Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

by Ben Fountain

  “And if they are?”

  He consulted his drink. “Suppose I’d have to follow the trade in that case. Mono or Guinea, that’s where you’ll see the stones turning up.”

  “Gee, Starkey, you’d actually cut out on us? Think of all the great fun you’d miss around here.”

  His laugh was phlegmy, coarse, as raw as Bazzy’s blender pulverizing ice. “Well yes, I really should think about that. All the fun one might miss in dear old Salone.” He turned fond as his laughter trailed off, his eyes tender, fixed on hers as if he meant to coax out some sort of therapeutic truth. Jill turned back to the TV—she felt, rather than heard, the faint break of his sigh, his feathery chuckle as he leaned in close.

  “Do you know how good you look right now? You’re a gift, Jill, that’s what you are to me. You’re just amazing, love.”

  She felt warm, slack; her eyes went slightly out of focus. Was this what it felt like to be loved? Before Starkey she’d never let anyone talk to her this way, and lately she had trouble remembering why.

  I want the hardest place—she’d actually said that when she signed her contract. She’d spent two years in Guatemala with the Peace Corps, then three years in Haiti with Save the Children, and after that she wouldn’t be satisfied with anything but the very worst. I want the hardest place—on any given day that was usually Sierra Leone, “the mountain of the lion,” a small, obscure West African country known mainly for its top-quality kimberlite diamonds and the breathtaking cruelty of its civil war. She’d signed on as country project director for World Aid Ministries, a Protestant umbrella group that specialized in long-term food relief; a religious vocation wasn’t necessary for the job, only a tolerance for what might be charitably called spartan living and a masochistic attitude toward work. So here was the joke: she’d come to Salone determined to lead an authentic life and instead had discovered all the clichés in herself. She wanted to be stupid. She wanted to be rich. She wanted to be lazy, kept, indulged—this was where her fantasies took her lately, mental explorations of the guiltless life. Starkey was rich, and old enough to be her father, a package of clichés that neatly fit her own. She’d tried to pick a fight with him at the Embassy party where they met; anyone in diamonds should have been her natural enemy, but something benign in his eyes, the patient sag of his face, seemed to express a basic decency. She felt calm in his presence, she felt safe; without much fuss she’d gone back to the Royal Sierra with him that night, and it had quickly developed into a standing thing, Jill driving over every evening and staying the night. Her friends in the NGO community thought she’d lost her mind. Maybe I have, she told herself, maybe that’s what crazy is. Despising precisely those things you’re most attracted to.

  “So Jill, you really like this guy?”

  She was sitting on the cinderblock porch outside her office, skimming the registration binder that Dennis Hatch had brought over from USAID. Sometime in the next few weeks she would be leading a small convoy through the southeast, delivering resettlement packages in advance of the planned repatriation of refugees. That is if the situation held—if the RUF honored the Lomé Accords, if the U.N. peacekeepers could hang onto their weapons, if the rainy season held off and her drivers stayed sober. If a hundred different things she couldn’t control came together at a single moment in time.

  “I suppose,” she said absently, flipping pages. Each sheet contained the vital statistics for a single family. Age, height, weight, arm circumference—numerical stick figures.

  “He sure must like you.” Dennis was looking through the door to her office, admiring the electrical inverter that Starkey had donated. “Is it possible the word ‘whipped’ could apply here?”

  “I’m not clear how much seed rice is going into the package.”

  “Well, we’re still elaborating our information on that.” After ten years in the development field, Dennis had mastered a sardonic form of bureaucratese that Jill found alternately funny and maddening.

  “Can you even give me a definite date?”

  “Negative.”

  Dennis folded himself into the straw-bottomed chair beside Jill’s. He had the lean, near-haggard body of a fanatic runner, and was good-looking in a nerdy sort of way, which was more or less Jill’s type. His intelligence and contempt for authority made him her natural ally inside the system, and since he’d arrived in-country a year ago their friendship kept threatening to be something more. But their timing was off, their rhythm, the intangible whatever; all those late nights they’d sat up talking and drinking, and he could never bring himself to make a pass. She knew he wasn’t gay, so what did that make him? Barely relevant, that’s how it struck her lately.

