Return to Paradise

by James A. Michener

  “Why?”

  He pulled up a chair and hunched up beside my mosquito net. In a low whisper he said, “The most disgusting person you can meet is a woman scientist. They’ve ruined New Guinea—studyin’ natives. They poison the Administration.” He could have squeezed no more scorn into the word. “They want to make a coon utopia.”

  “What you mean is, she spoiled some of your plans?”

  “My plans? I never have any. Just wait for what turns up.” He lit a hand-rolled cigarette and crossed his long legs. “But this damn fool Sheila …”

  “Wait a minute!” I protested. “This woman has been honored by the King. And by lots of scientists, too.”

  I could see Shark Eye’s face only dimly. It had frozen into a hard mask. “By God,” he snarled, “you’re one of ’em too! A coon lover!”

  “Go to bed,” I laughed. “I’m tired of you Administration haters.”

  “I won’t go until I tell you something. For your own good.” He leaned across my bed and whispered through the net. “I found out that this fine lady lived with a native man. Yes, right here in New Guinea. She was in the jungle, study-in’ primitive habits—so she said.” He filled the night with bitter scorn. Sheila Bancroft must have caused him much hurt to have incurred such hatred.

  The old man left my bed and stood in the doorway. “She studied native habits all right. No wonder she fills her books with dirty stuff about sex. She should know!”

  At breakfast he winked at me when Dame Sheila arrived. “She should know!” he cried in a whisper she must have heard. When she stopped to look at him, he stuck out his tongue at her and went, “Yannh.”

  That afternoon she met me going to the toilet, and although she must have known where I was headed, she stood in the pathway and said, “You’d be a fool to risk the Sepik with Shannon.”

  “I haven’t agreed to—yet.”

  “Be wise,” she warned. “Don’t.” I muttered something, hoping to break away, but she seemed to be weighing ideas. Suddenly she made up her mind and pulled me against the wall where no one could see us.

  “What do you know about Shannon?” she asked searchingly.

  “What everybody else knows. Rabaul skipper. Some experience with gold. He knows the Sepik.”

  “I suppose he showed you the parchment from Rabaul. He always does. But did he tell you why he can never return to Rabaul?” She pressed one hand against my chest and told in angry syllables how Shark Eye Shannon had fled the Japs in ’42. He had run off with the last boat. Had stranded some fifty men who had fought on to cruel death or even crueler imprisonment and torture. “He got away to Australia. But if he ever went back to Rabaul … they would kill him.”

  I listened and found in her voice a freightage of disgust that was unnatural. “Did he betray a man you loved?” I asked.

  “No!” she snapped.

  “Then what did you do to Shannon to make you hate him so much?”

  The powerful woman stepped back and digested my question. “What do you mean? What did I do to him?”

  “Look!” I said. “Last night he came to my room to whisper what a monster you were …”

  “What did he say?” she asked hastily.

  “I won’t tell you,” I said. “But now you report the same about him. What happened between you?”

  She was knocked off guard by this approach. Finally she said, as if at confession. “He was put in jail on evidence I gave. He debauched a native tribe. Terribly.”

  I thought this over for a long time and then said, “Dame Sheila, I like you. How’s about us going up the Sepik together?”

  “It’s very rough terrain, where you want to go.”

  “I know that. Could we get there without Shannon?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m here to hire him for my expedition.”

  This one bowled me over. Even though my bladder was about to burst, I had to get this straight. I said, “Look! You despise the man. You say he’s too tough for me. But you’re going with him up the Sepik. I don’t get it.”

  The tough little woman laughed. “Sounds silly, doesn’t it? But I meant my warning. To my knowledge Shannon has killed two partners and betrayed dozens.”

  “You’re still not afraid of him?”

  “No.” Then after a moment she added, “Sometimes you reach a point of involvement that insures protection.”

  That evening I had a further surprise. When I entered the bar Shark Eye and Dame Sheila were sharing a bottle as if they were old friends. Shannon’s lean face was extra animated and the English woman’s bobbed hair fell about her ears as she leaned forward to hear what he was saying. The Australian kicked a chair back for me and shouted for the monkey to bring more drinks.

  “Look!” I said abruptly. “I can’t hang around here much longer. Are we going to arrange a deal or not?”

