Red Jungle Read Online Free Page A

tuxedo, looking very fit and handsome and young.
    “How’s this? The Italians call this monkey suit a ‘tight.’ Is your mother ready?”
    “Yes,” Isabella said.
    “Would you like to dance? I’ll tell you all about the party tomorrow when we get back,” her father said.
    “And will everyone be there?” Isabella asked.
    “Everyone that should be,” her father said, holding out his arms. She stepped into the room and she felt her father’s arms around her shoulders and she was dancing, and he was talking about how they were going to go to the beach at Tilapa when she came back from school in the States for the Easter holiday.
    “I want to go to the party, Papa. Please!”
    He held her away from him for a moment. “Look, Gloria! See your daughter.”
    Isabella turned around, and her mother’s ghost was standing in the doorway in a party dress. Her hair, blonde, was done in the style of her day. Her mother had died in a car crash in Fresno, California, when she’d gone to visit her sister in 1962. She was hit by a traveling salesman from Chicago, who managed to walk away from his brand new Cadillac and ask her if she was all right. She said she thought so, but she died anyway in the ambulance. She spoke to everyone in perfect English until the very end. She had been educated at Columbia University, and she had always prided herself on her English. The last thing she thought about was that she’d left her handbag in the car, and that it was such a silly way to die.
    “You have a child now. A child of your own,” her mother said. That was all she said.
    The room went still; her parents abandoned her. There was nothing but her father’s empty desk. She went to it and took his revolver from the top drawer; for some reason, he’d always called it “the bottle opener.” She opened the action and saw the bullets neatly seated in their chambers. She snapped the action closed and walked out of the room with it in her right hand, the hand she’d used to play tennis at her school in the United States, where girls didn’t learn to shoot. She’d learned to shoot here, on the plantation. She was different from those blonde girls she’d lived with so long, the Helen Albrights and Madeline Thompsons of the Yankee world. Helen Albright had asked her incredulously if Isabella’s father rode a donkey, like she’d seen in the movies. She said no.
    Because Isabella was so beautiful, the other girls respected her. But they were never her friends, not really. She made friends with another Latin girl from Chile, whose parents owned a bank, and who ironically had blonde hair just like the Americans. Once, on a train trip to San Francisco, the two friends listed a hundred things that made them different from the other girls. They never admitted that they were both in love with Jesus Christ, the way young American girls were in love with the Beatles.
    I’ll kill anyone that harms my child, Isabella said, and closed the door. She never saw her father’s ghost again, no matter how hard she tried.
    She could hear the rain falling as she walked back to the porch, and thought she would have to speak up if her brother called. But he didn’t call that day. He was sleeping with one of his maids, and he couldn’t be bothered to answer the phone. (The maid had heard the phone ringing.) Isabella rang him again anyway, hoping he would answer.
    The patio outside was drenched in a warm torrent; the yellow trumpet flowers planted near the kitchen house bent over slowly as they were pelted. Isabella finally gave up trying to reach her brother and walked to the screened-in windows to stand and think of what to do.
    Why? she asked herself. Why. Everything when she was a girl had been so good. Her father was here, and her mother, and there was happiness and no war. And if her brother was a tall, irresponsible, charming boy, it made no difference whatsoever. But today it did matter, very much, and she felt so alone.
    She had wanted to tell