the replacement had gone with the mortgage money on the air fares. ‘You’ve no damned right to suggest . . .’

  ‘What’s the combat experience?’

  ‘Cameron Highlanders of Ottawa, closing the Falaise Gap, that was combat experience.’

  The smile widening. ‘When was that?’

  ‘Sir, that was 21st August in 1944 . . .’

  The laugh, not mocking. ‘Oh, yesterday . . . Why?’

  ‘Because, sir, my grandson cam
e down to this Godlost country, hippie boy, dropout kid, but that wasn’t cause for them to butcher him. I’m here to find a grave and give a silly kid a decent Christian burial, and I’m blocked at every turn . . . I would take it, sir, as a privilege . . .’

  A shadow figure on the move. A darkened shape flitting from doorway to alley. Fire and darkness alternating in the blackness and light of the streets of Santa Cruz del Quiché. A hunter working his ground, searching.

  In shame, Tom Schultz had lain on his bed through the day and through the evening and into the night. His suit, dirty and wet, four hundred dollars and his best, was in a heap near the door. He had the bruises and the pains to justify the shame. Twice the telephone had rung and he had let it go, and the ringing had needle-pierced his skull. He had shouted at the maid’s knock, driven her away. They paid bastards at Quantico to sift through the recruits for those to be classified as ‘Bad Attitude’. Missed one. Should have netted him then, Tom Schultz . . . He felt the shame because he had yelped to a stranger that his father sold spiv insurance and that his mother screwed round. He had been told, they always spotted the guys with ‘Bad Attitude’ at Quantico or on the first year’s probation.

  He’d not made the grade. The Intelligence Analyst had made it, and the Treasurer, and the Chemist, and the Country Attaché had made it good. Making it good, like the Country Attaché had, meant a wall filled with service plaques, and the framed prints of local newspapers cataloguing the big busts, and photographs taken with the President or the VeePee or the Director and signed.

  Washed up, and he had a head to prove it, and bruises and a closed eye, and shame. He lay on his bed which was damp, stared at the ceiling. He was out of his depth. His level was the ‘mid-grade trafficking’ in St Louis, inter-state violations of Controlled Substance Act, Code Title 21, playing at second-grade surveillance of bums. Wrestling with the shame and losing against it . . .

  She was red-eyed. She had not spoken. Twice Gord had seen the Priest go to Alex and put his hand on her arm, and each time she had shaken it clear. She followed him, a lost soul.

  His name was called.

  More firing ahead.

  He was going forward, responding to the shout, and the cart was squealing behind him. They were running after him.

  ‘Heh, where’s . . . ?’

  Seeing the faces in the light of flames, seeing the Archaeologist and the Fireman and the Street Boy and the Priest and the new man who was struggling to stay with them, seeing Alex.

  Gord snarled, ‘I said we were to be together, always.’

  The shout ahead for him growing, the demand for the fire.

  It was what he had told them, they should always be together . . . They wanted the fire to burn out a sniper, the last resistance.

  ‘You have the Kaibil battalion . . .’

  He saluted the general commanding G-4 (Logistics). They were out in a corridor of the estado mayor. It was past two in the morning. The corridor was awash with hurrying feet, uniformed staff officers. The general had told him that he had listened, himself, to the last communications on the radio from Santa Cruz del Quiché before the surrender and the cutting of the transmission. He felt a numbness, rare to him, because without argument he had been given the control of the elite force in the army he had served for eighteen years. It was the summit of his aspirations, had been his goal since as a twenty-year-old lieutenant, fresh from the Escuela Politecnica, he had gone to the training camp of the Kaibiles at La Polvora in the Petén. Mario Arturo turned away. The shout came after him.

  ‘. . . If you fail I will throw you, myself, to the dogs of the garbage dump.’

  He walked away from the pandemonium mad house.

  He drove away from the building where lights burned on each floor. He could imagine the earlier blow in the estado mayor, as the generals and brigadiers and colonels had gathered under the loudspeakers slung from the ceiling of the War Room and listened to the staccato reports, which would have lost coherence as the panic had grown, of the crumbling of the perimeter defences of the garrison’s barracks at Santa Cruz del Quiché, as the fire had come closer. He could imagine the dead crackle, lifeless static, and the silence of the War Room when contact had been lost. He had no fear of becoming a body on the garbage dump with the dogs pulling at him and the vultures pecking at him and the kids turning over a corpse to see if it still wore a ring . . . He drove to the American embassy, the concrete bunker behind the high railings where in the morning the queues for the visa forms would be stretching far down 7a Calle.

