by Vince Milam
With a surprising gentleness, he eased the second one in with steady pressure, stopping when satisfied. Luke wandered back over and watched, smoking. He finished his stubbie and it, too, went into the river.
I squirted more wound wash down the hole. The screaming pain left the realm of here-and-now. It became an intense howling chunk of muscle and flesh, separate from me. Detached. Thank God.
“All right. I’ll spread her a bit. Extension. Then you pluck the bloody thing out.”
He twisted the small wooden slats, again with surprising gentleness. Blood poured and collected at my waist. My nostrils blew like a freight train.
“Right. Pull it.”
“You sure?”
“Pull it.”
Luke, weary of the procedure, reached down, grabbed the arrow shaft, and jerked it out. I contributed an explosive snort and groan. Sprinkles of tiny stars floated across my vision. Babe eased the two tongue depressors out. Fresh blood cascaded. Son of a bitch.
“There. Right as rain.” Babe stood. He delivered rasping scratches to a patch of skin disease and headed for the wheelhouse and another stubbie. The little roo hopped after him. Luke wandered off and inspected the tribal arrowhead. I fought back puking.
Right as rain, I washed the wound a final time and pressed clean gauze to stanch the bleeding. Babe kicked the Sally into gear and eased toward a large overhanging tree limb on the opposite side of the river. He killed the engine, tossed a bowline across the limb, and tied us off. We bobbed in the light current, twenty feet from the bank. The bleeding slowed; gobs of now-crimson gauze waded and pressed. I remained leaning back, staring into the big empty. And thought, again, of changing careers.
Later I applied antibiotic cream and butterfly bandages. While my kit carried sutures, stitches weren’t an option. If this thing became infected, I wanted it to drain.
My rucksack held another item—a stainless steel flask filled with Grey Goose vodka. The warm liquid washed down four ibuprofens and two antibiotics. The little roo peeked at me from the doorway of the wheelhouse, one ear flicking. Night fell.
Chapter 4
I had a bunk belowdecks but opted to remain topside for a while. Babe’s snores resonated below. Luke joined him after our evening chat.
“Finished?” he’d asked.
“Yeah. Kiunga tomorrow. Ask a few questions. Port Moresby the day after.”
“You will come back?”
“No.”
He mulled that over. He’d command top dollar as a guide in Kiunga, so I held no concern over him finding his next gig. I shifted and held back a groan.
“Good team.”
“Yeah. We make a good team.” The moonlight highlighted the tribal scar design looping from his back to crisscross his chest. We did make a good team. Luke was fearless and provided everything I needed from a guide. The cultural chasm left a few holes—I’d never understand PNG tribal interplay. But he knew these rugged jungles and, when given a mission, he carried out his duties. A good man. I’d miss him.
“Where’d you get the name Luke?”
“Missionaries.”
“So you’re Christian?”
“Most times.”
I’d seen it before, the mix of belief systems. PNG tribesmen—and Luke was a proud member of a Sepik River tribe—were animists. They believed objects, places, rivers, and creatures possessed a spiritual essence. Somehow that belief system blended with Christianity—a belief system unique to each individual.
“It gives me peace,” he added.
I wasn’t ready to wrap my head around what constituted peace for a man ready to attack any perceived enemy with a machete. But I didn’t draw negative conclusions, either. It worked for Luke.
The wound’s pain, salved with hefty doses of Grey Goose, became a dull ache. I’d be sore as hell tomorrow.
“You?” he asked, pointing toward my lone tattoo—a small passion cross on my left shoulder. A remnant from a wandering relationship.
“It’s complicated.” I’d received the tattoo during a spiritual high-water mark. A tide that rose and fell. A tide, perhaps, designed that way. I didn’t know.
Luke accepted the answer at face value. Of course it was complicated. “Time for sleep,” he said, stretching.
“I’ll be down soon.”
He started toward the wheelhouse and the stairs taking him belowdecks.
“You are a good man.”
Seated, I shifted my gaze into his face. “You too, Luke Mugumwup. You too.”
Bats whipped and skittered across the Sally’s bow. Watery scuffling sounds and violent splashes filled the night. I fired my small flashlight. Deep underneath the overhanging branches as far as my light could carry shined pairs of reflective eyes. Crocs. Over a dozen, jostling for position, waiting for prey.
