Off the Mangrove Coast (Ss) (2000) (17 page)

Raj and I put our backs into it. We pulled three big partly rotten logs up the hill to the caves, both of us straining like a team of oxen on the rope. We laid a fire just inside where the tunnels converged and got it burning, then tossed every branch we could find up into a pile alongside it. We worked, getting everything into position and doing a fair job of it until I heard the boom of the Mauser.

I tossed the fuel bottle to Raj and took off running. "Don't do anything until you hear me whistle," I yelled back. I hit the mountainside and scrambled, arms and legs tearing at the earth and rock. I must have had my second wind but my muscles felt strange and hollow, it was not a good feeling.

I paused just under the lip to get a lungful of air then, hugging the ground, my leg throbbing, I slipped over the top. John was down inside the pocket of rocks where we'd had our fire and Helen was right behind him.

"What's happened?" I whispered.

"They're close. I shot and they went to ground."

"Okay. Give me the rifle. Stay clear of the cave mouth but if anything happens to me get back in the cave and stay there no matter what happens."

"What are you going to do?"

"Put on a show," I said and taking a deep breath, I stepped out.

"Tuan Jeru! Come out and face me!" I stood there, the Mauser slung diagonally across my back. I would have rather left it with Lacklan but if they hadn't seen it on me they would have suspected an ambush. As it was I'd be lucky not to get a bullet or a blowgun dart.

After a moment there was a motion in the brush and the slight form of Jeru appeared with the boy in the aviator glasses at his side. They started for me across the last few feet of the rocky ridge. Jeru wore a wood-sheathed parang on one hip and the ancient pistol on the other. The boy carried Lacklan's rifle. They stopped a short distance away.

"You speak poorly," sneered Jeru, commenting on my fragmentary Malay.

"I speak this language no better than I have to," I said loudly, my main audience was Jeru's followers, "but I speak the language of the spirits well. My obat is as good as yours in this place. Go away from here. Go and leave us to ourselves. The gods of this mountain do not want you!" I pinched my fingers together, placed them between my lower lip and upper teeth, and whistled as loud as I could.

The boy took a step back and shook his head in shock. He brought up the long rifle but I didn't move. I tried to calmly stare him down ... I was sure I was going to die.

Then there came a sound from the cave like a sudden rush of wind. In the boy's glasses I saw reflected a momentary flash of orange flame in the tunnel mouth. Raj, on my signal, had poured the entire bottle of stove fuel on the fire.

With a rush like a great wave crashing on a reef the bats vomited from the cave. They came piping and flapping blindly into the morning sunlight driven by the smoky fire that Raj was now stoking with all the wood he could find. With the lower entrances to the tunnels blocked by smoke and flame they sought the upper opening in numbers that were terrifying to behold. They were a great disoriented black cloud that shot from the hole in the mountaintop as if from a high pressure hose. They fluttered and dove and poured into the sky above our heads.

Jeru crouched in surprise and I stepped in and before" the boy could pull the rifle's trigger I slapped the barrel aside and kicked him in the groin. He went down, leaving me with the gun, and I saw two of Jeru's men racing away down the ridge, their tattooed backs glistening with the sweat of exertion and fear.

I turned to the old man and with a whining growl he , drew his parang. He cut at me with such speed that I barely could move in time, shoving the rifle sideways into the blade. There was a ringing of steel and Lacklan's gun was torn from my grasp, falling to the rocks at my feet. Jeru reversed and I leaped back, the blade slicing air near my belly. He was fast; for an old man he was awfully fast. I got my knife out and took a cut at him but he thrust along my arm, his blade leaving a trace of fire and a line of blood ... he was better at this than I was. Better by a long shot.

He stabbed and cut. We fought back and forth there on that high ridge with a clear sweep of forest below us on one side and the white glare of the clouds beneath us on the other. And then he cut me, the knife grazing my chest, the blade momentarily catching on the Mauser's leather strap, and it was all over. His blade snagged and I caught his arm and was behind him in one movement. It was my fight then and for him it was hopeless. As good as he was with a knife, he was an old man. I was stronger than he was and I was heavier too. I broke his arm but there was no give in him so I clipped him on the jaw, a punch that would have put away a much bigger man, and I'm not proud to say that I broke that too.

He was unconscious. I was down, the world spinning around me, my chest bloody, my arm bloody, too bloody. The boy scrambled away, sobbing. There was the sound of gunfire. Helen was standing over me working the bolt on John's fancy rifle. Brass flew, bright against the sky. Men fled downhill, disappearing into the trees.

They broke open the first-aid kit, poured something in my wounds that hurt more than the knife had. Raj was getting me on my feet and my head was clearing; I had never really been out, just gray for a while, like I'd held my breath too long.

We were at the edge of the slope when I remembered. I pulled away from Raj's hands and went back. Jeru moaned when I turned him on his back. He looked at me, eyes no longer full of anger but neither was there fear. He waited for me to do whatever I had to do. It took only a moment.

"Thank you, Tuan Jeru," I told him. "Go to a village where no one knows you, live your days as an old man should. Cross my path again and I'll take your head and hang it on my porch."

I left him there, bats circling above, and I staggered off after the others. We went down past the cave where the fire still burned but was now low and dying. Then we were in the jungle and soon it was darker and hotter.

It was two days back to the boats. Two days of struggle and pain. John Lacklan and I setting our pitiful pace. His* leg was swollen and my cuts and the places where the buckshot hit me had become infected. As much as I disliked the man he had a certain kind of toughness. It was the toughness of the littlest kid on the team or perhaps the brainy child that nobody liked ... but he wasn't going to let that leg stop us. I had to make myself keep pace , with him.

