Abnormal Occurrences

by Thomas Berger

  The living anaconda, which had taken our real guides a month to locate, soon vanished into the impenetrable swamps after we had gotten all too little of it on film. Despite its size, this serpent is anyway not the ferocious creature depicted in Hollywood potboilers, seldom taking on an adversary larger than a chicken, and remains as torpid as a garden hose for days after a meal—unless of course pursued by a TV crew, from which it flees in terror. In the wrestling match presented on our show, the antagonists were a thirty-foot anaconda made of foam rubber and a New York actor stained to represent a native guide; the jungle pond was a tank in a studio in Spanish Harlem.

  The film as aired, genuine and simulated sequences intermixed, looked convincing enough for those days. As I remember, the only complaints we received were from snake-lovers who, despite the aforementioned pains we had taken to avoid offending them (which included an affidavit from a leading animal-rights group, appearing as a graphic on the screen), insisted that living reptiles had been mutilated for purposes of entertainment.

  Octopus-fanciers were heard from after our skin-diver show, and a record number of written, phoned, or telegraphed protests (imagine what the volume of emails might have been; luckily the internet was a thing of the future) were provoked by our simulated killing of a reputed man-eating lion in Kenya. For the latter, we had used some old movie footage in which a Hollywood animal, toothless and nearly senile, collapsed on a cue from his off-camera trainer. Our worry had been only that sequence would be recognized by those hosts of viewers who had lately seen it on the television revivals of the ancient Tarzan movies.

  It was not so identified. I cannot recall a single complaint on that or any other similar score. No one seemed offended by fakery in itself. We were never taken to task for falsely promising that which we had no intention of delivering: real human beings in genuinely extreme situations. Either the man was bogus, at least in the role portrayed, or the experience was rigged so as to render it harmless.

  So much by way of introduction to the account of an incident in which the values were precisely reversed. Though every moment of this episode was recorded by our cameras, for obvious reasons the film could never be shown. Presented on the home screen, within rigid limitations of space and time and interrupted by commercial messages and station breaks, this remarkable event would have seemed pointless except as a cruel mockery of the moral proposition on which our show was based: that the intrepid man invariably vanquishes the menace; to put it crudely, that bravery pays off.

  We, the staff and crew of Courage, were in Southeast Asia at the time. I shall not give the name of the country; it had but lately achieved its independence from a European colonial power, and was suffering the usual elation, pains, and doubts of such a status. There were riots in the capital city, buckets of filth were hurled over the wells surrounding the U.S. Embassy, and from time to time homemade bombs were lobbed into outdoor cafes by dissident elements.

  I sat in such an establishment one afternoon with Bud Servo, our executive producer and my superior, who was naturally of the liberal persuasion but for his own reasons when abroad often posed as the vulgar, aggressive American whom he ritualistically deplored. At the moment he was loudly calling for ice with which to cool his nugi, a local sort of beer made from the fermented juice of some jungle flower. This potation was properly drunk just after it had been heated to the simmering point and decanted into tiny stone cups—a practice of which Bud was well aware.

  “Hey, boy,” he cried to our waiter, an ancient, coffee-colored individual dressed in a striped sarong bottom. There were dark looks from nearby tables. Many of the non-Caucasian clientele wore the Nationalist costume of white-canvas mess jacket and trousers and fore-and-aft cap.

  My visible embarrassment only caused Bud to shout the louder. As the Nationalists began to hiss in indignation, a shabby little man, his mahogany face pitted with scars, sidled up to our table and said: “Surr, you buy Jairmon camera?”

  “I’ll buy ten,” said Bud, reaching for his money clip.

  “Amee schleepok!” screamed the little man, meaning “American swine,” or the like—I had learned that much of the language—dropped the camera to the table, where it exploded with a great noise, broke all our nugi cups, and filled the area with pungent smoke. But oddly enough, as we discovered upon arising and shaking out our clothes, hurt no human being.

