The Convict and Other Stories

For fifteen minutes they blew parts of people out of the ditch. A soldier with an asbestos mitten threw the smoking shell casings behind the gun; a bare-chested soldier whose bronze skin was covered with pinpoints of dirt and sweat slammed another shell into the breech, locked down the handle, and the gun roared with a force that left us opening and closing our mouths. There was coral under the loamy earth, and when a round burst on the ditch’s edge, shrapnel sang across the field and a pink cloud of powdered rock drifted out over the grass.

The rebels tried to respond with some bolt-action Enfield junk. Through my binoculars I saw their heads and shoulders shred in the M-60 cross fire from the flanks. A barefoot man in a T-shirt and blue jeans leaped from the ditch and ran through the tall grass toward the mountain. His spinal column was arched inward as though he expected an invisible and deathly finger to touch his skin at any moment. There was a terror on his face that I had seen only on the faces of those who had been tortured by death squads before they were executed. One of the machine gunners turned his sights casually on the running man and blew the T-shirt off his back.

When it was over Captain Ramos offered me a sip of white rum from his flask.

“Do you want to take pictures?” he said. “We are not ashamed of what we have done. Nothing dishonorable happened here today.”

I told him I didn’t.

“This is a sad business,” he said. “Do you remember what Adolf Eichmann said before he was hanged by the Jews? A man must serve his prince, and an unfortunate man must sometimes serve a bad prince. I think there’s great wisdom in that.”

“I think it’s Nazi bullshit,” I said.

“Ah, my friend, you can afford to be a moralist because you are not a participant.”

I drive my rented car to a village outside of Quezaltenango to interview some distributors of American powdered-milk formula. Baby formula gets the hard sell down here. The people who push it wear white jackets like nurses or medical technicians wear, although none of them are medical people. The missionaries try to encourage the Indians to continue breast-feeding their infants rather than use the formula, since they often mix the formula with contaminated water and the children get sick and die.

On this bright morning the baby-formula people have packed their van and blown town. A death squad was working the area last night, and it was time to get out of Dodge and look for new horizons. For various reasons no one likes to find the victims of the death squad. The bodies are usually mutilated; the tropical heat accelerates the decomposition process rapidly, and the rancid smell hangs in the underbrush like an invisible fist; and often the victim’s body has a note fastened to it that threatens the same fate to anyone who buries the remains.

Five sugarcane cutters were shot at close range on the riverbank. They all wear purple-and-orange Jockey undershorts, and their thumbs are tied behind them with baling wire. My guess is that they were shot with .45-caliber dumdums, probably from a grease gun. Large greenbottle flies hum thickly in the hot shade of the canebreak where their bodies lie, and the blood from their torn wounds

has leaked into the stream. The local police will not come to the riverbank. Instead, a tear-streaked man backs a truck through the broken stalks, and he and a group of women snip the wire on the victims’ blackened thumbs, wash their faces and chests with wet rags, and lift their bodies onto the pickup.

Nobody can understand why the five cane cutters were killed. The youngest of them is sixteen. His mother is hysterical and will not let the village carpenter measure him with his yardstick. I use a wide-angle lens to photograph the bodies and the weeping women under the colonnade in front of the empty police building.

Maybe the baby-formula pushers retained a measure of decency by blowing Dodge. I feel like a voyeur in search of misery with camera and pen. I hear on the news from Guatemala City that the marines are kicking butt and taking names in Grenada. It seems that on this morning the world is dividing itself more distinctly into observers and participants. Provide, provide, Robert Frost said, or somebody will provide for you. I convince myself he meant two glasses of white rum before attempting lunch in the village’s only café, which is within earshot of the burial procession to the village cemetery.

I was raised in New Orleans by a gentle aunt who lived in the Garden District. I never knew any black people who were not servants or yardmen. There were none in our parish church or in our schools and neighborhoods. Along the moss-shaded and brick-paved streets where I grew up, people of color were servile visitors who showed up at back doors early in the morning and disappeared across Magazine Street by suppertime. They had only first names unless they had reached a sufficient age to be called “Auntie” or “Cap.” Even at Mass I never questioned the presence of only one race in the cathedral. William Faulkner once said that for southerners segregation was simply a fact, it was simply there. It had always existed, it always would. We gave it no more thought than we would the warm, magnolia-scented climate in which we lived.

But wonderful gentleman and writer that he was, Mr. Faulkner was wrong about this one. There were southerners who questioned the laws of segregation and found them odious (as he himself did), an insult to reason, a collective sin that jaded the entirety of the Jeffersonian dream. I remember some of those southern people—members of the Catholic Worker movement, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Bull Connor turned German police dogs on them and blew them skittering down sidewalks with fire hoses; George Wallace’s state troopers trampled them under horses at the Selma bridge; the Ku Klux Klan lynched them in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

Against our protest they reconstructed Golgotha before our eyes and forced us to drive the nails or to stand by in guilty witness. Their rent flesh, their bones exhumed from an earthen dam, would not leave our television sets. The barking dogs, the frightened hymn of Negro clergy surrounded by a mob, followed us into the kitchen where we tried to fix a drink. We asked patience and understanding in them that we didn’t require of ourselves.

I visited a Catholic Worker friend in the Baton Rouge jail. He and the elderly black man in the cell with him had been teargassed. Their eyes were swollen and red in the gloom. During the demonstration state police had killed two black students on the steps of Southern University; the old man was confused and thought white people had been killed, and he was sure he was going to be sent to die in Angola penitentiary. He was singing

Lower me down with a golden chain

And see that my grave is kept clean.

My friend hadn’t been arraigned yet, but a priest and I paid the old man’s bail. The hack waited by the cell door for him to walk out into the corridor. I looked at the old man’s red eyes in the dim light. He was still convinced white people were dead and Negroes would pay for it. But he said, “No sirs, I cain’t leave this white boy by hisself.”

In approximately five years they changed what we had let stand for 350.

. . .

The guerrilla leader was dressed in a pair of blue jeans, tennis shoes, a faded print shirt covered with blue-and-yellow parrots, and a John Deere tractor cap. He looked like someone who sold peanuts at an American baseball game. He sat in the open door of a bullet-pocked Huey helicopter, which had crashed through the canopy of ficus trees and was now rusted and cobwebbed with vines and wispy air roots from the ficus. He was in a contemplative mood, and he smoked an enormous hand-rolled cigarette while he balanced his warm bottle of Dos Equis on his knee. His parents, who were laborers on a coffee plantation, had named him Francisco for a great saint, but he was not a religious man himself, he said. His problem was of this world: the acquisition of more and better guns.

“We shot this helicopter down with rifles that are forty years old,” he said. “But we were lucky. If we had the equipment the government has, we could be in Guatemala City in six weeks.”

The men eating their lunch under the trees were armed with WW II M-1 and Enfield rifles and a few captured M-16s. Most of the men were young and dressed in dark, ragged clothes. Some of them had laced leaves and jungle vine through the straw of their hats.

“Mortars would be a stupendous thing to have. Or Uzi machine guns like the Israelis sell to the government in Chile,” Francisco said. “We have to deal with black marketeers in the United States who always cheat us if they can.”

I’d had four hot beers and I broached a more difficult subject. Yesterday the rebels had burned the transportation bus that ran between San Luis and the next town. It seemed to me a pointless and stupid act.

“What did your country do in Vietnam?” he said. His Indian eyes were black and unblinking, as though his eyelids were stitched to his forehead. “You bombed their trains, their bridges, their electric plants, and finally their cities. Why do you object to a bus?”

“I don’t agree with what my government did in Vietnam.”