Red Jungle (12 page)

Mahler started chopping into the bush. The machete made a pleasing sound as it struck wood, a metallic biting sound that Russell had always liked.

“It was a thousand years ago…” Mahler said without turning around. “I found Bakta Halik, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, that you did,” Russell said. He climbed off his horse, tied it next to Mahler’s, then pulled his machete out of the scabbard hanging from his saddle. He’d chosen a different style of machete; his was long and wicked-looking, and served as a weapon, because it was light, as well as for hacking bush. He’d had it sharpened by one of the men at the plantation. It was razor sharp, the dirty blade silver where it had been sharpened.

Mahler stopped and turned. He had a .45 stuck in a clip-on holster in the small of his back. “We have some coffee first?” He took his thermos out of the pack on his horse.

Carl rode up, his blond hair dark and plastered to his head from the rain. He looked miserable. Carl’s horse had settled down now. Russell waded through the water and took the horse’s halter.

“Now what?” Carl asked

“Get down,” Russell said.

“I’ll get wet,” Carl said. Russell looked at the man, incredulous. “My feet. The water is cold.”

“Get the fuck off the horse before I pull you off,” Russell said. Carl said something in German to Mahler.

“He doesn’t want to get his feet wet. And he’s heard there are snakes in the water,” Mahler said in a monotone. He was carefully pouring coffee into the black top of a thermos. His backpack was slung on one shoulder, his machete driven into a tree limb right behind him.

“Four Steppers?” Russell said. A black snake called
cuatro pasos
lived in Guatemalan rivers. As a boy with the cowboys on his mother’s cattle ranch, Russell often saw them when the cowboys were herding cattle across rivers. They were called “Four Steppers” because that’s how many steps you took, after being bitten, before you died. Russell had seen horses bitten and drop the rider, who’d been bitten too after he fell. The cowboys called that a “lucky shot.”

“You’re a great big fat giant pussy, my friend,” Russell said in English. “Now get off that fucking horse.”

“I can’t. I’m afraid.” Mahler stepped forward and handed Russell first the cup of coffee, then his backpack. He calmly walked up and pulled Carl off his horse as if he were unloading a sack of some kind. Carl squealed and fought like a little girl all the way down. When he stopped carrying on, Russell pulled a machete from the scabbard on Carl’s saddle and handed it to him.

“If you see a snake, you let us know,” Russell told him. The rain and Carl’s behavior had put him in a foul mood.

Ten feet inside the bush, it was so hot they had to strip off their shirts despite the rain. Mahler had pinned his long hair up on his head so he looked like a Sikh. His skin was fish belly white, but he was wiry, and his muscles were visible under the skin. He seemed tireless.

Russell and he worked together side by side, cutting through the thick growth. They’d tried to get Carl to help pull the larger pieces away, but he was useless. Tiny mosquitoes rested on them as they worked, undisturbed by their violent motions.

Russell stopped, looking down at his chest that was, at times, covered with them. They’d made jokes about getting malaria and being bitten by a
cuatro pasos
at the same time. They figured one would cure the other.

They went through all the coffee and began to drink river water. It tasted like copper pennies and was very cold. Twenty feet in, they climbed up on solid ground, and the way got a little easier. When Russell looked behind him, he saw a green tunnel, and at the end the river.

Suddenly, they were free enough to see several feet in front of them. Mahler stopped. He was sweating like a pig. They fell on their knees.

“I told you it might not be so bad once we got inside further.”

Russell could hear the screaming of monkeys above them in the canopy. They could still hear the river behind them.

“Where’s Carl?”

“How the fuck should I know,” Russell said. “I thought he was behind us.”

He’d had to throw Carl over his horse despite his screaming. He would never forget the way he screamed on the way back. The way it seemed to take forever to do those ten kilometers. The river growing muddy from the rain. The light leaving them in the end. The horses jumpy, because Carl kept screaming and moaning. Even now, in the house, with Carl in the bedroom with the doctor, Russell couldn’t get that sound of the screaming out of his head.

He crumpled the beer can. The room smelled of weed smoke and beer. It was pitch black outside. He hadn’t taken a shower yet; his clothes were still damp. His palms burnt from the blisters he’d gotten from the hacking.

A jaguar had attacked Carl. It had clawed his face real good while he’d gone to shit.

“That was bad,” Russell said. “I never want to hear screaming like that again.”

“Jaguars up there are bi…big. …He’s lucky it didn’t break his neck,” Mahler said.

“I need something stronger,” Russell said. “Jesus.”

“I have tequila.”

“Get it,” Russell said. “God, this is a filthy country. Something like that . . . Jesus.”

“We warned him,” Mahler said.

“It’s just—
Jesus.
That shouldn’t happen to
anyone
.” He watched Mahler walk down the hallway. He could hear the steady drumming of the rain on the house’s metal roof. He heard the door open, and the doctor from Colomba came out of the last bedroom, where they’d taken Carl.

For the first five kilometers, he’d never heard any kind of screaming like that. Even now, sitting in the living room, he couldn’t bear thinking about that trip back, with Carl tied to his horse. Twice they’d stopped, because Carl was begging them to. Russell hadn’t even wanted to turn around and look at him.

“You shoot me, yeah. Please,” Carl had said, breathing funny from so much screaming and crying.

“We’ll be there soon,” Russell said, turning to look at him. The way his head hung over the side of the horse. His hair all bloody, his pants down, his face clawed and his ass too.

It was Mahler who had taken Carl’s reins, pulled his horse around and convinced him not to listen. Telling him that the only chance Carl had was them getting him back to
Tres Rios
and then calling a doctor.

“You shoot him and then what? We have no one to broker the Jaguar,” Mahler said. His jungle hat was wet.

