Dedicated to James T. Sale
The men stood like tiny upright bottles in the mournful, greenish gloom of the jungle path, while soaring a hundred feet overhead, the wide tops of the trees spread and entangled each other, shutting out any view of the sky. From the thick, matted, tangled ceiling of vegetation, some thorny vines trailed down limply like rescue lines dangling over the side of a damaged, heeling ship. Back in the dim, green-black recesses of the jungle, a few sharp, yellow flecks of sun could be seen here and there.
The four-man party, flushed and worn out, had halted on the narrow path. On both sides of it there arose dense masses of bushes and thick, squat trees, and all around them the noises of the tropic birds seemed to intensify the jungle’s isolation. One harsh screech, repeated with the monotony of madness, seemed to say, “Play ball!” Play ball!” a cry that was answered raucously, near and far, by others of its kind. There was a chorus of other chattering and cooing birds as well, but they seemed fainter and farther away. The welter of crowding trees blocked out any hint of a breeze.
The young one with the mustache, clad in khaki, his rifle upright on his back, was haggling a pack of cigarettes free from his shirt pocket. A scratched match spurted into amazingly bright flame. The young man ducked his head. A gust of blue smoke hung without movement, until the man lazily waved his hand. The blue haze slowly stirred and writhed to thin and sluggishly vanish.
The swarthy, heavyset man, in wash pants and unpressed cotton shirt, blue in color, pawed and mopped at his face with a coarse, white cloth. His shirt had darkened as sweat had soaked it through. In his late forties and out of shape, his belly hung out a bit over his belt. His dark, tangled hair looked as if a bucket of water had been emptied over it. He exhibited a picture of complete misery. In fact, all four men were covered in sweat from head to foot.
“No, thank you,” said the foreigner to the crumpled pack extended to him. He was an American, his face red as a poppy. He had a pleasant, steady baritone voice, a bit out of breath. Pablo, the one in khaki, knew better than to ask the heavyset man. He knew he did not smoke.
Bernardo, the talkative one, was younger than his heavyset partner by a decade, but older than Pablo. Bernardo had a young, alert, open face that expressed a look of manly candor. He threw a look of assessing sympathy at the foreigner. He was a tough one, thought Bernardo. Fit. He came prepared. They almost never came prepared, but this one had. Well, they had said he would.
Sipping water from his canteen, the American stood lost in his own thoughts. To him, the air was heavy, thick, humid, and standing in it was like standing in a sauna. Even as they rested, he knew how acutely he was suffering from the heat. His name was David Heartrik, and he had lost his craving for adventure a long time ago. Ambition to stand out had died out of him in the trek up here. In the old days, he delighted cutting a dashing figure in the eyes of his colleagues – ambition had driven him on without rest. Back then, he was in love with the glamour of the strange; he had liked risk, he had loved enduring the maximum of privation. But now he was 37, no longer invincible, and being thought brave by others had lost its power to incite. Now he did his job because it was what he was expected to do. As he gazed into the gloomy, steaming sun-dappled black-green of the jungle, he suddenly realized that this place was making him uneasy. It was so hard to see in here, and it was as if they had stopped in a darkened closet. But it was something else that was bothering him, something he couldn’t quite find the words for that troubled his mind.
He was thinking about how, if you came up along the twisting coast road, the land displayed an exhilarating spectacle: a dense, green mass, its top going gold in the sunlight, and then the ragged, sharp mountain ridges rise dramatically overhead. Along the road, gracefully bending palms grew in orderly groves along the coast, and there were wind-bent pines like little hunchbacks. The bay was full of enormous crescent beaches that curved one after the other into the distance, their surf breaking in hazy, white lines on the shore. It was almost like a postcard in its beauty. Yet when one of his colleagues at The Washington Post heard of where he was going, he said to him, “You’ll see, from a distance it’s one of the most beautiful tropical views in existence, but when you’re in it, beware, on the ground it’s a mass of slops and stinks and pestilence.”
He became aware again of the smell: the deathly, dank, sourish odor that came from mud, from downed branches, the rotting plants, the incessant working of decay taking place everywhere. And then he realized what it was about the jungle. It wasn’t the thick, steamy matted screens of tropical vines or the twisted creepers. Instead, a sense of something sinister hung over the place; that was it, he thought. Something sinister.
“Hot,” said Bernardo. He looked with sympathy at the American, not realizing that by speaking to him, the man would now have to make the effort to reply.
