Going Native (35 page)

"I always knew you were nutty enough to do something like this," said Amanda, gazing in candid fascination upon her newly adorned man, "but I was never sure you actually would. It looks bad; does it hurt?"

"Oh no, not at all. In fact, it's rather invigorating."

"Yeah? Let's see what you say after you take your first pee. The Vaseline glop -- I assume that's some sort of healing ointment."

"Yes."

"You're not going to get infected and lose it, are you?"

"Some have died," he admitted. "Casualties on the long march toward erotic Utopia."

She couldn't take her eyes off it. "Penis jewelry," she exclaimed. "What an ingenious people. When can we try it out?"

"Pak Mofung said two months, but I don't know if I can wait that long."

"Me either."

"They say that once you've had the operation, you won't ever go back. They say sensation for both partners is multiplied beyond description."

"You're a man of many parts, Drake."

"All equally lovable, I hope."

"I hope so, too."

That night, as if the piercing implement had been a rod of flint striking volatile sparks from a hard covert place within, Drake found himself unable to sleep, the tinder of his mind nicely fuzzed, high on the new-sprung chemicals of his own body, restless fingers straying irrepressibly downward to touch in ever-recurring wonder the swollen actuality of his wounded self. He felt launched, flung into space among the brave, the foolhardy, the mad, warped by the physics of desire into shapes antic and fabulous, the transmuted population of the coming world.

That night he wanted fervently to act as the vessel for what the Pekit called a "good dream," a linked succession of well-cast, spankingly paced, brightly lit images rendered with such conviction its graphic unfolding is experienced as a major waking event, an exact embodiment of real life but for the nagging apprehension that every object, every deed, is saturated in significance, for Drake personally, for the village and all its inhabitants, too. For if he could convey valuable info to the Pekit from the other side, how could they resist inducting him into the sacred friendship of the tribe? But, too jacked on his throbbing
palang
to enter the grace of a profound descent, he spent fitful hours drifting in an imaginary dugout on the current of his breath into the twilight country at the borders of consciousness, ending eventually amid a haunted grove of ironwood trees festooned with hundreds of dismembered arms and legs dangling like gaudy ornaments in all the colors of corruption from frazzled ropes of human hair, this grotesque mobile swinging silently in the soupy green light of the forest, blood dropping in a scattered singsong rhythm upon the outstretched leaves, the tumbled logs, the swaying ferns, the befouled beds of sodden moss. Wedged into the crotch of every branch was a human head, eyes distended in extravagant expressions of perpetual shock, as if the trees themselves had bred this outlandish fruit for a peek upon the world and been unexpectedly appalled by what they beheld. And the question that had been ever turning in Drake's mind found a stop: no, head-hunting was not evil, but a resolutely moral practice undertaken on specific occasions and for specific reasons which focused and contained the murderous impulses of the tribe within a ceremony of devoted attention. No, head-hunting was not evil; it was a form of prayer. Evil was a rampant thing that loped along the ground and sped through the air, a homeless hankering thing in search of companionship, a faithful friend. And when it came to find you, it would indeed come as a friend. Then, in order to restore your balance, your personal harmony, you'd have to take a head. You'd have to. Or find yourself, your family, your people consumed by evil. And then, you too might find yourself accoutered in a belt of cured skin with a knobby kneecap buckle.

Sometime before dawn the chief's son with the BURNING SORE
T-shirt crept into the Copelands' room and touched Drake softly on the shoulder. Drake sat up, instantly alert. Not a signal was given, not a word spoken. Drake grabbed his jungle boots and his driest socks and his camera and followed the chief's son out onto the veranda, where a silent group of Pekit men was gathered with their spears and blowpipes and sheathed
mandau
blades. The mangy dogs milled skittishly about their tattooed legs. The chief looked at Drake, looked into him, and turned majestically away, the meaning of his gestures as clouded as Drake had always found them. A man Drake had never talked to, therefore never noticed, handed him a sturdy well-balanced spear. Drake's sensitized fingers closed around the shaft, the bumps, the nicks, the worn bald patches, the unreliable history of the wood. Drake nodded gravely and shook the man's hand. The man smiled, half his teeth gone, the others broken and discolored stubs.

