The place Dan Murphy knew I needed was in the wall of a mesa overlooking Chinle Wash—a few miles up from where the wash dumps runoff water into the San Juan and a couple of hundred meandering miles from the place it emerges from Canyon de Chelly. Back in 1988 when my memory of this was fresh and green, I wrote a piece published in the July 1989 edition of Audubon magazine. I have just reread it and found that I wrote as well then as I do now—alas, perhaps better. Therefore, I will plagiarize myself and take you to our campfire at the juncture of Chinle Wash and the San Juan.
“I begin collecting the kinds of impressions my victim would make as she arrived at this place. She would make the trip secretly and at night, since the dig would be illegal. She would be burdened with the sort of nervousness law-abiding people feel when they are breaking the rules. Still, she would be stirred by the evening as I am stirred. Violet-green swallows are out patrolling for insects. A beaver, looking old and tired, swims wearily up river, keeping out of the current and paying no more attention to me than he would to a cow.
“The song of frogs comes from somewhere up the wash. The rising moon lights the top of the cliff and a coyote and his partner began exchanging conversation far above on the Nokaito Bench. The nighthawks and swallows retire for the night and are replaced by squadrons of little bats. They flash through the firelight, making their high pitched little calls. I filed all of this in my memory.”
When I am back at my computer my soon-to-be murdered anthropologist will be experiencing all this, saving wear on my imagination.
The next morning Murphy took me up Chinle Wash. We passed a Navajo pictograph—a man shooting a bow at a black-hatted horseman who was firing a pistol at the Navajo. Nearby is an elaborate larger-than-life Anasazi pictograph of a figure standing behind a huge reddish shield that looked so much like the chest protector of an umpire that the river people called this fellow “Baseball Man.” About here the climb began—first from the floor of the wash to a flat expanse some thirty feet higher, and then another, steeper climb to an even flatter expanse of exposed sandstone. This spread away to the cliff walls of which support the vast igneous roof of Nokaito Bench.
Murphy pointed, said, “Over there,” and added that he wanted me aware of how these people hid themselves in this empty world. We moved along the cliff, and past another gallery of pictographs, one of which depicted Kokopela, resting on his humped back playing his flute between his raised legs. Anthropologists believe he is a fertility figure a lot like the Greek Pan and the hump he carries represents a sack of seeds. Whoever he is, he stimulated my imagination. I began thinking how spooky it would be if my foredoomed anthropologist, already frightened, began hearing the sound of flute music approaching in the darkness. With the problem of working flute music into the plot still on my mind we turned a little corner and we were there. In the towering wall of the mesa nature had formed a cavernous amphitheater in the cliff, some fifty feet deep, a bit wider, and maybe seventy feet from floor to ceiling. A live seep high up the cliff supplied enough water to grow a lush (by desert standards) assortment of ferns and moss here and to feed a shallow basin perhaps twelve feet across and eight inches deep on the stone alcove floor. Tiny frogs are all around it. On a ledge a few feet above this pool the Anasazi family had built its house—its roof gone but the walls, protected here from wind and weather, almost intact. At the mouth of the alcove footholds had been cut into the cliff leading upward to a higher shelf where an even smaller stone structure stood. A lookout point, Murphy guessed, or a last-chance stronghold if danger trapped them.
While we rested in the cool shade, I dumped the already written first chapter of A Thief of Time. A quite different book was taking shape out of what I’d seen on this raft trip. And here’s the way I thought the new first chapter would go:
By now the victim has definitely become female. She has reached this proscribed ruins just as Murphy and I did, but at twilight. She has seen Kokopela’s pictograph, the ruins, the pond, and the little frogs around it. She has decided she will sleep and start her dig with daylight. She notices the frogs seem to jump toward the water but never reach it, investigates, finds that scores of them have been tethered with yucca strings to twigs stuck into the ground. This seems cruel, sadistic and totally insane to her and since the frogs are still healthy, done recently. The mad perpetrator must be near. Then she hears the sound of a flute. Thinks of Kokopela. Listens. Recognizes the melody of “Hey, Jude.” Then sees figure walking into the darkness toward her. End of first chapter.
