Going Native (31 page)

About two in the afternoon Henry said they should stop now and make camp. A bad storm was on its way.

Amanda looked up into a hopeless tangle of branches and foliage. "How does he know a storm is coming? I can't even see the sky."

"Because, you ignorant white lady," explained Drake in a ludicrous accent, "the sounds tell him, the sounds of his native homeland, the song of the furry and feathered creatures, the howls of the great monkeys."

"I'd punch you if I weren't so tired."

An hour later the dim light got dimmer, the tall shafts of the trees began to move like masts in a high gale, the leafy crowns swaying together in banded harmony, the moaning of limbs as wood rubbed against wood in the gathering dark. Henry and Jalong giggled nervously between themselves. "You hear," Henry explained in embarrassment, "the trees, they are having sex together." A ragged skirt of black cloud must have swept in low overhead, for down in their shelter it turned to night. Lightning began stabbing at the ground somewhere beyond their sight, the thunder loud in their ears like empty steel drums being rolled down a ramp. Bits of leaf and bark fell in gentle hail upon their roof, where they clung to the poles like desperate sailors as the rain descended abruptly in full force as if a trap door had been sprung and the equivalent of a mountain waterfall crashed down upon their heads. In thirty minutes it was over. No one moved. The forest dripped from every surface, noisily, steadily, on through the night and into the next dawn, when they awoke to swirling curtains of steam issuing from the earth and the chirping of tree frogs, the screeching of birds, the hooting of gibbons. Henry and Jalong were huddled in conference over a small pile of damp sticks, urging on the fire from their Bic lighters.

A groggy Amanda gazed askance upon the scene. Drake sat nearby, rousting nighttime squatters from his boots with a vigorous shake. "Where the hell are we?" she asked. "Skull Island?" She blew her nose, frowned at the result.

Drake was amused. "I hope Kong likes you," he said, "or we're screwed."

She ignored her husband. She was in need -- of something, of anything. She hunted around for the Leeds & Palmer tin. Yes, damn him, the biscuits were slightly sodden, yet retaining more than sufficient flavor to transport her for a few delicious moments into a state where neither weariness nor discomfort could trouble her. Taste -- the sense of the gods.

The day was downhill from there, as all the trails seemed to climb doggedly upward and even when the land lay apparently level and clear of snares it felt as slippery as a greasy kitchen floor. Their stamina, instead of strengthening with use, deteriorated by the hour. They had difficulty maintaining their balance; one would stumble and fall, then the other. Once, as Drake reached down to help his wife to her feet, she thought she detected something in his eyes. "I can take this as long as you can," she declared.

Drake was stone-faced. "I didn't say a word."

They paused for lunch in a cool glade beside a hill of black rock from which poured a dozen separate streams of white gushing water. Drake took a picture. Amanda flung herself upon an inviting bed of spongy ferns. "You know," she said, "I've forgotten what the sun even looks like." Silence. No one cared to comment. So what? Indifferent by now to the faint persistent aroma of organic rot, Amanda sprawled on her back, casual as any native, at the center of this cozy green cave. The massive gray columns of the ageless trees soared up around her into fantastic vaults of living tissue woven so fine that, in the tiny shivering spaces between, the broken light of day twinkled down at her in a flaring of prismatic color as if projected through the tall tracery of a stained glass window. Exactly. The ancestral scene every cathedral was designed to mimic, the home that will always be, deep in the spiraling wonderwork of the human gene, our lost link with the true paradise, the arboreal playground up in the bouncing boughs where divinities reside and delight in communing with their creatures. Had she any strength, Amanda might have attempted a shimmy up the nearest trunk for kicks. She heard Drake's voice, he was saying something to her, he was saying it again. She lifted her head. "What?" she cried. "What is it now?"

Jalong was pointing in her direction.

"He says you probably should not be lying in that particular spot," called Drake. "Fire ants."

"Holy Christ!" She leaped to her feet, brushing frantically at her clothes, finding nothing.

"A precaution," said Drake. "I don't believe we're in any immediate danger."

