A SHORT AMERICAN STORY

http://rattlesnakedreams.blogspot.com  A SHORT AMERICAN STORY

Samaritan in Los Angeles
     At the beginning of summer, 1970, I was hitchhiking through Los Angeles to drop in at Mike Taylor's wedding, then head for Mexico for a summer of reading John Womack’s Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, then hitchhiking to as many of the locations mentioned in the book as I could get to. I'd just finished my first year in graduate school, was startled to find I had a little money left over from my first year scholarship, and figured if I was really thrifty I could survive a summer in Mexico without working.
     It was rush hour and I was stranded on some little traffic island in the midst of what seemed like an intersection of all the freeways in California. I couldn't even see a way to cross a street without getting hit, and didn't know which street to cross if I could.
     A pickup swerved out of traffic and bumped onto the curb. "Git in..." the driver yelled. I did. "... 'fore we both git run over!" he said as he rammed the pickup back into traffic. He turned to me, grinning: "Are you as lost as I think you are?" I said I sure was. I told him where I was trying to go, and he drove me to a less frantic street and told me where to catch a ride.
     I thanked him for bailing me out of a difficult situation, and for going out of his way to do it. I climbed down and retrieved my knapsack from the floorboard. As I bent to pick it up, I noticed the muzzle of a .22 rifle just sticking out from under the seat on the passenger side. I looked up at him, trying to formulate a question about what there was to hunt in urban Los Angeles.
     "That's my nigger gitter," he said, his smile as friendly as before.
     I didn't know what to say. I'd just had my faith in humanity sent to both ends of the spectrum, in a couple of minutes, by the same man.
     "Git many?" I asked. I actually wanted to know if he used the .22 to shoot at black people, but now I think it came out like we were two country boys talking about hunting cottontails.
     He shook his head, still grinning. "Nah." He drove off.

La Violencia + Dream

From the chapter “Guatemala: La Violencia”

Our idea was to use Roger’s contacts and familiarity with the country to introduce me to people who had stories to tell about the history of systematic killing and repression, particularly under General José Efraín Ríos Montt, the Roman Catholic-cum-Evangelical minister-cum de facto President and trusted friend of, and recipient of military aid and public praise from, U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

Roger had friends in San Cristobal de las Casas, a lovely Mexican town in the state of Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border. We stayed there for a couple of days, then went off the beaten path to a smaller town – I think it was Las Margaritas - nearer the border, and eventually to a small cluster of thatched makeshift homes of Guatemalan Mayan refugees who had managed to escape across the border during la violencia.

Roger now asked in the refugee camp for a specific Mayan man, by name. After a few minutes’ wait, a man appeared and approached us cautiously. Roger introduced us and we sat on stools in one of the huts.

He had a photo, several years old, of himself with a Guatemalan Mayan man. By itself, it meant nothing. But both men were readily identifiable, and Roger’s friend, the other man in the photo, had written a note about Roger on the back, and signed it. Roger handed the photo to this man, and sat quietly. The man looked at the photo for a long time. Then he turned it over and read the note on the back for a long time. Then he turned it back over and looked at the picture, again, for a long time. Then he looked up at Roger. His nod was the acknowledgement: I see that you are a friend of someone I trust. His face was now a question: what do you want?

Roger introduced me again, this time into a human situation that was categorically different from what it had been a few minutes before. He said that I could be trusted. He said I was a writer, a journalist who could get stories published about things that had happened in Indian towns in Guatemala. I could be trusted to name no names, to tell no details, that would endanger the life of the teller of a story, but that I could still tell the story to people in the United States, the same people who elected the presidents who were instrumental in giving military aid to Guatemala. The rest went unsaid; didn’t need to be said. It would have been like telling an Iowa farmer that too much rain at the wrong time might damage his corn crop.

The man was quiet. His head was bowed. He was sad. His sadness filled the hut. His sadness made us quiet, made us parishioners in the church of his sadness. He took a deep breath, let it out, spoke:

The soldiers came to our village. They gathered the young men who were there at the time. They tied their hands behind. They lined them up in front of the rest of us, their families. They painted them, their hair, their faces, all over, with gasoline.

Then they lit them...

Some of them we could only identify by their belt buckles....

