The Man In The Seventh Row

by Brian Pendreigh

  Indiana Jones gatecrashes a Nazi archaeological excavation in the lost city of Tanis, near Cairo. With the help of the crystal of the sun god Ra he locates the Well of Souls and lowers himself into a buried chamber. The chamber is home to hundreds of poisonous snakes, but it also houses a magnificent golden box, the Ark of the Covenant, the container for the tablets on which God wrote the Ten Commandments. The Nazis get hold of it and open it. They want the power of God. They get it. They unleash terrible swirling ghostly mists and fire that melts the flesh from their bones. Indiana Jones and his sidekick Marion close their eyes. They alone survive the wrath of God.

  Roy Batty walks through the imposing entrance hall. Eyes watch him from internal balconies overhead as he makes his way to one of the chambers that branch off the main room. His eyes scan the chamber as he walks. It is the wrong one. He turns. A black mamba flicks out its tongue and rises upwards ready to strike. Roy backs off watching it as he does so. Behind him is a rock python and an anaconda, the largest snake in the world, its name a combination of Tamil words for elephant and killer. Its green body, with black and yellow spots, is as thick as a child's, but four or five times as long. It is coiled around a branch that looks as if it should break under its weight. Its beady eyes follow Roy out of the room.

  Roy climbs upwards through the ancient building to a small chamber at one end. At the entrance to the chamber is the black granite statue of a goddess, with bare breasts and the head of a lion. He is alone in the room. He moves along a passageway, aware of the sound of his footfall and his quickened breathing. This is the place. On one side is a row of coffins decorated with intricate coloured paintings of cobras, vultures and fantastic hybrid creatures. The body of a falcon is topped with the head of a ram. Some of the coffins are coloured gold. Cold white eyes stare at him from inhuman faces. On the other side of the passage is what he came for. Another coffin. On it is painted the figure of a woman, with black hair and a white pleated gown. But it is not the coffin of a woman. For the coffin is only about two feet long.

  Roy slips a small notebook from his pocket and writes down a description. He hears nothing, but the sound of his breath and the scribble of his pen. Suddenly he is aware of a figure by his side. It is a young woman.

  Her hair is short and her skin black as coal, highlighting the whites of her eyes. 'There's a cafe downstairs,' she says, sounding as if she has a bad cold and may be losing her voice. 'You can buy me a coffee.'

  'That was how I became an archaeologist,' Roy tells Anna, 'and how I met Jo, in the Ancient Egypt room at Chambers Street Museum.'

  'Your wife?'

  'Very soon she was my wife,' says Roy. 'She had arrived in Edinburgh that morning, with the address of some friend of a friend who was supposed to put her up. But it turned out to be an empty flat. Her parents were Nigerian, but she had spent her whole life in London. She just decided it was time to be somewhere different. She was twenty and she was impulsive.

  'She asked me to put her up and she usually got what she wanted. She was going to stay with me a couple of nights until she could contact the friend of a friend or find a place of her own. She stayed eight years on and off.

  'Jo had a golden tongue. She could talk her way into anything. She sang for a living. Imagine a female Lee Marvin singing old songs from the movies like 'Over the Rainbow', 'Ol' Man River' and 'As Time Goes By'. Well, that was Jo. Smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish. I often wondered what she would sound like if she didn't drink or smoke. Maybe there's a whole tribe of Nigerians who sound like Lee Marvin. I loved her singing and she loved the idea of me being Indiana Jones. The next morning she went out and bought me the hat, and she called me 'Indy' the whole time. At least she did at the beginning.

  'We got married two weeks after we met. I was a student and she was singing in hotels, nightclubs and bars. I think she imagined that when I graduated life would be one big foreign holiday. Egypt, India, Crete, Mexico. But the closest we got to Ancient Egypt was the Egyptology room in Chambers Street and watching Raiders of the Lost Ark together.