  Shannon put down his drink and said, “I bought the boat. We’ll be shoving off shortly.”

  “Good!” Then to Sheila I said, “You coming, too?”

  “She is like hell!” Shannon interrupted. “That’s what we’ve been arguin’ about.”

  “You’ll take me,” the Englishwoman said confidently.

  “She thinks we can’t get past the Danduras without her,” Shark Eye gloated.

  Dame Sheila laughed. “Nor can you,” she said.

  “Why don’t we quit this stalling?” I cried. “Let’s agree right now. We’ll all three go. As soon as possible.”

  To my surprise Shannon turned almost black in the face and left us for another table. “Monkey!” he bellowed. The boy was slow coming and Shark Eye kicked at him.

  “That dirty beast,” Sheila gasped.

  “More beer!” the old man roared. He drank three bottles—big, black quarts from Antwerp—but he wasn’t even staggering when he entered my room late that night.

  “American,” he said softly, “we’ve got to come to an understanding. You’ve almost wrecked things.”

  “How?” I asked.

  He became very confidential. “We mustn’t take that busybody.”

  “What goes on between you two?” I asked. “I know her explanation. About having you arrested …”

  “And Rabaul. I suppose she told you about Rabaul?”

  “Yes.” I felt deeply involved with Shannon—for better or worse—and I wanted him to know that I was as tough as he. “She told me about you turning yellow belly. Deserting the ship.”

  I wasn’t prepared for his reply. He laughed heartily, then went “Sssssh!” as if I were making the noise. “I wasn’t the one who deserted the ship,” he joked. “I ran off with the bloody thing!”

  “She said they’d lynch you if you ever went back.”

  The tough old coot stopped laughing and said, “You’re young. I’m seventy-three. I watched a lot of brave men insist upon committing suicide at Rabaul. They hadn’t a chance. I told ’em so.”

  “They helped to stop the Japs,” I said.

  “Useless,” Shark Eye said in disgust. “A sensible man knows when to fight. The Government had betrayed us at Rabaul.”

  “I don’t like you, Shannon,” I said. “I did my turn against the Japs.”

  “Look, sonny!” he laughed. “I’ve done more fighting than all the gallant men in New Guinea. Most of them are dead. I’m alive.”

  There was nothing I could say to this, and for some moments I could feel his tense face close to mine. Then I let him have it. “Dame Sheila tells me you murder your mates or desert them.”

  With no embarrassment he explained, “There’s always two sides to a story. You’ve been giving me hell. I know why. You want to test the kind of man you’re dealing with. Now I’ve got to test you. Can I trust you?”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  Suddenly my left arm was gripped furiously above the elbow. I could feel my skin crinkling. “We’re not playing a game now,” he said harshly. “Yes or no. Can I trust you?”

  I knocked his hand away and said, “Yes.”

>   He pondered a moment, then lit a cigarette. He was afraid to speak, yet he could sense that his match had outlined the scar. He touched it with his finger and said, “It’s crazy to call me Shark Eye. A damned native did that.”

  “On the Sepik?”

  “Yes. Up where you want to go.”

  There was a long silence and I thought: “Well, I can wait.” Then abruptly he said, “I’m an old geezer, and I’ve got to trust someone. I want to get back to them hills because a long time ago …”

  He stopped and rose. I knew what he had to say, so I finished it. “A long time ago you found gold. Now you need it.”

  “I need nothing,” he boasted.

  “Don’t kid me, old man. Because I saw the date on the Brisbane bank book. I’ll bet you don’t have a tanner.”

  He stood in the deep shadows above me and said, “I know where there’s a treasure. But it’s inaccessible. The damned rotten stuff is in Dutch New Guinea.”

  “But you think you can smuggle some out.”

  “I know I can!” His voice became impassioned. “Yank, I never miss on gold. Forget your pictures,” he pleaded. “Come along with me! We’ll make a fortune.”

  “No,” I said. “You take me up to the Danduras. I’ll pay my share. From then on you do as you wish.”

  He gripped my arm more violently than before. “A man can’t do it alone,” he cried. “Last time I had fifty thousand quid worth of metal. Strike me dead. But the cursed savages chopped me up.”

