Miller Time

UNITED STATES—Sam Delaney was an ingratiating presence, and he had a big fine office building (at 12 stories you could do a lot of damage by stepping off the top, but nobody ever did in that steamy, comforting town where the atmosphere clung like amniotic fluid that surrounds a fetus, and it kept people from making that long step)....

UNITED STATES—February 3, 1975...7:53 a.m. EST. I’ve hurled myself at approximate 8 a.m. this Monday into the smutty white void. The speed of the vertical plummet is petrifying, scraping hard against by skin comically kneaded by the muscular wind. My black fedora floated off and is bouncing around the gibbous clouds. I who still answer to the name Max...

UNITED STATES—The harshness was candy-coated by money, which was for people what meat was for dogs. The mere scent whipped folks into a frenzy. The businessmen from Alabama, always left a little more meat on the bone, so as to traumatize Bananaland via the zone of “good” jobs in the Canal Zone, and the better banana jobs between the...

UNITED STATES—There had been a boiling point reached the day before when Yglesias was digging out a trench for a new irrigation canal with a steam shovel. They had been in the banana forest when they heard a huge explosion, it could have been one of the Americans dynamiting fish, and it could have just as easily been an...

UNITED STATES—It was hushed in the long barracks at night in the Valle de Sula where Juana and Antonio had met up, of all places. The whoosh-whoosh of dead tired souls prevailed, punctuated by a sneeze or dry cough. Near the river frogs said ribbit-ribbit and there was the implacable hum of mosquitoes flying, flying, mad, incessant that tormented...

UNITED STATES—I hear a lot of things as a reporter. Never know where the next story is coming from, ya know. Joe Holly once described himself as a common man who had no liking for war whatsoever, but when he got into where the shooting was, he just couldn’t get enough of it. It was a new “game” he...

UNITED STATES—His bosom buddy, who’d dubbed him “the incredible Yanqui,” the exiled Miguel Padilla, retorted, “Well, compadre. I’ve heard of a White House being turned into a bawdy house, my friend.” Phineas Cox sure had inadvertently done a heap more than any soul to stir up a hornet’s nest, that fussy corporate lawyer and former Attorney General, had been the...

UNITED STATES—In 1899, the renowned soldier for hire, Joe Holly, defected to the Honduran Government army, a move that crumbled any semblance of integrity he may have had. Yet this move paid off handsomely, as Joe was commissioned to be a colonel and became police chief of Tegucigalpa by appointment by the current president. Soon thereafter, Joe defected again...

UNITED STATES—Like the banana king, Sam Delaney, Joe Holly was fond of Central America. This land had offered Joe a second chance, and it is true that second chances are more often denied than offered in American lives. When Joe was barely out of his teens he helped build a railroad that joined Memphis and New Orleans, by way...

UNITED STATES—Lead by curiosity. . . Really Sam’s story began when he had that $8000  burning a hole in his pocket, as they say. Due to his deep conviction that he was fated to make a name for himself, while wandering around the French quarter, he saw a dimly-lit alcove behind a muslin curtain billowing in the hot wet...