After being lured into an open-air market by a drug dealer, a traveler finds himself lost in a maze of alleyways where danger lurks in the shadows.
They told me not to follow drug dealers down sketchy alleyways, but when I started following him, I hadn’t realized he would take me into the maze of Granada, Nicaragua’s open-air market. Night had fallen, but the moon had yet to rise. The sky was cloudy, starless, and black. What had been a bustling marketplace during the day–so full of people that you often had to squeeze through the crowd–was now abandoned and pitch-black. In the light, the biggest safety concern was watching your wallet, so it didn’t run off in the warmth of a pickpocket’s embrace. In the dark, there was potential for something far more sinister.
The dealer seemed to know the way by memory, stepping around heaps of garbage fragrant in the hot night. I could barely see his gray hoodie a half-step in front of me. I followed him over splintering particle boards and broken wooden pallets that half-covered puddles sitting stagnant since last week’s rain as we wound our way through little walkways barely wide enough for two people to stand side by side. It was dark enough for me to walk face-first into a wall or something worse. We turned blindly around corners and passed stalls closed for the night, where it only took one man lurking with a knife, or not even that—a broken bottle or screwdriver would be enough, let alone a machete—to give me a very real reason to be scared.
Even if the guy I’d met a few minutes ago, sitting on the corner selling drugs, wasn’t leading me into an ambush, it didn’t mean that I was safe. If we ran into the wrong people back here, we could both get jumped. Being Nicaraguan didn’t mean he had a get-out-of-being-mugged-free card. I stayed as close to him as I could, fighting the urge to turn and run the other way. I kept telling myself that if I got out of this one ok, I would learn a martial art, as if promising the universe that I would be a better fighter in the future would keep me safe in the moment. Getting stabbed had been on my mind.
I’d spent the previous couple of days in San Juan del Sur, a once quaint fishing village that tourism had turned into a party town/surf slum just north of the Costa Rican border on Nicaragua’s Pacific Coast. For my last day there, I went to Sunday Funday, a pub crawl that claims to be Central America’s best party. A drug dealer in one of the bars had confused me for a different gringo who must have been selling drugs on the guy’s turf. He’d stalked me off and on during the afternoon and then ended up coming after me with a knife at the last bar. I ran for my life. That was last night. Leaving San Juan on the first bus of the day, I’d gotten into Granada mid-morning and had spent the day half-hungover and a little jumpy.
Just out of college, I was seven months into a trip that I was set on making last for the rest of my life, and in the last week of a five-month stint in Nicaragua. I’d spent most of my time in Nicaragua in León, working as a backpacking guide, leading trips up volcanoes, and making an effort to be on my best behavior. Besides the occasional little slip-up, I’d done a pretty good job staying out of trouble.
But a few minutes ago, when a random dude sitting on the curb in a gray hoodie with the brim of his hat pulled low over his eyes had asked, “Hey chele, ¿quieres comprar marí?” I’d let myself get talked into buying three joints of “mango kush de Honduras” for seventy cordobas, which back then amounted to around two dollars US.
The plan was to smoke on the roof of my guest house, or maybe even in the courtyard if the owner was chill. I wanted to look up at the moon and try to remember as many of the things that happened to me since I’d hit the road in May in as much detail as possible to try to fix them in my memory forever. I also wanted a moment to reflect on how I was getting my life back on track and doing all the things I’d said I wanted to do.
Turning left around a stall, I saw light at the end of the alley. As we got closer, I realized we were headed towards a lit street. Maybe this wasn’t a setup. The dealer did seem like a good guy. Light didn’t mean that I could completely relax, but it was a good sign. I could feel the tension melt away as the dealer and I emerged from the darkness, and my adrenaline levels started to decrease.
We were on a residential street that had once been paved, and while there weren’t any streetlights on this end of the block, there were on the far end, where children played, women chatted in rocking chairs in front of houses, and men ate meat and gallo pinto from Styrofoam containers, washing it down with beer from big green bottles of Toña. The street and the sidewalk had been built at different angles, causing the curb that started at a normal height at the far end of the block to get higher and higher as the street got lower and lower, the closer they got to the market, until the sidewalk stood over a meter above the street at the corner. That little detail saved my life.
“Dame la plata,” said the dealer.
“Voy contigo,” I said.
“Tú no puedes entrar. Me esperas aquí.”
“Vas a volver, ¿no?”
“Claro chele, tranquilo.”
