Off the Mangrove Coast (Ss) (2000)

by L'amour, Louis

  The dancer disappeared from view and another took his place. He was a thin old man but he moved with an energy that, while not youthful, was surprisingly vigorous. He whirled and stomped, spinning a parang over his head with a glittering flash of steel. I suddenly saw that the dark area that I had noticed on one side of his face was not a shadow or a tattoo but a deep and twisted mass of scar tissue. He mimed climbing onto something higher than himself, something that moved unsteadily. He fought, he carried something away. He was raiding a ship or a boat… this must be Jeru! Not only was he here, still alive after all these years, but he was telling his story in a dance.

  I bent to Raj’s ear. “Is that him?”

  The boy nodded, his body alive with fear and excitement, j “You watch our backs,” I told him. I didn’t want him working up a scare by watching this man that he believed to be a witch and I didn’t want both of us to be night blind.

  When I turned back to the crack Jeru was hacking his way through the forest and then something … he mimed men marching and everyone laughed. He was showing them he’d been chased by soldiers, paddled up a river, cut off men’s heads with his parang. He stepped out of sight for a moment and came back with a long Japanese military rifle. He shook it in the air and then after handing it to someone, mimed cutting off what I surmised to be the Japanese soldier’s head. He pointed to the roof with a harsh cry and, crouching, I could see a cluster of dark spheres hanging from the rafters. Severed heads. No doubt the unfortunate Jap was one of them.

  The story continued with Jeru finding something in a stream. He held the imaginary something up to the light, turning it this way and that. He reached for his neck and pulled a leather strap off, over his head. In a setting or basket of leather there gleamed a stone.

  This was it. The huge diamond that he had used for many years to lure men upriver, never to return. A diamond of fabulous size and quality, so the story went; from where I was all I could tell was that it was large and wrapped in braided strings of leather. It glowed rather than flashed, for this was a raw stone with none of the facets of a cut one, but there was a white fire hiding deep within it.

  The old man took on a posture of humility, he moved stiffly, portraying a sense of age that obviously was not his natural state. Again, he got a laugh. He was showing the stone to someone, offering it, walking away as if disinterested, then leading them on. He took an old stove-in pith helmet from the place it hung on the wall and wore it for a moment as he paddled an imaginary boat. Then he was himself again and beating his companion to the ground he drew his parang and cut off the man’s head.

  The audience was silent now and a sense of tension penetrated the wall and clutched at my heart. Even Raj, eyes turned to the night, could feel it and he moved closer to me, his hand on his knife.

  John Lacklan staggered into view, pushed along by the rough shoves of the boy who had been his guide. His hands were tied, his clothing torn, his body scratched and bruised. How badly he had been treated I didn’t know; the I trip through the jungle might have left him in the condition that he was in. I admired him in that moment, though, for he held his head high, in his eyes was the look of fear but he didn’t beg, or cry, or even tremble. He was keeping himself together although I thought I could tell that it was a near thing.

  Without looking away I ran a shell into the chamber of; my rifle and set the safety. I wasn’t at all sure about my original plan of barging in and spiriting them away; there were easily as many shotguns in the room as I had expected plus the Japanese rifle and the boy carried Lacklan’s Win-‘ Chester over his shoulder. Not only were there more guns than I would have liked but several were cradled in the hands of Jeru’s outlaws, held casually but ready for use.

  The boy stepped in behind Lacklan and kicked the back of his left knee, knocking him to a kneeling position. Lacklan started to get back up but the boy unlimbered the rifle and poked him hard in the kidney with the muzzle. John Lacklan gave a choking cough of pain and collapsed back to the floor. Old Jem whirled his parang and then tested the edge against his thumb.

  “Find me a door!” I whispered to Raj. “Damn quick!”

  Now there was a commotion somewhere in the room. “Get off me!” I heard Helen call out. Then she lurched into view, a portly Iban trying to drag her down by one arm. She shook him off; he was surprised, I think, by that same physicality that had caught my attention. She was bigger than he was and lithely powerful.