I have seen – we all have seen, those of us who have been so lucky as to have a few decades of life behind us – a number of American presidents, speaking with utmost sincerity, on national television, appealing to us to believe their explanations of things, of what was happening to all of us, of what must be done in the face of these events.

I have never seen, on the face of any one of those presidents – Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama - anything that made me believe he was telling the truth as that Mayan man in an unofficial refugee camp near the Guatemalan border made me believe that he was telling the truth.

Dream: Bodies of Water

I am a soldier again, but not in the Marine Corps this time. It's a more irregular force. We drop from higher ground toward a village. It is somewhat familiar; it may or may not be our village. It seems deserted, but we feel other presences. As we march wearily and warily down into the village, there is an inevitability to our marching, that feeling in the body which my dream has borrowed from my Adeste Fidelis march at Camp Pendleton years before. This inevitability is a property not just of our column of dusty, sweaty men. It is a property of the very movements of our limbs, of our muscles and bones, even of our cells. We might as well be insects hatching. The air is thick with risk. Is the village deserted, or are the people (our people? people loyal to the enemy?) hidden in the rude houses behind shuttered windows? Is the danger from them, or from someone else who will come? This land could be the rocky ridges of the West Bank, say an Israeli or Palestinian settlement or village near Jerusalem and Bethlehem; or it could be an open rocky area of the Guatemalan highlands, near where the road forks between Todos Santos Cuchumatán and San Miguel Acatán, only less green; or Guanacaste, Costa Rica, where Ollie North and his cowboys built their secret airstrip for the contras. A small creek, less than three feet wide, runs through the village. The banks of the creek are lined with stones placed by human hands. Some of us kneel to drink; some look warily around, rifles ready, up and downstream. Even we who drink are looking, peering out from under our eyebrows. As I drink, the creek floats a human body beneath my face, almost touching. The creek is barely wide enough for the body to pass. The body is a dark haired young man. The head, shoulders, hips, feet, all bump jerkily against the creek's rocky sides as the water carries it along. The body floats face up. His hands are bound behind his back. I look upstream. Another body, another dark-haired young man, is close behind the first. As my eyes change focus and sweep upstream, I see the creek is filled with bodies of dark haired young men in civilian clothes, crowded head to foot, hands bound behind, bumping between narrow rocky creek banks propelled by a stream of clear water. They clog, jam up, bump into one another like wastage from a doll factory. But the same inevitability which infuses our movements unsticks the bodies, moves them bumpily on downstream. I look farther upstream, lowering my face until it is just above the stream of bodies and clear water. I now can see under the stone-lined culvert from which the stream emerges. In the light that comes through the tunnel, I see legs of soldiers standing on the creek banks beyond the culvert. They are wearing blue jeans, other civilian pants, boots, tennis shoes, the odd bit of uniform. I see only their legs, and the muzzles of their rifles at the ready. Their legs look like the legs of the bodies in the creek. They also look like our legs. Or they could be the legs of the players, seen through a broken horizontal slat in the fence around any inner-city basketball court in the world. Are they the killers? Are they coming for us? Are they reinforcements for us? Or are they a fresh supply of bodies for the water?  

  

A VETERAN'S DREAMS

Earlier readers of this blog may remember some of my later dreams, like “Dance of the Arrows” and “The Last Nightmare,” that still flirted with fear and danger, but essentially ended with a sort of redemption.

    

     The two dreams here, along with their short introduction, introduce dreams into the overall narrative of the book. They are not nice. But because Rattlesnake Dreams is not just about war – it is that – but about LEARNING ABOUT WAR, these dreams give a glimpse of how far I had to travel, emotionally and spiritually, to move from terror to laughter.

Interlude: A Veteran's Dreams

     Every veteran of ground combat has his own set of these dreams, usually for the rest of his life. Some are nightmares that are so horrible that they launch the dreamer bodily out of sleep, then clamp his mind shut, in forgetfulness, against what he just saw. Often only fragments remain. Or a dream will be repeated so often that it can't be forgotten. Sometimes, as with my dream about the wolves, it sears the brain so deeply, that one time, that it can't be forgotten.

     Since the war, my dreams have included an ongoing series of pursuit nightmares. Over the years, two things happened. I got weary of, and angry at, waking up terrified. I also realized that however scary the dreams were, they were also amazing pictures (in full color) and stories. I decided that if I had to put up with them, I should at least get some use out of them.