“Setenta, ¿no?”
He nodded.
I pulled out my wallet and passed him the cash, a wrinkled blue fifty cordoba bill and an even more weathered orange twenty. I only had one hundred cordobas left, just over three bucks, enough to get a good dinner if I ate street food. Otherwise, I didn’t have anything worth stealing. The most valuable thing I had on me was my shoes, or maybe my belt; the holes in my shoes were starting to get bigger.
Promising he would be back in a few minutes with the joints, the dealer disappeared into the darkness around the corner as I put my wallet away. A little worried that he wasn’t coming back, I took a seat on the curb, my feet dangling just above the street.
Taking a deep breath to relax, I tried not to stress out about potentially having just given my money away to a guy who might not come back. The one other time I’d gotten bud in Nicaragua it had been similar—I’d give money to some dude, and he’d come back a little later with a sack. If the dealer had wanted to take my money, he wouldn’t have led me all the way through the marketplace; he would have just asked for my cash where I met him in the street and then disappeared. And if he did decide to split with my cash, it was just two bucks. All was good.
The moon had started to rise. Children’s laughter and the smell of carne asada floated on the breeze blowing towards me from the far end of the block. Moonlight clouds marbled the sky. It was a beautiful night. Here was as good a place as any to sit and reminisce. I didn’t need a joint. And it seemed safe enough.
Following a random dealer through the dark market was stupid, but it had all worked out, and maybe that was the push that I needed to learn a martial art. I’d been talking about learning jiu-jitsu or Muay Thai for over a year. I should look into lessons. And I’d probably overreacted about the danger, too. I was being paranoid. Everything was ok. Maybe it would be good to smoke a joint and chill.
As if on cue, the dealer came back around the corner, the brim of his hat pulled low over his eyes, his gray hoodie now zipped all the way up with the hood pulled down over his hat. He stopped for half a second as if he were surprised to see me, but I smiled and held up my hand to say hi.
Seeming to finally realize that I was there, he continued out of the darkness until he was standing over me. Not saying anything, he stuck out his left hand with his palm open.
It was weird that he wouldn’t just hand me the joints. He’d been openly advertising drugs on a crowded street full of people going home after work, and now we were the only ones on this end of the block, but if that’s how he wanted to do it, that’s how he wanted to do it—his deal, his rules. I dapped him up, first high-fiving him and then going to grab the joints hidden in his sleeve before ending the handshake with a fist bump. It was the standard dealer’s handoff, but that’s where things started to go wrong. There weren’t any joints in his sleeve when I went to pull them out after slapping his hand, and when I bumped his still-open hand with my fist, he recoiled as if I’d burned him.
Taking a half step backward, he jerked away from me. I got a better view of his face, and time started to slow down. It was a different guy. A similar hoodie and a similar hat, but a different guy.
His right hand came out from behind his back. It was holding a knife. He brought it up above his head. The blade was black in the moonlight. It was big, almost as long as my forearm. His movements were strung out and shaky. He froze for a moment. Then he brought the knife down like a dagger towards my throat.
Flinging myself sidewise off the curb, I jumped backwards into the street, spinning to face him. We stared at each other like two animals ready to fight. Time had stopped.
Images of blood pouring black from my neck as I crawled through the dust of the gutter, calling for help with words that gurgled out into nothingness, flashed before my eyes. If I’d been standing instead of sitting, so he hadn’t had to bring the knife as far down to reach me, I might not have had time to dodge. I’d almost just died.
Not wanting to turn my back on him, I took a step backward further into the street. Bringing his knife back up, he took a shaky step toward me, looking down at where the sidewalk dropped off to the street, gauging the jump.
Then time was suddenly working normally again, and I started to yell in Spanish about the man with a knife who tried to stab me in the neck. He went to take another step toward me, then faltered and froze as if he, too, had just realized what was happening. Turning shakily on his heels, he disappeared back around the corner and into the darkness.
I took the long way home, making sure to stick to the light. I tried to tell myself that everything was alright, but I couldn’t stop looking back over my shoulder as if even my shadow was a threat. I was jumpy. The more time that passed, the harder my heart beat—I had time to process how close of a call I’d just had.
I spent the night with the window locked, a chair under the doorknob, and my knife on the nightstand. The next morning, I caught the first bus out of town. I haven’t been back since. I don’t tell people not to go to Granada, Nicaragua, but I do let them know to be careful and recommend against following drug dealers through the open-air market at night.
