Going Native (30 page)
Late in the day they made camp in a clearing Henry and Jalong hacked from the underbrush with honed steel parangs. In half an hour they had created breathing room and a comfortable lean-to shelter with sturdy sapling floor conveniently elevated inches off the damp infested ground and carpeted in a spongy layer of tree bark. Dinner was rice, naturally, and a bony river fish Henry caught at dusk with a homemade hook and a hand-held string. The Copelands had begun already to fantasize about distant foods, Drake drooling over ice cream of the rich premium variety, huge heaping goblets of rum raisin and pralines 'n' cream, the greater the butterfat content the better, Amanda lost in a chocolate truffle reverie, thin sculpted shells of creme fraiche and gin and Grand Marnier and liquid cherries and raspberry puree, imagined tastes the sweetest.
Then Henry, sucking gravely on his dead pipe, began to tell them stories he had heard as a child from the great head-hunting days of the not so ancient past, when painted parties of six to seven hundred men in feathered war caps of braided rattan and coats of beaded honey-bear fur and armed with long horn-handled
mandau
blades and sharpened spears and shields of thick gumwood bearing the curiously gentle and childish face of the tree god framed by tufted rows of human hair, when these ecstatic, chanting warriors marched off on prolonged raiding expeditions into the perilous country over the mountains. It was a time when the spirit world was lucid and robust. Every decision, every act, was regulated by the songs, the flight patterns, the dreams, of the birds, those inspired messengers of the gods. The birds told them in which direction to travel, and when. The birds led them to the perimeter of the enemy village and at dawn directed their attack. The men rushed the compound, bellowing like maddened bulls. The enemy longhouses were immediately set ablaze, the fleeing villagers hunted down and slain and relieved of their heads, wherever they happened to fall. These precious trophies were then roasted, wrapped in palm leaves, and carried home in triumph to the acclamation of their waiting families. Such was the purpose of war. Little boys were given swords to hold and taught to strike at the fresh heads. The women danced with them, mimicking the actions of their men, sometimes in their frenzy biting at the dead lips and cheeks. The feasting and drinking lasted for days, and when the party finally ended, the new heads were suspended in nets with the old out on the longhouse veranda well above the reach of the snapping dogs. Everyone was happy for a very long time. Heads were the containers of divine power and, like magic seeds, once planted in the heart of a village, in the mud of the padis, conferred health, fertility, and prosperity upon each member of the tribe.
"But this practice," asked Amanda, "was outlawed many many years ago?"
"Oh yes," agreed Henry. "Officially, in my grandfather's time. No more war parties since. But sometime, you know, people get mad at one another."
"So now if it happens that an enemy is killed, this act is understood to be a murder, not a ritual?" Drake asked.
"Yes."
"And is the head ever taken?"
"Yes, but very rare. No one knows, not the government, not the police, not the missionary. Very rare. You must not discuss this topic with anyone please. Very sensitive area."
"I've read that in labor disputes a few years ago some timber and oil officials were killed and when the bodies were found there weren't any heads to go with them."
"Yes," said Henry simply. "Very sensitive area."
The Copelands were encamped upon the grounds of such events, experiencing frissons no television or movie screen could ever provide. Or so they liked to imagine. The darkness was their screen now, and it was filled with a multitude of strange eyes staring invisibly back at them. When Amanda needed "to go to the bathroom," as she so cutely put it, Drake accompanied her down to the river, brave man with a big flashlight. She stepped out of shorts and panties, waded into the warm black current, and squatted down, Indonesian-style, the roll of flapping paper held unsteadily overhead, light beam bobbing playfully about her -- had she ever engaged in anything so ridiculous as this nerve-racking adventure in outdoor elimination? -- anxiously swiveling to and fro, checking to see that no living creature had managed to sneak up from behind while simultaneously trying to avoid contact with samples of her own floating excrement.
After the cooking fire had burned down and the kerosene lanterns quenched, they experienced, from the illusory safety of their mosquito netting, the phenomenon of a natural darkness that was almost total but for the eerily glowing trunks of a few nearby trees smoldering with the soft fire of phosphorescent fungus, and they discovered that here, in this fecund climate, the night had a thousand tongues. Creatures chattered and squeaked and howled and buzzed and whooped and bawled in a never-ending racket of astonishing volume.
"It sounds," declared Amanda, "like a video game."
Drake turned toward his wife -- even at this brief distance he couldn't actually see her -- and said, "I wonder who's winning?"
