by Tod A
“Let him finish,” Raj said.
Cooney wasn’t having it. “Why’s everything got to be a bloody soap opera with you Yanks? The whole country specializes in making mountains out of molehills. I’m sick to death of your therapists and your self-help groups and your talk shows. Talk, talk, talk. Oh dear, Daddy beat me! Boo-hoo, Mummy didn’t love me! They picked on me at school. Poor me. Now I’ve got to whinge and whine and mope and bring everyone else down. Why don’t you grow a pair.”
“Fine words coming from you, Mr Coons,” Monty said. “You’re no ray of sunshine.”
“Indeed, yours is a nation with a considerable drinking problem,” Raj said.
“What do you call twenty million alcoholics stranded on a desert island?” Monty said. “Australia!”
“No, no, Cooney’s right,” I said. “I come from a culture of navel-gazers and finger-pointers. It’s always everyone’s fault but our own. But I take responsibility for my actions. Nature made me a manic depressive, but I chose to be a drunk.”
“Why do I feel like a priest at confession?” Cooney said.
“I believe Mark has what the Victorians called a Melancholy Nature,” Raj said.
“Perhaps brought on by an excess of bile?” Monty offered.
“Bile?” Kubu said.
“Maybe this is a confession,” I said. “I don’t trust priests. And God has never answered my prayers. You guys are all I’ve got.”
“Maybe God just doesn’t like soppy drunks,” Cooney muttered.
“More the Devil’s department,” Monty agreed.
“Well, if this is a bloody confession, then go ahead, confess!” Cooney said. “Let’s have some dirt!”
I suppose I could have livened up the party by telling them of my many booze-soaked misadventures—like walking across a ledge fifteen stories up, or passing out at the wheel and driving into a tree.
“To be honest, I can’t remember half of the stupid shit I did.”
“I believe those are called blackouts,” Monty said.
“Well, I’m actually kind of thankful for them. A lot of the things I can remember make me cringe.”
“Binge, cringe, whinge,” Cooney said.
“Maybe I’m hoping that by making it public, that I’ll follow through on this. This crazy notion of me going on the wagon.”
“Wagon?” Kubu said. “What wagon?”
“Cooney? You are our resident expert,” Monty said.
“I’m in the intoxication business.”
“I can field this question,” Raj said. “Before indoor plumbing water was delivered in wooden casks by horse-drawn wagons. So, if one gave up alcohol, one was said to have climbed aboard the water wagon.”
“Water? That stuff’s for crops and farm animals,” Cooney spat. “And you’ve got to spend the rest of your life drinking it, Cowboy! There’s a sobering thought, eh?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I was thinking I would shoot for thirty days and see how it goes.”
Forever seemed like an awfully long time.
“Backpedaling already, eh?” Cooney sneered. “I give you about a week.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I sighed. “Ah, you’re probably right. My heart’s not really in it. I like being loaded. No, I love being loaded. I just need to get a handle on things.”
“Then stop being such a big girl’s blouse,” Cooney said. “Exercise some self-control, for fuck’s sake. Have a few pints—then stop. Get rotten of a weekend—just not every bloody night.”
“All play and no work makes Mark a dull boy,” Raj said.
“I wish I could. I’m weak, I guess. It seems to be all or nothing with me.”
The voice of the muezzin sounding the call to prayer floated across the bay from Kang-Kang.
“I guess you won’t be coming on our jag, then,” Cooney said. “No killjoys need apply.”
“What jag?” I said.
“I forgot to tell you!” Monty said. “Cooney’s taking us to Longa on his boat next weekend!”
“You finished the boat?” I said.
“The Titanic II is down at Kang-Kang harbor raring to go. And Captain Cooney is in the mood for some serious shore leave.”
“Cooney’s divorce papers came through,” Monty explained. “Kubu and I convinced him to take his boat for an inaugural run. You and Raj must come.”
“Unfortunately, Mark and I are on assignment in back-island next weekend,” Raj said.
“We are?”
“The Post wants a piece on the new palm oil plantations upriver at Dimana. You are coming along as photographer.”