  'Indiana Jones got to investigate the Temple of Doom and uncovered a cult of human sacrifice. I was lucky to get a job. I was digging up a lost civilisation, but it was in Whithorn. No, you'll never have heard of it. It's stuck out on a peninsula off the road from Glasgow to Ireland. It was the cradle of Christianity in Scotland and in the Middle Ages it was supposedly a city to rival Paris. But it didn't when we were there. To me it was a lost civilisation but to Jo it was just a village in the middle of nowhere. Old people retired there and young people left as soon as they could. It was four hours' drive from Edinburgh. And it always rained.

  'Nobody sang in Whithorn. Not for a living. Not for fun. Jo kept the flat on in Edinburgh, working there, and I would go back to see her at weekends. Or she would come down when she wasn't singing. Sometimes we would work on the dig together.' He paused momentarily before adding the word 'occasionally'.

  More often she would sit in the cottage watching videos, though she did not share Roy's passion for films. Films were at best a source of songs for her act, at worst a way of passing the time that involved less effort than reading a book. Roy had always had a video player. Back in the Seventies, when he was earning little, he hired one, a big heavy metal box with big knobs you pushed down for 'Play', 'Record' and 'Stop'. Six months advance rental entitled him to a free video film to keep and he chose MASH, one of the very first pre-recorded videos available to the public to buy. When Roy left his first job, his colleagues clubbed together and bought him a single blank video tape which he used to record The Magnificent Seven.

  Jo considered films more enjoyable if taken with alcohol, cannabis, coke or amphetamines. Sometimes she took amphetamines when she was helping him at the excavation site and would burrow through the earth like someone in a silent movie. Roy was not sure whether it was better that she come across something of interest or not, for it was not at all certain that a fragment of pottery would survive her excavation.

  'Look,' she said excitedly, extracting a shard of patterned glass from the topsoil. It carried the faintest traces of the symbolic markings that proved it once served as a container for the local drink known as Irn-Bru. Once she did find a bit of a Mediterranean wine jar and that fired her imagination for a day or two. But she wasn't really into digging with a trowel. She would rather just go at it with a spade and get it done as quickly as possible.

  'We decided to have a baby. Jo gave up her job and moved down to the cottage. But the baby didn't happen. Not at once anyway and Jo always wanted everything at once. She said there was nothing to do in Whithorn and she was going back to Edinburgh. She said I could go too if I wanted, but it had to be for good, not just the weekends. I said I wasn't going back to Edinburgh to be unemployed, with someone who didn't really want me around anymore. So that was that.'

  Roy left a few details out. As an atheist, he felt vaguely uneasy about excavating an ancient Christian site. He felt it slightly indecent that he did not share the beliefs of the hundreds of skeletons in the earth around the ruins of the cathedral. Secretly he shared Jo's sense that the dig lacked the excitement that had drawn him to archaeology in the first place. He did not want to dig up the beginnings of his own society. He wanted to unearth evidence of strange cults and ancient exotic civilisations. It seemed that the great days of archaeological adventure were in the past.

  In 1871 Heinrich Schliemann had discovered the lost city of Troy, to which Rosanna Podesta eloped with Jacques Sernas and a supporting cast that included Ulysses, Achilles, Agamemnon and Brigitte Bardot. Sernas shoots Stanley Baker in the heel, but Torin Thatcher captures the city after hiding his men in a wooden horse. In 1899 Arthur Evans located Knossos on Crete, where King Minos kept the minotaur, the creature that resulted from his wife's coupling with a bull sent by the sea god Poseidon, whose name was later made famous by Gene Hackman's sinking ship adventure. In 1922 Howard Carter opened the tomb of The Egyptian boy-king Tutankhamun, and in 1981 Indi
ana Jones found the Lost Ark of the Covenant, unleashed the wrath of God on cinema audiences around the world and inspired Roy Batty's belated entry to student ranks to study archaeology.

  Latterly during his stay at Whithorn, Roy had become excited by stories of a local cult that sacrificed virgins. And it happened not 1,000 years ago, but in living memory. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who had been involved, generally the girls who had leapt naked through the fire, rather than those who had been there on that awful day when they burnt a policeman to death. Various places were mentioned in the area and he marked them with a cross on a map. Creetown. Kirkcudbright. Gatehouse of Fleet. He visited the roofless church at the hamlet of Anwoth, with its graves dating back four centuries, decorated with skulls and crossbones. It was here that children supposedly danced around the maypole and learned that it represented the penis. But there was no archaeological evidence.

