Chapter 8. The Miskito Coast (pt 2)

"This is a children's crusade...
no matter our age."

It was about a week until my chaotic reunion with Kuka took place. She was in the midst of staff, nodding and agreeing to logistics and commands with maps or inventory lists spread out on a table in a cinder-block hut beyond the San Juan in Costa Rica.

After the others left the hut she relaxed a little and became the woman I knew in Santa Monica a lifetime ago, apologizing, “I’m sorry I brought you down here Max. Sit with me for a while.”

We sat on the cot in the back of the hut. I wondered how we would have sex on a small cot. “You led me to believe you were a school teacher,” I felt the anger of betrayal welling up.

“I was given this command after we landed in Tegucigalpa. My fund raising in Santa Monica was but a start. I won’t be with you very much from here on but we have made arrangements for you to leave. In the meantime, I trust I left you in good hands with the Bird Dog?”

“I haven’t seen him since Waspam.”

“You surprised us with your knowledge of weapons back in Honduras or the Old Dog would have sent you packing. He was dead set against you coming here at all but La Penca distracted us.”

“What, he was impressed that I could point a rifle?”

“No, anyone can do that. He respects your ability to keep things to yourself. It’s a talent for survival better than marksmanship.”

“You knew I wouldn’t make much of a journalist?” my anger settled down and I realized I loved it in the humidity and danger of the coastal rainforest. It was the adventure of my life, “but I’m glad you let me come here, Kuka?”

“I saw something in you under the cover of that drunk I met back there, Max.”

“What, that I’m pliable?” I countered, faking anger. “You said you were a fucking teacher, not a Contra leader!”

“Yes, you had a romantic image of a school-marm teaching children in an Indian school-house,” she responded with unexpected sarcasm. “That abandoned village where you were ambushed… That village was where I was going to teach school.”

“When did you find out you had no school to teach… that you knew it was empty?”

“I wasn’t told about my village until after we landed in Tegucigalpa. Then there was La Penca. I’m telling you, I never expected that to happen to Pastora.”

“You could have told me while I sat isolated in Tegucigalpa.”

“The Bird Dog was sent to take care of that. He brought you to camp so that I could say good-bye.” She almost pouted, “I’m only a small player here and not a guerrilla leader.”

She changed the subject back to me, “The others were impressed with how well you adapted to the jungle. But, under fire, you never used your weapon.”

“I couldn’t. They were only kids,” I tried to explain. “They were kids… teens that should be playing baseball.”

“Max, they play baseball and they kill Miskitos,” she rebutted fiercely, reminding me of the woman I saw that slammed her fist down in the sand an eon ago, “this is a children’s crusade, naïve children, no matter our age. One moment the C.I.A. promises us candy, and the next? Who knows.”

“I’m still glad you brought me here,” I confessed. My eyes searched hers for any sign she would pull me back into her arms. Kuka closed the door to the hut and rolled out a blanket on the floor where our passion could fully unfold. A couple hours passed and we lay on the floor smoking a cigarette, passing it back and forth while the wet season’s rains pounded out all other noise on the tin roof.

She put both hands on my shoulders to shake me, “Max, because you didn’t fire, you’re a marked man.”

“But I’m supposed to be a journalist and not a soldier. That isn’t proof.”

“It is proof enough to take you out. There are no judges or juries here. Everyone is a judge, jury and executioner.” She then said quietly, “I will be expected to take you out. You must know that, Max. If I don’t do something my life is in danger.”

“Do you think I’m a child, Kuka, to be frightened?”

She compassionately, as though to an abandoned child, affirmed, “We are all children, Max, and so are you. But make no mistake about it, we are fighting for our lives while you are on but an adventure; a teenaged boy’s fantasy. And, when it’s over, you will go back to tell exotic war stories in the bar or maybe even publish them. If you stay, however, you’ll have to become a killer… like those children you helped to ambush.”

The bile of anger arose from my gut and I understood I was being sent off by her. She stood before me in fatigues and I tried to imagine the woman in the colorful embroidered shirts she wore in Santa Monica. That was then but a vague memory.

“Shit, yeh, the Bird Dog. Who is he anyway?” my heart agreed with her. The realization that, at any moment someone could… that someone could even be Kuka… that someone would put a round in the back of my head. I knew in my heart, and it began to percolate into my mind, that I needed to get the fuck out of there as soon as I could.

“Do you think… do you believe for one minute that I’d rather lead a futile children’s crusade over leading them in a classroom? I was in Santa Monica to muster support for us… for our schools. Now all our villages are in so-called refugee camps and I’m a marked woman. We don’t give a shit about Ronald Reagan or his mercenary Somosista goons up north…”

Before I could answer, the jungle flashed from tracers and grenades. The rattle of gunfire suddenly burst from the direction of the perimeter. No sooner had we both picked up our rifles, a blast smashed the door… nearly vaporized from the frame and several shadows powered through the smoke and dust.

“Cubano motherfuckers!” she whelped as a crimson patch burst against the wall behind her against cinder-blocks. Concrete shrapnel shards splattered across the room exploding from pockmarks of rounds from AKs.