“I am?”
“I couldn’t possibly make do without you. Mick is still in KL. The editor was well pleased with your photos from the zoo.”
“A friend of mine comes from Dimana.”
“Simple,” Monty said. “You two sail to Longa with us, then continue on to back-island from there. Miss Kala is appearing at the TV Bar.”
“Who’s that, then?” Cooney said.
“Miss Kala? Only the hottest thingy from Singy,” Monty said. “She’s supposed to be just …”
“Exquisite,” Kubu finished, road-testing a new word.
“Well, it works logistically,” Raj said. “What do you say, Mark, old man?”
“There’s always room for friends, isn’t there, Cooney?” Monty pleaded.
“I guess.”
“We’ll see,” I said. “Not sure I’ll be in the mood.”
“Suit yourself,” Cooney said, rising and heading toward the bar. “I should check on the till.”
“The TV Bar is just the place to take your mind off your worries,” Monty said.
I looked at my empty glass.
“It’s settled,” Monty said. “We leave 8 am next Saturday from Kang-Kang Harbor.”
“Alright, pardners,” I said, tipping my cowboy hat. “I’m going to climb on my water wagon and mosey on home.”
“A very happy birthday to you, Mark.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Happy birthday to me.”
I lay under the mosquito net, my mind swimming in circles. I kept thinking about Frank, and about my unfinished book. I had just drifted off when I was roused by noises outside.
The big wooden doors swung open and a motorbike pulled in, its headlight weaving erratically. A woman teetered down the path to the big house on precarious heels. I heard the musicians starting up at the local temple. A light went on in Frank’s bedroom and the woman entered with a drink in her hand. It was Nung.
The temple music built slowly into an urgent chanting over the throb of drums and gongs. Nung moved languidly around the bed, letting her hands glide over her silk dress. She loosed her hair to fall over her bare shoulders, unhitched her dress and let it slide to the floor, lifted her arms in a sanctified striptease. I watched from the darkness of my room as thunder rumbled like a distant train.
Nung swayed in front of the wardrobe mirror, dancing with her reflection, admiring her fine form. I could see only her back but I felt she knew I was watching—that this performance was for me. I felt dirty, yet I couldn’t look away. The monsoon breeze bore the musk of night flowers and decay.
The bra came off—slowly, theatrically—then the panties, with a shimmy of hips. I caught a fleeting glimpse of skin before she flicked the switch and the room went dark. Then the mosquito net descended, glowing white in the moonlight. I sat at the window, watching her dusky body sprawled on the bed, as the temple music droned on. The thunder sounded all night, but still the rains refused to come.
I was jolted awake by a fearsome cry and death-rattle. I leapt up to see a wiry old woman down in the paddy, jerking on a curious contraption and shrieking at the sky.
The fields were crisscrossed with coconut twine strung between bamboo poles. Dangling from the lin
es were plastic scraps, wooden bells, cans of gravel, and other junk. As the woman shrieked and jerked, the whole web waggled in sympathy. Plastic flapped, bells rang, cans rattled. It sure scared the shit out of the birds.
My brain was bleary from beer and bad sleep. I wanted to know why Nung had a key to the compound. But when I went downstairs Sweeper told me Nung had already collected her things and gone. Back at my desk I lit a cigarette and exhaled heavily. Day One. My future life of sobriety stretched out before me like a parched and endless highway.
That first week was torture. I pitched and squirmed on sodden sheets through torrid nights, borne on a tide of edginess and angst. And just when sleep might have redeemed me in the one cool hour before dawn, the old hag’s strangled cries would rout me from bed, jangling my already-jangled nerves. Stale sweat clung to my skin like the sour residue of dreams.
I couldn’t work. Hour after hour the monitor lizard scrutinized me from his perch. Even Wulan’s hands couldn’t wring the tension from my frame.
“No beer today again, Mr Mark?”
“No, Wulan. No beer today. Again.”
“Good, Mr Mark! You are always drinking like a fish.”
“Fish drink a lot?”
“According to the English idiom.”
“It doesn’t seem to do them any harm.”
