The Convict and Other Stories

“Sometimes after I’ve fallen asleep I think I hear people out there in the banana trees,” Father Larry said. He pointed across the red, dusty road to the thick stands of banana trees and the jungle that climbed gradually toward low, blue mountains and a dead volcano. The volcano looked black against the cobalt sky. “But maybe it’s only animals. Anyway, they don’t come here. At least, not in a way that we recognize them.”

He was a kindly man, still somehow more gentleman than priest, an exile from Boston money, a quietly fanatical Red Sox fan with a taste for Jack Daniel’s rather than local rum. I supposed that his reluctance to speak of unpleasant things was more a matter of breeding with him than fear of the possible.

“Why do they always kill them in their underwear?” I said.

“I haven’t seen that here.” His face was round and Irish with light liver spots under the skin. His black horn-rims made his bald head look larger than it was.

“You saw it in El Salvador.”

“I don’t know why they make them undress. Maybe to humiliate them. I think you’re probably a good journalist, but don’t try to find these things out. Spend a few days with us, write a story about the children or the gunships or whatever you want, and then go back home. The rebels won’t harm us and we have nothing the army wants. But you—” He pointed his finger at me. “They’re not getting the guns they want and they blame the American press.”

We were sitting on the porch of his small white stucco house with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s between us. The sun was blazing on the bougainvillea and the tangle of red and yellow roses that grew along the porch rail.

“I’m a Catholic, too, Father. Maybe I want to be here for other reasons.”

He lit a filter-tipped cigar to hide the irritation in his face.

“This is not a place where you play with ideas. If you’re interested in discovering your identity, join an encounter group in the United States. You are presently surrounded by people who are morally insane. They kill their victims in their underwear because they often burn and mutilate them first.”

In Wi

chita, Kansas, where I taught creative writing at WSU, people worried about the spread of humanism. The city was surrounded by eighteen Titan missile silos. No one ever mentioned them. Daniel Berrigan, the Jesuit ex-con who did three years for splashing chicken blood on draft files, came to town while he was out on appeals bond after vandalizing some missile components in a General Electric plant. He was a serious man, maybe the best speaker I had ever heard, jailhouse tough but with eyes that seemed to see darkly into a terrifying prospect. He said our monstrous inventions might impose a suffering on the children of the earth that even Saint John’s Revelation did not describe adequately. He was obviously a reasonable, compassionate, and sane man. There was no television coverage of his talk. Half of the audience was made up of the 150 people whom we could assemble at a maximum at one of our antinuke rallies. Our small coalition of nuns, Mennonites, socialists, and Catholic Worker lefties was looked upon tolerantly.

North of Wichita a religious group burned rock-and-roll records and copies of Playboy magazine. Local businessmen voiced their concern when the Defense Department announced the Titans might be removed from Sedgwick County by 1985. The city voted down the gay-rights ordinance and banned musical concerts in the parks, and a group complained when a local high school chose the name Blue Devils for its football team. The sunsets in Kansas were like blood across the western sky. The countryside was so green in the spring, so soaked with melted snow and bursting with new wheat, that I gave up talking about Titan missiles, too, and drank 3.2 beer in happy bars with the people who worked at Boeing.

Three days later and fifty kilometers down the road from Father Larry’s orphanage, Captain Ramos told me he liked Americans, that he had lived two years in Miami and would like to go back again when this war was over, but that we Americans were too critical about human rights in other countries.

“You should understand our problems. You had them in Vietnam,” he said. We were parked in his jeep on a dusty, red road that bordered a long meadow that ended at the base of a mountain. The grass was tall and green and waving in the breeze, and in the center of the meadow was a crooked irrigation ditch that gaped like a ragged surgical incision in the earth. Divots of grass had been blown loose from the ditch’s lip. Two dozen enlisted men in camouflage fatigues were in a kneeling position by the road. On each flank an M-60 machine gun formed part of a floating, mobile X that could tear apart anything that tried to raise up out of the ditch.

“You see what we have to deal with?” he said. “They won’t surrender. They’re Marxist fanatics and they understand nothing but the gun.”

“What would happen to them if they surrendered?” I said.

“That’s a matter up to the prisoners.”

Behind his back Captain Ramos’s men called him Huachinango, or Redfish, because he was a big, dark man whose face turned a coarse red when he drank rum. He wore prescription blue sunglasses and a mustache and smelled of cigars and hair tonic. He looked impatiently over his shoulder for the 105 that was being towed on the back of a truck from the army barracks in town. To pass the time he asked me if his name would be in Playboy or Esquire magazine. I answered that I would probably end up publishing an article or two in a Catholic publication.

“The Catholic press in the United States is leftist. Like the Maryknolls,” he said.

I felt uncomfortable.

“I don’t think that’s true,” I said.

“They claim to be missionaries but they give sanctuary to the rebels. Your priest friend at the orphanage, what does he tell you?”

“He doesn’t talk politics. His only interest is in caring for the children.” My words were too quick.

“I suspect otherwise. But as long as we get no reports, he’s of no interest to us. We do not interfere with innocent people.”

“Will those guys out there surrender when they know you’ve got a 105?”

“At a certain point options pass,” he said.

Later, the enlisted men unhooked the howitzer from the U.S. Marine Corps six-by, clanked a gleaming artillery shell into the breech, and fired. When a young Indian soldier jerked the lanyard, the gun roared forward on its wheels, lifting a small cloud of dust into the bright air, and a moment later the round exploded in a black geyser of dirt on the far side of the ditch. Blackbirds rose in a frenzy from the tall grass. The gunners were good, and with two more rounds they had the ditch registered. The soldiers waited on Captain Ramos’s order. He lit a fresh cigar and puffed reflectively as though a deep philosophical consideration were working in his mind.

“Captain, I’m a neutral. I could walk out there with a white flag,” I said quietly.

But he wasn’t listening. I had thought he was weighing the lives of the people in the ditch. He called a private over to the jeep and told him to put all the spent shell casings in the truck. I was told later that the captain owned half of a scrap-metal business in Puerto Barrios.