From whence the craziness? We had paused at a ruins beside the San Juan. A raft crewman told me it had been vandalized by a Navajo boy reputed to be schizophrenic. How will I use him? I won’t. I will transfer the craziness to the fictional son of an area rancher. The boy has murdered his mother and siblings years ago. His father, filled with love and pity, is secretly slipping him supplies in the wilderness.
Why do I need such a character anyway?
Because (1) I need some chilling suspense in Chapter 1 and (2) I have seen that my murder victim must survive, therefore must have someone to care for her until Joe Leaphorn arrives to rescue her.
Why survive?
Because I must have a way to motivate Leaphorn to involve himself in a none-of-his-business case and take three or four days to float down the river and crash around in the canyons. That had been one of my two major plotting problems when I climbed aboard the raft at Sand Island to begin this trip. The other problem was also motivational. I needed a believable motive for an anthropology professor—even more amiable and nonaggressive than the average professor—to slaughter a fellow prof. I had planned to use mere scholarly ambition—the desire to uncover a major Anasazi cultural discovery before a rival did it. I had already used that motive in DHOTD. Here somehow it didn’t seem quite good enough.
Providence, which looks after well-intentioned mystery writers, handed me the notion for motivating Leaphorn the first twilight of the trip. A snowy egret flushed from a sandbar we were approaching and flew downstream, a graceful white shape outlined against the dark cliff ahead. I recall the form of an egret (this one with human feet) carved amid a mural of other spirit forms we’d noticed on a cliff earlier that day. But what was this bird doing here, solitary, without another of his species near? Were egrets, like some other species, monogamous? Had his mate died and left him here to live out his life alone? That reminded me (God alone understands how a writer’s mind works!) that I had almost made a widower out of Leaphorn in the previous book—saving Emma only with a last-minute decision to have her recovering from a successful brain tumor extraction. I also remembered how Leaphorn had discussed his cases with his spouse and was influenced by her advice. Inspiration strikes. Emma will have died after all (post-surgery staph infection). Leaphorn, in mourning, will know that Emma would have wanted him to find this missing woman. Out of his jurisdiction or not this effort will be his farewell gift to her.
I thought of the solution to the other motivation problem because of my self-made-man syndrome. I like them. Admire them. Know a bunch of them. On university search committees, given candidates with approximately equal attainments, I favor them—downgrading those with prep school and Ivy League credentials on grounds that while they were now on the same lap of the race with the graduate of North Dakota State, the Ivy Leaguer had been given, through family, money, the good-old-boy networks plus the inherent snobbishness of academia, a huge head start.
I was reminded of my prejudice on the trip while boasting to one of the other riders that one of our Navajo boatmen was a genuine self-made man. Born on the reservation to a family too poor to raise him, he’d been farmed out to a grandmother across the river (and the line) in Utah. Left thus with no birth certificate in either state, he couldn’t qualify for any tribal job because he couldn’t prove he was a Navajo. Starting from ground zero, he now owned a four-wheel-drive truck equipped with towing, battery-charging, and tire-inflating gear. In the winter he prowled the snowbound reservation
serving stuck customers and built his estate in the summer working the rafts.
“How’s that,” I boasted, “for being self-made?”
The recipient of this boast countered by telling me our generous host also qualified as self-made. He’d begun his career as a lowly runner and gofer for brokers at one of the stock exchanges. From that very bottom of the rung he had worked himself up to wealth, fame, good name, and financial prominence.
All day I enjoyed the thought of being on the same raft with two self-made persons. Then evening came and our host emerged from his tent. He was wearing a boating cap emblazoned with the name of one of the planet’s most expensive, most exclusive, most oldrich boy prep schools. I am seriously taken aback. And that evening, while enjoying this fellow’s largesse at dinner, I began examining my changed attitude. He is still genial, witty, friendly, etc., but now he is one of them and not one of us. Why? Because despite what Papa tried to teach about the foolish evil of stereotyping people, I nurse a mindless grudge against those fed from the silver spoon.
