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Home > Science Fiction > Science Fiction General & Other > The Magician and the Fool-eBook

The Magician and the Fool

Anderson, Barth

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The Magician and the Fool

Chapter One

Nicaraguan roosters never need the excuse of a sun to start screaming. A prowler startles one, or maybe it's a pair of headlights or another chicken, but with one loud cluck, that lone rooster sets off a chain reaction of shrieking across Managua. Nicaraguans never seemed to notice; to a local, a crying rooster was like a taxi horn to a New Yorker. You tuned it out or you never slept. Tonight, they started at 3 a.m. This was only his second night in Managua, and Rosemont hadn't learned to ignore them yet. He unwrapped himself from the sleeping priest and slid from bed.

After stepping into sweatpants, he walked around to the main gate leading into the Casa Evangelista courtyard. Enfolded in amniotic darkness, a broad-leafed tree nodding overhead in the night's sultry breeze, he sat by the bookcases in the open-roofed atrium where he could see through the front security gate into the street. Rosemont liked this hostel. He'd been backpacking south from Mexico and this was the fanciest place he'd stayed in since Costa Rica. Meals of gallo pinto (beans and rice), a hard-boiled egg, and a little cheese. Fans in the rooms. Showers with no warm water, but no one wanted it. Travelers from all over the world intersected here, some coming with church groups to offer aid, some to see the volcano south of Managua.

From the atrium, Rosemont could hear the Australian couple having noisy sex in the bathroom. Just that afternoon they'd been arguing bitterly, and just as loudly. He could also hear the group of European students drinking, flirting, and lamely trying to be quiet in one of their rooms. After translating for the hostel's cook, who had a crush on one of the French women, Rosemont had left that party a couple of hours ago.

Mentioned in most of the backpack travel guides, Casa Evangelista was an oasis after the trip that Rosemont had taken down from the Segovia region in northwest Nicaragua on Saturday. In exchange for food and board, he'd been picking coffee in that frontier for weeks. The harvest was over now, it was May, so he followed one of the shipments of beans south to market. Hopping aboard a wide wooden flatbed used for transporting one-hundred-pound bags of green coffee, he left the cloud-rinsed farms of the high Isabel mountains. Unfortunately for him, just before reaching the arid, middle regions of the country, Rosemont lost his hat when standing to hand a bottle of rum to a fellow hitchhiker. The man laughed, watching it spin along the dirt road behind the truck, and saluted it. "Go with God, hat!" Rosemont had laughed too. But when the sun vaulted to midheaven less than an hour later, he was baking like the wet coffee beans drying on wide, concrete patios that they passed along the road—nothing between him and the pounding Nicaraguan sun.

Around noon, as the mountain road stepped down into the deserts outside Matagalpa, his breakfast rum-buzz had worn off and Rosemont realized he was in trouble. He drank all the water in his one water bottle. He traded places to take advantage of what little shade he could get from the flatbed's crossbeam. He draped a T-shirt from his pack over his head, but he was already near heatstroke, dehydrated from rum and sun, and his whole body rumbled in a fevery hallucination of bouncing farm trucks, leafy boughs of coffee growing out of the stuffed burlap bags around him, and his landed-gentry grandparents back in t

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Title of ebook: The Magician and the Fool
ISBN: 9780553903935
Publisher: Bantam Books
Internet download file size: 322 kb
Released online for download: 03-25-2008
Author of eBook: Anderson, Barth