Outlaw (4 page)

IT WAS dark when my mind crawled from unconsciousness. Pinpricks of light that I first mistook for stars spotted my field of vision. I lay on my back in a puddle of warm water that sloshed gently around my legs and elbows. The strongest scent of rotting mud filled my nostrils and I found it hard to breathe.

Only then did I realize my predicament. I was bound up like a mummy in the bottom of a dugout canoe, and the pricks of light were tiny holes in some kind of bag that covered my head.

My first reaction was to cry out, but the moment I tried to open my mouth I learned that I was gagged as well.

The canoe rocked under the thrust of heavy paddle strokes, pushing the dugout forward in unbroken cadence. I might have struggled, but I had the sense to know that any attempt to break free would be pointless. Clearly the men who’d taken me were not given to my concerns. If they’d asked me to climb into their canoe I would have been in no position to refuse. They could have thrown me a rope and dragged me to shore and bound me up there.

Instead they’d smashed my head and hauled me aboard like a large fish. For all I knew, they thought I was dead. Showing my discomfort now might only earn me another blow to the head.

So I lay still and focused all my will on suppressing the waves of terror washing over me.

The air was hot—no August in Atlanta could possibly compare to that heat. A steady chorus of insects surrounded us, punctuated by the calls of birds as we passed their perches. Trees. I could hear no crash of waves on any nearby shore.

We weren’t out to sea. We were on a river driving into the jungle. To what end, I couldn’t begin to comprehend. Were we in Australia? I doubted it. These natives were vastly different from any photographs I’d seen of aboriginals.

The only possibility I could think of was New Guinea, north of Australia, the fanciful paradise I had dreamed of.

The eastern half of the island was hospitable, yes, but the southern coast of western New Guinea, known as Irian Jaya, was vastly unexplored and reported to be one of the most forbidding regions on the planet, inhabited by a mysterious and harsh people.

My dilemma felt surreal to me. That I, an American citizen from Georgia, could possibly be bound and gagged in a canoe like cargo, refused to rightly align with my reality.

That I had lost my son aligned even less.

An image of Stephen’s tiny form drifted through my mind. He was lost to the sea, consumed by the deep, gone from this world. Had he struggled? I prayed he hadn’t awakened before drowning.

The men whose cargo I’d become could burn my body, cut me into pieces, feed me to their dogs—it hardly seemed to matter. In fact, I think I might have preferred it. My life without my son was no life at all.

Still the paddles gurgled through the water. Still the canoe surged forward.

Grief and exhaustion finally coaxed me to sleep and only then did I find any peace.

I dreamed that I was back in Georgia, a young girl playing tag around the large cottonwood in our backyard, chasing my sisters, who squealed with the certain knowledge that I would catch one of them, because I had always been the fastest runner. A spring breeze sweet with the scent of peach blossoms rustled through the tree. The grass was cool under my bare feet. We were joined by Betsy, the eleven-year-old colored daughter of our maid, who could outrun even me. She became it and then I joined my delighted cries with my sisters’.

I was in church Sunday morning, wearing my favorite yellow dress, holding the microphone with a white-gloved hand, singing a solo of “Amazing Grace,” my mother’s favorite hymn. The enraptured congregation of two hundred faithful watched me, awed by my pure, angelic voice.

“She’s even better than her mother,” they whispered. “And she’s got the looks. She’s going to be a star one day, you just watch.”

We were on the south porch, Stephen and I, he cooing while birds chirped in the cottonwoods, I sipping a cup of hot tea with my mother, who had died before Stephen’s birth. Dreams could not hold the dead in their graves. Father sat across from us, smiling around his pipe.

I was lying in the bottom of a dugout canoe driving deep into the jungle, but in my mind I was in Georgia, eating peaches and singing like a bird and holding my baby as he stared into my eyes, both of us lost in a world of wonder and love.

It was all that I’d ever wanted.

The next time I opened my eyes it was raining. We had stopped and I was being pulled from the canoe. I jerked against my restraints in a sudden panic.

