The Drifters (67 page)

So at dusk Holt climbed back into his perch twelve feet above the ground—tired, sweaty, bitten by insects and
ashen-mouthed from thirst. It was a long six hours to midnight and twice he dozed, but the belt-lashing kept him steady.

At midnight the now familiar sounds assailed him, but his ear was attuned for that one signal which escaped him. There was no tiger. At two in the morning a new sound developed, but it was some lesser animal preoccupied with its own problems. At four there still was no tiger and Holt grew heavy with sleep, but at five-thirty, just before dawn, he heard a savage rumbling, as if a satisfied tiger were talking to himself, and as the sound grew closer Holt began to sweat anew.

It was the beast, the most terrifying of all killers, and he was going to pass close to the tree, as Holt had predicted. The jungle night was so dense that not even the shadow cast by a star was visible, so the trick was to wait until the tiger approached the clearing, then, with the gun barrel and the flashlight in the left hand, to blind the beast with a sudden burst of light. For a moment the tiger would halt, confused by this unexpected confrontation, and in that moment you had to fire directly into the animal’s heart, destroying his power. If you missed, a wounded tiger was on your trail and would never surrender until he died from loss of blood or tracked you down and killed you.

Holt fired and missed. Had he come prepared for shooting from a tree, he would have had a device to hold the flashlight, leaving his hands free to manage the gun. Or he would have had a helper to direct the light. As it was, when the light came on he was as terrified as the tiger, for directly below him reared this enormous beast, striped and monstrous with tooth and claw. When the flashlight touched the metal of the gun barrel it began to slip, and in trying to clutch it more firmly, Holt’s left hand trembled, then lost control, and the shot went wild. Immediately he steadied the light and the gun and fired again, but the tiger had now leaped forward and the bullet ripped into its left shoulder. The force was great enough to drive the animal backward in mid-flight, but it struck no vital spot, and Holt heard the enraged beast thrashing among the lesser trees and bushes as it took refuge in the jungle.

Holt never said what his thoughts were at that critical moment, but I can deduce them from what he did. Although
dawn was not quite upon him, he unfastened his belt, methodically ran it through the loops of his pants, tucked his troublemaking flashlight away, and carefully climbed down out of the tree. He then moved slowly about the trunk of the tree, keeping it always at his back, keeping his face toward the source from which the tiger’s raging came. He hoped that the animal would attack him, but he knew that with the coming of dawn the great beast would judge that it had better retreat for the moment to lick its wounds, returning to the man later.

In the first pale light of morning Holt saw the bloody trail that he must follow. It never occurred to him that he had an option. The rule of every settlement in Sumatra or Malaya or Burma or India where tigers prowl was clear-cut: ‘If you wound a tiger, you track him down and kill him. If you don’t, he’ll wipe out entire villages.’

All day Harvey Holt patiently tracked the wounded beast, growing ever more cautious, for he knew that as the tiger recovered from the shock of having been hit with a heavy bullet, his cunning would recover, too, and his rage for revenge increase. It was near noon when Holt realized that the tiger had gone over from the one pursued to the one pursuing.

That hot afternoon, with no food and no chance to stop by a stream lest the tiger leap upon him, was a hellish time for Holt. Of this he spoke to me once or twice in later years: ‘How did I know he was still there? I sensed he was there. But of course he had the advantage. He could hear me!’

When twilight approached, Holt had his first sense of panic. If he did not encounter the beast in the few remaining minutes of light, what could he possibly do in the darkness? Would the tiger not just go off and disappear into the deep jungle? How could Holt track him then?

Any fear that the tiger might leave him was misguided, for when night forced Holt into another tree, the beast followed him and filled the empty spaces of the night with terrifying roars. He knew that in the morning the man would have to descend to those waiting teeth and extended claws. All night the animal thrashed and roared, but what made the scene diabolical was that on those occasions when Holt flashed his light, hoping to get a shot at the beast, trees or brush would intervene, so that Holt could see the striped body but could not fire, because
branches would deflect the bullet. And the tiger would move on like a malevolent ghost.

Now hunger attacked, and thirst. Twice Holt felt as if he simply must leap out of the tree to seek water; he even tested his knees against the belt to see if he could break it. I judge from scraps I picked up from Holt in later years that he must have been delirious part of the time, or at least assailed by sounds and images he could not control, but whatever precipitate action he might have contemplated was held in check by the snarling presence of the tiger. And so the night passed.

