Red Jungle Read Free Page B

her friend Isabella was a doña and she wasn’t, her father, a worker who smelled of sweat and cheap alcohol, and who’d never had more than three quetzales in his pocket at any one time in his life, said it was because they were poor and Isabella was rich. He told her it would be that way until the sea dried up and God came back to earth to take them all to heaven, rich and poor alike.
    “I may drive us. Drive us to Quetzaltenango,” Isabella said. The two young women looked at each other in a way they didn’t normally. Each had a role to play—each had to give meaning to her society, master and servant. But this morning everything seemed to be different: the air itself seemed charged, dangerous, electric, like the afternoon when they had been lost together. They could hear the rain hitting the roof, and Isabella wasn’t sure that Olga had heard her. She wanted to reach for Olga’s hand and hold it, as she had when they had been children. She wanted to say she was frightened, but she didn’t.
    “Did you hear me, Olga?” Isabella said instead.
    “Yes, madam.” Olga’s eyes betrayed the obvious—that she was frightened, too. She had heard gunshots, and the radio said the war had started in earnest and that someone called Jimmy Carter was going to help them. In Olga’s mind, she saw Jimmy Carter dressed like a Catholic saint, with a stigmata on his naked side from a Roman lance. He wore a crown of dollar bills.
    “I’ve called Don Roberto in the capital, but he’s not answering,” Isabella said. “I’ll try again later.”
    The cook came running out of the kitchen, across the wet patio. Also a young girl, the cook was heavy-set, with thick legs. Her stomach pressed against the cheap fabric of her cotton dress, which had cost her exactly two weeks’ wages. She stopped under the awning, her hair shiny and very black. If there was a war, she knew nothing about it. The cook would die in a government ambush, her brain pierced by a bullet made in Indiana in a small factory with no sign. Ironically, the bullet was made by a woman, and fired by a woman who was fighting “in the name of the fatherland.”
    Isabella watched the cook hesitate, pull open the screen door, and then walk in. The young woman, who’d also grown up on the plantation, smelled of wood smoke. They used wood in the kitchen to cook tortillas long after they could have used propane.
    “Madam, I have the pork for lunch. Will there be anyone else today?”
    “No,” Isabella said. “No, I don’t think so.”
    “Don Antonio?” the cook asked. “Will he be coming to lunch?”
    They heard more shots then, and there was no mistaking them; they were shots and they were coming from the south near the town, less than five kilometers away. The women could hear them over the rain and the rolling thunder, which had broken twice over the house since Isabella had come to use the phone.
    Isabella instinctively told herself not to show fear; that if she did, that somehow it would be the beginning of something bad, something she couldn’t control, and the people around her would lose their courage too and they would all be lost. She felt, at this moment, as if she were the center of all their universes. She was the heart and soul of the plantation that her grandfather had left them. After all, she was a Cruz, and had her grandfather’s lion heart. She had the boy in the other room. He was sick. He was too small to be sick here on the plantation, with a war starting. He was fragile. What kind of Yankee was fragile? she wondered.
    “I want you to turn on the radio in the living room,” Isabella said to the cook, instead of saying: “God help us. They’re here. The communists are here, and will kill us.”
    Her father had died of throat cancer a year before in London. She had loved him very very much.
    At that moment Isabella, only twenty-one, felt very young, too young for the shooting and too young for the child. Her father had said he would not die