The Candidate (21 page)

“What do you want to know?”

Mike was at a loss. He realized he had no idea what he was really investigating. He pulled up a stool and removed a pile of papers, putting them gingerly on the floor and hoping they would not topple down. He felt a wave of exhaustion wash over him again, swamping him, and decided he should be as honest as possible.

“Look,” he said. “I can’t say exactly who I work for. But I am researching a topic that leads back to the late 1980s in Guatemala and US involvement in the civil war there. It’s not my area of expertise. I just need help.”

Gusman narrowed her eyes and regarded him for a moment. Though he dwarfed her in size, Mike suddenly felt small. Eventually she gave a little laugh.

“It’s about time some
Americano
took an interest in what your country did there.”

She took down a large folder from one of the shelves. She spread it out in front of him. It contained numerous pieces of white paper that appeared to be some sort of incident reports. They were interspersed with dozens of the same kind of black and white photos that were pasted up on the wall. Bodies upon bodies; men, women and children. The effect numbed Mike.

“This is the file for one province from 1987,” Gusman said. “We are trying to build a database of incidents. We get a lot of folks from Guatemala coming through here and we try and ask them about things they may have seen. A lot of them say nothing. But others can help us fill in the details.”

“Who are these people?” Mike asked, gesturing at the pictures of the dead.

“Farmers, peasants and, most likely, a few guerrillas too. The Americans trained the Guatemalan army to fight communists. The army did just that, but they did not care too much about the details. Nuns, social workers, union organizers, journalists… the definition of communist became pretty broad.”

Gusman saw the look on Mike’s face.

“Americans are never so good at looking at their past, especially beyond their borders. It is a talent you all have,” she said.

“What was the School of the Americas?” he asked.

“Was? It still exists. It is a military training school for Latin American countries. Thousands of army soldiers from Central America passed through its ranks in the 1980s. When you look at those photos you can see their handiwork.”

“And in Guatemala?”

“America feared a communist takeover, just like happened in Cuba,” she said. “So they helped the government murder and torture anyone with leftist sympathies.”

Gusman put more files down in front of him and began to go through the years, one by one. It was a litany of horror. The massacres, the torture of thousands in grimy prison cells, the CIA advisors and trainers who marshaled local thugs to keep the army in power. The pillage of vast areas of the country-side and the spilling of rivers of blood. Two hundred thousand people died or disappeared by the time it ended in 1996. The vast majority of them were Mayan Indians.

Finally, Mike could not take the endless lists of the dead anymore. “Do you know the name of General Rodrigo Carillo?” he blurted out.

Gusman nodded slowly. “A senior commander in the Lake Atitlan area. He was involved in the church massacre at Santa Teresa in 1987,” she said, realizing that Mike knew a little more than he was letting on. “The army killed 75 or more peasants around a village church after a guerrilla raid wiped out one of their patrols. It’s a relatively little known massacre.”

She paused, noticing the blank look on Mike’s face. “It’s well known to us. Just not many others seem to care.”

Mike could not miss the sadness and reproach in her voice. “And Carillo was responsible?”

“Carillo was hardly the only brute working for the army who broke the rules of war,” Gusman said. “But he was one of the most enthusiastic. He killed peasants, he tortured suspects…”

Suddenly Gusman shut the file with a snap and stood up. “I can do better than just tell you about him,” she said. “I can take you to someone with a more personal story. Come on, let’s go.”

Gusman took Mike by the arm and led him out of the office to her battered white Toyota sedan. It was a mess inside, full of Coke cans and scraps of paper. She grinned an apology and they set off. They drove for twenty minutes down blocks of increasingly scruffy-looking suburbia. Gradually all the shop signs in English switched to Spanish. Mike saw groups of men hunkered down on street corners, waiting for day laboring jobs that rarely came. Eventually Gusman pulled up outside a dilapidated ranch home surrounded by a half-dozen beat-up cars. They got out of the car and they walked up to the front door.

