Red Jungle (6 page)

This moment was to be the first impression, and memory, Russell was to have of his father. He would recall later that the man was tall, and looked down at him as Olga brought him out from the bedroom where he’d been napping. There was a lushness that he would always remember about life with his mother. She sank down beside him, her long hair falling over her shoulders.

“Mí querido, hoy te vas con tu papá
. My dearest, today you go with your papa.” She said it in both languages. Isabella rubbed his hair and held him tightly for moment.

Nothing would ever hurt her as much as that long moment. Not being alone on the plantation later, with the constant threat of death, or the loneliness of her affairs, or her addictions, or even the dreadful pain of missing her mother and father.

“He’s a big boy,” Montgomery said, walking towards him, speaking a language that Russell couldn’t really understand. Isabella wouldn’t have cried, but Olga started, and then Isabella couldn’t stop herself. The boy, not accustomed to the two women in his life crying, looked at his mother for an explanation. None, unfortunately, was forthcoming.

He was taken from his mother exactly a half hour later by a “nurse” who smelled of Listerine and called him Russ. The first word he learned in English was “Mother.” Russell once heard his father tell his stepmother that Russell’s mother was a drunk.

The first thing Russell remembered about life—about being alive—was the gunshot that had saved them. It had been very loud. His mother had shot well. Everyone at the tennis club in Quatepeque said so. The guerrilla had intended to kill them, people at the club said, because he hated the rich.

FOUR

The price of commodities throughout Latin America had collapsed completely, leaving strangled economies unable to breathe. Guatemala’s currency, the quetzal, dangled by IMF machinations and a prayer. Violent crime in the country had reached absurd, Hieronymus Bosch-style levels.

The free markets were at work, just give them time, urged his newspaper’s editorial writers. But they were in London, and even to Russell—who believed in the system—their opinions on the crisis seemed hopelessly out of touch.

Come to Carl’s Party in Antigua,
the email had said. The invitation had come to Russell’s office computer in Guatemala City, the Thursday after he’d returned from
Tres Rios
. It gave an address and a long list of people, some known to Russell, who were planning on coming. He scanned the list of names. It promised a good time and he immediately wrote back, saying he planned to come.

He called Katherine Barkley, an American girl, asking if she’d like to go to the party with him. She answered her cell phone from somewhere out on a coffee plantation, building housing for poor families.

Barkley was the opposite of the wealthy Guatemalan girls he’d been dating, girls whose main preoccupations had been their hair and their breast size. Katherine worked for a UN-affiliated NGO called “Houses for Humanity.” She was serious, intelligent and completely unimpressed by his big job with the
Financial Times
, which she considered an “establishment rag.” At the party where they’d first met, they had argued about the IMF’s role in the life of the country. She was, she’d said, an anti-globalist. He thought her position ridiculous, and told her so. He’d told her that capitalism
would
make the world richer, but it would take time.

He honestly believed that. It’s what he’d been taught at the University of Chicago, and like any neophyte, he believed what he’d been taught with passion. It was a harsh Darwinian system sometimes, he agreed, but it was better,
far better,
than anything else. Leave it to Adam Smith’s
invisible hand
. It was the only way, he’d told her. If it worked in America, it could work anywhere. Weren’t people all the same? He told her he thought it racist to think only white people had a right to prosperity.

They’d agreed to disagree, and he was surprised when she’d given him her number and told him to call her. On the way home that night, he began for the first time to silently question his beliefs. Stopped at a traffic light, he’d looked at the pedestrians as they crossed in front of him. He couldn’t help but see the pain in their faces, really see it, as they stood waiting for buses, holding a child’s hand. Their faces were marked by suffering, really stamped by it now. He’d seen it clearly—anyone could—a shared frantic look that said there were limits to patience before people exploded. The communist insurgency had lasted thirty years, and now this strange new enemy, an economic war with unseen generals and unseen armies but real casualties, was being visited upon them.

That Saturday afternoon, Katherine Barkley picked him up in her UN-issued Jeep, and they drove past the groomed concrete collection of shopping centers on the way out of the capital to the party. A red diesel-glow hung over a free trader’s dream of a skyline, bristling with gaudy bank buildings and Big-Business towers. Guatemala City was the biggest city in Central America. The diesel-smoke skyline was the carcinogenic byproduct of secondhand American school buses that had been shipped here, and were ubiquitous. Brightly painted, the “chicken buses,” as the tourists called them, spewed a rich black sulphur exhaust one could literally taste.

They passed the American-style strip-malls adorned with corporate logos: Papa John’s, Nike, IBM, Gap, PriceSmart. HBO posters hung neatly at every bus stop, telling passengers to enjoy
Band Of Brothers.
“War the way it should be,” Katherine joked
.

They passed a huge green
maquiladora
with Korean script, saying only a Korean knew what. The prison-like factory was anonymous. The tops of its high walls, wrapped in concertina wire, looked ominous and terrifying. Above the wire, the iodine-colored sunset was fiendish and hysterical.

They listened to a pop station whose DJ kept saying, “We got your
hot mix,
” in bad English.
“And there’s a shadow in the sky and it looks like rain,”
Nelly warned everyone from Pop Land. They left the buses-crawling highway at San Lucas. It was cooler up there above the city, the little shanty towns dismal and uninviting.

They took the turnoff to Antigua and started to descend on a modern three-lane highway. Katherine smiled at him, her body language seeming to invite him to kiss her. She was dressed in jeans and a white blouse. “We got your
Hot Mix.”
It was verging on dark, but they could see the outline of the
Volcan de Agua
suddenly hulking by the road, a bad actor in this country’s play. She was talking about her work in the countryside, and all he could think about was taking her clothes off.