  “Well,” I said, “that winds that up.”

  “What do you mean?” he cried angrily.

  “We could never arrange a trip.”

  “But I know the Sepik!” he howled.

  “You’re an old fossicker,” I said. “Mad for gold. Now you get any partner you wish. I’ll find me a skipper I can trust. Good night.”

  “But, Yank …”

  “Go to bed. You bore me.”

  Without another word he left the room, and in the morning I beat up and down the waterfront inquiring after various skippers who knew the Sepik. “That’s funny,” one of them said. “Short time ago a Dutchman was down here asking the same questions.”

  I met him that night at The Queen Emma. He was a chap about thirty, slightly bald, handsome and square in the Dutch manner. He was talking earnestly with Shark Eye and Dame Sheila. I was about to pass them when Shannon grabbed me and hauled me down beside him. “Meet Herr van Hoog.” Shark Eye laughed with malicious gaiety. “Guess where he wants to go!”

  “Up the Sepik,” I said, and the four of us sat together and drank beer, as we were to do for three weeks.

  The Dutchman took a keen, dislike to me and one night finally exploded. “You filthy Americans!” he shouted, and it was apparent that he had been cherishing a grudge until he got safely drunk.

  “Take it easy,” I said.

  “Easy?” he screamed. “When you ruined my country?”

  “Oh, hell,” I groaned. “Now we get blamed for Java, too.”

  “It was your fault,” he ranted. “If you had stood with us, the Indonesians …”

  “Take it easy,” I said again.

  But he raved on about how America had sabotaged the entire Western Pacific. The Dutch were kicked out of Java. Next they’d be run out of Dutch New Guinea. Then hell would start, because pretty soon the Indonesians would overrun all of New Guinea. Australia, with no defenses and no people, would be cut off. “Then,” he bellowed in his stubborn Dutch way, “you filthy Yanks with your handsome white teeth will be in the fire.”

  He had risen from his chair to insult me further, but I’d had enough. I reached over and shoved my hand into his fat square face. I remember that Shark Eye looked pleased at this, as if he prospered on fights, but before van Hoog could do anything I began talking very fast.

  “I wasn’t going to say this, but you asked for it. So here goes. I agree with you that America was criminally stupid in backing the Indonesians. And we’ll pay for that mistake. We’ll pay for it in blood. But, van Hoog, I saw the Dutch administration. I saw it good. In a place you never heard of. Tanah Merah. A dump lost in the middle of a swamp fifty thousand square miles wide. Shannon, you’ve been all over. You ever hear of Tanah Merah? It’s got a couple of big, spacious buildings for the Dutch, and a hundred little two-by-fours built of corrugated iron. They’re for the Indonesian prisoners. That is, they used to be. I was in one of those iron shacks. Temperature 130 degrees.”

  The bar at Queen Emma’s was deathly quiet, but visions of Tanah Merah came back. I said, “There was an administrator there, a Dutchman. One of the kind we used to hear about in the States. ‘The Dutch are the best colonizers in the world.’ This one sure was. He beat and starved and baked anyone who opposed the Government. You know what the Indonesians from Tanah Merah told us after the Japs had liberated them? They said, ‘If we get the Administrator we’ll cut his legs off an inch at a time. With rusty knives.’ Chickens come home to roost, van Hoog. So do Indonesians.”

  The Dutchman was very white. He took a drink of beer and said huskily, “All nations make mistakes.”

  “Yes,” I said, “and when we do, we never get another chance.”

  “Don’t say that!” the big, stolid man cried.

  The four of us sat around for some time thinking of the nations that had lost their way. Dame Sheila said, “It’s inevitable that all subject peoples must rise to the common standard. The Dutch in Java were unfortunate …”

  Shannon banged down his glass. “You talk like a damned fool. It’s you … Meddling old-women fools like you who talk savages into believing they can climb to our standards.” He was actually quaking with rage.

  The party ended dismally, but late that night my room door creaked open. “What the hell do you want, Shannon?” I rasped. I was sick of the old man.

  “It’s van Hoog.”

  “Turn on the light.”

  “Mosquitoes,” he replied, and felt his way to my chair.

  “I’m sorry about tonight,” I said.

  “No need, I’ve been to Tanah Merah.”