Since I’m a Roman Catholic, this should have suggested I do some act of contrition and resolve to improve myself. Instead I immediately see how I can transfer my own bigotry to Maxie Davis, bright and beautiful anthropologist and love interest in my yarn, and make Randall Elliot, the handsome anthropologist who loves her, the victim of my personality flaw, which I have passed along to Maxie. Motivation problem solved.
I give Elliot (note my bad guys tend to have famous old Anglo family names) a haughty prep school and Ivy League background, an admiral uncle, Navy Air Force commission, and the appropriate medals for Vietnam service. I make Maxie the product of a poor dirt farm who worked her way through a little land grant college with a doctorate from a state university, and a brother who served in Nam as a grunt and won the decoration grunts tend to receive—the posthumous Purple Heart mailed to next of kin. Thus Maxie thinks Elliot is a nice boy and maybe someday he’ll be a man but all he’s done so far is accept what’s handed him because of his social position. Thus our villain, desperate to impress his chosen woman, cheats to prove his scientific theory, is caught at it, etc. I am happy with this solution. Bigotry can be useful.
A Thief of Time made the New York Times list of notable books of the year, climbed up the paper’s bestseller list, and has made it into print in seventeen languages—a record for me. It also held top place on my own list of favorites—and stayed there until I finally got my original dream book written about Joe Pilgrim finding himself in the lawless chaos of the Belgian Congo.
That brings us to Finding Moon, about as far from Africa’s Congo Basin as you can get. And to another trip full of memories for me.
29
Finally Finding Moon
Marie had been hearing me talking about writing my Belgian Congo novel for approximately thirty-five years when, in 1985, we watched a television documentary marking the tenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. Scenes of civilians struggling at the gates of our embassy reminded me of the chaos I had intended to depict in Stanleyville. With the Congo bloodbath long forgotten by the world, I decided to move the story to Southeast Asia. I talked to my agent and editor about it and detected no enthusiasm. The two things you want to avoid on the cover of a book are the picture of a spider or anything about Vietnam, which we were trying to forget. My own common sense told me they were right. It would be stupid to stop writing Navajo tribal police mysteries, sales of which were soaring, to turn out a book nobody wants. But the idea was fully revived now.
I talked about it to Marie. Marie, as always, advised me to trust my own judgment. If I saw a good book, write it. I began daydreaming my way into a plot. It would take place in the few days leading up to, and away from, the fall of Saigon. Some of the settings would be in Manila and a lot in Cambodia. It would concern an older brother whom circumstances force to go into my version of the heart of darkness to bring home a child his now-deceased sibling had sired there. That settled, I needed to get a feel for the settings and visual material.
It was bad timing for visas. Neither Vietnam nor Cambodia was giving them. I would go to the Philippines and see where that would lead. Here, once again those years as a journalist paid off. Press credentials can make getting into interesting places a lot easier. I connected with a travel writers’ organization and joined a junket sponsored by the Philippine government to promote tourism. This netted me a business-class ticket on the Philippine national airline, plus a room in a new hotel built by Imelda Marcos, wife of the president and the promoter of this push for tourism.
Two problems developed immediately. First, as we prepare to land at Manila I notice I had picked up the wrong passport. The one I hold in my sweaty palm as we roll down the runway has CANCELLED stamped across my photograph. It expired in 1974. My new one is on my desk in Albuquerque. Again Providence saved me. The supporters of Cory Aquino have just overthrown the Marcos government, Ferdinand and Imelda had fled to Hawaii, a general strike is on, and the preoccupied customs agent simply stamps my arrival date on the back page and waves me past.
