The Fighting Man (1993)

by Seymour, Gerald

  There was a belt of machine-gun ammunition slung over his right shoulder and under his left armpit. She freed it and slung it into the darkness. She took the belt of machine-gun ammunition that was over his left shoulder and under his right armpit, worked if from his body, discarded it, and then the belt which was shorter and which had hung over both his shoulders and dropped to his waist. All the time that she had known him, since she had first seen him on the parade ground area at Playa Grande, he had been wrapped in the belts of machine-gun ammunition, and she freed him.

  On the road, moving with the New Age travellers, working the Social Security system, tight-held in the community, she had been available. There had been Johnny the Music who made the sounds on the lute, carved and strung for himself, that had seemed beautiful . . .

  She took the hand grenades that were buckled to the buttons on his tunic pockets, cold and wet in her palms, and tossed them away behind her. She unfastened his belt and worked to pull from him the webbing straps that held his water bottle and his food canteen and the double-bladed slashing knife and the pouch that secured the two magazines of the Kalashnikov bullets. He seemed not to move and not to respond to the pulling, tugging, dragging of her fingers. She could not see his face, but each time that she had lost a machine-gun belt or the grenades or the webbing she came lower to him and found his mouth and kissed the life into it, her life.

  There had been Johnny the Music, and Deke the Pony whose tresses of hair had reached to the small of his back and who gathered them at his nape with an elastic band and who had put the farmer with the riding crop in the river . . .

  She took the heavy anorak with the bloodstains from his shoulders and she ripped at the buttons of his tunic and she pushed up his vest above the nipples on his chest. She knew that she would do it all for him, because that was the way to bring back the life in him. The mud was around her and the rain was above her and the wind was against her. She soothed the palms of her hands over the length of his chest. The mud was smeared on him, an ointment. She wished that she could have seen his face but the darkness denied her, and she could only touch his face and learn the new contours of it with her lips and her tongue against the ears and the eyes and the nose and the mouth of the man to whom she tried to give the new life.

  There had been Johnny the Music and Deke the Pony, and the Van Man who had built himself a home of wood and corrugated iron that was riveted to the back part of his old Land Rover pick-up, and there had been others who had come to her vehicle in the nights and others to whom she had gone, because she was available . . .

  She took his trousers down from the wasted place that was his belly. She led his hands under the quilt of her coat and under the thickness of her sweater and under the smelling tightness of her T-shirt and onto the looseness of her breasts. Cold hands, as yet without the life, holding the hang of her breasts with a shyness. She thought that he must have the life that she could give him. And the body beneath her shivered in the spasm of wet and nakedness. She used her fingers and the nails that she bit to keep them short to return the life to the man. She was over him and dropping onto him and guiding him and kissing the rain away from his ears and his nose and his eyes and his mouth.

  When her mother and her father had brought her home in the big BMW car, the same day they had taken her to the doctor. It was just a precaution, her mother had said. It was bloody necessary, her father had said. She had still been docile and she had submitted to the tests for ‘anti-social disease’, as her mother had described it, and ‘bloody AIDS’, as her father had said, and pregnancy. She had not been with a man since . . .

  She loved the life back to him. With her fingers and then with her muscles she stirred the life again in him. She did not care that she had no contraceptive. She took the bareness of him into her. The life came again.

  There was the warmth in her, his hands on her breasts.

  There was the drive of him in her body.

  There was the tongue of him in her mouth.

  It was the fire that seduced her. She had not been with a man and not felt the want of a man since she had come off the road, and the fire now caught her. She was over him and punching down onto him, and the fire was in her mind, the fire that snaked and ran and caught and destroyed. There was the power of the fire in her, and the burning in her. She clung to him. She sank on him.

  When it was over, too fast for her and she did not care, when she felt the slackening of the grip of the hands on her breasts, when in her mind the fire died, she rolled off him.

  The rain fell on him.

  The mud was cloying against him.

