Red Jungle (7 page)

Lastly, all of us here at Blackwell Academy hope that the Communist insurgency you and your country face will be quickly defeated. Russell has spoken often about your struggles out there in Guatemala. God bless you in your fight against this menace to free people everywhere. We are all praying for your safety. Rest assured that your son is in good hands.

God bless you.

Sincerely yours,
Major D. Purcell
Commandant

Las Flores
Sunday April 3

Dearest Russell,

Querido,
I’ve just had a letter from the major at your school and he assures me that you are doing fine and that your chances of going on to a good high school are excellent. (I would like it to be the military academy in Virginia that your grandfather went to, if possible.) Do you still want to go to West Point? I think it would be lovely. We could go to the Army-Navy game and I’ll wear something very Gatsby! I have written to your father and he promises me he will contact his congressman at the right time. But it’s still a little soon, dear.

Your aunt says that we need military men here, and that you should come home as soon as you are able, to help us defeat the Communists! Right now she is living in Miami and I miss her very much, as I spend a great deal of time alone here working with no one but Olga to speak to. Your uncle Robert has gone to live in Paris—He is producing films!— so I don’t have any help. I wish you were all with me here. Maybe someday. But none of us can live without someone from the family being here on the plantation and seeing things are done properly— war or no war.

Dear, about the test they gave you. I really don’t think things like this should upset you. Of course you aren’t stupid. Why don’t we just forget the test. I know that you have always done well in school, and that’s really all that is important. As far as pointing the gun at the boy, I’m glad you wrote me and told me the truth about what happened. I don’t want my son to be a momma’s boy, and if that boy was bullying you, well, here it would be understood completely. God knows your grandfather pointed his pistol at more than one man! (I’m afraid to tell you the stories!)

Always stand up for yourself, my love, and know that your mother loves you and hopes that we can be together here someday. I love you and think about you everyday.

The guerillas came to the plantation two nights ago, but I was visiting a friend and they couldn’t find me so they left. They said they wanted our family to pay a war tax! Anytime the communists get close, workers from the ranchos come up to the house to warn me and I hide with them! Everyone here is very loyal to the family— thank God!

Besos y Abrazos
Tu Mama
.

PS: Coffee prices are wonderfully high, 106. So I’ve sent along some extra spending money. Antonio and I saw Elizabeth Taylor in Acapulco last month at the Villa Vera, where she was staying too. She and I had a conversation about our children, sitting by the pool. She’s actually very, very kind, and not at all like they say on the BBC.

•••

Like jails, military schools are run in part by the adults, and partly by the students. Several boys had come to him about the Greek, as he was called. The Greek was an asshole; the Greek was a bully, but worse, the Greek was buggering the younger boys at night, and it had to stop.

The Greek’s father was important. The students didn’t know what he did, but it had to be big, because Major Purcell was scraping and bowing like an Ottoman house slave every time the Greek’s parents showed up in their limousine. Someone had suggested the Greek’s father was a gangster; others that he was a congressman, or senator. The Greek wouldn’t say. (Russell learned later that the Greek’s father owned an independent oil and gas company in Louisiana.)

There had been a vote in study hall. Russell was a lieutenant now, and the younger boys looked up to him. This respect was given not because he’d been at the school since he was in the second grade, but because he was a sports star. And because, as officer in charge of the pool during the weekends, he didn’t allow towel snapping in the showers. Younger boys had been terrified of the showers until they’d put Russell in charge.

The towel snapping had stopped. Towel snapping with a well made “rat tail,” wet at the end, could leave terrible welts, and worse. It was like being hit with a leather whip. The older boys had hit Russell plenty with the rat tails when he had first come to the school, and Russell remembered how painful and humiliating it was. (Of course, if you spoke to any of the staff about it, just as in prison, it would only make matters worse for you.)

Later, Russell only smiled when people asked him why he’d spent hours in the gym getting strong. As he had learned in his military tactics and history class: superior and overwhelming firepower wins battles. (The rest, said his teacher who’d fought at Guadalcanal, was horseshit.)

The meeting had been called before lights out. Everyone was in pajamas and robes. It was dark. Russell remembered sitting on his bed, looking down at the house next door. He often spied on the family who lived next to the school: two girls, a mother and a father. He loved to watch them have dinner, but didn’t often get the chance.

Russell felt as if he knew the family. He had shared birthday parties and many holidays with them, if only from the window of his room. The girls and he were about the same age. The parents were kind. He could tell that. The father was a tall, thin man, and he would speak to his daughters while they did their homework at the kitchen table, as he helped or did the dishes. The four of them would spend the evenings there in the kitchen. Russell liked to imagine their conversations. Sometimes providing dialogue for the family (a habit that would later help him as a journalist and writer), he would stare in amazement at their world, free from loneliness or the threat of physical violence.

Right now the girls had finished their homework, and the parents were alone in the kitchen. Russell had a great desire to be adopted by them, but knew it was crazy. One Saturday he had almost knocked on their door to tell them that he was their son of sorts, their son of the third floor window. Their son of the school next door.

This was the first time he’d had a strange and obviously bizarre thought. He would have many as the years went by and he was always able to control them, but barely. He’d started to act out in strange ways, mostly on the football field at first. He loved the violence of the sport. Then he began taking dares, any dare, any challenge. Lately, it had been shoplifting. He’d stolen records by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, even though he could have paid for them.

“We’ve come to see you about the Greek, Lieutenant,” a PFC, maybe nine years old, was speaking for the whole first floor. The younger boys of this floor had elected him to speak for them. Four other boys had come up to the third floor dormitory where the oldest boys lived.

