The Fighting Man (1993) (53 page)

‘. . . And nobody
cares
, Gord. It was left to me who is small and elderly and frightened, to try to shout in the night that there is injustice and evil in my country. Why don’t they care, Gord? Where are they, those who should care? Why is it left to me who is weak to try to shout when those that have power do not care? The men who have power, how can they sleep in their beds and know that injustice is not punished, that evil is not checked? The great men in Washington and Moscow have abandoned us. The great men in Mexico City and London and Madrid and Paris have betrayed us. How can there be hope when the great men turn away, wash their hands, feel no responsibility? It is not right that only the small and the elderly and the frightened should carry the weight of the burden of responsibility. For them it would be so easy, for us it is so hard . . .’

The second hand moving and the minute hand jerking. Alex cradled Groucho’s head and held the cheek of his face against her chest, and gave him love.

‘. . . I do not feel the fear, Gord, any longer. The fear is gone. I do not blame them because they beat me. They beat me because they would have done the same as I did, it was natural that they should beat me. I blame only the great men who do not care. We were out of our time, Gord. The new world of the great men is a world of self-interest, it is a world where the man who is small and elderly and frightened, and without power, can be ignored. I am of the old world where the struggle of man for his freedom is noble, and the repression of that freedom is heresy. Perhaps I do not wish to live any longer in the new world of the great men . . . Mine was only a small shout in the night and not heard. Do not let them sleep sweet. Wake the great men in their beds, Gord . . .’

The second hand had raced, the minute hand had jerked.

Gord called the end of the rest halt.

He went to Jorge and Jorge passed him the Kalashnikov rifle. He remembered the banter talk in the Land Rover, Frank and Vernon and Zachary. Always the joke talk, crap gallows humour, when the going was bad. He was never a part of the joke talk of ‘Eff’ and ‘Vee’ and ‘Zed’. Zachary, ‘Zed’, had had the old book, dog-eared and dirt-stained, had it until the book had disintegrated but by then they had known the joke talk lines by heart. Always the joke talk lifted them when the going was worst.

‘
Any club that would accept me as a member I wouldn’t want to join.
’

Gord cocked the rifle.

Groucho ducked his head, exposed the back of his skull, and his eyes were open.

‘
A man’s only as old as the woman he feels.
’

Gord was close to him.

Alex pushed the cart away, followed Jorge and the group.

‘
My mother loved children – she would have given anything if I’d been one
.’ Thanks, Groucho. Thanks, Mr Marx. Thanks to Francis and Vernon and Zachary for the crap joke lines when the going was worst.

Gord fired the single shot.

There was the clattered panic call of a pheasant in flight . . .

Tom had been asked, and he had given the advice.

‘You tell them to stay back, stay right back.’

And it was the order that Arturo had relayed, that they should stay back, right back.

It had been more than a mile from the place that Tom was able to set down. There had been light scrub there and the troops had cleared an LZ for them. They were a mile from the beacon transmission point. They were guided from the LZ through the tree forest. He thought Arturo had been good. There had been commanders down in the Gulf who had snapped, gone haywire, when the balloon had punctured. Back in St Louis, the bossman on the surveillance team watching an out-of-state trafficker had blown his head when the team had shown out. There were some for winning and some for losing, and bawling for Mom didn’t trip losing into winning. Arturo, from the air, had co-ordinated well the follow-up after they had cleared up the old guy with the badge in his hand. Hard for Arturo, when the ambush had failed, not to have blown his head or snapped. He’d done well . . . They reached the place.

So still and so calm and so silent.

They were good troops and disciplined. Bad troops would have gone right in for it.

It was slung from a tree branch. The strap was looped over the branch and the beacon box hung below. Too still and too calm and too silent. They all went on the course. Escape and Evasion. He had been on the one-week course a year and nine months before going down to the Gulf. Only half a day of the week had been about Evasion (Delay). Half a day given up to the tactic of delaying a follow-up force of troops in hostile territory. He pointed to the colonel’s Uzi and he held out his hand for it. Arturo passed it. He armed it. He waved them all down and he lay on his stomach and he aimed at the black painted box. He fired . . . fucking missed. The echo of the shot died amongst the trees. On the ground, around him, the troops giggled, like that was good sport from a gringo. Tom was twenty-five paces from the tree. He fired again, and missed again. Arturo took the weapon. Arturo made the shot. It was as if the box had been kicked. The box, split open, leaped and fell and swung. So still. The giggle again around him. So calm. He had his hand on Arturo’s shoulder, that he should not move. So silent. He counted.

