by Lucy Taylor
After a couple of miles, though, he ran out of steam. Here was where the idea had been to guzzle down the bottle of Jack he carried inside his parka, stretch out on the ice and fall asleep or fall through, whichever came first, but that plan, like everything else in his life, had changed recently. He set the bottle down unopened—a prize for some ice fishermen if they were lucky enough to find it—mumbled a few words to Danny or God or anybody out there who might be listening and trudged back to the safety of the shore. He wondered idly if this failure to follow through on the original plan meant he’d lost his nerve or his cojones, but figured if Danny could change his mind, so by God, could he.
When he got back to his truck, he sat for a while running the heater, getting warmed up and gritting his teeth at his cell phone, which he’d laid out beside him on the passenger seat. It irked him no end how nervous he felt, because a real man ought not to be scared to call his own daughter any more than a real man ought to need those damned fool AA meetings he’d dragged his ass to a couple of times.
Then again, he was starting to wonder if he had any idea what a real man really was.
What the hell, he thought, and picked up the phone.
Maybe there was still time to find out.
Sanguma
Don’t disrobe, he’d told her. Whatever you do, don’t even think about wearing a bikini or a thong. It’s not like that here. You’ll see. The local women go into the water fully clothed. But if you must, at least wear a laplap, show that much common sense.
So said Milt. And Milt was the one reading the guide books, so Milt must know.
The day before, in Lae, she’d worn a yellow two-piece to the beach and removed the colorful laplap from around her waist before entering the water, charging into the surf with abandon, diving deep and wantonly into the green, curling waves. When she came out, a group of local men, chugging stubbies and chewing betel nuts at a beachside bar, had stopped talking to stare at her—not appreciatively as she was accustomed to being viewed by men, but with faint disdain, even malice—the way her mother used to stare at the scars on her arms—stupid girl, how could you be so careless?
Now she was lounging on the balcony of the Paradise Hotel in Goroka, an East Highlands town inland from Lae, with Milt and their young guide Harry Ingube. They were drinking beer, trying to cool off in the relentless heat after a sweaty, teeth-rattling ride on the Public Motor Vehicle that had brought them to Goroka that morning. Milt had been reading an article in the local paper about three woman in Mt. Hagan who were dragged from their homes, tortured and burned as witches, so the talk had turned to sorcery.
Charlotte found it sobering that in the twenty-first century, even in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, such atrocities occurred. She said to Harry Ingube, “Is it always women they burn?”
Ingube was a brown-skinned young man with a wide mouth full of startlingly white teeth and jet black, sparkling eyes under curly lashes. He smiled constantly, infectiously, as though his was a festive and merry heart always in secret celebration.
Now the dazzling smile lost some wattage as he took a swig of beer and leaned toward her, so near that for a moment, his meaty lips looked kissably, disconcertingly close. “No, not just women, men, too!” He said this with an enthusiasm akin to pride, as though burning people alive for sorcery was merely a minor rip in society’s fabric as long as it lacked sexist overtones.
“It happens like this, you see. A healthy man dies suddenly for no reason, so people believe it is witchcraft. Then a gang of rascals comes looking for the sanguma—the witch—who caused the death and they burn the witch alive.”
“Rascals?” said Charlotte, thinking a word she associated with mischievous children to be a tad mild.
“In New Guinea, it means thugs,” said Milt in his twangy Aussie drawl. “These rascals, they’re the reason it’s not smart for you to walk alone or show too much skin.” Milt was a gangly, narrow-shouldered man with a neatly trimmed goatee and hooded, melancholy eyes.
Contrasted with his small, cherubic mouth, the pensive eyes gave his face an inscrutable Cheshire Cat quality that might hint at deep and brooding thoughts or perhaps no thoughts at all. He and Charlotte had met in Singapore at the Mandai Orchid Gardens, he on holiday from his job as an assistant principal at a secondary school in Melbourne, she taking a break from teaching English in Hokkaido. It wasn’t mad love, exactly, but as Charlotte had observed in her peripatetic life, loneliness could be a hell of an aphrodisiac.
