To keep you entertained, here's a new short story I wrote because I was stuck at the airport. Don't think about stealing it, it's copyrighted. And don't ask if it's true because you know I won't tell you.
Blue Moon
Managua, Nicaragua 1995
I sat in the oppressive heat at
the bar in the Marine barracks, which we called The Ranch. It was Somoza’s
horse stables at one time, but had been taken over by the government and was
now part of the embassy compound. A banner I made hung behind the bar: “The
Only Difference Between Ranch and Raunch is U”.
On the bar was a tequila bottle
stuffed with the clear scorpions that infested The Ranch. Newcomers had to do a
shot which would contain legs, a thorax, or other bits of the scorpions. In one
corner was a set of black weights. When I worked out with them my hands smelled
like I just changed the oil in my car. There was a cheap boom box playing Billy
Squire. Against the wall was a green inflated crocodile pool toy. It was the
only communication I had had from home, if you could call it a communication.
There hadn’t been a note, just the crocodile.
Not that I blamed them. Though I
dutifully wrote my parents every month, using the return address “The Ranch: Marine
Security Guard Detachment,” to let them know I was still alive, they remembered
me as I was at home, a thoughtless asshole not on speaking terms with my dad.
But here, I fancied myself a
general in the war on drugs, and had six feral 18-year-old Marines I could unleash
on the world with a snap of my fingers. My favorite, Stretch, was behind the
wood-paneled bar, digging scorpions out of the tequila bottle, serving them to
me on a chipped china saucer I stole from the officer’s mess. I hated tequila
but liked the buzz I got from the scorpions. Crunching them made me feel I was
in charge in this fucked up place where nature made its presence known in every
crevice of attempted civilization. You couldn’t put shoes on without shaking
out the scorpions. Frogs, spiders, and snakes made themselves at home in my bed
sheets while I was at work.
“Dude, new bar opened in Managua. Blue Moon.
They’re giving out free T-shirts.” Stretch showed me a cheaply printed flyer
with misspelled English words and a wavy drawing of a crescent moon with a face.
God knows where he got it. Maybe from one of the whores that frequented the
South highway that ran in front of the embassy.
“Sandinistan bar for sure,” I said,
fingering the paper. They put their symbols on everything, even advertisements
for bars. Stretch knew that. And he knew we weren’t allowed to go there.
The other Marines wandered over
from a video game they had been playing on the sofa.
“Free T-shirts? That’s awesome.
Let’s go!” Free T-shirts of any kind were all it took to draw them in. And the
thought of going somewhere they shouldn’t.
I was the den mother. The only
reason I was allowed to hang out at The Ranch was to keep an eye on the
boys. They were five months into their
first stint in a foreign country where the drinking age was 18, their first time
away from parental influence. They were armed with .45s and a uniform that
showed that they were elite soldiers. Not everyone could work at an embassy.
I was supposed to say no. I was
supposed to encourage them to stay at The Ranch and drink the alcohol I had
bought for them at the package store with money that my agency had given me for
those kinds of expenses. I knew why I
was here and what my job was, protecting the boys that protected me. But that
night I didn’t do my job.
“Okay, we’ll go for a drink. But
only one drink. Get the t-shirt and go. And no one causes problems. Tranquilo,
dudes. Or I will fuck you up.”
There was a flurry of activity in
The Ranch as the boys put on aftershave and their cheap polyester shirts
purchased at the base exchange. It made me sad in a way to see them playing at
sophistication, thinking their horrible Hawaiian-print shirts were stylish, that
their aftershave smelled good. I watched them run brushes over their crew cuts
and polish their shoes. As for me, I was in flip flops, khakis and a dirty
polo. There didn’t seem to be any reason to care what I looked like.
I sat in the front seat of the Jeep,
against the passenger window because I got car sick. Stretch was driving and Mo
was between us. In the back piled three more Marines, with the shortest, Diego,
forced to ride in the back like a dog because he was the smallest, smaller even
than me. Driving through the dark down the south highway you couldn’t see the
people that lived in shacks made of billboards, the children with scabs on
their faces and scalps, the piles of trash blowing across the grass median. In
the dark, Managua
could have been a nice place to live.
A shittily-painted sign stuck in
the ground pointed us to poorly-laid asphalt which was the parking lot for the
Blue Moon. There were no lines painted on it so cars had parked haphazardly and
inefficiently. We parked close to the street, the front of the Jeep facing the lot
exit, for safety. We gave a Nica kid a dollar. He touched his eye and then
pointed at the Jeep. He would watch our car.
