Текст книги "Red Jungle"

Автор книги: Kent Harrington

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“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.

“Your back pocket,” Beatrice said, as if she was reading his mind. He’d forgotten that he’d taken the book with him. It had slipped out of his pocket somehow in the house. The maid handed him the book and a flashlight. Somehow it must have fallen out. He took the paperback book from the maid and looked up at Beatrice.

“I’ve read it. I had to at school. Oxford,” she said. He nodded a thank you. He had no idea how she knew it was his.

He spent that evening reading the Delacroix by the air conditioner, sometimes walking to the window of the little bungalow where he’d been put up and thinking about Beatrice. Katherine came to the door about nine; she’d been having a meeting with the general. She said she wanted to use the shower, as hers wasn’t working. They made love afterwards. She was very amorous. She was much more passionate than she appeared holding onto her telephone, or driving her jeep.

Afterwards he continued to think about Beatrice, what she was doing, even while he was lying naked on the small bed and Katherine was telling him all about the general and what he’d said about the upcoming elections. He was going to run for president. He’d told her that he was sure he was going to win.

After Katherine had left—when it was very late—Russell continued to think about the general’s wife, what she was doing. What, if anything, she might be saying to her husband about him. He wondered what kind of conversations that kind of man and a woman who’d been to Oxford could possibly have.

When he got back that Sunday night to his apartment in the capital, he emailed his senior editors in London and pitched the idea of a series of articles on the upcoming presidential election. He knew from speaking to his bosses in the past that they didn’t like General Selva on principle, and considered him an arch-example of the anti-democratic forces in the country that were bad for business. His editors, he’d guessed, would jump at the opportunity to push Antonio De La Madrid, the pro-business, neo-liberal candidate who was opposing Selva for president. He wasn’t surprised when he got the green light for the series. He wanted to see Beatrice Selva again.

EIGHT

He’d come back to Tres Rios to start searching for the Red Jaguar. The morning was viciously hot and clear, as if it hadn’t rained all night. When Russell walked outside with his cup of coffee, he could see the Volcan de Agua in the distance, part of a cruel-looking set of green mountains to the north. By four in the afternoon it would rain again, but the mornings were hot and humid and perfectly clear. The plantation’s rear garden was flat and had a fountain the French family had built, and a huge pond with fish. There was a swimming pool too, but it was empty, its white-painted bottom glistening now in the morning sun.

Russell walked to the edge of the pool. Sitting down, he let his legs dangle over its edge. He’d have it filled, he thought. He drank his coffee in silence and listened to the early morning sounds of the plantation: birds, horses being taken from their stalls, sounds of domesticity from the workers’ housing. There was a mixture of children’s voices and ranchera music, too.

He looked into the empty blue sky, cleaned of everything, for signs of rain. Why shouldn’t I feel optimistic? he thought. It was true he owed a great deal of money now, but he owned all this, and somewhere out there might be a great treasure. Maybe he would stay here after he found the Red Jaguar. He could be a man of leisure. Carl had assured him the Jaguar would fetch millions of dollars. His share would be enough to live on the rest of his life wherever he chose. Could he really be happy back in San Francisco? Or had this country gotten under his skin in some way, its Wild West quality perversely satisfying something in him?

“Don Russell?” He turned around. The girl who had opened the gate for him that first day was standing in front of him, barefoot like a goddess—a brown-skinned Diana.

“Yes,” he said. He had to shade his eyes to look at her. She was wearing the same yellow dress. Behind her, the white volcanic sand used to pave the garden was catching the sunlight. It made the sand sparkle under her feet like crushed diamonds.

“May I work in the kitchen? You will need a cook, Patron?” she asked in Spanish. “I worked sometimes in the kitchen– for Don Pinkie.” The girl was looking down at her bare feet. “I can clean, too . . . if you like?” The French family was going to take their own maid and cook with them to the capital. They’d been staying here, but were finally leaving that morning.

Russell suspected that Don Pinkie, who owned several other plantations, was going broke slowly and would finally be ruined. That morning at breakfast, he’d kept checking his pager, which gave him the current price of coffee at the Chicago Board of Trade. He’d come to have breakfast and to say goodbye to Russell and Mahler.

