Twenty-Seven Bones elp-3

by Jonathan Nasaw

  Twenty-Seven Bones

  ( E. L. Pender - 3 )

  Jonathan Nasaw

  Jonathan Nasaw

  Twenty-Seven Bones

  From too much love of living,

  From hope and fear set free,

  We thank with brief Thanksgiving

  Whatever gods may be

  That no man lives forever

  That dead men rise up never

  That even the weariest river

  Winds somewhere safe to sea.

  — Algernon Swinburne, “The Garden of Proserpine”

  See my lips tremble and my eyeballs roll,

  Suck my last breath, and catch my flying soul!

  — Alexander Pope, “Eloise to Abelard”

  Prologue

  In 1985, in the village of Lolowa’asi, on the island of Pulau Nias, seventy-five kilometers off the western coast of Sumatra, a chieftain lies dying.

  Or rather, sits dying. It is still the custom on Lolowa’asi for a chief to deliver his obligatory deathbed oration sitting up in his elaborately carved wooden marriage bed, supported from behind, if necessary, by one or more of his wives, with the skull or the right hand of one of his enemies nearby, for him to take with him over the bridge to the next world.

  Sometimes a deathbed oration, summing up the great man’s life and reign as well as the history of the village, goes on for days. This one started several hours ago. But although all around the chieftain’s house village life continues as usual-women boil yams or work the fields; men chop wood or feed and groom the pigs, which are the primary source and display of wealth in the island economy-in the Omo Sebua, or Great House, neither of the dying chieftain’s two potential successors has yet stirred from his bedside.

  There is a reason for this fidelity. In Lolowa’asi, both succession and inheritance are still conferred the traditional way: upon whichever of the heirs manages to be close enough to the chieftain at the ultimate moment to inhale his dying breath, which is believed to contain his sofu and fa’atua-tua, authority and wisdom, along with his all-important lakhomi, or spiritual glory. Together these comprise his eheha-his spirit, or immortal soul.

  Get the breath, you get it all: the pigs, the property, the spirit, the Great House. So the two heirs, bare-chested, with ceremonial gilt-threaded sarungs wrapped around their waists, wait and listen while the women come and go, bearing platters of rice and chicken and crackling pork.

  But there is one woman present who neither cooks nor serves. She is a young white woman, an American, half of a husband-and-wife team of anthropologists. She and her husband are using a camcorder to document what is believed to be the last traditional-culture village in the North Sumatra province of Indonesia. He operates the camcorder, while his much younger wife takes notes by hand.

  The anthropologists, who have heard about the deathbed ritual but never witnessed one, know what is supposed to happen next. According to tradition, after the oration and the deathbed blessings (everyone in the room including the Americans is eligible for a kind word and a chunk of consecrated pig jawbone), the chief will remain sitting, supported by his wives, while his two sons shuffle in a circle at the foot of the bed.

  When his senior wife senses that the chieftain is dying, she will signal to the other wives. Together they will lay him back down, and the lucky heir who is closest to the bed at that moment will lean over the chieftain, openmouthed, and suck in the expiratory exhalation, sofu, fa’atua-tua, lakhomi, eheha, and all.

  Timing is everything-the Americans are expecting something on the order of a solemn game of musical chairs with an unusually intense scramble when the music, so to speak, stops. They’ve even joked about it privately.

  But in the end there is nothing funny about what transpires this summer afternoon. The camera catches it all. Before signaling to the other wives that the time that will come for us all has come for the chieftain, the dying man’s senior wife surreptitiously signals the older son, the son of her own loins, Ama Bene, by putting the back of her hand to her brow as if in grief. He slows his pace and is standing by his father’s head as the old man is laid back down upon the batik-covered mattress. The scrawny bare chest-not even the wealthiest man in Lolowa’asi has much fat on him-falls, rises, falls again.

  Just as Ama Bene begins to bend over his father, the tape shows him being pushed violently aside, shoved all the way out of the frame, and as the room explodes into chaos, it is the younger son, Ama Halu, whom the camera captures leaning over the body of the chief. He inhales deeply, a great, whooping gasp, and throws up his arms in triumph.

