The Long Walk to the Crown

It is an ever-warm, damp-laundry Managua night, and at 8:16 p.m. Bob walked out of the Managua Inn. The air was filled with the smell of diesel, cooling asphalt, the final fumes of fried maduro by street vendors and the metallic hope of rain which may finally appear to happen after night. He put the cheap sunglasses which he did not actually need yet continued to put on due to habit and glanced up the hill.

Not a metaphor. An actual hill. Cerro de la Colonia, or so the natives named this particular slope of bastards which on the opposite side of the hotel appeared to be offering the middle finger to any pedestrian approaching after night. Up there somewhere--beyond the broken walk, now illuminated by the intermittent street-lamps, the open sewers also glowing with sodium orange, the bony dog scampering on all fours in the darkness, the motos that ranged by screaming through the darkness even more ferociously--was the Burger King. The sole one in this quadrant of the city. The crown beacon, which flows in the dark.

But first, a detour.

Bob went over the broken road to the old orange apartment house on the other end. And with a whistle he banged against the rusty gate. Several seconds later the metal door buzzed open and Stuart came out already in his own pair of defeated sunglasses (because why break tradition) and a T-shirt that had gone to surrender to the humidity hours ago.

Thought the night would make you go, Stuart said, getting out of the sidewalk.

"Thought about it," Bob replied. Then I recalled that the Whopper can do whatever he pleases at what time of day.

They began to pass by side.

First there was the shattered concrete, and treacherous in the light. All the third slabs were gone or slanted on drunken principles, and it was necessary to jump out in an awkward sort of hopscotch at the flicker of expired bulbs. A moto boy passed round them both, red taillight on their heels, screaming away something in the clatter of the engines. They decided to assume that it was adoration.

Then the dogs. Three of them, of caramel, ribs appearing as of the cage bars. They woke slowly out of the shadows of a mango-tree, gleaming in the street-light, and making the couple the once-over, they found that two hot-blooded foreigners at night was not worth the trouble and slipped back into the darkness. Small mercies.

Almost halfway up, the pavement merely stopped. Just stopped. It was now dirt track, gravel crunching beneath the soles of feet, and every now and then a piece of rebar lying like a trap in the darkness. Somehow still awake, a chicken dashed by their side, half a tortilla in his beak, like a little pirate bearing his loot of the night. Stuart pointed. Bob laughed quietly. They kept going.

Even in the chillier night their backs were running with sweat. their shirts were now second, and very wet skins. On the left a small tienda came into view, with its single fluorescent tube buzzing, and reggaeton so loud that they could feel their ribs vibrating. They purchased two Pepsis that they had in the cooler, which were the coldest. Their hands were perspiring with the bottles. After a moment they drank quietly and laid the cold glass on their foreheads as the men who seek to baptize themselves of the heat of the day.

The hill got steeper. Their cows began to grumble in the specific language of those who have not used stairs since the pandemic. The two gringos were being punished under the streetlamps before a crowd of teenage boys who sat on a low wall and stopped their conversation to watch. One of them was imitating wiping his brow theatrically, and then doubling it to the second victim. Bob and Stuart handed over similar weak thumbs-up. The boys laughed, faint, and affirmative. Fair.

And then--destined to take forty minutes, it was, but must have been twenty-three--the golden crown rose over the treetops, and shone more on the black sky. Burger King. Shining. Air-conditioned. Still faintly redolent of fries, fifty meters distant, borne in the night air.

They were stumbling in the parking lot like men back home after the same war. Slammed the glass door open. The cold air hit them like a blessing of heavenly mercy.

The teenage cashier glanced up from her phone, completely unfazed by the late hour.

"Bienvenidos. ?Que desean ordenar?"

Still gasping like the last run of the block, Bob and Stuart could only utter two words together:

"Whopper. Grande."

She nodded so solemnly as though she knew just how serious the shared night journey was.

They went to a corner booth and put their trays on and with reverent hands stripped off the burgers, and at the same instance gave the first bite.

Down way down below they still went on with the racket of their tumultuous life under the streetlights. Here, in the flourescent world of flame-grilled meat and lettuce that has been wilted, everything was a minute or two at most.

The hill had been climbed.

The crown had been earned.

Together. In the dark.