Someone was led off. Krieger adjusted the binoculars and saw that it was an elder. A machete fell even before hands rose away into the plaza and the liquid green of the surrounding leaves broke in on Krieger’s periphery as he dropped the glasses to avert his gaze. He caught himself, looked again, understood that the longer he studied the scene below, the less certain he felt about its significance. Weary, increasingly agitated, and shivering a bit from the chill that had set in as the rain-forest fog lowered itself into its slate-blue mountains, Krieger gave up his vigil, climbed down out of the tree, and began to descend the hill in the opposite direction from the village. What the fat man had accomplished set his head reeling. A bravura performance all around. How long would he be able to keep the village, how long maintain his shamanship without going crazy, without giving in to deeper tribal dictates like having himself tattooed with the geometrical shapes of the Paya, ornamentally scarred on the face and teeth chipped like the Sumo men? How long would he have before the war, its shrapnel, its flames, its almost biological imperative to grow, rage, would sweep across him here, overwhelm him in the fiery wave of its advance? Among the Sumo and Mosquito a man who has been wronged must avenge himself or be considered a coward. Poisoning is the honorable method for murdering an enemy. How long would he have before he was given, perhaps in some repast so lovingly prepared by a concubine, the secretions from a frog, the dendrobates tinctorius, the juice of Hippomane mancinella which is swift and very lethal? Not that long, not that long. Hath swallowed down riches and shall vomit them up again. Weights and balances. Only good in it was the reversion to primitivity. An absolute reversion to primitivity. Admirable ploy. Not even a ploy, a decision made in the marrow. Cristóbal de Olid came to mind. Which of them had chosen that name out of the encyclopedia?—not that its aptness hadn’t brought laughter even that first evening when Krieger happened to be traveling north from Matagalpa not so long ago and came—and this was hilarious too at the time—posing as a Maryknoll priest, into a particular village, quiet, comparatively, clean and well supplied, comparatively, overseen by a local strongman, Carlos.
That night, safely distant from the village, sheltered in a narrow crevasse that backed up to the ridge where he first had shown Lupi what brave and basic sights the jungle could produce, he sat with a blade of grass pulled taut between the balls and tips of his thumbs, which were pressed together. He blew hard into the opening, trying to produce a tune. The coals of his small fire gave off a friendly light. He hadn’t tried to play the grass harp in years. It might be a good way to relax, to calm himself, but try as he might he found he’d forgotten how to make more than three notes, and those could not be kept much in one order or another. With a stick he prodded at the coals, making orange flickers of spark. He spat in the fire and saw the plume and heard it hiss as the heat consumed his saliva in a quick boil.
A spasm of anger passed through him, thinking again of Lupi and how he had never showed up at the hotel in Managua that morning, as he was instructed. It had been suicidal of Krieger to rent that car in the capital and drive straight north on the road past Estelí into the war zone. He had never done anything like that before, but had enough experience down here to know that the safest way to avoid ambush on the open roads north of Jinotega was to drive as fast as possible, and stop for nothing or no one. He had crossed the border without incident, left the car in Danlí, set out on horseback for this unknown place. It was curious how, back in Nueva Segovia, he kept thinking he saw Sardavaal’s face, over and over, a shoulder above those groups of refugees walking in families along the road, their movable possessions tied high and wide in panniers of colorful cloth on the backs of mules and oxen. Whenever he would slow the car down to look closer, the face proved to be that of someone else, a missionary, or one of the members of a volunteer brigade come from the States to help in the fields. Sardavaal, he thought, and shook his head. All Sardavaal’s work, the lives he may have saved with his inoculations, the villages improved through program after program, the foundations of the earliest cultures in the hemisphere dug up in fragments of fabric and bone, bits of pottery—all of it was going to come to nothing.
He chuckled. The howler monkey that was perched atop a broken formation of volcanic stone just below where he had made his temporary camp for the night glanced up with its perfect round eyes across whose surfaces were reversed images of the flames of the fire. The monkey flinched at the several bursts of sound that came from the man up the ridge, echoed from the stone blind. It bared its teeth, and its delicate fingers clasped the pulpy branches of the limb in which it crouched.
Krieger didn’t notice his audience. If he had he might have lobbed a rock down the side of the hill into the tree for sport. He wouldn’t have tried to kill the howler, for he wasn’t fond of monkey meat. Years ago, working for one of the corporations, on one of his business junkets to visit some bauxite mine or other, his hosts had served it proudly as an example of rural cuisine. The plates were from China, the servants who brought it to table come—way back in their families—in the holds of slave boats so heavily loaded with men and women the waves played over the decks on the calmest days. Rural cuisine, he thought, you cannibals. Dutifully, he had eaten his portion. Strings of gristle caught in his teeth for days after the meal, and the whole experience caused considerable discomfort and even a nightmare.