  He had the man pitched out of bed.

  Kramer blinked in the bright light of the lobby hall.

  ‘Is it that bad, shit . . . ?’

  Kramer stood in his slippers and pyjamas and he held a cold cigar end as if for comfort.

  ‘. . . I don’t know why you came to me . . .’

  Kramer wore a wool dressing gown with the logo on the back of the Cincinnati Tigers wrapped tight round him for warmth.

  ‘. . . You want SouthCom people in here? Sorry, forget it . . . You want marines in from Honduras? Sorry again, forget it.’

  ‘I want the flier,’ Arturo said.

  The last sniper had taken a position in the cemetery. He had used a high-powered rifle but had not possessed an image-intensifier sight. He had taken targets when they were silhouetted against the fires round the field of stone crosses and marble Virgins. The flame thrower had burned him out, flushed him clear from the vault beside the big stone that commemorated the nineteenth-century family of a Ladino merchant in the dyes of cochineal and indigo. When the sniper had run from the flame spurts the machine-gun hail had cut him down.

  Gord saw him fall.

  Jorge was beside him. ‘Finished.’

  He heard the vibrancy, excitement, of the word. Gord said bleakly, ‘Finished? Of course it’s not finished, it is finished at the Palacio Nacional . . . You have to do your talking piece fast. Well, don’t hang about for it, man. We have to get the food, we have to get the armoury, we have to get the new men, we have to move on . . .’

  Astonishment. ‘Gord, do you not understand?’

  ‘We have to move on and out from here . . .’

  ‘Do you not understand what is happening in the town?’

  ‘We have to keep the drive going.’

  Jorge snapped, ‘We are very grateful to the great man who always can tell us what to do. Now, I tell you, I am going to sleep. I am going to sleep in a bed. In the morning, when I have slept, then we will talk about going forward . . .’

  ‘One block in their time, their place, and it is over. You have to maintain the speed.’

  Shouting into the rain night, at Jorge’s back. Turning to the group around him for support and gaining nothing from the Archaeologist and the Fireman and the Street Boy and the Civil Patroller and the Priest and the Canadian, and nothing from Alex Pitt. Raking back over the faces and it came to him, sudden, that a secret was held by them and denied to him. Slashing over the faces and demanding the explanation. They were the group, they were together, there were no secrets. They had been an hour at the cemetery before the sniper’s position had been identified, before the fire had burned him from his shooting place. He demanded to know . . . They led him. The group was sombre and the secret was held, but they took him and they showed him. He knew the secret before they came to the place. The nozzle on the centre of the cart had blocked, the one whose job it was to keep the flame thrower going, working, had not been there to clear it. Delay, Gord swearing, the Archaeologist and the Fireman trying to do the work that was not theirs to do, covering the secret as Gord had cursed . . . They led him to the small sandbagged redoubt. It was close to the gate of the garrison’s barracks and the redoubt had been sited to provide a field of fire across open ground to the main road running south to Chichicastenango. He had been a dear good man, Gord thought. He wore the same shoes as when they had found him sitting at the side of the road between Playa Grande and the climb into the Cuchumatanes mounta
ins. He wore the same raincoat, and the same little beret lay in the glistened mud beside the bloodied face. He did not know his name, only that he had been an Academic at the University of San Carlos in Guatemala City. It had been their secret while he had cursed them and sworn at them, and while he had belched the fire to flush out the sniper. A great sick and personal pain. He looked down onto the ragged corpse of the Academic. He thought, fleeting, that the power of the group had been broken.

  He walked away from the place.

  He walked out into the dark rain-sodden fucking night, out onto the open ground between the sandbagged redoubt and the road running to Chichicastenango.

  She followed him and the dog was with her.

  The responsibility gouged him, the death of a dear good man who had no business in a fighting column on forced march.

  He sat in the mud of the ploughed field.

  She knelt beside him.

  The weakness trembled in him. He drove them all forward. He felt as if he preyed on them all.

  She took his head in her hands, he felt her fingers on his face.

  He had destroyed the belief in her, the belief that was non-violence, and she had killed a man that he might live. She had beaten the head of a man into the cobblestones that he might live.

  She kissed him.

  14

  She kissed him and she pushed him away from her and down to the ploughed mud. She eased astride him, sat over him, and her hands came from holding his head that sank in the field mud, and she started to strip his upper body.

  On the road, travelling, she had known the men had thought of her as the ‘bicycle’.