  The Nationalists now made a handsome gesture, coming en bloc to apologize. They were concerned that we should form a negative opinion of their country on the basis of this single incident. Their spokesman, in serviceable though quaint English, blamed the “rude lot of revolutionist hooligans” for our inconvenience, and assured us that the vast majority of his fellow countrymen were of the democratic persuasion.

  The upshot was that Bud proceeded to stand them several rounds of nugi, discoursed at length on the economic affairs of the country—with which he had somewhere acquired an astonishing familiarity—and eventually went off in their company to one of the twenty-seven-course dinners that were a local specialty.

  Bud confessed to me next day that the little “hooligan” had been in his employ, had been furnished with the harmless camera-bomb and paid to detonate it on our table. Only in such a fashion, Bud had felt, could he genuinely make contact with the citizenry.

  “You’ve got to neutralize their basic hostility,” he said. “Now that we have become victims, we will be trusted.”

  All I can say is that it worked, as Bud’s contrivances usually did. He had obtained from his new friends a number of recommendations to chieftains and headmen in the back country without which we could not have got far. We had come to this land to do a single show, on tiger hunting, but now Bud envisioned at least three additional programs treating the pursuit of, respectively, the giant squid that infested the coastal waters; the gaur, a kind of wild cow and formidable as the Cape buffalo; and finally and foremost, the king cobra.

  Bud had always had a partiality towards snakes as a theme for Courage. No wild thing more intrigues an audience than a reptile. You start with the instinctive response of horror and dread that is universally felt by human beings for that which squirms and writhes; add to that the lethal properties of the dangerous serpents and you have something to conjure with.

  Now, we had already done the anaconda show, but as yet we had not brought to fruition a sequence concerning venomous snakes, among which the king cobra is pre-eminent: the largest in the world, growing sometimes to exceed eighteen feet, and the most potent; its bite has been known to kill an elephant, if administered to the tender tip of the trunk.

  On the list of persons to contact in the provinces, given Bud by his newfound friends, appeared the name of one Dr. Poon; specialty, King Cobra; address, “west of Duala Kum, Southeast Province.” In the margin opposite these data, Bud’s informants had noted, “controversial individual.”

  I pointed this out to Bud as we supervised the loading of our equipment onto the Land Rovers amid the red dust of the capital’s main thoroughfare. Nearby, a man in a dirty turban lashed the emaciated ox that pulled his cart, and we were surrounded by beseeching brown urchins.

  “Dr. Poon,” said Bud, “has an ambivalent reputation. He claims to have developed a concoction, to be taken orally, which provides absolute immunity to cobra venom. I have return cables from the top herpetologists of the U.S., Europe, and Germany, who term him without qualification as a fraud. But,” Bud went on, wiping the sweatband of his Norm Thompson safari hat, “Dr. Poon’s own countrymen swear by him. Now you can sneer and call them ignorant wogs, but I say let’s catch his act before we read him off. After all, these people have lived with cobras all their lives.”

  It took us five days of hard travel to reach the city of Duala Kum over the so-called national highway which throughout much of its length was hardly better than a cow path, crossing desert, jungle, mountain, and swamp—the entire series in every fifty miles, or so it seemed in the ghastly heat and chockful as we were of antibiotics,
vitamin reinforcements, and other preventatives of Asiatic maladies.

  In certain marshy places not even the four-wheel drive of the doughty Land Rovers sufficed to keep us moving, and more than once we had to send forward or to the rear for towing service, which in these parts meant an elephant, commandeered by a native with a steel hook. At sunset we made camp just off the highway, when that was feasible; when not, upon the road itself; there was so little traffic. Mosquitoes hereabout were big as grasshoppers. Occasionally we thought we heard a tiger cough in the distance.

