The Traveller (27 page)

and thinking then how strange that was and how battle

made all one’s senses acute.

The men surrounding him had broken, of course, and run. It was infectious, the need to run from fear, and though

he couldn’t remember actually tasting fright on his own tongue, he’d found his feet just as readily. He’d fled with the young men, a dozen years or more his juniors, but outdistancing them easily, confidently, so that he was able to turn and catch a picture, one of his favorites, f-1.6 shot at 1000. Violent death had not changed much, he thought. In the background there was a spiral of smoke and a violent upheaval of dirt, while in the foreground three men, tossing weapons and web belts aside, were rushing toward the camera. A fourth man was spinning down, caught at the heels by death, pinned by shrapnel. Life had used the picture in their World News section. He thought: Fifteen hundred dollars for a millisecond of time, stolen out of weeks of deprivation, some fear, and much boredom. The essence of news photography.

He looked back down at Anne Hampton.

She stirred and he caught her eyes opening to the sunlight.

‘Ah, Boswell arises!’ he said.

She started and sat up quickly, rubbing her face hard.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to doze off.’

‘It’s all right,’ he replied. ‘You need your rest. Your beauty sleep.’

She turned and stared out the windows. ‘Where are we?’ she asked, then she turned back toward him in near-panic. ‘I mean, only if you want to tell me, it’s not important really, I was just curious, and you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not a secret,’ he said. ‘First stop is the Louisiana coast.’

She nodded and opened the glove compartment, taking out one of the notepads. ‘Should I take that down?’ she asked.

‘Boswell,’ he said. ‘Be Boswell.’

She nodded and made a notation in the pad.

Then she looked back up at him, pencil poised. She saw that he was watching her as carefully as he could while still eyeing the highway ahead.

‘You reminded me of someone,’ he said. ‘A woman I saw in Guatemala a couple of years back.’

She didn’t say anything, but continued to scribble in the book. She wrote: ‘Memory of Guatemala, several years old…’

‘The real story,’ Jeffers continued, ‘was up on the border, where the military was trying to root out a couple of guerrilla factions. It was one of those little wars that Americans weren’t supposed to be involved in, but were, all over. I mean, Army advisers, high-tech weaponry, CIA guys running around in bush jackets and mirror shades on their eyes, and US Navy destroyers on maneuvers off the coast…’ He laughed a little and continued. ‘Remind me to talk about delusions. It’s what we’re best at…’

She underlined the word delusions three times.

‘Anyway, lost in all this bang-bang guerrilla-hunting was this little peculiarity about the Guatemalan situation. For years, hell, I suppose centuries, the indigenous Indian population has taken the brunt of the bad times. Both sides, Marxist guerrillas, rightist militarists, shit, even the liberals, what there were of them left after being murdered equally frequently by both sides, uniformly slaughtered the Indians from time to time. I mean, they were just not considered people, follow? Like, if an Indian village lay between the two sides, it was ignored …”

‘How do you mean “ignored”?’ she asked tentatively.

He smiled. ‘Good. Very good, Boswell. Questions that help clarify matters are always welcome …’

He paused, thinking.

‘If the sides were in position for a fight, but the intervening land was some large important estancia, well, things would just be moved. It was as if both sides realized certain places were off limits. Like kids playing touch football. Out of bounds was a state delineated less by boundaries than by a mutually agreed-upon state of mind…’

He continued: ‘Anyway, not so with an Indian village. They’d just blast away. Anyone who got in the way, well, tough. That was what I was thinking of. We walked through one of those villages after a fight. I think maybe

the government troops had killed a couple of guerrillas and the guerrillas managed to kill a couple of government troops. That’s it. No big deal. But they sure as hell had torn the shit out of the village.’

He hesitated.

‘Baby blood. There’s nothing like it. It’s almost useless to take pictures of baby blood because no one will run them. Editors look at them, tell you how powerful they are, what a statement they make, but damn, they won’t run them. Americans don’t want to know about baby blood …’

He looked over at her.

‘There was one Indian woman, sitting, holding her child. She looked up as I took the picture. Her eyes were like yours. That’s what I remembered …’

Again he paused.

