The Crossing, a short story
couldn’t decide who to give the tip to. I stuck my remaining pesos in my breast pocket, the edges showing like a pocket handkerchief in a suit. Pesos seemed to lack the authority of dollar bills.
Nearby two young men sat, one strumming a guitar, both looking out of uniform in conventional clothes. The one with the longer hair and drooping mustache said, “At least you look straight.”
“Had to, man,” the other said. “When I was going down they just looked hassled, but when I was coming back they told me, ‘cut the hair, or you can stay in El Salvador.’ They got you when you’re coming back, no shit.”
I walked out to the truck.
“What gives?” Margot asked.
“I can’t find anyone who wants our business. You eaten anything?”
“We had some of those tangerines we bought in San Andrés Tuxpan.”
“Tuxla. Tuxpan is another place. —It’s getting muggy.”
“Maybe we’ll have our first real rain.”
We paused to watch a truck back up to the dock and the peones begin to unload coffins, from tiny ones, no more than two feet long, up to adult size. Each coffin was opened and examined.
“Well, the clouds are piling up to the northeast,” I said. “But this is the dry season. —Say, are there any more cigarettes in the glove compartment?”
She handed out a pack. “Have you seen a restroom?”
“No, why don’t you take the kids and look for one?”
“Is it hot or isn’t it?”
“I’m going back in and see if I can roust someone,” I said.
Wander up to the first guy looks bored enough to be a péon, wave a copy of the letter with the seal of the Ministry of Defense, yell armas de fuego, get immediate results. I tried that out in the judgmental part of my brain and then the executive part. I executed, and the péon I said this to relieved me of any need to judge.
“Armas de fuego? Did you tell the National Police below about them?”
I admitted I hadn’t.
“That is twenty dollars right away,” the péon said. It sounded as if he were demanding an immediate payoff, but before I could debate whether to meet his demand, he grabbed a co-worker, whom he belabored with the words, armas de fuego.
The péon watched carefully as the guns were unloaded. Two were in gun cases, the third, a varmint gun, was wrapped in an orange cloth cut from a cast-off slip cover. The man took the three in his arms, bent at the knees to pick up the musette bag containing the cartridges, and marched across the street to the office of the Jefe de Aduana.
I followed, calling over to Margot, who was walking up, “I’m getting action. Guns is the magic word.”
In the chief’s office the péon explained the reason for his intrusion, looking over at me and referring to me as ese hombre while I tried to look unconcerned, staring out one window at the shade falling over the cluster of buildings, then out another for the better view, across the valley of the Suchiate.
Did the name have anything to do with ‘dirty?’ Sucia is the word for dirty. I’d have to look up Suchiate and see if I could find the derivation. The river didn’t look dirty. It was a good, big river, maybe deeper and wider than any we’d crossed in Mexico. Maybe the name was Mayan. Did the Mayans have aduaneros? They couldn’t have; they didn’t have clip boards and ballpoint pens.
I was introduced to the chief, whose name I’ve forgot, a dignified, gray-haired man with a trimmed mustache. I produced the letter granting permission to carry my guns through Guatemala. A third man, possibly the supervisor of peones, joined us. A discussion ensued, about the coronel from the Ministry of Defense who had signed the letter. René Guiterrez Berro? No one had heard of him. The chief spoke some English and I explained to him that I had obtained the permit writing from San Francisco in September.
The chief smiled. “Many things have changed since September. I am going to call on the radio my headquarters and clear this up. It should take only a little while.” His tone of voice, a full head of almost white hair, his bearing, made me feel deferential. The man bespoke calm, as if here, in the office of the chief, I would get prompt action. Here the seeming lack of coordination, of a plan controlling all the scurrying peones and indifferent officials, would be revealed as orderly after all.
The péon and his supervisor opened the gun cases and checked the serial numbers against those in coronel Guiterrez’s letter. They were entranced by the guns, held them lovingly, inspected them in every detail. One held up a .270 cartridge, whistling. Though I felt as if they were fondling my wife, I tried to be friendly.
“For elephants,” I said.
“Truly?” one asked.
“No, it’s a joke, un chiste,” I said.