“Seventy dollars, that’s all we need, right!” Don Pinkie had said to him at breakfast, as if Russell were an experienced coffee plantation owner. The fact was he’d never grown a house plant, much less run a coffee plantation. He knew nothing about the practicalities of coffee production. What he did know about the business he’d learnt over three years of covering the commodity as a financial journalist. From what he could tell, the over production in the world’s coffee market was going to kill off most growers in Central America. They just didn’t stand a chance against the Vietnamese and the Brazilians, who paid their workers even less.

The Frenchman reminded him of himself when he’d been holding a losing position while trading stocks. Why is it we always believe things will get better, he wondered, looking at the Frenchman. Why do we believe that the stock will go up in an hour or tomorrow? That prices will turn around? That she will love me better tomorrow?

“Right,” was all Russell had said. “Seventy dollars would do it, all right. Things would be much better.”

“We’ll get it by next January, when the harvest comes in. You watch. The Brazilians can’t keep dumping coffee into the market. You’ll see that you made the right decision, young man. You’re at three thousand feet here. That’s quality coffee,” the Frenchman said. “Don’t forget that.” Don Pinkie turned to look out the window at his wife and children out in the garden, saying their goodbyes to some of the workers. “I left Europe without a penny thirty years ago. I was a Legionnaire in Africa. . . .”

Don Pinkie’s wife, a tiny, attractive Frenchwoman, was much younger. Russell watched her walk to their old Willys Jeep with a box. She’d thanked him for allowing them to stay in the guest house while they made arrangements to move to one of their other plantations. Don Pinkie talked on nervously about the coffee market while his children played for the last time near the fountain the family had built in happier times. Russell listened respectfully while he watched the wife and one of her maids pack the car.

“Could you take our picture?” Don Pinkie said, finally standing up. “By the fountain. We liked this place the best. It was our home.” He seemed upset, but was trying to hide it.

“Of course,” Russell said, standing too. Russell and Don Pinkie went out on the veranda. Don Pinkie’s wife was crying. She was a pretty woman with red hair cut very short, in her early forties, Russell guessed, and her eyes were blue. She looked at them and said, laughing, that she’d been crying all morning. She’d kissed several of the workers goodbye one more time. The workers, mostly old men, had come to the big house and paid their respects, and she’d kissed the old men and embraced them. They had been embarrassed but moved by her gesture. They all embraced her and shook the Frenchman’s hand, and wished him luck there by the fountain.

Russell took the family’s picture. The Frenchman looked done in, he thought. He’d gotten older, it seemed. Mahler came out and stood on the veranda watching them.

“My wife says that you have a kind face and people like you always have good luck in business,” Don Pinkie said, taking the camera from him. They all walked back towards the family’s cramped jeep. The two children, boys, in short pants and white, well-pressed shirts like French schoolchildren, were gathered around their parents, looking sad. Their father took their picture again standing by the jeep. Years later, the boys would look at the photo and say that they’d been very happy there.

“I’ve let go of the administrator, so you’ll have to get someone if you’re going to be living in the capital. And there are only about ten families left working here. It was all I could afford. We didn’t bother to clean this year, or fertilize. I hope you can keep them on? Of course you have the right, according to the new employment laws, to. . . .”

“Yes… I’ll keep them on,” Russell said, and they’d shaken hands the way men sometimes do, earnestly, from the shoulder. The wife shook his hand too.

“And the ex-guerillas. They have the plantation next door,” Don Pinkie said as he opened the door to his jeep.

“I didn’t know that,” Russell said, surprised.

“I should have told you. I’m sorry. But they’re harmless. The government gave them the plantation as part of the peace settlement. I’ve been over to help them with technical advice.

They were very good neighbors, but they don’t know much about coffee. They won’t bother you, but I thought you should know. Goodbye then,” Don Pinkie said.

He and his family got in their jeep and drove away, the children very quiet in the end. Russell realized, after they left, that he had forgotten even to ask to see the office or the books.

He stood up now and looked at the girl. The fountain had brought it all back. He’d wanted to confess to the Frenchman that he had bought the place only to find the Red Jaguar and that he had no interest in the coffee, or the coffee business, but that had seemed cruel. He told himself he was taking an incredible gamble and that he shouldn’t feel guilty about paying good money for the place.

