On Wednesday, a child was rushed in from the village of San Manuel to the Chinandega clinic in critical condition because someone had stored paraquat in a Coke bottle.

On Thursday she was grimly happy. Five contras were making a secret sabotage raid on a hydroelectric plant, somewhere to the east, and were surprised by some armed farmers who took them captive. The culprits had passed through town in the back of an open Jeep, slit-eyed with dishonor, on their way to trial in Managua. Wouldn’t it be something, she mused, if that Jeep hit one of the contra road mines? But there was the driver to consider, and even if there hadn’t been, it wasn’t something she could wish for. She said, “You can’t let your heart go bad like that, like sour milk. There’s always the chance you’ll want to use it later.”

I wondered at what point I’d given up on later and let mine go sour. I didn’t know, although Hallie might. I reread each of the three letters with fascination but also the same dissatisfaction I’d had on the morning I’d opened it. It was all just things happening, and selfishly, I wanted Hallie. Even if she didn’t speak to me directly, I wanted her to speak.

I tore open the last envelope and was hit full in the face with what I wanted. It was four pages long, in a cursive enlarged by rage. When God wants to punish you, as Isak Dinesen declared, He answers your prayers.

I am like God, Codi? Like GOD? Give me a break. If I get another letter that mentions SAVING THE WORLD, I am sending you, by return mail, a letter bomb. Codi, please. I’ve got things to do.

You say you’re not a moral person. What a copout. Sometime, when I wasn’t looking, something happened to make you think you were bad. What, did Miss Colder give you a bad mark on your report card? You think you’re no good, so you can’t do good things. Jesus, Codi, how long are you going to keep limping around on that crutch? It’s the other way around, it’s what you do that makes you who you are.

I’m sorry to be blunt. I’ve had a bad week. I am trying to explain, and I wish you were here so I could tell you this right now, I am trying to explain to you that I’m not here to save anybody or any thing. It’s not some perfect ideal we’re working toward that keeps us going. You ask, what if we lose this war? Well, we could. By invasion, or even in the next election. People are very tired. I don’t expect to see perfection before I die. Lord, if I did I would have stuck my head in the oven back in Tucson, after hearing the stories of some of those refugees. What keeps you going isn’t some fine destination but just the road you’re on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, “What life can I live that will let me breathe in & out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?” I didn’t look down from some high rock and choose cotton fields in Nicaragua. These cotton fields chose me.

The contras that were through here yesterday got sent to a prison farm where they’ll plant vegetables, learn to read and write if they don’t know how, learn to repair CB radios, and get a week-long vacation with their families every year. They’ll probably get amnesty in five. There’s hardly ever a repeat offender.

That kid from San Manuel died.

Your sister, Hallie

“What’s new with Hallie?” Loyd asked.

“Nothing.”

I folded the pages back into the envelope as neatly as I could, trying to leave its creases undisturbed, but my fingers had gone numb and blind. With tears in my eyes I watched whatever lay to the south of us, the land we were driving down into, but I have no memory of it. I was getting a dim comprehension of the difference between Hallie and me. It wasn’t a matter of courage or dreams, but something a whole lot simpler. A pilot would call it ground orientation. I’d spent a long time circling above the clouds, looking for life, while Hallie was living it.

Five miles outside of Santa Rosalia Pueblo, Loyd stopped the truck, pulled off his cowboy boots, and put on moccasins. Shortly we were going to have to get out and walk through snow.

“Saving your boots?” I asked.

He ignored me. Those particular boots looked as though they’d hitchhiked to hell and back without getting a single ride.

“Me and Leander used to come home at the end of the summer wearing cowboy boots and Mama would have a fit. And cowboy hats. She’d grab off our hats and swat us with them and say, ‘Ahh! You look like Navajos!’”

I’d never seen Loyd wear a hat of any kind, now that I thought about it. His story brought back a memory, vague and incomplete, of cowboy boots and a hat I’d had myself, as a child. I could just recall the sheen of lacquered straw, and a terrible sadness.

“You see it yet?”

I squinted toward the south, but saw only snow-covered hills dotted with dark, spherical juniper bushes. The horizon was punctuated with bleak mesas whose rock shoulders stood exposed to the cold. “See what?”

“Where we’re going to sleep tonight.”

“I hope not.”

A few minutes later he asked again. I saw mesas and scalped hills with rocky outcroppings on their tops. I saw juniper trees, and snow. “Is this an eye test?” I asked.

We were practically inside Santa Rosalia Pueblo before I saw it. The village was built on a mesa and blended perfectly with the landscape, constructed of the same stones as the outcroppings that topped all the other, empty mesas. Horses and broadfaced cattle looked up at us from their pens as Loyd’s red truck, the newest-looking thing within a hundred miles, rolled up the dirt track into town.

It was a village of weathered rectangles, some stacked stepwise in twos and threes, the houses all blending into one another around a central plaza. The stone walls were covered with adobe plaster, smooth and appealing as mud pies: a beautiful brown town. The color brown, I realized, is anything but nondescript. It comes in as many hues as there are colors of earth, which is commonly presumed infinite.

We left the truck in the company of other pickups and station wagons at the edge of town, and walked up into the narrow streets. In his moccasins Loyd walked with a softer, less aggressive gait. Jack stayed close to his left knee. There wasn’t a soul out, but lines of smoke drifted from chimneys and the big adobe beehive ovens that squatted in every third or fourth backyard. A black dog pawed at the edge of a frozen puddle. The ladders that connected one rooftop to the next were drifted lightly with snow. One house had a basketball hoop nailed to the end beams. Front curtains everywhere glowed with warm interior light, though it was still early afternoon, and strings of bright red chilies hung by the front doors.

Loyd’s mother’s house had a green door. The front window was crowded with artificial flowers and ceramic animals. Loyd’s oldest sister, Birdie, met us at the door. The two of them spoke rapidly in a language that sounded like song, as if the pitch might be as important as the syllable. Birdie had a perm, and wore a large turquoise necklace over her flowered blouse. She stopped talking to Loyd just long enough to touch my arm and say, “He still has that dog, don’t he?” and “Come get warm.” We followed her into the kitchen, where Loyd’s mother enveloped him with a hug, then tugged his ponytail and lightly boxed his ears.

“What’s she saying?” I asked Birdie.

“She’s saying he looks like a Navajo.”

The kitchen smelled of cedar smoke. Inez Peregrina was cooking a goose, among other things. She wore a large dress composed of about six different cotton fabrics, florals and plaids, somehow colorfully harmonic. The frames of her glasses were large and owlish. Her gray hair was trimmed in bangs and a pageboy over her ears, but long in back, twisted into a heavy, complicated coil and tied with red cloth. Her hands were noticeably large. I wanted her to hug me too, but she only smiled and touched my cheek when Loyd introduced us. She continued talking to him in a steady, musical downpour, to which he was attentive.