  “Stop it! You stop this!” she yelled at them. Raj was back tugging at my sleeve but the boy, sunglasses pushed up on his forehead, stepped in quickly and pressed the rifle barrel against Helen’s throat … even if John Lacklan got his head cut off I wasn’t going in there if it risked Helen’s getting killed.

  The boy yelled at her in Iban, then in English. “Sit, missy. You sit or I kill you.” He jabbed at her with the gun barrel. “Everybody die, you don’t sit down.” She didn’t even move.

  “You can’t kill him. Take our things, our money. You can’t kill him!” she cried.

  “We’re Americans, damn it. Let us go or you’ll regret this.” John’s voice wavered.

  In my travels around the world I’ve noticed that identifying yourself as an American never helps, it just makes the locals get violent or want more money.

  The boy shrugged, “We kill Englang, Dutch … America, who cares.” He suddenly spoke in his own tongue for a moment and everyone laughed. Old Jeru the hardest.

  “You don’t want John’s head.” Helen spoke in a manner that let me know she wanted all to hear. “I know that Dyak tribesmen only take the heads of powerful enemies, of warriors. The head of a strong man is magic but a weak man … a weak man is nothing. My husband is not a warrior, he’s not even a strong man. Did he walk here? No. You had to carry him over the last hill…”

  “Be quiet, Helen!” John hissed. “Don’t make this any worse than it is.”

  But she ignored him. “He’s a scholar. What are you going to say? There are the heads of the Japanese soldiers, we fought their machine guns with knives but we won. There is the head of the man who read books, aren’t we brave!”

  The boy turned to Jeru and they spoke quietly for a moment. Others in the crowd seemed a bit nervous. The bottles started being passed around again but with them there started a low mutter of conversation.

  Jeru spoke and the boy turned to Helen with a smirk. He spoke in Iban to the crowd and there was scattered laughter but it sounded forced. He said to her, “We cut off head; see what happens. No magic, we throw out!”

  “No!” she cried and started to say something else but John bellowed at her.

  “Helen, shut up! Just shut up!” He was almost crying in fear or frustration. He lurched to his feet and the boy smashed the butt of the rifle into the pit of his stomach. I was ready to move and Raj was even tugging me toward the door when Helen threw herself on the boy. Jeru knocked her to the floor but John charged him. With his hands tied all he could have done would have been to knock Jeru down but the old man deftly rapped John Lacklan on the head with the butt of his parang and Lacklan went to the floor, out cold.

  Jeru hawked and spat. Then with a further growl of disgust he dragged Lacklan into a corner and dropped him. He motioned to the boy and the young man led the quietly sobbing Helen to the same spot, then they both stepped forward to the seated group and took up arak bottles.

  I got the feeling that there had been a reprieve of sorts and I’d better make the best of it. Pulling myself away from the scene beyond the crack in the wall I let my eyes readjust to the darkness. When my vision started to come back I motioned Raj ahead of me. “Let’s get on the ground, we’ve got to get to work.”

  We dropped down under the long house and I made my way back to the spot where the broken floor sagged toward the mud. This whole corner of the building was ready to collapse and I figured that it would be unlikely that anyone would be using it for anything. I shrugged out of my pack and dug out my mountaineer stove. I pumped up the pressure an
d fired it. Using the light from the flame I found a place where several broken logs and a piece of the at tap thatch wall all lay together. I wedged the stove into the broken wood just under the thatch and let the plume of fire bite into the thatch.

  I grabbed Raj and led him back to the spot where we had climbed onto the long house verandah.

  “You stay here. When I come back I’m going to be coming fast, if anyone needs help getting off the porch you help. If you run into any of Jeru’s people …”

  “I know what to do, boss.” He tapped the hilt of his parang.

  “Right. If I’m not with you go straight up the hill and follow the crest east, okay?”

