Something Fishy

by Derek Hansen

  ‘Does he come back to eat and sleep?’ asked Peter.

  ‘No, patrón. He has gone back to living how he always lives.’

  ‘What about school?’

  ‘He says he will come back when you come back.’

  ‘I won’t be back down for three weeks.’

  ‘Then Pinky will be back in three weeks, patrón. No problem.’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’

  XR went looking for Pinky the same day Captain Pete arrived back in Zihuatanejo. He found him in the yard of a fisherman, working on a panga that had come to the end of its life. But the fishermen were preparing the panga for one last high-speed crossing of the Sea of Cortez, with a new outboard motor provided specially for the occasion. Most pangas were sunk along with their motors as soon as they were unloaded so there was nothing left for the Federales to find. The fisherman was risking everything in the hope that the crossing would earn him enough money to build a new panga so he could continue to support his family. Pinky left with XR, but reluctantly.

  The captain stayed down in Mexico for two weeks and even did a run up to Puerto Vallarta and back, as much to keep Pinky entertained as to catch fish. One night, while they were transiting between ports, Captain Pete went up to the bridge to relieve XR and found Pinky with his eyes glued to the video plotter, watching tiny dots zip across the sea from near Mazatlan to the Baja Peninsula.

  Before returning to San Francisco, Captain Pete gave XR more money and told him to speed up work on Pinky’s room.

  Things can happen quickly, even in the land of mañana, when sufficient inducements are offered. On the way to taking For Pete’s Sake north to safe harbour in San Diego at the start of the cyclone season, XR took Pinky over to Cabo and enrolled him in school. The timing was perfect as far as Captain Pete was concerned because there was little opportunity for Pinky to run away. Few skippers were prepared to take the risk of crossing the Sea of Cortez when a cyclone could hit with little warning.

  He rang XR whenever he knew XR was in Cabo to check on Pinky’s progress. He was heartened to learn Pinky was still attending school and had fitted in well with his family. But not all the news was good. Pinky was in a class with kids little more than half his age and often less than half his height. In the shame of his predicament, Pinky alternated between desperation and working twice as hard as anyone else to try and reduce his promised two years’ schooling to one. He wanted to honour his obligation to Miss Peggy and Captain Pete. But inevitably, as so often happens in Mexico, intention and action went separate ways and, one day, Pinky failed to return from school. He’d found a boat crossing the Sea of Cortez to Puerto Vallarta and talked his way on board.

  By swapping notes with other boat owners, Captain Pete and XR kept tabs on Pinky’s movements and eventually tracked him down running people back and forth to their boats in Acapulco. He was thinner than ever. With lashings of food and kind words they persuaded him to return to school and even crossed back to Cabo for that specific purpose. All the way over, Pinky kept his eye on the video plotter, watching for the high-speed boats that fuelled his fantasies. Consequences didn’t figure in these fantasies, just the water rushing beneath the hull, the wind in his hair and the thrill of speed.

  Pinky ran away from school for the last time just three weeks after Captain Pete and XR delivered him back to Cabo. Now, whenever the captain and XR cross the Sea of Cortez at night, they can’t help watching the fast blue dots on their video plotter and wondering if Pinky has finally realised his dream. At the back of their minds are the bales of marijuana they’d found out at sea and the life that was lost there. Whenever they motor down to Zihuatenejo Captain Pete deliberately moors out in the bay for a night or two in the hope of waking up and finding his tender missing.

  The Evil Within

  ‘Mr Wallace! Mr Wallace!’

  Six o’clock in the morning and our driver, Charlie, was banging on our door. I think the Sumatran sun does a workout every morning because it’s already hot and sweaty before it clears the rim of the hills.

  ‘Mr Wallace!’

  Alongside me Abby groaned. We were each pretending to be more asleep than the other. It was dare versus double-dare because whoever answered the door would also have to make tea and probably breakfast as well.

  ‘Mr Wallace!’

  The sun was making beautiful patterns in the dark, stark, alien room. Shafts of brilliance had cut between ill-fitting wooden slats and defined themselves in airborne dust, our own laser light show reaching high into the rafters. I hoped the sun had also snuck in under the eaves and was giving the bats hell.