The blues eased open the door and slid inside. Understandable. I could try and paint a different reality—ease personal angst—but there was no denying my current situation. Middle-aged, sitting on a rotting tub at night in the New Guinea wilderness, and nursing an arrow wound. Babe was right. I’d picked up a souvenir, a marker. One I’d carry the rest of my life. And I slapped back the possibility Babe represented me, decades ahead. Yeah, I lived on a boat. I kept moving. But most times life was a joy. A good life. And I had family. Both blood and Delta.
During the trip upriver, I’d asked Babe about family. Wife and kids.
“Good wife. Two kids. All dead. Dead and gone.”
A short conversation. It may have driven him to his current life. Hard to say and I didn’t pry. But unlike Babe, I held a deadly item to hang my lifestyle on. A large and ever-present item. Whether Babe and I shared psychological similarities weren’t part of my musings.
The singular item—a bounty on my head. A million bucks. As did my retired Delta Force brothers. Marcus, Bo, and Catch. Sometime during our Delta days we’d pissed off deep pockets. Deep pockets with unyielding revenge on their mind. Marcus, our team leader, shrugged it off. He lived life among the vastness of Montana. A rancher. He didn’t hide, or run. And as a rare black rancher out there, he stood as an anomaly. But his neck of the woods offered wide, wide spaces and a degree of isolation. He had a good shot at spotting interlopers. Bounty hunters. Then he’d take his personal shot. With high-powered weaponry.
Catch lived in the Pacific Northwest. Green, dripping Portland. Juan Antonio Diego Hernandez. The “Catch” moniker derived from Delta days. He lingered at the periphery during our violent fast-in, fast-out engagements and caught the unexpected. Covered our backs. While all of us were crack shots, Catch excelled. When he squeezed the trigger, someone died.
Bo Dickerson moved to Portland at Catch’s invitation. Bo’s houseboat in Virginia’s Dismal Swamp had been shot up and burned down. A mercenary attack. His move to Portland was a natural stopover. He’d move on again. Maybe. With Bo, definitive never applied. And his worldview seldom made a whole lot of sense. But he was my closest brother. Wild and crazy and ensconced in an alternative reality.
A fourth Delta brother, Angel, had gone bad. We’d killed him.
A cry, human, came from across the river, a far distance away. It snapped me to attention, Glock at the ready. The movement set the wound off, sharp slices of squinting pain. I waited until nature’s night sounds reigned again, and half relaxed. Tribesmen could come after me in dugout canoes. But they’d invade Babe’s place in doing so. And I held a high confidence factor they didn’t want to mess with their sole source of trade goods. I shifted, the wound barked, and more bats flickered past my head, hunting.
Rae. My murdered wife. I’d broken the bounty hunter’s neck. But he’d broken my life. Rae. Beautiful, lively, loving. My soul mate. After Delta, I’d wandered, lost. She found me and plugged holes I didn’t know I carried. Years later I still missed her. Every day. We settled in Savannah, my hometown. Until she was killed. Murdered. I moved Mom and CC to Charleston. Mom took back her maiden name after cancer took Dad. The change of location and name offe
red a degree of safety. The lion’s share of my revenue went to Mom. She and CC were taken care of. Except for the part about putting them in danger due to the bounty.
My Delta brothers and I tried to find the funding source, the paymaster. No luck. Even Jules of the Clubhouse lacked success with the endeavor. And the bounty—ever present and washed with guilt due to Rae’s death—offered the rationale for living the Ace of Spades lifestyle. A day or two here, meander down the Intracoastal Waterway—the Ditch—and a short stay at the next stop. My brothers remained on my butt about settling. Marcus more than the others. But I enjoyed the lifestyle. To paraphrase a PNG warrior, it helped me find peace.
But these gigs put me in uncomfortable physical and mental places. I could use another vocation. One allowing me to work from the Ace. But my skill sets mapped to these jobs. And these jobs fed my hardwired inherent desire for the occasional adrenaline rush. I’d denied that facet of my makeup since retiring from Delta. But the fire was resident, and I couldn’t stamp the freakin’ thing out.
