The Stars at Noon

  “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.”

  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. r />
  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.

  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?

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” I said. “Russians.” The two of them sat before the counter of a soda, flanked by distinterested patrons, and mopped their faces and looked a million miles toward home.

  “Officers,” the Englishman said.

  “Russian officers,” I repeated. The sight of them absolutely disoriented and frightened me.

  “Have you never seen a Russian person before?”

  In my homeland, I might have told him, we're trained to rank the presence of uniformed Russians with the coming of the Kingdom. “They’re not supposed to be real,” I said.