  She turned to the budget at the front of the binder. “One-forty per ton for transport.”

  “Can you live with that?”

  “You offering better?”

  “Nah.”

  Jill shut the binder. “Then I guess I’ll have to live with it.”

  Several women from the sewing co-op passed by with snacks they’d bought from the street vendors outside, the women greeting Jill and Dennis with shy hellos. The co-op was housed in a building at the back of the compound, a sideline to the project’s core food relief mission. A year ago, in an absurd expense of time and energy, Jill had followed an inspiration and put the co-op together, converting the warehouse space, cadging basic supplies, plucking forty women from the refugee camps and putting them to work making skirtlike lapas. The project’s main warehouse faced the office, a large cinderblock structure with a sheet-metal roof and rolling metal doors at either end. Everything in sight reflected Jill’s rage for order: the stone paths, the neatly thatched baffas and sheds, the flame trees she’d planted about the grounds for shade. Beyond the walls lay a world of squalor and chaos, but here she’d managed to carve out a small island of control.

  “So how’s your beau these days?” Dennis asked in a chipper voice.

  “He’s fine.”

  “What’s he say about the embargo?”

  “It’s bad for business.”

  Dennis laughed. “Duh, Jill. But good for the country. Hopefully.”

  “He doesn’t deny it.”

  “You know the U.N.’s set up checkpoints on all the roads out of Kono. And anybody flying in from the interior is basically subject to a strip search.”

  “It’s still a joke, there’s no way they can stop it. You can hide a million dollars’ worth of stones in a tube of toothpaste and still have room for most of the toothpaste.”

  “Well, I guess you’d be the expert now.”

  “That’s just common sense, Dennis, it doesn’t take any expertise.”

  He flashed her a vicious look, out of all proportion to what she’d said. She had to check an impulse to apologize.

  “Christ, Jill, what do you see in this guy? I’m saying this as a friend—”

  She turned away.

  “—somebody who really cares about you. These are not good people you’re hanging around with, okay? They’re into a lot of nasty stuff, they’re basically bleeding the country dry and that’s against everything we’re working for. It just makes me wonder where your head is at.”

  Jill was calm; she felt as if she was floating above the argument. “So who do you want me to hang around?”

  “Look, all I’m saying is I’m worried about you. It doesn’t fit, you and this guy, every time I try to picture it I come up blank. I just think you being with him is a symptom of something.”

  “Well, yes. Sex is usually a symptom of something.”

  Dennis winced. “All right, okay, I’ll shut up now. I know I’m way out of line.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Not that anything I’ve said matters anyway.”

  Jill acknowledged this with a half-smile; she realized that Dennis mostly made her sad these days.

  “You know,” he said, “as long as you’ve got this guy wrapped around your little finger, you might hit him up for a contribution to the co-op.”

 
“Nope. It just doesn’t work that way.”

  “Has anything come through?”

  “Handicap International turned us down last week—I guess they don’t believe there’s such a thing as one-armed seamstresses. CRS said no, Global Relief, everybody. They’re sending all their money to Kosovo now.”

  “Well, Kosovo’s hot these days. And a lot of people have pretty much written off Salone.” He stretched a leg, gingerly popped the knee. “How much longer can you keep it going?”

  “A couple of weeks. Maybe a month if we really string it out.”

  “If you give me the numbers I’ll try to get something for you. Enough to keep it going till some real money comes through.”

  “Aisha’s got the books,” Jill said, rising at once. “Come on.”

