Текст книги "Red Jungle"

Автор книги: Kent Harrington

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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.

He hadn’t needed light. He’d lived here for over eight years, and knew the school so well he could have gotten around it if he’d gone blind. He went down to the indoor shooting range in the basement of the gym, to the gun cabinet on the wall. The climbing ropes dangled in the dark behind him.

Paterson was in charge of locking the gun case after practice and keeping the key. He had left the metal locker door open, unlocking it after he played taps. Russell felt for the first pistol on the specially designed cabinet. There were twenty-five .45 automatics, their barrels buried in wooden slots. He took one and dropped the clip out, making sure it was empty. He racked the action twice to make certain, then he left the gym and went across the grass towards his dormitory. He collected leaves on his slippers as he made his way back to speak to the Greek.

He opened the Greek’s door. The Greek slept by the window; both he and his roommate were asleep. Russell turned on the small flashlight, walked between the beds, and climbed up on The Greek’s bed, putting his knees on either side of the sleeping boy’s body. The Greek was big, six feet and two hundred pounds. There was no way Russell could beat him in a fight, he’d known that. He had simply decided to use the lesson he’d been taught in school: Superior tactics, combined with overwhelming force, win battles.

He turned the pen light on the Greek’s face, then put the barrel of the gun on the Greek’s forehead.

“Wake up,” Russell said. He moved the pen light so the Greek could see that it was a pistol he had resting on his forehead.

The Greek had blue eyes. Russell hadn’t noticed that before. “I’m going to kill you unless you stop bothering those boys. Do you understand?” He pulled the hammer back for effect. It made a big sound. It was a sound the Greek would never forget. He would never learn empathy, but he had finally learned fear.

Russell glanced over at the Greek’s roommate. He was awake, and was staring at Russell. He was no friend of the Greek’s either, though, because he was smiling.

SIX

Ayoung Indian woman, dressed in a formal blue and white maid’s uniform, opened the heavy antique door to Carl Van Diemen’s colonial mansion. Van Diemen, Mahler had told Russell, had spent a fortune remodeling the place. It showed. The maid led Russell and Katherine out to the traditional courtyard, which was full of mostly young partygoers. Van Diemen, in his late twenties, had become one of the biggest dealers of Pre-Columbian antiquities in Europe, and was obviously making a killing, judging from the magnificent seventeenth century digs.

Russell and Katherine followed a hallway along a twenty-foot-high stone wall. Painted plaster saints, their white faces hit by spotlights, hung next to Mayan stone fertility figures. The juxtaposition of the two clashing cultures was dramatic and poignant. At the end of the hallway was a towering, Titianesque painting of the Last Supper—it had been pulled from the ruins of the city after an earthquake. Under the colonial-era painting, young women in tight jeans and exposed midriffs swayed to Dirty Vegas’s famous trance tune.

“You come. I’m so glad,” Carl said, pushing through the crowd to get to them. He was a big man, a little overweight, a little ripe and unctuous-looking, in the way of Europeans of a certain class. Van Diemen wore a black turtleneck shirt– the shirt untucked—and faded but ironed blue jeans. The young man’s face was round. He was very blond and very rich, and the two things seemed to come together perfectly in him. At least, that’s what Katherine had said on the walk to the house. She’d been to lots of Carl’s parties, she confessed.

Carl gave Russell a bear hug, then roughed up his hair. They had spent a week at the same hotel in Costa Rica once, and had gotten to be friends there. Carl was with his Costa Rican lover then, a well sun-blocked kid of maybe eighteen who wore an orange Speedo, even out to the clubs. Carl’s lover looked a lot like a girl, except for the package in the Speedo. In the streets people would yell maricon at them, real hateful. Carl and the kid were oblivious. Intrepidly queer, they didn’t seem to care.