Gusman knocked and a small, dark-haired man peered out. His eyes blinked wide as if just awakened. There followed a burst of chatter in Spanish that was so quick Mike could not follow it. But at the end of the conversation, the small man cast a glance in Mike’s direction, nodded imperceptibly and opened the door to let them in.

Inside the living room was entirely bare except for an ancient television set and a couple of grimy-looking mattresses on the floor. The man sat on one of them and gestured unself-consciously for Gusman and Mike to do likewise. Mike settled himself, and tried hard not to look at the stains.

“This is ‘Jose’,” Gusman said. “You don’t need to know his real name. He was a villager from the Atitlan area, near where the Santa Teresa massacre happened. He was picked up for interrogation by Carillo’s unit back in 1989. He can tell you what sort of person the General is.”

Mike looked at the man. He could not guess his age. He must be at least 40 or so, he thought, but you could put ten years on either side of that and he would not have been surprised. His face was lined with the harsh kisses of the sun and the stresses of hard work, but his eyes sparkled and his black hair shone like it had been polished. His hands, which seemed large for his body, were thick and muscular, a product of a lifetime of labor. They looked like they could strangle a horse.

“Tell me what you know about General Carillo,” Mike said.

Jose nodded and spoke slowly in thickly accented English, while Gusman helped him along when he got stuck. He talked of his village, San Diego, deep in the Highlands, surrounded by thick jungles and farms. Of how the guerrillas came down from the mountains and took food for their supplies; of how the villagers begged them not to come, but could not refuse their requests. They were just peasants with no weapons and, besides, many of the guerrillas were cousins and brothers.

Then, one day, Carillo came to their village and lambasted them as communist-lovers. He ignored protestations that they were simple farmers. He singled out five of them for interrogation, including Jose. They were put in the back of a jeep and taken to an army camp.

Jose stopped talking. Mike could see the man’s bottom lip quivering and his breath came in deep gasps. Gusman reached out and rested a hand on his arm.

“Perhaps this was not a good idea,” she said. But Jose jerked his arm away and shook his head fiercely.

“It’s about time someone asked about this,” he said. “Carillo was beloved of the Americans in Guatemala City.”

Mike said nothing. It seemed there was a spell in the house that gathered in the shadows from the far corners of the room and reached out to throttle the light.

“I was kept in a dirty room for seven days. I was tied to a chair and they beat me three times a day. Each morning, noon and night, they beat me. Their fists fed on me.”

Jose spat the words out angrily, his eyes shining and defiant as they tumbled out of his mouth. “Carillo was the worst,” he said. “He asked the same questions over and over again. Where are the guerrillas? Who are they? Give me their names. It did not even matter what I told him. Whatever the answer he would take one of his big, fat Cuban cigars and stab it out on my flesh.”

Mike winced at the thought and remembered the smell of smoke that permeated Carillo’s villa. He wondered how the stench changed when mixed with burning skin and muscle.

Jose stood up and lifted his T-shirt to reveal a long line of old, blistered white scars that marched across his chest like a line of lunar craters. “In the end I told him what I knew. Everyone did,” he said. “They made a few arrests and they let me go.”

His voice faded away and he looked down at the ground. “But I survived,” he said. Then more loudly: “I survived.”

There was a sudden knock on the door which broke the dark spell in the room like a snapped twig. Jose rushed to open the door. Again there was a burst of staccato Spanish and he looked back. “There is a job,” he said. “A lady in Georgetown is moving house. It’s a half-day’s work to lift her furniture. I’ll get twenty dollars.”

Gusman and Mike got up and Jose brushed past them as he left. He barely acknowledged them as he collected some warm work clothes. A flat-bed truck idled outside and its exhaust sent plumes of smoke into the cold air. A half-dozen other Latino men sat on the back of it, wrapped up warm, their faces dark or light, young and old, betrayed different nationalities and stories. Jose jumped on the truck to join them. It trundled slowly down the street. Jose did not look back. But Gusman and Mike stared at it until it disappeared from view, carrying its human cargo, his scars hidden beneath cheap clothing, onto the highway heading north.