As they lay there, attempting to gather whatever minutes of sleep they could against the demands of the coming day, bugs plopping like fallen nuts upon the netting, the hectic night life around them blended gradually into a gentle storm of vague static, the forgotten television in the next room that signed off the air while you fell asleep thinking of other things.
Drake's dream: his first shot in the director's chair and events could not be more disastrous, lights were popping, sets collapsing, lines being flubbed, actors late, actors missing, crew squabbling, execs complaining, funds withering, and in the middle of an elaborate take of a crucial scene the camera runs out of film. But this is his chance, maybe his only chance, to show the world, the industry, what he can do. He can't quit. So, hunched over the editing table, sweat dripping off his nose, paralyzed by the insight he hasn't a clue how to cut the film into a coherent piece of work, individual scenes like so many miscellaneous playing cards, he begins to wonder if the order of the deal would even matter. Would the audience notice? Would it even care? The questions swing above an abyss. The audience, too. He is the bridge maker. He must not fail. The film is in his hands, it's slippery, it slides apart, it can't be held, it's like a snake, it's in his hands.
They arose in the dank dawn out of a sleep without rest to quietly assume the previous day's languid positions in the boat, gazing speechlessly like sated connoisseurs upon mile after absolute mile of bursting, shrieking, pullulating redundancy, verdure without beginning or end, the moss-backed primordial crowded up against yesterday's tender birth, the same random elements combined, recombined in a ceaseless round of genesis and collapse. The scale of such vistas so great that their sense of themselves, the plain humanness aggrandizing every puny ego, lost its turgor, its shape, a goodly portion of its size. They were small and they were lonely, their solitude enlivened occasionally by the green cord of a tree snake dangling ominously near or the rare sight of a fleshy-nosed proboscis monkey bounding shyly away into the upper canopy. Then the jungle would resume its mood of poised tranquillity and the boat would pass on, the smoke from Drake's countless clove cigarettes hanging motionless in the stagnant air of its wake. Late in the day a huge rhinocerous hornbill came whu-whu-whupping on black leathery wings down over their heads, the totem bird of the forest people, conveying, even as they watched in startled wonder, a fresh soul to the far country of the dead and reminding Amanda, for no particular reason, of their interminable flight in from LAX, cramped hours, fetid thoughts in a whining aluminum tube to whose outer skin clung, in painted representation, Garuda, the mythical sun bird, capable of bearing Vishnu, Lord of the Sacrifice, from one world to the next quick as lightning. The national airline of Indonesia operated at more modest speeds. The blue curve of the Pacific extended into infinity. Back home Amanda had worked as a volunteer for the ecology group Groundswell, dedicated to raising funds and planetary consciousness. Until this trip she hadn't realized how big the planet actually was.
When the keel began scraping bottom, Henry declared the river leg of their journey ended. He and Jalong dragged the boat up into the deep grass and made camp for the night, again fashioning out of raw forest a snug little shelter with a watertight roof as easily as throwing up a pup tent. Neither man seemed to sweat or even breathe hard. After dinner (same, same) Amanda broke into a tin of Leeds & Palmer Country Tea Biscuits and offered them around.
"You opened those too soon," said Drake, taking two nevertheless. "Next week you'll be wanting them badly and they'll be soggy and damp."
"But I want them now. If I hadn't wanted them now, I wouldn't have opened them. And how do you know I don't want them more now than I would next week?"
"We're supposed to be pacing ourselves, remember?"
"Look, when my biscuits are gone, I'm not going to be filching your Fig Newtons -- if that's what you're worried about."
"We've got to keep the big picture in focus, Amanda."
"Never lost it, Tuan Drake."
Amanda's dream: she is being pursued through the moonlit maze of a stone temple by a howling gang of yellow-fanged baboons. At their head a demon king with the inhuman features of a medieval gargoyle. She is caught, she is eaten alive, she is dead. The scene is briskly rewound and replayed. Again and again. She cannot wake herself up and make it stop. She sits up, she opens her eyes; she sees herself sitting up, opening her eyes; she sees herself seeing herself -- the dark refractions of the sea of sleep.
