Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (6 page)

The coffins attached to the wall are the pricier ones, Daisy Quinteros explained to me the next day, pointing to the far end of the funeral parlour shop.

‘The most expensive is 54,000 lempiras,’ she said, smiling – just
shy of $3,000. She was a good saleswoman and dressed appropriately for this sad room: motherly. Her hair was flecked with lines of white, and her trousers a smart grey that strained slightly around her hips. She wore a tastefully embroidered white shirt. The look clearly worked – she sold about three coffins a week, getting a commission from each. She once earned over a thousand US dollars in just one month, she said.

We were overlooking a street lined with funeral homes. The kerbs were filled with solemn cars, and beside them pine trees cast spots of shadow onto the baked pavement. One of the funeral-home owners had planted white, almost translucent, orchids in pots leading up one stairway; and all around the entrances and pavements were swept clean. Unlike other parts of the city, this area was free of graffiti. This street looked the richest of them all.

I had come here to see one more community impacted by the gun – to look at the art of the undertaker. In San Pedro you did not have to travel far to meet one.

Daisy beckoned me to sit down at the glass table in the centre of the showroom. Unusually around here, she had not lost anyone personally to the violence. That was not to say that it had not affected her; the suddenness, the shock of death coming unexpectedly, these were the things that still disconcerted her.

‘You can see it in the eyes of the family members,’ she said, and leaned forwards and touched my arm; 90 per cent of her clients had died violently.

‘It’s not all bad, though. The other day we buried this old man. He was 102. No one lives that long here.’ And she smiled a thin smile, because she knew this wasn’t what I was here to write about.

I asked her if earning a living from the violence bothered her.

‘Well, we’ve been here twenty-one years. We provide a service – we are a necessity. I don’t think our business is taking advantage at all. What would they do without us?’ She talked quickly and without pause, her moving hands covered in gold rings. ‘Everyone is going to need this service some day.’ She pushed a folder towards me. It was filled with images of coffins and garlands, plaques and headstones: a catalogue of death.

‘So – how would you like to be buried?’ I asked, and through the tinted windows you could see a chain of cars pass slowly outside. Another cortège. Another profit line reached.

‘I’d like a mid-range coffin. I’ve already bought it.’ She flicked though the laminated sheets and pointed to the one she had in mind. It was modest, and beside it was a list of measurements. People are getting fatter, she said, now you have coffins in XXXL. But they only come in a set height, so with a 6ft 2in. man like me they would have to do something to reduce my leg size. She didn’t elaborate, and I imagined someone shortening me with a hacksaw on a metal gurney.

Daisy seemed the happiest of all the people I had met so far in this city. Perhaps her job was meaningful in a way others were not. She still had contact with the living – even if they were suffused with grief. Other professionals I had met in San Pedro, like Orlin, had jobs that focused on the bodies delivered by the carnage. But Daisy dealt with those with breath still in their lungs. She had to be professional and sympathetic, not least to help families navigate their way through the layered choices presented to them in her laminated folders.

Later, I sat down with Daisy’s hidden counterparts: three embalmers who were brothers. They were in their fifties and had the same triangular and light-brown features. One had lived in the US for many years, and the good living had bloated him to twice the size of the others, but they all had the same eyes. Eyes that had seen things get steadily worse over the last five years: ‘Once we buried five people from the same family, all dead from guns,’ one said. ‘We prepare far too many teenagers for the ground,’ his brother added, and the three nodded in unison, like priests. ‘Many are just fourteen years old,’ the third said.

Their skill stretched back to their grandfather, ninety years before. It wasn’t like it was now, not back then. But theirs was the oldest outfit in Honduras, and they were still working hard; on average they prepared thirty bodies a week. The preparation took place out in the back, away from the light of the shop front.

They led the way. Past a line of neat walnut-coloured coffins,
through heavy swinging doors and out to a room that looked like a cheap operating theatre with a metal trolley at its centre. But here there were no machines to monitor life: just things to mimic it.

To the side was a kitchen tray bearing lines of mascara, rouge, lipstick in neat, ordered rows. In this Catholic country, the casket was often left open at the funeral. People wanted to file past to bid farewell; death was so often sudden and unexpected many things left unsaid had still to be said. So these brothers worked to make sure that the bodies looked peaceful. They erased the look of terror imprinted on lifeless faces. They brought back the illusion of serenity – peaceful resurrection with a make-up bag.

The eldest, Arnold Mena, a softly spoken man in a crisp white shirt and a lined jacket, was so good at what he did that it wasn’t an issue if you’d been shot in the face. ‘One shot, two shots, three shots – as long as the bullets don’t destroy the face – you can just stitch up the entry hole and cover it with foundation.’

‘Here they use smaller-calibre guns, and that doesn’t break the face so much,’ Arnold said. ‘But if the skull is totally destroyed . . . we have to use a small football to keep the shape.’

He explained how they use small prosthetic eyeballs too, but then they have to keep the eyelids closed and fix small pins to keep it all in place.

‘The real challenge,’ he told me, ‘was when we do not have a photo and do not know what the victim looked like. Then you have to be a little creative.’

They did other things here, too. In that stark room, beside a metal table with an ugly drainage hole for the dripping fluids, stood rows of formaldehyde from ‘The Embalmer’s Supply Company’. Twenty-four bottles cost $180 here, and that was enough for twelve bodies. ‘It will keep a body for a week, even without refrigeration,’ they said, even in this Central American heat.