I was relieved to see that the bar
didn’t look very crowded. It was still early, eight o’clock. Just get them out
by nine. Things wouldn’t get dangerous here until at least ten thirty. There
was time.
The inside of the bar stank of
varnish and vomit, was filled with tables and chairs that wouldn’t have been accepted
at a Good Will store back home. I chose one that had a vinyl covered seat,
figuring it was easier to clean, and wiped it down with a wet nap from a basket
on the table. Nicaraguans didn’t seem to understand the concept of a paper
napkin. Two of the boys wandered over to a pool table to watch the locals play.
The table was leveled by stacking concrete blocks under the uneven legs. The
green felt was stained. Coffee or blood, it could have been either.
Loud music played over cheap
speakers. I couldn’t make out any of the words because the singer’s voice was
distorted. I ordered a bucket of Victorias.
Tona was recently in the news because the company had not properly sterilized
their bottles and people who drank the beer got sick and sometimes died. I
didn’t want to think about dying while I was drinking.
Stretch opened my beer with his key
ring. I had counseled the boys on how to treat women, worried they would get
into some bad habits down here. Even the women they didn’t pay were seen as
little more than whores.
I pulled out a box of Payosas and
he lit my cigarette too. I turned the box over in my hand as I smoked. Bright
blue with a picture of a clown face on the front. I wondered why a clown? Not
something I associated with smoking. The brand was local, horrible, like
smoking dried chaff and twigs. But I didn’t want to be that person buying
Marlboros at the PX. I wanted to experience local. Not like those embassy fucks
who get stationed all around the world and never leave the confines of the
compound.
Stretch was looking at a girl who
was dancing in the middle of the room with her friends. She was wearing a tight
black dress with white stripes down the side. She would be considered fat in
some countries, but here she was just another shapely young woman trying to get
the attention of boys who might be her ticket out of this shithole.
“Hot,” Stretch said.
“No,” I said.
“Come on, I’m going to have a
little fun.”
“If you bring her over to this
table I will cut your balls off.”
I hated it when the boys brought
their girls around me, coaxing them to speak the English phrases they had
taught them, “Thank God it’s Friday”, “Make my day”, bad words. I felt
embarrassment at the women’s embarrassment, knew I looked judgmental. It made
me feel old though I was only 25.
“What’s wrong? She seems cool. Good
dancer.”
“For fuck’s sake. I tell you to
find a nice girl and you pick one with racing stripes.”
At this Mo laughed, and Stretch got
up from the table, making his way to the dance floor.
He was a good dancer, modifying the
two step he learned in rural Texas
where he grew up into something that was kind of like salsa. Then he and the
girl were dancing. The music was fast, loud.
I lit another cigarette and noticed
a man at the end of the bar, in the shadows. He was moving toward the middle of
the bar, near where Stretch was dancing. I felt a sudden pang of fear when I
recognized him.
The Dentist. Sandinistan. Given
that nickname because he liked to pull people’s teeth out. The left side of his
face had a crescent scar. He had been hit upside the head with a bottle when he
was young. I wondered now if that’s where the logo for the bar had come from.
“Mo, get the boys at the pool table
back here.”
As he left the table, the music
switched to a slow song. Stretch was now grinding against the girl. The Dentist
looked at him, looked over at the boys returning from the pool table. He backed
into the shadows again.
I felt light headed, panicked. I
took a bottle cap from the table and threw it at Stretch. It hit him on the arm,
but he ignored me. Finally, the song ended and he sauntered back to the table.
“We need to get out of here, now.”
“What’s your hurry? We just got
here.”
“We haven’t gotten our T-shirts
yet.”
The t-shirt would never be worn in Managua. That would cause
problems with the management, who would ground the Marines for going somewhere
they shouldn’t. But when they got home they would be worn for bragging rights.
Everyone collected T-shirts from off limit bars. It showed they went to
dangerous places, did shit, hadn’t just sat behind the bullet-proof glass and
barbed wire taking photo copies of visitors’ passports.
I waved a child over who had been
sitting on a stool at the entrance to the bar and gave him the flyer that
advertised the free shirt. He scampered out the door and returned a minute
later with a skinny old man who reeked of marijuana. He had T-shirts draped
over his arm.
He threw the pile on the table and
the boys began pawing through them, checking size labels. The shirts were
hideous. Simple line drawing of a full faced moon in a top hat, holding a cane
in gloved hands, done in the purple color of an old mimeograph machine. “Blue
Moon” was printed in hand blocked letters above the moon. The words on the
shirt were wavy, as if they were printed underwater.