  She hadn’t loved Johnny the Music, nor Deke the Pony, nor the Van Man, nor the others . . .

  What she thought, she loved Gord Brown.

  She heard the hiss and spit of new wood thrown on a fire. The glow of the built fire came to her. He lay beside her and his eyes were closed and the breathing under the whiteness of his chest was steady. She thought she had given him again the life, her life. The fire glistened the wet on his body and caught the mud smears on his skin. She took his hands from her breasts and she pulled back up her jeans and fastened the belt on them, and she felt again the old cold. She turned to the fire. They were sitting there, around the fire. They were thirty paces from her. The group watched over him and she could see the silhouette against the fire of the cart and the wheelbarrow. She stared back at them, defiant. They were sitting crouched round the fire, watching him as if to guard him, and her dog was with the group and she heard it moan for her.

  She said softly to Gord, ‘When we get to Guatemala City . . .’

  The man she loved was sleeping and naked and spattered by the rain.

  They stood over Tom as he dressed.

  They offered him no explanation.

  They had pulled the clothes he would wear from the hangers in the wardrobe and from the shelves in the chest.

  He hooked himself clumsily into his combat fatigues. Enough impatience at his slowness for the Country Attaché to bend and lace the boots, and for Kramer to check the loading of the magazine in his Glock automatic pistol.

  They marched him out, like he was a prisoner on close escort, and Kramer kicked the door of the room shut after them. Coming out of the long sleep and the big shame and his right eye was half closed and there were abrasions on his chin. Tom limped between them on the corridor and down the stairwell.

  In the rain, the wind tugging at them, they hurried along the path between the ornamental flower gardens.

  An armed marine admitted them through the front door of the residence.

  The Ambassador waited for them in the residence lobby. He had the printout sheets in his hand and the speech prepared. Tom saw the squashed cigar butt in the crystal ashtray on the table beside the flower display. It was the cigar size that Kramer now lit. They had been there before him to settle business. He thought it was the big carpet job, a government official drunk, a DEA man loose in the cat quarter, a Federal man spilling to a local that his father sold spiv insurance and his mother screwed round.

  The Ambassador intoned, ‘Good to see you, Schultz. Sorry about the hour but crisis rarely comes convenient . . . The place is falling apart, fast. Santa Cruz del Quiché has gone. I won’t beat round it. What stands between this rabble mob and Guatemala City is the Kaibil battalion. We want the Kaibiles to win. We want this rabble mob broken, turned, and hit so as they never are able to regroup. The fact that a pitiful Congress back home denigrates the government of Guatemala at every turn precludes me from helping these people in their hour of need but, and I stress, the interests of the United States are best served by the survival of the government. Anyone thinking this rabble mob is the route to a better society has gone apeshit. I’m getting there, the success of the Kaibil battalion is critical to us. There is a new commanding officer for the battalion and he has made one request of us. He has asked for you. You are seconded to his command. Wait on, Schultz, don’t go breathing hard at me, it has been c
leared with State and with DEA. They want you and we’re giving you to them. The quicker the killing is done the happier we shall be. Got me, Schultz . . . ?’

  He rocked. ‘And if I . . . ?’

  The Country Attaché murmured, ‘You’ll be on the next bus north, up the Highway, up the Pan American, and don’t be looking for a future.’

  Kramer said, ‘You’re a servant of the American people. The American people want stability in this crap yard.’

  The Country Attaché murmured again, ‘We’ll have it over these bastards here, and it’ll be milked, we’ll have gratitude and co-operation as long as I’m above ground.’

  Kramer said, ‘Just help to blow away that murderer with the flame thrower.’

  ‘Go to work, Schultz, and go to work good.’ The Ambassador stood his full height.

