Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

The guerrillas are traveling to Progreso too, where they’ll blow up the railroad that links the seaport to German Merida. We travel at night, negotiating the underground pools and long mean swatches of jagged coral on my crippled feet, crossing the dark smoking henequen fields that have been strafed by German Stukas overhead. The ruins and abandoned Spanish plantations of the countryside are the bastions of the Mayan Resistance. Lucia says, The Americans bring in their own troops sometimes but the truth is they don’t understand the territory much better than the Germans. Better, she says, that they airdrop the supplies and guns, or ship them across the gulf, and let us do the fighting. Let the Yanquis worry about defending Des Moines. I think she’s trying to make an impression on me, so that if I am a German spy I’ll understand that no matter how many Germans there are, or how big the guns and planes, or how many miles of the peninsula the Germans believe they control, there will always be the Mayans who know the Yucatan better and will engage the Germans until the last one’s sealed up in a Viennese wall or has returned to Berlin to get drunk in his favorite beer garden. Sometimes I want to tell Lucia that my mother was an Indian; but there aren’t many Austrian refugees with American Indian mothers, and I don’t want to get caught in even the most harmless lie. During our time with the guerrillas, the old man and I live through two battles and several skirmishes. Z sits in a gully watching me load weapons for the purpose of shooting his army. Often I’m shaken awake in the night and must arouse the old man so we can pull out because a German patrol is close by. It’s the guerrilla strategy to retreat whenever possible, never to be drawn into a battle for which the guerrillas themselves didn’t plan and prepare. We wind our way though the forests across the limestone flats, always to another crumbling palace where we meet up with other rebels. Few of them ever speak to me, though they’re always kind to the old man, feeding him soup and finding him the softest and most secure hammock. They blame me for having brought him into the situation, and of course they don’t understand when I almost beat him to death one night in a small devastated village half a day south of the railway that runs to the sea.

IT’S THE SIGHT OF the little girl that does it. We come into the village late at night, past midnight; a mile outside, the rebels know something’s wrong. There’s an odor in the air and a low din, which turns out to be the flies. The flies are everywhere in the village; the bodies of the villagers are black with them. Even for the guerrillas who’ve seen such atrocities, it’s shocking; but for me it’s more, the manifested vision of everything I’ve known but never had to see. The guerrillas stealthily sweep the village to make sure Germans aren’t waiting. Lucia must decide whether to burn the village and the bodies or take the time to bury them. She opts to bury them. She sends a two-man scouting party on to the next village to see if there’s a priest. It’s as the men are digging that I come across the dead little girl. I don’t want to talk about her. I don’t want to tell what they’ve done to her. I … it’s enough to explain that someone has pinned to her a note, which says, as far as my own German can translate, “Another virgin for the Leader.” The girl, she must be all of eight. She’s small enough that it’s not so difficult imagining Courtney that age, if she’d lived a little longer to become that age. I turn my back on the girl. I can’t even bring myself to remove the note, to pick her up and carry her in my arms to the graves. I turn my back on her and go out beyond the houses of the village to where I’ve left the old man lying in a clearing. Another virgin for the Leader, is all I keep saying to myself; I guess I’m still saying it when I find him lying there in the clearing. Silently, without a word, I just begin to beat him. I beat him and he’s staring up at me with his eyes popping out, and the guerrillas come along and pull me off him when I’m within an inch of his life. They pull me off and it’s clear that, in their own rage over the village, I’ve become to them the German who murders old people and children. You vicious bastard, Lucia says to me, while the others hold me back and someone tends to the old man. Another of the guerrillas, a short stocky Mayan who’s second in command and hasn’t spoken a word of English the entire time I’ve been around, speaks it quite well now. He says now, This man’s like the rest of them. They stare at me; if they’ve ever considered shooting me, it’s never seemed a more reasonable solution than at this moment. The old man lies at my feet bleeding from his nose and ears. For a moment I’m about to tell them. I’m about to tell them who he is, whether they’ll believe it or not, and I don’t suppose they would, but I’m about to tell them because I’ve been waiting to tell someone. And then I know I won’t tell them. I won’t because I believe it’s better they villainize me, a big violent man my whole life, than an old weak sick man. Because there’s always the one awful chance that they will believe me, that they’d look into his face and eyes and see that it’s true, at which point the pure righteous wrath of their fight would have to accommodate the humanity of his evil. They’re fighting for an age in which the heart and consciousness have not been stripped of the reference points that have become denied to time and space: they’ve stared into the bloody rorschach of the Twentieth Century and seen the budding of a flower. You can’t do that to them, I say to myself. If you do one good thing in your life, I say to myself, let it be this, that you leave them their faith, that in your monstrous form you reaffirm their vision of what’s monstrous, and what’s therefore to be defeated; and that in his weak helpless form you reaffirm their vision of what’s weak and helpless, and therefore to be defended. With one shudder from my torso up, I retrieve what havoc I need to shake the guerrillas free of me, and hope that in the process I provoke them to shoot me. They almost do. But Lucia barks a command within an inch of my own life, and instead throws me a shovel. With the others I return to the village to dig. I remove the note from the little girl’s body before anyone can see it, and bury her myself.

NOT LONG AFTER THAT we’re in Texas, or to be more precise, we’re just below what used to be the border of Texas. I … I’m not sure how this happens. It’s probably all that prevents my execution at the hands of the guerrillas; in the ambush that comes the day following our discovery of the massacred village, it’s a German bullet that saves me. The ambush is fast and overwhelming, at the bottom of a ditch. In the midst of the scant three minutes it takes place, I remember the short stocky second-in-command taking aim at me; I turn at the last moment to read it in his eyes. If anyone’s not getting out of this alive, his eyes say, it’s you. And then the eyes flinch with annoyance as though he’s just been stung by a mosquito, except it isn’t a mosquito; he just drops. A second later I’m dropped as well by a blow I never see. In the hours to come I’m only fleetingly conscious; I’m aware of the back of a truck, where I’m bound at my hands and feet and jostling with other prisoners. I assume the old man’s here too but I don’t see him. Lucia’s several bodies away from me, also bound; she may be alive or dead. When I come to again, I’m lying still bound on the open deck of a boat, bombs and gunfire in the distance; it’s nightfall and I crane my head above the edge of the boat to glimpse in the full moonlight the waters of what must be the gulf. I’m cognizant enough to think to myself that perhaps it isn’t the brightest thing to be sailing hostile waters in full moonlight. On the other hand, maybe that’s the idea. I don’t spot Z anywhere. Before slipping back to the deck, however, I do see those ancient birds of the blue city circling the dazzling lethal lights of the gulf as though they’re coming home; I wonder if the old man, who’s watched in his mind those birds night after night since we left, has sprung them loose by raising his eyes to the sky and opening them like cages. I rush to sleep before this boat is blown from the water. I’m surprised to wake at all, and a little more surprised to find myself sleeping next to a dying fire, the old man dozing right beside me, on a morning beach right outside of Brownsville.