  I pulled myself up onto the aging boards again, and careful to walk along a crosspiece so as to make less noise, I slid up to the wall and took a fast glance through the crack. Heavily tattooed bodies moved back and forth, momentarily obscuring my vision. Nothing much was going on but more people were up and around. Well, that couldn’t be helped.

  I moved along the wall to the door that Raj had found. I breathed deep and waited for the fire to catch. Suddenly there was an excited burst of Iban from inside the building, the sound of running feet and a breaking bottle. It was only then that I smelled smoke. There was a rush of feet and a door in the front of the place crashed open. I couldn’t see what was happening but I figured someone was going for water. I didn’t move until I heard the crash of the floor giving way.

  I hit the door and came into the big room with the Mauser up, sling around my left arm. The long room was filled with smoke and the back, where I had started the fire, was listing. Flames were beginning to take the roof. An older man stood right in front of me with a bottle in his hand, he seemed to be standing back, bemused, while the main crowd moved toward the blaze. I dropped the rifle from my shoulder and clipped him on the side of the head as I went past.

  A woman tore by me and in the confusion didn’t even notice that I was there. Someone seemed to have fallen through the burning floor and that was fine with me. I dropped beside the Lacklans pulling my knife.

  Lacklan twisted around in panic and kicked at me with both feet as I reached for his arms. Helen got it first. “John, stop! It’s help.”

  I grabbed one of the kicking feet and cut off the ropes that bound them, when they had tied his feet I didn’t know. She extended her hands to me and I quickly swiped the blade between them catching the bindings by luck. Then there was the roar of an explosion and a scattering of bird shot tore into my boot and ankle like a swarm of angry bees. I dropped the knife and turned bringing the rifle up.

  A short, tattooed native struggled to reload his crude shotgun. Others stood behind him frozen, but they were all looking at me. Suddenly one of the men in back came up with the Japanese rifle, I didn’t even know I had him in my sights until I squeezed the trigger.

  The concussion in the long room was even louder than the shotgun. The rifleman went down and all hell broke loose. Men and women scattered, two shotguns belched fire in the light of the roaring flames, throwing huge plumes of white smoke. I wasn’t hit but burning paper and powder smoldered in my clothes. I put three shots into the crowd as fast as I could work the bolt and then I was pushing Lacklan toward the door and praying that Helen was following. In my last look the room was an inferno of flame, burning thatch falling from the ceiling. Around the cluster of heads hanging from the rafters wasps swarmed in panic, driven from their nests in the empty eyes and mouths by the heat and smoke.

  We crashed out into the fire-streaked night. Lacklan stumbled and a man dropped a bucket of water and came at me with a knife. I deflected it with my rifle barrel and kicked him hard on the hip. He fell and I gave him another in the face. The gun was empty and I had no time to reload.

  I pulled Helen past me, pointed to the end of the verandah, and yelled, “Go! Find Raj!”

  I turned, knowing that to run at that moment would be the end of me. Three men rushed forward in the shifting light and I went to meet them. I clubbed and punched and kicked and bit. One cut me across the back. Then I was on the wooden floor slamming my knee into his midsection. My rifle flopped uselessly, its sling still entwined with my arm.

  There was a flare of light and an explosion of wood. One of my attackers threw himself off of me and there was Jem, standing over me holding a pistol so ancient it must have come to Sarawak with the first white rajah. I twisted sharply, Jeru fired again, missing. He struggled to cock the enormous relic, twisting the cylinder by hand. I scrambled sideways, put a knee into someone’s stomach; suddenly I was fighting with one of the men who attacked me again. We struggled, turned, and then hit the railing of the verandah. With a splintering crash at least twenty feet of it let go and we were falling.

  In midair I pushed away from the man I was fighting, hit the ground, and rolled. My rifle, still bound to my arm by a twist of the sling, rapped me on the back of the head. My vision went gray but I heard Jeru’s gun bellow and the hard bite of black powder hit my nostrils. He was leaning over the railing peering into the darkness, the torn side of his face a dark knot of rage. I grabbed my rifle and ran underneath the burning long house Flames licked along the floor above me. The structure groaned as walls twisted and buckled. In back, the corner where I had started the fire was dark. Someone had managed to put out the flames, a futile gesture for the fire had spread to the rest of the building.