  Duala Kum, capital of the Southeast Province, consisted of a cluster of wicker cottages surrounding one termite-gnawed structure of wood. Bud had sent a native porter ahead to announce our arrival, and a welcoming committee, complete with a band of bamboo flutes and homemade drums, greeted us as we hauled up in the municipal square. After a concert, fortunately brief, we were led into the wooden building, which proved to be the gubernatorial palace, and received by the provincial governor, a huge, rotund, hairless, relentlessly grinning man of mocha hue, named Lu Pok. He was soon revealed as a singular combination of what I can only call Eastern guile and Western vulgarity. The latter no doubt was the result of his two years as an exchange student at a teacher’s college somewhere in rural Indiana, in the early nineteen fifties. He had apparently watched a good deal of TV during that period, and prominent upon his office wall was an eight-by-ten glossy of an overblown blonde personality of those early days in television. An inscription to “My friend Lu Pok” ran across her abundant mammaries.

  “And how goes it with Miss Trixie in these days?” asked the governor, indicating the photograph and our chairs with the same graceful gesture of his fat arm.

  She had vanished from the national networks a decade since, to open supermarkets and perform at county fairs, but Bud of course was quick to convey her personal greetings to Lu Pok.

  A tiny pink lizard scuttled up the wall behind the governor’s huge, cropped brown head. A tattered ceiling fan, operated through a series of crude pulleys and fraying ropes by a breech-clothed lackey who sat on the ground outside, stirred occasional gusts of air and stench upon us.

  “My goodness, how one is taken back in the memory to joys of one’s undergraduate,” said Lu Pok. “Hotdogs and melted milks. At the bathing pools, ladies’ legs bared. Whereas the bosom, which in my country is of no erotic interest, in yours is kept ever swathed.”

  As if to accentuate his point, at this moment two bare-breasted maidens entered the room and served us cups of brackish green tea.

  “One trusts,” said Lu Pok, having sipped loudly from the cup and wiped his great mouth, “the film you are about to make will prove profitable. One can assure you that the license fees to operate a motion-picture camera in the Southeastern Province are modest, and one’s own brother owns appropriate terrain for any type of setting: jungle, plain, mountain; the rental being exceedingly reasonable.”

  “However,” Bud said when the interview was finished and we had moved into the wicker huts assigned us as lodging, “that fat bastard has us by the short hairs. Did you hear his threat that guerillas would burn our transport on any land not rented from his brother?”

  “Well,” said I, “I think you called his bluff.”

  An explosion outside made my statement valueless. We dashed into the clearing to watch one of the Land Rovers burn vigorously while the members of the erstwhile welcoming delegation stood about unconcernedly chewing betel nut and spitting red. Luckily it was not the car that contained the cameras. Nevertheless, the loss was substantial in sleeping bags and tinned food.

  Within a few moments after the flames at last died away and it was clear that the entire vehicle must be written off, Bud requested another audience with Lu Pok. This time the governor received us in his steam bath, a tightly woven straw enclosure in the back yard of the “palace,” where he sat stark naked while servant girls, dressed only in abbreviated shirts, poured cold water on hot stones. Clouds of mist swept over his mountainous form, and torrents of perspiration rolled down his fat breasts and the rubbery horizontal folds giving way to the great convex of his belly.

  Bud and I were both deftly stripped by the girls and shown to dried-grass carpets flanking Lu Pok. My own embarrassment was relieved by a certain sense of satisfaction that for once Bud had met more than his match.

  “Your Excellency,” said Bud, “we won’t give you any trouble about the license fee, but I should make clear our purpose in visiting your beautiful province.” He shifted on his hams, for the mats were ungodly hot. “It is not to make the Hollywood-type motion picture nor the New York-type television show with which you are familiar from your days in the U.S.A. It Is rather to pursue our long search for situations in which man meets and overcomes a true-life experience of the greatest danger.”

  A servant girl leaned across Bud and sponged his brow, while another did the same for me, her firm nipples against my upper arm.

  “I am afraid, much as we would like to oblige your brother,” Bud continued, “our interest is confined to one individual in this region. Excellency, we made this long trip in general to encounter and vanquish the king cobra, and in specific to meet your remarkable fellow countryman Dr. Poon.”

  “Ah,” answered Lu Pok with a grimace, “then your effort will be contradictory, for Poon has totally eliminated the danger of cobra. Through his work cobra is now harmless as a lark.”