A gentle, low male voice spoke in a language that sounded garbled. Even so, its fluidity struck me as perfectly mathematical, like that of a master percussionist’s drum roll. I could not mistake his tone—he did not want me to struggle.

A soft chuckle from the others reached me. They dragged me up a muddy bank by my ankles, then dropped my legs onto marshy ground.

The bag was removed from my head and I blinked up at pouring rain. Lightning slashed through the sky and for a stuttering moment I caught a glimpse of my new world.

The jungle rose in jagged angles on all sides, crawling with vines, and leaves a hundred times the size of any I’d seen before. We were at the bend of a muddy river. Rain poured from the sky in long unbroken strings. A tall, dark-skinned man stood over me, his scarred chest bulging, arms limp by his sides.

It was a staggering canvas, here on the edge of the world that tested the bounds of human sanity. And then the lightning was gone and I was in darkness once again.

The form remained still for a moment, then squatted, pulled the gag from my mouth, and tilted a gourd to my lips. Cool water flooded my mouth. I choked and sputtered, then lifted my head and gulped.

When he thought I’d had enough, he removed the gourd, replaced the gag, and dribbled water on it so I could suck at it. Then he pulled the bag back over my head and threw a covering over me. At the time I thought it might be plastic, but later I learned it was thatched palm leaves. Rain pelted the hood over my face.

They made no attempt to feed me. If they had, I doubt I would have eaten. I was too heartbroken, too exhausted, too ill to eat. There was nothing I could do but lie still in the steady downpour and cry, mind filled with thoughts of my son.

I knew that Stephen hadn’t been found by these men, at least not alive. I would have heard his cry by now. There was no way to silence such a young child indefinitely. The image of his limp body, bound up in one of their bags, haunted me for a long while, but I finally reasoned that they would have no use for a dead baby. In this I found a sliver of comfort. I much preferred him returned to nature than seized by cruel hands.

I, on the other hand, was alive and worth their taking. To what end, my imagination knew no bounds. I begged God to save me, but he remained utterly silent. I felt betrayed, abandoned, and a fool for having thought a dream could be more than wild fantasy. My sisters had been right. And now my son was dead.

And yet I clung to the barest hope that God would somehow rescue me.

Little sleep came to me that first night. I replayed the dream in my head, desperate to find the beauty of that song that had lured me from safety into the jaws of death. But each time I recalled the dream, the once-enthralling and -haunting tones sounded more and more like a mocking melody.

Calls and howls from unseen creatures in the jungle replaced that song, and I soon found myself hating, even cursing the once-loved call in my dreams. I could not stop imagining leeches and snakes crawling over my legs and belly. My captors had wrapped me like a mummy, but slippery creatures could surely find a way in through the seams.

I had just slipped into an exhausted and thankfully dreamless sleep when I felt the wrapping on my legs being unwound. The rain had stopped. Daylight dotted the tiny holes in the bag over my head. Words were mumbled, melodic and low. The man caring for me began to prod my legs with a hot stick. But the hiss of burning, wet flesh wasn’t of my own. It took me a few minutes to realize that he was burning leeches off my skin.

When I was twelve I tried out my mother’s razor on my legs. The blade was loose and I managed to scrape a strip of skin off my shin before pain convinced me to jerk the razor away. By then it was too late, and blood seeped out of a two-inch wound. After firmly scolding me, my mother took the greatest care of my wound.

Now I was at the mercy of a native jabbing at my beautiful legs to burn off engorged leeches. The thought of it nauseated me.

My caretaker pulled the worms off one by one, and despite being burned they did not come off easily. I could feel their tenacious grip on my skin. Leeches do not squeal, but in my mind they put up a horrid fuss when forced to let go. I imagined that each took a chunk of my flesh with it. When the man dug into one on my inner thigh, a full foot above my knee, I felt I might pass out.

Job completed, he coated my arms and legs with a cool mud and bound me up again. He was only protecting his possession, but to the extent that a Southern belle from Atlanta was able to appreciate such generosity, I suppose I did. Somehow I got it into my head that the mud’s awful odor might keep carnivores larger than leeches from taking a bite out of me.