  I made it to the darkness and looked back. The dim forms of Jeru’s men began to appear in the firelight. Some . ran off toward the river, probably for more water, but four or five of them started forward under the building, coming after me.

  I’d had just about enough. I snapped four fresh cartridges into the magazine of the Mauser and dropped a fifth into the chamber. I backed up farther into the darkness and brought the rifle up. I took aim at the first man, then shifted to one of the pilings beside him. I fired and splinters flew. They dropped to the ground but then came on, worming their way forward through the debris under the long house The first had a shotgun and the second man carried a long blowpipe with a spear blade bound to one end. I squinted, fired, and the heavy bullet took the blowpipe man along the top of the shoulder as I had intended, then burned the back of his calf. He screamed, and I ran, blindly, uphill into the jungle.

  I nearly took a header into some kind of hole, leaves whipped my face, and I slowed down. I cursed myself for not killing both of the men I’d shot at under the long house I had a total of nine bullets left, three in the gun and six jingling in my pocket, I couldn’t afford to waste them.

  I had to find Raj and the Lacklans. If they hadn’t made it out I’d have to go back … I wasn’t looking forward to suicide.

  I cut left along the hillside, heading in the direction they would have taken if they had gone straight up the hill. I stopped to catch my breath and found I couldn’t keep my knees from shaking. I squatted down, sucking air, and felt the prickles of adrenaline recede from my limbs. I had shot a man. Several actually, but one of them I had killed for sure. Unbidden, a phrase that my father had used came to mind, “If you fool around with a bandwagon, you’re liable to get hit with a horn.” It wasn’t as amusing as it had been but I was realizing that it didn’t only apply to me getting into this situation, it applied to those poor chaps I’d shot, too.

  Those men down there had lived as traditional Iban and Kayan or whatever. Some, perhaps many, had traveled to the cities and oil fields to try a different kind of life.

  But somewhere, something had gone wrong. Instead of staying on to collect their paychecks, instead of returning home to farm and fish, they had come here. In a country that was virtually without violent crime they joined with a man who made a living robbing tourists and diamond hunters. A man who was continuing to take heads not of his enemies in war, a practice, if not what I would call civilized, then at least honored by Iban tradition.

  Helen had thought quickly back there. She’d confronted that old witch doctor with his own hypocrisy, given other circumstances it mi
ght have been funny. It was something else too, though. Some of those men in there had believed in what she’d said. There was magic in the head of a brave enemy. To take a man’s head was, in a strange way, actually an honor. If you had a vision of. yourself as a warrior you didn’t kill tourists. Helen might have planted a seed of doubt in a few of the men down there. Either old Jeru might have fewer followers come morning or they’d all be coming after me, the more honorable enemy.

  I started up the hill again, going slowly in order to make as little noise as possible. In the dark phosphorescent mushrooms glowed dimly. The sounds of insects and animals filled the night, covering the noises that I made but also covering the sounds of anyone who might be following me. It felt like hours since Raj and I had the fight with the dogs but I could still occasionally see the moon through gaps in the trees; I didn’t know what time it was but it had been headed down as we approached the long house Higher and higher I climbed, pulling my sel along using the trunks of the smaller trees and rocks an handfuls of undergrowth. I was exhausted, my legs wei shot, and my arms and lower legs were covered wii leeches.

  Finally I reached the bare crest of the ridge and look out across a vast panorama, dimly lit by the setting moon.) I turned east and started climbing again.

  When the landscape was left in blackness, when the las! of the silver light had faded from the sky, I rested. I carefully cleaned the leeches off by feel. One leg was puckered with bird shot but most of it had not penetrated my boot. I stopped myself from touching it. I knew Borneo, it was going to get infected and the less I scared myself the better. I got up and pressed on and it was only a few hundred yards farther when I heard voices ahead.