Red Jungle Read Free

off, gaining speed, heading north toward Mexico.
    Russell watched him pass a truck and disappear. He thought about chasing him, but decided against it. It would be a race into the town, there were a thousand side roads to turn into and hide, and undoubtedly the old man, like any good rat, knew all the good holes. He took off with only the name of the plantation and a curt description of how to find it. He got that lost feeling again as he drove south, but it passed.
    He’d written his mother a last letter soon after her death. He wrote it on her birthday and mailed it. In that letter, he told his mother everything he’d never gotten a chance to tell her. He laid out his plans for the future, telling her that he thought that his years of military school had been good for him, and that he hoped to be a doctor or soldier; something “worthwhile.” There had been a moment after he’d read his uncle’s letter when he’d been gripped with a horrible panic. He thought he might have no future at all.
    He’d walked to the duty officer’s room and handed him the letter, which was a “dead letter” even before it was mailed. The older boy—a captain—in mufti, because it was the weekend, was on the phone with his girlfriend. The captain nodded to him, took his letter and threw it on a pile with many others; and that was it. He’d gotten on with his life. He’d gone on. Now he’d ended up back here in his mother’s country, half crazy and not even aware of it.
     
     

ONE
     
October 1, 1972
Guatemala, Plantation “Las Flores”
     
    Isabella Cruz Price, despite all the people around her, felt very alone. She turned the crank of the old-fashioned black telephone in the morning room, trying to get a line.
    The Cruz family plantation, Las Flores, was enormous—ten thousand acres. Even now, parts of it had never been planted or exploited in any way; whole tracts lay virginal and untouched. It was a verdant, tree-filled womb, creating oxygen that would fill the lungs of Californians, New Yorkers, and Englishmen without them ever knowing where it came from. The plantation had been bought by her great-grandfather for—it was said—one thousand dollars, long before Isabella was born and sent to the United States to study at a convent school near San Francisco. A nun at that school fell in love with her, because even as a young girl, she was very beautiful. Isabella had thick chestnut hair, very white skin, and exciting blue eyes that pulled you in. The nun—who lost her faith— would die years later still thinking about Isabella, still completely in love with her.
    She got a line. The telephone operator put her through to her brother’s apartment in Guatemala City. Isabella heard the phone ring. She pictured the living room of the apartment with its view of Avenida La Reforma, the grandness of that view. The street, a Third World version of the Champs Élysées, had been designed by an architect who hoped Guatemala City might, someday, be the Paris of Central America. He was an intelligent fool, or an extreme optimist; the city would never be anything like Paris.
    When they were children, Isabella and her brother would drink lemonade on Sunday, before lunch with the family, watching out for their father’s car—a big black chauffeur driven Buick—as it came down the widest avenue in Central America. They would rollerskate through the halls of the apartment, frantic to greet him. They had been very happy as children, surrounded by three generations of the family and the knowledge that somehow they were important and powerful.
    Isabella had kissed the President of the Republic on the cheek in front of that big window in the living room. Isabella had had her first period in that apartment, mystified by the bleeding. Feeling as if she were going to die, she’d run into the arms of her Indian nanny crying, very frightened.
    Her brother, Roberto Cruz, had changed some things about the apartment, modernizing many of the