  ‘. . . I don’t know what had happened to him, Cathy – you don’t mind if I call you Cathy? – I don’t know because he never bothered to tell me, but when he came up here he was a man with trouble on his back. He was army, wasn’t he? He was something in one of those flash outfits, wasn’t he? He was an officer, wasn’t he? He came with trouble . . . I asked myself, what’s a Para or whatever doing in this bloody place. I asked him enough times, and I never had the answer. It was like it was private trouble and not to be shared. He worked at the farm as if it was important. Of course it wasn’t important. I work hard, he made me seem bloody lazy, Cathy. He had trouble on his back and a short-fuse temper. You shouldn’t mix it with him, not when he’s the temper up . . . These three gooks came for him, and they came with all the photographs of bodies and kiddies cut up, and I was arsing them, I was pretending I was him, big laugh, and when he had enough of the laugh he just told me to get myself lost. I did. Look, Cathy, I’m a hell of a lot heavier than Gord, I can look after myself. I went meek as a wee lamb. You don’t cross him, not when he’s the temper up . . . There were three lads crossed him. They were from Tyneside and they came up here to do the eagles’ nest on Sidhean Mor. If Gord had any relaxation it was going out where it was wild, and climbing and lying up, suppose that was his training, to watch the nest, see how the eggs were. Not disturbing them, never closer than a couple of hundred yards and he’d go up in the dawn light and come back in the dusk light. I reckon those big buggers would have known he was there, bloody good eyes they’ve got, but he wasn’t a threat to them. These three lads came for the eggs. I heard what happened from the district nurse, because one of the lads told her. They were coming up near the nest and they must have nearly walked over him. You get a good price for eagles’ eggs and these lads weren’t going to back off just because there’s a joker up in the rocks who tells them it’s better if they turn round and disappear. There were three of them and they must have rated their chances. Fair do to him, Cathy, he helped them down. He had to help them down because one of them had a dislocated shoulder and one of them had a broken nose with concussion and the last had balls the size of oranges after the kicking they got. It was the only time I know of, Cathy, when the fuse blew on him . . . I am not good with words, not at explaining. I’ll put it to you this way. He was like a lost man when he was here, like a man wanting to find something. Does that sound prat rubbish, Cathy? He didn’t find anything, other than the times he was up Sidhean Mor with those big bugger birds, until the three gooks came for him. I reckoned he’d been running up till the time they came for him, and they showed up and he stopped running . . . The pictures they brought, Cathy, they’d have turned a hard man . . .’

  The salmon farm labourer reached for his wallet and the diminishing fold of notes made from the sale of Gord Brown’s wheels. She shook her head and the gold hair of Cathy Parker sheened in the low light of the hotel bar. She made her excuses, said she was driving back to London through the night. Before she left the bar she paused to gaze up at the stuffed majesty of an eagle, then ducked her head and went out into a still and clear night. Rocky walked her to the car.

  ‘. . . I suppose he went there, yes, of course he did. I suppose he’s making waves there. I said he was running, but I don’t reckon after those photographs of blood and bodies and kiddies cut up that he’ll want to run any more. Not unless he’s won, he won’t run out of there. Been good meeting you, Cathy.’

  The queues were already forming outside the embassy for the opening of the visa section, the damp light was growing, and the men who would hire their services with old typewriters were setting up their pitches under high umbrellas.

  The gate was edged open for Tom by a marine guard.

  The jeep was parked on the kerb.

  The colonel sat impassive beside his driver.

  Tom slung his kitbag into the back of the jeep and climbed after it. He was jerked down onto a hard seat as the jeep powered away.

  The jeep went through the grey-lit city. The colonel ignored him, studied a mass of papers that were protected from the rain by cellophane sleeves.

  A barrier was raised for them.

  The jeep parked outside the military hospital, and Arturo jerked his thumb for Tom to follow. They ran past two lorries in army camouflage that were being hosed down and scrubbed clean.