‘I was standing next to this CIA guy named, named, Christ, Jones or Smith or some other lie he told us. He looked down and saw the woman and the child, same as me, and he said to me, “Probably got hit when those rebel rounds fell short.” And he looked hard at me and said, “The damn Russians are always short-loading the shit they sell these backwater revolutions. Too bad, huh?” ‘

Jeffers thought before continuing. ‘I remember his words perfectly. He was one of those guys that wasn’t there, you know.’

Jeffers was momentarily silent and drove on steadily.

‘Do you understand what he was saying?’

‘Not exactly,’ she replied.

Without hesitation, Jeffers took one hand off the wheel and slapped her hard. ‘Wake up! Dammit! Pay attention! Use your mind!’

She cowered back in the seat, fighting the tears that formed instantly in the corners of her eyes. It was not so much the pain of the blow, which on the scale he’d established was relatively low, it was the suddenness of it.

She took a deep breath, struggling for control. She could hear the quaver in her voice as she spoke: ‘He was saying we didn’t do it…’

‘Right! Now what else?’

He was fixing the blame for murder on everyone but…’

“Right again!’ Jeffers smiled.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘isn’t it easier to use your head?’

She nodded.

‘Gratuitous cruelty. Delusion. If we had not been there, there would have been no battle and the child would have lived, at least a few more days, weeks, who knows. But we were there. But we didn’t cause the death?’

He laughed, but not at a joke or anything humorous.

Delusions, delusions, delusions.’

She wrote this down.

Anne Hampton thought of a dozen questions and bit back each one.

After a moment he said, ‘Death is the easiest thing in the world. People think killing is hard. That’s only what they want to believe. In reality it is the simplest thing around. Pick up the newspaper some morning, what do you see? Husbands kill wives. Wives kill husbands. Parents kill children. Children kill each other. Blacks kill whites. Whiles kill blacks. We kill in secrecy, we kill in stealth, we kill publicly, we kill with purpose, we kill by accident. We kill with guns, knives, bombs, rifles - the obvious things. But what happens when we cut a federally subsidized grain shipment to Ethiopia? We kill, just as surely as we would had we taken a handgun and put it to the temple of some little kid with a swollen belly. Hell, if you think about it for a moment, our entire national approach to the world, to life itself, is based on the question of who we may or may not kill on any given day. And what weapons we might or might not use. Foreign policy? Hah! We should call it our death policy. Then a spokesman could get up at a nice Washington press briefing and say, “Well, the President and the cabinet and the Congress have decided today that Guatemalan Indian peasants, South African demonstrators, certain elements of the issue in Northern Ireland, both sides, mind you, and a few other sundry peoples about the world are doomed. Once again, just as I said yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, the Russians

are okay. No need for dying there.” ‘ He stared down the highway and laughed.

‘I really sound crazy.’

He glanced over at her. ‘Do I scare you?’

Her heart sped as she tried to decide what the right answer would be. She shut her eyes and spoke the truth: ‘Yes.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose that’s reasonable.’

He was quiet before continuing. ‘Well, politics wasn’t how I wanted to start this. I mean, we can talk with more sophistication after you come to know me a little better. That’s why we’re heading this way.’

‘Can I ask a question?’ she tried timidly.

‘Look,’ he answered with a slight tone of irritation. ‘You can always ask. I’ve told you that before. Please don’t make me repeat things. Whether you get an answer or’ - he balled one fist, then released it - ‘some other response really depends on my mood.’ He reached down and suddenly grabbed the muscle above her knee, pinching it painfully. She gasped. ‘Remember, there are no rules. The game simply progresses, stage by stage, until it ends.’

He released her leg. It continued to burn. She wanted to rub it to try to reduce the pain, but dared not. ‘Ask!’ he said.

‘Are we going someplace where you’ll help me know you better?’

He smiled. ‘Smart Boswell,’ he said. ‘Excellent Boswell.’

Jeffers hesitated, just to give his words a bit of impact: ‘That should be obvious. That’s the whole point of this little trip.’ He smiled and aimed the car down the highway.

They drove on in silence.

