Off the Mangrove Coast (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures)

by Louis L'Amour

  Like that…it was no way for a man to die, no way at all. This was a situation where mere nerve and a gun wouldn’t help. They were too close, there were too many of them. They were altogether too close.

  “There’s water inside such stones,” Helen was speaking quickly. “When the stone is moved, the water often moves. Primitive people often believe a spirit is imprisoned in the rock.”

  My .45 slid into my hand. Lacklan was staring at the natives, his jaw muscles working. “Jeru!” I yelled. “The rifle!” My gun was trained on his chest. “Return the rifle and call off your people or I shoot the Orang Batu!”

  That stopped them. Most of them knew some Malay, and they would certainly know what I meant by the Man of the Rock.

  “No good.” Jeru stared at me sullenly. “You maybe kill me. Rock dead. The Man of the Rock is gone.”

  Lacklan was looking longingly at my pistol. I could see the fear and impatience riding him.

  Helen looked at Jeru’s crystal, but she spoke to me. “Would it help,” she suggested, “if you could put the spirit back in the rock? It can be done.”

  If there was fear in that girl it did not show. If she was trembling it was not in her voice. Here was a woman to walk beside a man, not behind him…and certainly not one who would always be fighting to get ahead of him.

  It was a gamble, but what else had we. “Jeru,” I spoke contemptuously, “the Man of the Rock has left you because of your wickedness.” I spoke in Malay, but I knew that he and at least some of the tribe would comprehend me. “You are evil. You have murdered and robbed from your friends the white men who came in peace. You have enriched some of your tribe by theft, but the spirit of your tribe has gone away. You are alone now. Sickness and death will come upon your village unless the spirit returns. Many sons will die. The strong men of the village will die. The game will go from the forests and the fish from the river. There will be hunger and evil in your huts, and there will be evil and death in your hearts.”

  Malay is a rolling and beautiful language when spoken well. Their eyes were upon me, struggling to follow. I knew enough of the words were known to them to give them at least the sense of what I spoke.

  “You lie!” He said it without strength, sullenly, resentfully, fearing in his heart that what I said was true. There was murmuring among the people.

  “I do not lie! The spirit of the rock is friendly to the white man and to the white woman. We can bring him back to your village if your hearts are right. If he does not return, your village will die and the ants will pick over your bones and the people of Jeru will be no more.”

  Whatever it meant, I was gaining time. In the back of my brain, there was a vague recollection that certain quartz crystals contain water or liquid carbon dioxide, and sometimes these are seen as floating bubbles with the rock. Once that water is gone, however…

  They stared at me, dark superstition stirring within them. Jeru was old and wise, yet superstitious as the rest of them. To these people each rock, each tree, each mountain held a spirit. Yet the spirit of this rock which Jeru wore from his neck was one where the spirit could be seen. It was there, they knew it was there. How long it had been in the village, no man could guess, but now the spirit was gone.

  “Only we who are close to the spirit can induce him to return.” Their eyes were upon me, haunted, staring.

  Out of the side of my mouth I said, low-voiced, “Lady, you’d better be right! What’s the gag? How’s it done?”

  She, too, whispered. “I’ll need a kettle or pot, one with a lid. The stronger the better. And a hot fire.”

  Among the objects in the village was a large iron pot with a lid that I had already seen. Suddenly, I stepped forward. “Now!” I said, and knew if this didn’t work I was going to kill old Jeru, at least. “Bring the rifle to me! You!” I pointed at one big Dyak. “Bring that pot! You, you, and you! Build a fire! Gather stones to place under the pot. Quick!”

  They moved almost without thinking, and I turned swiftly on Jeru. “I have no anger for Jeru nor for his people. I shall induce the Man of the Rock to return, but he will stay with you only so long as you do not do evil to the white men who are your friends. The things you have stolen, all must be returned to Tuan Vandover to free you of evil!”

