“You see the dead, they care for nothing now. They don’t care about sex. They don’t care about love. Not even about food. Nothing,” the bartender said, getting ready to set the Indians up with beers.

Russell had decided to wait here for the American who would guide him to the plantation, for no particular reason other than that he liked the place, and it was right off the Pan American Highway, and the back had a view of the jungle and a river that was entertaining to watch. He liked the way the jungle grew right down to the river’s edge.

A psychiatrist might have suggested to him that he came to places like La Ultima because he had a death wish. He was ignorant of that particular desire, as he was of so much of his psyche. Some desires he was very aware of. Some were sitting around the back of the bar, wore short skirts, and could, under the right circumstances, make you feel better. But not always. The others were less obvious. He sought out fearful situations and now he had the desire to make a great deal of money. He couldn’t explain his seeking out fear, but he was aware of it. It was as if he were trying to prove to himself that he was not a coward, and whatever he did was never enough.

In fact, he thought he was fine. But all his risk taking was a strange way to live, he would have agreed. Other men he knew wanted to feel safe, safe in their occupations and families. He’d always envied those men their children, their wives, their knowing whom they could count on.

Something had happened to him that made the simplest things in life difficult and the harder things easy. He would run towards a fight and away from anyone who said they cared for him. It wasn’t right and he knew it, but it was the way it had shaken out.

The men from the road sat at the bar, and the place livened up. They wanted to put the deaths behind them now. Russell bought them all a round; they thanked him, and said he was “muy Christiano.” Very Christian. He said he was sorry for what had happened.

Fit and tall, Russell had his Guatemalan mother’s thick brown hair and his American father’s rawboned good looks and green eyes. He had a quick, knowing smile that put people at ease right away. He was working now as a financial journalist for a famous English newspaper, which suited him. He could have continued with that, but didn’t want it anymore. He wanted money now, and was going to buy the coffee plantation from the Frenchman.

The afternoon started to crumble into long dull moments, still appallingly hot but overcast. The immensity of the jungle outside reflected the endless tangled nature of existence. Things floated by on the river.

“You want something to eat?” the bartender asked later.

“No thanks,” Russell said.

“You want to talk to a girl?”

“No. Not in the mood.”

“You’re young. You should talk to a girl,” the bartender said. “It’s always fun.” “Maybe later,” Russell told him.

The men who’d planted the cross proceeded to get drunk. The young priest had one polite drink and left for his church. Russell moved to a table and continued to wait for the American while he watched a parade of impoverished plantation workers — men and women — in black rubber boots, some carrying their machetes, walk past the bar toward the town.

Russell knew from his reporting work that the old feudal world his mother had been born into had ended with the destruction of the coffee economy. And yet the coming brave new world, promised by well-dressed young people at the World Bank, was not in place, either. It was a strange time. No one knew what was coming next. The execrable feudal traditions — abhorrent to him — were at least based on a perverted social contract that guaranteed homes and food to the country’s most wretched. To his mother’s class, it had also guaranteed great wealth and leisure.

But now, even that grossly unfair contract was being swept aside by Darwinian “market” forces that guaranteed nothing to anyone. The plantations were closing down, and there seemed to be nothing left for the poor to count on. A hundred and fifty years of history was being carted away, as if by magic.

He’d met the old American in a restaurant in the town. The American had claimed to know Tres Rios, the plantation Russell was going to buy. The old man had offered to guide him. It would save time, and Russell had eagerly agreed to meet him later. He was a man in a big hurry. He wanted to find the Red Jaguar, the Mayan antiquity he expected to dig up there, which would make him rich and allow him to leave Guatemala for good. And the sooner, the better, he thought.

The bartender walked out from the bar and put a new beer in front of him. “I put it next to my girlfriend’s heart,” the bartender said. “It’s ice cold.”

They both laughed. It had started to rain, first softly, then suddenly in a great hostile downpour. The voices in the bar seemed to get louder. Russell could hear the rain striking the building’s corrugated metal roof.

He slid the shotgun shell into the pocket of his jeans and turned and watched a couple dance. Suddenly, and for the first time in his life, he admitted to himself that he was completely lost. He put the idea aside quickly, a little afraid of it.

His mother’s family had owned one of the biggest coffee plantations in the country. His mother, Isabella Cruz, had been raped, murdered and thrown into a ditch by communist guerrillas, while he’d been sitting in a math class a thousand miles away. He’d gotten a long letter at school from his uncle, who’d written him with the news. His uncle’s letter had been very beautiful, but lacked something.

Russell’s mother had died when he was ten. They had been very close, in the oddest way. They had an understanding and sympathy towards each other that went beyond the usual mother and son relationship. There was no possible way to describe it; words do fail sometimes. Because of the war, he’d been sent abroad to school. His relationship with his mother had been epistolary for the most part, although he’d come back here to visit her for all his vacations.

Because he’d been trained not to show “weakness” in the military schools he’d attended, he hadn’t allowed himself to cry when he got the news of her death. Sometimes, however, when he’d glance at his writing desk, he’d felt like it. He’d seen other boys cry, and he hated it. He wanted to slap them. It seemed a violation of everything they’d been taught about being a soldier.

He was eight when he was told that war would make him a man. He’d believed his teachers, the way young boys do.

The school had been brutal, so he’d learned to cope with brutality and physical violence at a very young age. (Every adult on the staff, short of the cooks, had the right to practice corporal punishment on the students, and they had.) He’d become expert at both psychological warfare and the strange, capricious, and often purely sadistic behavior of adults.

Many of his fellow students would die trying to prove how tough they were. One died in Somalia in Delta force, the toughest of the tough. Russell had seen his name in the newspaper. They had been on the cross country team together. He remembered the boy catching him on a hill once in the rain, and they’d raced along together in silence, sharing the pain of a long run.

His school was shut down when the idea of making “soldiers” out of young boys finally went out of fashion. As far as he was concerned, it had been a good education, and prepared him for a world that was less than fair most of the time.

Russell watched the old American’s beat-up, lime green Volkswagen bus pull up in front of the bar, right where the men had planted the cross. The driver’s-side door was bashed in. The old American slid out, locked his bus up and waited for the traffic to clear on the road, then ran across in the downpour.