The explosion came from across the path.

The blast hit their ears.

The shrapnel sang above them.

A good one from Gord, what he would have expected of Gordon Benjamin Brown. The fine string had been laid from the box and held taut up the strap and then hooked to the branch and then run down the tree trunk to a stone that weighted the string tight before the run to the grenade. It was pretty near to what they had taught at the half-day for Evasion (Delay) . . . Then watching Arturo. Arturo was on his hands and his knees and going forward and moving down the faint lines of the wheels’ track.

It was a length of vine.

The vine was forty yards, near enough, from where the box had been hung. From where Tom was, the vine seemed to lie casual across the wheels’ track. He went to Arturo who was kneeling short of the vine. Only when he was close to it could he see that the string was woven round the length of the vine. He felt the chill. No giggling now from the troops, no more fun from the gringo games, like they knew it was for fucking real . . .

Tom called for a length of rope, and when it was brought him, he tied the end of the rope to the vine. He crawled back, paying out the rope, never allowing tension in it. He saw they all lay on their stomachs. He jerked the rope.

The grenade blast gouged resined holes in the tree across the path, level with where a man’s stomach would have been.

It was the right stuff, it was Evasion (Delay) done by a man who cared to be expert.

They went slow.

They found the body.

The dusk was coming to the forest trees. The presence of Gord chilled him. It was no place to be in darkness. He felt the power of Gordon Benjamin Brown. He thought of the string that had been wrapped to the strap and the string that had been gathered along a length of vine. He remembered when he had seen the face of the body, fear-filled, pulled onto the helicopter . . . the murdering bastard, Gordon Benjamin Brown . . . He was a part of it, dragged to it, Gord’s war. He could not hide from it.

He shivered. He could see the wheel tracks of the flame thrower winding away into the trees. He thought that he had crossed the line. Searching for the new family had carried him somehow across the line, new loyalties claiming him.

‘Let’s get the hell out.’

Arturo said, ‘Does he frighten you?’

‘We’ll go get the shit in the morning, and hit him.’

He wanted to be with her, close to her.

The dog was between them and the shoulders and the ears of the dog brushed against their legs.

He needed to know.

‘You were wonderful with him. You gave him the strength. Because of you he went calm and he went proud. It was your strength, Alex . . .’

Her hand dropped to the dog’s head. Her fingers locked in the coat of the dog’s neck. He thought she choked. It would have been good for her if she had wept.

‘. . . Where was the strength from, Alex?’

And again there was the head thrown back and the hair flying from across her forehead, and she blinked her eyes and seemed to cough. He thought that she had killed the chance of tears.

She said it flat. ‘When I was thirteen, fussed over by Mummy, drooled over by Daddy, spoiled brat. Gymkhanas and Pony Clubs. I had this little piebald, very calm. Round where we lived, Somerset, there was plenty of safe riding, off the road. I used to go out on my own, hard hat and jacket and blouse and jodhpurs, looking a proper fool. Are we getting there? Probably it was a rabbit hole. At the canter. Winston broke his leg. We were out in a hardwood plantation. It wasn’t till dark that my mother went to panic state. There were five hours of darkness before I was found . . .’

He walked beside her, and took her hand.

‘There was nothing wrong with me, just bruises. For five hours I held Winston’s head before the torches came and the shouting. They didn’t seem that bothered about Winston, and they wanted to take me away because it would be a long time before they could get a vet there to do the necessary. I screamed at them, every foul word that they didn’t think their lovely little daughter, aged thirteen, would have known. It was put down to hysteria, but they backed off . . .’

His head was lowered. They went together, slow.

‘I stayed until the vet came and put that sweet animal beyond pain . . . Bit young, don’t you think, to lose your childhood at thirteen, yes? I loved that horse more than I loved my mother and my father . . . Well, that’s a happy little story, isn’t it?’

‘Thank you for telling me, sharing.’

Alex laughed, shrill. ‘Cliché of the day. You can buy strength, but at a hell of a price.’

