Off the Mangrove Coast (Ss) (2000)

by L'amour, Louis

  The day before we were supposed to leave I spotted the Lacklans coming up the path from town. And something their postures, the way they walked? told me the plan had gone wrong.

  “Kardec?” There was a bluster in his manner that seemed ready to challenge any response that I might have. “We’ve made other arrangements. I’ll pay whatever expenses you’ve incurred so far.” Helen did not meet my eyes.

  “Other arrangements?” The answer was evasive. “You’ve decided not to go?”

  “We’ll be going, but with someone else. How much do I owe you?”

  Frankly, it made me angry. The deal had been all set, and now … I stated my price and he paid me. Helen merely stood there saying nothing, yet it seemed she was showing a resentment or anger that I had not seen before. “Mind telling me how you’re going?” “Not at all. But it doesn’t really matter, does it?” His very arrogance and coolness angered me, and also to have all my excellent planning go for nothing. “It matters a great deal,” I told him. “There’s one other man that would take you upriver who is trustworthy, a native named Inghai, and he’s down with a broken leg. If you go back in there with another native, you’re a fool!”

  “You’re calling me a fool?” He turned on me sharply, his eyes ugly. For a minute I thought he was going to swing on me and I’d have welcomed it. I’d have liked nothing so much as to help him lose a few teeth.

  Then I had an awful premonition. Jeru was up to his old tricks again. “Look,” I asked, “is it a native? Did he show you a diamond? A big stone? Something about twenty carats?”

  They were surprised, both of them. “And what if he did?”

  “You tried to buy it and he wouldn’t sell. Am I right?”

  “So what?”

  “If I am right, then this was the same fellow who guided two parties up the Baram before, one group from Kuching, one came over from Sibu. None of them ever came back.”

  “You’re implying that he had them killed? For what reasons? For the diamonds they found?”

  “Diamonds mean nothing to him. I believe he used the one stone he has to lure them upriver so he could murder them for their possessions.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “He was an old man, wasn’t he? With a deep scar on his cheek?”

  Their expressions cleared. “No.” Lacklan was triumphant. “He was a youngster. No older than your houseboy.”

  So they had switched, that was all. The trick was the same. The stone was the same. And they were not the first to do it. It had been done by the Piutes in Colorado, eighty or ninety years ago, with gold nuggets for bait.

  “Have it your own way, Lacklan. It wouldn’t matter if you were going alone, but you’re taking your wife along.”

  His face flamed and his eyes grew ugly. “My wife is my own concern,” he said, “and none of your affair.”

  “You’re right, of course, only I’d do a lot of thinking before I’d let bullheadedness risk my wife’s life. Risk your own all you like.”

  “Nonsense!” Lacklan scoffed. “You’re just trying to scare us to keep our business.”

  So they walked away and I could see Helen talking with him as they went up the road toward town. Whatever she said, I heard him answer angrily.

  What the Lacklans were getting into had a certain smell to it. It was the smell of an old reprobate named Jeru who was hidden out upriver with a small band of renegades. Jeru was reputedly the last of the old-time Sea Dyak pirates and the story was that he had fled upriver from the Brook militia and was living like a tribal chief with a group of followers who had been outcasts from their own long houses No one really knew if this was true but it was known that Jeru had appeared in the cities along the coast and lured people, usually foreigners, into the backcountry. And once they disappeared they never returned.

  It had been years since the last time this had happened and the story had been spreading that Jeru might be dead … nonetheless, it had me worried.

  That night there were four of us there on the verandah of the resident officer’s bungalow. Van apologized for the deal with the Lacklans falling through. “There’s no accounting for people, I suppose.”

  I didn’t mention John Lacklan’s hair-trigger jealousj and the fact that I might have helped arouse it.

  “I’ve got another possibility for you though,” he said. “There’s a canal job. It cuts through from one of the creeks about a mile above town. Hasn’t been used in years but Frears wants it open again. I told him you could do it, bossing a native crew. It’ll pay almost what Lacklan would but it will take longer. We’ll get you home yet.”

