Deadribs

In January 1985, I spent 8 days with some Miskito Indians who were based in southern Honduras and sometimes raided  across the international border (the Rio Coco) into Nicaragua. They were anti-Sandinista, so were allied with the US, in this case in the form of some mercenaries hired by a Texas oilman. Most of the Miskito warriors were teenagers who were casual about where their weapons were pointed. So I looked down a lot of gun barrels that week...

   For some time after I returned from that trip, I was virtually dizzy trying to remember it all, to write it down, to process it first in my own mind, then into my article for the San Jose (CA) Mercury News. As I looked at the photographs, at my notes, and at the images in my mind, one that was among the most recurrent was that of rifle muzzles: brownskinned teenage warriors, serious yet for all the world like neighborhood kids playing war, handling their AK47s and G3 automatic rifles and M16s and M1 carbines, with their limited training, as if they were toys instead of fully loaded assault weapons. They'd climb aboard the Toyota pickups, letting the muzzles point where they would, often including in my direction. So I looked down a lot of gun barrels that week.

     A few nights after I got home, I had this dream:

Dream: Deadribs       

I am dead. I'm a skeleton. Wind blows between my ribs. I can't move; can't leave the place that is death. People who aren't dead can visit me here. My wife comes, and friends. They ask what it's like. I answer that I'm sad I can't go back with them to the place of the living, but that loneliness isn't the worst part. The worst part is not being able to move. That, and being a skeleton, with the air passing freely between my ribs, not blocked by any organs or skin, the uncaring wind blowing through me and not finding any life there, no warm barrier between my bones and the wind.