“Surely not,” Heartrik grinned. Not much got past this man, he thought, a bit sour.
“Always hot. Always fucking hot,” grumbled the heavyset man, mopping.
“You’re all right?” asked Bernardo of the foreigner. He had a way of putting real feeling into whatever he said.
“I’m fine, thanks,” was the reply.
“You have hot places in your country, yes?” asked Bernardo. “You have your deserts and such places?” He seemed to enjoy the American’s company. A sort of comradeship had sprung up between them.
“In mine?”
“There are parts are very warm, are they not?”
“We have deserts, yes. Very bad ones where people die.”
“In your deserts, though, you do have much heat.”
“Not like this.”
Bernardo smiled, canted his head, quizzical. “Heat is no fun, yes?”
“Not this stuff. I mean, even desert heat is dry, a dry heat,” said Heartrik.
“Well, it’s not much farther,” Bernardo said.
But Heartrik was thinking, only in Hawaii had he experienced heat like this. Hawaii had heavy, wet air, like this air, and it made your body wet, and it dissolved your will to action. Everything took extra effort. You always felt enveloped by something that drained away your strength and purpose.
“But you look quite strong,” said Bernardo, assessingly to the American.
“Ah. That’s the running,” Heartrik said. “Otherwise, you would have left me for dead, way back down the trail.”
While he felt quickened by Bernardo’s admiration, it was a bit of brag, all the same. Running or not, the truth was that he felt like a wet dishcloth with the strong, connecting threads gone, hanging over a line to dry.
“You are right to drink plenty of water,” said Bernardo.
The American, Heartrik, stood staring out, sipping from his canteen, regaining his strength. At least now he knew he would last. During the first half hour, he’d felt so leaden, clumsy and washed out, at times he had feared he couldn’t take another step and would have to stop and rest. But every time he’d felt he’d reached the edge of not being able to go on, every time he had touched the bottom of his stamina, the others had stopped of their own accord. After that, his conditioning had kicked in, and now he knew he could do it if they could. It was not part his makeup to quit what he started.
“Always fucking hot,” said the heavyset man. “Not in the day you don’t want to come out, not in the day, like this.”
But the American, too irritated and tired for small talk, was no longer listening. He was growing impatient. “You don’t have to wait on me,” he said. “Let’s get it over with.”
The heavyset man sighed, pawing at the wet, sagging flesh under his chin, head tilted back as if to admire the heavens, except his eyes were closed. “There is no hurry,” he said. “There is certainly no reason to hurry. For what?”
But there was reason enough. Above all, Heartrik thought, he didn’t want to be in the jungle at night. The jungle got as dark as the bottom of a well. No house lights, no lights from cars, just a deep, dense dark that smothered everything. It was as if you’d gone completely blind. Taking a drink from his canteen, Heartrik thought, “We’re wasting time, goddamnit.” He wanted to get up there and do what they had to do and get out.
“Who’s in control of the area now,” he asked them.
“Where we go?” said Bernardo.
“Yes.”
“They’re long gone,” said the heavyset man. The third man, Pablo, simply stared and said nothing.
“The government soldiers came and did their work and they left,” he said.
“How do we know they’re gone?” Heartrik said.
“There is little that happens up in here we don’t know,” said Bernardo.
“So they’re gone? The soldiers? You’re sure of this?”
“They’re long gone. We control this area now,” said the heavyset man. He had sternly serious eyes that seemed to be bearing some great and painful inner burden.
A few minutes passed. The American was growing more and more impatient. He saw they sensed it. A quick, white flick of the eyes of the heavyset man went to the rifleman in khaki. Pablo had a young face – but it had a cold, hard, immovable expression that stayed stonily the same. He straightened and took a drag on his cigarette. The red bead of the cigarette peeped brightly and crawled back along the skinny tube whose edges went black. Then suddenly, the cigarette butt spun away, going end over end.
They resumed in single file. Pablo was far back. Riding shotgun, guessed Heartrik.
Heartrik, the heavy set man, and, Pablo in khaki followed the end of the column, and all toiled laboriously up a path that was pitched steeply up a worn slope. Thorn branches bordered the path, their form very graceful, but they were to be avoided. Just brushing one left a neat row of tiny red beads where the briars had raked the skin. It was hard work hiking the hill, Heartrik thought.
The young, friendly Bernardo in front was turning his head to talk. “You really must understand that what we want to establish is justice,” he said. “We do not want to replace one injustice with another.”