The boats were intact. In this I was surprised for I was sure that even if we got to the river without another fight I thought they would have stolen or destroyed the boats. I guess with their burned long house several dead, and wounded leader they had enough to deal with. Raj took us downriver in the bigger dugout with Fairchild's motor jury-rigged to the stern. On the trip downriver I got sicker and they tell me when I arrived in Marudi I was unconscious and running a high fever. For the second time in two years I had returned from upriver barely alive. But this time I had the difference.

I lay in bed and got better. Vandover came down and brought the doctor. He shot me with penicillin, cleaned my wounds and dusted them with sulfa, then they sat on the verandah and drank the last of my scotch. I stared at the peeling paint on the ceiling.

She came to visit me an hour before the mail boat left for Singapore. The room was closed and dark but sunlight blazed through every crack in the shutters. She was dressed in a white traveling outfit and as she stood in the doorway she was a vague figure beyond the patched mosquito netting. I sat up.

"Mr. Kardec?" She came into the room, taking off a large pair of dark glasses. "I just came to thank you. You saved our lives." I could see that the wedding ring, with its empty socket, was missing from her finger.

I wanted to make some kind of smart comment but I didn't really know what it would be. "How's your husband?" I asked.

"He's got a bad sprain. All that walking we did made it worse. We're leaving today ..." She stopped for a moment, holding on to some kind of feeling, I couldn't tell what.

"He won't talk to me," she said. "It's like I did some thing unforgivable back there but I don't see that I really had a choice."

"I think he's trying too hard to be a strong man." I thought this was right, it felt right. "Something inside of him is desperate. He's barely holding on to something but I don't know what it is. He'd of rather died back there than be saved by you."

"John was so brilliant. You should have seen him when we met. They all listened when he spoke, Dr. Teller, even General LeMay."

"This is a different world, Helen. You knew that, I could see it. Sometimes when there is nothing between you and nature you find out things you wish you didn't know ... sometimes when you look at yourself you are smaller in the scheme of things than you thought you Were." I * shifted, sitting up a little farther, leaning back against the headboard. "There's been a time or two when I found myself in the middle of a dark forest praying for God to save me. You have to accept your fear and survive. It's not about your image of yourself, it's just about getting back in one piece."

"I guess so," she said.

We were both silent for a moment. Then she straightened up, all business.

"We should pay you, at least what we were going to for guiding us. We owe you that, and more."

I carefully moved the mosquito net aside and swung my feet to the floor. The cut under my bandages pulled tightly and it burned, but it was a healing pain.

"I don't want any money," and then before I could take it back, I said, "I did it for you. I don't want to lose that."

She crossed the room and bending down, she kissed me. For just a moment she held my face in her hand. "What will you do?" she asked. "How will you ever get home?"

I didn't really wonder how she knew this, I expect I Vandover or Fairchild must have told her ... it didn't matter I sat straighter, trying to feel the strength in my body. It was there, not much, but coming back. I opened the nightstand drawer.

"Never underrate a man who has lived as I have, I Helen. Just as a man who has lived as I have would never underrate a woman like you." I grinned. "I'm not proud and I do what it takes to survive." I held out my hand and opened it to show her. It was ironic, when I had gone into j the forest for personal gain I had returned with nothing,! but when I had gone intending to help others somehow ij had been rewarded.

On my palm lay, in a setting of woven leather, the thong I broken from when I had torn it from his neck ... the diamond of
P
eru!

*

It was an hour after sunup when Dud Shafter rode the roan gelding up to the water hole at Pistol Rock. The roan had come up the basin at a shuffling trot, but the man who waited there knew that both horse and man had come far and fast over rough trails.

The waiting man, Navarro, could understand that. The trail this rider had left behind him lay through some of the roughest country in the Southwest, a journey made no easier by the fact that several Apache bands were raiding and their exact location was anyone's guess. He glanced appraisingly at the sweat-stained, sun-faded blue shirt the red-haired man wore, noted the haggard lines of the big-boned, freckled face, and the two walnut-butted guns in their worn holsters.

As the man drew up, Navarro indicated the fire. "Coffee, senor? There is plenty."

Shafter stared down at the Mexican with hard blue eyes, and when he swung down he kept the horse between them. He stripped the saddle from the horse and rubbed it down briskly with a handful of desert grass, then walked toward the fire. He had not even for an instant turned his back on the Mexican.

"Don't mind if I do," he said at last.

Squatting, he placed his cup on a flat rock, then lifting the pot with his left hand, he poured the cup full of scalding black coffee. Replacing the pot alongside the coals, he glanced across the fire at Navarro and lifted the cup.

"Luck!" he said.

After a moment, he put the cup down and dug in his pocket for the makings.

"You make a good cup of coffee," he said.

Navarro lifted a deprecating shoulder and one eyebrow. His eyes had never left the big man's carefully moving hands. It was simply something to say; Navarro was a good cook, coffee was the least of his achievements ... and he had other abilities as well.

The Mexican wore buckskin breeches, hand-tooled boots, and one ivory-butted gun. His felt sombrero was fastened under his chin with a rawhide thong.

The sound of another horse approaching brought the heads of both men up sharply. Navarro touched his lips with his tongue, and Dud Shafter shifted his weight to face the opening into the basin.

A buckskin horse came through the opening at a walk, and a man sat that horse with a double-barreled express shotgun across his saddle bows. The man was a Negro.

"Howdy!" Shafter said.

"Join us," Navarro added.

The Negro grinned and swung to the ground. He was shorter than either of the others, but of such powerful build that his weight would have equaled that of Shafter, who was a big man in any company.

He wore a six-shooter in an open-toed holster, but as he dismounted and moved up to the fire, he kept his shotgun in his hand. He carried his own cup, as did the others, and when he squatted to pour the coffee, the shotgun was ready to his hand.