“Yes, of course,” he told the girl. “If you like. I need someone in the kitchen. What’s your name?”

“Gloria Cruz. Gracias Patron,” she said. The girl turned around and walked toward the house. He called to her and she stopped, her hair silken and so black on the yellow of her tattered dress, her breasts heavy against the fabric. She reminded him at that moment of a great painting.

“Gloria…? What do you want? Your salary?” he asked her. She looked at him a moment, nonplussed.

“I don’t know,” she said, smiling, and turned around. He let her go. He tossed out the rest of his now cold coffee on the ground. It made a dark spot on the sand, and he followed the girl to the house. She was born here, he thought. She was afraid he would send her away from the only thing she’d ever known. She just wanted to stay there. The idea of the city probably scared her to death.

“I’ve ordered two horses,” Mahler said. “I take you to where I want to start digging.”

“Fine,” he said. Gloria cleared away the breakfast dishes. They’d come back to the dining room, with its view of the fountain and gardens. Mahler flirted with the girl as she cleared up, asking her where she was born, about her mother and father, if she was married. Each question drew a girlish smile. Russell stayed out of it. Rather than be sexually attracted to the girl, he felt protective of her. He doubted Mahler felt the same way.

Mahler, shirtless, lit a cigarette. The wife of the Frenchman had put up new wallpaper in the breakfast room. It was bright yellow with white roses, very elegant.

“What are you looking for? I mean, it’s daunting isn’t it? So much jungle,” Russell asked. He watched his partner inhale and settle back.

“Hills, that’s what we look for,” Mahler said. “That’s what we look for. Clearings and then small hil… hills that don’t look right. Geo…logi…cally out of character.”

“Look, I’m no expert, God knows that, but I’ve been out here in the bush and I know you can’t see shit—much less clearings. There are no fucking clearings… How could there be?”

“You’re nervous. Since you came here. Re…Relax… I find the jaguar,” Mahler said, letting the smoke pour out of his nose.

“There’s a hundred and ten acres. Half of that Don Pinkie said was jungle. Never been planted with coffee and no roads into it. It’s virgin jungle,” Russell said.

“I said relax, old boy.”

“I’ll need more than that, old boy,” Russell said quickly.

“Water,” Mahler said, and winked at him.

“Water. And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“The Mayans worshipped water. They needed water to irrigate their crops and they didn’t build if there was no good source of water nearby. They were very smart people,” he said.

“And?”

“There are three rivers on this plantation, one is very small. What you call a. . . .”

“Creek,” Russell said.

“Yes. Creek.”

“That leaves two. One runs through the cafetales and is used for hydro power here. They would most probably ha…have found any ancient building site of size when they were putting in the coffee years ago. The workers would have been all over that river.

“Okay.”

“That leaves the other one. Rio Amargo. We look there,” Mahler said, flicking the ash off his cigarette. “It’s virginal, like that beautiful girl in the kitchen.”

“Okay. Sorry. It’s just—I’ve never owed $200,000 I can’t pay,” Russell said. “I have to make a payment next month. Twenty thousand dollars. I’ve got to pay it to Banco Industrial by the twentieth of the month. And I don’t have it. I don’t even have half of it.” The enormity of what he’d done hit him. He had no idea how he was going to raise the next payment.

“Don’t worry. Carl says he buys the stone lizards and the Olmec head outside, remember?”

“Yeah, for five thousand dollars. That’s not enough,” Russell said. One of the old men was bringing their horses. Russell could see him from the window leading them across the road from the stables, across the brilliant white volcanic sand driveway. He didn’t feel hopeful the way he’d expected to.

NINE

Rio Amargo ran wide and not too deep, so they could use it as a road into the jungle. They’d seen spider monkeys, so Russell knew they were far from any roads now. He could hear the monkeys’ screams, echos over echos coming down from the jungle canopy, at times thrilling. It was hot and it was raining. Drizzle fell from the slot of sky over the river. The neck and flanks of Russell’s horse, a bay, were stained a tan color by the rain.