  But a moment later Halu staggers back from the bed, a bloody spearpoint protruding downward from his lower belly at an obscene angle. From behind him, Bene comes into the frame again, grasps the spear, and leans backward, placing his bare foot against his younger brother’s backside for leverage.

  The spearpoint disappears. Bene falls backward with the gory spear in his hand as Halu reels toward the female anthropologist. She catches him in her arms. Bloody froth bubbles from his mouth.

  Meanwhile, Bene has regained his feet and is charging toward the two. Clearly his intent is to reclaim the patrimonial breath, one step removed. But Halu has other ideas. He glances over his shoulder at his older brother, flashes him a bloody grin, then turns back to the woman. He clamps both hands around the back of her head and pulls her face to his, opens his mouth wiiide, and plants his lips over hers.

  She struggles, her mouth smeared with blood. She tries to turn her head, but even with Bene trying to separate the two, Halu’s death grip is unbreakable. Halu falls heavily to his knees; the woman falls to hers. He breathes his last into her mouth as his brother clubs him repeatedly from behind with the butt of the spear. The woman feels the dull shock of the blows indirectly; the front tooth that is chipped that day will never be capped.

  As for the dying breath, it is soft as a sigh, sour and coppery, and there is not, and will never be, a doubt in the woman’s mind that there is more to it than carbon dioxide. The hands clenched around her head relax; the dead man topples to the floor. Kneeling alone now, she looks up-Ama Bene, the fratricide, stands over her, his face distorted with rage, gore-tipped spear drawn back. She gives him a bloody, triumphant grin. The blood and the triumph belong not to her but to the dead man; the grin, however, is very much her own.

  Chapter One

  1

  Andy Arena drove down to the Frederikshavn docks at midnight and parked his elderly yellow Beetle across the street from the deserted harbormaster’s shed, as instructed. When he was sure that no one was watching, he locked the car, crossed the road, and waited by the shed with his duffel bag, again as instructed.

  Andy, a thirty-nine-year-old bartender whose favorite song was Jimmy Buffett’s “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” didn’t know yet whether they’d be leaving by land or sea (the Epps had been deliberately vague on that point), but either way, he could hardly contain his excitement. Top secret plans, a midnight rendezvous, a hand-drawn oilcloth map, buried treasure: even if they returned empty-handed, the adventure alone would be worth his time and trouble.

  In any event, he had nothing to lose. If his new partners had asked him to share expenses or put up some good faith cash-well, Mama Arena’s baby boy Andrew hadn’t just fallen off the banana boat yesterday. But all the Epps seemed to require of Andy was a closed mouth and a strong back, for which they were prepared to pay 10 percent of their net proceeds, if any.

  At 12:05, a white Dodge van with curtained windows pulled up. Andy slid the side door open, tossed his duffel in the back, and climbed in after it. There was no rear seat. Andy overturned an empty plastic bucket to sit on and exchanged a friendly nod with the other man in the back of the
van, an Indonesian of indeterminate age whom he knew only as Bennie, squatting on his hams by the back door. Andy had never been able to figure out the precise relationship between the Epps and Bennie. Ostensibly he was their houseman, but something about his deep-set, watchful eyes, his seamed face and grave demeanor, suggested to Andy that there was more to it than that.

  “Does anybody know you’re here?” Dr. Phil Epp, gaunt and bearded, turned around in the passenger seat. The beard was one of those mustacheless Abe Lincoln affairs. He looked a little like Lincoln, too, but even more like photographs Andy had seen of mad old John Brown-especially around the eyes. “Anybody see you waiting?”

  “Negative and negative.”

  “What did you tell your boss?” Dr. Emily Epp, a heavy-bosomed woman in her early forties, a good two decades younger than her husband, with gingery hair, gray eyes, a wide sensuous mouth, and a nubbin nose, was behind the wheel.

  “Didn’t have to tell him anything. Monday and Tuesday are my regular days off.”

