Denis Johnson - The Stars at Noon

Another absurd fuckhead.

“Do you know how crazy you are?” I asked him.

“I’ve put you in the picture. I’ve let you know what you can do by helping me with my report, and I’ve let it fall out where I stand, and that’s only fair, anyway that's what I think.”

“Are you clinically insane? You're really nuts, really. You never said anything about helping you. Your memory is all messed up.”

“Wait a minute, will you? We're just sitting around getting sloshed because it’s Sunday, okay?”

“It’s more like Tuesday or Wednesday. It isn’t Sunday.”

“Okay, you win. Now, do you want to change the subject? I’m bored.” He smiled one of the most charming smiles I’ve ever seen and called in Spanish across the room, “I’m ready to drink! Can we have some rum?”

We had a couple, and after a point I said, “To live outside the law you must be honest.”

“There you go.”

“You don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.”

“I’m faking it,” he admitted. “I’m not honest. I don’t live outside the law.”

It was torture to feel him doing trial-and-error on me, seeking the key word. “There isn’t any key word,” I said out loud. “All your words are burned out.”

“I know that,” he said. He was a goner. Giant blue circles under his eyes — with that hair of his, his head, wouldn’t you know, was red, white, and blue . . He looked across at me from the other side of a cloud. “Don’t you think I know the words don’t work?” he said.

Histrionically he raised up his two hands before us. “I see trained-up Cubes walking all over the toys. Let’s be realistic, those are the choices, us or them. If I can change that, tell me how, tell me how, I’d give anything — but just be realistic.”

“All right, I will be. Anything for a friend, hey?”

"Look, I don’t know what you think of me,” he said. “I was just offering about this deal, I mean it’s the only deal I could set up across two borders —I’ve only been here two weeks. . It’s for real, and it’s straight.”

“Just what exactly is this deal,” I said, “better fill me in, I’ve lost track.”

The sale of my cordobas, that was the arrangement he’d supposedly been making. He himself had forgotten. “How does it feel to you,” he ventured. “What kind of deal do you think is being offered?”

“I think you’re offering to screw me,” I said with fatigue and also, I admit, with some interest.

“That’s the one thing I’m not offering to do, no.”

“What. You wouldn’t mess around with a lady like me?”

“Not on an afternoon like this. But I’d sure buy you a drink.”

Until right now his fairy propensities hadn’t manifested themselves.

I got up. “Excuse me — is that polite enough for you? — I have to piss.” Whether on purpose or not I don’t remember, I toppled my drink so it dribbled in his lap.

That click had occurred in my head, that click after which you’re no longer having a good time.

“What were you gonna do?” he said, wiping at his thighs with a napkin. “How do you get across the border? Wave a U.S. flag and gather up a few Contras?” As I left him he called, “What’s the plan?”

I WAS dead to the world by five that afternoon and woke up in the middle of the night. I guess the rain coming down had awakened me.

Now I was moving onto the Englishman’s rhythm of sleep — he was up, too, sitting by the desk, naked, but with a towel draped over his lap, hanging his head, the saddest man I’d ever seen.

“Is that son of a bitch still around?” I said.

“Who do you mean, the American?”

“What time is it?”

“Quite late. Or early.”

“Let’s leave, okay? Let’s just get out of town.”

“How can you get totally drunk, and then even want to get out of bed? Much less leave town?”

“I need to feel like I’m getting somewhere.”

“They’ve got the car locked behind the gate, you realize.”

“Well Christ, let's wake them up, let’s just—”

The management had locked the car in the yard for safekeeping. We couldn’t get away. But having him awake was a comfort. The panic began leaving me. Whatever I feared, if it hadn’t happened by now, it wouldn’t happen till morning.

I lay back. “Are you mad at me? I mean I know you are, but I mean to the point of murder, let’s say, that mad.”

He came over to the bed and kissed me.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes. I don’t know what’s my problem. Sorry.”

B U T — the Englishman . . I didn't quite get around to telling him about that afternoon's drunken conversation. The American was my own problem. This trouble belonged to me. It was up to me to cope with it. And it’s also true that I felt more comfortable having something over on my lover, if you understand what I mean, it was good to have compartments he wasn’t privy to, right and proper to set up these barriers excluding him because, when you think about it, he didn’t belong in my game in the first place, did he?

THE NEXT day en route to the border one of our tires went flat. We’d only gotten a mile out of the town of Rivas. “And the spare is flat too,” I wagered.

“There isn’t a spare,” he said, banging down the lid of the trunk.

“We’re dead. We’ll pass out in this heat.”

“We’ve only come two kilometers at most, wouldn’t you guess? Are you willing to walk with me? I don’t like leaving you here.”

I felt feverish, queasy, and absolutely parched walking along behind him. It was actually overcast, but the air was baking.

He was surprised that I carried my shoes. “I walked barefoot all over Managua,” I told him. “The night I first met you I walked all the way home barefoot.”

“And was that somehow in my honor.”

“Yeah. Kind of. I don’t know.”

The clouds seemed so much blacker in that part of things. You’d think the war was raging just past those hills, and the smoke of destruction covering up the sky.

At the garage in Rivas the young men were very kind as they begged us for money “as a souvenir,” and picked out for us another wonderful pseudo-tire from Leningrad. One of them shouldered a jack and started off toward the highway, elatedly rolling the tire along ahead of him, until the others stopped him and gathered everything, and us, and them, into a pickup truck.

The closer we got to the car, the higher the price of this tire we were carrying. By the time we unloaded it you’d have believed it was made of heroin or ambergris, its value had swollen that much, and I had to be held back by the Englishman from strangling the larcenous little shits.

“We have the money,” he insisted, “and they seem to have the tire, don’t they.”

“But they said two thousand!”

The young men worked casually but managed to get the tire installed, at a price of seven thousand cordobas, before any of us realized it didn’t match the size of the other three.

But for no extra money at all they went back and got another and corrected their mistake, cheerfully and very slowly.

For that reason we had to approach the border at night. One of the tire artists insisted the border was closed by five p.m. every day, a policy instituted since the Contras, coming across the Rio San Juan from Costa Rica, had blown up the kiosk and killed several guards three months ago.

The others said the guards weren’t afraid of anyone and the border would be open whenever we reached there.

If it was open, that would guarantee nothing about the Costa Rican side of things. We might have to spend the night caught between two nations. And the Costa Ricans had to match the Nicaraguans in everything, so theirs was a system just as elaborate, with stamps, forms, payments, searches, defumigations at one point after another — I’d crossed over this border on my way in, and even before La Cruz the checkpoints began, about a dozen useless ones employing various bastard offspring and idiot relatives of all the politicians, right down to the most doubtful cousin of the least postal clerk.