With dawn the tiger would present a clear target to the hunter, so he withdrew, and once more Holt methodically threaded his belt through his trouser loops, tucked his flashlight away, and climbed down to the hellish job that still faced him. All morning the man and the beast moved in purposeful circles, each trying to come upon the other in a position of advantage. Holt had two heavy bullets in his rifle. The tiger had two sets of claws, made doubly perilous by the sharp flashes of pain that coursed down his left side. No sun penetrated the heavy cover of branch and vine beneath which they moved. Once Holt had to drop to his knees beside a leaf-filled stream to drink, for he was perishing, but he had taken only a few disciplined sips when he sensed a movement behind him, and he had to get moving again.

At high noon the humidity of the jungle became intolerable. Holt once asked me: ‘How could a man who was dying of thirst sweat so much?’ Twice in this period he seems to have come close to fainting, but the threat of what moved behind the leafy façade kept him alert.

And then, toward mid-afternoon when the savage heat had abated a bit, Holt came to a second stream, and his loss of liquids had been so great that he could no longer restrain himself from falling on his stomach for a long drink. As he did so, the tiger, who had been counting on just this moment, knowing in his animal cunning that a man who moved so much and sweated so much would have to drink, sped from his cover near the stream, took three giant leaps, and came down with his great claws extended and his teeth ready, only to look into the barrel of a heavy rifle that had been swung at the last moment into position.

There was a shattering sound, then another. Without
panic Holt fired directly into the chest of the flying tiger, and his hands were so steady that the second bullet struck almost precisely where the first had gone, shattering the great animal’s bone structure and exploding its heart.

The claws, as if animated by a will of their own, slashed wildly at Holt, but missed. The massive face, rimmed with whiskers and striped fury, lunged so close to Holt’s that he could feel the teeth brush his shoulder. The body, already quivering in death, fell across his, so that the gushing blood stained his clothes. And from the trees above, numerous birds and monkeys chattered of the amazing thing they had witnessed.

As you have probably guessed, Harvey Holt loved hi-fi systems. He appreciated music for itself, but since he was also an electronics expert, he enjoyed the beautiful technicality of high fidelity. He built so many sets for others that sometimes an incoming shipment of mail, which had lain for weeks at some major distributing point, would contain half a dozen components that he had ordered for friends in whatever country he was then serving.

His own set, which I often listened to in Afghanistan, was a masterpiece costing well over three thousand dollars. He had a Marantz console from America, four omnispeakers from London, a specially constructed Mirachord turntable from Germany, a Roberts tape recorder with extra features added in Japan, and all sorts of sophisticated gear from Sweden and France. He had something like twenty-seven dials he could play with, so that his set could operate at a whisper or with the force of a hurricane. He preferred that his friends not touch the set—it was too complicated for anyone but an expert—but he was happy to demonstrate it for hours, if anyone was interested.

Holt was not a man whom many people liked. Respected, yes. Liked, no. But he did one thing which endeared him to all the music fans in his area. He would assemble from many sources the finest records available. Classical, rock-and-roll, country, soul—you name it. He preferred to use records that had been played only once or twice, and since a lot of men overseas imported excellent disks from Sam Goody or that outfit in Copenhagen, it
was fairly easy to put together a representative sampling of any type of music.

Holt would then transcribe these records onto tape of high quality—say, twenty-nine of the best hot jazz numbers or the chamber music of Bach, including the six Brandenberg concerti—until he had a concert of a given type of music that would run a couple of hours. He was so skilled at this and his equipment was so precise that in the end he would have a tape rather better than any which the professional companies were making. He would then process it through his various machines and make half a dozen copies for his friends. The result would be music so flawless that life in the forgotten outposts would be a little more tolerable.

His own tastes were specific. He respected classical music, and sometimes when he was making a tape of Beethoven’s nine symphonies or Verdi’s
Requiem
for the local prime minister, he would admit grudgingly, ‘Not too bad.’ But he kept none of these tapes for himself. The raucous music of recent years he understood not at all, yet curiously enough, he enjoyed making transcriptions of it for the younger tech reps, for it presented a technical challenge: ‘A record like that … pure noise … it sort of tests your equipment. Listen to how this gear picks up those bass notes and separates them.’