  “How about your girlfriend? You have a girlfriend?” She adjusted the rearview mirror so she could see Andy’s face. He could see only the reflection of her slightly protuberant eyes, lit spookily from below by the green dashboard lights.

  “Nobody in particular.”

  “Bet you get a lot of pussy, being a bartender and all,” said Phil.

  Andy had done his share of barroom boasting in his time, but for reasons he couldn’t quite pin down, he found that discussing his sex life with these two made him feel a little…icky, was the unlikely word that popped into his mind. “So where are we headed? You can tell me now, can’t you?”

  “Here, you tell me.” Phil handed him the famous map-or rather, a xerographic copy. Andy had been shown the original only once, last week, and then only the back of it.

  “Looks like-okay, it’s definitely St. Luke. Of course, I could have guessed that by the fact that we’re not in a boat.”

  “Go get ’em, Einstein,” said Emily.

  “Okay-well here’s Fred’ Harbor…” With Phil leaning over the back of his seat, Andy traced the coast north, then east with his forefinger. “And here are the Carib cliffs…so that must be…Smuggler’s Cove?”

  “And that’s all you need to know for now.” Phil snatched the map back with a hairy hand, refolded it, and slipped it into one of the many pockets of his long-sleeved safari shirt.

  They drove on in silence, following the clockwise coast route Andy had traced with his finger. It was a moonless night, but the stars were Caribbean bright. Andy slid the bucket he was sitting on over to the left side of the van (which in accordance with St. Luke law and custom was proceeding on the left side of the two-lane road), parted the curtains over the side windows, and pressed his nose to the glass. Looking straight down, he could see the thin white line of the surf out beyond the base of the Carib cliffs, so named because four hundred years ago the last survivors of that fierce, ill-fated tribe, men, women, and children, had jumped to their deaths from these bluffs rather than be enslaved by the Spaniards and sent to work in the Dominican gold mines.

  “Have you guys ever done a dig at the bottom of the cliffs?” asked Andy, closing the curtain again. The Epps were a husband-and-wife team of anthropologists and/or archaeologists-Andy had never been exactly clear what the difference was, if any.

  “Oh yes,” replied Emily, grinning at him over her shoulder, displaying a chipped front tooth. “It’s a boneyard down there.” She made that sound like a good thing.

  “Honey, you don’t keep your eyes on the road, our bones are gonna be down there with ’em,” Phil cautioned.

  “And won’t that complicate the archaeology in another four hundred years!” said Emily cheerfully. Then, to Andy: “We originally came down to St. Luke to study the Caribs. Know what the best thing about ’em is? They’re completely extinct: no MLDs-Most Likely Descendants-to make trouble over the bones.”

  The highway descended from the heights in a series of switchbacks. Bennie didn’t seem to have any trouble keeping his balance, but Andy’s bucket kept shifting under him. He stood up, bent almost double, with a foot on either side of the transmission hump and a hand on the back of each front seat, and surfed the curves the rest of the way down to sea level.

  A few minutes after they passed Smuggler’s Cove, a broad star-lit lagoon ringed by poisonous manchineel trees, Emily slowed the van to a crawl. Phil stuck his head out the passenger window. “There!”

  A feathery, wind-sculpted divi-divi tree on the right marked the turnoff. Emily jerked the wheel; the van left the highway and began following a faint set of tire tracks inland, then west again, back up into the rain forest hills.

  The tracks petered out shortly after the forest canopy closed above them, shutting out the starlight. Emily turned off the lights and switched off the ignition. After a moment the jungle sounds started up again-mongooses and their prey rustling in the underbrush, nocturnal black witch parrots screaming in the high forest canopy-but Andy waited in vain for his sight to return.

  “Smell that?” whispered Phil.

  Andy took a sniff. “Smells like…Juicy Fruit.”

  Phil laughed and tapped him on the nose with the stick of gum he’d been dangling only inches from Andy’s face-that’s how dark it was.