Monkey meat was not for him. The monkey meant nothing. The monkey too was a nightmare. His whole concentration was on this one thing that had brought him around from his attempts at making music into the coughing smile that spread over his sweat-clouded face and the sudden understanding that what he would have to do, and as quickly as possible, was get to a telephone. He had had an intriguing idea. Yes, he thought. Yes, well, that might work.
A Biography of Bradford Morrow
Bradford Morrow is the award-winning author of six novels and numerous short stories, essays, poetry collections, and children’s books, as well as the founding editor of the celebrated literary journal Conjunctions. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the Academy Award inLiterature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Pushcart and O. Henry Prizes, and the PEN/Nora Magid Award, as well as other honors.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1951, Morrow grew up outside Denver in Littleton, Colorado, where his parents had settled after growing up in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and Oak Creek, Colorado, respectively. Morrow’s maternalgrandparents were farmers from Nebraskawho eventually migrated to Colorado after losing their farm during the Depression, and his paternalgrandfatherwas a doctor who came to Colorado to set up his practice on the frontier. His family instilled a spirit of adventure and curiosity in Morrow, traits that would be evident in his writing as well as his peripatetic travels and career choices.
Morrow left home at fifteen, traveling first to Honduras to participate in a summer program sponsored by the American Medical Association, where he worked as a medical assistant helping to inoculate thousands of impoverished, rural Hondurans. He then spent his senior year of high school as a foreign exchange student in Italy, earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado, and spent time in Paris. For over a decade after setting off on his own, Morrow lived an itinerant life, moving back and forth from Europe to the States. He then spent five years in California, where he met the poet Kenneth Rexroth, and finally settled for good in New York City. Before becoming a fulltime writer and editor, Morrow worked as a bookseller, jazz musician, and translator, and attended graduate school at Yale. His first book-length work was a bibliography of Wyndham Lewis, published in 1978.
In 1981, Morrow launched the literary journal Conjunctions. His taste, passion, and editorial savvy quickly attracted a diverse slate of contributing writers and editors, including Chinua Achebe, John Ashbery, and Joyce Carol Oates. The novelist Robert Coover has called the publication “without exception, America’s leading literary journal, one of the greatest such magazines in the literary history of the country.”
After years of contributing to anthologies and supporting the work of others in his role as editor, Morrow published his first novel, Come Sunday, in 1988. Morrow’s debut set the tone for his later works with its rich historical allusion, globe-spanning plotlines, lyrical prose, and illuminating philosophical exploration. Morrow’s second novel, The Almanac Branch (1991), was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and highlighted the author’s interest in the complex interior lives of his characters. The tone of his work is often Gothic, especially in Giovanni’s Gift (1997), which was partly inspired by the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Morrow meticulously researches his fiction: For his diptych consisting of Trinity Fields (1995) and Ariel’s Crossing (2002), the author interviewed special ops veterans from the U.S. engagement in Laos, students involved in the Columbia University riots, and Manhattan Project scientists, among others. He even lived for a time near Los Alamos—where atomic weapons were first tested—to better understand the characters in his sweeping historical sagas of American life in the atomic age.
Aside from his work as an editor and writer, Bradford Morrow has taught writing and literature throughout his career, which has included positions at Brown, Columbia, Princeton, and the Naropa Institute. He currently lives in New York and is a professor of literature at Bard College, which sponsors Conjunctions.
“Lois Hoffman and Ernest Morrow, my parents-to-be, standing in front of the Luscombemy father flew them in on their first date in 1949. My father was a pilot and the owner of a Harley-Davidson that he regularly drove from Oak Creek, Colorado, over the continental divide to Denver, where Lois lived at the time, an all-day drive on his cycle.”
“Age one, striking something of an authorial pose with the forefinger to the cheek. I remember those curtains, very Western in theme with the cattle and other cowboy imagery.”
“Looking at this photograph, it’s really those narrative Western-themed curtains behind me that I find most interesting now. I remember staring at them and inventing stories in the drapery. This was in our house on Cove Way in Denver, Colorado.”
“The H.M.S. Pinafore outfit that I wore onone of my two youthful outings as a thespian (the other being Gilbert & Sullivan’s other workhorse operetta, The Mikado). My mother made the costume from scratch, right down to the epaulettes and medals. I still have this outfit in a box somewhere and the bookcase, too. Littleton, Colorado.”