  ‘Mr Wallace!’ More urgent.

  ‘He wants you, darling.’ Abby’s voice, heavy, sleepy and phony as all hell.

  ‘Why not you?’ I said, miffed. Our bed consisted of two unsprung mattresses over unyielding floorboards and I hadn’t slept well.‘Don’t answer,’ I said, beating Abby to the obvious. If Charlie had wanted Abby he would have called ‘Mrs Wallace’. Bare feet hit wooden floor. Muscles complained. Hands parted the mosquito net. The mattresses were barely ten centimetres thick and packed tight with stuffing.

  ‘Hang on, Charlie. Give the door a rest.’

  The thumping stopped. Charlie seemed to sleep most of the day, which was probably why he had no trouble getting up at the crack of dawn. Charlie wasn’t Charlie’s real name nor was he just a driver. He was our guide, our shepherd, our interpreter, our bodyguard, courtesy of the Research Institute for Food Crops. Truth be told, we were more his than he was anything ours. We were his responsibility and, for our entire sojourn in the Minangkabau highlands of Sumatra, his property. Charlie got whatever sleep he needed curled up in his van.

  Theoretically, the door I was about to open was three hundred years old. I figured it must have been replaced once or twice, though certainly not in this century. It had an amusing Hammer Films horror-movie squeak as it opened.

  ‘Mr Wallace —’

  ‘Charlie, we have a deal, okay? You call me John and you call Mrs Wallace,Abby.’

  ‘Yes, John.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I was about to close the door and crawl back into bed when I realised there had to be another reason for opening it beyond giving Charlie lessons in familiarity. My mind was as foggy as my eyes were bleary, but finally circuits made connections.‘Charlie, why are you holding my wallet?’

  ‘Tombstone founded it on the road. He see your poto in your passport. He giveded it to me.’

  Tombstone was the water-buffalo man, but Tombstone wasn’t his real name either. I nicknamed him Tombstone because he was always smiling, scrunching up his old wrinkled-prune face and flashing his pride — his single tombstone-like front tooth. He looked about eighty hard years old, stood no more than a metre and a half tall and wouldn’t have weighed thirty kilos in a monsoon with a bellyful of rice. Tombstone spent his life up to his thighs in mud and water-buffalo shit ploughing rice paddies. His buffalo weighed as much as a medium-sized tractor but Tombstone could make it turn on a five-cent piece. I think he could have made it sit up and beg if I’d asked. He was the happiest man I’d ever met and always found something to smile about. I wished I had his talent. At that precise moment I couldn’t have cracked a smile if Bob Hope had been standing on my doorstep. I was even immune to the Sumatran sun. It could do nothing about the chill in my veins or the icy hand that had wrapped around my bowels. I could distinctly remember tucking my wallet under my pillow as I lay down to sleep.

  ‘How did my wallet get on the road, Charlie?’

  ‘Maybe someone droppeded it, John.’

  ‘Okay. But who droppeded it?’ At the beginning we’d thought it cute the way Charlie kept past-tensing his past tenses. We hadn’t realised quite how infectious it could be.

  Charlie hesitated, unsure how to ask. ‘Maybe you droppeded it?’

  ‘No, Charlie, I didn’t droppeded it. I put this wallet under my pillow last night. You understand? Under my pillow.’

  ‘You didn’t drop
peded it? Then how it get droppeded on the road?’

  Indonesia has around three hundred different languages and cultures and you have to be patient in all three hundred of them. I noticed a crowd had gathered. They were all watching to see what happened. You get used to not noticing crowds in Indonesia because crowds always gather. Stop to tie your shoelaces and you’ll draw a crowd.

  ‘Charlie, I don’t know how it got droppeded on the road. Let me look inside it, please?’

  I opened my travel wallet fearing the worst. But there was my passport. There was my Amex card, my Amex traveller’s cheques, my Visa card, my gold driving licence, my entry/exit immigration card, various receipts and business cards. Now the test. I unzipped the back of the wallet and didn’t even have to count to know that the wad of American dollars and rupiah within was untouched. That brought no joy. It didn’t solve the riddle but added to it. Only made things more scary. Who would sneak into our house, steal my wallet but not rob it of its contents? Who was so sure of themselves that they would leave it on the road outside, certain that it would be returned to us? Someone was flaunting his power, sending us a message. But who? And why?

