Denis Johnson - The Stars at Noon

Women idling on one leg, like storks, with the sole of one bare foot clamped against the other knee, stood looking up and down the highway . . As in every region, rivers with the names of animals, streets with human names, places eternally irrelevant, landscapes as innocent as water in cupped hands. Billboards swung by trying to tell us things — No Pasaran — FSLN — red hammer and scythe over the Communist Party’s initials, MAP-ML–CASTROL GX — ALTO — and on the poles and walls were posted various exhortations and explanations (“There are no replacements because everything must go to the defense of our country”—et cetera, I forget the rest) . . Desperate surviving made comprehensible through torn slogans . .

Pulling to the side of the road we would survey the scene and check out the roadside pedestrians, looking for the face that might have half a brain behind it. And then we’d ask our questions. I’ve experienced starvation and thirst, but never the drained, aching need for information, anything, the smallest piece of data — left or right? near or far? open or closed? is there a garage? a constabulary outpost? a meal? a drink? what time? how far? — that powered our movement along the edges of those towns. I got so that I trusted most the mean-looking jungle farmers trudging along by the road with their straw cowboy hats and machetes and hard brown flat bare feet like shapeless boots; but they were just as dumb as the others, completely in the dark as to what I was asking but not in the least reluctant to dish up an answer, giving me directions to places that will never exist, in colloquial phrases complicated by something they always seemed to be chewing, or sucking, and contradicted by their sign-language: a mix of rabbit-punches-in-reverse and caresses enacted on the air.

But don’t think we covered a lot of ground on this trip — the entire ride happened on a hundred-mile stretch of the Panamerican Highway and some of its tributaries. The reason it took five days was that we didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know whether the border represented escape or danger, and so we dawdled in towns like Masaya and Rivas — the latter only twenty miles or so from the border — hoping to learn how to get across.

Rivas was set up just like Masaya and most other towns in Central America. . The streets emanated from a courtyard and a tall cathedral raised by Indians under the lash of zealous padres many centuries ago, before the Indians acquired uniforms and automatic rifles. The farther you got from the central church square, the more haphazard grew the system of Moorish lanes, until you were likely to wander the rest of your life among high walls spangled with bullet-holes if you didn’t have a map.

But Rivas’s geography was simple enough. On one side of town was the highway, on the other a couple of red earthen roads that toddled a tiny distance toward the horizon before being pounced on and eaten by the jungle.

Except for the fact that I was born without any sense, I might have lived there in Rivas forever. In the first place, we found a motel in that town that accepted my cordobas — a nice motel, with toilet paper, soap, showers, small blue electric fan on the bedside table, a bar full of rum and a restaurant that served chicken and fresh cow’s milk. On top of that, there weren’t any police or Department of Defense people around. Soldiers staffed the local FSLN headquarters, but they weren’t after anyone, they only liked to sit out front under the crimson-over-black slashes of the FSLN banner waiting for a capitalist revolution. The rural south of Nicaragua, if you asked me, was altogether genteel.

We woke up in the morning with the blue fan cooling us — because now the Englishman and I slept together always, trying not to touch because of the heat, but wanting to be near — and I thought to hell with it, this is absolutely the last motel, the last wadded Kleenex, the final ashtray. Let’s just die here.

“Are we in a hurry?” I wondered.

“There you have me. It just may be we’re not in anything at all — if you get my meaning, because I’m not sure I do myself.”

“No. I get it. I agree.”

“And so then, cheers,” he said.

He wasn’t happy. But couldn’t I change all that with love? It was one of those moments again. . Nothing so sad as the heart that cries, I can change, I can change! But we made love, and he went back to sleep. . The Englishman did his sleeping in the mornings. And he was always able to sleep soundly in a moving car.

But he didn’t sleep at night, because he didn’t drink enough rum.

I did. I drank a little in the mornings — to wake up — and I drank a lot in the evenings — to sleep.

Oh well. . Thus anointed I kind of coped. My poor Englishman drank only grief and fear, and he was drunk enough on that.

But he managed to rest a little every morning, and he was cheerful when he came out three hours later. It was good he was in shape to be reasonably sociable and gracious, because I wasn't alone.

I’d gone for a walk, and when I’d come back into the restaurant I’d found an American sitting there all by himself, a young redheaded man wearing round rimless sunglasses; he had a cute little red beard, too.

He invited me to watch him eat breakfast — how could I have turned down a chance to observe? — and told me all about the wonderful places he’d experienced on this, his first trip to Central America for the consulting firm by whom he seemed to want people to think he was employed.

He was eating a beans-eggs-rice collision called gallo pinto —a Costa Rican dish, the first instance I'd seen of it here in Nicaragua.

From the sound of things, a whole extended family was building an ark out in the kitchen, but no one came out to wait tables. We were the only customers — it was a dead place because it required money, and you can bet nobody in that town had any.

“Was that ABC Consultants,” I asked him, “or did you say XYZ?”

He just laughed.

What did I know, I could never keep track of all the initials stamped on the documents and stencilled all over the buildings — P.S., Partido Socialista, MAP-ML, don't ask me what that stands for, FSLN, don’t forget OIJ, and in the B arricada headlines for the last three days running: CIA.

He told me, “Look, these businesses — you should have seen the place we stayed at in San José. There was a swimming pool outdoors and another one indoors, there was a gambling joint right in the building — a casino, you know, with all that green felt. The outdoor pool was just for decoration. You can't swim in that cool weather, it’s in the mountains. They have all kinds of money, these outfits we consult for; I mean the budget can be — you think these countries are poor, but it’s only the poor people who are poor. . We stayed at a mansion in the hills about a month ago, really an unbelievable spot, all we were doing was putting together an assessment on this one outfit, the owner put us up. The company president.”

He had a sad, worried look about his face as if he thought he’d be misinterpreted or disbelieved.

“And what was the full name of this company you work for?”

“We’re out of Connecticut, consulting is a weird game — to spell it out, businesses and industries hire us because they don’t trust their own interpretations of their own data, and frankly, it’s ridiculous what they pay. It’s just silly. I’m not kidding, like right now I’m working on a report and if I need something I snap my fingers, like if I needed to hire you to consult for me, if there was something I needed you to do for me, I could drop an envelope in your lap with, what? — God, I don’t know — it’d be easy as hell to scrape up about a thousand. A thousand U.S. I’ll tell you, they don’t let me sling around that kind of money up in Hartford. I don’t stay with any company presidents up there, either.”