“The people here,” Ingube said, “many of them have no education. They believe in sangumas and ghosts and shape-changers. I was lucky. My aunt raised me in Port Moresby, and I was sent to a Lutheran school. But up in the Highlands where we’re going—they say that when a plane lands, people still check the exhaust pipes to reckon if it’s male or female.”
He flashed that bright, captivating smile again and held Charlotte’s gaze.
“Bloody hell!” Milt gave his biceps a ringing slap, mashing a mosquito the size of a dime to a bloody smear. He used a napkin to wipe the mess off his arm and said, “Look here, Ingube, what I want to know is whether you’ll be able to take us to a singsing. Not one of those staged shows put on for tourists, but the real thing. Our first guide said he could find one, but now that he’s dropped and abandoned us…” He left the statement hanging on an accusatory note.
This time, Ingube’s smile tried to hide his embarrassment over the fact that Bob Okibo, an older man who’d come recommended as a top-notch guide, had failed to show up that morning, when he was supposed to meet Milt and Charlotte in Goroka. Not so unusual, apparently. An over fondness for Jungle Juice and a certain lackadaisical approach to commitments were endemic to the lifestyle here, or so it said in Lonely Planet. While Milt was frantically trying to track down Okibo, smooth and smiling Ingube had approached Charlotte outside the hotel to offer his services.
“Yes, tomorrow we’ll go to a big singsing with many tribes,” Ingube said. “No problem.”
“What about the Mudmen of Asaro? Will we see them?” The famous Mudmen were high on Milt’s lists of reasons to visit New Guinea.
“Mudmen, yes, yes” said Harry, though Charlotte had the feeling he knew as much about the likelihood of the Asaro Mudmen showing up as she did. Still, she added a request of her own, “Harry, I’d like to visit a spirit house where they keep the sacred masks. What’s it called, a haus tambarans?”
Inguba picked at the label on his bottle of beer, not meeting her eyes. His evident discomfort prompted Charlotte to ask, “What’s wrong? Aren’t there any here?”
“No, no, there is a spirit house klostu—nearby,” Ingube said, “but, women, they are tambu. Long time back, if a woman went inside a spirit house, the penalty was death.”
“Tough place to be female” said Charlotte, chugging her South Pacific Lager. She remembered seeing a red and white pamphlet published by the police department in the give-away rack of a shop back in Port Moresby. The title “It’s Illegal to Beat Your Wife” had seemed like a put-on at the time. Now she was starting to realize such information was put forth with dead seriousness.
As she pondered this, a commotion came from the street below. A battered Toyota pick-up careened around the corner, two-wheeled it over a curb, and braked with a sound like a pig having its throat slit. The bed of the truck was packed with young men, all shabbily dressed and armed with clubs and bush knives. They jumped down out of the truck bed and jogged up the street like a posse. People scurried to get out of their way. Vehicles U-turned.
“Don’t look at them, get down,” hissed Ingube. He grabbed Charlotte’s arm, yanking her below the level of the railing, and squatted beside her, his face so close that she could see the diamonds of sweat glistening in his furrowed eyebrows. His fingertips brushed her bare arm, leaving in their wake a sensation of electrical energy, of silver sparks cascading through her blood like neon fish.
“What’s going on?” said Milt, who was crouching inside the door to the lob
by.
“Stay down,” Ingube said, “Police will be here soon.”
Through a gap in the railing, Charlotte could see the gang fanning out down the street, entering the stores and hostels along the block. A pair of them approached the hotel. They wore bright bandanas and filthy-looking shorts and their bare, coppered chests gleamed in the sun.
To her amazement, the desk clerk, a scrawny old man with skin gnarled and brittle-looking as tree bark, hobbled outside to confront them. The young men shouted at him and the old man hollered right back. Charlotte tried to understand what they were saying, but they were using the Pidgin dialect that was nearly incomprehensible to her. One of them kept rubbing his thumb over the hilt of a mean-looking knife. She was sure the old man was going to be gutted like a mackerel right there in the street, but amazingly, after more yelling and gesturing, the two rascals turned away.