Racing Stripes and her friends were closing in
on the table. They exchanged a few words with the man, who refused to give them
shirts. Mo handed his shirt to one of the girls. She was fat and had bad skin,
poured into a tube top and indecently short skirt. She blew a kiss at him and
Mo smiled. He was the least attractive of the boys. He always paid for it.
The music volume went up and now Mo
and Stretch were both dancing with the girls to a fast song. The other boys
wanted to join in but as they started to get up from the table I shook my head
once, no. The Dentist had disappeared into a door behind the bar when the man
with the T-shirts came in, but now he was back and there were five other men
with him.
When the song was over, Stretch and
Mo brought the girls back to the table, Stretch collapsing across from me in a
plastic lawn chair with a broken leg. He rocked back, caught himself, slammed
the chair down onto the three good legs. Tube Top picked up a half-drunk Victoria and guzzled it
in one long swallow, applauded by the boys. When she put it down on the table
there was a large red smear around the opening from her lipstick. Stuck to the
inside of the bottle was a half smoked cigarette.
The boys laughed, but Tube Top was
so drunk, or high, that she didn’t notice. A slow song came on and she started
swaying her hips to seduce Mo back onto the dance floor.
“We’re leaving,” I said, and, with
my hand flat on the table, pointed an unlit cigarette in the direction of The
Dentist. Without looking Stretch looked at him. Then leaned across the table.
“I’m not leaving because of that
fat fuck.”
“Yes, we are, because there’s about
to be trouble.”
“And I’m going to start it with
that fat communist shitbag.”
The other boys seemed to waver
between me, Stretch, and the girls. Suddenly the bar got very quiet. No one was
standing around the pool table anymore. People mingling around the tables had
moved against the wall.
The old man with the T-shirts
scurried into the bar. “You leave now,” he said, pointing at me.
“We’re going.”
I put three boys in front of me,
the other three behind me, to make sure they didn’t start anything. Stretch
walked slowly and as we made it to the door he yelled, “Te trueno el coño si no
te callas puto!
”
The Dentist and his five men raced
towards us. The boys laughed and only half ran to the Jeep, to show they
weren’t afraid. I stood in front of them as if I could protect them.
The Dentist stormed over to a large
1970s Cadillac. One of the men opened the trunk with a key and The Dentist
pulled out a large tire iron, brandishing it at us. This sent the boys into a
fit of laughter. They exaggeratedly slapped their thighs and punched each other
in the arm as if they had seen the funniest thing on earth. The Dentist walked
towards us, holding the tire iron like a baseball bat.
Stretch opened the passenger door
and leaned in the Jeep. I saw the light in the glove box come on and then he was
standing beside the Jeep, pointing a .45 at The Dentist.
Everyone stopped moving. It was
just a few seconds but it seemed like we were in that dusty parking lot for at
least an hour, us staring at the Sandis and the Sandis starting at us.
Finally I said “Get in the car.”
The boys quickly climbed into their seats like children who knew they would be
punished when they got home. My sweat felt thick, like blood, as it trickled
off my scalp and down the back of my shirt.
I stood in the parking lot until Stretch
started the car. Maybe The Dentist knew who I was, maybe he didn’t. I hoped if
nothing else my being female would keep the situation from getting any more out
of hand than it already had.
Mo bumped me in the ass with the
passenger door. “Get in the car cunt!” he shouted with more bravado than he had
ever shown before.
I stepped up into the car and
Stretch didn’t wait for the door to close before hitting the accelerator and
peeling the tires. Dust clouded in front of the windshield and loose blacktop hit
the bottom of the Jeep chassis, sounding like popcorn kernels in hot oil
banging against the lid of the pan. Stretch still had the .45 in his left hand.
His window was open and the smell of burning trash permeated the inside of the
car.
As we approached the parking lot
entrance we were going so fast I wondered if Stretch was going to stop. He
slammed on the brakes right as the Jeep aligned with the sign for the parking
lot. The wood stake holding the sign up snapped as Stretch steered into it.
Looking in the side window I could see the tail lights of The Dentist’s
Cadillac burning red against the darkness of the parked cars.
“Fuck,” I said.
Stretch smiled. “Yeah, fuck him.”
He stuck the .45 out the window and fired it into the air.
My ears felt like they were filled
with hot metal shards. The noise ricocheted around my skull cavity, and then
all I could hear was a fuzzy white noise. Mo said something, and it sounded
like he was really far away. I couldn’t make out his words.
“Fucking go now!” I yelled. I think.
I was unsure I said the words aloud. Stretch hit the gas and the car started to
slide out of the parking lot, the tires finally catching on the gravel.
