Denis Johnson - The Stars at Noon

We headed for the border in the dark. Ours was the only car on the road for the last thirty kilometers. There were no more towns, no more houses. The highway seemed to be a tunnel cut through a world of tree-tall grass, the picture in front of us was changeless, and except that I had to turn the wheel a little this way or that way to keep in the center of it, I’d have thought the car was standing still. At one point, a white Brahma bull was suddenly floating in the road ahead of us. . And although my foot reflexively found the brake and we stopped, with the hood just beneath its drooling face and the screech of deceleration stifled instantly by the darkness, I couldn’t quite accept this apparition. In a few seconds it was gone.

As we got closer to the border, the rain of tiny gnats off Lago de Nicaragua obliterated the windshield. And it was no use turning on the wipers, because dead bugs aren’t wet. . And then I nearly drove through a cable stretched across the road. We’d come to the first border checkpoint. There wasn’t a light on anywhere. A blinking, terrified soldier approached us.

“I’ve made a terrible mistake,” I said.

The guard talked to us while other soldiers turned out of their beds and ambled through the headlights without shirts, shoes, or rifles to lean on the car, breathing and stinking. The border was closed.

I recognized one of the soldiers, a suffering entity who had looked at me with such venom, when I’d crossed five months ago coming the other direction, that his hatred had hummed a song in my ears and I’d distinctly felt it scratching at my skin . . He said nothing tonight.

They all talked us over for a while. “Your passport.”

I handed it through the window with a hand that wouldn't stop shaking.

“The passport of your comrade?”

“Oh, God, do they want my passport?” He handed it to me and I put it out the window. They handed the documents around among themselves and looked at them pointlessly and then gave them back. “Tomorrow at seven,” the guard said.

We turned around and didn’t say a word until we were out of sight of them.

At which point I stopped the car. My hands felt so rubbery I couldn't grip the wheel.

“What now?” he said quietly. “Back to Rivas I suppose.”

I started to cry. “We could try Granada,” I said.

“That’s quite a ways beyond Rivas, isn’t it?”

“We’ve got more than half a tank left.” I cried some more. “I really don’t think I’m going to make it, honey. I just feel like killing myself to get out of here.”

He was quiet for a while.

I couldn’t see him at all in the dark. Beyond the road the frogs and insects roared steadily.

“This car is filling up with these things,” he said finally, slapping at gnats. “Do you feel well enough to drive on?”

WE SAW no one until we were halfway to Rivas. And then three soldiers with their rifles at port arms suddenly showed up in the headlights, boldly blocking the road.

They were hardly more than children. The spokesman, who’d ripped the sleeves off his blouse and wore a bandana around his neck, was both shy and demanding. He draped an arm on the car’s roof and hung his head right down in my face.

They were doing sentry duty at a bridge up the road a ways, he explained.

“What do they want?” the Englishman said.

“They want a ride.”

“Get in, get in,” he said, gesturing invisibly at them in the dark, “just, please, don’t do anything,” he said, “to hurt us.”

“Your country?” the boy said when they were all in the back seat and we were moving.

“Sweden,” I said.

“Turn soon.”

“The bridge isn’t on the highway?”

He didn’t answer.

“What’s the trouble?” the Englishman said.

“I’m getting really scared.”

The Englishman didn’t want to talk about it.

“Here. Now we’ll turn left,” the soldier said.

“Is the bridge on this road?”

“Go farther.”

The road became dirt following a mile or two of blacktop.

“Exactly where is this bridge?”

“Go farther. We have to guard the bridge against the Contras.”

We ended up in San Juan del Sur, on the Pacific Ocean, forty-five minutes later.

“What type of place is this?” I asked.

The soldier with the necktie explained it had formerly been a tourist resort.

When the boy said this word, I said, “Well, a resort.” It sounded nice.

“Is it a town?” the Englishman said. “It certainly appears to be a settlement.”

“He says it used to be kind of a vacation resort.”

As soon as we let them out, just before the bridge, they told us to get out of town.

“This is a bad place for Europeans,” the spokesman explained.

“We’re going to be driving all night. We’re just getting more and more nowhere,” I told the Englishman.

“I have an idea. Why don’t we ask them politely to let us cross?”

All courage failed me. “You ask them.”

He beckoned to the soldier, leaning toward my window, and called, “Por favor? Si? Por favor?”

When the boy came around to his side, the Englishman kept on saying just those words, but laid his cheek against prayerful hands to indicate “beddy-bye” and then gestured across the bridge at the town, “Si? Por favor?”

“Okay, okay.”

“That’s very kind of you, very kind . .”

The boy waved us on and we passed over the wood bridge with a clumping sound, you’d have thought we were on horseback, and on into ugly San Juan del Sur.

It was after eleven. A lot of people were going home from somewhere. Silhouettes sprang up in the headlights. But it was hard to appreciate that they were substantial.

The town seemed only half-built. We bumped along dirt streets with nearly impassable gutters hacked right across them. . They were certainly conserving on streetlamps in San Juan del Sur. There was nothing but a dusty, windblown dark that seemed to suck up, even before it hit the street, the light spilling from the occasional canteen or soda.

The FSLN office was open and brightly lit.

We drove by a pool-hall full of soldiers, and then along a row of stores and small houses; their unpainted facades gave the town an ambience of frontier remoteness. The streets weren’t set around a church square in the usual style.

We found what must surely have been the only bar in town, a giant place with a blue dance floor, and a jukebox reverberating cavernously, but there was nobody in it other than the bartender and a little boy.

“Don’t the soldiers and sailors come in here?” I asked them.

The bartender was tight-lipped. “Don’t know.”

“Can we eat something?” the Englishman asked in English, shovelling his hand toward his mouth.

We had chicken, rice, and coffee, and the bartender’s whole family came out to get a look at us: two more smiling, happy kids, a smiling happy uncle or some such, a smiling happy woman who identified herself as the bartender’s wife and as the author of our meal. The jukebox across the dance floor blasted Elvis’s rendering of “Farther Along”:

When death has come

And taken our loved ones

Leaving our homes

So lonely and drear

Then do we wonder

How others proper

Living so wicked

Year after year

They directed us toward the town’s only worthwhile hotel, and we started driving all over looking for it. As in Managua, the townspeople were getting along without street signs.

At one point the Englishman made me stop the car and back up in the street.

He flung his hand toward an open doorway and said, “Look there, look there,” referring to two men in grey — were they wearing ushers’ uniforms?