Fault Lines - John Knoop

Puerto Marques, August 7
We’ve taken a side trip down to Acapulco, and it’s nothing but hotels, gringo-ridden and
unappealing. The son of the Dominican Republic’s dictator Arturo Trujillo is here. He sailed in
on a beautiful four-masted, barque-rigged ship with a clipper hull and is rumored to have flown
Kim Novak down from Hollywood on a chartered DC-6. The gossip on the beach says he will
spend half a million pesos during his stay. A French woman just lost a leg and an arm to an
enterprising shark, and the shark bounty rose to 125 pesos. We’ve retreated from all this and
found a beautiful tourist-free bay a few miles south at Puerto Marques, where we pay two pesos a
night to sleep in hammocks under which the surf runs at high tide. We eat bananas, bread and
fish.
At night the bay is dotted with the lights of fishermen’s dugouts. Bodies gleaming in the
lightning hauling in a net, five on each shoulder-heaved line. If the lead man loses purchase in
the loose sand he moves seaward: an on-going rotation. The net is out about fifty yards from
shore, thirty feet long and ten deep. When they haul it up on shore there are several bushels of
fish to be divided by the fishermen’s wives. Later the men drink beer and play cards. One ageless
man sits at a table, very drunk, watching me with gnome-like, multi-focused eyes. I give him a
cigarette and light it for him. He draws on it and puts it on the table and watches it slowly roll
off. I pick it up and hand it to him and when I look back he is grinning and watching it roll off the
table again.
One of the fishermen is playing a guitar at the table with the drunk; a small crowd gathers
around to listen. The drunk nods and smiles, trying to keep time by drumming on the table.
Music: the dominant sound in my parent’s house is classical music pumped through a hi-fi
system with Voice of the Theater speakers in the living room and smaller ones all over the house
and in the basement workshop and darkroom. My father has a huge collection of 78s. He bought
one of the first players as soon as LP's became available, and the library of discs grew ever
faster. He set up a timer that would turn on the music every morning so we could start the day
with Beethoven, Vivaldi, or Mozart instead of a buzzing alarm clock.
In the milking parlor the radio remains tuned to WCKY, the most powerful voice of
country music in the Midwest; 50,000 watts of Hank Williams, Bill Munroe and the Carter
Family. Country music was part of my working life. It was in the barn that I first heard
"Blueberry Hill" and "Heartbreak Hotel". I knew as soon as I heard Elvis that his kind of
"Hillbilly Music" was not just for me, the goats and the hired men while we were milking or
cleaning up.
14