Russell put down his book, closed the curtain, and slid his feet over his bed. The boys were standing near the door.

“Close the door,” Russell said. One of the smallest boys closed the door behind him, and they all came closer.

Officers had the best rooms, and only one roommate. Younger boys lived four to a room.

“At ease, gentlemen.” There was, despite everything, a true military order to the boys’ lives. They respected the Lieutenant deeply, as Russell had when he first arrived. The boys didn’t really relax. “What’s the problem?” Russell asked. The PFC stepped forward, a real tow-head who wasn’t afraid of much and who would one day die in Lebanon. (Several of Russell’s schoolmates would die in the armed forces.)

“The Greek’s coming down onto the first floor at night, sir. He tries to do stuff . . . to the younger boys.” He spoke as if he wasn’t one of them.

“What kind of stuff?” Russell asked. He knew what kind, or at least he suspected that he knew, but he had to be certain what he was dealing with.

The boy turned away and looked at his friends. No one who hasn’t been through it understands what happens to children who are forced to leave home at an early age. They mature and they make new bonds, bonds that may be even stronger than the familial ones they’ve been forced to break (this break is very profound). Ironically, this new family was what would make them good soldiers later. The military was their mother and father.

The boy looked Russell in the eye. “He . . . you know, wants to touch.” The boy started to turn crimson. His friends looked everywhere but at Russell.

“I get it,” Russell said. He held his hand up.

“We’ve spoken to the house mother, Mrs. Crimp, but she hasn’t done
anything
about it, sir. She’s always asleep when he comes down.” Russell watched the boys nod in unison.

Lisa Crimp had been a dottering old shrew who smelled of lilac water and fish when he’d been on the first floor years before; she couldn’t have gotten any better with age. Her biggest concern was that sick boys not bother her during the day, when she was watching soap operas. God help you if you ventured into her room then. She’d cuff you and tell you to get out. If you told anyone, it was your word against hers. She was his first lesson in fascism.

Russell stood up and went to the little bookcase he shared with his roommate. He slid his copy of Dana’s
Two Years Before The Mast
in with the other books he’d collected. He turned and looked at the boys, and saw the time. Taps would play in a few minutes, and if they weren’t in their rooms, their house mother would give them five demerits.

Demerits were not just a silly way of dehumanizing children; they were a real scorecard. If boys got too many during the week, those who lived close enough couldn’t leave the school to spend the weekend at home. For the boys who rarely went home, like Russell, demerits meant they couldn’t leave the school to go to the shopping center on Saturday, to see a film or meet girls or play pick-up basketball. You would be confined to the school. Nothing was more horrible or lonely than those hours after the movie let out, as they made their way back in groups through the Saturday evening streets, with their sidewalks lined with homes. Each step carried its own kind of disappointment and the promise of a better day, when they would be in charge of their lives.

Russell always felt stupidest on Saturdays, and dehumanized on Sundays by the trip to church to listen to old men prattle on about something they called God. God didn’t go to school with them, so who gave a shit about him?

Russell waited for Paterson to get back from playing taps. Paterson and he went back to their first days here, in the second grade. Paterson’s mother had died that year, and he wasn’t talking much. His taps were lovely, soft, pitiful things.

Russell watched Paterson put the trumpet down on his desk. He pulled the mouthpiece out, as he always did, and stood it up on the edge of the bookcase. He took his hat off and laid it down next to it. Russell and Paterson had lived together at the school through most of their childhood, and now into the first years of puberty. Although they would never see each other after they left the school, they would often think of one another.

“The first floor was here,” Russell said. He had been looking up at the ceiling of the room, at the holes in the varnished knotty pine. He looked now at his friend as he undressed. Paterson would go on to become a famous heart surgeon; his father was a surgeon, and his grandfather before that.

“Yeah,” Paterson said.

“The Greek is wandering.” Wandering was what they called it back when they were on the first floor.

“That’s not good,” Paterson said, and sat down at the desk. He bent down and unlaced his shoes. Their Spartan furniture was old, from the Thirties, all with art deco motifs and very heavy dark lacquer.

“I want you to leave the pistol case unlocked tomorrow after practice,” Russell said. He heard the sound of Paterson’s shoes on the closet floor. He and Paterson had had a fight once, years before, and they’d gone into the closet of their room to have it so that no one could hear. It had been wild slugging in the dark, hitting with shoes and hangers, whatever they could grab.

They had come back to their room and it had been torn up by the duty officer; they had left something undone or unclean. Each blamed the other, and they fought like that in the dark, like animals, full of hate for everything around them. They never fought again after that.

“What are you going to do, rob a bank?” Paterson said.

“No. I’m going to go speak to the Greek.” There was a long silence. Paterson undid his pants, folding them carefully. He walked to the closet, and Russell heard him hang them up. Then he re-crossed the room, opened his chest of drawers, and took out his pajamas. “Well, will you do it?” Russell asked. Paterson stepped into his pajamas, took off his shirt, and put it in the pile on the floor of soiled clothes that they would drop off at the laundry after breakfast. He turned off the desk light and got into bed in the dark. They used to talk more at night, but since Paterson’s mother died, he had stopped that. It seemed he just wanted to sleep, or study, or be busy with whatever.

“Okay,” Paterson said, turning over. “You got it.”

Russell had wanted to ask him if he was all right, if there was something wrong, but military school isn’t like a real family, and you don’t ask about things that make you weak. That was the rule: show no weakness. Even between friends.