"That, and the family massacre."
"Remind me of that."
I knew this was a set-up: Bonnie hadn‘t forgotten a single syllable of
the story I had told her within half an hour of us meeting for the first time.
Feeling as if I was goose-stepping through a minefield, I retold my tale…
Our crew had seen a death squad, dressed in regulation army fatigues,
leaving the scene of a family slaughter just as we rounded the corner of the
same street. We waited in our car, because death squads often circled the
block to discourage witnesses from coming forward. Five nervous minutes
passed before we entered the house. O ur producer took slides of the
carnage while our reporter tried to avoid staring by taking notes he would
never need. Leblanc shot his pictures while I meticulously recorded the
sound of flies buzzing around the still-pooling blood.
From the gore, and listening with every fibre of my being for the
sound of a troop truck, I began shaking so much that my feet were literally
bouncing off the plank floor. It didn't help that I was sure LeBlanc would
soon be saying something professionally caustic and personally
humiliating to me, because the vibrations had to be interfering with his
work. But no one made a sound other than to gag.
Finally, LeBlanc declared that he could do no more, and as a unit, we
moved toward the door and fresh air. Max and Brian passed ahead of us,
while LeBlanc stopped to draw the curtains closed. "Won't rot so fast," he
said, staring at the leading edge of shade as it moved across the stack of
corpses. Then loudly, "We need some fuckin' witnesses," he said, as we
exited the house.
Of course, we found no one willing to either speak to us on camera or
off, nor would our own driver divulge how he knew the massacre was
taking place, when he called us at 04:00hrs.
We called it a wrap and piled back into the car, which is when I
noticed that the smell of violets, blood thick and sickly sweet in the humid
house, had invaded our clothing. Manny had told me this would happen,
and I would have to throw them away. During the drive back, I avoided
revisiting the scene by thinking about where I would hide the cost of a
new shirt and pants in my expenses.
It was breakfast time when we got back to the hotel, so the lobby was
full of journalists planning their day. They knew by our expressions and
aroma that we had recently stood close to death, but they let us pa ss. After
we had showered and gathered again to eat, representatives from each
network, in turn, sauntered over to our table to ask us where and how
many.