"Are they laughing? Are they laughing over there behind that tree? I'm not too tired or too weak to do something about that."

"Here," said Drake, extending an arm. "Forget about them." In his hand was a Fig Newton.

"Why, thank you. Whatever did I do to deserve this?"

"Do I need an excuse to act decent?"

She pretended to think for a moment. "Yes."

"I must love you," he said. "I'm immune to your insults."

She chewed thoughtfully on the Fig Newton. "Getting kinda soggy, aren't they?"

Henry called to them. With their knives he and Jalong had been prying a curious stone from the silt along the stream. He turned the mud-caked thing in his hands and all could see that it was a skull, small and discolored.

"Monkey?" asked Drake.

Henry shook his head. "Human," he said. "Human baby."

The bony hemisphere had been cracked open and the case once containing the world within the world was packed to the sockets with wet clay.

"How'd it get here?" asked Amanda.

Henry didn't know. Perhaps the child had been buried here, perhaps the remains had been washed downstream from another place long ago.

"That child was murdered," said Amanda. "Look at the size of the hole."

Henry shrugged. He squatted before them, washing the skull in the flowing water, and when he was finished, he ran a length of vine through the jagged hole in the cranium and out the foramen and wore the skull around his neck like an amulet. Protection that might come in handy further on in their journey.

Drake took a picture. "When in Rome," he said grimly.

"Why not?" asked Amanda.

That evening they pitched camp at the base of a looming mountain wall of gnarled limestone. At dusk they were startled from their wood gathering by a high whooshing sound as the rock face overhead splintered into thousands of dark brittle pieces sucked up and away in a towering vortex toward an invisible hole deep in the clear orange sky. A grottoful of chittering bats launched flapping on their nightly feed. Life up close on the food chain.

And later that night, long after the others had fallen asleep, the pale shaft of Drake's flashlight could still be glimpsed by curious nocturnal eyes, shifting fitfully over the pages of his remaining guidebook. Printed information had never seemed so vivid, so urgent, so necessary. " 'All the islands are permeated by the notion of
semangat,
or life force, inhabiting not only people, plants, animals, but sacred objects, villages, places, nations. The
semangat
of a human is concentrated in the head. The goal of life is to keep the positive and negative
semangat
around you in harmony. One way this can be achieved is through enhancement of your own
semangat
by, as certain tribes in Borneo, for instance, believed, taking the head of another. Blood, of course, is rich in
semangat
and was often used for anointings, for drinking, and, among the Makassarese of Sulawesi, as a solution in which royal weapons were regularly bathed in order to keep them charged.' " Amongst the wonder of words, the wonders beyond the word.

In the morning Amanda looked at herself in a mirror and screamed. This was the longest she'd gone without an image check. Reacquaintance with herself, with what Borneo had done to her, was a shock. She didn't speak to Drake for most of the day.

They labored up one ridge and down, and up and down another, and on the third ascent before lunch encountered a jolly troop of Australian girl scouts marching down the narrow path to the tune of "Octopus's Garden." "Earning their merit badges in bush humping," mumbled Drake. Tremendously excited by the sight of friendly white faces, they clustered around the Copelands, all speaking at once. They'd hiked in from the coast up over the Muller Range and were now headed back to the Kapuas for the boat ride to Pontianak and the jet home. They were learning survival skills and they were bird-watching (seventy-six different species so far) and they were bonding with nature. Wasn't the environment absolutely marvelous? Weren't the people super? The orangutans grand? Shake hands, Good luck, and the girls disappeared, singing, into the trees, a hallucination of wholesomeness, well-being, and irrepressible youth.

The deeper in they got, the more crowded the terrain. The jungle was crawling with foot traffic. They ran into a team of polite Germans under contract from their country's largest pharmaceutical firm, collecting plant samples in small plastic Baggies. A party of Kenyan passed in single file, the leader nodding once and once only, their expressions neutral, their eyes hooded but wary, not one word spoken between strangers.

