Red Jungle (2 page)

The bartender walked out from the bar and put a new beer in front of him. “I put it next to my girlfriend’s heart,” the bartender said. “It’s ice cold.”

They both laughed. It had started to rain, first softly, then suddenly in a great hostile downpour. The voices in the bar seemed to get louder. Russell could hear the rain striking the building’s corrugated metal roof.

He slid the shotgun shell into the pocket of his jeans and turned and watched a couple dance. Suddenly, and for the first time in his life, he admitted to himself that he was completely lost. He put the idea aside quickly, a little afraid of it.

His mother’s family had owned one of the biggest coffee plantations in the country. His mother, Isabella Cruz, had been raped, murdered and thrown into a ditch by communist guerrillas, while he’d been sitting in a math class a thousand miles away. He’d gotten a long letter at school from his uncle, who’d written him with the news. His uncle’s letter had been very beautiful, but lacked something.

Russell’s mother had died when he was ten. They had been very close, in the oddest way. They had an understanding and sympathy towards each other that went beyond the usual mother and son relationship. There was no possible way to describe it; words do fail sometimes. Because of the war, he’d been sent abroad to school. His relationship with his mother had been epistolary for the most part, although he’d come back here to visit her for all his vacations.

Because he’d been trained not to show “weakness” in the military schools he’d attended, he hadn’t allowed himself to cry when he got the news of her death. Sometimes, however, when he’d glance at his writing desk, he’d felt like it. He’d seen other boys cry, and he hated it. He wanted to slap them. It seemed a violation of everything they’d been taught about being a soldier.

He was eight when he was told that war would make him a man. He’d believed his teachers, the way young boys do.

The school had been brutal, so he’d learned to cope with brutality and physical violence at a very young age. (Every adult on the staff, short of the cooks, had the right to practice corporal punishment on the students, and they had.) He’d become expert at both psychological warfare and the strange, capricious, and often purely sadistic behavior of adults.

Many of his fellow students would die trying to prove how tough they were. One died in Somalia in Delta force, the toughest of the tough. Russell had seen his name in the newspaper. They had been on the cross country team together. He remembered the boy catching him on a hill once in the rain, and they’d raced along together in silence, sharing the pain of a long run.

His school was shut down when the idea of making “soldiers” out of young boys finally went out of fashion. As far as he was concerned, it had been a good education, and prepared him for a world that was less than fair most of the time.

Russell watched the old American’s beat-up, lime green Volkswagen bus pull up in front of the bar, right where the men had planted the cross. The driver’s-side door was bashed in. The old American slid out, locked his bus up and waited for the traffic to clear on the road, then ran across in the downpour.

He must be seventy or even older
, Russell thought, watching him run towards the door. He was spry, though. The old man came into the bar and, seeing Russell, approached him with a decrepit bonhomie that was common out here when finding a fellow American who might be better off than oneself. The shoulders of his worn cowboy shirt were stained dark from the rain.

“I don’t care what kind of beer… anything wet.
Tres Rios.
It’s impossible trying to find it, if you’ve never been up there.

No signs. Nothing to go by. You should get some quality coffee

out of a place like that. You said you were going to
buy
it?”

“Yes,” Russell said.

“Wow. That takes guts, with coffee not worth shit right now.” The old American looked at Russell from ancient, keen eyes. “Don’ pay too much, that’s all,” the old man said, after they exchanged handshakes. “You can call me Coffee Pete.”

Russell signaled the bartender and ordered him the beer he’d asked for.

“I know the way all right. Don’t worry, I can save you a lot of time, I spent years out near
Tres Rios
chicken farming,” the old man said. The American’s blue eyes darted around the barroom, landing on a young bar girl in a red tank top and white short shorts, sitting alone.

Russell didn’t ask the old man his connection to the Frenchman who owned the plantation he was going to buy. He didn’t really care if there was one.

“You should listen to me, son,” Coffee Pete said. “Get out of this damn country while you’re still young. Hell! Better places than this backwater. Why don’t you go to New York?”

“I was there,” Russell said.

“No shit. Girls there all had good jobs and big tits — when I was there, anyway.”

Coffee Pete managed to smile and flirt with the young girl halfway across the barroom. “Don’t be like me. I can’t leave now.” The old American was tall, wore dirty khaki pants, and had a short-barreled .45 shoved into an expensive-looking quick draw holster on his right side. The side arm was the only clean-looking thing on him.

He claimed he’d come to Guatemala to train the Cubans for the Bay of Pigs invasion for the CIA and decided to stay on. Russell could see he’d been big and strong and proud once. He was diffident now, not proud anymore, but still dangerous, Russell thought. Maybe it was even true about the Bay of Pigs. But one heard so much bullshit in these bars.

“I guess you can pay me now. Three hundred Q,” Coffee Pete said, putting down his empty beer glass. “If you don’t mind. If I had time, I’d take that girl over there and go have a relax out back.” He smiled, and Russell saw a great animal cunning in the old man’s face.

Russell counted out the money and added fifty quetzales, just because the old man seemed down and out and he felt sorry for him.

“I didn’t think there were people like you anymore,” the old man said, thanking him. “Generous people out here don’t last, as a rule. Only the mean last, kid. ’Cause the mean just don’t give a shit about heaven.” He slipped the money into his shirt pocket, behind taped-up reading glasses. Russell paid the bill and they left. The old man went to the bathroom, telling him to follow him once he got his VW turned around and pointed south.

Russell went out to the parking lot and loaded his combat shotgun with six rounds of double-0 buck shot. He loaded the little Velcro belt built right into the stock of the shotgun, then put more loose rounds on the seat, where he could get to them quickly. When he was finished, he laid his weapon on the seat next to him and looked out at the road. He’d tried unsuccessfully to buy a hand grenade on the black market. In a firefight they made all the difference. He would try again, he thought, waiting. He didn’t want to die defenseless, as his mother had. The war had ended, but not the violence.

