Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [75]
“Do you think they understand what’s happening to them?”
“No.”
“That’s what I think too,” he replied. “None of us does, not really. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to lately.” They walked in silence for a time. “Wouldn’t you care to ride in the jeep?”
“No.”
“You’re planning to walk all the way to Guendu.”
“Yes, that’s what I’m planning to do.”
“You know,” he said after a moment, “you make me ashamed of myself. I don’t think I’m a particularly bad man, but you make me ashamed of myself.”
She wanted to hit him then. By now she was convinced that something was wrong with her, and that was what she planned to say to Starkey: I’m sick, I’m mentally disturbed. That’s why I gave away your diamonds, I’m fucked up in the head. To the women of the co-op she couldn’t imagine what she’d say—nothing, hopefully, if she could manage it. If she could resist the idiot urge to explain herself. At dawn a detachment of peacekeepers met them at the outskirts of Guendu, and as the column filed into the waking town Jill pulled the daypack out from under Pa Conteh’s seat and threw it to the Fullah youth. Tossed it carelessly, like so much dirty laundry, glad that she couldn’t do any more damage with it. After that things ran together in a blur—the walk into town, the peacekeepers herding them along, everyone collapsing finally in the dusty square. Pa Conteh found Jill propped against a concrete wall; he led her back to the Mazda, got her settled in the cab, and went to find them something to eat. She was still there, dozing with the door swung open, when she heard someone approach.
“Miss. Excuse me, Miss.”
She opened her eyes. Sawhey was standing there with a group of officers. Jill let her head fall back against the seat. Smoke from a hundred cooking fires was rising over the town, spindly columns drifting past the thatch and sheet-metal roofs, delicately twisting into nothing as they rose past the palms. For several moments she followed the smoke with her eyes, trying to find the exact point where it dissolved into air—there, that’s where she existed, where she’d lived her whole life. Turning back to the soldiers felt like the hardest thing she would ever do.
“Please, Miss,” Sawhey said. “We need to know what to do with these people now.”
Brief Encounters with Che Guevara
1. Love and the Revolution
When I was six my father became president of a college in Virginia, a small, well-endowed Episcopal school to which generations of wealthy Southern families had sent their sons, and which, though it had admitted women since the early fifties, still very much expressed that ripe, combustible blend of sentimentality and viciousness so vital to the traditions of the monied Southern male. We lived in the president’s mansion on campus, a massive Greek Revival structure in the old plantation style, with columns towering along the broad front porch, a sweeping central staircase fit for royalty, and high-ceilinged formal rooms whose hardwood floors had the acoustic qualities of a bowling alley. School tradition required my parents to host receptions for the faculty several times a year, and it was at these gatherings—peeking with my sisters from the top of the stairs at first, then later as a fringe participant, serving punch with the help in my coat and tie—that I became aware of my attraction to Mona Broun. Mrs. Broun was a faculty wife, a trim, petite woman in her early thirties whom I confused for a time with the actress Natalie Wood. She had the same wholesome looks as the famous movie star, the same well-scrubbed, faintly exotic sex appeal, along with fawn-colored hair worn loose and soft, this at a time—the mid-sixties—when women’s hairdos, in the South at least, resembled heavily shellacked constructions of meringue. But it was her eyes that got our attention from the top of the stairs, intense brown eyes with rich, lustrous tones like shots of bourbon or maple syrup, framed by sharp, exaggeratedly arched eyebrows like the spines of