Free Red Jungle by Kent Harrington Page A

towards the coast they’d passed some of the country’s biggest and oldest coffee plantations: La Bella, La Sultana, La Gloria, some obviously still grand and managing to keep going, others forlorn and abandoned because of the coffee crisis. The temperature cooled as they went higher into the mountains near Mexico. At times the dirt road was lonely and terribly rutted; at others it was well graded and busy with workers from a nearby plantation. Some plantations were so massive they’d spawned small towns outside their gates.
    “I feel like going home to the States for a visit,” she said. “You just like to feel really safe once and a while. Go to Nordstrom, that kind of stuff.”
    “So have you met General Selva?” he asked, changing the subject. He didn’t want to say the obvious, that even home wasn’t really safe any more, but he thought it would be mean to remind her of that.
    “Yes. He’s very nice in his way. He’s been very kind to me and the volunteers, anyway.”
    “Selva is head of Guatemalan intelligence,” Russell said.
    “I know.” She turned and gave him a fey look. “I think that’s why he’s hosting the project. He wants to convince Time magazine he’s not a monster. It makes him look like a liberal, having his picture taken with people like me,” she said. “He’s a committed free trading globalist, Russell—just like you!” She smiled at him.
    An hour after they turned off the asphalt, they arrived at the general’s plantation. Haggard-looking dogs ran out from shabby workers’ housing to confront them. Pretty young Indian mothers, some very young, could be seen inside their shacks sitting by the doorway, some making tortillas on wood burning stoves. Small refrigerators peeked white through shack walls. They caught glimpses of flimsy television sets, even once a glimpse of Jennifer Aniston on the familiar set of Friends .
    Men, unemployed because of the crisis, sat in groups in front of the company store, some holding machetes. Here and there banana trees grew out of the mud, exotic-looking.
    “How many families live here?” Russell asked as they drove past the store. Some of the older men waved at Katherine.
    “Maybe three hundred. We did a census, but it was difficult to get a hard number because so many people here are extended family, or have family that are just passing through. But basically there are three hundred, a little more,” she said. “With the crisis, half of them are unemployed.”
    There was something sentient about the red clay ground. It was almost the exact color of the people’s skin, so that it looked as if God had simply shaped the people from the clay earth and blown life into them, and suddenly they were drinking Coke and playing soccer and having babies and smiling at you. A little girl, held by her mother, waved at them from the doorway. Russell lifted his hand and waved back.
    Standing in dirty clothes at the corner of the building site in the hot sun, Russell watched the college kids, mostly from Europe and Canada, work with joy on their faces. He was quiet and found it hard to share in their excitement. Despite his age, he didn’t feel young any more. The others were sure they were changing the world, one little building at a time. He saw the project instead for what it was, a public relations stunt. It made him feel jaded. He wanted to believe that building new houses on the deck of an economic Titanic was worthwhile, but couldn’t. He wondered now if he wasn’t suffering from what he’d seen in other foreigners who’d stayed in the country too long: that strange malaise, a spiritual bankruptcy that overwhelmed them.
    He was mixing concrete on a piece of plywood. It was a job that even he could do, as he had no building skills whatsoever. He simply added water from a hose and mixed the concrete with a shovel to a cake batter consistency. He hadn’t even known how to do that, until a young girl from Paris showed him exactly how. She was