Back then, Carl was always buying everyone around the hotel pool drinks, so Russell had decided Van Diemen had to be a rich kid, a gangster, or a fool. He liked Carl well enough. Most people did. He was the new kind of German, silly, pretentious, pacifist. He was the kind of German who wouldn’t go to war unless it was over a fashion statement, Carl had told Russell one night by the pool. His boyfriend stood in the shallow end, holding a fancy blue colored drink and looking at Carl like a girl. Russell had thought that was pretty funny. “Attack when you see Tommy Hilfiger,” he had said.

“I’ll only use laughing gas, and those little drink swords!” Carl had said.

Katherine said that Carl gave the best parties in Guatemala because he didn’t let in the squares. From the look of it, it was only hip people tonight, which in this country meant you could talk politics and art instead of soccer, and drink wine instead of whiskey.

“I didn’t know you knew Carl so well,” Katherine said, turning to him surprised. Russell hadn’t mentioned Costa Rica to her.

“We spent a week in the same hotel,” Russell said. “I was working on an article. I think it was called, ‘Costa Rica: Switzerland of Central America.’ ” It was a joke, but neither Katherine nor Carl got it. “That’s the standard line,” Russell said, trying to explain. “You see four or five of those articles a year. The Costa Rican Tourist Agency pays for a lot of them. It’s a lie, though,” he added. “It ain’t no Switzerland. They have the biggest cockroaches in the world. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen one cockroach in Switzerland.”

“What’s a lie?” Carl said. He’d missed what Russell had said because he was checking out some kid’s ass. Carl turned to Katherine. “Russell, yeah, he work in Costa Rica, he no fun. But he has fun here in Antigua. I see him at the Oprah Café with girls all the time.” Katherine looked at Carl, then at Russell a little disappointedly.

Russell was embarrassed because he didn’t want to appear a playboy, although—if truth be told—he was, to a degree. Women liked him and he liked women. It was that simple.

Katherine hit him with her hip, just like in high school, but he noticed that she kept holding his arm. Carl got them a drink by whistling with his fingers in his mouth and a waiter, a short guy, hustled over like he was playing for Manchester United. They picked champagne glasses off a silver platter and Carl took them to meet a painter friend that Russell suspected Carl was trying to put the make on. The bottle of champagne cost more than the waiter would make in a year, maybe two, Katherine told him later.

“Did you know that Gore Vidal used to live here?” the painter said. “In this very house.” The painter was a handsome American, and Russell pegged him as an upper cruster. The painter seemed very preoccupied with his watch, spinning it around his thin wrist. Russell asked him if he’d come to Guatemala to paint. The young man looked at him shocked, as if he’d been asked if he picked his nose, or ate bugs that landed on him.

“No, of course not. I’ve stopped for the time being. I’m not doing anything. Really. I’m trying to figure out the next thing.

Then I’ll paint it. I mean, you have to get a good picture of where we’re going and then get that down, man. You know, get it down. Guatemala is next. I think its going to be hot. I’m going to Coban and see what’s there. Caves, I’ve heard.” The painter acted as if he’d taken crystal meth. He had that wired anticipatory look. He was thin and had a stud in his tongue. When he spoke, it looked as if the end of his tongue wasn’t on quite right.

The music stopped, then started again. Someone put on the sound track from the movie Stealing Beauty. With the small yellow lights strung up everywhere, the mansion’s wide Mediterranean-style corridors, and the sound of the water from the big fountain in the courtyard, they could have been in Ibiza or the Costa Azul in Spain, Russell thought.

If the mountain fell in the sea let it be. I got my old world to live through. The Hendrix cover got turned up loud. Some people nearby got in the groove and started to sway. Two very blonde girls speaking in Dutch were sliding their hips to the music.

“Girls from Holland like to fuck, smoke dope, and read books. And tell you how it’s going to be when the Greens take over the world,” an English guy told him, staring at the girls. “I been here a month. I want to fuck them all.” He smiled happily.

“You want to go to the coast with me? Tomorrow?” Katherine asked him over the music. “We’re building some houses on a coffee plantation.”