They filed quietly out of the village, the eager dogs trotting on ahead, down the dirt trail winding along the foaming yellow river, mile upon mile, Drake as elated as a little boy on his first trip to Disney World. He liked the casual manner with which he'd been notified of his acceptance on this hunt, the cool attitude implying both "Of course you were expected to come" and "Be grateful you've been so chosen." The forest was alive, vibrant with the tones he could recognize but not identify. Critters. Life. Even the muscleless plants seemed to reach out to him with green spatulate hands. This was it, despite the early chill, the random scratches appearing on his unprotected arms and legs, this was existence at its most effervescent, the real thing, walking the edge on a genuine Borneo pig hunt.

Nothing much happened all morning. They hiked far down the river to a favorite pig wallow off the trail where the dogs sniffed and snorted and snapped at one another, utterly unable to follow out a single trackable spoor. They went on, the frustrated hounds breaking into spells of inexplicable barking no one could hush. They spied a rare orangutan high up in the knotted bough of a dying fig tree, its sad human face peering stoically down at its hairless cousins, the famous "man of the forest," who knows how to talk but won't for fear of being put to work. One of the men moved forward into a crouch, lifting the enormous blowpipe to his mouth. The first dart hissed away into the leaves and the gentle russet-haired creature was gone before a second could be tried. For Drake the morning passed in an elevated druglike state of private bemusement, shuttling endlessly between exhilaration and dolor as fluently as stepping from sun to shadow and back again. The Pekit didn't talk much to one another. The mood, reading the mood. They stopped once to snack on folded banana-leaf packets of cold rice. The bland taste of the grain burst upon his tongue like a handful of liquor-filled candies. Not once this day had he directed a single thought toward himself. For several blessed hours he had forgotten totally who or what he was, an episode of longed-for amnesia that could only be interpreted as an act of grace. Now. Now he was truly on vacation.

Suddenly, from far up the trail, the nervous song of the jungle was silenced by the ferocious yelping of the dogs. All the men immediately sprinted off, Drake stumbling along behind at a brisk grandfatherly trot. When he caught up, he found men and dogs surrounding an immense thicket of thorny brush that shook and squealed like something possessed. The Pekit shouted out instructions to one another as they maneuvered themselves around the trapped boar. The noise of the dogs was as loud as stone being broken on stone. Occasionally one of the delirious animals would quit nipping at a nearby doggy ear and go tearing off into the living brush, only to return a moment later howling like some creature newly released from hell. The clump of thorns rattled and shook.

"Are you sure that's a pig in there?" Drake called out.

No one bothered to answer him. The man who had given Drake the spear remained close by his side, apparently his appointed guardian for the hunt. Wild pigs were dangerous beasts, particularly when cornered. Mean, ugly, and quick, they came equipped with a nasty pair of razorous tusks. Guidebook facts for the curious traveler. Drake grasped his spear and held it at the ready, or what he imagined would be a good defensive posture.

From inside the quaking bush came a yelp of canine pain and then an awful tearing clattering sound as out from his lair, in a panicked blind charge, bolted an angry black pig as big as a small buffalo, followed in close pursuit by a shrieking horde of Pekit men, their spears carried on the run like jousting lances. Even as they rushed on in jagged concert, one of these spears was abruptly raised and darted quick as a whaler's harpoon into the frightened animal's spotted flank. The pig let out a human scream and dashed off up the trail, dragging the heavy bouncing shaft behind. Incited to greater frenzy by this first hit, the Pekit sprinted away, howling in demonic unison and shaking their weapons.

The pig did not get far. A second, then a third strike crippled his rear legs, and when Drake rushed up in a sweaty pant, unable to speak, the wheezing animal was lying on its side in a bloody patch of flattened grass, its wounded body trembling feebly as if laid across a block of ice, curds of dirty foam bubbling up between its convulsing jaws, the hard round burtons of its eyes already fixed on some happier land. It smelled of blood and excrement and the corroded brassiness of carnal fear. The chief looked at Drake and gestured impatiently, speaking tersely to his son.

