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92 the minnesota review Dennis Trudell To the Young Man Who Said "Nuke 'em" When I Offered a Central America Flier In Managua the first day I woke early and left the air conditioner, the suitcases; I followed the scent of Managua to the movement and light in front of the hotel. There was field and the rear of a barrio, and a storehouse across the highway. Buses—old, jammed. People stood in open trucks. They came from barrios, singly, in pairs, in dresses and sneakers, ballcaps . . . There was a barrio one hundred yards to the right of the hotel. Taxis—dented, rust; someone calling: like a party had started while I had slept and now I had come and nobody cared . . . People passed on the dirt trails, the only sidewalks, going to work. In pale blue denim, untucked shirts; in skirts and heels, straw hats, in their flesh and blood. Managua was moving to the left and right, and if they noticed me it wasn't important. Tourist in front of the expensive hotel; they would earn a few dollars or return with most of the melons or rolls still pressing the skull, or they would have a baby. Or feed and wash two dozen babies. Or shine a few pairs of shoes—uncloud their lustre of eyes from young soldiers' boots—for free, for a grin, for the Revolution. . .They walked past rubbing their eyes, moving sandals or bare feet as they had the day before and would the next. Six A.M., and the colors of T-shirts and soiled tan slacks, the pink dresses, pale blue dresses. Mufflers needing repair on Volkswagons, Plymouths, motorcycles; Trudell 93 a city bus still painted to carry kids to school in Iowa or New York State in 1960. . moving, stinking. The smeU of Managua at dawn, and after dawn—all afternoon, when it presses like a warm hammer— is a human smell. And the fields, and volcanic earth, and the dirt of clothes, the pots and small fires. The unpainted boards of shacks and the fruits and rinds, the pigs, and chemicals in Lake Managua, and the hills, the hills rolUng toward and from Honduras and gunsmoke. A human smell. In the nearby shacks, hands were moving and their palms held the morning and the years before. ...

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