Saving Fish From Drowning (41 page)

She shrieked thanks as if deliriously grateful.

Warmed that they had done the right thing, my friends picked up their packs and turned to leave. “We better head back,” Moff said to Black Spot. Several members of his tribe cried to him, “Why does the Younger White Brother want to leave us?” Black Spot quietly told them not to make too much noise about this. It takes time for a Reincarnated One to recognize who he is, even if he has shown the three signs. It was true for other holy people, true even for Loot and Bootie. But once a Reincarnated One knows who he is, he will slowly regain his senses and his powers, and fulfill the promises he made.

The tribe was soothed to hear mention of this. They all knew the promise of the Younger White Brother. He would make them invisible, with bodies that no bullets could pierce. They would take back their lands. They would live in peace, and no one would ever try to harm them again, because if they did, the Younger White Brother would unleash on them all the Nats.

Black Spot and his cohorts discussed how to handle this latest situation. They had been lucky in getting the boy and his followers here. Perhaps they needed a little bad luck to keep them. They had 2 9 0

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no choice. They had to delay the boy as long as they could. Say goodbye to them, Black Spot instructed the tribe, wave to the foreigners just like they are doing.

My friends left, with Black Spot, Grease, Fishbones, and Salt following behind. Vera complimented the tribe, knowing Black Spot would hear and report this flattery to his people: Really nice folks, so generous and sincere. Others piled it on: That place was the greatest.

And those strangler trees—have you seen anything so bizarrely beautiful? What a wonderful surprise. They were so glad they came. And lunch was unusual yet tasty. It was good to try something new. But now they were looking forward to hot showers. Of course, there was still that wobbly bridge to get across. The second time would be easy.

Just take a deep breath.

When my friends arrived where they had crossed, they were puzzled. Where was the bridge? They must have come down the wrong way. They were about to ask Black Spot for guidance when Rupert shouted: “Dad, look!” He pointed at the barely visible bridge, dangling by limp ropes on the other side.

Bennie gasped. “Oh my God, it’s fallen down!” He rushed to

Black Spot. “The bridge!” He gestured madly. “It’s broken. How are we going to get out of here?”

Black Spot looked at the dangling bridge. He yelled to his comrades, telling them to act surprised. He did not want their guests to become alarmed, thinking they were held against their will. He simply wanted them to remain as their guests. Moff called over to Black Spot: “What’s another way out of here? We need to get down before dark.” He pointed to the dimming sky.

Black Spot shook his head. “No other way,” he said.

Dwight broke in: “Maybe the ravine is less deep up ahead, and we can climb down into it and then up.” Again Black Spot shook his head.

“Oh man, this is bad,” Bennie moaned. “This is so bad.”

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Dwight shouted at the top of his lungs. “Christ! Walter, you fuck!

Why aren’t you here to deal with this?”

Vera noticed that the men from the tribe looked ashamed that their guests were unhappy, so she tried to calm the group. She was skilled at dealing with crises. “If the Lajamee people can’t get us out soon, I’m sure Walter will send for help once he gets here. Maybe that’s what he’s already done. He came and saw the bridge was gone and went back down. The best thing we can do is stay put.”

There were sounds of agreement, acknowledgment that this was reasonable logic, the probable truth. Help was on its way, they now believed. And so, with the exception of Dwight, they agreed to retreat to No Name Place and bide their time there. As they walked back into the camp, the people of the Lord’s Army greeted them with hands clasped in prayer. Thanks be to the Great God. Black Spot told them to give their guests the best of everything.

Dusk came, Walter did not. Another hour rolled by, then another.

Except for firelight, the camp was pitch black. The inhabitants of No Name Place slashed bamboo and sharp palm leaves to weave stools for their honored guests. Black Spot had told them that foreigners did not like to sit on mats. Grease and Fishbones brought a pile of clothes and set them down. They pointed to them: “Take, take.”

“Hey, that’s my polar fleece,” Rupert said, and he pulled out an orange jacket. The others dug through the pile and found the clothing they had brought to wear during the chilly morning ride that now seemed so long ago.