Remarkably, Kuka fired a burst, holding her weapon’s butt somehow wedged with the bad arm against her side… “like in a fuckin’ Rambo movie!” I thought.

Even though she didn’t hit anything but the ground in front of her, she certainly cleared the door.

I fired back without thought. I was protecting Kuka and not fighting for a cause. I didn’t freeze this time. I saw their faces when they entered and fired into their chests. These raiders were men, trained soldiers, real soldiers, and not children like those I stepped over back in the cypress swamp. They weren’t supposed to be in Costa Rica. I had no time to think about that as I helped Kuka sling her good arm with a forty-five in her hand over my shoulder. I took the forty-five from her just as a grenade was tossed into the hut from out the left side.

"Go!” She commanded. Only a brief fraction of a second left room for the decision to be made: stay inside, where we were sure to be blown up, or dash out the door firing, hoping anyone there lying in wait would take cover. I braced myself against her and we leaned towards the door. I emptied the clip of the forty-five in the direction the grenade came from out the door... a sting, a searing stab, punched my gut.

Several of our own joined us as we hobbled to the cover of the bush. I tore off her skivvy shirt and packed an improvised field dressing on the wound on the right side of her chest above the breast. I didn’t know what to do with the exit wound. Nothing hit an artery but, judging from the mangled back, where pieces of bone, blood and tissue gaped from the back of her shoulder, the wound was serious enough to demand immediate attention. I wasn’t a medic but I knew enough. My mind was on one thing and one task alone. Her scapula was smashed, the bleeding had to be stopped... someone pulled me off her screaming, “lay down... you’ve been hit!” and then my vision faded into darkness.

The Cubans were gone. It was a hit on Kuka’s staff; retaliation for last week’s ambush on the patrol. The Cubans didn’t follow up on the attack and the perimeter was secured. I wasn’t aware of all this. I was oblivious to anything that was going on about me. Noises first began to filter into my consciousness. Then I faded out. I was digging in the soft soil... a grave? The Cubans I’d killed joined me after cutting off an ear from each corpse. It was a vision... a fearful vision of Mayan Priests in Jaguar masks presiding over a sacrifice... my offering. The priest raised an obsidian knife and cut open my bowels, pulled out my intestines and bathed them in perfume. It was okay with me. Everything was okay with me.  I loved the priest and bid farewell to the Cuban soldiers and Kuka. Where was Kuka? Anywhere else the Cubans and I would have been left to rot in the jungle but Mayan priests took reverence for the fallen and the tribe’s women buried them proper. Where was Kuka!

The field surgeon and medics had taken over working on Kuka and me all through that night. She was knocked out the whole next day and recovered quickly. However, it was a week before I came to. I came to just as I was asking the Mayan priest for Kuka... the priest became a field surgeon.

“Kuka’s okay,” the priest answered.

“Your fever broke last night,” the surgeon was saying.

“Fever?”

“You have been asking about Kuka,” the surgeon assured. “She is recovering well.”

Kuka entered my sight and put a hand on my forehead, “You’ve been gone for a week.”

“Gone?”

“You begged us to bury the Cubans.”

The old Bird Dog appeared two days later after I began recovering. He was a phantom of sorts and appeared and disappeared almost always alone. He sat on the bench inside of the dinged-up hut next to where I was laying. I sat up when I realized he was there.

“Well, Max, it looks like you lived through it.”

“What do you know about the attack?”

“They are already singing about Kuka’s American lover who saved her, guns a blazin’ like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Romance and machismo are a heady combination here.”

“Shit, I didn’t save her.”

“I know. Legends don’t give a crap about that. If it makes for a good story, it gets sung,” he laughed, “over and over, ad infinitum.”

He put an arm over my shoulder and, when he did so, the weight of it testified to the muscular bulk of it. “So, Max, it’s time for you to go.”

“But Kuka…”

“Kuka, Kuka, Kuka,” The old man moaned, “You know, you were going to be taken out because of your previous performance. The truth is that you barely proved yourself and there are those here that trust performance over legends. They struggle for their homeland and they have no home to go to until they win… thoroughly wipe out the enemy. The Sandinistas wish to do the same to the Miskitos.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Kuka’s the one that called for me to scoop you up while you were out of it.”

“I don’t get it,” my mind stilled fogged, protested, “I’m just starting to get the hang of things around here. She needs me.”

“Max, she needs you all right. She needs you to leave. Kuka will be killed if you don’t go.”

“What? Why?”

“It doesn’t matter why when you’re both rotting in shallow graves. Look, I’ve been doing this since before you were born. Once you’re in it as deep as we are the exit door is locked,” he said, showing no emotion.

“And Kuka would be killed too?”

“Yes,” he sighed. “I have the job if you don’t get on the plane that waits for you.” I detected a sadness in the old man’s voice.

I was curious then, more curious than ever about the man. I asked, “How did you get the name Bird Dog?”

“It’s an OSS code name that stuck.”

“Shit OSS? That’s Dubya-Dubya Two. You’ve been at this awhile then.”