Violent thrashing erupted from a nearby treetop. There were no monkeys in PNG, so a couple of unknown tree critters scrapped. Or an arboreal creature became supper for a tree snake or night-hunting raptor.
The bounty. Cutting off the head of the snake would change everything. Maybe. Flying solo held appeal, granted. No boss, my own rules. And few of those. I declined hit jobs and wouldn’t light any geopolitical fuses. The people on this planet created more than enough opportunity to kick off chaos and death. I refused to strike those matches.
I ached for her. Rae. The large things, the whole person, laid the foundation for memories and longing. But the smallest remembrances shot their own pain-inducing arrows. The gleeful laugh at something she’d seen or heard. The hands-on-hips stance when she would get serious. The touch of fingernails sliding along my forearm, desultory and meaningful. Oh man.
The last drop of Grey Goose found a home, and I used my pistol hand to push off, stand, tired and awash with melancholy. I wobbled and regained balance. And regained a grip on my physical situation and mental attitude. Yeah, certain aspects of life sucked. But I was here, alive, and working a gig. Enough wallowing in woe-is-me. Sleep called.
One foot through the wheelhouse door, a whiff of the Sally’s shipboard funk hit hard. A pause, a sideways glance, upward and from the corner of my eye. Into the billion-star night and way, way beyond.
“Could use a little help.”
Down the stairs and onto a filthy bunk bed. I dreamt of vivid green surroundings and a hidden pitched keening, loud and lamenting and jungle bound.
Chapter 5
Dawn. Babe popped open a stubbie once he’d fired the engine and untied us. Luke bummed a motrus from the Sally’s vast stock. I asked Babe if he possessed anything resembling coffee.
“I do, mate. I do. Drive.”
He walked away from the wheel and I steered us downriver as clatter and cussing rose from the bowels of the old boat. He bitched and moaned his way upstairs and handed me a small pot and an old jar of instant coffee. It would do.
My left chest and shoulder delivered a deep ache but no lighting shards of pain. The wound hadn’t shown signs of infection. A big deal. Wounds in tropical settings festered with ease. I rotated my shoulder, slow and gentle, fighting back stiffness. While the water heated on a propane-fired single burner situated on what once was a wheelhouse map table, I bathed. A bucket dipped in the muddy river, body wash applied, and three days of jungle body stench scrubbed away. I drip-dried nude and drank something that could have passed as real coffee’s cousin. A distant cousin.
Five hours to Kiunga. It had taken ten coming upriver. The Sally had been the sole available motor craft. The mining contingents brought in their own newer, faster boats.
“They don’t want the old Sally,” Babe had lamented at his strange whining/pleading best when we’d met. “But she’ll get you there! Yes she will.” Then he tried to gouge me on the price.
I set up shop on the back deck during the downriver run, utilizing satellite connectivity for both phone and Internet. Pricey, but worth every penny. I checked messages on the deep web, dark and obscure, using 128-bit encryption.
The sole communiqués were from Mom and Jules of the Clubhouse. Mom wondered when I’d drop by Charleston. She intimated there was an available woman who passed the Mary Lola Wilson, mother of Case Lee, vetting process. I replied, Within the next couple of weeks. Love you. I did. A lot.
The message from Jules—two cryptic words. Gears turn. Great. Gears turn. The whole Spookville thing irritated. She’d glommed onto something. A fine filament of her spider web tingled. She’d scuttled over and consumed the information. Something from the private sector, or CIA, or NSA, or a foreign clandestine organization. Sent as truth, rumor, or misdirection.
But odds were high Jules wouldn’t have sent it unless it affected my current gig. Something or someone moved, took action. Gears turned. And she sent it as a calculated debt-reduction statement. I maintained a credit with her. The amount unknown—the abacus balls and Jules owned that accounting turf. And she wasn’t shy about expressing discomfort at the debt.
I’d paid her hard cash—three large—for PNG intel and maintained my credit balance from the previous Global Resolutions engagement. When visiting her after that one, I’d fed her hot items, real and actionable. She hadn’t pushed using my credit with her for the PNG intel. The warm side of my heart intimated she’d use it as an excuse for interpersonal connectivity. The Jules version of bonhomie. The cold side accepted her taking my cash as a calculated move. Given my vocation, there stood a chance I’d get killed, her debt disappearing with my demise. A play-the-odds mind-set on her part. And I liked Jules. Which speaks volumes to my workaday world.