Crosby, Stills, and Nash came on, more “We got your
hot mix
.” It was a beautiful evening despite everything. He was randy; it had been weeks since he’d slept with anyone.

They passed the last of the handmade furniture places at the bottom of the hill, just before getting into Antigua proper. Now the wan, polluted light had gone dull, like dark water pooling on a stone. A few samples, handmade desks and chairs, were being carted in by young skinny kids pushing against the twilight’s swift angles. The boys looked like crude skinny cherubs come to life.
Maybe you’ll sell tomorrow,
Russell thought.
Maybe tomorrow
someone will buy them all. He had his doubts, though. Lately he couldn’t stop the doubts pouring in. Was he changing? Like all men, he hated change. Had his professors been wrong? It had seemed impossible when he first got here, but now he wasn’t so sure. He’d been two weeks in Argentina the year before, and what he’d seen there had scared him. He’d witnessed the complete collapse of a society.

There were red taillights and cars, and the sudden confusion of Antigua’s narrow colonial-era streets. The walls of houses and buildings, very close, still glowed from the sunset. The buildings’ warm colors felt soft and welcoming. Young shop-girls walked with their black hair pinned up. The town’s colonial architecture was a blessing of another century, before the ungodly cheap modernity and buck hysteria of the capital.

They stopped for a drink at the Opera Café. They sat in the back and talked about how it was to be a foreigner in a country, how they never, no matter how well they spoke the language, quite understood all the nuances. The language had its little side streets, didn’t it? Katherine said.

He didn’t tell her he wasn’t really a stranger to the country. Even his colleagues at the paper didn’t know about his mother. Or who his family was.

They drank Chilean white wine, good, cold, and expensive. He was not one to save money. If he had it, he spent it. Sometimes he would spend it all just to feel broke, something he’d never understood about himself. To have nothing but his job and the beer in his refrigerator and the wax on his floors. He didn’t want to collect things—he’d learned they could disappear as quickly as they’d come. He’d wondered if this sense of futility was what might be wrong with him emotionally. If he wanted
things,
he could have taken another trading job in Paris or London—not become a journalist in Guatemala. Things—TV, new cars, clothes—were somehow silly here, and beside the point. Here you lived by the minute or by the hour, but no more than that.

Somehow, in the tropics, the idea of the future seemed ridiculous—and yet it wasn’t enough. He wanted money. He wasn’t even sure exactly why. Now, thinking about what he’d done with Mahler, he had no explanation for his decision. He knew it was the adventure. It wasn’t the money, not really, he decided.

He liked to look at the movie posters and the cool people who came to the café, mostly young couples drinking coffee. He liked the red of the walls and the photos of famous singers. It was his kind of place, elegant, clean, sophisticated, with something extra, something that made him relax, took him away, a mixture of the right light and the black and white tile floor and the waitresses—in Indian garb,
corte—
who were very professional, never botching things.

They had only one drink, then decided to walk on to Carl’s place for the party. They might have been in a café in New York or San Francisco, except there were a few men with pistols strapped on just under their jackets sitting at the café’s bar. They were rough-looking. They stared at Katherine as they walked out the door.
Dope,
Russell thought.
Real
killers.

FIVE

Major Douglas Purcell U.S.A.R.
Blackwell Academy
232 White Blossom Road
Palo Alto, California 96601

April 2, 1988
Mrs. Isabella Cruz Price
Plantation “Las Flores”
Colomba, Costa Cuca
Guatemala, Central America

Dear Mrs. Cruz-Price,

We are in receipt of your letter of 15 January, which included full payment for this school year. Thank you.

In answer to your question: Yes, we have spoken to Cadet Russell about the results of the intelligence test he recently took, and we are aware of his concerns. As you may know, because so many of our graduates go on to the various private high schools that feed the United States service academies, we have, as a long standing policy, administered the military aptitude test, which is a prerequisite for entrance into these schools.

I’m happy to write that your son tested very high, and that we were pleased and gratified to report the results to both parents of record. We feel his long stay here at Blackwell has proven of real value to Cadet Russell and will hold him in good stead in the future.

However, I must take this opportunity to express my concern about Russell’s negative attitude towards both having to take the test, which he at first refused, and his troubling attitude towards the results themselves. It seems that he doesn’t believe the results—in fact, he says he’s quite stupid. Furthermore, he has stated to members of our staff that the test is a “gimmick to make him feel good about himself.” These attitudes are certainly unfortunate and of concern to us, as Russell has maintained a sterling record both academically and otherwise, until very recently. Perhaps there is something wrong at home?

I must also inform you that Russell has been involved recently in quite a few fights and that this behavior cannot be tolerated indefinitely. I’m sure you understand. One incident was quite serious, and resulted in his being removed from the pistol team when he was accused of pointing his weapon at a fellow cadet. Should this event have been witnessed by a staff member, it would have led to an
immediate
dismissal from Blackwell. As there was no proof that this event took place (the other boy involved has subsequently left Blackwell) — and as Russell has been with us since the second grade — we have decided to speak to him about his recent behavior and warn him that he is on probation.

I must also ask you to write your son and warn him of the consequences of any further inappropriate behavior. All of us here agree that Russell is a very fine boy – a boy we feel will make a great soldier — who is very much liked by the staff. We all consider Russell a great asset to both our football and baseball teams, and I’m sure he will get back on the right track!