He’d strapped his shotgun around his neck so that it sat on his stomach. He wore a black nylon bodyguard’s vest, with extra shells in the loops. The vest was soaked through. The sound of his horse’s hooves splashing in the river was loud, the metal horseshoes tromping on the riverstones.

Russell stopped his horse and turned in his saddle. He looked down the river through the mist and rain. He could see Carl on his horse a hundred meters behind. The young man’s horse had stopped and was fighting to turn into the jungle, wanting to leave the river and climb to easier ground. Carl was having trouble controlling his animal. The man was completely out of his element in the bush, and was no horseman. Russell reined his horse, turning him back up river.

In front of Russell, in the lead, was Mahler, leading a mule. Mahler rode a small Arabian horse, far ahead of them now, his shoulders slightly forward as he rode. Like Russell, he could ride well, and the challenge of riding upriver against the current wasn’t a problem for him.

Mahler had insisted that Carl—who’d come to pick up the antiquities in the garden—come out to search with them. Russell had been against it. Carl had confessed that he’d never spent time in the bush, and Russell didn’t think Tres Rios was the right place to start. In the end he’d relented; he was sorry now that he had.

Russell had gone into the town to buy newspapers and come back late. He’d found Carl in the living room alone, reading. He was wearing his wire glasses and pajama-style slacker shorts. He looked like a college kid on vacation. A big black flashlight sat at his feet. Carl said the power had gone out briefly while Russell had been gone.

“Where’s Mahler?” Russell asked, putting his things down.

“I’m not sure,” Carl said. For a moment they looked at each other; then Carl stood up, and they shook hands.

“You did a smart thing here,” Carl said. “Buying this place. I was just looking up the objects out in the garden. They’re worth a lot, especially the snake. Collectors love those Olmec snakes. I can get you maybe ten thousand dollars for that right away. More than what I thought.”

“How much are you making?” Russell asked. “Just kidding. Ten thousand dollars, sure. I’ll take it.” He looked towards the kitchen; it was dark. “You want a drink? I called on the way home and told the girl to cook some dinner. Did she?”

“Sure. I’d love a drink,” Carl said. Russell put down his shotgun and walked towards the kitchen. There was a maid’s bell. He rang it.

“I’m starving,” Russell said. “Have you seen Gloria?”

“She was here earlier,” Carl said. Carl sat back down.

“Have you eaten, then?” Russell asked.

“No,” the Dutchman said. “We were waiting for you.”

Russell looked into the kitchen, annoyed that dinner wasn’t ready. The kitchen was tidy but empty. He’d called and asked that dinner be waiting for him. He walked into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and looked inside. There was German beer Mahler had bought, lots of it. He took a can and called to Carl and asked him if he wanted one.

Russell walked back out into the dimly lit living room that smelled sweet, like old books. “I don’t know what happened to the girl. I just hired her. I told her to have dinner ready by eight,” Russell said, handing Carl a can of beer. “You want a glass or something?” Russell asked.

“Yes. Thanks.”

Mahler stepped out of one of the hall bedrooms then. Russell caught a glimpse—for just a second—inside the bedroom. A bedside lamp was on. He saw the girl pulling her skirt over her head. She’d been naked.

Mahler pulled the bedroom door closed and came out of the shadows of the hallway. He was smoking a joint. He crossed the room and gave Russell a nod without saying a word. Russell could smell the sex on him.

“Did you get the cigarettes I asked for?” Mahler asked, patting him on the back and offering him the joint. Dressed now, the girl came out of the bedroom, her head down, obviously embarrassed, and went straight past them into the kitchen.

He could see Carl’s horse struggling to climb up the riverbank, wanting to leave the hard going of the river. Carl was yanking back on the reins and kicking the animal at the same time. Russell swore under his breath, turned his horse around, and trotted back down river toward him. His mother had had him riding as a child, on the plantation. She’d made sure he’d learned horsemanship with one of the cowboys at a cattle ranch they owned. He’d spent weeks with the cowboys during his summers, learning their trade, everything from roping and branding to shooting long rifles at poachers from horseback. When he fell from his horse in the beginning, when they were roping in the corral, he would often begin to cry, his hands and knees in thick green cow shit. The men would only laugh and tell him to pick his sorry ass up, and quit being a faggot. After a week he stopped expecting sympathy. It hardened him in a good way. In the end, he’d learned to love the lasso, the way he could bring down a calf, the way he could get his horse to step back and tighten the lasso. The war had just started then, and some of the cowboys started carrying M-16’s. A mercenary who had come to train the cowboys taught him that automatic weapons torque when you fire them. He was twelve.

