Car flat out trying to go around this bend in the road in the jungle gotta get around this bend but Shit! There's a huge green truck pulled across the road slam on the brakes and spin the wheel to the right looks like some guys running out of the way don't care don't want to hit that truck don't want to be here crashing into bushes and small trees guys with guns all over the truck all in the jungle started shooting as soon as I came around the corner not shooting at me shooting at whoever is shooting at me engine stalls and I am glad.
Slide to the floor under the dash. Make myself very thin. Changes in the texture of light shadows going by my windows. There's a thud and that sound metal makes when it pops in and out and the car is bouncing. Look up through the windshield, green uniform body smooshed up against the glass, like those photos from Rolling Stone, back in the seventies those photos of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards lips all squished flat against the glass between the camera and them. This guy's body like that. Lying across the windshield, shooting over the roof. The sound of his rifle shooting is big, like I'm inside it, like the whole car is the barrel of the gun. Please god don't let the gas tank explode.
There is a really shrill loud whistle and some yelling, and the gun firing slows down. The bangs stop, peter out like the couple of pops after you take the popcorn pan off the stove. The man on the hood of my car stands up, he puts his foot on the top edge of the windshield, and I'm looking at the bottom of this guy's shoe. There's mud in the waffle sole.
He looks down, sees me looking up at him. He gives me a thumbs up. It's so quiet that I don't want to make any sound. Just want to lie here quiet until they all go away and then I can sit back up and continue my drive. Just continue my drive lah de dah down the Guatemalan highway to the next country, where maybe they aren't having a war today. The whole thing has taken maybe forty five seconds, from back window exploding to this quiet. I'm not dead. My car's not exploded. I can go, now, right?
"Where's our prize?" Someone says. In Spanish. I'm really getting used to Spanish now.
I slide back up onto the seat. Sit up, trying to keep my hands in sight. I sit there with my hands on the steering wheel, look straight ahead at the jungle on the hood of my car. The door opens. My captor is standing there. Or my savior, which ever he figures he is. He has the guns, after all.
"Gringo!" he says. He reaches out his left hand and takes my arm, pulling. Wants me to get out of the car. My legs want to stay inside. I force them, but they're not happy about it. They seem to have forgotten how to lock at the knee. Lean against the door frame.
"Welcome to my Guatemala!" the man says. His eyes are glinting obsidian beads looking at me out from under bushy eyebrows eyes. His mouth is a lips stretched into a wide grin over stained and missing teeth mouth.
I have to swallow before I can speak, because all the moisture in my mouth must have decided it liked being in the car, too. Anyway, it wasn't in my mouth anymore.
"Thanks," I say.
He is no taller than me, thin like a dancer. He moves like an athlete, like a gymnast, like a trapeze artist. His hat is a crumpled bill with captain's bars pinned to the front hat. His hair is long straight black tied in a braid halfway down his back hair. His face is a lean, long showing all his feelings face. His nose is a wide with a tiny mustache underneath nose.
"Let us walk over here," he says. He puts out his hand palm open like a maitre d' in a restaurant. His other hand is holding my arm and tugging in that direction like a guard in a maximum security prison.
"I am Capitan Juanito Dela Velanova," he says, "of the National Federation of Socialist Liberators. This is my territory."
"Oh?" I say, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to intrude..."
"No, no!" Velanova says, "It is quite all right with me. Those filthy dogs who shot up your car, they are members of the government army. They have a permanent position at the edge of our territory."
I look back the way I came. Can't see around the bend in the road. I'm thinking this is a good thing.
"They probably think you are a spy," he says. Can't tell if he's joking or not. He's still got that smile, and his eyes; it's like looking at one of those kachina dolls and trying to figure out what it's thinking.
Velanova leads me around the other side of the truck. We step off the road and into a space where the jungle isn't so thick. The jungle isn't so thick, I realize, because this is a camp. There's a little fire in a pit not too far from the road. Over by that tree there's a canvas lean-to, looks like an old radio transceiver under it. Past that there are some hammocks tied between trees.
* * *
We sit around a small camp stove. Me, Velanova and a couple of his men. We are drinking bad coffee and eating tortillas and beans out of tin plates. Around the edges of the clearing there are more men, some of them snoozing under trees. Some of them cleaning their guns. Some of them smoking cigarettes and staring into the jungle.
Velanova offers me a cigarette from a crisp pack of Camels, box. I take it. Don't want to seem like I don't appreciate his generosity. Don't want to tell him I quit years ago. Don't want to not smoke that cigarette right then. Matter of fact, that cigarette tastes really really good right then.
"Thanks for saving me," I say.
Velanova waves his arm, pushing the palm of his hand toward me like he's pushing some kind of mushy stuff back at me. He looks at me with those stone eyes.
"I may ask a favor in return," he says. He smiles, his mouth twisting up at one side.
"Sometime." he says. The men near him laugh, like they know something.
After the meal, Velanova stands up. He motions his hand to me, fingers flipping up like he wants me to give him something.
"Come," he says. I stand up. Follow him when he walks. He leads me away from the others. Off toward the edge of the clearing.
He wears a uniform, but it's really pieces of uniforms from different armies. It says Smith over his left breast pocket in white stencil letters with square edges. A bandoleer of long, pointed bullets crosses his body from right shoulder to left hip, and a holster, black like Paladin’s with a gun, shiny silver gun like The Lone Ranger's, rides low on his right side, it's tied to his leg at the bottom. In a western I once read, the good guy sheriff told the impressionable little kid that the guys who tied their holsters to their legs were bad guys. Velanova’s shoes are muddy purple high-topped Converse basketball shoes sticking out of his fatigues.