Heartrik, sweating heavily as he hiked, looked wearily plagued by the effort to keep on the climb. The steaming heat made every step an extra effort on the steep grade.
In any case, he was tired of talking politics. It was all he had done for two days.
“I’m sure you are ambitious to improve the lot of the people,” he said.
“We mean to build a nation, señor. We want to build the nation. That is our only aim. Do you see? Our only aim.” Bernardo was quite passionate.
“Yes. But you say, build…”
“That is all that matters…to build the nation. To…”
“I understand that. But...”
“…to build a new nation that is more than the sum of its parts. For what is a nation but that? The nation comes to life, every time a man or a woman or a child takes a breath that is free. That is the nation we want to establish.”
“But you already have a nation,” Heartrik said, impatient.
“We have a nation, but it is not our nation. It is their nation, the nation of the clique.”
“A clique that governs and has power, all the same...”
“…A clique that thinks the world consists of the people they see at the opera each week, that go to each other’s palaces and estates while the people starve,” said Bernardo. “We want a nation that offers the sum of its benefits for all, instead of just some. It is not a real nation as it stands now.”
“I’m sure they think it’s real enough.”
“Who?”
“The clique, as you call it. They have at their resources the power of the state, you know. They have the Army. They worship force.”
“Supplied by your country,” said the heavyset man.
“It’s the business of the arms business to sell arms,” Heartrik said with a shrug. He didn’t like the arms dealers either.
“But to such people as these?” He made a disdainful face.
“They pay.”
“Yes. They pay. That’s true.” But he was disgusted.
“They pay. To the seller of arms that is all that matters. That they pay. That’s not to say I approve. It is simply a fact.”
“But why do they give the clique its weapons?” said the heavyset man. “It is because they want to continue as they are, illegally hogging power. But we, we are attempting to build a national unity.”
“Is this why you are setting up communes?”
“Communes are the arm of national liberation,” said Bernardo with force. It came out like a paper slip from a machine after you pressed a button.
“The arm that fights back,” said the heavyset man. His face expressed distress, and he was walking as if his legs were made of lead. “The arm that defends the nation because in them, in the commune, the person legislates and finds itself and gets real sovereignty.”
“And the fighting?” Heartrik asked.
“We regret the clashes,” said Bernardo, “but we did not begin them. They have an army, we do not. As you said.”
Heartrik knew that the government did indeed have any army, and it was completely ruthless, pitiless. It was addicted to massacre. The four of them had driven most of the night, taking side and back roads to escape the army. No one spoke of it in the country, but in every town, one came across a train of parked khaki trucks along a curb, men in green fatigues lounging about. Or if you were driving up a mountain, you suddenly passed a barbed wire enclosure, grim and featureless, where uniformed men with bayoneted M-16s turned and looked at you coldly as you passed. Heartrik had encountered them before on an earlier visit.
For many here, the loathing of the government was based on the loathing for the army.
“And the cliques, as you call it. What happens to them, if you win?” Heartrik panted.
“That is why they mobilize the troops to crush the people at every turn. Because they have one doctrine only -- to crush the people so they can go on as they always have with their exploitation.”
“But what will you do?”
“We? If we win?”
“What will happen?”
“Of course, we will win,” said the heavyset man. “Because those in power have no program, no designs for improvement, no development, no political parties, only the crushing of the people by collective armed force. That is why we brought you here. Because we knew you were a truthful man who would tell the American public what we face in them here.”
“My question was what happens to the clique if you defeat it?” Heartrik looked back at the heavy set man. He looked utterly miserable, entirely worn and played out.
“To them what happens?”
“Yes.”
He shrugged. “In every revolution traitors and collaborators have been punished. It was so in your revolution?” Bernardo said.
“They paid with their property, not their lives. You’re speaking of the Tories?”
“Yes.”
“They lost their property. Some moved to England. They weren’t killed. That’s not true. A few were killed especially in the South, but their numbers were small.”
“But surely some must be punished. The worst must be punished,” harshly gasped the heavyset man.
“But who judges who was the worst?” Heartrik almost said the words, but pulled back. Of course, the retaliations would begin with a few murders, but then everyone would be swept up in an accelerating escalation of rancor and emotion and a desire to exact vengeance. Then more and more scores would be settled, savagery would feed savagery, until the worst in the new group would do what the worst in the old group had done, until finally, ordinary people, tired of slaughter, would pause in a period of nervous debility and inertia that would gain the name of peace. He had seen it all before.
Silence fell.
