Denis Johnson - The Stars at Noon

But my Englishman looked even worse, as if his foot were being crushed and he mustn’t scream, when the redheaded man claimed to have an arrangement to sell cordobas across the border for Costa Rican centimes and I said, “Oh, really.”

“We’re all agreed, Nicaraguan money stinks,” the consultant explained. “I wouldn’t have bought any in the first place if I didn't have someone to sell it back to.”

“You can almost always sell it to some black-market person or other right at the border,” I said, “the Costa Rican side. Anyone can.”

“I can get you a better rate.”

“I’m surprised to hear that. But somehow not totally astounded.”

“Forgive me for changing the subject,” the Englishman said, his fingers squeaking on his wet glass, “but the elections rather interest me. I wonder if there’s a newspaper. .”

From the consultant he got the same look of naked incomprehension he might have by announcing a passion for people’s unwashed feet. “I guarantee you this,” the consultant said finally, “if we kept stalling on elections like these guys — in the U.S., I’m saying — somebody would overthrow the government.”

With palpable relief the Englishman started arguing otherwise. Latins were accused all too easily of procrastination, it wasn’t quite fair, et cetera. Certainly, the elections were slow in coming by current U.S. standards. “But think back to your own revolutionary era — between your insurrection and the election of this fellow George Washington, didn’t nearly seventeen years elapse? At a comparable stage in the birth of a new Nicaragua, the Sandinistas actually turn out to be quicker off the mark by nearly a dozen years, don’t they?” He wiped his mouth unnecessarily with his napkin and transmitted various subtle pre-flight signals. “Why don’t you and I take a stroll around town,” he said to me, “maybe we can locate a paper. It’s got quite a Spanish feeling, the town, don’t you think so?” he said to the consultant, moving back in his chair.

“Give me a minute,” I told him, “I’m thirsty.”

I ordered something cool.

“Ah.” He sat there with his chair pushed away from the table, and crossed his arms.

Something seemed to turn over a bad card in the consultant’s head. “Not that free enterprise is much better,” he said out of nowhere. “Down here. .”

He looked at the Englishman and said, “Whores, is what they all are.”

“I —beg your pardon?”

“I mean they’ll all do it for enough money, any of these women, Costa Rican, Venezuelan, I’m not kidding in the least. Grab one coming out of church sometime and try it. You’ll see what I mean. They’re all lonely as widows, that’s the real truth about them, they haven’t had a man’s hand on their thigh since Jesus was in diapers. Sure, I’ve been around the Key Largo, and I couldn’t tell what part any of those people were supposed to be playing, the men or the women. In the end I’d say, if you’ve got some money to lose, put it down on a horse race or something and go back to the hotel and play with yourself.” We laughed at this and he concluded with a remark that seemed to float before us, “The area is full of amateurs.”

Then he rode right over it: “So who’s this minister down there you were saying? You don't mean a preacher? You said, yeah, a vice-minister or something? What was his name?”

“I have a terrible head for names.”

“He was in the tourist department, or what exactly did you say?”

“You are, I mean, unbelievably obvious.”

“I could probably get you in touch with my bankers. You don’t sell your money to the characters right at the checkpoint there. You go all the way into La Cruz — you know it? Yeah? I think they call it that because it's nothing but a crossroads and four petrol joints. Two of them are closed anyway.”

“I was through La Cruz on my way up here.”

“I’m going for a paper,” the Englishman said.

“Look, okay, I’ll set this thing up, I think I can do it.”

“Nobody asked you,” I said.

“If you want, I mean.”

“I really have to be going now I think,” the Englishman said.

He’d committed himself, he got up from his chair. But I didn’t leave with him: because I felt he was pushing me, he didn’t trust me to keep out of trouble — because he refused to trust me.

The consultant watched him go without saying goodbye. “He’s not an American. He’s definitely British, right?”

“You tell me.”

“Yeah. But who is he to you, exactly? How long have you known him?” He laughed like a kid. “Well, listen to me!”

“I don’t mind listening but I don’t feel like answering, you know?”

“Is his passport for real?”

It’s a mystery how he managed to beat me over the head with these questions and at the same time make me laugh at the very fact he thought he could get away with asking them . .

I told him I'd been with Eyes for Peace. Helping to maintain the integrity of borders in a troubled universe . . He was contemptuous. The Sandinistas had no future: “Except for the intense involvement of the Castro government and the indirect — in some cases direct — involvement of the Russians, the Central American proletarian movement isn’t a permanent consideration.”

Oh no no no. Not at all. In fact, they’ll all be gone in a minute or two . . “Only rum is forever,” I agreed.

“In the long stretch the movement’s a volley in the Ping-Pong game between the rich and the poor down here, it might result in certain corrections, in many respects it won’t amount to anything, possibly we’ll live to see it pass on, die out, and sometime in the future flare up again. Unless Castro extends his influence and deepens the socialist entrenchment in the politics of the region. In that case we’re not talking about proletarian agitation with a constructive outcome. We’re talking about trained-up Cubes walking all over the toys down here. If Castro has his way too much longer, this whole area's going to be unbalanced for centuries, and our own country maybe gets mixed up in a war.”

He went in a giant dizzy leap from the general to the personal. “What were you doing back when Vietnam was showing every weeknight on the tube? Demonstrating against it on a college campus?”

“I’m not that old. How old do you think I am?”

“I think you’re about thirty and I know you’re not that old, excuse me. I watched that war on TV every night because my older brother Rick lived in Vietnam at the time, in the jungle, out of a pack — he was a U.S. Marine. He lived there — on the front lines of the same conflict that’s going on down here. And he died there.”

False sincerity always makes me sweat with embarrassment. In what he was saying there were far too many burned-out words. But he was compelling, his Adam’s apple plunged and leapt, the tendons of his throat jerked taut as he hoisted these drowned ideas above the froth. .

“I have a younger brother, Charlie, who’s still alive. I don't want Charlie to spend his last few minutes spitting blood and trying to stay on his feet by hanging on to that tree out there by that wall, or some other tree just like it somewhere else in Nicaragua. I have a right to care how it all turns out down here. It relates to my family. I’m really fucking pissed at anybody who fucks with the arrangement.

“How do you know this British guy? I can tell you don’t go back too far. I can see it in the body language. How do you know he is who he says? How do you know he’s not a — whatever, you fill that one in, somebody you hadn’t counted on, could be anybody, is the point I’m making. And, hey —I know how exotic it can feel down here, every connection is ten volts higher — when I meet a dark-eyed lady down here I don’t ask for references. So you didn’t ask for references. That’s not a crime, that’s a mistake. And mistakes can be corrected.”