Spanish music, Mexican, oriental, Russian, Portuguese and everything in those genres he dismissed as ‘gook spook.’ I remember once when an aficionado asked him to make a tape from some valuable flamenco records. Holt listened to one minute of the first record, then growled, ‘I’ll do the gook spook but I’ll be damned if I’ll listen to it.’ And he made the whole transcription electrically, in complete silence, without once permitting the offending noise to echo in his quarters. Grand opera was also gook spook, but oratorios or Masses for the dead, like the Verdi
Requiem
, were not. ‘That’s religious,’ he said reverently.

What Holt liked was American popular music from the 1930s and 40s, those memorable years when the great bands crisscrossed the nation, playing in sumptuous ballrooms or over the midnight radio. By dint of careful search, he had asembled the finest records of that period and had constructed from them various tapes which evoked this classic period of American jazz, but after a
while I noticed that whatever the program, he invariably slipped in three instrumental numbers which apparently summarized the epoch for him: ‘A String of Pearls,’ with Glenn Miller; ‘In the Mood,’ with Tex Beneke leading the old Miller band; and ‘Take the A Train,’ with Duke Ellington. Once, in Burma, I tried to quiz him on these pieces, but he responded only to my question about ‘A String of Pearls.’ ‘Probably the best piece of music ever written’ was all he said, but from other hints he dropped, I gathered that he liked these numbers because they recalled the days when he was a youth just beginning to date girls.

‘It was great,’ he told me once. ‘You’ve got a Ford. A couple of couples. You drive fifty miles in to Cheyenne to hear Glenn Miller at the Crystal Ballroom or even a hundred and twenty into Denver to hear Charley Barnett at Elitch’s Gardens. The lights would …’ His voice trailed off. ‘There’s nothing like it now. Nothing.’

In the music he liked, Holt had excellent taste—no sobbing violins, no cheap echo chambers. He went for the hard, clean sound of American jazz and brought to the attention of his friends odd bits of music they might otherwise have missed. He was most partial to a razzmatazz outfit called The Empire City Six, who played a set of variations on ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ stepping up the pitch six different times until the room was shaking with glorious noise. He also introduced us to a strange piece of music which I had never heard of but which apparently meant a great deal to him. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington had collaborated on it, whiskey voice and heartbreak piano. ‘Duke’s Place,’ it was called, and once Holt confided, ‘It reminds me of all the lonely cafés I’ve eaten in.’ It haunts me even now when Harvey plays it, an irritating, inconsequential piece of music that ought not to have the power of evocation it has: down at Duke’s Place where we spent those aching, empty hours of our youth.

I can recall a dozen times in recent years when I have been visiting far corners of the earth, without comforts or good food or clean music. It was sweaty, lonely work, and even the fact that I was picking up good commissions made it no easier to take. Then I would hit the town where Harvey Holt was working and he would take me to his immaculate quarters, with the two toothbrushes
hung just so, the lastest copy of
Time
, some cold Tuborg in the refrigerator and a local girl preparing meat and potatoes in the kitchen, and I would sink into a rattan chair and Harvey would thread onto his machine one of his favorite tapes, but he would have picked it so that selections I liked were included, and I would sit back and hear the sounds I had once loved so well: ‘Boogie Woogie,’ with Artie Shaw; or ‘Two O’Clock Jump,’ with Harry James; or ‘Muskrat Ramble,’ with the Dukes of Dixieland. I sometimes had the feeling that it was Harvey Holt’s well-disciplined world that saved my sanity.

It was not easy to talk with Holt. To the longest question, he would reply only with a grunt. Also, it was difficult to identify the places he talked about, since he never referred to cities or nations, only to the airports at which he had installed UniCom systems: ‘It was when I was at Yesilkoy putting in the Big Rally II.’ This meant that he had been working at the airport for Constantinople, installing a communications system of the second degree of complexity. I never knew where the name Big Rally came from, but there were four of them, and only the largest airports like Kennedy and Orly had Big Rally IV. With this you got radar, side bands, closed-circuit television and half a dozen relay stations about the country, all of which Harvey Holt could keep operating when he was left behind as the tech rep.