* * *

AS he drove back from Washington to New Hampshire, Mike decided to visit Corinth Falls again. It was a whim, borne of the long drive and a longing to see Sean. He desperately needed someone to just relax with, free from the campaign, free from Guatemala. Just an old friend. He punched in his phone number and, when Sean answered, simply named their old, favorite local bar.

“I’ll see you in two hours,” Mike said and hung up without waiting for a reply.

Then his foot hit the gas pedal and he was there in ninety minutes.

The bar had not changed one bit. O’Rourke’s squatted on the corner of Locust and Main. It was a dark, seedy dive where daylight never penetrated and the same selection of 80s hits that Mike remembered from so many wasted evenings of his youth still played on the Juke box. Sean waited inside. They embraced each other and then burst out laughing and ordered a round of beers.

Mike listened patiently first while Sean updated him on his family life and the struggle to find work. Then it was Sean’s turn to play confessor and listen to Mike unburden himself. He talked about his trip to Guatemala and Washington but kept the details a little vague. He trusted his old friend with more than he told anyone else so he mentioned Hodges’ links to Central America, the visit with the General and Jose’s horrible story. Sean grimaced and shook his head.

“The only good thing to come out of the 80s was the music,” he said, as a
Guns’n Roses
hit played for the fourth time. “The politics stank.”

“Yeah, I know. But don’t you think it all seems like ancient history now? I mean, it was the Cold War.”

Sean shrugged. “Doesn’t seem like ancient history to you. Nor that Jose guy in Virginia,” Sean said.

“Yeah, but what if Hodges was involved in something really bad? What if the woman who tried to shoot him wasn’t just some crazy person? But was out for revenge. I mean, Jesus, what could Hodges have done that means you would still want to kill him 30 years later?”

The pair fell silent. Mike had finally voiced his innermost fear, the burden that grew heavier and heavier the more he delved into Hodges’ background. Sean breathed a deep sigh and took a swig of the whisky chaser that nestled snugly beside his bottle of beer.

“Fuck,” he said. “I can’t think like that, Mike. Hodges gives a lot of people around here a bit of hope. People talk about him all the time. They’re rooting for him to win in New Hampshire. They don’t want the same old bullshit from some career politician like Stanton,” he said.

He paused for a moment. “They want a chance to vote for Hodges, Mike,” he added. “Not just in the primaries. But in the real election against that prick we’ve got in the White House right now. They want to vote for Hodges to be president.”

Now it was Mike’s turn to have a drink. He could hear Dee’s voice, delivering her favorite lecture: we’re here to protect our man. Even from himself. From his own past. From his own sins. Mike was a soldier. Trust in the righteousness of the cause. And it was righteous too, he thought. The hope and inspiration that he read in people’s faces when they heard Hodges speak, when he spoke to them directly, like a man, like a fellow American, not just another politician angling for votes. He felt it himself, too. That was, after all, why he first signed up.

“Oh shit…” Sean breathed suddenly and Mike followed his gaze to the bar’s front door where a slim, female figure had walked in out of the cold.

Jaynie.

She cast her eye around the bar and when it settled upon Mike’s surprised face, her expression lit up like a pinball machine. Mike could almost hear the bells and whistles going off. She smiled a heart-breakingly familiar grin and bounded over.

“Mike!” she cried. “Goddamn! What are you doing here?”

Mike looked at her, trying to see if she was high on anything. But her eyes were clear. She pulled herself up a few feet away from them. Mike wondered if she remembered how just two days ago she slammed the door on him and left him sprawled on the ground.

“Can I join you?” she asked, an acknowledgement that now she needed to be invited.