The Wrecking Yard by Pinckney Benedict

Author:Pinckney Benedict [Benedict, Pinckney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79675-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

AT THE ALHAMBRA

Johnnie and Anne sit out on the patio of the Hotel Alhambra in the morning sun, watching a holy procession out in the plaza. A man in the caravan stumbles as he passes them. He’s supporting one corner of an eight-foot-tall image of the Madonna, which totters, sways sideways, is righted. It is covered in bright flowers, and some of them fall to the ground.

The procession circles the octagonal wooden bandstand in the center of the plaza. Beggars sleep in the bandstand at night. A brass orchestra occupies the place now, pumping out slow, solemn religious airs.

Anne thinks Johnnie is beautiful in his white shirt with the short sleeves, his forearms muscular and brown with the sun of the place. A Panama hat, a planter’s hat, sits on the table near him. He said to her when he found it in the open-air market at Masaya, “They make these down here. This is the place to get a hat like this one.” Though they are in Nicaragua, not Panama.

It is 1970, and troops of the Guardia Civil occupy the intersections of most city streets. Anne does not like the way they eye her, pretty norteamericana, when she takes a walk. They wear carbines slung on canvas thongs over their shoulders. Their uniforms are in good shape, new, but the creases are dull in the humid air. Johnnie doesn’t respect them as soldiers. He is an Air Force captain—was, until recently. He’s a civilian now.

“This week is Holy Week,” Anne says to Johnnie, who taps the tabletop in time with the footsteps of the pilgrims out in the plaza. “At home they’re boiling eggs to dye. They’re buying little chocolate rabbits wrapped in foil.”

“Right,” he says.

“You’re drunk,” she says.

“Right,” he says. “Quite a country,” he says. “Quite a little country. We should stay here. A man could live his life right here.”

“I won’t talk to you when you’re drunk,” she says. “Not when you’re drunk in the morning.”

“Get drunk in the morning, and still you stay in the best rooms in the best hotel in the whole damn country. Why don’t we just live down here the rest of our lives, Annie? We should stay here. We should recognize a good thing.”

“I won’t have that conversation with you,” she says. She turns from him. Her silence is not angry. It’s almost companionable. She’s pretty sure that Johnnie doesn’t mean what he says, that he sees Granada is a small, sad city, Nicaragua is hot and dirty and poor. He knows about the earthquakes that tear apart the country, the active volcanoes that ring it.

He’s talked about staying in every place they’ve seen on their trip. He talked about it in Tampico, where they passed through Mexican customs, and in Vera Cruz, where they swam in the Gulf of Mexico, and in Tapachula, where slim Mexican girls lounged around the lighted pool at the Camino Real. He always loses the thread of the idea in the middle of the day, when the city around them dozes in the heat.

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