They laughed and the chief looked up from his desk and laughed too, his small eyes, with bags beneath befitting his age, almost closed. He smoked a cigarette and dropped ashes on the floor, though there was an ashtray at hand. He motioned me to a chair.
“I will be a minute,” he said, “and then I see if I can get headquarters.” He glanced at his watch.
From my chair I could see the top of the camper with its canvas-wrapped supplies, and beyond the valley. Humidity aside, it would be an inviting place to camp, if there were no aduana there. I glanced at my watch, which had stopped at ten till two. There was no clock on the wall. So far in Latin America there had been no clocks on walls but all officials wore wrist watches.
I tried to read the time from the wrist watch on the President, whose nearly life-size photograph hung opposite the chief’s desk. A handsome man, he reminded me of Prince Phillip with dark hair. Did his being a general, posing in uniform, say something about the country? His expression was more than calm, as if the ponderances of bureaucracy dare not break down with him staring out over the desks of all the country’s bureaucrats.
The chief’s trip to the radio was interrupted by a pleasant man who stepped in for a signature. From his looks I judged he did not cultivate chief aduaneros and other officials only because it sped his crossings. There was something in the way he took the chief’s hand that said these small courtesies were important for other reasons, perhaps to mark the progress of his journeys, perhaps as points of reference in a trail he blazed. He dressed no more formally than I, but his bearing was that of a businessman about his business. His purposefulness kept his from the travel-wear I was all too uncomfortable with: my wrinkled trousers, my sweat-soaked shirt.
In the words of Emeril Lagasse, the jungle had kicked the humidity up a notch. Why wasn’t this businessman as travel-worn as I?
The man left and the chief, at last, stepped to the radio. For this signal event, several persons looked in from the vestibule. He spoke very loudly:
“Calling Guatemala, calling Guatemala, this is Talisman, this is Talisman. Do you receive me, do you receive me? A red light glowed on the transceiver. I heard static but no response. Out the window I watched Margot descend the stairs opposite with a Coca Cola in hand. I didn’t see the girls.
“Calling Guatemala, calling Guatemala, this is Talisman, this is Talisman. Do you receive me?”
The reply seem to come from every corner of the room. I jumped at the sudden booming. “This is Guatemala, this is Guatemala. I receive you, Talisman. Go ahead.” There followed a lengthy discussion, more on the side of the local chief: references to the letter, the serial numbers, the manufacturers—Savage coming through as Sah-vah-hay—but mostly about Coronel René Guiterrez Berro. The soul-shattering voice came back on, repeating the name with a tone of incredulity. I closed my eyes and imagined the voice coming from the portrait of the President.
There came a long pause. I began counting: one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, but stopped. Somewhere I’d read that the agony of the prisoner before execution came from magnifying each moment until it assumed its own dimension. Dostoevsky? Camus? Camus was very down on capital punishment.
“There is no such coronel in the Ministry of Defense,” the voice on the radio boomed. No
way. I’d written well in advance of leaving, as I had to Mexico and every other Central American country. I’d even conferred with the Guatemalan consul in San Francisco.
The tempo of the words back and forth increased and then abruptly the conversation was over, leaving my ears ringing.
The chief got up, leaving the receiver open. “It will be a few minutes. There is a matter to clear up with the Ministerio de Defensa.” He returned to his desk. I offered him a cigarette.
He sat back in his chair and said, “What do you hunt?”
“Deer, duck, rabbit—things to eat.”
“I too am a hunter, but I don’t have such a weapon as the .270. That would be very good for tigre.”
“Do you hunt tigre?”
“Yes; I have shot many.”
“And what weapon do you use?”
“A shotgun,” the chief said.
I raised my eyebrows.
“One hunts at night. If you can see the eyes in the light, you can make a shot with a shotgun. In the jungle one does not shot very far.”
A voice, not that of the person in Guatemala City, came over on the frequency of the chief’s radio. The chief, unable to talk more, went back to the papers on his desk. The voice on the radio gained in pitch and lost in clarity. At first I thought it was broadcasting a place name, but then it sounded like the Spanish word for danger, peligro, peligro, peligro. A hint of strangled hysteria could be heard in the voice, as if, calling from some remoter jungle outpost,