  He and Jo drove from Whithorn to the very tip of Wigtownshire and into the caravan park at Burrow Head. It was deserted. Wind blew over the waves and whipped icy rain into Roy's face as he knocked on caravan doors without response. Eventually a young man in a singlet answered and, with a yawn, directed him to a mound overlooking the sea. Roy drove as far as he could and then he and Jo got out of the car and walked the last few yards across the land. The wind was so fierce here that it threatened to blow them over the edge and they had to shout to make themselves heard.

  'I'm going back,' said Jo.

  'No, look,' Roy shouted. 'Look. This is it.'

  He was pointing to a square hole in the ground. He stepped towards it, but the wind blew him back a step. He knelt at the hole. It had been partially filled with cement and contained the final remnants of what might have been a wooden stake.

  'This is where they did it. We've found it. This is where the cult sacrificed Edward Woodward in the wicker man.'

  'It wasn't a cult,' said Jo. 'It was only a film.'

  'It was a cult film,' Roy replied.

  That was when Roy told her he had the chance of another job and asked if she would come with him. He felt this was what she had been wanting for the past two years; he had taken the necessary steps to make it happen, to move from the erstwhile cultural metropolis in the bottom left-hand corner of Scotland back to the 20th Century. Jo asked where the new job was. Roy said she should be prepared to commit herself to going with him before he told her. She said if he told her where it was, she might go with him. He said that was not good enough. All she needed to do was say that, in principle, she would go with him, and then he would tell her where it was. But she wouldn't. So he never told her. He just went. Without her.

  18

  The yellow blossoms of the prickly pear, the fiery orange on the tips of the spidery ocotillo and the delicate pink flowers of little spiky cacti sprinkled the dry brown landscape with colour, just as they had in Cochise's time. The shopping centres, gas stations and fast-food joints of Phoenix's urban sprawl ended suddenly when Roy turned his one-way hire car off US Highway 60 at Apache Junction, the very name of which marked a transition from Glen Campbell's America to that of Geronimo, Victorio and Chato.

  The road was marked on Roy's map as the AZ88, but was popularly known as Apache Trail. He drew the Ford to a halt at the sight of the empty desert spread out before him. He got out of the car and walked across the blistering earth. A snake slithered across a rock and disappeared into the brush. Saguaro cacti, familiar from Roy's earliest western memories rose to several times his height. The characteristic arms do not branch out from the main stem until the plants are about 75 years old and mature specimens live till they are 200. Perhaps Geronimo had stood beneath this same specimen.

  The landscape had not changed in a thousand years. This was the Apache raiding route, twisting, turning and climbing over the ridges of the rocky desert landscape, from Apache Junction to the ancient Salado Indian cliff-dwellings 40 miles away. The Apache could cover 70 miles in a day by alternating walking and trotting. They would put a pebble in their mouth so it would not dry out. Now Roy was going to join them at San Carlos, one of the best known names in the history of the West, and the history of the western.

  The Apache were the most feared and savage of all the Indian tribes. Their very name meant enemy. But Roy had seen Broken Arrow. He knew Jeff Chandler was a man of honour, a man of his word, and that it was the white man who spoke with forked tongue, like the snake on the rock by the car. As a boy Roy wore his mother's bright red headband and a long towel that went inside his trousers, but was arranged so that it hung out at the front and rear. He used lip-stick to draw lines across his cheeks.

  The government tried to 'concentrate' the Apache on the San Carlos reservation. 'Take stones and ashes and thorns and, with some scorpions and rattlesnakes thrown in, dump the outfit on stones, heat the stones red hot, set the United States army after the Apaches, and you have San Carlos,' wrote Geronimo's nephew Daklugie. Cheated and tricked by the authorities, the Apache regularly broke out of San Carlos. Geronimo had only 20 warriors on his last campaign in 1886, but ran 5,000 American troops ragged. One officer observed that chasing Apache was like 'chasing deer with a brass band'. San Carlos served the same purpose in westerns as Colditz and POW camps did in war films. It was a place to escape from. Some would rather die a good death than live a bad life on San Carlos.