"He want you to stick it, too," explained the son. All the Pekit were looking at Drake. Instinctively he knew that he dare not pause, dare not reflect, he must avoid the snares of thought, he must step up with bold decisiveness, the hefty spear gripped firmly in both hands, he must jab the keen tip deep into the sacramental flesh of this living beast -- like so! -- and he could instantly feel the throbbing quickness of life traveling up the shaft into his clenched fists like the not unpleasurable tingle of a low-grade current and down he pushed with an unaccustomed and profound ferocity and the spear shuddered to his shoulders and abruptly the power went out. The Pekit made jokes among themselves and patted Drake on the back. The pink Hollywood boy had been deemed capable at last. But there, on the ground before him, was this death, absolute, irrevocable, a potent mess. A sense of contagion stained the air. Drake didn't know what to think or what to feel; he was exhilarated, he was disgusted; he was thrilled, he was repelled -- simultaneously -- his emotions locked in such a maddening contention of equally measured opposites, honesty declared he could affirm neither one nor the other, and within this paralyzing space of dark infinite confusion, a murder twisting on its axis, Drake was struck by the dread that perhaps all this inner churning and collision marked a site whose magic had been irresistibly beckoning him since childhood. Points where the magnets pulled alike in all directions defined a human border, the pattern cast by this equilibrium offeree tracing out the faintest suggestion of a shape, of being perhaps, and the invisible orders ranged in trackless silence beyond. But if this were a foundation, a potential dwelling place, what a feast of intimations and curses for brooding eternity. A towering rage passed over Drake like the shadow of a great wing, whelming in an instant conjecture, ambiguity, the tendrils of independent sensation. His hands shook and to make them stop he slammed the blunt end of his spear into the ground. He had frightened himself and he wanted to leave this jungle -- but not before recording for one last time the evidence of his pilgrim's progress through the back lot of the known world. He handed the camera to the chief's son, showed him where to look, where to press, and though he couldn't quite bring himself to pose with booted foot triumphantly astride the fallen pig's haunch, he did, in waterlogged Timberlands and grubby loincloth, assume a selfconsciously casual stance beside the dead creature, spear at ease, attempting to project onto the film the least dimension of the complexity he was experiencing at the moment, but seeming, he was quite sure, the compleat itinerant idiot.

The chief's son frowned, lowered the camera from his eye. He couldn't see anything through the viewfinder. The fungus, which had been proliferating inside the lens barrel since their arrival, irising steadily in, had concluded its work. The lens was completely blocked.

"And that's why we don't have a single picture of the crowning event," Amanda was explaining to their friends, the Burkes, over an elaborate dinner of Indonesian cuisine
(tempe
and
krupuk
and vegetable salad with sambal sauce and grilled carp and chicken baked in spiced coconut cream and, of course, the ubiquitous
nasi goreng,
or fried rice) back home in Brentwood, California, U.S. of A. The tablecloth was a shimmering hand-drawn batik of red, blue, and gold in the famous Cirebon "rain cloud" motif, symbol of mystical energy. On the wall were mounted a pair of
wayang
(shadow) puppets of carved buffalo hide, Siva, the Lord of Sleep, and Kali, the Power of Time. In the background, providing appropriate aural atmosphere, played a cassette recording of the gamelan orchestra, "Drifting in Smiles," a liquid tapestry of metallic sound stirred by foreign rhythms quaint and oddly melancholy.

"Screw the pictures," cried Jayce, "I want to see Drake's
palang."

"Did it hurt?" asked Brandon.

"No more than getting it caught in your zipper," said Drake. "I thought of God and country, and did my duty."

"Does it work?" Jayce asked.

"We haven't dared try yet," said Amanda. "He's still knitting."

"A piece of metal up inside me," mused Jayce, "I don't know. What if it falls off?"

"Straight lines that shameless shouldn't be permitted to go parading about in public," muttered Drake leeringly, tapping an imaginary cigar, "and neither should you, my dear, if you know what I mean."

"Stop it, Drake," she said, pushing him away. "I'm afraid you're simply going to have to show me this bizarre ornament. I have such a poor imagination."

"See, she's already measuring me for one," said Brandon.

"Private viewings for a small fee in the bedroom after dessert," Drake said.