It was hot, hard work hiking the hill. It was endless, the hill, Heartrik thought.
“What about private property?” he gasped.
“What about it?”
“Well, what happens to property if you win?” Heartrik puffed.
“What people own?” gasped Bernardo.
“Yes.”
“It is theirs. Like in your country.”
“Given to them? Or is it owned by them?”
“The property? It’s theirs. I don’t understand.” Bernardo seemed not to know where the American was going with this.
“But it is given them?” Heartrik said.
“Given, yes,” interjected, the heavyset, perspiring man. Heartrik saw for the first time that he had a big, broad, clean-shaven chin like the heel of a boot. “We believe that freedom is the giving of everything to all.”
“But can the average person, after you win, can they acquire property of their own by work? In my country, civil liberties were built on the right to own property. Our leaders owned a lot of property, not the people.”
“At first it will be given, but through work it can be acquired,” the heavy man said.
Given, thought Heartrik. Given meant keeping the people dependent on the government, keeping the people dependent on a group of leaders who would give them what they thought they deserved, coin by coin by coin.
“You do not approve, I think,” said Bernardo, carefully.
“Of what?” For a moment Heartrik felt the alarm one feels when he discovers another has been reading his mind. “What we said of punishment. Of repaying traitors. You dislike that, too, I think.”
“It’s hard to keep revenge and retaliations under control,” Heartrik said.
“You forget that the members of the clique are not decent people.”
Heartrik sighed. “I’m sure they are rotten to the very core.”
“Then?”
“Look. I understand that the sense of having been wronged is one of the most powerful of all the human senses. I know this. It’s just that I have seen this sort of thing before,” said Heartrik.
“What sort of thing before?”
“Well, you talk of building the nation.”
“We want to build. We must build,” said Bernardo.
“But when you punish, when you root out, you divide, isn’t that so?”
“We do not divide,” said the heavyset man. “We simply clear in order to build the nation just the way a woodsman would clear a forest.”
Heartrik said nothing.
They puffed and panted past an obscene twisted knot of roots sprouting from the path.
Ends and means, thought Heartrik. Everyone talked of the ends, not realizing that the means were simply the ends in their youth. The ends did not justify the means. Success simply caused the means to be forgotten. But he was too tired to talk. Besides, who would listen? All they wanted were words that upheld their ideals and character as freedom fighters.
They halted again on the path, all of them breathing like bellows, faces flushed red, soaking wet. Ahead the green tangled ceiling seemed to end abruptly. Beyond, there was a brilliant field of light, almost harshly savage, that seemed to lie far ahead.
The heavyset man eyed the American. “A difficult man,” he thought. “An honest man. He does not bend. He does not trade.”
“We’re wasting time,” thought Heartrik, utterly weary.
Here in the dim, green-black gloom, even though where they stood now was as hot as a humid, baking oven, he knew the weather could turn gusty and cold in a minute, the rain coming down in blinding sheets, turning the ground to slimy, slippery mud, forming pools, making little tunnels that gushed gaily and noisily down the hill. Soon you were shaking with a damp, bone-chilling kind of cold, and, even if the sun came out again, it simply steamed you dry. You began to smell then, and beginning to smell made you unhappy with yourself. He peered intently through the eerie, dim, dark and mysterious gloom, the dank smell of decay in his nose. What a place! he thought.
Heartrik wasn’t surprised that his newspaper had sent him down here. People’s minds are quick to form patterns, quick to characterize as a permanent trait what in fact was only an accident. His first big piece on the paper had been about the homeless being hired by business firms to clear asbestos from old, broken-down buildings. Paid poor wages, the homeless workers had been given no masks, no briefings, and no warnings of the cancer their exposure to asbestos would probably cause. The business firms recognized no obligation to the pay the families of the dead.
It had caused quite a sensation, the piece, and his career was cast, his specialty discerned once and for all: he was the man with a considerate feeling and concern for the weak. He had an affinity with the unfortunate. After that, it was living on Death Row for a month, working in VA emergency rooms, or doing a portrait of a man dying of cancer in a hospital for the poor in the Bronx, or spending three months with 4,500 gang members on Chicago’s south side.
“You have a touch with this stuff, man,” editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee had once said to him, admiringly.
So he went all over the world, covering riots, bombings, insurrections, always trying to personalize, to bring to life by means of words what such events meant to the people having to live through it.
