Red Jungle (28 page)

“Olga. I’m leaving for the party.” Isabella had come into the kitchen. She didn’t always come into the kitchen. It was Olga’s place.

The two women, more like sisters than master and servant, looked at each other. Perhaps it was a premonition. “I don’t know what time I’ll be back,” Isabella said.

“Sí, senora.”

“Olga?”

“Sí, señora.”
Isabella had stopped by the doorway

“Are you happy?” she asked Olga. It was an odd question. Isabella wasn’t even sure why she’d asked it. Olga had been married now for a year, and the change in her had been pronounced; Isabella was jealous. She’d never thought she would be jealous of Olga. After all, Olga was deformed, and short, and an Indian; and yet Isabella, the day after Olga’s marriage on the plantation, couldn’t look at her exactly the same way. She loved Olga, she knew that. It was a love she couldn’t have explained to anyone; it was profound, like her love for the land her grandfather had left them.

“Sí, señora.”
Olga gave her a rare smile. She was normally serious, and had been that way since they were little girls.

“I’m so glad.” Isabella went back and hugged her. “I’m so very glad,” she said.

For some reason, she decided at the last moment to take her father’s pistol out of her purse. Antonio looked at her as she took the old-fashioned heavy revolver out and laid it on the table by the phone. She had carried it everywhere since the war had started.

Then they left. Five minutes later, her son called from his school, saying that he’d just heard that he was going to the military school he’d applied to in Virginia and he wanted his mother to have the good news. He’d missed his mother by five minutes.

Later, as Olga was making tortillas out in the courtyard, squatting alone, she smelled Isabella’s perfume mixing with the smell of the corn and the wood smoke, and felt uneasy.

Isabella had been at embassy parties before; many, in fact. Mostly they were rich Guatemalan boys from all the best families and American women who worked at the embassy, gold diggers in their thirties from Tennessee and New York. Women who, like Isabella, were certainly not innocent, and were of a certain age that called for certain girlish attitudes to be put aside if they wanted a man. Like the other women at the party, Isabella understood that they were alone, as women of the world are alone. It was the first time that she had an inkling of the idea she was now a woman, not a girl or a male adornment. There was something in the intense expression of one woman she met, a redhead from Chicago; the redhead was a little drunk when Jose introduced them. It was clear from the woman’s body language that she “knew” Antonio very well.

“She helped me with my sister’s passport problems,” Antonio said. Like most men, he was a bad liar. Isabella knew then it was over between them, not because of the woman from Chicago, but because she was too old now for this, and she was tired of chasing her youth. It was over. It ended there in that living room, listening to the Rolling Stones on the stereo.

The war had changed her. She was tired of men like Antonio who saw the war as only an inconvenience, and were anyway spending more and more time out of the country. She felt very alone, looking around the rococo-style mansion that belonged to the Minister of Health.

She felt as if she were meeting herself after a long absence, and the Isabella she met was a stranger. She saw herself for the first time that evening. It was bizarre. She’d never had a really clear picture of herself, not since she’d been a child in boarding school in the United States, when a store clerk— hearing her Latin accent, but not seeing her—called her a Mexican. She wasn’t a Mexican, but she understood what it meant. She was different, and would never forget that the United States wasn’t really her home. The only home she had was out there in that strange place of volcanoes and coffee and warfare and Indians and rain and ghosts. She wanted to tell her son to be something, anything but what Antonio and his kind had become—empty rich boys. She wanted to leave the party then, but Antonio begged her to stay. So she did.

It was late, and there were the loud voices of people who had drunk too much. The stereo was playing rock music from the States. It sounded foreign to her. She preferred Latin music.

She didn’t know where Antonio had gone. She sat in the living room, impassive. The Minister of Health, only forty, was going on about horse racing. Men and women sat on the couches around her. There was a great deal of blue cigarette smoke. She was drinking vodka and was slightly drunk now, and wondered how she would get rid of Antonio, because she had no interest in ever sleeping with him again. Oddly, she was thinking of what she would eat in the morning when the American girl from Chicago hit her on the side of the head with a heavy Mayan stone god. It had been sitting on the coffee table; Isabella had even picked it up and looked at it, only minutes before.

She died instantly, as Mick Jagger began to sing. Everyone who was there would remember the terrible sound of her body falling on the glass table.

Her son was asleep. He slept well and rose to the sound of a bugle, as he had for the last eight years of his life.

TWENTY-FOUR

Beatrice had gotten drunk. At times she would look at Russell across the dinner table, from her place next to her husband. He’d deliberately sat far away from her, between his aunt and Rudy Valladolid.

Alone in his room after dinner, he could hear the sound of an electric generator. The generator’s distant whir had been a pleasant sound over their dessert. They had flan and sweet German wines, the weak lights of the pergola dimming at times. The dinner conversation had been about the World Cup, and how well the American team had done, then turned to children away at college and boarding schools. Russell had barely spoken.

After hearing his aunt’s story about his mother’s death, Russell couldn’t help but spend dinner wondering what his life would have been like had she lived. His aunt told him that the guerrillas had wanted to make an example of her because of who she was.

His aunt and uncle hadn’t wanted him to know that his mother had been murdered. They were afraid that it would be too much for him, so they had made up the lie about a traffic accident. Because they had been Cruzes, the story was easy to fix. They’d even had a newspaper article planted with details of the accident, in case Isabella’s ex-husband made inquiries. He never did, of course. The only thing Russell’s father ever said about his mother’s death was that he’d heard the roads in Central America were dangerous and he wasn’t at all surprised, given how fast his mother drove, that something had eventually happened to her. Russell thought his father seemed relieved that she was gone for good.

