Guerrillas Read Free Page A

heap of concrete blocks. At the edge of the clearing there was a corrugated-iron latrine on a high concrete base. It was silver in the hard light, and the door was open. A thatched roof had been fixed to the back wall of the concrete hut, at the far end. It began halfway up the wall and sloped down almost to the ground. In the black shade of the thatch, on a wash stand made of trimmed branches, there were unwashed enamelbowls and plates and basins; the ground below was dark and scummy. Desolation: she had the urge now to get away.
    When she saw Roche and Jimmy Ahmed coming to where she was, she could tell, from the melancholy and irritation in Roche’s face, that he had been quarreling with Jimmy. But Jimmy was as expressionless as before, his mouth as seemingly clamped shut below his mustache.
    Roche said, “You’re going to have an epidemic on your hands one of these days.”
    Jimmy said, “Yes, massa.”
    Roche smiled at Jane. His irritation was like her own; but his smile depressed her. That smile of his, which had once seemed so full of melancholy and irony, issuing out of the largest vision of the world, now seemed to hold only a fixed, meaningless irony. And less than that: it held sarcasm, frustration, pettishness.
    They walked to the car to drive to the field. Jane sat with Roche; Jimmy sat in the back. Too soon for Jane, who would have preferred to consider the visit over, they got out, to the renewed shock of heat and glare, and crossed from the road to the path at the edge of the leveled field, beside the wall of forest. They walked one behind the other: Roche, Jane, Jimmy. Roche was still irritable. Jimmy’s impassivity had turned to something like calm. To Jane he was even considerate: she was immediately aware of that.
    He said, in his light voice, “How did you get on with the boys?”
    “We didn’t say very much.”
    Roche said without turning round, “They don’t have too much to talk about.”
    Jimmy gave his grunt. “Hmm.”
    The sun was full on them and full on the forest wall, less green, drier, and more pierced than it appeared from a distance. There was no play of air. The path was hard and bumpy and they kicked up dust as they walked. Jane was sweating; dust stuck to her skin.
    Roche said, “Did they ask you for money?”
    “One of them asked me for a dollar.”
    Jimmy said, “That was Bryant.”
    “A boy with pigtails. Very black.”
    “Bryant,” Jimmy said.
    Roche said, “Did you give him a dollar?”
    “No.”
    Jimmy said, “Hmm.”
    They walked between the forest and the dry field, past the furrows where shiny green weeds grew out of the caked earth; past the abandoned red tractor marked Sablich’s; past the crumbling thatched shed where long-stalked tomato seedlings yellowed in shallow boxes of dried earth; past human excrement laid in two places on the path itself. They went silent after stepping over the excrement.
    Then Jane said, thinking of shade, and thinking at the same time of something that Jimmy and his boys might find easier to do, “Are you planting any fruit trees?”
    Jimmy said, “That’s long-term. In this phase of the project we need cash and we are concentrating on cash crops.”
    They came to the end of the field, where four boys in jeans and rubber boots stood in weed-choked furrows and straddled four dry ridges. As if in parody of nineteenth-century plantation prints, which local people had begun to collect, the boys, with sullen downcast eyes, as though performing an unpleasant duty, were planting tomato seedlings which, as fast as they were set in their dusty little holes, quailed and drooped.
    Jimmy said to Jane, as though speaking of a purely local vegetable, “Tomatoes. You can pay eighty cents a pound in the market. Marketing, massa—that’s going to be a problem.”
    Roche said, “We’ll cross that particular bridge when we come to it.”
    They left the boys behind and walked to where clumps of bamboo grew at the edge of the forest and