Russell knew, watching him, that Carl was doing everything he could to confuse his horse. He wiped his wet face. “Fuck,” he said out loud. He shouted for Mahler to stop as he approached Carl. But Mahler didn’t hear him. Russell pulled his shotgun over his head and was about to fire in the air to signal Mahler to stop and wait, but stopped himself. He realized that the shot might be enough to get Carl’s horse– already frantic—to buck him off.

The girl had been embarrassed when she’d seen Russell looking at her as she stepped out of the bedroom.

“Buenas noches, Patron,” she said.

“Buenas noches,” Russell said. Mahler was still standing next to him, the joint burning pungently in his hand. The girl came across the room and explained that she’d had dinner ready in the stove, and that they were just waiting for him to arrive.

Russell turned to look at Mahler. “What’s going on?” he said in English.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t fuck with me. What’s going on? I hired her. I’m responsible for her.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mahler said. “She’s in love with me. No one is responsible. She’s a grown woman.”

“Is she?”

“She’s nineteen . . . most girls have two kids here by that age. Shall we eat?” Mahler said.

“She’s eighteen, maybe, and you know it. She might be younger,” Russell said.

Mahler looked at Carl, and then back at Russell. He shrugged. “Is he jealous, Carl? Is that it? What do you think, you’re a man of the world. Is she sixteen or is she nineteen? They don’t even know, most of the time. Did you know there’s no birth certificate for these people? Maybe something in the church. But not during the war. Who knows how old she is? She probably doesn’t even know.”

“He might be jealous. She’s very beautiful,” Carl said. Carl tried to smile about it, trying to make a joke of it.

“You see, my friend. Even Carl says she’s very beautiful, and he’s a fucking homosexual. Can you blame me?”

“She’s a simple girl who’ll get hurt. She can’t even read. She’ll expect you to marry her,” Russell said.

“Shove the morality, old boy, will you please? She doesn’t need to know how to read for what we do, anyway.” Mahler slapped him on the shoulder.

“Wow, you’re something else,” Russell said.

“You wanted to sleep with her the moment you saw her, didn’t you? Tell the truth,” Mahler said. “Go ahead. I mean, in your newspaper you tell lots of pretty lies all the time, but here you don’t have to. It’s just us. Didn’t you want to sleep with her?”

Russell looked at Carl. “No, I didn’t,” he said. “You see, I’m not an asshole like you.”

They got drunk later and Mahler apologized, but it hadn’t sat well with Russell, and he didn’t let it go. The girl was in love with Mahler, Russell could see that plain enough. They slept together again that night, he was sure of it.

“You have to stop kicking and pulling on the reins. You’re confusing the horse,” Russell said angrily. He’d come back down the river, the water gray and turgid from the rain. The constant drizzle had suddenly turned to something harder. Above them, the strip of sky showing through the jungle’s canopy was completely gray. “Do you understand?” He could see Carl was scared.

Russell reached over and grabbed the horse’s halter, then moved up the neck and took the reins. “Now stop doing anything. Just stop for a moment,” he said, the rain dripping from Russell’s cowboy hat as he spoke. He’d told Carl to wear a hat but he hadn’t, and now he was scared and couldn’t see very well because the rain was hitting his glasses.

“I think I should go back; the fucking horse is wild,” Carl said.

“No, he isn’t. He’s tired of this river and he just wants out. But we have to go upriver; it’s the quickest way in,” Russell said.

“I didn’t know it was going to be like this.” Carl was wild-eyed. Everything seemed to be scaring him now. Russell led his horse out, away from the bank. The water was running off his hat and his clothes were soaked through, but he felt like he was sweating; it was that warm, maybe ninety degrees. He stopped his horse, got his plastic poncho out from the saddle bag and slipped it over his head. He would be even warmer now, but he was tired of getting wet.

“Now you have to stop putting on the gas and the brakes at the same time. It’s one or the other, but not both. Do you understand? And stop yanking the reins. They don’t like that.