  There was a pause and then it hit me. That white Dutch face over the beer mug. “You were the Administrator!”

  “No,” he said with deep relief.

  “I’m glad,” I said.

  “I was an assistant.” Another silence followed and he said, “Some day tourists will be shown through your Alcatraz. And they won’t believe it. All nations make mistakes.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  Bluntly he changed the conversation. “Can I trust Mr. Shannon?”

  “He’d cut your throat—if money’s involved.”

  “Money is involved,” the Dutchman said. “You must come along with us.”

  “You find a gold mine near Tanah Merah?” I hazarded.

  He whistled slightly and said, “I took some convicts across the swamps. Up into the mountains near the border. That’s why …” He paused and said in a terrible voice, “That’s why I can never go back. It was a bad trip. I had to be harsh. The Indonesian Republic has named me a national enemy.”

  “Watch out for Shannon,” I said.

  “Do you suppose he knows about gold? Across the border?”

  “No,” I said.

  “If I paid you, would you come along?” van Hoog begged.

  “Nope,” I said. My door opened and van Hoog was gone.

  Next morning Shannon sailed his boat up to the pier. It was a sturdy craft with two engines, a dirty cowling and a deck house that would sleep four. It smelled of gasoline, and this may sound silly, but it looked a lot like Shannon, barnacled and weather-beaten.

  “She was sunk by the Japs,” he said. “But she’s worthy, this one.”

  That night at the corner table he put it up to us. “Now make up your minds. Yank, will you join us?”

  I studied the three partners: the Australian adventurer, the Dutch renegade, the English seeker. “All right,” I agreed. “As far as the Danduras. You push on by yours
elves from there.”

  “Good. You, Dutchman?”

  “All the way.”

  The nasty old man looked at Dame Sheila. “There’s no room for you,” he said maliciously.

  “I’ll be there,” she said with no concern. “Because without me you’ll not get through. Has he told you, van Hoog, that last time he was nearly killed?”

  The fossickers argued late into the night. They were like nations, each hating the other, each needing what the other had.

  I thought of Sheila Bancroft’s superb essay on sex in ultra-primitive societies, of the furore it had created. It was odd to sit with her in The Queen Emma and to catch a glimmer of what had driven her into the great jungles of the spirit. No man could have loved her. She had been a rejected girl, an unhappy woman. So she’d fled her society to study the ultimate beginnings of sex, the cruel force that had so punished her. Somehow, in some strange way, she had triumphed over those early rejections and had found reassurance in the savage jungles of our first beginnings. She had become a woman loved by the entire world. But the jungle remained her home, and she now proposed to fossick even past the boundaries she had previously reached. Once she told me, “Beyond the mountains you’re always sure there will be gold.”

  Beside her, night after night, sat the stolid Dutchman. When he had boasted of absolute power over miserable brown men, he had pushed them through deadly swamps and up strangling mountains. He had written an arrogant book about it, Beyond the Swamps, and in each line he had signed his own banishment from all he loved. His family had ruled Java for centuries; now Java lusted to crucify him. He was an outcast, a fugitive from everywhere. Yet he felt certain that if he could only get back to that mountain of gold—the mountain beyond the swamp—he could rehabilitate himself. He had executed the only Indonesian who might have deduced the truth about the gold, but he was willing to believe that even such a crime was expiable if one could regain that mountain.

  And to my right sat the old man of the islands, hatching his own plots. He had to abide the crazy Englishwoman in order to escape his earlier attackers. It infuriated him to think that a woman so despicable could, by reason of her disinterest, go where his rifle was powerless. He no longer tried to reconcile such absurdities. He’d seen everything: Queen Emma herself, the French settlers who had died like ghosts sensing the dawn, Tiger Lil of the imperial manner, the polite Jap trochus fishermen, the Australian Jew who had found the great gold fields, the whole lot of them. None of them was worth a damn. Men or women either. Once he’d carried a young married couple from Cairns to Rabaul, and five days after the marriage the girl was sleeping with him. He thought he might have as many as ten black kids, and there wasn’t a decent one in the lot. Mewling half-castes, the lot. It was a rum world, but there was gold up the Sepik, and if you played your cards right you’d get your share, and maybe the Dutchman’s, too.