  Other villagers had turned now and were helping to build high the fire. They were excited as children. This was magic, and magic they longed to see. “Get the rock, Mike,” Helen told me, “and put it in the pot about two-thirds full of water. Put the lid on and weight it down with rocks, then boil that water and hope!”

  “If steam or pressure splits that stone,” I said, “we’d better be the first to know!”

  “I’ve seen it done with a pressure cooker,” she said. “My dad was a mineralogist.”

  Then the water was boiling and the lid of the kettle weighted down. I stepped back and faced the flames. “Now don’t laugh,” I said. “They need something to impress ’em!”

  With my hands outstretched toward the flames, I repeated Hamlet’s soliloquy in solemn tones, really hamming it up, but good.

  In all this time there had been no word from John Lacklan. He stood back at one side, glowering. Maybe I wrong the guy, but I doubt if he even thought of the time we’d gained, of the fact that we might pull them out of the hole. All he was thinking about was that I had been right about Jeru and the diamond and that it was his wife and I who were doing something about it. What was cooking in that narrow skull of his I couldn’t guess. I only hoped he’d save it until we were out of here.

  “What if this doesn’t work?” he sneered.

  “You better pray that it does,” I replied shortly.

  He started at Helen. “You never told me you knew anything about stones!”

  “You never gave me a chance, John,” she said quietly, and then she lifted her eyes to his. “I was really in love with you, John, but you made it harder and harder to stay that way. You never let me help you, John. You always knew. You always had to be right. Even as a little boy, if you couldn’t pitch you wouldn’t play.”

  We watched the flames around the kettle. How much steam would build up inside? How much pressure? How much would it take? I knew nothing of such things. Nor was there, I expect, any general rule. The problem of each stone might be original and different.

  Slowly, as the time passed, the natives began to gather around. “Raj,” I whispered, “if anything goes wrong, it’s every man for himself.”

  “Yes, Tuan.” He looked at me briefly. “If all not well they be very angry. They think much of Orang Batu. Him all right, you be very big man.”

  There was no use delaying. It was now or never. Some time had passed, and now all waited. Slowly, with a long stick, I moved the fire away, then pushed the rocks from the top of the kettle and pushed off the lid. Instantly, steam billowed up, a great gust of it, and muttering some audible words, using two sticks as tongs, I fished in the kettle for the rock, then lifted it out.

  Helen moved close beside me. The steam cleared…she gave a little gasp.

  My mouth was dry. Turning slowly, with infinite care, I looked over the faces that stared at me. They ringed around us, their eyes wide, expectant. Old Jeru was in the front rank, and now he stepped forward. “How is it with the Orang Batu?” he asked.

  Helen said nothing and some native shifted his callused feet on the hard earth. The only good thing was the feel of that Colt in my hand. Helen was looking at the rock again.

  “Mike!” Her voice was excited. “Look!”

  But I had seen…There was one tall, intelligent looking man of some forty years in the group. He had fine features and a strong body. I had noticed there was no friendliness visible between this man and Jeru.

  “The Man of the Rock has come back to you,” I said, “and he will stay and bring prosperity to your village as long as there is no evil among you.”

  Jeru took a hesitant step forward, hand outstretched to receive back the fortune of th
e village, but taking the crystal, I stepped past him and placed it in the hand of the tall man of whom I had noticed much. “You,” I said, “will be the keeper of the Orang Batu. Jeru brought only evil to your village. You will keep this and you will speak with the words of the Orang Batu!”

  Sure it was politics! But there was concentrated evil in the face of the old devil Jeru, and no man with such a face could be liked…The tall man, however, was different…Besides, in case of a fight it is always wise to have the young and strong on your side.

  Jeru? He stepped back like I’d slapped him, actually seeming to shrivel. The new chief was no dope. He stepped out and accepted the rock and looked at it, and when he moved it there stirred under the thin surfaces of the rock a small shadow shaped like a man. The natives crowded around to look, and like Carl Sandburg’s “Fog,” we departed on cat feet.

  Oh, yes! I did linger…just a moment longer.

