Red Jungle (9 page)

“I feel like going home to the States for a visit,” she said. “You just like to feel really safe once and a while. Go to Nordstrom, that kind of stuff.”

“So have you met General Selva?” he asked, changing the subject. He didn’t want to say the obvious, that even home wasn’t really safe any more, but he thought it would be mean to remind her of that.

“Yes. He’s very nice in his way. He’s been very kind to me and the volunteers, anyway.”

“Selva is head of Guatemalan intelligence,” Russell said.

“I know.” She turned and gave him a fey look. “I think that’s why he’s hosting the project. He wants to convince
Time
magazine he’s not a monster. It makes him look like a liberal, having his picture taken with people like me,” she said. “He’s a committed free trading globalist, Russell—just like you!” She smiled at him.

An hour after they turned off the asphalt, they arrived at the general’s plantation. Haggard-looking dogs ran out from shabby workers’ housing to confront them. Pretty young Indian mothers, some very young, could be seen inside their shacks sitting by the doorway, some making tortillas on wood burning stoves. Small refrigerators peeked white through shack walls. They caught glimpses of flimsy television sets, even once a glimpse of Jennifer Aniston on the familiar set of
Friends
.

Men, unemployed because of the crisis, sat in groups in front of the company store, some holding machetes. Here and there banana trees grew out of the mud, exotic-looking.

“How many families live here?” Russell asked as they drove past the store. Some of the older men waved at Katherine.

“Maybe three hundred. We did a census, but it was difficult to get a hard number because so many people here are extended family, or have family that are just passing through. But basically there are three hundred, a little more,” she said. “With the crisis, half of them are unemployed.”

There was something sentient about the red clay ground. It was almost the exact color of the people’s skin, so that it looked as if God had simply shaped the people from the clay earth and blown life into them, and suddenly they were drinking Coke and playing soccer and having babies and smiling at you. A little girl, held by her mother, waved at them from the doorway. Russell lifted his hand and waved back.

Standing in dirty clothes at the corner of the building site in the hot sun, Russell watched the college kids, mostly from Europe and Canada, work with joy on their faces. He was quiet and found it hard to share in their excitement. Despite his age, he didn’t feel young any more. The others were sure they were changing the world, one little building at a time. He saw the project instead for what it was, a public relations stunt. It made him feel jaded. He wanted to believe that building new houses on the deck of an economic
Titanic
was worthwhile, but couldn’t. He wondered now if he wasn’t suffering from what he’d seen in other foreigners who’d stayed in the country too long: that strange malaise, a spiritual bankruptcy that overwhelmed them.

He was mixing concrete on a piece of plywood. It was a job that even he could do, as he had no building skills whatsoever. He simply added water from a hose and mixed the concrete with a shovel to a cake batter consistency. He hadn’t even known how to do that, until a young girl from Paris showed him exactly how. She was all business, tearing open the concrete sacks and showing him how much water to add. He mixed carefully now, following her instructions, while others came with buckets and took the concrete away to pour in the forms that had been dug and built by a previous crew the weekend before.

He met the general’s wife, Beatrice Allenby-Selva, that afternoon. All the volunteers had been invited in for tea at the great house. He was sure his mother had known the general’s family, and it was even conceivable that he’d been here as a child, given the proximity to his mother’s plantation, but he didn’t remember it. The original plantation house had been burnt down during the war, one of the workers had told him. The general’s new house had just been completed. It was massive and very modern, and looked like it belonged in Connecticut, not Guatemala. No one had seen either the general or his family during the day. But they had all seen a brand new Toyota Land Cruiser, two bodyguards hanging on the running boards, race past the construction site several times while they’d been working.

All the foreigners working on the project were presented to the general before tea was served. Carlos Selva was dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, like any American executive might have worn on the weekend. Selva wore his black hair combed straight back. He had a high forehead and was white, obviously from European stock. The general was handsome in a very starched way and somewhat younger than Russell expected, maybe only 39 or 40. There was a trace of gray in his mustache. He had serious blue eyes and seemed smug, like so many important men he’d met as a journalist, Russell thought. He’d come to associate smugness with political power, in fact.

The general barely glanced at him as they were introduced. They shook hands perfunctorily, and then Selva was onto the next person.

Russell had purposefully come in his dirty work clothes. A lot of the others had cleaned up more. He had not. It had been his way of hiding, making sure that there could be no possible connection made between him and his mother’s family. The moment passed, and there had been no recognition in Selva’s eyes.

As their group was coming down the hall towards the garden, Russell saw Beatrice for the first time. She was coming in the opposite direction, flanked by her nanny and her two young children. The moment he saw her, he knew he had to speak to her. There was something about Beatrice, something about her beautiful face that beckoned. It was the intelligence of course, and her great beauty, and the way they harmonized.

All the young men noticed her. She wore trendy slacks that showed her naked stomach, which was muscled. She stopped to say something to her husband. She put her hand on his shoulder. She’d been a dancer, and it was obvious, she had a great grace.

She was smiling and leading the children, joining the group. It was clear she had been told to make an appearance and bring the children, as it made the general and his trophy wife (he’d been married twice before) seem even more affable.

Beatrice was introduced to everyone when they got out to the garden, where the staff had set up drinks tables. She went out of her way to make eye contact with everyone she met. She kept hold of one of her children’s hands. Russell noticed she was wearing an over-sized gold cross. He thought she might be winking at the system, because she was dressed so
au courant
and she was so young. The juxtaposition of bare midriff and gold cross somehow didn’t seem to fit exactly, unless you took the cross as making a kind of joke of it all.