     I made a conscious decision to try, when I was having a nightmare in which I was being pursued, to do two things: to turn, in the dream, and confront my pursuers; and to remember the dreams instead of forgetting them. After all, I was a storyteller, and I was missing out on the use of material which was among my strongest, and for which I had paid the highest price. I began to write them down. The dreams related here are told exactly as they occurred to me, except that some have been shortened either by me or by that great editor, forgetfulness.

     In more recent years, my dreams – well, some, anyway - have become friends, except for the rare visitation of a nightmare as graphic and terrifying as the first two presented here. Along the way I learned an interesting thing: that while dreams inhabit the most fearsome recesses of the human soul, dreams themselves are brutally unafraid. They will go anywhere, reveling in deepest fears and unmentionable desires. Allowed to travel unfettered and then to haul their stories into the light of morning, they will do work - especially for a writer - which simply cannot be done by the awake mind.

         Dream: Nazi Pursuit

I am alone. A battalion of Nazi SS troopers are after me. They are focused entirely on finding and killing me. They are all big, strong men, definitely not parade‑ground troops. Their uniforms are dirty. They march with the cadence of our Adeste Fidelis column at Camp Pendleton, sweating as they march. All are armed with fully automatic weapons: submachine guns and heavier. Everything about them says: fit, experienced combat men. We are in a town that has been shot up in earlier fighting. They are near. They know the area; I do not. They spread out, searching expertly. I scurry like a rat. I duck into a dark place under a raised sidewalk, like the one I looked under in Cho Lon at the corpse of the Chinese woman. I clutch my rifle, which is a single‑shot .22 like the one I hunted rabbits with as a kid. I have one or two .22 cartridges to go against the SS battalion. Their big black boots are close enough to touch as they march past my face.

                                        Dream: Money Man Pursuit

A man, one man, is after me. He's decided I'm between him and what he wants. It has nothing to do with me personally, with who I am or with anything I've done. I try to dissuade him, but he won't listen. Only my death will clear his way. There is a long pursuit. Part of it is over the rooftops of the human community. I do good tricks to get away but he always picks up the trail again. I go through a library with all human knowledge in it, in such a way as to leave all that knowledge in the form of impediments for him. But he comes through it all, picks up my trail. Along the way, some people try to help me, but can't. Others are afraid to try. He has an AK47 which he fires at me whenever he comes within range, barely missing me. I hear the bullets snapping around my head like the bullets snapped near the well in Tho An in 1966. I meet a friend, a fellow combat vet. He says, "Remember that time...?" and recounts my telling him of our shelling and bombing a battlefield after a firefight until nothing recognizable was left but mud blasted into tortured shapes. My friend connects that story to the pursuit I'm now enduring, but I don't know why, unless just for its implacability, its inevitable movement in the direction of death. He says he'll be a lot more reluctant now, after a battle, to do his usual job of walking the ground and looking for survivors and for evidence of what happened there. I'm weary of dreaming this dream. I know I can't escape this man who pursues me. I know he'll kill me if I don't kill him. I lie in wait. I get up close. Fear and strength struggle in my body. The fear and the strength stop fighting, come to an agreement. The only way out is for me to become a more focused killer than he is. I become that. He comes. His eyes are maniacal, yet more cold than wild. Methodical. I now have a pistol. I aim carefully. A good head shot takes out one eye, goes into his brain. He keeps coming. I shoot again, take out the other eye. He will not die. I shoot and shoot, all brain shots. I'm aware of a wonderful, terrible ability to focus, like when I shot the rattlesnake on the Rogue River, or like standing in the open under fire at Tho An. This focus allows me to compartmentalize my being, putting my revulsion at killing off in a corner with my fear of death and the physical distractions of my environment and of my pursuer's movements. His head recoils crazily with each shot. Still he comes; he won't get it through his head. I grab a short sharp stick. Bullets are not enough; it has to be more personal. I thrust, put all my body's strength behind it, with the butt of the stick against my palm, and drive the point into one bloody eye socket, through his head, out the back of his skull. He finally gets the point. He dies, but not before he gets what he came for. We are in a fast food joint, behind the counter. Dying, he falls toward the cash register, grabs a wad of greenbacks the size of a large man's fist, too large to swallow, but rams it into his mouth anyway, his face a swamp of gore as he falls dead, still trying to swallow the money.