“I thought we left these in the truck,” Marlena said.

“Those porters must have brought everything along with them,”

Vera replied.

“Thank goodness they did,” Marlena said. “It’s a lot cooler up here than down there.” She tossed Esmé a purple parka and shimmied into her own black one.

“I wish we were in a hotel with a
real
bathroom,” Esmé said. Ear2 9 2

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lier in the afternoon, most of them had visited the latrine, situated a discreet distance from camp. A palm thatch screen, about five feet high, provided the scantiest of privacy, and behind it was a trough of rushing water, flanked by two long boards on which the user could balance. Instead of toilet paper, a bucket of water with a ladle stood off to the side.

Marlena put her arm around Esmé. She watched an old woman

stoking the fire in the rock hearth. What a long night this would be.

Her thoughts drifted to Harry. What was he doing now? Was he worried about where she was? Was he even thinking about her? She pictured his face again, not the one that was lustful or embarrassed. She was seeing the sheer wonder in his eyes when she first lay down on the bed with him. Tomorrow, she thought, but no candles, no mosquito netting this time.

“Think of this like summer camp,” Marlena consoled her daughter. “Or a sleepover.”

“I never had a sleepover like
this
.” Esmé was feeding Pup-pup scraps of chicken.

Others were having similar thoughts. Would their beds be hard as a rock? Would there even be beds? What kind of people were the Lajamees, really? Moff and Wyatt exchanged stories of the travails of past backpacking trips: A thunderstorm in a leaky tent. Bears that got their food. Getting lost after smoking pot. Moff said they’d probably look back on this night as one of the more memorable parts of the trip.

A strange sound arose. Sirens? Could it possibly be . . . police cars sent out
here
? Off to the side, my friends saw a glow of intensely bright light. It flickered. They rose and approached this mysterious illumination, and there they beheld rows of people watching—good Lord, of all the amazing things one might find in a jungle—a television set! A news channel was on, and a female voice was reporting on a gigantic fire in a nightclub in China.

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“A TV!” Wendy exclaimed. “How funny is that? And it’s in English.” More news reports followed. My friends were transfixed.

“Global News Network,” a man’s deep voice announced after a

few minutes. “Making news in how we report the news.”

It was good old GNN!

My friends moved closer to see. Those were the familiar faces of news anchors beaming back at them. Instantly they felt comforted.

They were closer to civilization than they thought. But then one of the twins aimed the remote and switched from the news to a program that featured people wandering through a jungle. The crowd whooped and cheered.

A woman in outback duds held a mike in guerrilla reporting style.

“Will Bettina eat the leeches?” she asked in an Australian accent.

“Stay tuned and find out on the next episode of
Darwin’s Fittest
!”

“How the hell are they getting reception out here?” Dwight asked.

“Here’s your answer.” Wyatt pointed to some snaky cords leading from the television set to a car battery. Another cord ran along the ground and up a tree.

“Must be a satellite dish above the tree canopy,” Moff said. “Man, that’s a lot of tree trunk to cover.” He kneeled and tapped a loop of rope that circled the tree trunk. “And here’s how they climb it. They get inside the lasso and leap like frogs.”

“But where did they get the satellite dish?” Bennie asked. “It’s not like you can order this stuff and have it delivered up here.”

Rupert inspected the battery more closely. “Didn’t that come in the back of the truck with us?”

Two young Karen women rushed to offer Rupert a stool made of rattan that was taller than the others. He would have sat on it, too, if Moff had not given him a look that strongly suggested he let Vera have the seat. Soon additional improvised seating was made available to the other guests—stumps and more low stools, which they placed near the television.

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“We’re back!” the Aussie woman chortled. “
Darwin’s Fittest
, number one among kiwis and wombats.”

“Numbah one! Numbah one!” the children chanted.

The Aussie woman leaned close to the camera so that her nose looked like a frog with dark holes for eyes. “And now we’ll see which of our survivors will be brave, and which will face hunger and
starvation
.” Suspenseful music rose, bass fiddles sawed away.

