Red Jungle by Kent Harrington Read Free Book Online Page A

years, and now this strange new enemy, an economic war with unseen generals and unseen armies but real casualties, was being visited upon them.
    That Saturday afternoon, Katherine Barkley picked him up in her UN-issued Jeep, and they drove past the groomed concrete collection of shopping centers on the way out of the capital to the party. A red diesel-glow hung over a free trader’s dream of a skyline, bristling with gaudy bank buildings and Big-Business towers. Guatemala City was the biggest city in Central America. The diesel-smoke skyline was the carcinogenic byproduct of secondhand American school buses that had been shipped here, and were ubiquitous. Brightly painted, the “chicken buses,” as the tourists called them, spewed a rich black sulphur exhaust one could literally taste.
    They passed the American-style strip-malls adorned with corporate logos: Papa John’s, Nike, IBM, Gap, PriceSmart. HBO posters hung neatly at every bus stop, telling passengers to enjoy Band Of Brothers. “War the way it should be,” Katherine joked .
    They passed a huge green maquiladora with Korean script, saying only a Korean knew what. The prison-like factory was anonymous. The tops of its high walls, wrapped in concertina wire, looked ominous and terrifying. Above the wire, the iodine-colored sunset was fiendish and hysterical.
    They listened to a pop station whose DJ kept saying, “We got your hot mix, ” in bad English. “And there’s a shadow in the sky and it looks like rain,” Nelly warned everyone from Pop Land. They left the buses-crawling highway at San Lucas. It was cooler up there above the city, the little shanty towns dismal and uninviting.
    They took the turnoff to Antigua and started to descend on a modern three-lane highway. Katherine smiled at him, her body language seeming to invite him to kiss her. She was dressed in jeans and a white blouse. “We got your Hot Mix.” It was verging on dark, but they could see the outline of the Volcan de Agua suddenly hulking by the road, a bad actor in this country’s play. She was talking about her work in the countryside, and all he could think about was taking her clothes off.
    Crosby, Stills, and Nash came on, more “We got your hot mix .” It was a beautiful evening despite everything. He was randy; it had been weeks since he’d slept with anyone.
    They passed the last of the handmade furniture places at the bottom of the hill, just before getting into Antigua proper. Now the wan, polluted light had gone dull, like dark water pooling on a stone. A few samples, handmade desks and chairs, were being carted in by young skinny kids pushing against the twilight’s swift angles. The boys looked like crude skinny cherubs come to life. Maybe you’ll sell tomorrow, Russell thought. Maybe tomorrow someone will buy them all. He had his doubts, though. Lately he couldn’t stop the doubts pouring in. Was he changing? Like all men, he hated change. Had his professors been wrong? It had seemed impossible when he first got here, but now he wasn’t so sure. He’d been two weeks in Argentina the year before, and what he’d seen there had scared him. He’d witnessed the complete collapse of a society.
    There were red taillights and cars, and the sudden confusion of Antigua’s narrow colonial-era streets. The walls of houses and buildings, very close, still glowed from the sunset. The buildings’ warm colors felt soft and welcoming. Young shop-girls walked with their black hair pinned up. The town’s colonial architecture was a blessing of another century, before the ungodly cheap modernity and buck hysteria of the capital.
    They stopped for a drink at the Opera Café. They sat in the back and talked about how it was to be a foreigner in a country, how they never, no matter how well they spoke the language, quite understood all the nuances. The language had its little side streets, didn’t it? Katherine said.
    He didn’t tell her he wasn’t really a stranger to the