The Death of a Journalist
(Page 8 of 11)
September/October 1996
Lynda Schuster, Granta (www.granta.com)
At Lilia's house, I pounded on the door, softly sobbing. Workers glanced at me curiously as they passed on the street. Finally Lilia answered, and I fell into her arms; from then on, she was in charge. She drove us back to my apartment and within a couple of hours had found a Mexican air charter company to fly me to Honduras. With some difficulty, she procured the landing rights for Tegucigalpa and Los Angeles, where Dial's children lived and where I wanted to bury him. By now the flat was filled with journalists come to help: Eloy Aguilar brought dollars to pay for the aircraft's refueling; Chris Dickey of the Washington Post offered himself as an escort on the journey; his wife, Carole, followed me around with a spoonful of scrambled egg, murmuring, 'Eat, you must eat.' I was in the bedroom trying to find black clothes when Lilia yelled that it was time to go. The reason for the haste, besides the three o'clock deadline, was that Tegucigalpa's airport had no runway lights: we needed to be airborne, on our way to Los Angeles with the body, before dusk. I made a last call to the U.S. embassy in Honduras to request that the body be waiting for me on the tarmac, and that the press be kept away.
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There was less room inside the jet than I had imagined. Chris and I sat on opposite sides of the aisle, facing the cockpit; nevertheless, our arms were practically touching. I'm usually uneasy about flying, especially on small planes, but this time I didn't even bother to fasten my seat belt. It was, I think, the only time in my life I have understood the desire for suicide. To obliterate memory, to slip free of the relentless, crushing pain, to feel nothing, all seemed irresistibly alluring. I couldn't even watch the stewardess serve Chris a beer without recalling the way Dial gripped his glass with both hands, thumbs tapping a little tattoo on the sides. So I secretly welcomed every bump, every sudden, stomach-tightening dip the airplane took.
My longing for oblivion intensified as we approached Tegucigalpa. The plane passed over the familiar, squat houses clustered on the hills, banked hard, and landed on a runway flanked by lines of drying laundry. It was well before three, but the place seemed deserted: no hearse, no body, only shimmery undulations of heat rising from the tarmac. Then I noticed the phalanx of television cameramen on the airport's observation deck, the deck where, on a similar afternoon a few months before, Dial had caught a strand of my hair between his fingers and kissed it, murmuring, 'See how it glows golden-red in this light.' I looked away.
Al Shuster, the Los Angeles Times' foreign editor, was suddenly walking toward us across the tarmac. He looked ghastly: He too had been up all night. The U.S. ambassador to Honduras was with him. The ambassador and I were not on good terms; he had flown to New York to complain to my editors about the Contra story, not because he disputed its accuracy but because he believed that it should never have been written. He explained the hearse's absence: To enter California, Dial's body had to be in a hermetically sealed casket. Such a box wouldn't fit in our little plane, so we would have to spend the night here and take a commercial flight to Los Angeles the next day.
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