He asks where I am from, and I tell him. He asks where I am going and I make something up.
"Panama," I say.
Velanova stops and looks at me. Looks at me like he knows that's not the whole story. Looks at me like he understands why I don't want to tell him the whole story. Like he already knows the whole story, but he's not gonna embarrass me by saying that. He nods. He squats down in front of a tree and leans back against it. He lights another cigarette, offers me one. I take it and squat down in front of the next tree over. Lean back against the tree.
We sit with our knees drawn up, resting our elbows across our knees, our feet spread a little to help prop us against the tree trunks. He takes out his knife and begins scratching in the dirt between his feet.
"I was eleven when the Death Squads came to our village," he says.
He is looking down at the dirt. At his knife scratching lines in the dirt.
"They came in the night," he says, "when everyone was asleep. They had a big truck with a plow on the front and they ran into our houses. The soldiers came with torches and guns, shooting the men as they ran to defend our village with hoes and machetes. They hacked the men to death and caught the women, killing the old and raping the young."
Velanova takes a firmer grip on his knife, holding it in his fist with the blade sticking out the bottom. He digs this down into the scratched place he started, jamming half the blade into the ground and then twisting it out, breaking up the dirt. Jamming it in. Twisting it out.
"My father was an outspoken man." He said, "He had criticized the government many times. They tied him to a tree and cut off his penis. Then they raped my mother and older sister in front of him. They cut off his eyelids so he could not close his eyes. They slashed my mother's face with their knives and cut off her breasts before they killed her. Many men raped my sister, sometimes several at once, until she hemorrhaged. Then they beat her head with their guns until she died. She was only fourteen. At last they cut my father's stomach open, letting his entrails fall out. They left him to die that way."
His face is rigid and dark, his eyes are small and brittle and far away. His hand holds the knife ready to jam it into the ground again, but it stays there, in the air, about two inches above the earth. Light blinks off the blade, flickering into my eyes like a strobe light. I can hardly breath. If I were to move, I am sure the twisting in my gut will push something out through my mouth. I swallow bile. It goes down hard.
After a moment, his shoulders loosen and he looks at the ground again, There's a twelve inch long patch of loosened up dirt. He shifts grip on the knife, the blade pointing up from his hand, thumb and forefinger holding the blade like a spoon. He uses the flat of the blade to shovel the loose dirt out of the gash. Piles the dirt next to the gash.
"I was away overnight." he says, "On a hunting trip with my uncle and cousins. The next day, on the way back, we saw the smoke. The smoke of our burning village. I found my family, ripped open and covered with flies."
His voice stops. It's like he was going to keep talking but his voice decided not to. Like someone squeezed that place where the voice comes from really hard. His lips are jammed together, and his eyes are closed.
He lets the knife down slow and pushes the little pile of dirt back into the gash. He puts the knife down and uses his bare hand to push the dirt back in.
"We buried them in the yard," he says, "my uncle and my cousins and I. The next day we left to join the guerrillas."
He brushes over the little trench with his hand. His hand is quiet and smooth, patting the dirt into a little mound.
I can't say anything. What is there to say?
An engine starts up. It's my car. I take a big breath and let it out. Look around, Velanova's still looking at his little grave.
My car rolls into camp, with one of Velanova's men at the wheel. He waves out the window and parks under a tree. I hear him pull the emergency brake. I feel my face squirm up at the sound. I know from the sound he's pulled it really hard and it's going to be a bitch for me to get it loose.
"Your government," Velanova says, "supports these savages."
I look at him. His face is hurt, like a child who's been punished for no reason.
"I know," I say. I hang my head. It's like it's all my fault, because I know it happens and I don't know how to stop it from happening.
"Why do you let it happen?" he says. His face says he really wants to know.
"Nobody really wants it to happen." I say. "None of the regular people, I mean. It's just all so big, so huge. There's a big military industrial complex, they like to sell weapons. They don't sell weapons if there's peace. Some of those government agencies, they don't really answer to anyone, or I guess they don't answer to anyone like me, like the regular people. They get money for covert operations none of us ever get to hear about until after it's all over and then it's too late."
He looks at me as if I'm not making any sense. I guess it doesn't make any sense to me either.
"Most people," I say, "they're just so busy trying to keep up and live their lives, they don't have time to really pay attention to politics. They just want someone to take care of it for them. And then you gotta figure all them politicians are the same, anyway, all scum, so it don't really matter who you vote for as long as I get mine then fuck everyone else."
I'm thinking I'm not doing a very good job explaining, but I keep trying, anyway. It's like the harder I'm trying to explain how come us North Americans can't get our heads out of our asses, the further I'm shoving those heads in.
He nods while I talk, like he's really trying to make sense out of it. We light up a couple more cigarettes. Finally, I just run out of words, run out of excuses. It comes down to we've got it and you don't so tough titty. That's what it comes down to. Tough titty.
The day is getting hotter. Steam is rising from the higher branches, where the sun is hitting.
"Siesta time, gringo," says Velanova. He offers me a hammock, but I go for the back seat of my car. I brush all the glass off, check out a couple of bullet holes where the seat stuffing is coming through. Stretch out on my back on the vinyl, feet out the open door. Put my left arm over my eyes. There's a dark small place in the middle of my head that expands to about the size of....
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