Think about it; it’s a big piece of steel you’re shoving around in his mouth.”

“Yeah, okay,” Carl said. Russell pulled his horse around until they were directly across from each other, then handed Carl back his reins.

“What’s he looking for anyway? Mahler?” Carl asked

“How the fuck should I know,” Russell said. “I hope he’s looking for a big jade figure. And I hope to fuck he finds it. How much is Mahler getting of that ten thousand?” He hung his shotgun over his back, so that the weapon rode over the blue plastic of his poncho now.

“He gets a finder’s fee,” Carl said.

“How much? I want to know.”

“Twenty percent,” Carl said, collecting the reins and leaning back. He kicked his horse; the animal started stepping forward carefully, its head down. “I have to take a shit,” Carl said. “Very badly.”

“Go ahead,” Russell said and wheeled his horse upriver again. “Go ahead, nobody is watching as far as I can tell.”

Mahler was standing in the river next to the bank. He had his machete out. He was using one of those fat-ended ones, heavy and wide in the front. He had tied his horse and the mule, which carried all their equipment, to a tree.

“Here,” Mahler said. “I found this little creek. . . .” Like Russell, Mahler had worn a hat, but his was the military kind, a soft jungle hat. It was soaked from the rain.

“It will take us a day to chop ten feet,” Russell said, looking at the solid wall of jungle.

“Maybe. But I don’t think so. We go inside, we cut a path two-man wide. Leave the horses out here, see how it is.”

Russell looked around. He saw the water from the creek rushing out from the jungle, pushing against Mahler’s pants leg. The river was very shallow here. But otherwise, from what he could see, there was nothing to distinguish this spot from any other along the river bank.

“Wouldn’t there be more of a beach or something? I mean, if the Maya were going to develop something?” He had to hand it to Mahler, he could drink until late, stay up with the girl making love, he imagined, and now he looked fresh and strong here.

Mahler started chopping into the bush. The machete made a pleasing sound as it struck wood, a metallic biting sound that Russell had always liked.

“It was a thousand years ago…” Mahler said without turning around. “I found Bakta Halik, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, that you did,” Russell said. He climbed off his horse, tied it next to Mahler’s, then pulled his machete out of the scabbard hanging from his saddle. He’d chosen a different style of machete; his was long and wicked-looking, and served as a weapon, because it was light, as well as for hacking bush. He’d had it sharpened by one of the men at the plantation. It was razor sharp, the dirty blade silver where it had been sharpened.

Mahler stopped and turned. He had a .45 stuck in a clip-on holster in the small of his back. “We have some coffee first?” He took his thermos out of the pack on his horse.

Carl rode up, his blond hair dark and plastered to his head from the rain. He looked miserable. Carl’s horse had settled down now. Russell waded through the water and took the horse’s halter.

“Now what?” Carl asked

“Get down,” Russell said.

“I’ll get wet,” Carl said. Russell looked at the man, incredulous. “My feet. The water is cold.”

“Get the fuck off the horse before I pull you off,” Russell said. Carl said something in German to Mahler.

“He doesn’t want to get his feet wet. And he’s heard there are snakes in the water,” Mahler said in a monotone. He was carefully pouring coffee into the black top of a thermos. His backpack was slung on one shoulder, his machete driven into a tree limb right behind him.

“Four Steppers?” Russell said. A black snake called cuatro pasos lived in Guatemalan rivers. As a boy with the cowboys on his mother’s cattle ranch, Russell often saw them when the cowboys were herding cattle across rivers. They were called “Four Steppers” because that’s how many steps you took, after being bitten, before you died. Russell had seen horses bitten and drop the rider, who’d been bitten too after he fell. The cowboys called that a “lucky shot.”

“You’re a great big fat giant pussy, my friend,” Russell said in English. “Now get off that fucking horse.”

“I can’t. I’m afraid.” Mahler stepped forward and handed Russell first the cup of coffee, then his backpack. He calmly walked up and pulled Carl off his horse as if he were unloading a sack of some kind. Carl squealed and fought like a little girl all the way down. When he stopped carrying on, Russell pulled a machete from the scabbard on Carl’s saddle and handed it to him.