He was struck by how young she was. She must have been only twenty-five, or less. She seemed to be a child herself. It was the nature of her beauty, he supposed, trying not to stare. She was equal parts siren and waif. The children, both toddlers, were beautiful—a girl and a boy. Both favored their mother, and were very fair.

Standing there looking at Beatrice and her husband, Russell felt jealous for the first time in his life. Nothing had prepared him for the reaction. He had never been the type. He had certainly been around rich people, and he had been for the most part unimpressed by either their possessions or their families. Even during the great bull market when he’d been working at a bank trading stocks, when men his age were suddenly collecting great manor houses and Lear jets, he hadn’t really cared. But he was jealous suddenly of this man who seemed to have brought to earth some kind of goddess. There was something godlike about Selva, too: the military posture, the way his bodyguards and the maids seemed to hang on his every gesture.

Russell noticed that all the young foreigners were swept up into this tropical Olympus. They were all made part—if only for an hour—of the fortune, of the beautiful wife, of the thousands of acres out there that were growing for the general’s benefit, bearing fruits for him and his beautiful family. Everything, in the end, seemed to revolve around
him
. Looking at the two of them, Russell found it fascinating as well as intoxicating.

Katherine attached herself to him, actually holding his arm as if they were husband and wife. She was asking him if he wanted to meet the general. He was trying to think of an excuse not to, as he was still afraid that Selva might make the connection somehow between his mother and him. He told Katherine they had already met. But she said that she wanted to introduce him anyway.

“He speaks English like an American,” she was saying, “really, really well.” He was about to answer her when Beatrice appeared. She had been letting her little boy run on the terrace, and she’d come to collect him. Beatrice stopped in front of them and swept the little boy into her arms, then looked up at Russell.

He would never forget that moment. People say that of course, and don’t mean it. Unforgettable, because he felt she
trained
her beauty on him purposely. She even told him as much later. She said that when she looked up and saw him, she knew immediately that their lives—hers and his—were going to collide in some meaningful way.

“He’s uncontrollable sometimes,” Beatrice said to them, her blue eyes resolute, taking them in.

“He’s adorable,” Katherine said, bending down to hold the little boy. Russell said nothing at first, feeling awkward as a school boy as he watched Katherine. It took him a moment to gain confidence.

“We’ve met,” Beatrice said to Katherine.

“Yes,” Katherine said.

“You didn’t tell me you were
married?”
Beatrice said, looking suddenly at Russell.

“Oh, no. He’s a friend . . . Mrs. Selva, this is Russell Price.”

“Just a friend,” Russell said again, looking at her. A nanny came and took the child away.

“It’s
Rosa De Jamaica,
” Beatrice said, taking a drink from the tray and handing it to him. “You can’t find it in the States. I’ve looked in Miami, but they don’t have it.”

He thought that if anyone knew other than Beatrice what was going to happen, it was Katherine. He looked at her later, as Beatrice took them for a tour of the garden. Just the three of them. Katherine kept looking at him as if she knew somehow what was going through his head. They followed Beatrice out into the garden.

The garden sloped downhill. Katherine’s college kids were here and there, milling about holding drinks, some in dirty clothes like himself, proud to come up to the big house as would-be workers. He knew it was a sham; they all belonged to the same world. They weren’t workers; they were the middlemen between those out there and this General.

But the more he listened to Beatrice speak, the more he stopped thinking. It was as if watching her he suddenly had become someone else, a quieter, more relaxed version of what he had been only minutes before.

Katherine’s cell phone rang, and she moved away from them. The sun came out. He looked at Beatrice; she was telling him how she had just come from Roatan in Honduras. She was learning to skin dive, she told him. She was describing her first time underwater. He could barely pay attention to what she was saying. He was focused instead on her hips in her jeans; there was something so goddamn sexy about her hips, the way her waist went long to her breasts, which were small. It was as if a Viking Princess had been dropped down in the middle of the jungle.

“I had to take an enormous amount of decongestants. I had a cold, Carlos thought it was so funny,” she said. She lifted her glass and took a drink, her eyes watching him. “Do you skin dive, Mr. Price?” Her eyes held him for a moment; then she looked away, to where Katherine was standing holding her phone.

“No,” he said. “I don’t.” He couldn’t feel natural with her at first. Later he spoke to other men who said they felt the same way, men who were normally inured to beautiful women, either because they were playboys or because they were happily married. In either case they couldn’t get over the impression she made, it was something
profoundly
sexual. Until you saw it, you couldn’t describe it. If you were a man, you wanted her. It was very simple.

“You really must. It’s an entirely different world down there,” Beatrice said, looking at him. “It’s where life began. The ocean.” She moved her long blonde hair out of her eyes.

“Well, I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.

“What
do
you do, Mr. Price? When you aren’t building houses.”

“I’m a journalist,” he said.

“Oh, then you’ll have to meet my husband. He collects journalists. He gets them to write only nice things about him. He’s very, very good at that.”

He heard Katherine’s phone slap shut. Both Beatrice and Russell turned to look at her. It was their first conspiracy.

Later, when he was leaving, Beatrice appeared again.

“You’ve lost your book, the Delacroix,” she said. Completely nonplussed, he looked at her. He was leaving with the others, going down the front stairs of the house. Beatrice was holding her husband’s hand. They were both framed by the enormous doorway. It was very, very hot and almost completely dark out now. The maids had been ordered to bring them flashlights. He was trying to get one, and didn’t even realize Beatrice was speaking to him.