Story 5

"Dang, Carlos puede manejar!"
Not recognizing the whisperer, I cocked my head around the passenger seat headrest of the 15-passenger van. Patrick stared back at me from the second row amid a sea of tense faces. I appreciated the effort the reduce the anxiety, and acknowledged it with a comment to the effect that yes, Carlos could drive better than anyone I've ever met and was perhaps on par with Jason Bourne and the Transporter. Looking through the back windows, the scene of destruction on the main artery from Guatemala City to Antigua looked eerily like the wrecked set of one of those action movies. I hoped his heroic efforts would be enough to get us out with only the wounds we were already carrying.
Chewing on my own comment, I fancied myself on par with Jason Bourne in another way: nearly infinite capacity for destruction. Driving away from the scene of my crimes amid a storm of angry Mayans, I reflected on what I had done right over the past year. And all that had gone so terribly wrong.

The first inkling that I have given power to something I cannot control hits me in the form of the handle of an M9 Beretta pistol. It makes the odd sound of "thack" as it meets the frontal bone of my cranium. I have a very strong hunch that this particular pistol originated from a shipment of handguns destined for California by China, diverted 2 months ago by members of Club de Drogas on a hijacked Guatemalan navy speedboat, and distributed to inmates of Prision Federal Numero 7. The sinking feeling of being double-crossed by the prison crime bosses hits me just as a right cross catches me near the temple- a nearly fatal blow. Now I am bleeding from a deep gash on my forehead, and as the blood trickles over my eyes, I think of the victims- my victims- on that cargo ship. And the prison guards who had been overwhelmed (just yesterday) by the most violent prison uprising in Central American history.
In this moment, I recognize the phenomenon of the intellectual, even philosophical reaction to pain that contrasts so sharply with that of el cuerpo. Although I'm not sure, I detect a foreign train of thought that may be approaching remorse. Remorse! I know intrinsically that remorse inevitably leads to one of two attitudes: a blind bunker mentality or a weak, broken, downright Christian posture of repentance. This heretical train of thoughts must be stopped.
Yet with each blow, the remorse awakens my latent conscience with increasing insistence. Soon I find myself trying to slither away from the assailant- and my thoughts- clawing through the dirt. My remorse couples with the calm, calculating center- the will- that every boxer knows so well. It dispassionately proclaims, "We are getting beat up quite badly at the moment. If something is not done, soon we will be unconscious." In response (and with an agility that surprises even myself) I peek through a window through the blood that has briefly opened up and catch a glimpse of the killer stroke, meant to propel the ethmoid bone at the bridge of my nose into my frontal lobe. I reach up and grab- punch and hold, really- the dark descending hands. Three seconds and eight heartbeats later, he lies dead at my feet.
Killing a man is not an effective remedy for remorse.
Fortunately for me, this vinctive fugitive renegade was apparently a foolish, impatient vindictive fugitive renegade. Had he waited a few more minutes, he and his friends could have surrounded my compound (se llama La Union) and taken out half of the leadership of the Club de Drogas and one-sixth of the leaders of the various Clubes de Lucha. We had to move fast to avoid burning alive. I grabbed the megaphone.
"Todos en el van! Ahorita! Corran! Corran! Corran!"
Grabbing the 9 and stuffing it in the front of my pants, I yell for Carlos to drive. I spend the drive in fear, pain, and confusion. It feels like Guatemala.

Carlos whisked us to safety. That night, safety meant a local converted shoe factory that had been converted to an "assimilation station" for Mayans, modeled on Australian's successful program of assimilating half-Aborigines during the first seven decades of the last century. In my muddled state, it seemed like all 500 unhappyMayan children stared out their windows at our headlights as we pulled up. Couldn't they understand they were getting a better life? I resolved to give them a good speech on the superiority of Western culture, once I got cleaned up. Yet as I looked myself over en el espejo, I saw the chilling eyes of a calloused killer where once there had been love.
I didn't even try to get any sleep that night. Or the next seven nights. I survived on a constant flow of chicken-and-rice tortillas and horchata. After a week of unceasing labor, executing the long-term plans of Club de Drogas, I finally lost my conscience in the fog of insomnia.

