Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [77]
I was desperate to speak to her, but that look stopped me cold. She scared me so badly that I remember thinking that I didn’t want to fall in love with anyone, ever, not if that’s what it could do to you.
2. Death in Bolivia
When I was twenty I dropped out of college and got a minimum-wage job delivering office furniture. At the time I was living in the Northeast, in a cold, dirty, technically bankrupt city where dozens of random murders occurred every night, but my main concern was finding work of the sort that would allow me to stop thinking for a while, which seemed advisable after a near-sleepless sophomore year in which I fell prey to certain compulsive behaviors, such as trying to read everything Ezra Pound had ever written. So I got a job with a discount-office furniture company, found a cheap apartment in a high-crime neighborhood, and started taking the bus to work every morning. It was a lonely, orbitless time in my life; I had few friends, and was too bottled-up to talk to women, but delivering furniture had its satisfactions. You could double-park all over the city, for one thing, and I liked lifting stuff and riding around in the truck, and the other guys in delivery didn’t mind me too much. I think they knew instinctively what they had on their hands, a stressed-out white boy whose life had jumped the tracks, but my troubles must have looked pretty puny to them. My first day they sent me out with Clifton Weems, an older black man with a barrel chest and a mangled, arthritic way of walking. After a couple of hours of brooding he turned to me and said: “Hey kid, you know what?”
“No, what.”
“You turn sideways when your woman’s shooting at you, you cut her target more’n half.”
They thought I was funny with my goofy formal manners, the way I automatically called the older guys “sir” until they yelled at me to stop. During the day I hauled furniture and took a fair amount of guff; at night I listened to gunfire barking up and down my street and had conflicted, homesick dreams about the South. I’d come to this place of my own free will, following a perfectly honorable subset of the Southern tradition by going north for school, but somehow I’d managed to make an exile of myself. “Good luck,” my father said when I called to say I was dropping out. By then he was president of a bigger, even more prestigious college. “Come see us when you feel like getting serious again.”
Life became very basic. Work, food, sleep—as long as I rolled my body out of bed in the morning, everything else just seemed to happen by itself. One day I was out on deliveries with Luis Batista and Clifton, sitting in the peon’s middle seat while Luis surfed the truck through six lanes of traffic. Clifton relaxed on my other side with his arm out the window, humming into the early spring breeze. We heard something shift in the back of the truck, then glass shattering. Clifton reached over and turned up the radio.
“Hey,” he said, leaning back in his seat, “you know Gustavo’s the guy who killed Che Guevara?”
“You’re kidding,” I said, instantly reeling with nostalgia; it was like opening an old steamer trunk full of mothballs. “You mean Che Guevara the guerrilla?”
“No, man, Che Guevara the nightclub singer. Who the hell do you think I mean?”
“I—”
“You’re surprised I know about Che? You think I’m just an ignorant nee-gro, doncha boy.”
“No Clifton, I just—”
“Shit, man, I knew Malcolm X. I used to hang with Adam Clayton Powell Jr. all the time, you dig? I was right in the middle of all that sixties shit.”
I couldn’t tell if Clifton was razzing me or really mad, so I shut up. Luis glanced at us and casually shifted gears.
“Yeah,” he said, “I heard that about Gus.”
“You think it’s true?” Clifton asked.
“Sure, why not. He was in the army down there. He’s a pretty tough guy.”
“You ever ask him?”
“Fuck no man, you don’t talk about stuff that happened down there.