The Cause (12 page)

After the last match had been struck, I cursed myself for having given them away. A dilemma arose between keeping the fire alive and finding enough time to feed it with something to eat. The second rain in a week had doused a previous fire, which I had managed to keep alive for two days before the relentless downpour. Now the mission of keeping the fire breathing grew urgent, as I had not been able to start one by rubbing sticks together or using flat river rocks as flint.

Over the last days, I had fed on green snakes, whose heads I bashed with stones. Impaling their bodies with two sticks, they roasted well over the orange coals of a fire. The oil in their skins would drip and make the smoky flames crackle. I found frogs and managed to catch enough of them for a meal. Hoping none were poisonous, I ate one and judged its effect on me. Only after enough hours passed did I eat the others. I saw squirrels, field mice, rats, tree monkeys and wild hares, but didn’t have the experience to catch any. I fed mostly on the spiky green fruit of the durian tree. Other fruits I would boil, chew a bit to taste test for bitterness. If the taste passed, I would swallow and wait for a few hours to see if it would bring on nausea.

The fire’s hunger grew more important than my own. I raced through the woods gathering dead branches and kindling. The task consumed most of the day. Finding dry wood was a quest unto itself with the jungle wet half the time. Finally I managed to build a small cache, a one-day supply of dry wood.

After the twentieth day in our campaign, the sky foreboded heavy rain as a wave of dark clouds crept eerily from the east. I built a small backup fire under my bivouac, opening a hole
within the palm-branched roof to air the smoke. After fortifying the roof, I plunged back into the forest in a quest for something to shelter the main fire. I found a large flagstone that had ample width for a shield. With great effort, I carried it back to my camp. When I arrived, the fire inside my bivouac had died and the main fire was smoldering from my neglect. Frantically, I ran to it, blowing gently at its roots, feeding it with small branches and needles from Khasi pines until finally it bloomed into a knee-high flame. Then I rebuilt the fire in my bivouac and gathered enough dry refuse and branches to replenish my cache.

I went searching for planks to mount my slab of rock, hunger now crying deep in the pit of my stomach. At last I came upon a rotted-out stump that I smashed into two ample pieces of wood capable of taking the weight of the stone. Rushing back to camp, I found my fires on their last breaths. When I went to fetch wood from my cache to feed it, all of the dead branches and kindling were gone. My heart sunk, and I rushed to the river. There I searched for the thief. Uriah’s fire smoked from the opposite side of the river, but his fire always seemed well-tended. Downriver, I spotted the smoke coming from a fire in Mir’s area. Upriver curled the light smoke from Conroy’s fire. On my side of the river, smoke rose from Burns’s area. Only a light haze came from Drake’s vicinity, and I guessed he was in the same dilemma.

I pushed the remaining scraps of kindling into the fires, and once again raced through the woods gathering burnable refuse and dead tree limbs. When I appeared back in camp, I felt the first drops of rain pelt me on the head. I fed the fire frantically, but the sky opened up and drenched everything, and despite all of my effort, both fires were lost.

The next day, a slight fever greeted me, and the worm of weariness burrowed deeper inside. Hunger bit my stomach, and my body shivered. I crawled out of my palm-frond bed, weak and disoriented. With the fire smothered, so went hope. For breakfast, I resorted to the insect world for nutrition, overturning
rocks and scooping up the earth to pick out crawling beetles, slugs, and earthworms, forcing them in my mouth, swallowing them whole. I vomited once, but soon my mouth learned to accept the squirming feeling one sometimes sensed, the crunch of crispy wings, the bodily squirts of those consumed. In the afternoon, I stood over ant nests with a stick, licking larvae off the stripped branch like my simian ancestors. I peeled the bark off trees to find termites or grubs and ate them greedily. My fever broke out to a new level of anguish, and I became more delirious. I picked unknown berries from plants, not knowing if they were poisonous, too weary to voyage further into the jungle, scarcely caring if I perished. My mouth now played with death, chewing with the simple rule that bitterness be rejected, my stomach now malleable to new risks.

I wandered to the river and saw the curl of rising smoke from only two fires, one smoking across the river from Uriah’s territory, the other coming from Mir’s plot. As I connived how to steal a flame, Uriah emerged from the woods from across the river, armed with a makeshift wooden spear and fishing line made of twine. He waved as if the day were any other, ordinary and blasé. At first I thought it a taunt, but seeing the genuine expression on his face, I raised a quivering arm and waved back, smiling feebly. Upon seeing his shaken, near-worried expression, I retreated back into the woods and hid. With tears in my eyes, I watched him fish the river until he emerged triumphant with a flapping trout.