The bum passport, however, blights my hope to get across the South China Sea to Nam or Cambodia. My plan to talk my way into a visit of Manila’s vast Bilibad prison was thwarted because Cory’s government is busy releasing more than five hundred political prisoners. Instead I get permission to visit the nonpolitical maximum-security gaol on Palawan Island. While I head south Marie sends my good passport to Imelda’s Manila hotel to be held for me there until I pass through again en route home.
On the plane I sit next to a dealer in “ethnic items” to be sold in places like Melbourne, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. He had boarded the plane at Zamboanga, where he had made a deal for some artifacts, and was headed for Puerto Princesa, to demand better quality control from his blowgun supplier. From his bag he took a hollow bamboo tube and a sack containing four pointed sticks split from the same plant. “Shameful,” he said, displaying them to me. “Not even a tourist would believe it would work.”
Before I could ask him what sort of work it did, he was pointing out the window at Mount Mantalingajan, rising through patches of fog. “Two thousand eighty-five meters high,” he told me, and began giving me equally precise geographic data about the island it dominated. Palawan is one of the larger of the seven thousand or so islands that form the Philippines, and the skinniest—275 miles long and maybe 35 miles wide. It angles southwest from Luzon almost to Borneo with about three hundred miles of dark blue Sulu Sea separating it from the bulk of the country.
As I previously noted, the famously low pay of newspaper reporters causes those who survive to develop a habit of recycling the stuff they write. In my newsroom days, for example, I was selling by-product stories to journals ranging from Film Daily and IBM World News to Capper’s Farmer and the Portland Cement Assn. Journal. (A friend won the admiration of us all by selling a little feature he’d done on the difficulties of making a dry climate compost pile actually produce compost to eleven different magazines and papers, with slight modifications to fit each editor’s needs.) So here I am, collecting stuff for a book that nobody wants to publish, and taking my habitual notes for the magazine piece I think I can sell. To demonstrate how it works, I will recycle here part of the article I sold to Islands.
My exporter friend and I are about to land at Puerto Princesa.
“Just below was a jumble of buildings roofed with sheet metal, palm fronds and tile; and the docks of the seaport, mostly occupied by barges and a gaggle of small craft. The biggest ship was a rusty minesweeper, probably abandoned by the US Navy in 1945. But what caught my eye was a two masted sailing ship with fresh paint as white as snow—a pearl set in a field of barnacles. Even before our plane touched the weedy landing strip, I had collected two characters—my seatmate and this dazzling ship.”
The airport existed, my seatmate explained, “because Imelda wished it.” Imelda owned the island’s only lodging (adjoining the airport) and an uncle was developing a resort twenty mil
es away on the South China Sea. A road was to be paved to that resort—thereby more than doubling the island’s present eight miles of pavement, but he suspected that Cory Aquino would now pave a road for one of her family instead.
The route to Palawan’s maximum-security prison was not among those paved. The Jeepney taxi (Puerto Princesa had six of these) followed a narrow dirt road crowded by rice paddies stretching away on both sides to jungle-covered mountains. The cabbie, having explained the biographies of the gallery of saints welded to the Jeep’s hood, spoke disapprovingly of the way the men cultivating the paddies were handling their water buffalo.
“All city people,” he explained. “Nobody taught them how to plow.”
I wondered why these urbanites were plowing so far from a city.
“They’re convicts,” he said.
Indeed they were.
The gate to Palawan Prison was a palm log laid across the road. The cabbie blew his musical horn. A plump middle-aged man emerged from a bamboo shed, chatted, pulled aside the log, and waved us through. A mile or so onward we reached a compound of concrete buildings put up by the U.S. Army during the Philippine Insurrection. The warden had his office in the largest of these with a chart on his wall showing the number and nature of his charges. The population was 3,318, a much smaller number was under a category that I would call “sharecropper,” and an even smaller group were finishing their terms and preparing for release. Smallest of all (a total of three) were noted as “absent.”
Did that mean they had escaped?
No. That category was for those who had missed two consecutive daily roll calls. They go out in the jungle but there’s nothing to eat, snakes, stinging insects, spiders, etc., so they come back.
Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir Page 30