She pressed her thumbs into the arches of my feet, sending electric bolts of pain directly to my liver.
“Ow! Well, it’s probably quite a dull life down there,” I mused. “Swimming around in the dark, year after year, until some cold-hearted bastard puts a hook through your face. You can see why they’re all drunks.”
“Very funny, Mr Mark.”
“You don’t drink, Wulan?”
“No. I take only rice wine during ceremonies sometimes.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” I said. “Man, I do miss it.”
“Be patient, Mr Mark. Your outlook will improve. Rome was not built in one day.”
My relationship with Wulan was strictly professional. Yet every day we spent an hour alone half-naked on my bed. Madunese women were easy on the eye—and genetics had certainly smiled upon Wulan—but I hadn’t had sex since before the divorce. Intimacy remained a terrifying concept.
On Madu, ex-pats were a glamorous and exotic breed. Fair skin was coveted because it distinguished common field laborers from their supposed betters. And locals automatically assumed any foreigner was loaded. So, even the homeliest, pasty-faced mayat was considered a catch. I got glances from girls half my age. It was perplexing to be an object of desire.
But it didn’t take long to learn that, here, there was no such thing as casual sex. You had to be in it for the long haul. Virtuous young ladies lived with their families until a suitable match was found. Dating meant courtship. You had to meet the parents, the siblings, the whole damned brood. By pursuing a woman without matrimony in mind you were only leading her astray. I was still far too fractured inside to plunge into a serious relationship.
Some Madunese women flouted the rules. But they were the Fast and the Loose. These ladies usually got tossed from one mayat to the next—often bearing the stigma of an abortion, or a few illegitimate kids hidden away in their home village.
Of course men could always pay for sex. I’d heard all about Longa from Cooney and the guys. But I wasn’t that type—not me. It wasn’t Irish Catholic guilt that deterred me—I’d purged that crap from my head long ago. Bar girls were for pot-bellied Romeos who were too pathetic to get laid back home, and I wasn’t like those other men, the desperate ones.
But the nubiles were everywhere—on motorbikes, in the fruit market, at the shipping office, crossing the street—taunting me with coy smiles and almond eyes, flaunting ankle bells and bare cinnamon bellies, or that flash of cotton panty at the hipline that bobbed like the tail of a fleeing deer. It made even a civilized man entertain carnal thoughts. Testosterone coursed through my bloodstream like a cheap narcotic. I knew if I didn’t get some relief soon, I was liable to do something shameful. My animal thirst rose with the heat.
It made me crave a drink—or twelve. I tried to remember Dr Fang and my poor liver. The human body had simply not been designed to withstand the level of abuse I had put mine through over the years. I’d been lucky so far. But, like Buster, one day my luck was bound to run out.
My dad’s younger brother had been a mess of contradictions. After two tours as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, Buster came home to our white bread New England town with a bronze star and some shady souvenirs—a Browning pistol, an engraved Zippo, a human skullcap, and some crude tattoos.
Vietnam had marked him in other ways. There was his weakness for intoxicants, his obsession with firearms, and the bright pink scar on his temple where the shrapnel had hit. Though the military doctors assured us there’d been no significant brain damage, I know my mother always had her doubts. Either way, seeing his friends die fighting a war none of them believed in had left Buster a little shattered. He never flew again.
“I’ve got too much baggage,” he used to say.
After his discharge Buster took an engineering degree at UMass on the GI Bill, and landed a job at the General Electric Aviation plant in Lynn. But the Army had taught him to distrust human hierarchies. As a result my uncle never rose higher in the GE ranks than Bird Strike Safety Tester, a job which primarily consisted of lobbing supermarket turkeys into jet engines. But that was alright with him. Buster often said he preferred manual labor to working behind a desk. He claimed it kept his head free of ‘garbage’ and left his mind free to wander wherever it wanted to go.