That was the high point of my effort. I lost my soul at about the same time as I got back into the good graces of the criminal warlords who now ruled the cities. This reversal of fortunes stemmed from my ability to forge an agreement between the army and the various mob bosses that had ascended to power in the major cities. The mob bosses got the cities they wanted, and the army got everything else- mostly pueblitos and the open countryside. The former government managed to escape to Panama, to the angst of the army's big-shot generals.
I only acted like I cared about the balance of whatever Guatemalan political power was to had. Yet ironically, I had become the most powerful man in Central America almost overnight.

Naturally, the United States issued their usual list of statements they always brought out against movements they did not understand. Yet apparently nothing can make Americans really care about Central America, at least not at this low point in their history.

It happened while I was giving the acceptance speech at that National Parliament Building to the first annual "Humanitarian of the Year Award" sponsored by Guatemalan organized crime. It had been over a month since I had slept, yet I launched into a spiel emphasizing "cultural deconstruction" - I coined the admittedly euphemismic phrase on the spot- in characteristic Spanglish. Judging from the gunfire and applause (most gunfire), my extemporaneous comments were really rubbing the ganglords the right way. Then it happened.
When one has insomnia, one is never quite awake and never really asleep. I had spent hours looking at myself from a few feet above my head, watching hours tick by on an imaginary wall clock as I accomplished another goal of Club de Drogas. My only release from this state was one especially brutal thrashing by a large black man named Rufus at Club de Lucha. I had the vivid impression of being mauled by a panther. Fortunately, he was a former paramedic. Yet I did increasingly more stupid things without realizing them, and several crises had rarely been averted in the preceding couple of weeks.
As I watched myself stand at the podium, delivering the speech of my life, the audience in my periphery morphed into a sea of brown faces. As I leveled the gaze of my mind's eye on the curious phenomenon, I suddenly became distracted and distraught. I lost the magical "flow" that all orators would kill to have for just a few minutes. I began making comments such as "Guatemala es un pais de ladrones y rameras" and "Your country is dooty," when I meant to say that "Guatemala is a country of beauty and promise" and "You have a duty to your country."
The audience in my head precipitated my distress.
It was an audience of all the people who had died because of me. Chinese merchantmen, courageous prison guards, resistant Mayan parents, big-wigs of Central American pharmaceutical companies.Yet I felt not a tinge of regret. I felt only a loss of control, a powerful drainage of my life-force, as if the souls I had sent to judgment had come back to me in my finest hour and exacted their vengeance on me by preying on my mente.

This is why I now sit in the passenger side of a 15-passenger van fleeing the cronies of angry mob bosses. We are headed for Antigua, yet up ahead is a roadblock of flaming 18-wheelers.
"Pull off."
Carlos was already turning the wheel onto a deeply rutted agricultural track that led straight up the nearby mountains.
"Vaya hasta no puedes ir mas."
We drove in the fading light of dusk until the stars illuminated the path. The front headlights were somewhere on Guatemala Highway Numero 1.
We drove until the transmission began to fail.
Then we drove some more.


The van finally sputters to a standstill near the outskirts of a godforsaken Guatemalan (or Honduran) pueblito, coming to its final rest after a nearly endless ordeal of constant jarring and dull, pulsing pain. I open the door and smell the midnight air. Carlos lights a cigarette on the other side of the van, and the surviving remnant of the Club de Drogas spills out of the back seat. The jungle is dark and dense and I feel its desire to consume this creaking, smoking metal intruder into its age-long repose. I take a cold chicken-and-rice tortilla and a sealed taza of horchata out of the front console and settle myself on the warm hood of the van. My thoughts begin to turn to possible Plan B's. Perhaps I could stay in this pueblito; I may be able to hide out here for years before getting discovered. Maybe start a touring business or an internet cafe. Yet I am startled out of my reverie when I glance up from my repast and lock eyes with a very large and very close jaguar.
I will myself to recognize the sight as a hallucination.
Then I wake up.