  Bennie broke trail with his machete. Emily and Phil followed. All three were wearing miner’s helmets with state-of-the-art lamps that allowed them to switch between red laser and white LED beams. Andy hauled gear and brought up the rear. Before they set out, they had smeared themselves with insect repellent, but the insects didn’t appear to be repelled at all, thought Andy-they weren’t even vaguely offended.

  Within a few hundred yards, the stars began to wink into view again. This was second-growth forest, low and tangled. The entrance to the cave complex was only three feet high, set into a bluff hillock, camouflaged with brush and creeper vines. Phil and Bennie cleared the mouth of the hole. Phil switched his helmet lamp from LED white to laser red and crawled through first, followed by Bennie. Emily motioned for Andy to follow them. He got down on his hands and knees, stared down the sloping rock-floored tunnel, then looked up over his shoulder at Emily, shielding his eyes from the glare of her helmet lamp.

  “I don’t think I can do it,” he told her, backing away from the hole.

  “You said you weren’t claustrophobic.”

  “I’m not-I mean I never was before. But it’s like there’s something deep inside me screaming don’t go down there.”

  “A hundred thousand dollars,” she said. “That’s what your share could come to.”

  “What’s the holdup?” yelled Phil.

  “We’ll be right down.” Emily took off her helmet and got down on her hands and knees in front of Andy. The first few buttons of her safari shirt were open, revealing an impressive, if pendulous cleavage barely contained by an industrial-strength underwire brassiere. She swayed forward, pressed her forehead against his. “You’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t do this,” she whispered.

  He looked up. Their eyes met. For Andy it was a little like looking into that tunnel. Don’t go down there, he thought, as she touched her lips softly to his.

  2

  Monday morning, seven o’clock. Holly Gold flung out a bare arm and slapped the alarm clock into silence. I’m back in my own bed, she told herself-it was a little game she liked to play some mornings. Laurel is still alive, the rest was all a dream. If I listen closely I can hear the waves crashing against the rocks at Big Sur, and when I open my eyes and look out the window, the trees I see will be windblown cypresses and Monterey pines, and beyond them the sky will be cool and gray.

  Then the mosquito netting rustled, a small warm body crawled into bed beside Holly, and she was reminded again that her new life on St. Luke had its compensations too.

  “Good morning, baby doll,” said Holly.

  “Mmmm.”

  “Is your brother up yet?”

  “Marley say he
ain’ goin’ a no school today.”

  “Well you tell Marley…” Holly hardly had to raise her voice to be heard in the other bedroom of the cabin. “…that Auntie Holly says not only is he going to school today, but if he hasn’t gotten dressed and eaten breakfast by the time I’m ready to leave, he is going to school hungry, in his pajamas.” She was bluffing, of course, but then, so was her nephew.

  “Ain’ wearin’ none,” piped a voice from the kids’ bedroom.

  “Bare-butt naked, then-suit yourself,” said Holly, sending the six-year-old girl beside her into a paroxysm of giggles.

  The island of St. Luke is shaped like the drumstick of a turkey, with a neat round bite known as Frederikshavn Harbor (a redundancy: havn means harbor in Danish) taken out of the southwestern edge of the meat end.

  The higher the city of Frederikshavn rises from the harbor, the more expensive the dwellings. At sea level, in the quarter known as Sugar Town, the houses are mostly shanties constructed of tin and unmatched lumber, roofed with sheets of corrugated green plastic. Above Sugar Town rises Dansker Hill, where the buildings are Danish colonial style, their tiled rooftops hanging out over the porticoed sidewalks, and their thick masonry walls arched, colonnaded, covered with lime-and-molasses stucco, and painted pastel pinks and blues and yellows. Above Dansker Hill, on the ridgetop to the east of town, safe from even the highest of hurricane tides, tastefully modern castles with cantilevered walls of timber and tinted glass look out over the harbor.

  Holly herself lived eight miles to the east of Frederikshavn, in a little village known as the Core, tucked into a fold of the rain forest ridge. (Everybody called it the rain forest-technically it was a secondary dry tropical, as the island received less than fifty inches of rain per annum.)