  ‘Charlie, I would like to talk about this later. Okay?’ Charlie nodded. All Indonesians are good at talking about things. Before radio and television, talking about things was their principal form of entertainment. Up in Minang country, it still is. ‘I’d like to thank Tombstone for returning my wallet. He deserves a reward.’

  ‘Tombstone does not ask for a reward.’

  ‘I insist. How much is fair?’

  ‘One tousand.’

  One thousand rupiah was roughly fifty cents US, which meant Tombstone would get twenty-five cents for his honesty. I’d already learnt that go-betweens took a commission, which was always a source of negotiation and dispute with the deemed receiver. Fifty per cent seemed common for a go-between, but basically they kept what they thought they could get away with. I wanted to ensure Tombstone got his ‘tousand’.

  ‘Two tousand,’ I said, which put me four hundred and ninety-nine dollars ahead of where I might have been, not counting the traveller’s cheques. I deliberately handed Charlie two one-thousand rupiah notes, one of which seemed to crawl up his arm and into his shirt pocket of its own accord. I waited until the other had found its way to the little man with the heroic tooth, and accepted his beaming gratitude. One thousand rupiah is a lot of money to a man who drives a buffalo for a living. I closed the door behind me. Its groan seemed to mock, sinister and no longer amusing. I tossed up whether or not to tell Abby before deciding it was just the thing she needed to wake her up.

  ‘You mean somebody came in here and stole your wallet just to let us know that he can come again whenever he likes?’

  ‘Do you have a better explanation?’

  Abby sat with her arms around her knees, pulling them hard up against her chest. Any other time she would have looked endearingly waif-like. Instead she just looked scared.

  ‘He could have gone through my things.’

  ‘Yes, and he could have taken our heads off with a parang.’ I wished I hadn’t said that but rifling through a bag of undies didn’t strike me as the greatest threat to our wellbeing. Abby hugged her knees more tightly, as though cold.‘Fact is, he did neither.’

  We stared at our nasi goreng. The cold egg yolks stared balefully back. We didn’t normally start the day with chilli fried rice, but corn flakes no longer seemed appropriate. Well, you don’t go to Rome and not eat pasta, do you? Besides we could live for a week on the price of a single packet of Kellogg’s.

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘I’ll speak to Charlie, he’ll speak to the village headman and they’ll put together a deputation to go over the house and make sure all the shutters and doors close properly. I’m sure they feel as badly as we do. Tonight the entire village will sit around and talk about it.’

  ‘What about the police?’

  ‘Nothing was stolen, no one was hurt. What is our complaint? Besides, nobody around here trusts the police.’

  ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘What’s to like?’

  Our village, Datar Guguk, was the Minangkabau version of the Cotswolds. In the village proper, almost every house sat on stilts and had the traditional upswept buffalo-horn roof; six-pronged, quite ridiculous but indisputably majestic. Some of the roofs were made of corrugated iron and rusted a fierce, burnt brown, but most were still thatched with sago stalks. Huge, dark Tolkien trees gave shade to the village, which sat like a tropical island in a vivid emerald sea of rice paddies. Everywhere I looked was a postcard. I did three rolls of thirty-five mil on our first day. The sea of rice was why we were there.

  Abby and I went for a walk to check on the tilapia and gourami hatcheries while Charlie and the village deputation did as I asked and put catches and latches on shutters and doors. Perhaps our intruder was one of the team.

  ‘Unbelievable,’Abby said and had no need to say more. We had offended no one and had no enemies. We were as welcome as anyone would be who promised to put a sustainable supply of cheap, nourishing protein on the plates of subsistence farmers. I’d made a fifty-thousand-rupiah donation to the mosque building fund, a gesture which had been most appreciated. Everyone went out of their way to be kind and helpful. Everyone smiled at us and we repaid their friendship in many thoughtful ways.