  The co-op was housed in a narrow concrete building with barred windows along one side and rough wooden tables arranged in rows. Wicker baskets full of country cloth and gara were placed at each row, and the women worked in teams of two, one woman stitching while the other held the cloth; in a matter of weeks they’d grown so proficient that each team could sew as fast as any able-bodied seamstress. On a good day the co-op turned out over two hundred garments, but the stuff sold too slowly piecemeal, and the Lebanese traders wouldn’t buy in bulk until they were satisfied the peace was going to hold.

  Jill always felt a kind of compression when she stepped into the co-op, a crowding of awareness that made her hushed and anxious while at the same time lifting her out of herself. How believers might feel when they entered a church—it had something to do with suffering, she suspected, but beyond that she lacked the energy to analyze it. While Dennis and Aisha went through the books Jill tallied and stacked the morning’s output of clothes, looking over the room while she worked. Her gaze inevitably lingered on the women’s stumps; on some level she never really stopped thinking about that, though for a long time she’d tried to deny her obsession, this thing she had—which seemed shameful, vaguely pornographic—for visualizing her own mutilation. “It go red when you chopped,” one of the women had told her. “Everyt’ing go red, red, like your mind on fire.” Jill was sure she would die of horror if it happened to her; most did, ostensibly from shock or loss of blood, and how these women had survived was beyond her comprehension. Not just survived—how they seemed capable at times of quite genuine joy. Lately Jill had seen them laughing and chatting as they worked, edging back toward something like normal life. They had no idea that she was a couple of weeks away from shutting them down.

  “I can’t make any promises,” Dennis said as she walked him across the compound to his jeep. The street noise beyond the walls roared like a slow avalanche.

  “You know I appreciate it,” she said, and felt hopeful enough to try a joke: “Feel free to puff up the numbers all you want.”

  “Well, you know that’s never a good idea.” He didn’t smile—did he think she was serious? At the jeep he turned and studied her so intently that she feared some sort of ridiculous scene.

  “Jill.”

  “What.” She avoided his eye.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine, Dennis.”

  “I don’t know, you just seem awfully tired lately. Frankly I think you’re depressed, not that it’s any of my business. But a lot of us are concerned.”

  This affected her more than she might have expected. She had to swallow, then consciously smooth out her breathing, but even so the irony didn’t sound quite right. “Well, I may be having a normal reaction to this place.”

  “It’s still depression, Jill. If I were you I’d be putting some thought into that.”

  Sometimes at night, when they were alone in his room, Starkey would take out a batch of diamonds and instruct her on the finer points of valuation. He seemed to enjoy the ego-boost of mentoring her, the role-playing and not-so-subtle sexual subtext, and Jill went along with it, amused, not uninterested, though the diamonds themselves were disappointing. In their rough state they were such chalky little nubs, airy nothings that rattled around your palm like baby teeth, and yet they put him at the center of something vital. At night she watched him empty his pockets as he undressed, spilling out scraps of paper, cocktail napkins, matchbook covers, all with names and phone numbers scribbled on them. By eight the next morning his cell phone was going, and by nine he was meeting people downstairs, receiving them on the terrace like a little king. She was starting to see the point of it, how making money might actually be interesting, and how the more you made the more interesting it could be. And lately another revelation had come to her: Starkey was responsible only for himself. This was, she thought, the great luxury of business, of a life devoted solely to making money; it seemed strange to her, exotic in the way of forbidden things, until she remembered that this was how most people lived.

  Yet in his way he took care of so many people—or was that simply part of working smart? He was extravagant with gifts and favors, a soft touch for beggars, and he tipped as if bent on keeping the whole staff afloat. He had a trade-school education—mechanical drafting, he’d confessed—and talked enough about his past for Jill to get the sense of a hardscrabble childhood, so different from her own. He wasn’t at all touchy or bitter about it; he seemed to take real pleasure in the narrative of what he called her “American” life, the big house, the horse stables, good schools, college. In bed he had definite ideas about what he wanted, though he never pressed, never insisted. He didn’t have to, Jill reflected, laughing to herself, feeling the heat rising into her neck and face. She supposed that’s what a nice man did for you.