“Me as a grinning Cub Scout in Littleton, Colorado. I would go on to become an Eagle Scout and must confess that the Boy Scouts at that time—in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains where we went camping, sometimes in the dead of winter, and hiking through difficult terrain, learning the flora and fauna, as well as all sorts of real survival skills—is a part of my youth I now cherish.”
“I’m standing here with a group of beautiful young children somewhere in the mountains south of Comayagua, Honduras, in 1966, when I was serving as a medical assistant for Amigos de lasAméricas. This Peace-Corps-like experience in the second-poorest country in the hemisphere (after Haiti, at the time) absolutely changed my life. When this photo was taken, I had just finished inoculating the entire school body of this little village against smallpox and other diseases.”
“On the beach near Genoa, Italy, visiting the host family with whom I spentmy senior year in high school when I was a foreign exchange student living in Cuneo, not far from there. I lived with the Delpiano family: Minu and Aldo, my host parents, and Dario, Andrea, and the youngest brother, Davide, who’s sitting here beside me, in 1970 or so.”
“In Littleton, Colorado, visiting my parent’s house from the University of Colorado in Boulder. From the left: my beloved Grandfather Hoffman, who was a farmer in Red Cloud, Nebraska, until he lost everything in the Great Depression; my mother holding his hand; me in the middle with a pensive or else depressed look on my face (basically my mind must have been elsewhere); my equally beloved grandmother, Jenny Hoffman, to whom I attribute some of my storytelling skills; and my sister Deborah. Around 1972.”
“In my early twenties, camping somewhere in the Colorado mountains.”
“With the legendary James Laughlin, publisher of New Directions, at a reception at the Gotham Book Mart in New York. The first issue of Conjunctions was a festschrift in honor of Laughlin, who published everyone from Ezra Pound to Tennessee Williams, Dylan Thomas to John Hawkes, Ferlinghetti and Rexroth, Patchen and Bowles, William Carlos Williams, and so many important modernists and post-modernists. 1981.”
“Bird-watching in the highlands of Scotland, on the North Sea. Late 1980s.”
“This is the barn on my uncle Henry and aunt Helen Rehder’s ranch near Steamboat Springs. The ranch served as the setting for Giovanni’s Gift, and this photograph was taken by me when I went to visit them at the height of their being harassed in the middle of the night by people who were trying to get them to sell their ranch so that it could be developed. Mid-1990s.”
“Me standing next to a low-rider car with an absolutely superb flame paintjob in the small village of Chimayó, New Mexico, where some of Trinity Fields and Ariel’s Crossing is set. With one of my trusty Boorum & Pease journals under my arm. Mid-1990s.”
“Visiting the highly restricted site of the White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico, where the world’s first nuclear bomb was detonated at 5:29:45 Mountain War Time, on July 16, 1945. The obelisk in the background stands on the precise spot where the world entered the nuclear age. Taken when I was working on Trinity Fields, 1994.”
“I write my books sitting at the kitchen table of my rural farmhouse in upstate New York. This was a photograph taken of my worktable while completing the manuscript of Trinity Fields in 1994.”
“Me in front of Franz Kafka’s house on Golden Lane in Prague. This was during my first research trip to the Czech Republic to work on my seventh novel, The Prague Sonata. Late 1990s.”
“Some of my brilliant Conjunctions staff in the New York office, where the journal is edited: Eimear Ryan, Jessica Loudis, J. W. McCormack, and Jedediah Berry (whose first novel, The Manual of Detection, came out to widespread critical praise in the past couple of years). Sitting with us is my dear friend and hero, Barney Rosset, founder and editor of Grove Press and the Evergreen Review. Turtle, the Conjunctions cat, is wiggling out of my arm, meantime. Summer 2010.”
“A photograph of me walking with my all-time favorite cat, Woody, on the second to last day of his life, at my place upstate. Woody was like no other being, animal or person, I have ever met. I honestly feel that in many ways he was my spiritual superior. He’s buried now in the garden along with Grace, another magisterial feline whom it was my honor to hang out with. November 2004.”
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Portions of this novel have previously appeared in The Paris Review, Bomb, and Conjunctions.
“Little Red Rooster” written by Willie Dixon. © 1961 Hoochie Coochie Music (BMI). Administered by Bug/Arc Music Corp. (BMI). All rights reserved. Used by permission.
copyright © 1988 by Bradford Morrow
cover design by Karen Horton
ISBN: 978-1-4532-1198-4
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
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roadmedia.com
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