“Before then and long enough to know that you aren’t cut out for this, Max. You’ve had your baptism in blood and now you think you are one of us. But, my boy, you ought best get out while you can.”

“But Kuka…”

“Yeh, Max, I haven’t seen it before. She cares for you.”

He wasn’t done yet so I let him finish.

“That’s why she ordered your transport out of here at her own peril. C’mon now, pack your sack and let’s get goin’. The plane leaves in one hour and we have a hike to get to the strip.”

She was sitting up on a chair at the table. To immobilize it, her torso and shoulder was wrapped up with her right arm secured in a sling over one arm, across, and under the left arm, flattening her breasts. She was pale and feverish with sweat beading on her face. Three NCO’s stood at the table when I entered the hut to gather my stuff. I wasn’t expecting her to be awake and doing business.

“I need to go now…”

She lifted her free hand as if to say; “I know. I’m busy.”

I packed up my gear and bid her adieu, “Good bye, Kuka.”

One of the lieutenants glowered, nodding as I left the room. I understood with that nod from the officer meant. I was supposed to be dead by now… still alive and always the foreigner… I was a stranger in a strange land. She said nothing but held up her hand. Her eyes met mine but she wasn’t there with me at all. The fire was gone from them as though she was a prisoner of war awaiting her own execution. She dared not speak but set her face on the maps and plans on the operating table we had been laid out on for surgery the week before. The last time I held her in my arms was when I carried her out of the hut and set her down in the bush. I wouldn’t hear from her again.

A week after I left, Kuka was taking care of urgent business with ARDE in Tegucigalpa when an assassin came up from behind and put a bullet in the nape of her beautiful neck. It was as painless as it was meaningless... symbolic of the bloodshed of those jungles. A Mayan priest in a jaguar mask greeted her at the top of a temple with an obsidian knife and she went home, an offering to the sleeping gods.

The Piper Cub took me to San Jose where the Bird Man parted company with me. From there the Chilean pilot smoked Cuban cigars, talked and sang all the way to Ilopango Airport in San Salvador. I was in a morphine haze and listened to the pilot’s voice as though it was the background noise, the rhythm behind the music, of the engine’s musical purr.

“Where are you going from El Salvador, Senor?”

“Santa Barbara, I think.”

“Chile! Oh yes, the Bio Bio. I had a cousin from…”

“There is no river in Santa Barbara…. Santa Barbara, California,” I corrected.

“Ah-ha! California,” the pilot laughed, “Beautiful city, I have a cousin there too.”

I smiled thinking about how damned near everyone down here was a cousin to anyone damned near anywhere in Nuevo Hispaniola no matter where the borders were drawn.

The Cub made another connection where I hitched a ride on a Southern Transport C-123 to Miami. It was loaded with bales of coffee and a handful of rough looking characters from Medellin Columbia. From Miami, I caught a Greyhound back to Santa Barbara. I was burnt out and had no idea where else to go. Trains and Greyhounds were my favorite ways to travel. I looked forward to the long-assed ride… to getting a chance to sit and not think. I call it not thinking, thinking… just to sit and digest what had happened since last New Year’s Eve.

My gut wound, since the field surgeon’s efforts, was becoming infected. A gnawing ache grew from under the stitches left by the emergency operation to clean the shit from my stomach. An eight-inch slit down my abdomen was covered with a large bloody gauze patch wrapped around my torso. The passenger next to me most of the way was an old man that stank to high heavens. However, his soothing tone almost made up for his sulfuric presence.

“My name’s Lucky, some call me Lucky because they think of Lucy’s a girly name,” he finally introduced himself after a couple of hours. “Where you goin’, young feller?”

“Santa Barbara,” I offered …vaguely remembering a Lucky a Luciano or something… like recalling a dream…  the memory of it slipped… de je vu.  Even though I usually regretted starting any bus or train conversations at all, I let Lucky talk. Maybe just to jog my memory, “Do I know you?”

“Maybe you do… maybe you don’t. We meet all kinds of people on a bus. Sometimes they make it; a bus ride…  a ride to, or from, … to and fro, you know, for the hell of it.”

From the beginning, I thought the old man’s cryptic conversation unique enough to hold my interest though I don’t know what was so damned unique about it.

“I love the bus almost as much as a train,” I said, thinking I’d interrupted something profound that the old man was about to say.

“Yes, excuse my pessimism,” Lucky snarked, “It could be a ride to heaven too.”

A tinge of fear entered my heart. Yes, right in the chest so I asked, “What do you mean? You think this bus is going to crash?”

“No,” said Lucky, “But, where you’re goin’, you will.”

I got up to use the toilet. It emitted a sour stench from the long ride beyond Dallas. My nausea at the aroma of the can was enhanced by the syringe and a supply of morphine to hold me over until I could check into the VA Hospital in LA. I anticipated interviews with the police there about where the wound came from and how it got treated. I thought, “What the hell, I’ll just tell them the truth. They won’t believe any of it and, to tell the truth… uh, what can they say about that?”

When I returned to my seat, the old man was gone. The bus hadn’t stopped to let anyone off.