Denis Johnson - The Stars at Noon

My words came out small and whining: “Oh God, oh God, I hope nothing happens. .”

I told him I wanted to see everything destroyed before I had to look at any more of it.

He didn’t talk at all.

And the Englishman kept his thoughts to himself even after we were stopped ten miles down the highway with the walls of grass growing on either side of us, in the line of cars waiting to get out of this horrible land.

Someday the Marines would come down from the sky and strafe this convoy of hopefuls. Would come in a plague of U.S. gunships like big lightbulbs in the nighttime, sowing down on them all a lot of Dow chemicals, drifting and winking leaflets full of unintelligible threats and bribes, and high-caliber Gatling tracer-bullets. . And giant firebombs . .

We spent a good hour moving down the last mile of Nicaraguan roadway full of holes, turning the engine off and letting it rest between our yards-long advances toward that first kiosk.

Behind us in the line was a group of boys with a huge transistor radio, all four of them wearing the kind of sunglasses I associate with French film stars, in a tall convertible jeep with Panamanian plates. Their jeans were impossibly blue, their tee-shirts white as glaciers. .

On the other hand, ahead of us was one of those buses that seem to drift out of history from Buchenwald and turn up in the Third World to take impoverished people home. The passengers had all gotten out and were wandering up and down beside this strange craft looking patient and content.

We stayed in the car — out of an unspoken mutual tenor of exposing our faces, I’m sure. And still the Englishman hadn’t said one word since San Juan del Sur — two hours ago.

He kept quiet as we got past the first checkpoint, where last night the cable stretched across the road had stopped us. Our documents were fine; nobody bothered about us at all. Up ahead, it appeared, we would have to get out and complete some forms, and then wait while our car was searched.

It was phenomenal: a few hundred yards down the road was Costa Rica, and I swear to you that on that side of the verge the palm trees were taller, the fields a more subtle shade of green, and the highway moved up into cool mountains without a bump or a hole in its pavement. And everyone was better dressed, and there weren’t so many bugs.

The sun came over the easternmost of those mountains all too soon. The windshield grew hot to the touch. Eerie shafts of light, reflecting from the glass parts of jeeps and trucks, flew up through the dust-cloud ahead.

A shadow passed over us trailing a vague, light rain; and in two minutes the day was bright again.

“We’ll pass out if we stay in this car,” I said.

The Englishman didn’t answer me.

“You haven’t said a word in almost — a long time,” I said. “You’re thinking too hard. Don’t do that, not in this heat, okay?”

Later I said, “The temperature is fatal.” I was drenched; but there was something narcotic about simply giving in, letting myself be cooked. The line of cars moved slowly, to say the least. The Panamanian boppers behind us had taken to the shade by the road and fallen asleep on the grass. “I didn’t think so many people would be here so early. Look at all the people .”

I couldn’t help saying such things, the Englishman’s cold treatment was making me nervous.

But for once he answered me. “Maybe this is better, all this crowding, as they’ll have less time to. .” He didn't go so far as to name the possibility.

THERE’S NO conveying the state we’d reached. Let it be enough to say that as we’d sat in the car and stood by the car, we’d seen most of the people around us walking over to the second kiosk to surrender their Nicaraguan travel papers. We wouldn’t be able to go any farther until we did the same. But we behaved, the both of us, as if we were certain that something else had to happen first, maybe that an official had to approach, look at our papers, and pass us along, or the car in front of us had to disappear — exactly what trick my fear-struck mind was playing I can’t remember. . The point is that the next move in getting on toward Costa Rica was ours, that was the procedure here, but we did nothing. We did nothing for hours. Such was the obliterating strength of our fate.

Basically this border station was a little settlement occurring between two roadblocks — stores, residences, a barracks, some offices, everything made of soggy lumber, like a jungle village. Across the highway was a chapel with its doors and windows boarded over.

In the afternoon I went behind the church to pee — this was the only private place I’d found to do it the day I’d come into this country. Now I watered the same patch of grass again. . Everything was still happening twice . . As I was done, I had a picture of myself running away into the field and shrinking out of sight

When I got back to the car, he wasn’t there. Everything was in motion suddenly. The locks on his heart were shattered, and he was standing in the line at the second kiosk with his papers in his hand. He was just like the rest of them in the line: unhurried, bedraggled, lobotomized.

He watched me as we gave them our passports and papers.

“I pray to God you got rid of that money back there,” the Englishman said.

I couldn’t say anything. I hadn’t.

The money? . . I hadn’t even thought about it.

He couldn’t say anything either. But he was so excruciated that if I’d touched him with a hand, my hand would have hurt, I know it.

But now I understood what he’d been waiting for — what he’d put off saying. Why he hadn’t gone up to the kiosk until now. He’d asked me once, and he was too civilized to go on demanding that I not endanger us. Now, it seemed to him, I’d had a chance to do the right thing. .

I put him straight. “The limit is only for currency you bring in. They don’t care how much you take out —they’re glad to see their stupid currency go.”

“But you mean to say you didn’t put it away back there? Out back of the church?”

“No.”

“But I was sure you had.”

“I told you, they’re glad to see it carted out of their miserable country. It's worthless. Here,” I said, losing my grip altogether suddenly and going after the money in my purse, “here, do you need some toilet paper?”

“But you’re over the limit by thousands — tens of thousands. It’s just too irregular, you’ll call attention to us. .”

“Oh, big fucking deal,” I said, just to be talking back.

“It’s fine of you to want to destroy everything between us, but do you have to be so unbearably stupid about it?”

“Oh — stewpid,” I said. “Stewpid.”

Okay, okay. But he’d shocked me by laying his finger so deftly on — was it the truth, was I doing something irrevocable and crazy just to break us up? I didn’t know. It was hot, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think.

But the suggestion drove me to produce nonsense. “Answer me, do you need some toilet paper or not? When do you shit, anyway? I’ve never seen you,” and so on.

“This is so silly,” the Englishman said, “I’m silly, I’ve been an absolute fool. You’re a sick woman, you’re very ill. .”

And he continued, now addressing the young civilian approaching us for the search: “And she would have to be disturbed, you see — a woman peddling herself in the cocktail bars, without any reason for doing it, so much to recommend her — take pity on this woman, she’s ill — loco, loco. .

“I’m being sacrificed,” he said to me. “You’re destroying me.” And he announced: “It probably has to do with your father.”