He thought of the quiet, subdued pride he would feel in pulling this off. As he had left the office, Boyce, a senior editor, a man always needling him and forever out to make him look small and subsidiary, had come out by the water cooler, cradling a steaming cup of coffee against his belt. “What is this, Dave, another one of your coups?” he said, with a slight sneer but with a trace of admiration in his voice.
Because by then all of them in the office had heard how murderous this particular government was. It was massacring its peasants wholesale and blaming it on the peasants themselves. The government soldiers had shot two French reporters in the head as they were disarmed and lying on the ground, and then had blamed it on rebels.
Heartrik was used to succeeding in this sort of circumstance because he brought to it unique gifts. First he brought knowledge of the country’s language, its culture, its people; information about its history and its customs from whatever source he could find. This knowledge he would use to put people at ease, to give them the sense that the country they belonged to was of so much account, that a foreigner had gone to the trouble of studying it. This touched people to the foundation of their souls. In Iran, in Mexico, in Guatemala, wherever he had been, when people saw they were not despised by an American, they became a lot easier to deal with, a lot more forthcoming. Perhaps, by the end, they’d even felt some affection for him, who knew? He had for them. He often thought of them. He had certainly admired most of them.
But he never forgot that the world they lived in was not his world. His fellow reporters often made that mistake. They acted as if the inhabitant of foreign nations were basically inferior versions of themselves. Out of weakness or sycophancy or fear, the American reporters flattered the people, but it was instantly perceived, and it bitterly offended. Heartrik did not make the mistake. He stayed in his own world. He was loyal to what he was and where he was from. He was there to learn, to listen, to remember, but that was all.
He felt intense sympathy for their lives in the end even though it wasn’t his life. “To love with the heart is to pity,” his father had said, and he had tried to live by that line. But Heartrik knew a great gulf parted the rest of the world and his world. They and he could stand at its edges and talk across, but the gulf remained. And because he remembered the gulf, strangers often found him to be the exception and refreshing, and he had found himself liked. Or so it had seemed. Certainly he had kept up communication with many of the people he’d interviewed. He also brought an alert, discerning eye (which again, he was careful to disguise), plus he brought some intuitive sense of “touch,” some special sensitivity to the inner atmospheres of the people he was with.
Bernardo, the heavyset man, and Pablo, they were honest men, not corrupted yet by wealth or luxury. Unlike Americans, they needed no comfort to be effective, and they were tough, trained, tireless and were of serious purpose. They were not to be trifled with. You could not lie to them in the least thing.
He would do them the honor of reporting them accurately. What they said and did. If he had misgivings, he would confront them with them there, not wait until the articles came out and made them look foolish when they had no chance to fight back.
All stories entailed risks deliberately taken, but Heartrik had a rule: to never take counsel of his fears. By now he had learned to put out of his mind the possibility of serious harm or failure. Besides, like most people, the desire of being thought special, had gained a hold over his mind. He prized the reputation he had slowly built up among his colleagues and his friends in Washington. He was also aware that they overestimated the danger and thought him a romantic figure, but there was little he could do to deflate or re-proportion their ideas. They simply thought him modest every time he tried, so he had finally stopped.
But he had a powerful attachment to his family and parting from them this time had been very tough. He and his wife were close. Theirs was an attachment of great passion, physical, emotional and mental. Their little girl, Sarah, was the core of their life now.
The night before he’d left, only three, wearing a vivid blue dress, she had climbed on his lap, clutching crayons splayed from her fist, and they had worked together, his wife watching bemused from the big chair facing them and the TV. Sarah had drawn him a “tree,” which meant she dragged with a crayon of any color, a rather wobbly line down the center of a blank page. If he asked for a forest, she bent far over, intent and industrious, tongue poked out of her lips like a cat, and laboriously inscribed a series of wobbly, scraggly unconnected lines on the paper sheet. and, as pleasure beamed in her face, she would scream with joy, her little clenched fists up at her eyes until she twisted to bury her face in his shirt.
Since he’d been down here, all his thoughts of home had awakened in him a sweet ache of pain, a mood of gentle melancholy, and he would sharply miss his wife or see in his mind his little girl, hearing her voice, missing the delight of her climbing into her lap each morning as he read The Washington Post. Except this time, his wife had not liked him going at all. She had grown somber, soft in the face, her eyes anxious, and had just clung to him wordlessly until the taxi came. “This is the last,” he said to her.
“Until they ask you again,” she said.
“No. There are other things at the paper I can do.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it,” she said.