  It was easy to think of the Minang as delightful children, because they’re such a small people and often react like children. They have no artifice. When they’re happy they smile, when they’re sad they weep. Yet they are clever and renowned through the archipelago for their managerial and organisational skills. They’re also known for their honesty and trustworthiness. But one of them was also our intruder, neither honest nor trustworthy. That was what was so unbelievable.

  Home invasions had become a real cause for concern among the expats in Jakarta. Friends of ours had had their home broken into while they were sleeping. She was raped, he was beaten and their four-year-old daughter had a gun pointed at her head to persuade her father to hand over every piece of cash in the house. The persuasion worked. They’d left Indonesia for ever inside twenty-four hours, but still have to live with the memories.

  We’d taken comfort from the fact that our little village was a cultural world apart, centuries away from Jakarta in lifestyle and a full day by available transport. It’s a staggeringly scenic two hours from Bukittinggi, the Minang capital, and another two hours from Padung. Padung is a further hour by plane from Jakarta. Perhaps it still wasn’t far enough.

  ‘Unbelievable,’ I said and had no need to say more.

  We’d come to the highlands of West Sumatra as part of an international initiative to re-establish the raising of food fish in remote villages. The people of Indonesia had a tradition of raising fish in ponds and rice paddies but, through overpopulation or poverty, the practice had fallen away. Both Abby and I had degrees in aquaculture. One day we’d probably become businesspeople and farm barramundi or trochus and make our fortunes. In the meantime we’d decided to use our degrees to see interesting parts of the world and help the underprivileged. Both of us loved living simply among simple people where life was about as basic as it could get.

  Raising fish like gourami, tilapia, carp, milkfish and catfish in rice paddies did more than just add welcome protein to the local diet. Fish fertilised the soil more effectively than commercial products, which the villagers could not afford to buy anyway, and reduced pests by eating leaf-hoppers, stem-borers and aphids. Done properly and without a great deal of effort, rice-fish culture can increase the yields of rice by up to thirty per cent. We oversaw the building of breeding and growing tanks, supplied the fish stock and developed the systems that made the whole thing work. In return, the people made us welcome.

  We’d never locked doors or troubled to hide money, passports or cameras. We had no cause to suspect the entire village was anything but honest to a fault. If anyone had asked how we felt as w
e trudged along the narrow pathways between the paddies, we would have answered, ‘Heartbroken’. When dreams perish something dies inside. Truly it does.

  ‘Poto!’

  We turned at the shout and the giggles that followed. Two young women were sheltering beneath coconut palms to escape the heat from the late morning sun, their dark faces swathed in cotton wraps, white teeth gleaming and mouths wide in smiles. Taking cover behind them were four naked kids, round bellies and spaghetti-thin arms, all eyes and guilt. One of them had called out and embarrassed them all. But we represented an opportunity too good to pass up. Abby already had the Polaroid camera out and was playing with the focus.

  The house we rented was large by Minang standards and rather grand. Every exterior panel was intricately carved and coloured with faded vegetable dyes: red, green, brown and white. And we had it to ourselves. In Minang society, that was an almost undreamed-of luxury and proclaimed us as wealthy indeed. Even the newer houses, little concrete bunkers smaller than a one-car garage, were shared.

  We’d had the good fortune to be invited into homes to cool off with iced tea and oversweet cakes, often coloured a sickening blue-green. It didn’t matter that we had few words of language in common. All they wanted was for us to enjoy their hospitality. In the beginning we had no idea how to repay their kindness. Then Abby had noticed the absence of pictures of any kind and realised the precious gift we had to offer.‘Potos!’

  ‘Rambutan,’ said Abby.

  ‘Rambutan,’ replied six voices simultaneously. Abby clicked. She didn’t know the word for cheese in the local dialect so used the Bahasa word for lychees. Forget television, radio and jet aircraft. In the highlands of West Sumatra there is no greater technological marvel than a developing Polaroid photograph. Abby took six portraits as the first image slowly materialised, each one a study in awe and expectation. How could we not smile? How could we not join in the fun? How could we not forget — at least for a while — that someone was trying to frighten the crap out of us?