The Convict and Other Stories

“No one cares about those things, except maybe a few ancient Jews that nobody pays any attention to.”

“Uncle Sam cares. Wait till they send your butt back to Germany.”

“I’m a citizen and businessman, Marcel. Would you like me to dial friends of mine in the State Department so you can talk with them? It would make you feel better, I think.” He smiled at me and his rimless glasses were full of light. His dueling scars looked like a small gray bird’s claw at the top of his brow. “You know the businesses I represent. Would they hire a Nazi? Ask yourself that.”

“Try this one for size, Klaus—I’ve got a nine-millimeter Luger at the houseboat, probably one your pals used to execute some partisans. You try to cook some barbecue with Amanda again and I’m going to stick it in your mouth and turn your brains into marmalade.”

“She said she’s worried about you. I think you should talk to a psychologist. I know several in Lafayette. I’ll lend you the money if you need it.”

I left and drove in my pickup to a bar out on Bayou Teche and got drunk and listened to all the Cajun records on the jukebox. I was all bluff with Klaus. I didn’t own a gun, and I never broke the law in my life except when I was a kid and I got those eight months on Angola farm in 1955 for running a bunch of whiskey up to north Louisiana. I was just full of guilt, that’s all, and sick inside because of Amanda. I love this damn country. The Nazis are supposed to be in old black-and-white newsreels. Why is one in New Iberia diddling my wife?

Because I allowed it. I flew for him.

He said it was machine parts for Belize. But the Nicaraguan he put on the plane with me in Miami waved me right on through Belize into Guatemala. I started to get mad at this Nicaraguan because I’d been had, then one of the port engines on the DC-6 started to misfire and shudder and blow oil back on the wing, and I had to feather it before the prop sheared off, which meant I had to feather the corresponding engine on the starboard wing, which meant we were carrying about three boxcar loads of metal-filled crates over the mountains at night with half power.

The moon was full and the black-green jungle-covered crests of the mountains were coming up fast, and I was leaning back on the stick and juicing it with everything I had while Klaus’s man whimpered beside me with his fist against his teeth. The downdrafts were hammering on the wings, and I heard stuff busting loose and sliding around in the hold, and I knew we’d either rip apart at the joints in midair and rain down on the jungle like an exploding junkyard or nose straight into a rock wall and fill the sky with thunder and yellow light.

But I believe a lot in prayer, and sure enough I dropped through a deep cut between two mountains, saw the valley open up before me, saw a long shining river bordered by coffee plantations, and wiped my palms on my windbreaker while the flat, geometrical, moonlit landscape moved by predictably a thousand feet below.

“Relax, podna,” I said to Klaus’s man, the Nicaraguan. “You look as uncomfortable as an ice cube in a skillet. That’s the strip where those truck flares are burning, isn’t it?”

His face was white and sweating in the instrument lights, and he twisted his head back at the rolling clatter of noise behind the cabin, his mouth too dry and pinched with fright to speak.

“That stuff’s not going anywhere,” I said. “If it didn’t punch out the ribs a few minutes ago, it’s not going to do it now.”

“Three-point-fives,” he said.

“What?”

“Bazooka rockets. Dey already unstable. I seen dem blow up with my cousin in back of yeep.”

I took a deep breath, held it, and eased down on the dirt runway that was lit by two rows of hissing flares spiked into ground. The runway was short, and I was standing on the brakes by the time I reached the wall of eucalyptus trees at the far end. A large crate crashed into the bulkhead right behind my seat.

“That Klaus is one entertaining fellow,” I said.

Short Indians in tiger-striped fatigues and U.S. Army steel pots off-loaded the whole store. Stroessner’s traveling dry goods included flamethrowers to polish a face into a roasted egg, Garands and Thompsons to blow hearts and lungs all over the trees, grenades, mortars, and rockets that could make dog food out of a whole village.

I decided to let the Guatemalans keep Klaus’s DC-6, with its bum engine and its cargo hold that smelled of death, and I would catch a commercial flight back to Miami or New Orleans. The major, who was a friend of the Nicaraguan, gave me a ride into the village in his jeep. The air was warm and smelled of the long rows of coffee trees that stretched away toward the encircling mountains in the moonlight, and I could see the river winking through the thick groves of bananas that grew along its bank. We reached the village just as the dawn rimmed the mountain crests in the east, and the air was so hushed in the rock streets, in the graying light that slowly revealed the glistening tile roofs, the rust-colored, dew-streaked adobe houses, the colonnades and stone horse troughs in the square, that it was hard to believe that these people lived in the iron sights of the guns that Klaus sold to moral dimwits.

I thanked the major, a compact, mustached little man who looked like a streetcar conductor, and asked where I could catch a bus to a town with an airport.

“No, no, you stay here till plane fixed,” he said, waving his small hand like he was swatting at flies. “It very dangerous for you out there. The communists kill many people along the road. You safe here.”

And he locked me in the village jail.

For two weeks I watched a war through my barred window. Each morning trucks full of soldiers would drive down the crushed rock street and out into the hills. I’d see them advance up a switchback on a mountainside, small-arms fire would start popping like strings of firecrackers, then the shadows of two gunships would streak across the village, the chopper blades beating in the glassy blue sky. The soldiers would flatten out behind the switchback while the door-gunners opened up on the tree line, then the rocket launchers would kick smoke, and balls of orange flame would balloon out of the jungle.

One afternoon the soldiers came back with six prisoners roped together by their hands in the back of an army truck. They were barefoot, covered with dust, and sweat ran in clear lines down their faces. The soldiers marched them by my jail window; one of them fell, and a soldier kicked him and then pulled him erect by his hair.

“What’s going to happen to those guys?” I asked one of the alcoholic thieves who shared the cell with me.

“Dey tie him up on phone crank.” He began giggling and pumping his fists in circles like he was working invisible bicycle pedals. “When dey call up a communist, he always answer.”

I never saw the prisoners again and I don’t know what happened to them. But three days before I got out, I saw the handiwork of the death squads. An American priest driving an old flatbed truck brought in the bodies of sixteen Indians who had been shot in a ditch outside of town. The police tied handkerchiefs across their noses and put the bodies in a line under the colonnade. It was a burning hot day and I could hear the blowflies droning in the shade. The thumbs of the dead were tied behind them with wire, and the cop who had to snip them free was sweating heavily behind his bandanna. There were two fat, middle-aged women among the victims. Their faces were painted with blood. The wind blew their dusty dresses and exposed their underwear and swollen thighs. The priest took a torn piece of striped canvas awning from inside his truck and covered their lower parts.

The alcoholic thief began to giggle next to me at the window. When the others pulled me off him, his tongue was almost halfway down his throat.

Amanda is brushing her hair in front of the dresser mirror. Her red mouth points upward with each stroke. She wears an orchid-colored nightgown I’ve never seen before and smells of a new perfume. It’s like the odor of four-o’clocks opening along the banks of the bayou in the evening. I put my hands on her shoulders and rub the back of her neck. She neither resists nor acknowledges me. The muscle tone of her skin is perfect, smooth as sculptured soapstone.