  “Van,” I said, “I’m worried. Their story sounded so familiar. Remember Carter? That was two years before my time, but he came down from Hong Kong on a vacation. He met some native on the coast who had a big diamond and wouldn’t sell it. The native agreed to show him where there were more. He went upriver and was never heard of again.

  “A few months later, the same thing happened to Trondly at Kuching. There was also that story about the two who went up-country from Sibu and Igan, and another from Bintulu.”

  “That was old Jeru. Word has it he’s dead.”

  “Maybe. But this sounds like the same come-on. And it sounds like the same diamond. Huge thing, high quality, native won’t sell but he will take them to where he found it. If it’s not Jeru then it could be someone else playing the same game. If a native finds a gem-stone and sells it, he spends the little he got, and that’s the end of it. This way that stone represents a permanent income. Rifles, ammo, blankets, trinkets, food, clothing, tools, and trade goods … and every few months a new supply.”

  “Fantastic idea.” Vandover rubbed his long jaw. “It sounds like that old blighter of a Jeru, or his ghost-Maybe e he figured he was getting too well known to keep doing it himself.”

  “It could be,” Fairchild agreed. “You’d better call Kuching on it. Sounds to me like a police matter.”

  My scotch tasted good, and the furniture on the verandah was comfortable. Turning the glass in my fingers, I looked over at Fairchild. “Using your outboard? It is a police matter but I don’t think it can wait. That fathead can fry in his own juice for all I care, but I’d not like to see Helen Lacklan trapped because of him.”

  “Use it,” Fairchild assented. “If Rector wasn’t due in tomorrow I’d go with you.”

  By daylight the native huts and banana and rubber plantations were behind us. Only Raj accompanied me. Although a Sea Dyak of the coast, his mother was Penan, one of the forest people. His uncles had occasionally taken him off on long migrations following the wild sego harvest and he spoke a number of the inland dialects. He knew of old Jeru as well and liked none of what he’d heard. From a blot to the hollowed-out tree trunk that is the native boat, he learned from three natives that the boy and his two white clients were six hours ahead of us.

  Raj sat up in the bow of the canoe, on the other side of my quickly loaded supplies. The strong brown stream was muddy and there were occasional logs, but this outboard was a good one and we were making better time than Lacklan would be making. I did not attempt to overtake them because I neither wanted them to think me butting in nor did I want their guide to know I was following.

  I was carrying a Mauser big-game rifle, a beautiful weapon. It gave me a comforting feeling to have the gun there as I watched the boat push its way up the Baram. The river trended slightly to the south-southeast and then took a sharp bend east, flowing down from among a lot of eight-thousand-foot peaks. Mostly jungle, yet there were places where stretches of tableland waved with grass. This was wild country, rarely visited, and there were small herds of wild pigs and a good many buffalo.

  We avoided villages as the necessary social activity that would accompany our stopping would slow us down considerably I made camp on a small island cut off from shore by a few yards of rushing water. We slung our hammocks, draped mosquito netting over them, and slid into our dry clothes to sleep.

  As we pressed on th
e river narrowed and grew increasingly swift. We were well into the Kapuas Mountains, the rugged chain that is the spine of Borneo and terminates in the thirteen-thousand-foot dome of Kinabalu. The air was clear and the heat less oppressive at the increased altitude. At times we pushed through patches of water flowers miles long and so thick it looked like we could have gotten out of the boat and walked.

  I put on a bit more speed for the motor would soon be useless in the rocks and shallower rapids and I wanted to be able to catch up when necessary. We ascended cascades, the easier ones with the outboard howling at full throttle, the more difficult by shoving and hauling the boat through torrents of water streaming between the rocks and over low falls.