“No, I’ve done enough. It’s time to do something different.” And they had kissed goodbye.
When the four of them came out of the jungle canopy into the sun, it was like coming out of a tunnel into the day. The harsh light fell into their eyes like a lash, and the muggy heat enveloped them like a kind of woolen garment thrown over their bodies.
They stood now on the steep slope of a mountain. Behind and below them, the dark jungle over spread like a green humpy fungus. He could see the curved beaches of the bay, the bay itself blue and smooth like a polished metal plate. Far below, there was a tiny white road that lay like a little piece of dropped thread.
When he looked up, the heavyset man was staring at him piercingly, with a look of peculiar resolution. He turned and pointed.
Heartrik frowned. He turned back. The heavyset man pointed. Then Heartrik saw. It was a village that made a cluster higher up on the slope. It was surrounded by a wall made of mud the height of a man’s head. Heartrik didn’t like the look of it.
They kept mounting the slope, red faced, perspiring, exhausted, their legs as stiff and numb as sticks. The mountain behind rose as a solemn and forbidding rampart, colored a dark, black green.
Each man now seemed busy with his own thoughts. Heads down, bodies bent, they went on hiking up the hill.
They smelled it before they saw it.
First they heard the noise: their heads lifted. They all thought that someone had farted loudly. They came closer. The sound had come from a body ahead lying by the side of the road. The corpse made a dark, rounded mound. Around it whizzed clouds of flies. Even from where they were, the loud, buzzing of disturbed flies filled the air. The heavyset man was talking of how decomposition here happened very quickly. The immediate attack was by millions of flies, but within four hours came the maggots. Heartrik tried to just listen to it, listen to it with a part of his mind that would be like a desk drawer that he could close when they were finished. The heavyset man was talking, saying that in two days the body would start to swell. He said they had seen one case where a body had finally burst through its clothes, and the penis had stuck up in one final, violent erection. Heartrik and the others had made a nervous laugh. The heavyset man, humorless, just waited, then said how, under the broiling of the sun, the body, beaded all over with oil, finally burst, releasing a foul, sick stench that would be smelled for miles.
Heartrik felt a touch and turned. It was the khaki clad one with the rifle, Pablo. He offered Heartrik a cigarette, and Heartrik refused. Pablo shrugged.
Heartrik wildly batted away a fly that landed on his face. They heard another loud fart. Pablo, the rifleman, took out a cigarette, broke it in two and gave it to the American. Heartrik looked at it a minute, but the man gestured, and Heartrik understood. Gently, he put each stubby segment up a nostril. His notebook and pen were out, and he began to take notes.
“You will see now what swine the army is,” said the heavyset man. “These are people who do not preserve the decencies.”
Bernardo had grown quiet, worried. He kept casting glum looks at the American.
In front, by the wall, were bundles of colorful laundry dropped here and there, lying at the same angle. More dead. “Jesus,” Heartrik said. More bodies lay sprawled, most on their faces. Some lay on their back, eyes open and staring. He gazed at sights so horrible that he knew he could never share with his wife.
But then Heartrik slowly become aware of something. He sensed it more than he saw it.
“What is it?” Heartrik said.
The men around him were acting oddly, he thought.
Alert in every sense and fiber, Heartrik stopped, uncertain. He looked wildly about, flailing at the flies trying to land on his face. Suddenly, with horror, he looked ahead and thought in panic, “Government Soldiers.”
“Is it soldiers?” he said, fearful.
But he saw that they were all over the mud-walled village.
“What’s wrong?” he said. Because some odd tension had seemed to enter them. It was not as though they were watchful and ill-at-ease. It was something else that he couldn’t name.
The heavyset man stopped and looked back, slowly shaking his head. “Nothing is wrong,” he called to Heartrik.
“Are there other men here?”
But the heavyset man did not reply. Heartrik felt himself gripped by some indefinable sense of danger, like catching the sound of something sinister. He sensed some threatening presence. They seemed to feel it although they steadied and kept on straight ahead.
“What’s happening?” Heartrik asked, now frankly scared.
But the heavyset man did not answer. Bernardo just climbed ahead.
Suddenly their four heads snapped up.
Heartrik halted still as stone, tensed to flee. Behind the baked mud wall, a figure in khaki appeared. It held a rifle. It waved, friendly and vigorous.
“He is ours,” said Bernardo, glum.
But Heartrik’s spine tingled as if someone were moving a morsel of ice up and down his back. He didn’t like surprises. The heavyset man looked more stern and serious and sadly burdened.