  The ward was filled. Each bed was taken. There were mattresses laid out in the central aisle. There was a scream from a bed, and a moan from another, and a sobbing cry from a mattress. The nurses hurried on silent rubber-soled shoes, and the doctors lingered over beds and mattresses and their hanging white coats were blood-stained and showed the dark marks of charred burning. Tom hesitated by the door of the ward, beside the big heap of stinking uniforms, and Arturo from the middle of the aisle demanded with an impatient sweep of his arm that Tom follow him. The nurses and doctors were around him with the saline drips and the swabs and the syringes of morphine. He forced himself to look. He saw the dog-quiet eyes of men in shock from pain, and the trembling of the arms of men in shock from fear, and the eyes were diamonds in the blackness of a scorched face and the arms were dark stumps where the skin had bubbled in heat. The scream became a rattle and the rattle was lost and a sheet was pulled over the head of a man and the nurses pushed the bed on its wheels out through the swing door at the far end of the ward. He made himself look. Arturo covered the length of the ward, did not speak to a doctor nor to a nurse nor to a burned soldier. His boots smacked back over the length of the aisle. Tom followed him out.

  He understood the fire.

  He knew the wounds that the fire made and the terror that it brought.

  He felt the cold of the rain and the wind as they returned to the jeep. It was about family. It was family that he searched for. He had not found the family in the DEA community working out of the Guatemala City embassy, because there he was just the ferry man who did the lifts. And he had not found the family in the military where the regimen of promotion crawling and camaraderie bonding suffocated him. Nor had he found the family at what had once been home. There had been a teacher, far back, who had been the nearest thing to family. The teacher had driven him through the grades to college, and been around to pressure him through the exams for the military. The teacher was dead, cancerous lungs. The teacher had died the month that he had travelled to Fort Wolters. He thought it was because he had never known it that he cared so much about finding family. And he wondered if he might just be finding family in a ward for burns casualties . . .

  Tom grasped Arturo’s shoulder. The anger bit in him. ‘I didn’t need to be told. I didn’t need to be given a show at the theatre. My orders are to help you to hunt him down and to kill him, the man with the fire . . .’

  With the first light coming the hunger gnawed in the stomach of the Civil Patroller. Through the night, watching over Gaspar the spirit and the woman who had gone to him, his gut had groaned for food. He could see the white body of Gaspar the spirit and he could see the woman sitting close to it, and they were protected well enough by the Fireman and the gringos from America and Canada and the Priest and the Street Boy from Guatemala City. He whispered that he would g
o to look for food. What he hoped to find, what he had dreamed of in the half-sleep through the night, were fresh-made tortillas with beans and chilli and perhaps some rice, and better if he could wash the rawness from his throat with atol, and not bad if he could find warm Coca Cola. The dream of the food was fanciful to him, the food that he ate on the few days a year when he went to the festivals in Uspantán and Sacapulas. The dream was of enchiladas and guacamole with mashed avocado, and ceviche which was marinated raw fish. He told the men in the group that he would go to look for food and he thought that each of them felt the hunger. He took the rifle with him that he had been given and started back towards the town. He did not see the shadow movement. He did not cry out as the shadow movement closed on him, took him. The thoughts of the tortillas and warm Coca Cola were shredded from his mind. He did not cry out as he felt the knife against his throat and the stale breath against his nose because he believed that to have cried out would have lessened his chance of survival.

  The older ones would have known him.

  The older NCOs and some of the officers at platoon or company level would have remembered Mario Arturo from Victory ’82 and Firmness ’83. He searched among the faces for those who had been with him in the triangle and in the Ixcán, and those who had paraded with him on the Campo de Marte on Army Day, before he had gone to lecture at the Escuela Politecnica, before he had gone to the staff at the estado mayor, before the shit job of liaison with the drugs hunters. They were the best, he felt the pride.

  ‘What does a Kaibil eat? flesh . . .’

  He stood on an overturned orange box. He let the roar chant wash over him.

  ‘What kind of flesh? human . . .’

  The American was behind him. The officers of the battalion were below him. The chant was for him.

  ‘What kind of human flesh? communist . . .’