Behind her, Milt exhaled audibly. “Bloody hell! Remind me to buy that bloke a beer.”
««—»»
“What do you suppose that was about?”
Charlotte sat on the edge of the bed, looking out the window onto the street below, where a woman at an open-air stall was serving up plates of fried sweet potatoes, taros, and yams to a trio of Westerners on bicycles. Farther on, beyond the post office and the row of shops and budget hotels, she could see the roof of the Goroka Market, the Raun Raun Theater and in the distance, the outline of the improbably named Mt. Kiss Kiss, with its steep trek to the look-out at the top.
Beside her, Milt was paging through a “Guide to Flora in New Guinea,” trying to identify some plant specimens he’d picked earlier that day. All was quiet. As Ingube predicted, police had shown up, but only after the gang of rascals had piled into their truck and screeched away.
“Maybe they were just fired up, celebrating payday,” said Milt.
She twisted to face him. “No, they were looking for someone. I don’t feel safe here. I think we should leave.”
He put the book aside, stroking his goatee as though that simple action might somehow coax forth erudition. Not for the first time, Charlotte thought he was either very wise or adept at feigning it. Finally he said, “Tell you what, after the singsing tomorrow, we’ll come back, get a good night’s sleep, and catch the first flight to Port Moresby the next morning.” He put a hand at the small of her back and leaned forward to kiss her neck.
She wriggled away like a skittish cat. “It’s too hot for that. Doesn’t it ever cool off here?”
“Apparently some of us are already cool.” He added petulantly, “Ugabe’s keen on you, you know. I’ve seen him looking at you.”
“What is he, all of nineteen, twenty? At that age, a boy’s keen on any woman who gets within fifty feet of him.”
“And at your age, a woman can be keen on any man who shows interest.”
“At my age?” snapped Charlotte, who was not yet forty and hardly considered herself a crone. Never-the-less, the words stung. She found herself reverting to an old form of self-soothing, crossing her arms and stroking her forearms with either hand, cradling them like small animals in need of comfort.
Milt coughed and looked embarrassed. He took her hands away and held them still. “I’m sorry, Char. I didn’t mean to say that. Come on, it’s been a long day. Let’s get some sleep.”
««—»»
Sleep was a struggle. The bed was narrow, the mattress lumpy as undercooked porridge; the relentless heat gave no quarter. It was as if all day the earth absorbed the heat only to exhale it in sweltering waves after dark. Mosquitoes whined round her ear and she thrashed on sheets slick with sweat.
To her annoyance, Milt fell asleep at once and began to snore deeply. That he could sleep under such circumstances was alone reason to hate him.
Had she been less fatigued, Charlotte might have sensed what was happening and woken herself up before it was too late, but by the time she caught the cloying, giddy fragrances of citrus and spiced plums and ginger, she was deep in the den of her nightmares.
Candles—how she had loved them, the ceremony, sensuality, and drama implicit in their use.
In the kitchen of her childhood, fist-sized chunks of tallow, rainbow colors, were lined up on the sink—lavender and tangerine and dandelion gold. In the window sill, the finished product: some stumpy and sawed-off as gnomes, others skinny as broomsticks, a few obvious failures where the candle ended up crooked as a bent back or listing tipsily to the side—the ones she privately labeled “Mom Staggering Out of the Alibi Lounge,” chuckling as she fed those back into the bubbling saucepan on the stove to be melted down again.
As always, she was alone, which had frightened her when she was young, but thrilled her now that she was almost ten and had discovered her own company to be more interesting and entertaining than that of most adults and certainly all children. She was creative, she could sew dresses and bake brownies that she slathered in German chocolate frosting from a can, she could fill the sink with soapy water and give her Barbie dolls a bath, dunk their blonde heads under until they drowned, then hold a pretend funeral from which they resurrected as alive as they had been before. These elaborate and somber Barbie funerals required candles—hence, her current project.