  It was all over when Geronimo surrendered in 1886. His people were officially classified as prisoners of war until 1913. Geronimo sold autographed photos of himself to tourists and became an exhibit at the St Louis World Fair in 1904. He took to wearing a top hat and charged appearance fees, like a film star. One night in 1909 he got very drunk and fell off his horse. He lay out all night in the cold, contracted pneumonia and never recovered.

  A hundred years after Geronimo broke out of San Carlos Indian Reservation for the last time, Roy Batty arrived. He had little difficulty finding his house in the town of San Carlos, for it was little more than a few streets of identical grey houses, with cars propped up on bricks alongside the buildings to be cannibalised for spare parts. A child with narrow eyes, olive skin and hair as black as a raven's wing watched him, unsmiling, as he got his cases from his boot. He dumped his luggage and walked over to the cafe. The only other customer was an overweight female officer in the uniform of the Apache tribal police.

  Like the child, she watched him silently with dark brown eyes, as he ordered breakfast of coffee, bacon and eggs from a young Apache woman in tee-shirt and cut-off jeans. The policewoman noted the strange foreign accent. San Carlos did not get many tourists. Those who wanted to see Indians preferred the dancing variety at Knott's Berry Farm, where they could also see Snoopy and take in a couple of rides in a morning.

  'You the archaeologist from England?' she inquired.

  'From Scotland,' he said, nodding.

  She extended a plump brown hand.

  'Yeah, Scotland, I know. I'm Mary MacDonald. I'm part Scottish too.'

  Roy wondered which part exactly.

  'Do you know the MacDonalds?'

  In the days that followed he regularly breakfasted at the cafe and met the Apache policewoman who called herself Mary MacDonald and told her about the old country. They talked about the similarities between the Indian tribes and the Scottish clans. She was in her forties but had never been farther than Los Angeles. After breakfast she would sometimes drop him at a site where the Apache had camped a century before and he would dig patiently in the earth for anything they had left behind. He found a flute that might have been used by some courting young man and a stone wrapped in buckskin that would probably have been the head of a club. But he was also looking for pottery and artefacts of earlier occupants, tribes that had disappeared, tribes like the Salado, who built the cliff dwellings at the end of the Apache Trail, but the search was proving disappointing.

  'Denise will give you salado with your bacon and eggs, Roy, if you ask her nicely,' Mary told him.

  Roy reflected that Apache puns were worse than th
ose of his dead father.

  He got to know the young Chiricahua couple that lived in the house next door, the parents of the little boy who had watched him so curiously when he first arrived. With them he went to an Apache initiation ceremony. Apache girls would become women in the sunrise ceremony. Roy remembered the drama of Richard Harris being pulled to the ceiling by ropes and pegs in his chest in A Man Called Horse. They followed the dust trail of another pick-up to a clearing where dozens of young women were dancing, not very energetically, in lines; and several hundred onlookers sat around on tail-gates and in deck-chairs, drinking and chatting. The girls were dressed in red and yellow and blue Spanish dresses. The onlookers wore jeans and stetsons and cowboy boots. There was not a headband or bath towel in sight. The initiates were sprinkled with yellow powder and it occurred to Roy that it was easier to become an Apache woman than a Sioux warrior.

  Prospector Ed Schieffelin arrived in Apache country in 1877. He was told that the only thing he would find there was his own tombstone. But he struck lucky, found silver and, to rub salt into the wounds of his detractors, called his claim Tombstone. Within a few years the town that sprung up in his wake was one of the biggest between St Louis and San Francisco, with a population approaching 20,000 and a murder rate four or five times higher than that of Los Angeles in the late 20th Century. It was here that Marshall Henry Fonda, with the aid of a consumptive Victor Mature, did his duty, rid the town of the murdering Clantons and made the west a safe and decent place for his darling Clementine to live. It was here Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, DeForrest Kelley and John Hudson, walked tall down the main street. You only had to look at them to know they were the goodies.