Anne Hampton daydreamed as they swept past Mobile on the interstate. It was still early and she thought of the pleasant sensation that rising at dawn in the summer brings; a feeling of synchronization with the day. She recalled when she was a child how she enjoyed padding about the house by herself. It was time she spent in special quiet, alone with her things. Sometimes, she remembered,

she would crack the door to her parents’ room and watch them lie in their bed. When she was sure they wouldn’t stir, she would creep across the hallway to her brother’s room. He would be flung across the bedclothes, a jumble of sleep, absolutely oblivious to the world. Her brother slept late. Always. Without fail. A bomb blast wouldn’t wake the little terror. It was as if her brother’s body knew how important it was to store energy for the nonstop way he threw himself into life. Inwardly she smiled. When Tommy died, she thought, the entire world probably slowed, even if just a small amount, an infinitesimal measurement, readable only by the oldest, wisest scientists at the greatest universities with the newest, most exacting instruments. When I die I’ll be lucky if there’s a ripple on some tiny pond somewhere, or a little gust of breeze in the trees.

She blinked hard several times swiftly, to clear the thoughts from her head. My mind is filled with death, she said to herself. And why shouldn’t it be? She glanced over at Jeffers, who was whistling something she couldn’t recognize as he steered the car.

‘Are you only going to talk about death?’ she asked.

He turned toward her momentarily before shifting his gaze down the road. He smiled. ‘Good Boswell,’ he said. ‘Be a reporter.’ He paused, then continued. ‘No. I’ll try to talk about some other things. You raise a valid point. The trouble is’ — he laughed before going on — ‘a certain preoccupation with morbidity. Fatalism. Ends rather than beginnings.’

He paused again, considering. Anne Hampton scribbled down as many of his words as she could manage, then stared in despair at her handwriting. She didn’t trust its legibility, and wondered suddenly, in a moment of fright, whether he would check.

Jeffers broke into a grin and laughed out loud.

‘Here’s a story for you. The best life-affirming story I can think of off the top of my head. I’ll try to come up with some more from time to time, but this one, well, it was when I was with the Dallas paper, the Times-Herald, back

in the mid-seventies. People used to call it the Crimes-Herald, but that’s another story …

‘Anyway, I was working day general-assignment, which usually meant anything from flower shows and business-page shots of captains of industry — what a silly phrase that is - to accidents and cops, and anything else that might come through the window. And we got this call, I mean. it was one of those sublime moments on a newspaper, which of course, no one ever realizes, but happens nonetheless. Guy calls in and says the damnedest thing just happened. What’s that? replies the city-desk man, who’s bored out of his skull. Well, the guy says, it seems like this couple was having a fight, you know, a domestic. They were getting a divorce and they were arguing over child custody and grabbing at the baby right and left and screaming at each other, and the dude tries to snatch the baby out of his old lady’s hands and whoops! Out the baby goes, right out the fourth-floor window …

‘Well, the city-desk editor finally wakes up, because this is a helluva story and he starts yelling for me and a reporter to get going, because there’s a baby been tossed out of a window and suddenly the editor realizes that the guy on the phone is trying to interrupt. Yeah, yeah, the editor says, just give me the address. You don’t understand, the guy on the phone says, starting to get exasperated. What don’t I understand? says the editor. The story, says the guy. Well? says the editor. The story, the guy says, after getting his breath back, is that someone caught the baby. What! says the editor. That’s right, says the guy, there was this dude walking right underneath, who looks up and sees this baby come out the window … and damn if he didn’t catch it right on the fly.’

Jeffers looked at Anne Hampton. She smiled.

‘Really? I mean, he caught the baby? I can’t believe

‘No, no, he did. I promise …’ Jeffers laughed. ‘Fourth story. Just like a football player making a fair catch.’

‘What’s a fair catch?’

‘That’s where the guy receiving the ball can raise his arm and signal the other team that he’s going to catch the

ball without trying to advance it. Then they’re not supposed to tackle him. It’s the ultimate act of self-preservation.’ ‘But how …”

‘I wish I knew.’Jeffers laughed again. ‘I mean, the guy must have had incredibile presence of mind… . I’d guess that most people would look up and see this shape coming out the window and scurry out of the way as fast as possible. Not this guy.’