Buster might have daydreamed all the way through to retirement but for a tragic on-the-job accident that curtailed his poultry-pitching career and nearly killed him. A jet engine exploded during testing. Partially shielded behind the test rig, Buster survived. But the rest of his crew were decapitated by flying shards of metal. The explosion took off Buster’s left leg below the knee and most of his left hand. He often joked that he’d survived Vietnam only to come home and be ‘winged by a fucking turkey’. Now living on disability, he agreed to look after me in the afternoons until my mother got home from work.
Buster in his prime had built the house with his own two hands—from brick foundation to roof shingles—living in a tent for the seven months it took him to do it. Every day, after pulling an eight hour shift at GE, he had labored until midnight, then risen at dawn to put in a couple more hours of work before heading back to the plant.
Ma had come from a long line of teetotalers, and as much as she approved of Buster’s work ethic, she could never quite bring herself to approve of the man himself. I have no idea what my father thought of his brother, but it didn’t matter. My father was long out of the picture, and he’d forfeited any moral high ground by running off to Montana with that woman from the office.
Buster was a wild card, but he was still Family—the only family my mother had left—and his services came free, whereas daycare cost money. I think Ma saw her brother-in-law as a force of nature, something you simply had to endure—like a nor’easter, or raccoons in the woodshed. If she had ever got wind of a fraction of the shit we got up to together, I’m sure my uncle’s babysitting days would have ended far sooner than they did. But I knew enough to keep my mouth shut. And Buster always put on a respectable face when Ma came to collect me for dinner.
“Your mother is a saint,” he’d say. From a lapsed Catholic this was a back-handed compliment.
My afternoons with Buster were a taste of future freedoms. Every day at school I watched the clock until it was time to board the yellow bus and ride it to the end of the line near the old white church. My uncle would be there, hunkered down on the Indian—a massive 500cc antique he’d inherited from my grandfather—with a can between his legs and a Chesterfield on his lips. We’d thunder home at twenty-five miles an hour sounding like a
squadron of B-52’s.
Often it felt like Buster was the only adult who took me seriously. Never short of an opinion himself, he was always interested in my take on the world. He took pleasure in showing me how to build and repair things. With no kids of his own, he probably wanted to pass on to me what he’d learned in life. I could never match his enthusiasm for hunting and fishing. But my uncle felt that a man needed to know how to survive on his own. And that meant knowing how to kill.
One sunny spring afternoon a raccoon staggered out of the bushes near where I was reading on the grass. I had never heard of rabies. Buster grabbed a garden hoe and turned the crisis into a lesson.
“A sick animal is unpredictable and dangerous, Marko. If it’s coming at you, stab it in the throat. Go for the jugular or the windpipe. If it’s facing away, give it a short sharp shot to the spinal cord. You probably won’t get a second chance, so get it right the first time. One short sharp shot. Show no fear, and no mercy.” He paused to sever the poor animal’s neck with a swift downward blow. “Remember. No fear, no mercy.”
My uncle was many things—an old-school Yankee, a trained killer, a drunk—but the key role he played in my life was The Bad Influence. “Degrees don’t mean shit,” he said. “It’s brains and balls that get you through.” His UMass degree hung in the garage—obscured by sawdust—next to a TIME Magazine cover of Nixon he’d stapled to a dartboard.
Yet Buster was a well-read and thoughtful man—a blue collar intellectual. He turned me on to Jack Kerouac and Joseph Heller, Hunter Thompson and Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. He was always free and easy with his paperbacks. “Go ahead, keep it,” he’d say, tapping his temple. “It’s already set in cement.”
Music was a different story. Buster’s stereo was sacred and his records sacrosanct: mess with either and you risked excommunication. Apart from the Indian, Buster’s vast LP collection and state-of-the-art ‘70s sound system were the only possessions he truly valued. His house was always alive with music: Monk and Mingus, the Kinks and the Stones, Captain Beefheart and the Electric Prunes.
Buster also introduced me to intoxicants. He handed me my first beer when I was ten. After that came grass and hash, opium and crank, mushrooms and LSD. Each came with an introductory lecture. Buster swore by his Red White and Blue, a watery brew that required downing at least a six-pack before you felt any effect. It was the cheapest beer in New England, and its low alcohol content allowed him to drink all day without ever becoming visibly intoxicated.