The first river barge passed by our port side two hours into the trip. A seventy-footer, aluminum. High sided with a flat drop-down bow used for easing up to a riverbank and becoming a ramp. Loaded to the gunwales with material and equipment, it flew the Union Jack. Babe started screaming as it came around a bend in the river, a quarter mile away.
“You’re going to rock the Sally, ya bastids! Rock her like she were nothing!”
He meant the river barge’s wake. As it approached, the low growl of twin high-powered diesels echoed off the jungle walls. Babe continued to scream. The captain smiled and saluted as he passed. Babe grabbed his privates as response. The Sally did rock and roll but handled the large wake with aplomb. I almost patted her railing. Good girl.
An hour later the Russians passed with a similar vessel, also loaded full. The crewmen maintained a dour expression as they passed. Babe didn’t deign to acknowledge them. The Chinese passed next. When spying a crewman’s large black telephoto lens, I ducked into the wheelhouse and stood behind Babe, blocking the camera’s view. Case Lee doesn’t do photographs.
The Indonesian contingent didn’t make a showing on the river.
Kiunga’s rickety docks hopped with activity and noise and dreams of riches. Corrugated tin warehouses pressed wall-to-wall. Some with cut timber frameworks, others using jungle poles. Several pole warehouses leaned, touching the adjacent building. Muddy roads became impassable, so jungle timber was laid perpendicular to the ruts as a road surface. Men and women hustled about. Kiunga locals, tribal members, Asians, Europeans—you name it, they were there. Another gold rush boomtown. It smelled of sawdust, human sweat, and cut-your-throat greed.
“Thanks, Babe. Been a pleasure.”
He took a break from yelling at dockworkers who committed one infraction or another securing the Sally.
“You’ll be back?” he asked, taking my hand. I made a mental note to sanitize the hand ASAP. He’d been on a scratching binge.
“Nope. Good luck. I hope everything works out.”
“Oh, it will. It will.” He turned and delivered a blistering rant to a local who’d failed to meet his expectations performing a task. Addressing me as I slid over the railing with my rucksack, he said, “Look,
mate, I never caught your name.”
“That’s okay. Take care, Babe. Take care.” A final wave and smile and a mental declaration. That wasn’t me in thirty years. No sir, no way. Yeah, Babe was another river rat. A kindred spirit ninety degrees removed. But he held no joy, no appreciation, no love. I’d keep those fires stoked my entire life. Certainty and relief lay there.
I’d kept our room at the lone hotel, using a fake name. Tim Jones. An English couple ran the place. It had modern amenities and an expansive covered veranda for gathering and meals and cocktails. An interesting backstory hid there somewhere, but I’d kept my brief conversations with the proprietor couple focused on current state of affairs. They had told me of Babe and the Sally.
Luke and I worked through mud and standing water. I nodded at passing strangers. A few locals smiled back. The rest stared and looked away. Two men, sweat pouring, alternated blows with their sledgehammers, driving a piling. The rhythmic thwacks of steel on timber set a dull backbeat among the muck and mire and dreams for the milling workers, hustlers, and hangers-on. It began to rain.
It was an hour or so before the hotel cocktail hour, when the top-echelon gold mining players would assemble. Corporate and government types, the overseers of field operations. An interesting cast. The hotel veranda represented the lone game in town, the foundation for the evening play. My information-gathering expectations remained low, but a dance across the stage was requisite. Finish the job. Report out. The bush camps told the real tale. The little hotel soirée—all smoke and mirrors and glares.
Luke went for a walkabout. I hiked over to the gravel-strip airport, a half mile distant. It helped keep my shoulder loose, although the left chest muscle barked, loud. Clouds roiled overhead, rain alternated between drizzle and downpour. The corrugated tin shack alongside the runway contained a collection of material scheduled for the bush. And a young Australian pilot. He wore classic Aussie white knee socks, shorts, and a deep-blue aviation shirt with epaulets. Looking sharp. I inquired as to the next flight available for Port Moresby.