The light was almost gone, so that they could see only the mist and the lighter rocks in the river now. Russell could make out Mahler’s face in the twilight. He didn’t really give a shit about Carl. He just wanted to sell that Jaguar when they found it. Carl started begging Mahler to shoot him, but Mahler just kicked his horse, and they started again downriver towards
Tres Rios
.

Doctor Calsado was a veterinarian, not an MD. But out here in the bush, Calsado was called a lot of the time in emergencies when people couldn’t find the regular doctor.

The doctor was the color of coffee and milk. He’d been born out in Livingston. He was a large man, with a large man’s rolling gait, and he carried an old fashioned black doctor’s bag, having accepted his status as an ersatz MD.

“Mahler’s getting tequila,” Russell said.

“Good,” the doctor said in English. He’d trained in the States, in Texas. His specialty was large animals, horses and cows. He’d been working when Mahler had called him on his cell phone. They’d had to wait more than an hour for him to arrive.

“Is he going to be all right?” Russell asked.

“Yes. In a day or two, he can get out of bed. Twenty-five stitches in his face alone. I put forty or more in his ass. He’ll have to take only liquids for forty-eight hours. But he’ll be all right.”

“He’ll live, then?” Russell said.

“Yes. He just won’t look quite the same,” the doctor said. “Where’s Mahler? I need a drink. You two saved his life.”

“I would have brought mescal. I mean, to celebrate,” Mahler said, coming back inside. Russell heard the doctor start to laugh. It was the kind of joke they made in Guatemala; Russell understood they helped defeat the ugliness of the place, but he couldn’t laugh, not this time.

For just a moment back on the river, he’d thought of shooting Carl. For just a moment, when he saw him like that, suffering, begging Russell to do it. He had thought of doing it, just for a moment. Now he was glad he hadn’t. Mahler had been right.

Russell got up and got them glasses. He heard the doctor and Mahler laugh again while he was in the kitchen.
Bloody, bloody country,
he thought.

“And what were you doing up the
Rio Amargo
like that? It’s full of
cuatros pasos,
” the doctor said, when Russell handed them each a drink. He didn’t know what to answer. He looked at Mahler for help.

“My friend just bought the place, and he’s insisted on seeing
all
of it,” Mahler said, sitting down across from the doctor.

“Well then, you must be crazy,” the doctor said in his Texas accent. He looked at Russell and took a drink. “But you won’t last long acting crazy out here. I promise you that.”

“I keep telling him that, too,” Mahler said. “But he won’t listen to me. He’s an American. You know how they are.”

“Yeah. I do,” the doctor said.

TEN

He’d thought about Beatrice constantly during the ten days he and Mahler spent at
Tres Rios
looking for the Red Jaguar. When he got back to the capital, he tried to tell himself that his decision to cover the presidential election had nothing to do with having met her. But he knew it wasn’t true. He’d been jealous of General Selva, and was smitten with his wife. He couldn’t, in fact, get her out of his mind.

Despite himself, he wanted to understand how a beautiful young woman like Beatrice could have married a man of Selva’s type. Had she married him only for his money? The general’s family was one of the richest in the country. Had he swept her off her feet?

Katherine had told him on the way back from the general’s plantation that the two had met in England when Beatrice had descended from Oxford graduate to stripper. The general had been the military attaché at the embassy. He’d frequented the strip club where she worked. She may simply have fallen in love with him, without knowing much about him.

None of it made sense, because he was jealous but couldn’t admit it. He simply told himself he was appalled, without asking himself
why
he should care so much about a young woman he’d met only once.

Russell was looking out his office window at the view of the avenue
La Reforma
. Below him, streams of noon-time traffic poured around the huge roundabout crowned by a statue of a Spanish conquistador who’d captured Central America.

His cell phone lay on his cluttered desk, along with his notes on Antonio De La Madrid, the candidate opposing Selva in the election. De La Madrid’s party was called the PAN—
Partido Accion Nacional
. The PAN was a staunchly capitalist pro-business party at loggerheads with the World Bank and the IMF. Russell had just interviewed an old liberal senator who told him that Carlos Selva was going to be the next president of the country because Antonio De La Madrid scared everyone, including the American embassy.

The senator, Rudy Valladolid, had been slightly drunk when he showed up at eleven in the morning at the café at the Camino Real Hotel. The well known left-leaning senator ordered a drink immediately, despite the early hour. The senator smoked Marlboros incessantly, and looked as if he might keel over from a heart attack at any moment. He was sure that General Selva’s opponent would be assassinated, he told Russell matter-of-factly. “He’ll either be shot at his home, or killed with one of his mistresses in bed,” the senator said as he lit a cigarette. “But it won’t really matter how they do it.”

“Why kill him?” Russell asked. The senator smiled, put his cigarette in the ash tray, and took a swallow of his drink, studying him.

The old man’s eyes were jaundiced and the color of scotch whiskey. Russell couldn’t help feeling that Valladolid was a political dinosaur. Cuba and the rest of that socialist mess had already been thrown on the junk heap of history, as far as Russell was concerned. He was sorry that he’d made the appointment. He’d hoped that the Senator, who had a reputation for being the country’s most astute political observer despite his left wing leaning, could have helped him sort out the political players. But what could this old man possibly know about the new world that his generation represented? Russell suspected that he didn’t even have a computer. He asked him as much.

“I have a pen,” the senator said. “It’s worked fine for sixty years—no,
longer.
It’s was my great-grandfather’s fountain pen. He signed the constitution here. You know our constitution was patterned after yours. After America’s. Do you know why President Ubico had my father killed?” Ubico had been the military dictator during the 20’s—a little Napoleon, and really no more than the United Fruit Company’s representative in the country.