At that moment there was a noise as
if we went over a speed bump. Something hit the windshield with a splat, as if
we dropped into a puddle. I couldn’t see forward anymore.
“What the fuck! What the fuck was
that?” Mo was shouting in my ear but his voice sounded muffled as if he was
yelling through layers of cotton.
I instinctively looked into the
passenger mirror and saw something lying in the street behind us. It looked
like a bag of dirty laundry. Except, facing towards us, was an arm. A hand.
“We hit someone,” I said.
“Something.”
“No. Someone.”
Mo reached over and turned on the
windshield wipers. Blood smeared around like a child’s finger painting. I could
smell it. It was the stench like the
airplane hangars I occasionally worked in. Mechanical. Hot. Like dumping out a
quart of viscous oil on a warm concrete floor.
I couldn’t see out the front windshield
though the wipers slapped back and forth. I felt sick. I looked in the
passenger mirror, watched the grey bag in the street, half expecting it to blow
away. It’s not real, I told myself. It’s only a bag of clothes.
Back at the embassy compound we pulled
into one of the bays where they sprayed cars down with pesticides. It was done
here, it was done at the border. Supposedly it prevented the spread of bugs. It
probably just caused cancer.
We sprayed the car down with the
pesticide, tried to wipe off the blood. But the pesticide and the blood were
both oily. It was just making a mess. The pesticide got on my skin and burned
it. I tried not to inhale but the chemical smell burned my sinuses. Though I was a heavy smoker, I worried the
chemicals would damage my lungs.
The passenger headlight was
shattered. I kept looking at it, wondering why I hadn’t heard it break. There
was gore all over the front grill that sprayed down the side of the car. There
was a dent in the hood. I decided it was from the head of the person we ran
over though I wasn’t sure. Could a human head dent the hood of a Jeep? I didn’t
know.
Eventually we gave up on the
pesticide spray and took the Jeep back to the ranch. The boys took turns
bringing out water in a bucket that was usually used to clean the floors of the
ranch. I smoked. No one expected me to help. I was the only woman, but this was
not a woman’s cleaning job.
I wanted to go home. Someone
dropped me off at my house on the South highway. I don’t remember who. I had
the passenger window down and smoked on the ride home even though that wasn’t
allowed. This wasn’t a country where it was safe for a gringo to ride with the
windows down.
“We have to tell someone,” I said.
“Tomorrow.”
“We have to tell someone.”
“Tranquilo. Tomorrow. Tranquilo.”
By Monday nothing had been done, so
I called my management at the agency where I worked. An internal investigation
ensued. The Marines were mad at me. I was a rat. A report had been filled out
saying we had hit a cow, not uncommon in Managua
where the cattle grazed along the highway. The boys were called in to explain.
My manager asked me over and over
again. “Why did you go there?”
Yes, I knew it was a Sandi bar. Yes
I knew it was off limits. Free T-shirts made a sorry excuse.
Stretch was flown back to Houston for an interview, and the college applications I
had helped him fill out when he first arrived in Managua ended up in the trash. On his flight
home was a 20 year old woman named Aura Lila who was knocked up by someone in
the State Department. She was flown to the US
to get an abortion since they were illegal in Nicaragua. It was her first flight,
even though she worked at the airport, and she threw up the whole way. No one
on the plane spoke Spanish. We didn’t expect her to come back, as she was now
ruined, but she did.
In the end, it was determined that
Stretch had done nothing wrong. The man we had run over was homeless and had
been huffing paint. In the eyes of the government he, like all the Nicas,
wanted to die. He was high and stepped in front of the Jeep, committing
suicide.
Stretch took an assignment in the US, married a woman from Dallas, and they had two kids. He eventually
retired from the military and got a job as a manager at a McDonald’s. He sent
me Christmas cards with pictures of his kids and quotes from the bible. He
forgave me for being a rat, said he was glad to be exonerated for what some
might have thought of as a crime.
At the embassy, a show was made of
trying to contact the dead man’s relatives to deliver a collection taken up at
the compound. Likely they didn’t look too hard. Likely the cash disappeared, as
it often did in countries where a duffle bag was the local ATM and as long as
you had filled out one of the blank receipts we were given along with the
duffle, no one cared.
A year after the man was killed I
flew home. My parents met me at the airport. I must have been a shocking sight,
20 pounds underweight, arms and legs covered with infected scratches and bug
bites, face tinged a sickly green from a six week bout of malaria that nearly
killed me and ended my assignment in Central America.
My dad touched me, something he
rarely did, and said, “We’re glad you made it back safe.”
But I knew I hadn’t made it back
safe. I knew for the rest of my life I would return to that table in the Blue
Moon.