In the morning they loaded their supplies onto their backs and moved single file out into the waiting jungle. From the shallow headwaters of the Kutai the land sloped severely upward. Less than halfway to the top and the Americans were feeling the grade in the burning muscles of their legs and the floppy bags of damp cotton that were their lungs. Drake paused to tie a bandanna about his dripping forehead, perfume to the black cloud of hungry gnats thronging in sync with his slightest movement. Amanda surprised herself by draining an entire bottle of water in one breathless gulp. "Wait-a-minute" vines tore at their clothes; rocks bruised clumsy knees and shins. At the summit Henry and Jalong went to work with their parangs and -- presto! -- a stand of young trees dropped dramatically away to reveal a spectacular "scenic view" of untouched rain forest rolling in deep green swells out to where clouds piled up like mountains of snow on the rim of the world. Over the valley hung a Laki Neho, a hawk, as if suspended from a string, planing in tight circles on motionless wings. Good sign, Henry assured them, now they would not have to turn back, to crouch at river's edge before their omen poles, waiting for crested spider-catcher to pass, east to west.
"Yeah," grumbled Drake, "I'll show you a lucky bird."
Henry and Jalong turned away to conceal their mirth.
Amanda wondered what folks in these parts did to amuse themselves in the days before dumb Westerners started volunteering to serve as stand-in clowns, fools, and jesters. She was leaning back against the slanted trunk of a dead tree, skeptical eye on the ruthless sun and this apparently impassable immensity before them being pelted so with hard light, and she couldn't help speculating whether that hawk might not be trying to tell them something else. Her attention was caught by movement closer to hand and she noticed that the ground near her feet, or at least the grasses, leaves, and bark chips covering it, seemed to be alive and heading in her direction.
"Drake," she called softly, not wishing to panic, cause undue alarm. She began backing away behind the tree trunk. "Draaake!"
He looked where she was pointing. "What the hell is that?" He leaned over, trying to decipher the meaning of this strange new phenomenon.
"Leeches," announced Henry, grinning as if they'd just discovered gold. "Very good friends. They like you."
"Sure, that's what they say at Global Artists, too."
Henry squatted down and began beating upon the undergrowth with the flat blade of his parang. "They already on you," he said nonchalantly.
"Where?" asked Amanda with some alarm, picking gingerly at her clothing. Then she saw the blood running down Jalong's leg. A quick search of her own person revealed several of the fat brown critters hanging like slimy ornaments from her terribly white calves and thighs and a cozy thick pair nestled against her stomach. Drake, who had attracted even more of the little suckers -- one hardy fellow managing to squeeze its way through a boot eyelet for a hot meal in the hollow of his ankle -- took pictures of this first close encounter with Borneo's wildlife. Neither he nor Amanda had felt a thing. Henry taught them how to scrape the parasites from their skins with the edges of their knives. Obviously, no one was going to be permitted to cross this forbidden territory without shedding some blood -- an involuntary offering to the great forest itself -- and an activity, loathsome at first, then merely irritating, that promptly became a regular habit of their day, thoughtless as brushing their teeth.
After everyone was rubbed down with tobacco juice (a trekker's tip provided by Henry, juice by an energetically chewing Jalong), rebuttoned, rebloused, and generally refreshed, they descended the ridge down a narrow winding trail into the submerged blue-green world of perpetual jungle twilight. The air was muggy enough to float in. In less than an hour the astonishing array of tropical life-forms, the knitted texture of an organic art, was reduced to the numbing reiteration of your own plodding feet, the complex orchestration of animal and insect sound condensed to the chuffing of your own breath in your own sea-throbbing ear. They tripped; they fell; they got up and struggled on without complaint -- talking used up too much precious energy. Their bodies began to collect an impressive assortment of cuts, bites, stings, and scrapes. Their faces, as if coated in a protective layer of oil, were always slick with sweat, Amanda's hair in sodden ringlets to her chin. They crossed a rickety bridge of vine and bamboo, a fast tributary foaming yellow and brown beneath their tighrwire steps. They waded through turgid streams of warm tea-colored water and crept down log trails slippery with moss. They floundered in mud thick as chocolate frosting, pungent as an open latrine, and then burst through the forest wall into an extraordinary clearing alive with light, simple strands of grass standing up like spun rarities ignited from within, and farther on an abandoned village, huts and barns long collapsed, only the gray bleached roofs left sitting flush on the overgrown ground, sprigs of fresh green sprouting here and there like ribbons on a dull suit. They came upon a flower in the middle of the wood, a massive scarlet eruption almost a meter in diameter, as if the forest floor had been incised and deliberately peeled back, exposing a raw ugly wound speckled with white poxlike scars and reeking of old meat. Buzzing flies of monstrous proportions clung to this flesh with an addict's avidity.