Heartrik hurried up to them. “Are we okay?” he said. There was still some undercurrent here that he could not quite fathom. Perhaps, they hadn’t been sure of the identity of the soldiers.
“We are safe,” said the heavyset man. He suddenly pressed the American’s arm with affection. “We are fine.” The small group moved forward.
Of course, thought Heartrik with a flood of relief: he had the answer now to their uneasiness, they knew what had happened here. Of course. That was it.
He looked up. Overhead a great mass of cloud was building forbiddingly over the crest of the mountain. It meant rain later. “We’ve got to get in and get out” said Heartrik to himself. How he hated the slanting, driving sheets of rain, the mud, the slippery mud that would make the hike back take hours longer.
They approached the gate of the village and went in. When the American saw what was in the courtyard, nausea flooded his mind, and he was nearly sick, gasping.
Two more men in khaki appeared. There were four or five in all, and they stayed across the courtyard, watching him. Heartrik was writing in his notebook. The bodies on the ground looked like discarded bundles of colorful rags.
“The Army?” Heartrik said, He sounded as though he had a cold from his stuffed nostrils. “This was the Army?”
“The Army’s work, señor. Now you see,” said the heavyset man.
Heartrik could still get the smell of death through the tobacco, that unique, sweet smell, as if honey had been poured over herring.
“They butchered them all,” Bernardo said, angry and bitter.
“Why?”
“They just shot them. Even the children.”
Heartrik walked carefully, bricking up any sense of sympathy he felt. Sympathy left you vulnerable. It left you open, slow to act. But, at bottom, he knew that what he was telling himself was merely a way to cheer himself up. He felt a sense of utter, sick depletion. “How many people?”
“Twenty-five, thirty.”
“And this happened when?”
“Last night.”
“Last night?”
“Last night.”
“Jesus,” Heartrik said.
He moved from pile to pile, the air above wildly alive with hordes of flies. He moved along, his keen, trained eye noting the details: the lifeless eyes staring into nothingness, the sagging jaws, and the humorlessly grinning mouths.
Ahead was a house, its windows sightless. He turned and looked back. They were there: Bernardo, the heavyset man, and Pablo in khaki with the rifle. Cautiously, he forced himself to go in. It was a shock: the permanent face of poverty and underdevelopment: no furnishings, no tables, chairs, lamps or appliances. Only straw mats. And the festering bodies. He stared down at one, a woman, her grimaced face bloated and twisted as if in an agony of pain. Her skirt was pulled up, and a bayonet protruded from between her thighs. Curiously enough, there was no blood, just half a blade of bayonet sticking out. Heartrik found a dirty blanket, and kneeled to cover her up. There was a man lying there, three feet away, but his cut off head was sitting under a stool. Then he saw a teenager, a head wound turned into a seething mass of maggots blindly jostling and pushing, crowded like the cells of a honeycomb. The maggots were as thick as clustered bees on a branch. The smell was sickeningly bad, and Heartrik pushed the cigarette butts further up his nose, as he absent-mindedly watched clear bubbles of gas moving under the tightly stretched, brown skin of the dead.
Of course, The Post would remove or retouch most of the animal indecencies. After all, the reader wanted only the embellishment, the noble fight for freedom. Not what you’d really seen.
He realized he was going to be sick and started gulping air. And then he realized a brackish coating of some kind had spread in his mouth. He saw where the blood had pooled under another bundle of clothes and, with shock, found another body in the same condition.
He came out, sickly pale, agitated. Numbness was settling over him like a net. He felt he couldn’t quite shake himself free of a strange, odd daze. He stood in the bright, baking air, pushing the stubs even farther up his nose. Bernardo, the heavyset man, and the man in khaki, stood not far away.
Then the heavyset man was walking up. He grabbed Heartrik’s arm. “Look,” he said and pointed. It was a v-shaped clump of grass next to a low bush, and then the American saw.
A sudden clutch shut his throat. Something in his throat began to swell, and he widened his eyes, blinking back the tears. It was no bigger than a shoe box. He thought it was something someone had dropped when he saw how caked and smeared with mud it was, and then he realized. The mud, that’s what had kept off the flies, the caked mud. She must have been all of two years old, dressed in a little skirt and blouse. She had black hair, long. Her hair moved as a gust of wind caressed it. An infinite pity surged up in him. He fought it back down. But something was swelling and choking his throat.