When the sun was on the sea, slanting over the low islands of the Cayería las Cayamas, hovering above the slight waves, the signal reached the base.

The base commander read the signal that had been taken from the teleprinter, and he grimaced in surprise. He telephoned to the ministry, made it his business to speak personally to a major in air force intelligence to gain irrefutable confirmation of the order carried in the signal.

It was the dog day of the regime. It was the time when the regime bent to the circumstances of the new order. It was explained to him curtly . . . Confrontation gone, independence lost, the knee bent . . . a last throw. The base commander asked his orderly to bring him the pilot. Never again, not afterwards, the major had said, would such madness be repeated. The flight was ordered at the highest echelon of government. The final moment of madness from the ‘old man’ . . .

After it was dark, after the sun had slipped on the Golfo de Batabanó, the orderly reported to the base commander that the pilot could not be found, gone fishing.

They made a camp by the swirl of a clean river pool.

Gord said they should all sleep.

They had no food.

Gord said that he would take the watch.

He started, alone, to refill the tubes on the cart.

Zeppo came to stand close to him, big and awkward. Harpo was behind Zeppo, hovering.

Zeppo said, subdued, ‘I could not have done it, we could not have done it. He was our friend . . .’

Gord scowled, gave them nothing.

‘. . . I knew him, we knew him, like he was a brother. I feel the shame, we both feel the shame, because we kicked him and beat him when he was identified, that was what we did to our friend, our brother. You gave him love and we gave him nothing . . .’

Gord stared back, brutal and cold.

‘. . . Where he stood, I could have been standing, we could have been standing. We know that and we feel the shame . . . We feel the greater shame because of what we have said to you, because we have not helped you. You have promised to take us out, and we believe you. We believe you because we understand that you are the only possibility we have of living . . .’

Gord began, mechanical, to sort the tube lengths from the air cylinder in the wheelbarrow.

‘. . . He spoke a great truth, the father of Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez, when he said that we should take a fighting man . . . I ask for forgiveness, we ask for forgiveness.’

Gord was fastening the tubes.

They went away from him, clumsy and noisy, as the dusk darkness settled through the trees.

It was the birds that woke the Street boy.

There was the crashing of the birds in the trees above him and their screams. He could see the chase of the monkeys that had disturbed the birds. He loathed the place, and he had not slept as he did on the pavements near the big hotels of Guatemala City. The streets and the pavements and his friends, that was his freedom. The forest was his prison. He wanted again to feel the freedom . . . He had dreamed in the night of being with his friends and circling the tourists and watching for the opportunity, and he had dreamed of the excitement of running into the dark alleys behind the hotels when the police cars cruised by, and always in the dream he escaped from the police . . . They treated him like a child. The Street Boy did not believe he was a child. They treated him like a child and they had shielded his eyes when the man was shot dead. He pushed the wheelbarrow, he took his place, and they had no right to treat him as a child. He had heard the way that they talked, if the plane came, about a return to Havana . . . He thought Havana would be shit. From what they said, there was nothing for him in Havana, no tourists and no watches and wallets and no AmEx and Diners Club cards and no traveller’s cheques. He craved the excitement again of hunting with his friends on the pavements of Guatemala City, and it had not been
excitement
when he had taken the wheelbarrow at the run through the ambush . . . No excitement, just terror, and he had wet his trousers as he had run, and he thought Gord knew that he had wet himself . . . They should not have shot the man. The man had been kind to him, the man had given him sweets and chocolate that had been taken from the camp at Nebaj and the barracks at Santa Cruz del Quiché. He would have much to tell his friends on the pavements of Guatemala City. He watched Gord. He was not sure whether Gord was awake or whether Gord slept. He would have liked to have taken Gord to Guatemala City . . . They would not let him go in the day, but it was not until he had dreamed that he had determined to break out from the prison that was the forest. They would not let him go because he knew the place where the plane would land and the time. The man who had given him the sweets and the chocolate had known the place and the time, and the man had been shot for his knowledge. He would go at the end of the day . . . and he would take the Kalashnikov with the folding stock. When he was back, on the pavements of Guatemala City, then he would show his friends the Kalashnikov and they would know that he spoke the truth of what he had seen.