Beside the bottles were small plastic bags. They put the intestines inside these. The bags were then sent elsewhere to be burned, and they packed your body with ‘pulverised hardening compound’ instead.

After a while I shook their hands, and they told me to stay, to come back soon, but I wanted to leave. I did not want to know
more about plastic bags filled with intestines or skulls filled with balloons. And the smell had long ago seeped into my clothes.

I had seen enough of death’s ugly business – I knew all too well what the gun could do. I just wanted to head back to the land of the living. Or, at the least I wanted to see a glimmer of hope in all of this sunless despair; so I left and sought instead to meet those who had managed to survive the gun’s barbed impact.

3. THE WOUNDED

South Africa – a bedside visit – the gun’s hidden impact revealed – a chat with a trauma surgeon – a blood-tinged night in a Johannesburg emergency ward – understanding how science feeds off the gun’s misery – a trip to the BBC to meet a paralysed correspondent

The boy – for he was hardly a man – lay there and watched me. His chest rose and fell, and my eyes drifted from his handsome face to his stomach, where he had been shot.

It was a hellish place to be hit. The bullet had ripped through his intestines, leaving a gaping and ragged hole. Five weeks had passed since the rushed horror and blood-soaked panic of that night, and the wound still refused to heal. The shit from his bowels was re-infecting the coarse edges of torn flesh, and you knew this because of the stench. The doctor spoke to him quietly in Afrikaans. He was eighteen, and there was a chance he would have to carry a colostomy bag for the rest of his life.

Three other South Africans lay in that room. Each shot. Another six lay in the room next door. These men, too, had been shot. And in the room further along another six lay. By this point you had stopped asking the doctor what had happened to them, whether they had been shot, because this was Cape Town, and this hospital was the main medical centre for one of the largest townships in South Africa. And as such it was home to one of the busiest trauma units in the world for gunshot wounds. Which was exactly why I had come here.

The room was empty except for their beds. No flowers, no cards. One man turned in his delirium and moaned; his back was sweated out, and his head was swollen. His breathing came in low gasps.

There were fifty-one beds in this trauma ward, and sometimes it got so bad the overflow spilled into the waxen, squeaking corridors. There were only four nurses on staff, and that was never enough. Last month, three men were brought in. All were in the back seat of a taxi when someone had fired a single high-velocity shot through the car. They were all hit by that same bullet – six legs to be treated, the round clean through. And that story alone filled up three beds just there.

The ones who lay here, sullen now the pain had passed, were young men. More would come. Tonight was a Friday night, and the weekend brought in the bodies. And I looked at the plastic bag that had been taped over the young man’s stomach and wrote something in my notebook that I later was unable to read.

What this scene reminded me, like the dramas played out in thousands of wards in slum-towns and war-zones the world over, was that the majority of people go on to survive being shot.

It works out as a hidden epidemic of pain and violence. In the US, up to 91,000 people were admitted to hospital with non-fatal gunshot injuries in 2011 compared to 8,583 who were killed in shootings.
¹
In the UK, it is estimated that 777 people were shot and survived in 2012,
²
compared with about 150 killed by gunshot the year before.
³

Such harm is hard to imagine, but consider this: about 35,000 American children and teens are said to have suffered non-fatal gun injuries in 2008 and 2009 – six times more than those shot and killed. This is the equivalent to 700 school classrooms of twenty-five students each: a number greater than that of US military personnel wounded in action in Iraq and double the number wounded in Afghanistan.
⁴

Admittedly, the exact numbers might be debatable, but what is
not challenged is that each injured child experienced the horror of a bullet crashing and crushing through them. Their tissues and bones and muscles were shredded in the bullet’s path. Their insides were horrifically displaced, as if kicked by a mule. Their bone fragments spun off and lacerated and pierced their young bodies.

Ultimately, these children’s chances of survival were dependent on a host of factors. The speed of their getting treatment was crucial – the so-called ‘golden hour’. In one study in the US, it was found the likelihood of you dying from a gunshot wound was about 25 per cent higher if you were shot 5 miles or more from a trauma centre, and you could not get there within the hour.
⁵

Also important was the wealth of the country in which they were shot. In the US for every person shot and killed, as many as nine survive. In developing countries the ratio is far smaller; more people who are shot will die – about one in three. The World Health Organization estimates that between 50 and 80 per cent of traumatic deaths in developing nations happen before people get to hospital, in part because, in many areas of the world, ambulances are almost non-existent.
⁶

Your chances of survival also come down to factors far beyond your control. The bullet’s weight, the speed at which it hits you, even the pull of the moon has an effect. It is all about the transference of kinetic energy in a chaotic way; variables that determine the final resting place of the bullet or how badly you are hurt are all unfathomable.

Other things matter. If you’re wearing clothing at the time, there’s a greater risk of damage and infection to your body.
⁷
If you are pregnant there are sometimes significant complications.
⁸
And, in the US at least, whether you have health insurance plays a factor. One study said uninsured trauma patients were more likely to die after being shot than those insured.
⁹

It is not just the immediate trauma of the wound that causes harm. Bullet fragments left in the body can also result in higher blood lead levels.
¹⁰
Or you can go on to develop related health concerns – as in the case of US President William McKinley, who earned the title of being the first reported case of traumatic gunshot pancreatitis.

All in all, getting shot is a terrible lottery. The odds might be in your favour, but it’s one bet never worth taking. Thank God, then, for doctors.