  I wondered how the Lacklans were making out; I couldn’t really imagine John Lacklan in chest-deep water pushing a canoe ahead of him. And though she might be willing to try, I couldn’t imagine him allowing Helen to do such a menial job. How they were negotiating the river was a question that worried me because if neither of the Lacklans were doing the physical work, then there had to be more natives helping out besides just the one guide. The crew of the blot to had not mentioned the number in the crew and I’d heard no mention of an outboard like mine … that meant oarsmen and probably two boats to split the weight of both the men and supplies into manageable amounts. So that meant four to eight natives, I hesitated to guess at their tribe and if they were from Jeru’s group, that was probably a moot point.

  “Raj,” I called forward, “how many boats do you think they have?” We were stopped in a shallow sandy part of the stream at the top of a rocky cascade. I was bailing the water from the canoe and Raj was carefully wiping off our equipment. We were both soaking wet.

  “Two, boss.”

  “And how many men on paddles, four?”

  “Six. Two paddle in each boat, one rests.”

  I looked up at him narrowly. “How the hell do you know that?”

  “I can see them!” He grinned at me and pointed …

  In the distance, through some trees and across the river, two boats were turning into the shore. I sloshed around for a better look. It was midafternoon and it looked like they were going to camp. There were two big dugouts each with four people in them and as I watched the men in the bows jumped out and dragged the hollowed-out logs up onto the shore. In one boat was a slender figure in a wide straw hat, that must be Helen, and in the other sat John Lacklan, wearing a cork sun helmet. For an instant his glasses flashed in the sun as he rose from the boat.

  “We’d better pull out here and camp ourselves. I don’t want to be seen.”

  We hauled the boat to shore, built a smoky fire to keep the sand flies away, and as Raj began to make camp I took my field glasses and crept along the bank to a spot across the river from the Lacklan camp. I slid in behind a decomposing log covered in plates of bracket fungus and focused my binoculars on the beach across the river.

  Two of the tattooed natives were cooking a pot of what had to be rice and another had walked upstream and dropped a line into the water, patiently waiting for a fish to strike. The three others had vanished into the forest. Lacklan was sitting on the sand jotting notes in a book or journal and Helen was tying up their hammocks. I put down the glasses and glanced around. My spot was back. within the tree line and relatively dry, even so it wouldn’t be long before the leeches got at me. The air over the river was thick with brightly colored butterflies, some as big as my hand. They fluttered in and out of patches of sunlight like continuously falling leaves. I squinted through the lenses again. Lacklan looked comfortable on his small crescent of beach. The fisherman and one of the cooks looked to be in their mid-thirties, hard capable men, though small. Each had a parang at his side and near the kit of one of the natives that I assumed had gone into the jungle was an old single-barreled shotgun, its stock held together with copper wire.

  The fisherman looked up suddenly and the two other members of the boat crews came wandering back into camp. With them was a slight younger man whose posture was somehow more assertive than the older men, tough as they might be. This would be the boy I’d been told about. He wore a button-down shirt that was missing most of its buttons and was tucked into an old pair of dungarees. The clothes were castoffs from someone down in the settlements but he wore them with a certain flair. Unlike the others, he did not have the traditionally pierced ears. Over his eyes he had on a set of sunglasses, the type that aviators tended to wear. The returning men sat close around the rice pot and the fisherman returned to his chore.

  I was getting set to pull back into the trees and make my way back to our camp when I saw Helen walk away from the spit of beach across the river. She had obviously been waiting for the other men to come back, because as soon as they sat down she walked over to the place where Lacklan was sitting and spoke to him, then she picked up a small pack and walked away.

  She headed downriver and in a moment was out of sight, lost in a tangle of vines and tree trunks. I slid back a ways, then moved through the forest on my side of the river, trying to catch up. If she went too far I was afraid she’d see our camp. Unless the two of them ran into trouble I was not of a mind to try explaining what I was doing there to a paranoid little tyrant like John Lacklan. I moved downstream as quickly as I could without being seen. Noise wasn’t a problem here because the river would drown out anything short of a gunshot.