  “Look at those bastards.”

  She was at the bar, sipping her third drink of the evening. Dennis Hatch slid onto the stool next to her, jutting his chin at the TV; CNN was running a story on the latest crop of tech billionaires.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Meeting.” His eyes stayed fixed on the TV. “Kind of makes you want to puke, doesn’t it.”

  “In a way you’ve got to hand it to them. They had the energy, they went for it. They pulled it off.”

  “You got any money in the market?”

  “Not a cent.”

  “Me either.” He laughed. “I can’t wait for the damn thing to crash.”

  Jill supposed she sympathized; supposed she even agreed. “So who are you meeting?”

  “Some WFP honchos from Conakry, we’re tightening up the strategic stocks plan. Just in case.”

  “Could be a good move.”

  “Star beer,” Dennis said to Bazzy, then he turned on his stool to look over the terrace. The tables were packed with an ecumenical mix of whites and Africans. Thrashing, bass-heavy music played on the sound system, while waiters hustled up and down the steps with drinks. A stunning hooker with blond cornrows passed two feet in front of Dennis, raking him out of the corner of her eye. He turned to Jill with a smirk.

  “Always a party at the Royal.”

  “Somebody’s gotta do it.”

  “How come you’re sitting up here?”

  She followed the line of his gaze to Starkey’s table, where the people and chairs were stacked three deep. “He’s having office hours.”

  “So?”

  So—she felt like a whore when she sat at his table? “I’d just rather sit up here.”

  Dennis turned back to the bar; they talked shop, traded gossip about their fellow expats, speculated on the political situation. Jill didn’t mention the co-op; she made herself wait for Dennis to bring it up, and when he didn’t she was gradually given to understand that there would be no money from the government. Despairing as she nodded and sipped her drink, maintaining, minimizing the personal side; by now it was second nature. Presently Starkey walked over to the bar, giving Dennis a bland smile as he ordered a Sassman’s. Jill introduced the two men.

  “Ah, USAID,” said Starkey. They shook hands around Jill. “Still a growth industry, what?”

  “Unfortunately yes.”

>   “I should think the only one in Salone at the moment.”

  “I don’t know, I understand you diamond guys are doing pretty well.”

  “On the contrary, they’ve put a ban on our product. Or haven’t you heard.”

  “I didn’t think a little thing like the law slowed you guys down.”

  Jill kept her eyes on the television, one hand on her drink. She wasn’t especially shocked that they’d gotten into it, just surprised that it happened so quickly.

  “Please,” said Starkey, “let me enlighten you. My man’s sitting up in Koidu with six months’ worth of stones and I can’t get to him even if I wanted to. And everyone here is in the same boat, we’re all slowly bleeding to death. Another month or two of this and we’ll be closing up shop.”

  “Cry me a river,” Dennis said through his teeth.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Cry me a river, it’s an expression. Basically it means all you guys can go fuck yourselves.”

  “Oh. Well. That’s awfully sentimental of you.”

  Dennis snorted into his beer.

  “You think I’m being facetious? I’m quite serious actually, the whole embargo concept is a sentimental crock. It gets the human-rights chaps all warm and fuzzy, but what it’s really about is De Beers keeping a lock on the market. Seems so righteous of them, lobbying for the ban and all that—they’ll shut down the juniors in the name of good citizenship, then they’ll move in and open up the tap again. It’s all a farce, son, a sham. I shouldn’t think a smart fella like you would need me to explain.”

  “It’s never clean,” Dennis said. “I sure as hell don’t need the likes of you to tell me that.”

  “Yes, well said, it’s never clean. But you’re wrong if you think things are actually going to change. People will buy and sell diamonds as always, my friend. They’ll just be different people. Well,” he hoisted his drink at Dennis, “cheers.”

  Starkey turned to leave, but Jill caught his arm.

  “Stay,” she murmured, tightening her grip. “Don’t mind him. Just stay.”