Hood still over my head, I was hauled back into the canoe and we pushed off the bank. Then we were sliding through the river once again.

I could hear the steady breathing of the two men on the canoe that carried me, otherwise only an occasional cough or the sound of spitting betrayed our journey through the infested jungle. I guessed that they saw no need to advertise their passage along this river, perhaps because it was enemy territory.

It’s interesting how the mind can dredge up the most hidden bits of knowledge when left to itself for long stretches. I knew next to nothing about Irian Jaya, because the missionary who’d first spoken of the island had come from New Guinea proper, the tamer, eastern half of an island the size of California.

That night the bag was again removed from my head in a heavy downpour. Again a gourd of water was tilted to my lips, and again I sucked at the water in long, deep drafts. For the second time since my capture I was able to see the leader, who tended to me. It was he who first gave me food.

I say food, but at the time I wondered if it was the mud scraped off the bottoms of his feet. The gray paste that he held in his fingers and pushed into my mouth tasted like a flour glue that had started to rot. Something squishy was mixed with the starchy compound. I know now that it was a sago grub—a thick white worm half the length of a finger that feeds on the pith of the sago palm.

My mother had always claimed that I was the pickiest of eaters. I was the last of her daughters to try fish, the last to taste escargot—and then only once, after my uncle coaxed me into it with a bribe of twenty dollars. I liked my meat well done and my hamburgers plain. I could barely handle biscuits and gravy, and mashed potatoes were passable only as long as they weren’t too smooth. With these exceptions, no gooey thing ever went into my mouth.

But I hadn’t eaten in nearly three days, and so I stared into the man’s brown eyes and swallowed his offering whole, desperate for any kind of nourishment.

The leader returned my stare without interest before pushing another handful of the paste into my mouth. He then pulled the sack over my head and left me free to breathe without the gag.

Despite the heavy rain, I slept that night.

The next morning my caretaker repeated the procedure. Off with the leeches. On with the mud. He replaced the gag, this time over the hood. Back in the canoe. Up the river.

No speaking, no chanting, no laughter, nothing but the steady breathing and gurgling of paddles as they were drawn through the water.

I was only half-alive. Deadened by sorrow over my child’s fate. Suffocated by self-pity. Barely strong enough to lie still, knowing that any attempt to change my predicament would surely worsen it.

The men had come a very long way—that much was now clear. I found moments of comfort in the likelihood that they would only carry very important cargo for so many miles into the jungle. They didn’t act like warriors celebrating any great feat, nor like mindless savages given to causing disturbances.

They carried themselves with utmost assurance and purpose, sure of their every move, contained and unruffled. They dominated their world without fear. Indeed, they seemed rather bored with it all.

When it seemed to me that nothing would ever change, our journey upriver came to an end sometime after noon on the third day.

For the first time since I’d joined them, my captors began to speak freely as they pulled the canoes up the bank with me still aboard. Their tones were low, and the speed of their speech rather than its volume expressed a new enthusiasm among them.

I’d surrendered my exhaustion to the unceasing murmur of paddles dipping into water, and to the gentle, musical quality of their voices, comforted by the fact that they had not killed me. But now any semblance of peace ended and my skin prickled with the uncertainty that faced me.

Two men hauled me out of the canoe and dropped me onto firm ground. I landed with enough force to knock the wind out of my lungs.

One of them gently nudged me with his foot and spoke what I assume were instructions. When I failed to respond, he nudged me again and presumably asked if I’d understood him.

Still gagged, I offered him the only thing I could, a mere grunt.

This seemed to satisfy him. My hands and feet were loosed, then strapped securely to a pole. In less time than it took me to grasp their intentions, they had me hanging from the pole between them and were marching into the jungle.

My sore neck couldn’t support the weight of my head, so I let it hang. My skull struck objects on the ground twice. Both times I cried out into my gag. Both times the carrier at my feet expressed surprise and lifted the pole higher for a moment before setting it back on his shoulder.

This is how, in August of 1963, I came into the valley known as Tulim: strapped to a pole like a bag of beans, carried like a bundle of bananas, swinging above the ground like a slain pig.