  So that was the story we told the [word missing], and it was the story we talked about, Fairchild, Vandover and I, in the later hours. “What a man couldn’t do,” Fairchild said, “with a woman like that!”

  “What you could do, Fairchild. Or Kardec. Not Lacklan.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Vandover stoked his pipe. “He’s all ego, yet she saved his life, pulled him out of the mess he got them into. He’ll never forgive her.”

  Then I remembered what he had said when we got into the boat. “I supposed you two are satisfied,” he’d said, “being the whole show.”

  The next time I saw her it was morning. She came down the path of the bungalow alone. “We’re flying out,” she said. “I’ve come to say goodbye.”

  “I take back what I said, that this country isn’t for a woman like you.”

  She smiled at me, a little forlornly, I thought. “No, Mike, you were right.” Her eyes met mine. “I lost a husband here, Mike.”

  “Hadn’t you lost him before?” I asked gently.

  She hesitated, looking out over the garden. “Maybe. Or he lost me, or something.”

  “Sorry,” I said, but I lied in my teeth, and she knew it.

  “You made the trip for nothing,” she said. “It wasn’t fair.”

  “No,” I told her, “not for nothing.”

  She looked at me, hesitated, then said quietly, “Mike, I’d never suggest such a thing to John, but you…you’re a bigger man. John would never accept anything from me, not even…partnership. But Mike, I…I’m a wealthy woman, Mike, and I heard you were guiding us just for passage money. Would you let me pay it to you now? You earned it, you know.”

  She was a very beautiful girl. A very wonderful girl. A very desirable girl. “It won’t be necessary.”

  “You’re not just proud? You could pay me back if you liked?”

  “No, it isn’t being proud. Remember, when I hung back a bit at the village?”

  “Yes, of course.” She was puzzled.

  My hand came from my pocket. “Never under rate a man who has lived as I have, Helen. Just as a man who has lived as I have would never under rate a woman as lovely as you.” I smiled. “In this sort of life, well, one always…” I opened my hand.

  On my palm lay an easy twenty-five carats…the diamond of Jeru!

  THE END

  Whenever I work on one of these old stories, I initially focus on trying to make it a representation of the best of my father’s talent, to the point of considering what had happened in his life up to the date it was written and doing research into what he had been writing and reading at the time. After that, however, I try also to fulfill the story, to listen to what it wanted to become as an entity separate from my father. Once he began writing, Dad would always try to follow where a story would lead him. I do not necessarily have the same unconscious ability and my sensitivities are somewhat different, but I try in my own way to deliver a similar result.

  One of my first problems when it came to revising “The Diamond of Jeru” was that I knew almost nothing about Borneo and had little time before the book’s deadline to do research. As luck would have it, an acquaintance recommended several wonderful books. Stranger in the Forest by Eric Hansen is the account of the author’s journey from one side of the island and back, on foot, mostly alone. It is filled with wonderful detail and absolutely saved my bacon over and over. Together with Redmond O’Hanlon’s Into the Heart of Borneo and a classic from my father’s library, World Within by Tom Harrisson, I had the backbone of a library on the world’s third-largest island.

  So I was off and running. I started expanding the narrative, creating a similar but more nuanced plot, using the same basic characters but trying to make them more complex and human. My editor kept calling: “Where’s the book? Deadlines! Deadlines!” I knew where I was going but not necessarily all the things that were going to happen along the way. “They’re still going upriver,” I’d tell him. “You have to give me more time!” Finally, it was finished and the manuscript was shipped off to New York. My experience with diamonds, the tribes of Sarawak, Jeru, Mike Kardec, and John and Helen Lacklan was over…or so I thought.

  A year or so after the collection Off the Mangrove Coast was published, I got a call from Michael Joyce. Mike is a good friend of mine and we had briefly worked together in the film business a decade earlier. I believe that the first production he worked on was Star Wars (the original 1977 film) and his last credit, before retirement in 2004, was the pilot for the Sci-Fi Channel’s reboot of Battlestar Galactica. He was a veteran line producer who had the capacity to make any type of film.