In the late afternoon, my energy returned a bit, and I constructed a feeble trap out of sticks and twine. Any animal could have gnawed their way out of it given enough time, but I thought it would suit my purposes. I baited it with a dead frog, stuck a rock under it, and attached a piece of twine to it. I chained more twine together and hid behind a tree. In a state of complete hysteria, I laughed at the thought of what I would do if I actually caught anything. Would I eat it alive? Fire was crucial, and I told
myself I had to have it.

After hours of waiting behind the tree for an animal that would never come, I walked back to camp thinking about the looter who had raided my cache. If his fire had gone out, would he be daring enough to come back if he still had matches? Perhaps he had already started another fire and needed wood. As I pondered these questions walking loudly through the jungle, suddenly I glanced to my left and saw a figure staring at me. Conroy stood next to a white-striped tree, inside Burns’s boundary. Besides his tangly black hair blowing in the wind, there seemed to be little trace of the former man. At least fifteen pounds thinner, most of the weight had come off his midsection and arms. His lips bled, and his pupils danced wildly inside his black eyes.

“You’re a long way from home,” I said.

“Aren’t we all?” He coughed, choking on his words. He smiled grimly, and I saw his thinning gums. The skin covering his wan face was almost translucent, as thin as a bed sheet covering his bones.

I stared at the painted lines at the bottom of the tree on my side of no man’s land. Three stripes looking like the hash marks on my police uniform from long ago.

“What are you doing out here, Conroy?” He didn’t answer. I waited a bit, but he remained in a stupor. “They probably have cameras out here. You wouldn’t survive a whipping. You’re taking a risk.”

“The risk is not eating,” he said. “I’ve got to find some food, something more than insects.”

I nodded in agreement. “Where is Burns?”

His gaze drifted upwards. I glanced up to see where he was looking at, but his eyes were adrift, staring into the blue nothingness of sky.

“Conroy,” I repeated. “Where is Burns?”

He shrugged his shoulders. His lips quivered. A slow tear
dropped from his eye.

“Conroy,” I said snapping my fingers trying to draw his focus. “Where is he?”

“Ran off, I think.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Might have deserted, I don’t know.”

“Deserted?” I asked.

“I hear other guys have been turning tail out of here.”

“For what purpose? To starve to death in another part of the jungle?”

“I don’t know, man. I don’t know what’s going through people’s heads.” He paused a moment, thinking. “There might be coconut trees out there. You notice there aren’t any here?” He pointed and said, “Those stumps you see. That was a coconut tree. They didn’t want it to be too easy.”

He scanned the treetops. Then he craned his neck and glanced backwards. “Briana is stealing people’s shit. She’s faster and can get away.”

I looked at him skeptically. “What did she steal from you?”

“Nothing, but it looks like she raided Burns’s camp.” He stood there shaking his head, playing with his hands as if somehow he might find some food in them. Then he produced an eerie smile, grabbed the beard on his chin and gave it a tug. “We’ll get through this thing, brother, won’t we?”

I nodded.

“You don’t got anything to eat, do you?”

“Man, I don’t got jack, and my fire’s out too.”

“You shouldn’t have given up those matches,” he said.

I stood silent for a moment, then nodded in agreement.

“I thought you might be better at this than me,” he said.

“No,” I said. “I’m not.”

“Well, I’m off, Isse. Best of luck to you.”

As he turned, I said, “I wouldn’t linger if I were you, but since you’re in a daring mood, go see Uriah. He’s doing this thing as if
he’s on a camping trip.”

“Thanks for the tip,” he called out, wobbling on his feet a bit as he moved away.

I went back alone to the riverbank to look for fires. Mir’s and Uriah’s billowed gray smoke, both on the opposite side of the river, and another, far upriver, in what could have been Briana’s area. A few moments later, I saw Conroy wading across the river on Burns’s side. I wondered if he was the only man blatantly disregarding the rules. I hid myself and watched Conroy move into Uriah’s camp. Conroy waved at him as he approached, walked up to his fire and began speaking. Uriah nodded at him. His lips moved, but I couldn’t understand what was said. A minute later, he put another trout in the fire. Conroy shook his hand and sat down.

Anger welled up in me. Not knowing what to do, I hauled firewood to my empty cache, hoping to spring a trap for the person who looted my supply. If no one came, I promised myself I would cross the river late in the night and steal a coal from Uriah’s fire. My own moral fiber had suddenly split after seeing Conroy. I had to remind myself the only rule that counted was
don’t get caught
.