Then, late one night, a pair of gentle Dayaks stepped diffidently into the bell-like glow of their cooking fire. They were carrying between them an antique spinet, scarred and buckled and missing several keys. They were returning home to Kalimantan from the oil fields of Sarawak, where they had gone for work more than six months ago. This battered instrument the first purchase of their labor. The Copelands shared their dinner and afterward watched through a mutable scrim of woodsmoke one of these half-naked visitors pick out with dirty fingers the notes of "Camptown Races" in a manner rousing enough to have them all singing by the start of the second chorus. Again, the human voice raised in song against the noise of the forest -- a gesture of gathering import. And when they were finished, the last note ringing out into the hushed darkness, there was a pause and then from some wild wordless tongue the answer of a cry almost mortal in the gleaming nakedness of its anguish.

The sound haunted them into the light and along the same trail, past the same sights they'd seen yesterday or the day before or the day before that. Drake found himself humming, whistling nonsensically, fragments of melody from a time in his life when every song was new, a motley banner in the tumultuous air. Amanda told him to shut up. They had stopped on their midmorning break and she was squatting over her bag, searching for a spare bottle of calamine lotion. When he turned, he saw that the entire back of her damp blouse from neck to waist was covered in a rich swarm of salt-hungry butterflies, a soft breathing coat of such intense color it seemed about to erupt into fiery applause. He didn't speak. He didn't move. The moment a web of frail strands he didn't dare break. It was possible to believe that beauty was a reciprocal of love and that nature bore no wiles. Then his unknowing wife straightened up, the butterflies scattered like scraps of torn paper, and everything returned to how it was before -- only different.

An hour later they found a message stick planted along the trail, the raw bark at its tip peeled back in thin strips and twisted into curlicues of local significance.

"Pekit," pronounced Henry. "Pass by here yesterday maybe. No game. Very hungry."

"Are they headed home?" asked Drake.

Henry nodded.

"How far is home?"

"Two, three days for them." Henry paused. "Four, five days for us."

Foot foot, foot foot, foot foot foot.

And it was they who moved, not the forest, working a treadmill of mud and slime and green sweat without respite or hope of progress, mind sunk complaisantly into body, a stone beneath the ripples and eddying of language. For hours no one daydreamed, no one experienced a conscious thought. Sun and air and space had all disappeared forever and the Copelands were simply these tiny tired pale creatures picking their way brainless as grubs across the tangled roots of the world.

Amanda was suffering from a more or less permanent headache, whether caused by heat or fatigue or unheard-of agents she did not know. Whatever the origins, this distracting pain had apparently come aboard as an obnoxious traveling buddy for the duration. Aspirin did no good at all. A single codeine tablet she popped as an experiment turned one morning's hike into the final leg of the world-class iron woman competition. Also, despite the frequent and generous application of numerous ointments and powders, some vital portion of her anatomy remained in perpetual itch. Her mood was less than congenial.

Drake never complained. Outwardly, he appeared to be managing the course, although he was certainly not about to tell anyone of the occasional words and phrases that had begun floating out of the woods on a wave obviously directed to his ear only. Once, perched on a flowering log, scraping leeches off his calf, he heard a clear distinct voice enunciating out of the massed foliage at his back, firmly, oh-so-quietly. "Help," it said. "Help me." Startled, he whirled around, but there was no one there. Later, on the trail, he heard the same voice again but speaking in tones of a lower register. "Bastard," it said. "Bastard, bastard." The voice, now established, returned at intervals at least once, sometimes several times a day, growing louder, bolder, expanding its vocabulary, as if someone malicious were following to taunt him from the jungle cover. He was too embarrassed to mention this phenomenon to Henry -- probably a not uncommon trick of the senses in an alien environment -- and he refused to confide in Amanda, certain she was already monitoring him carefully for incipient signs of physical and mental weakness. He tried not to worry too much; symptom or reality, the voice, like everything else in this bizarre creation, was prisoner to a life cycle of its own that would be played out to the end regardless of his wishes or defensive measures. Just another aggravation buzzing about his head with the gnats, the flies, the mosquitoes. Give the devil no due and he'll skulk off in frustration. Keep it centered. Maintain the harmony. Shoulder on.