  Mike was returning from a location scout in North Africa for a potential USA Network movie. During the long flight he’d had a discussion with one of their executives about the fact that they were considering doing a classic adventure piece.

  As soon as he landed he called me to ask if I had something of Dad’s that might be appropriate, and of course I had a number of different alternatives. After several days of discussion about the likely locations and what the budget of the film might be, we decided to show them “The Diamond of Jeru.”

  In my experience it’s virtually impossible to sell a project to any studio or network unless there is some sort of preexisting demand. Because, in this case, we had that on our side we were able to make a sale in short order.

  The contracts for the underlying rights (the story itself) were finished by early December, a time when the entire film business starts to shut down for the holidays. Mike had arranged to bring me on as a producer (an offer so generous it still astounds me), but the more I considered the story the more I realized that I wanted to write the screenplay as well.

  That was vastly easier said than done. Studios and networks are very particular about whom they hire as writers, usually choosing from an extremely exclusive though ever-changing list. While I had scripts to show and I’d been hired a few times in the past (on films that ultimately did not get produced), I knew it was very unlikely that I could submit myself (always seen as grossly self-serving) and actually be hired to write the screenplay. If I was going to pull this off, I would have to write the entire script on spec and then hope for divine intervention, too!

  Though not quite divine intervention, there were two things in my favor. One was that the holidays were approaching and nobody was going to be looking for a writer until they all came back to work in the second week of January. The other was that there were contract negotiations with both the writers’ and screen actors’ unions scheduled for early summer. All film production would need to wrap prior to a potential strike in case the negotiations failed. That meant that the network would want to get the production started as quickly as possible…or would have to wait until the new contracts were signed.

  Waiting in the film business is a death sentence; in this case waiting would likely mean the film would never get made and the money spent to option it would have been wasted. Therefore, if there was a chance to finish the production before the negotiations started, the
network was going to be very motivated to take advantage of it. Hollywood myth is full of fanciful examples, but this is what an actual “breakin” opportunity looks like.

  I started writing. My job was to adapt the novella that I had written from my father’s short story. The way I think about it, it is deadly for a writer doing an adaptation to feel too beholden to the underlying material…even if you were one of the original authors. It is always important to activate a new layer of creativity and discover new qualities in the work so that it remains fresh and continues to evolve.

  When working on the novella, the rules I’d made for myself about deviating from Dad’s style had restricted my approach to the story. The original short story and the novella were written in first person: a story told by Kardec from his interior perspective and in the past tense. Movies are, by their nature, mostly present tense, and they are told from an exterior perspective. Audience members are shown what the characters do; they are not told how they feel or what they think. Those things are indicated by the context.

  Since I was again expanding the story to fill the USA Network’s eighty-nine-minute time requirement, that meant, first and foremost, that I had the opportunity to deal with John and Helen Lacklan in a close and personal way, rather than just as characters only seen through Kardec’s eyes. What exactly were the Lacklans’ marital problems? Why did they come, of all places, to Borneo? I also wanted to portray more of the life of Borneo natives, dealing with them in a more complex manner than just Mike Kardec’s friend Raj and Jeru, the villain. Then there were a similar set of questions about Kardec and what he was doing in Sarawak. What the heck was his backstory?

  I had only a few weeks to write the script, so I had to burn the candle at both ends. Often I was writing out rough drafts of scenes while I was supervising the edit of the dramatized audio production of Son of a Wanted Man. Late at night I would polish and refine those drafts before I finally went to bed. Over the holidays I drove to Colorado, stopping occasionally to type up my various ideas and mental notes. I wrote on the road, in our cabin, and in a hotel room in Santa Fe, creating an adventure in the tropical rain forest while surrounded by the Rocky Mountain winter. Returning to Los Angeles, I had just enough time to do yet another draft before the network resumed work for the new year.