  “Yes,” Bud doggedly insisted, “we want to meet Dr. Poon as soon as possible. So you see, Excellency, we’ll have to pass up the opportunity to make an arrangement with your brother.”

  “Not at all, my dear chap,” said Lu Pok, making his narrow eyes vanish in amusement. “Poon is my brother.”

  At that moment the girls brought in several containers of cold water and drenched us all. After the initial shock it proved greatly refreshing. Then they briskly toweled us dry. My winsome helper, even more attractive than Bud’s, was very adept with her birdlike hands. I should have liked to know her better, but after polishing Lu Pok’s brown hide to a sheen, the girls helped him into a pair of underdrawers made of fine linen and both accompanied him into the gubernatorial residence. Perhaps they were his wives.

  Next morning as we set out for Dr. Poon’s compound, fourteen kilometers to the west of Duala Kum, we came upon the governor’s car, an ancient American sedan, which stood blocking the one-lane national highway. Lu Pok filled the entire rear seat. He wore his full-dress uniform: billed cap and a white tunic the massive chest of which was covered with multicolored decorations.

  “One would,” he said gravely, “consider it shameful not to conduct you personally to one’s brother.” He directed his naked chauffeur to put the car in motion, which was done with chatters and squeaks and billowing clouds of smoke. In such fashion and at a speed of some eight miles per hour we were led along the washboard road towards the great authority on cobra.

  The trip consumed the better part of the morning. Twice we had to stop and clear the road of teak-log obstructions placed thereon, according to Lu Pok, by insurgents. And through a particularly dense stretch of jungle, where the trees joined above the highway, we endured a fusillade of nuts hurled by orangutans who were enraged by our invasion.

  We parked on the highway and walked in the last mile to Dr. Poon’s on a narrow, tortuous jungle trail that hummed with insects. Lu Pok elected to bring up the rear, sending his chauffeur ahead with a machete to out obstructing vines and point out pools of quicksand. Bud had forgotten, or was too cheap, to hire a sufficient number of native porters; and sweating under their heavy burdens of equipment, our crew swore to bring the matter before their union when we got back to New York.

  But finally the jungle gave way to wiry brush, then the brush opened on a rolling savannah of tawny grass above which rose the thatched roof of Dr. Poon’s laboratory.

  Lu Pok swept up to join Bud and me in the vanguard. “To wait here is highly advisable,” he warned. “Poon is utterly deaf, like his cobra, bu
t again like the reptiles he can detect ground vibrations at inordinate distances. So large a party has never before come to visit him. Unless approached circumspectly, he may have recourse to some desperate measure. As with all geniuses, he is eccentric.”

  Bud was somewhat unnerved, but had enough presence of mind to order the cameras to roll from the moment the governor moved towards his brother’s building. Lu Pok’s great body, in its white uniform, went across the clearing for a hundred yards. He paused before the long building, then, a grotesque image through the field glasses, stole on tiptoe to the void of the entranceway and peeped within, bending at such an extreme angle that his figure seemed to end at the buttocks.

  Waves of midday heat shimmered above the field like flights of translucent insects. All about us lay menacing silence; even the flies had gone. My clothes, soaked through, clasped me insidiously.

  His face like a wet orange, Bud said to me: “I don’t like it.”

  Then, behind us, Walt Riley, the chief cameraman, screamed like a woman, and I turned to see the flat head of a cobra staring at him from above the grass tops, which hereabout rose beyond our waists. The specimen must have exceeded ten feet in length, and, I realised later, probably stared in curiosity, not malice, its hood unflared.

  But Bud brought forth a small pistol from under his bush jacket and proceeded to blaze away. I had not been aware until this moment that he carried a weapon. He missed with six shots, though clipping grass on either side of his target. The cobra’s head never wavered: that was the frightening thing to me at the moment. I did not then appreciate the fact of its deafness.

  In its own good time, the snake eventually sank out of sigh, and shortly thereafter, Lu Pok reappeared at the door of the straw building and called across to us. As we moved towards him, I saw Bud desperately reloading the nickel-plated revolver, dropping more shells than he placed.