Close to my hideout, I found a dead branch the size of an arm, gnarled at the top. I mashed stones into the ruts, and wrapped vines around the top in an effort to secure them. In a thicket of bush, I crouched down with a mangrove leaf full of grubs, eating them while waiting for the sun to come down. Dusk finally fell, the jungle like a colossal snake swallowing us, eating the mice of civilized men, each of us a bump in the belly of Nature on our tiny plots of land along her twisting serpentine riverbank shores. Darkness digested what was left of my principles. I felt like a sack of withering flesh over a set of tired bones, and an animal spirit rose up in me.

Under a heavy wind, I perched like a madman, struck by the fangs of revenge. I crouched saucer-eyed and skeleton-faced,
gazing into the darkness, mumbling with a cracked voice through parched and bleeding lips, waiting for the night to sink into its deepest depths.

I gripped my makeshift club with sweating hands. The soft, incandescent glow from a toenail moon glowed over the river while I ruminated. Perhaps an hour later, I heard a faint rustling, too inconsistent to be the wind. I wondered who it would be. A figure emerged, thin and sticklike, a figurine in the dark, a strange hyena neck protruding from his body leaving a canine-looking head sniffing for danger in front of him. He crept methodically to the edge of the riverbank under the moonlight. It was Burns. Did he not know how much he was exposed?

I saw him staring down, using the river stones to soften his footsteps. Sneaking slowly to the tempo of windblown leaves, he edged closer to my treasured cache of firewood.

I sprang, but he sniffed the danger and leapt back into the woods. I pursued—heart humming in my chest, legs finding strength, and through the darkness I chased with renewed vigor, ears acute to the rustle of leaves and each cracking branch ahead. Eyes from The Hole tuned in with what little light bent into the forest, guiding my running feet safely past broken stumps, clumps of creepers, half-buried tree roots. Burns stumbled and fell. Jerking himself back up, he fled toward the river. Only a few footsteps away, I heard his frantic breath panting for air, his lungs heavy and hyperventilating with exhaustion. Finally, he dashed out of the woods and into the twilight. I broke from the trees, out into the openness where bats darted into the moon and the rumble of the flowing river filled my ears. Now inches away, my arms pumped in a sprint until I closed the gap. With my fingers, I nipped Burns’s shirt ruffling in the wind. With a swoop of a foot, I kicked him in the shin, the force of it intersecting and tangling his motion. The gawky Burns went down, tripping over himself, clipped of his legs as he tumbled onto the stones of the riverbank. He screamed as I plunged on top of him. “Stop! Stop!
Stop!”

I dragged him closer to the shore. Gibberish poured out of him incoherently in a noisy stream. One of his pleas might have been Conroy’s name. The tumult of excuses continued as I plunged his head under the water, drowning his protests. Pulling him up after ten seconds made him even more frantic, so down he went again. He clutched at my wrists wrapped around his throat, his body thrashing under me. His arms traveled to my face. Fingernails dug into my skin. I cocked my head away, gazing up at the zinging bats over the moon. The stars twinkled as brightly as shards of broken glass. Once more I brought his head out of the water. This time, he coughed, and then vomited up a mouthful of river. Once finished, he glared up at me, wormy strings of hair slithering into his beady eyes.

“Steal my fucking wood,” I yelled.

He shook his head. No, it wasn’t me, his eyes said. “Briana,” he croaked. But then a hand slid behind his back—the sudden shift of weight from beneath my hips—and out of the water came a fist clenched with a large stone. I blocked his wrist, but the stone hurled toward me as his wrist’s momentum stopped. The blow stung my ear and cheek, but I remained conscious, still mounted, and still able to grab him by the neck and push him under. I held my breath, and in so doing, split myself in two—one man feeling him drown, the other alive and free, breathing the cool midnight air. As he squirmed, flopping in the eddies, swiping at my chest, leaving long claw marks and tracks of blood, his hand rolled over my heart, punching at the missing picture of the Earth drowning in space. And then my fingers clamped, thumbs pushing furiously into his throat, my knuckles white with the toil of squeezing. The water roiled with sediment. His hands grasped for another rock, and his feet squirmed to kick free from the unbearable weight on top of him. So there, under the moonlight shining on the muddy berms of an unnamed river, it was I who gasped for breath with him, saw the
cold, marble-blue Earth reemerge from darkness, an eye of God in the midst of the vast universe.