Russell watched the old American come out of
La Ultima,
run to his VW bus, and start it up. It belched smoke. The old man flashed him a smile, then pulled carefully out into traffic and took off. Russell kept expecting, as he watched from the parking lot, for the VW to turn around and come back south. The old man drove off, gaining speed, heading north toward Mexico.

Russell watched him pass a truck and disappear. He thought about chasing him, but decided against it. It would be a race into the town, there were a thousand side roads to turn into and hide, and undoubtedly the old man, like any good rat, knew all the good holes. He took off with only the name of the plantation and a curt description of how to find it. He got that lost feeling again as he drove south, but it passed.

He’d written his mother a last letter soon after her death. He wrote it on her birthday and mailed it. In that letter, he told his mother everything he’d never gotten a chance to tell her. He laid out his plans for the future, telling her that he thought that his years of military school had been good for him, and that he hoped to be a doctor or soldier; something “worthwhile.” There had been a moment after he’d read his uncle’s letter when he’d been gripped with a horrible panic. He thought he might have no future at all.

He’d walked to the duty officer’s room and handed him the letter, which was a “dead letter” even before it was mailed. The older boy—a captain—in mufti, because it was the weekend, was on the phone with his girlfriend. The captain nodded to him, took his letter and threw it on a pile with many others; and that was it. He’d gotten on with his life. He’d gone on. Now he’d ended up back here in his mother’s country, half crazy and not even aware of it.

ONE

Isabella Cruz Price, despite all the people around her, felt very alone. She turned the crank of the old-fashioned black telephone in the morning room, trying to get a line.

The Cruz family plantation, Las Flores, was enormous—ten thousand acres. Even now, parts of it had never been planted or exploited in any way; whole tracts lay virginal and untouched. It was a verdant, tree-filled womb, creating oxygen that would fill the lungs of Californians, New Yorkers, and Englishmen without them ever knowing where it came from. The plantation had been bought by her great-grandfather for—it was said—one thousand dollars, long before Isabella was born and sent to the United States to study at a convent school near San Francisco. A nun at that school fell in love with her, because even as a young girl, she was very beautiful. Isabella had thick chestnut hair, very white skin, and exciting blue eyes that pulled you in. The nun—who lost her faith— would die years later still thinking about Isabella, still completely in love with her.

She got a line. The telephone operator put her through to her brother’s apartment in Guatemala City. Isabella heard the phone ring. She pictured the living room of the apartment with its view of Avenida La Reforma, the grandness of that view. The street, a Third World version of the Champs Élysées, had been designed by an architect who hoped Guatemala City might, someday, be the Paris of Central America. He was an intelligent fool, or an extreme optimist; the city would never be anything like Paris.

When they were children, Isabella and her brother would drink lemonade on Sunday, before lunch with the family, watching out for their father’s car—a big black chauffeur driven Buick—as it came down the widest avenue in Central America. They would rollerskate through the halls of the apartment, frantic to greet him. They had been very happy as children, surrounded by three generations of the family and the knowledge that somehow they were important and powerful.

Isabella had kissed the President of the Republic on the cheek in front of that big window in the living room. Isabella had had her first period in that apartment, mystified by the bleeding. Feeling as if she were going to die, she’d run into the arms of her Indian nanny crying, very frightened.

Her brother, Roberto Cruz, had changed some things about the apartment, modernizing many of the rooms after their parents died. He’d sold off some of the old-world furniture. Her brother loved everything new and everything American. He wanted, more than anything, to be a modern American swinger. Isabella loved the heavy antique furniture her grandmother had brought with her from France. It was said that her grandmother had been born and died in the same bed. Her brother had sold the bed and bought something out of a catalog from the United States, with an upholstered headboard and a built-in TV set. The advertisement had claimed that this style bed was used by the stars in Hollywood. The TV set had never worked.

She missed the heavy purple curtains that had hung in her grandmother’s bedroom. The dark curtains seemed in keeping with the somber visits she remembered from an ancient Spanish priest, who had fought alongside Franco and against the Spanish Republic. The priest came every day while Isabella’s grandmother was dying. He would hold Isabella’s hand and tell her that Christ loved her very much. She was glad that Christ loved her. It made her feel good. She knelt by her grandmother’s bed, her skates on, and prayed to Christ, asking him not to take her grandmother away.

Her grandmother died the month they sent Isabella to the United States to go to school. Her grandmother had said something to her in French the morning they brought Isabella in to say goodbye. Isabella never understood what her grandmother had said. She had simply told her granddaughter: “Enjoy life, dear. It is very short.”

Isabella wished she and her baby were in the capital, safe. But they weren’t. There was going to be a war. The air was different now. Even the rain was different now, the way it fell against the coffee patios in unforgiving thunderous moments.

She looked down the hallway of the plantation house towards the bedroom where her infant son, Russell, was sleeping. She wondered if he would always love her. Her son had the blood of two countries: Guatemala, the poor coffee country, and The United States, the great top hat country of Henry Ford and Broadway and jet planes and smoking factories. She called him her little Yankee when she fed him, and would laugh while stroking his white skin. She had bathed her son in the same bathtub she’d been bathed in, a bathtub her grandfather had bought and had carried from Puerto Barrios in 1899, through the jungle, to rest here in the plantation house that hadn’t changed in more than a hundred years. Indians who saw the porcelain bathtub coming up the narrow jungle track —like some porcelain god— would bow, her father had told her, laughing. The Indians, the story went, would run from their houses just to touch its white sides with the magical words “American Standard.”