The front door slamming startled her—she thought it was her mother coming home, leaning like a tipsy candle. She turned too fast. Her elbow struck the handle of the pan, the molten tallow sloshing upward, an elegant red arc of languid, airborne lava. As she flung her arms up to protect her face, it splattered onto the stove and across the counter, in search of something soft and living to adhere to and finding what it sought. Had she been designing a batik, the imprint of fiery scarlet semaphores and teardrops and stars might have been stunning. But as it was…
Stupid girl, you could have set the house on fire!
She found herself sitting bolt upright in bed, clawing at her arms, teeth clenched against remembered pain. She gasped Milt’s name and reached for him, flailing empty air.
Outside the window, shreds of rose and saffron dawn illuminated the rooftop of the post office and YMCA hostel. She got up and checked the bathroom, found it empty, then dressed and padded downstairs to the lobby. The desk clerk was bringing out a pot of coffee and some paper cups. She asked if he’d seen Milt leaving the hotel. He said he hadn’t, but looked at her oddly, as though merely to voice the question was to implicate herself in something unsavory.
“Maybe he went for a walk,” she muttered weakly.
The old man filled a cup with coffee and handed it to Charlotte. “Now why would he do that?” he said, shaking his head. “It’s dark. Not safe out there.”
Charlotte sipped the coffee “That was very brave, what you did yesterday, confronting those thugs.”
The old man snorted and waved off the compliment with a boney hand. “Them rascals drink, think they big men. They sober up, find out they still no ’count.”
“What did they want?”
The wizened desk clerk studied her, then shrugged and turned away. Charlotte thought the conversation was at an end when suddenly he said, “You had a different guide before you come to Goroka, no? Man named Bob Okibo.”
She nodded, “Yes, Okibo showed us around Lae and Mt. Hagan. He told us he’d meet us in Goroka, but he never showed up.”
“That’s cause he dead,” the desk clerk said.
Charlotte’s voice came out a scratchy whisper. “My God, was there an accident?”
“No accident. One minute he’s getting off the PMV, next he go bugarup, get the chills and die. He from Goroka, his clan is here. Them rascals think somebody used witchcraft to murder him. They looking to get payback—money, blood, or both.”
Charlotte struggled to keep her expression from betraying her. It was she who had hired Okibo in the first place, when she and Milt had just flown into Lae from Port Moresby. She’d chatted with him outside the hotel for half an hour, negotiating a fee and an itinerary, while Milt was upstairs studying his guidebook. How many people had seen
her talking to Okibo, she wondered, feeling a minor frisson of fear which she dismissed as ludicrous. She was a tourist, for God’s sake. Okibo guided tourists for a living. How many other foreigners had he talked to in recent days?
“These men, do they know who they’re looking for?”
“Right now they don’t know for sure, but don’t matter to them as long as they find somebody they decide be guilty. When they do, they torture that person until they confess. Then they kill them.”
“And if they don’t confess?” asked Charlotte.
“They kill them anyway.”
««—»»
She went back to the room to compose herself and try to think. Milt was missing, Bob Okibo had dropped dead, a gang of thugs was trying to track down a sorcerer: if the various events were not so dire, she’d have laughed aloud. She decided to give Milt another hour. If he didn’t return by then, she’d hire a taxi and visit the police station, the hospital, the Australian Embassy. In the meantime, she’d try to find Harry, who—assuming he was not with Milt—must have an idea where he could be.
Enough, thought Charlotte. She grabbed her brimmed hat, doused herself in mosquito-repellent, and was heading for the door when her eye caught sight of something odd outside the window: having already risen once, the sun appeared dissatisfied with its performance and, like an actor asking to make another entrance on the stage, had gone back to cross the lip of the horizon for a second time that hour. Not only that, but it had chosen for its curtain call, a location more southeasterly than east and was now a livid siena smear at the end of Kundiawa Road.
Mystified, she hurried outside and ran up the street to where a group of people—some weeping, others cursing, cheering—were witnessing, not a sunrise, but an ungodly spectacle. The stench of singed meat assailed her nostrils. Her eyes watered from the smoke.