“You’d think the people here were watching this show to get pointers,” Roxanne joked. And in fact, they were. The tribe had fantasized that they might one day have a TV show. They were fitter than these survivors. If they had a show, everyone would admire them. And then SLORC would be too ashamed to kill a tribe that was number one.

When the show ended, the jungle hosts led their guests to their accommodations. They were given greenish-colored blankets, woven from the fibers of young bamboo, the panels stitched together with heavy thread. Rupert, Wyatt, and Wendy broke into grins when they learned that they would be staying in the strangler tree “bungalows.”

Bennie noticed right away that the floor was a platform of rattan raised six inches above the ground, and atop that was a springy bed made of layers of small bamboo strips, which, as he discovered upon lying on his back and then his side, was amazingly comfortable.

Heidi used her headlamp to inspect the interior of her room for the night. The sinewy root walls were smooth and clean, devoid of the dreaded four: mold, bats, spiders, and muck. She took out her Space blanket and wrapped it around herself; it would reflect and retain up to eighty percent of her body heat, or so it was advertised.

While she was putting the Lajamee blanket over that, an old woman poked her head in. She hurried over to Heidi, threw off the blanket, turned it the other way, and pointed to the fringe, gesturing that it must always be at the bottom, never near the face—that was a big no-no. Heidi was amused that the woman was such a stickler for details. That should hardly matter out here.

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When Heidi was settled in, Marlena borrowed her headlamp, saying that Esmé was scared of the dark. Actually, Esmé was already asleep.

“Don’t put the blanket fringe near your face,” Heidi warned. “The fashion cops will get you. And you can keep the headlamp. I have another one that’s smaller.”

Marlena aimed the light at the interior of the tree she shared with her daughter. The more gnarled portions looked like arthritic gnomes in agony, a bas relief created as a Lamaist version of an
Ars
Moriendi
.

And so they settled in for their first night, what they believed would be the only one. Moff told Rupert to sleep with his shoes on, in case he had to get up in the middle of the night. Esmé had Pup-pup tucked under her arm. Bennie lay wide awake for hours, worried because he was without his medications and the CPAP machine.

Marlena was trying to remember whether snakes were attracted to body heat at night. But soon these thoughts gave way to reptilian fantasies about Harry. She pictured his undulating tongue, snaking along her neck, her breasts, her belly. Suddenly, she had pangs of longing, of sadness, of fear that the two of them had missed their opportunity. She knew what was meant by “star-crossed lovers.” The black sky was filled with a billion stars, and some of them made an eternal pattern for each destined set of lovers, a constellation for them, which thus far she had failed to see. She had been too busy looking down at the ground, searching for pitfalls. She fretted over the years already gone by without great passion, the possibility that what she had had with her ex-husband—those meager moments of rapture, which she preferred to forget—would be all that she could lay claim to as an approximation of ecstatic love for the rest of her life. How sad that would be! And with those thoughts, she drifted into fretful sleep.

Hours later, she jolted awake with a pounding heart. She had 2 9 6

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dreamed she was a monkey living in a tree. She was crawling up its trunk to get away from dangerous creatures below, but soon she tired and dug in her fingernails. Were all trees this warm? When she placed her face against the trunk, she saw that it was Harry, and soon she and the tree began to make love. But in doing so, she let go of her grip and fell, jerking herself awake.

Why had she dreamed that she was a monkey and Harry a tree?

And why had she dug in her fingernails so deep? Was she too clingy?

Before she could ponder any further, she saw that someone was moving outside. It was not yet dawn. Were people making breakfast already? The figure was hunched over, eating furiously while glancing about. The figure froze, eyes fixed on Marlena’s. She was confused, for it was as if her simian dream-self had escaped and was just ten feet away, a hoolock gibbon with a white-rimmed eye mask, stuffing its mouth with the candy bars left out by the new intruders at No Name Place.

I N THE MORNING, over coffee, Harry and Heinrich were discussing who should be sent out with the search party, when a huge clatter and whine broke the air. A longboat with four military policemen came swooping up with an impressive backwash. Most boats slowed to a soft putter well before they reached the resort. But these men were beyond such rules, because they had made them.