His uncle had explained, the day he’d called Russell from Paris, that the war was making it too dangerous for Russell to go to Guatemala for the funeral. “Your mother would want it that way,” his uncle had told him. Russell had decided that his uncle was a coward. He would have gone. He hadn’t been afraid. He felt ashamed. He knew that his mother would want him to go, to be there for her.

After that call, he’d crossed the empty lawn back to his dormitory. The rest of the students were in class, the classroom doors shut. Russell could see the boys bent over their books through the windows as he made his way down the middle of the parade ground, past the flagpole with its plaque dedicated to the boys who’d died “defending” their country. The tips of his shined shoes picked up bits of grass, because they’d just run the mowers.

He’d gone up to his room, taken off his Sam Browne belt and his coat, and lay on the bed. The facts of his situation came and went as he stared out at the winter elm trees. He said “coward” out loud several times. Later, he tried to recover the pistol his mother had used to save their life when he’d been a baby. No one—including his aunt—seemed to know where it had gone.

A few minutes before, he’d heard a plane flying low over the general’s beach house. It was very loud for a moment, then the sound of the engines moved out over the water.

There was a knock on his door. He was reading. It was very late, and he was pretty sure that Beatrice was too drunk, when she’d said good night to the last of her guests, to sneak off and come to his bungalow.

“Yes?” Russell said.

“It’s Carlos.” He heard the general’s voice.

“Come in,” Russell said immediately. It was after one in the morning; he was surprised that Selva wasn’t in bed. The general opened the door and stepped into the room. Russell caught a glimpse of the moon through the open door.

“I’m going out on the lagoon. I thought you might like to come.” Carlos was dressed in shorts and a
guayabera
. “Just you and I,” Carlos said. “Do you have a pistol? Or something, just in case?”

“Señor
Mossberg,” he joked, referring to his shotgun. “It’s rather late, isn’t it?” Russell smiled and closed his book.

“Yes. But I saw your light on,” the general said.

“It’s warm in here,” Russell said. “I suppose it would be cooler out on the water.”

“Good. . . . We don’t want to be caught with our pants down. There’s all types out at night here. You’d better bring the shotgun. I get so tired of bodyguards all the time. I thought we’d go alone,” the general said. Carlos looked at him for a moment. Russell slid his book onto the table next to his bed and stood up.

“You know what the people around here call Tilapa now,” Carlos said.

“No.”

“They call it the Red Jungle.
La selva roja,
because so many people are murdered either on the lagoon or out in the mangroves.”

“Why?” Russell stood up. He felt odd. The general was looking at him closely. “I suppose I should put on long pants. For the bugs.” The general nodded and sat at the end of the bed.
Does he know something?
Carlos’s eyes were bloodshot from drinking. Heavily brilliantined and combed straight back, his hair looked almost wet.

“The locals are all doing something illegal with their boats. Cocaine. The planes from Colombia fly over about a mile out from the beach and drop the drugs. The boatmen pick it up and take it by sea to Mexico; it isn’t far. Sometimes bandits come and try to take the coke from them on the lagoon. It’s interesting,” Carlos said. He glanced at Russell’s shotgun in the corner of the room. “Come on. I’ll meet you out at the dock. I’ll tell Beatrice we’re going out. . . . She worries.”

Russell nodded. He went to his pack and took out extra shells for the Mossberg, then slipped on a pair of running shoes and a T-shirt. It dawned on him, as he bent over tying his shoes, that Carlos had learned about him and Beatrice, and was going to kill him.

She might have simply confessed. She had drunk too much at dinner, and with the strange way she’d been acting since he’d arrived, it was certainly possible, he thought.

He walked into the dark bathroom and switched on the light. Beatrice’s bathing suit bottom was gone from where he’d hung it.
Damn it
. He’d meant to hide it.

The lagoon was moonlit when Carlos yanked the cord on the outboard. He’d kept Russell waiting as he stood on the beach speaking on his cell phone, his back turned. Russell sat in the boat with his shotgun on his knees, looking out at the lagoon that went for miles towards Mexico. He could hear the occasional jaguar, and once or twice heard the loud sound of twin outboard motors heading towards the narrow opening on the lagoon that opened onto the Pacific.

Coming towards the boat, the general tossed a Steyr machine gun to Russell as he climbed in. It was the same boat that Russell and Beatrice had taken out that morning.

“There’s something going on in the capital,” Carlos said, standing over the boat’s engine. He checked the gas tank, opening it and shining a small flashlight down into the reservoir. “That was the U.S. embassy.” He turned and shone the light into Russell’s eyes. “My friend, a friend on the third floor. CIA. . . . They say Madrid is planning a coup.” Carlos began pulling the motor’s cord; the boat, floating out into the lagoon now, rocked under Carlos’s weight as he pulled. His voice was punctuated by the outboard motor’s attempts to start. “Have you heard anything about this, Russell?” As if answering his question, the motor started.

Russell was holding the Steyr on his lap along with the shotgun. He thought for a moment of shooting Carlos immediately, but realized that the sound of it would draw Selva’s bodyguards, and he couldn’t possibly get away. He would be dead before he could cross the lagoon.

“No. Not a thing. But then, how would I know that?” Russell said. “It’s hardly something they’d tell me.”

Carlos sat down. The engine was idling. They looked at each other. Russell could see the beginning of a smile on the general’s face.

“My embassy friends asked me what the fuck you had to do with this. They can’t figure you out, apparently. You’ve appeared on their screen and now you’re a great mystery to them. They don’t like mysteries. They say you’re advising Madrid in regards to the economy, but maybe more,” Carlos said. He turned the throttle up and they moved away from the dock, the lagoon calm. Russell could see that a few of the houses on the spit still had their lights on, the house lights dim and yellow like yellow oil paint.