  I dodged back toward the water and crouched down. I couldn’t see anything. Then, I noticed some movement on the bank upstream of where I had been looking. It was a piece of fabric moving in the breeze. The khaki blouse that Helen Lacklan had been wearing hung from a branch near a calm backwater. Now, what… ?

  Alarmed, I almost stood up. Then there was a bursting spray of silver as Helen’s head appeared above the surface and shook the water from her hair. She swam for the bank and I would like to say that I was gentleman enough to avert my eyes when she climbed out but that in all honesty would not be true.

  She fumbled with a pile of gray fabric on the sand that I now realized was the pants that she had been wearing, and then splashed back into the water with a bar of soap in her hand and began to wash.

  The idea of a bath reminded me that I might not get one myself until I got back to Marudi, unless I could share Helen Lacklan’s soap. An entertaining but not very realistic thought. Before I was tempted to watch when Helen climbed out again and got dressed, I slipped away from the riverbank and made my way back to camp.

  The next day, travel was harder. We had to creep our way slowly upriver, cautiously coming around every bend, always alert for the chance that John Lacklan’s canoes had stopped or that there would be a stretch of river long enough for them to look back and see us trailing them. To make matters worse, although they were heavily loaded, there was an extra man to switch off paddling in each of their boats and in the rougher spots all of them, including John and Helen, helped out. We had the outboard but I was afraid to start the damned thing because of the noise. It had enabled us to catch up but now we merely had its weight to contend with.

  Mountains loomed up around us and the way was narrower. Somewhere, hidden in these peaks, I had heard there were huge caves. We were nearing the place where I had originally found my diamonds, a long day or two and we’d be there.

  That gave me an idea. What would happen if I dropped into the Lacklan camp some afternoon and let them know my old diamond placer was nearby? John would almost certainly object but I wondered if he wouldn’t be tempted to take a day or two out to see what might be found there. With luck I could derail the whole plan, if there was a plan at all. I leaned forward to speak to Raj. “Jeru’s camp, does anyone know where it is?”

  “No, boss. Very far upriver.” He paused for a moment. “If I was Jeru I would not be on river. Police mans, they do not like to get out of the boat. They do not like jungle because their rifles are no good.”

  He was right, the limited light, limited range, and plentiful cover in the forest did reduce the effectiveness o
f firearms considerably.

  “I have heard on the coast that the pirate Jeru went to a long house where all mans dead of sickness. He took long house for those who follow him. They are all very bad. They take heads, even now they take heads.”

  If Borneo is famous for one thing it is its native headhunters. As romantically gruesome as the practice is it has been dramatically curtailed in recent years, at least along the coast. In the interior, the severed heads of tribal enemies are still kept for their magical power, and a freshly taken head has the most power.

  The sun was just touching the rim of the mountains when Lacklan’s boats tucked into the shore and Raj and I stopped paddling and let the current carry us back downstream about half a mile before finding a place to camp.

  As was becoming my habit I took my field glasses and started upriver, out of camp. At the last moment Raj’s voice stopped me for a moment.

  “Boss?” I turned to where he was standing by the fire. “If there no trouble, we hunt for diamonds, okay?”

  “Sure, Raj,” I said. “We’re up here, might as well.” He was right. I’d given up the canal job to come after the Lacklans; we were using up the supplies I’d bought for them and nothing lucrative awaited us back in Marudi. On the day after tomorrow I would drop in on my favorite tourists and find out if I could get them away from their guides. Then we’d see if we could dig some diamonds. I didn’t want to return from this fool’s errand with nothing. On top of it all I had a sixteen-year-old Dyak kid who thought I was just enough off my rocker that he had to remind me occasionally to keep my eyes on the target.

  The river was wide here, and though I was farther away than the first time I had spied on the Lacklans, the water was slow enough that I could hear some of what was going on in their camp. There was a clank of pots as one of the older men laid out his cooking supplies, the hard bark of an ax as someone back in the forest chopped wood.