“Sure,” Russell said. He mostly wanted to sleep with her. Unlike a lot of the people here, he wasn’t a do-gooder; he’d gotten a master’s degree in economics at the University of Chicago when he was only twenty three and looked askance on all the do-gooding, only because he felt charity—no matter how well intended—was just that, charity, not a solution for the country’s chronic underdevelopment.

“We’d have to leave early tomorrow,” she said.

“I don’t mind,” he said, but he was lying; he would have just as soon stayed in bed and screwed all morning.

“You can stay at my place,” she said. “Tonight. That way you don’t have to get up so early . . . it will be a lot easier.” It was the invitation he’d been hoping for.

“Sure,” he said. “Okay.”

Mahler appeared with a drink in his hand. When he saw Russell, he took him further out into the garden, and they sat on the edge of the fountain. Mahler gave him a report on Tres Rios, and Russell listened carefully. They’d only been able to survey the river on horseback before Russell had to go back to work.

They smoked a joint together. As he spoke about the work, Mahler’s blue eyes were intense, the fountain’s light catching them. Russell listened to Mahler talk about east of the river, Amargo. It was exciting and it was dangerous because he was working alone, he said. They had to keep the search a secret or they would run the risk of losing out to others, Mahler told him.

Russell agreed. He tossed the roach into the fountain and looked around the garden. The whole place seemed straight out of some MTV video.

“If something happens out there in the bush when you’re alone, you’re fucked,” Russell said.

“I’m blessed. Nothing ever happens to me. Let’s go talk to Carl before he gets too busy buggering some choir boy,” Mahler said. They went, and found Van Diemen talking to some girls. Carl took them into the house, to a library full of Mayan antiquities. The room had green leather club couches and dark red walls. Mayan statues and Olmec heads rested on a huge mahogany coffee table, along with a few tiny solid gold figurines. Mahler whistled out loud as they walked in.

“I’m so glad we can do business,” Carl said. “I mean, I buy the Jaguar. If you guys find it. I buy it. We get rich.” Carl smiled and looked at them happily. He was a little drunk.

“You’re already rich,” Mahler said, looking at the stuff on the coffee table.

“Great,” Russell said, impressed.

Mahler crossed the room, picked up a huge black obsidian knife from the bookcase, ran it across his throat, and smiled. “Fucking Mayans,” he said.

“You’ll buy all that stuff in the garden at Tres Rios? I need the money,” Russell said.

“Yes, of course. I buy all of it. Don’t worry . . . just find the Jaguar,” Carl said, watching Mahler.

Mahler tossed the knife on the couch. It was a heavy knife, and bounced. Carl picked it up and put it back on the shelf. Mahler was jealous of Carl, it was obvious, and it suddenly made Russell uncomfortable.

He went back outside to Katherine. She’d been looking for him, standing on the edge of the garden in one of the corridors, young men and women dancing behind her in the yellow light, swaying to the trance music that someone had turned back on.

Katherine had a Snoopy doll on her bed. He threw it off, and she got them something to drink. Some men had tried to stop their car on the way out of Antigua. She’d driven through them, not willing to stop and find out what they wanted. Shots had been fired. She was still upset, but was pretending not to be, he thought. They’d barely spoken on the way back into the city.

She lay down next to him, and he felt her shake. It was like a cat shakes when it’s scared. Later, they made love between the fresh cold sheets of her bed.

SEVEN

The general’s wife is very, very beautiful. I’ll warn you,” Katherine said suddenly. “And everyone thinks she’s crazy. She’s not like anyone I’ve ever met. All the guys I’ve brought up to work on the project can’t stop talking about her. I suppose you won’t be any different . . . guys are so predictable.”

On the drive towards the coast they’d passed some of the country’s biggest and oldest coffee plantations: La Bella, La Sultana, La Gloria, some obviously still grand and managing to keep going, others forlorn and abandoned because of the coffee crisis. The temperature cooled as they went higher into the mountains near Mexico. At times the dirt road was lonely and terribly rutted; at others it was well graded and busy with workers from a nearby plantation. Some plantations were so massive they’d spawned small towns outside their gates.

“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.