Suddenly the heavyset man touched him. He turned and looked straight into his eyes. “This is why we needed you. To see. To tell people of this. You are the man we need, señor. You care. We were right to bring you. The American public must know of these things.”
With an expression full of sorrow, of anger, of heartbreak, Heartrik started to kneel, but the heavyset man said, “I wouldn’t touch her, señor.”
Heartrik, his lips pressed close, was standing then, writing, sketching the tiny girl, blinking back his pain. He had hot flashes of savage rage, but they were mixed with cold repulsion that took the heart out of him.
He was thinking of his own little girl, at her third birthday party a few weeks ago, dressed in her bright, fresh, yellow party dress, sitting at the table, her small face full of innocent pleasure, head back, singing, “Aaapy to-you cake.” When he had taken the birthday cake back to the kitchen, she’d cooed, “Bye, bye to-you cake.”
The heavyset man stood watching him work for a while, and then slowly walked away.
Heartrik wrote and wrote, then finished. He had seen enough. He looked around. No one was in the yard. The heavyset man watched as the American at last came out through the gate, his face looking numb, wasted, and empty. The extremes of pity and horror and suffering had left him a shell. Pablo and Bernardo stood off a bit waiting for something, the one in khaki upright as a post.
Heartrik lifted his face. Then, purpose beginning to come alive in him, he hurriedly jotted an additional note, his lips tightly pressed together as he wrote. He finished, putting up his pen, raising his face to look over at the waiting men, beginning to smile at them, when the club-like impact caught him, he was like a skater who had skidded on the ice. He dropped his notebook and flung his arms out wildly, trying to regain his balance, feet pushing and pedaling backward, thrashing. A violent force he was unable to begin to imagine had smashed straight into his head. Thrown violently back into the wall, there was a loud, dull pumpkin sound as his skull hit and rebounded from the hardened mud wall. Then, his legs slowly caving, he slid very slowly down the wall that kept him upright.
There was complete, ominous silence, except for a cheerful, brisk rushing of water, lively and quick, as if a faucet had been left on, as the blood rushed out of his head. Soon this rush slowed, and there was only a leaden, sparse tick, as if a clock had started. The blood from his head had pooled in Heartrik’s lap. Behind his head was a great red splatter of it on the mud wall. His skull had exploded everywhere.
At the shot, Bernardo had seen the red eruption spew into the air, and he quickly turned his back, seizing his elbows in both hands. His teeth began to chatter, his face a sick, deathly white.
The smoke curled in a lazy thread from the barrel of the gun of the one in khaki, Pablo. His face was without a flicker of life or interest. The heavyset man motioned the shooter back.
Bernardo came up, teeth chattering, his pale lips twitching. With a brutal tightening of his jaws, the heavyset man gave Bernardo a single, hard, slashing slap in the face. Bernardo stood hugging his elbows, his shoulders sagging, his nerve gone.
The heavyset man stared down. It was over. “It was hardly a surprise, Bernardo, yes?”
He stared down. The American’s dulling, glassy, vacant eyes were puzzled and unblaming and seemed to ask why.
Yes, he thought. The American reporter was past all things a man could love or hate.
“We must preserve the decencies,” whispered Bernardo, whose face was a very angry, sick white. “We must preserve the decencies.”
“Shut up,” said the heavyset man.
“But we must preserve the decencies.”
“Will you shut up, Bernardo?”
“But he was for us. He was for us. He was such a likable man,” Bernardo chattered, his face stricken with horrible pallor. He still couldn’t bring himself to look down at the American.
“Bernardo,” said the heavyset man, gently, but, with savagery, Bernardo pulled free of his touch and walked away.
The heavyset man stared down. He was squinting. It was hot. A big fly had already settled on a smudge of blood, walking across the ashen forehead. “He was a fine man,” he said. “We must make sure to publish his notes. Mail them to his paper.”
And he had been likable, the heavyset man thought. But later today, Washington would thrill with horror at the news of the murder of one of its famous, most promising foreign correspondents. There would be an outburst of furious repulsion at the government, a cut in foreign aid to the clique. Then American military aid and support, lacking so far, would come flooding in, and, above all, the American press would come. They would come and rescue the cause. What was the fate of one man when the fate of so many was at stake? What was the fate of one? Every cause required sacrifice. This poor, gullible, likable man had met his fate: that was all.
The heavyset man turned and walked away. Bernardo stood, hugging his elbows, horribly pale and agitated. A group of soldiers stood nearby, talking, their backs to the body.
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