But now — now they were camped somewhere on the Nicaraguan side of the border, listening to monkeys howl and getting their asses chewed off by mosquitoes, ticks, chiggers, leeches, and everything else that crawled, swam, or flew. It began to rain. The rain, Robert Jordan understood, would be bad for his hair. He finished a granola bar, exchanged curses with the old man, and crawled into his one-man pup tent. “You take the first watch,” he growled through the wall of undulating nylon in his very bad Spanish. “And the second and third too. Come to think of it, why don’t you just wake me at noon.”
The camp was about what you’d expect, Robert Jordan thought, setting his pack down in a clump of poisonous-looking plants. He and the old man had hiked three days through the bug factory to get here, and what was it but a few banana-leaf hovels with cigarette cartons piled outside. Robert Jordan was thinking he’d be happy to blow this dump and get back to the drugs, whores, semi-clean linen, and tequila añejo of Mexico City and points north, when a one-eyed man emerged from the near hut, his face split with a homicidal grin. His name was Ruperto, and he wore the combat boots, baggy camouflage pants, and black T-shirt that even professors in Des Moines favored these days, and he carried a Kalashnikov assault rifle in his right hand. “Qué tal, old man,” he said, addressing Bayardo, and then, turning to Robert Jordan and speaking in English: “And this is the gringo with the big boom-boom. Nice hair, gringo.”
Robert Jordan traded insults with him, ending with the usual malediction about shit, milk, and mothers, and then pinched his voice through his nose in the nagging whine he’d perfected when he was four. “And so where’s all the blow that’s supposed to be dropping from the trees out here, huh? And what about maybe a hit of rum or some tortillas or something? I mean I been tramping through this craphole for three days and no sooner do I throw my pack down than I get some wiseass comment about my hair I could’ve stayed in Montana and got from some redneck cowboy. Hey,” he shouted, leaning into Ruperto’s face and twisting his voice till it broke in a snarl, “screw you too, Jack.”
Ruperto said nothing. Just smiled his homicidal smile, one eye gleaming, the other dead in a crater of pale, scarred flesh. By now the others had begun to gather — Robert Jordan counted six of them, flat-faced Indians all — and a light rain was sizzling through the trees. “You want hospitality,” Ruperto said finally, “go to Howard Johnson’s.” He spat at his feet. “Your mother,” he said, and then turned to shout over his shoulder. “Muchacha!”
Everyone stopped dead to watch as the girl in skintight fatigues stepped out of the hut, shadowed by an older woman with the build of a linebacker. “Sí?” the girl said in a voice that inflamed Robert Jordan’s groin.
Ruperto spat again. “Bring the gringo some chow.”
“The Cup of Soup?” the girl asked.
Ruperto winked his mad wet eye at Robert Jordan. “Sí,” he grunted, “the Cup of Soup.”
As he lay in his pup tent that night, his limbs entwined in the girl’s — her name was either Vidaluz or Concepción, he couldn’t remember which — Robert Jordan thought of his grandmother. She was probably the only person in the world he didn’t hate. His mother was a real zero, white wine and pasta salad all the way, and his friends back in Missoula were a bunch of dinks who thought Bryan Adams was god. His father was dead. When the old man had sucked on the barrel of his 30.06 Winchester, Robert was fourteen and angry. His role model was Sid Vicious and he was into glue and Bali Hai. It was his grandmother — she was Andalusian, really cool, a guerrilla who’d bailed out of Spain in the ‘30s, pregnant with Robert Jordan II — who listened patiently to his gripes about the school jocks and his wimpy teachers and bought him tire chains to wrap around his boots. They sat for hours together listening to the Clash’s Sandinista album, and when he blew off the tips of his pinky and ring fingers with a homemade bomb, it was she who gave him his first pair of studded black leather gloves. And what was best about her — what he liked more than anything else — was that she didn’t take any shit from anybody. Once, when her third husband, Joe Thunderbucket, called her “Little Rabbit,” she broke his arm in three places. It was she more than anyone who’d got him into all this revolution business — she and the Clash, anyway. And of course he’d always loved dynamite.
He lay there, slapping mosquitoes, his flesh sticky against the girl’s, wondering what his grandmother was doing now, in the dark of this night before his first offensive. It was a Tuesday, wasn’t it? That was bingo night on the reservation, and she usually went with Joe’s sister Leona to punch numbers and drink boilermakers at the bingo hall. He pictured her in her black mantilla, her eyes cold and hard and lit maybe a little with the bourbon and Coors, and then he woke up Concepción or Vidaluz and gave it to her again, all his anger focused in the sharp tingling stab and rhythm of it.
It was still dark when the old man woke him. “Son of a bitch,” Robert Jordan muttered. His hair was crushed like a Christmas-tree ornament and there was a sour metallic taste in his mouth. He didn’t mind fighting for the revolution, but this was ridiculous — it wasn’t even light yet. “Ándale,” the old man said, “the Cup of Soup awaits.”
“Are you out of your gourd, or what?” Robert Jordan twisted free of the girl and checked his watch. “It’s four-fifteen, for christ’s sake.”
The old man shrugged. “Qué puta es la guerra,” he said. “War’s a bitch.”
And then the smell of woodsmoke and frijoles came to him over Ruperto’s high crazed whinny of a laugh, the girl was up and out of his sleeping bag, strolling heavy-haunched and naked across the clearing, and Robert Jordan was reaching for his hair gel.
After breakfast — two granola bars and a tin plate of frijoles that looked and tasted like humus — Robert Jordan vomited in the weeds. He was going into battle for the first time and he didn’t have the stomach for it. This wasn’t like blowing the neighbors’ garbage cans at 2:00 A.M. or ganging up on some jerk in a frat jacket, this was the real thing. And what made it worse was that they couldn’t just slip up in the dark, attach the plastique with a timer, and let it rip when they were miles away — oh, no, that would be too simple. His instructions, carried by the old man from none other than Ruy Ruiz, the twenty-three-year-old Sandinista poet in charge of counter-counter-revolutionary activities and occasional sestinas, were to blow it by hand the moment the cargo plane landed. Over breakfast, Robert Jordan, angry though he was, had begun to understand that there was more at risk here than his coiffure. There could be shooting. Rocket fire. Grenades. A parade of images from all the schlock horror films he’d ever seen — exploding guts, melting faces, ragged ghouls risen from the grave — marched witheringly through his head and he vomited.
“Hey, gringo,” Ruperto called in English, “suck up your cojones and let’s hit it.”
Robert Jordan cursed him weakly with a barrage of shits and milks, but when he turned round to wipe the drool from his face he saw that Ruperto and his big woman had led a cluster of horses from the jungle. The big woman, her bare arms muscled like a weightlifter’s, approached him leading a gelding the size of a buffalo. “Here, gringo,” she breathed in her incongruously feminine voice, “mount up.”