Diffusion

by Stan C. Smith

  At the table there were boiled eggs and bread slices with a bit of peanut butter on them. As they ate, Mr. Darnell reviewed the day’s schedule. The flight to Sentani was at 3:30, and everyone had to be at the losmen by noon. Until then they could explore on their own.

  Mrs. Darnell was against this and everyone knew it. Apparently Mr. Darnell had convinced her they wouldn’t be kidnapped or killed if they had a few hours on their own.

  When Mr. Darnell finished, she shouted for them to stay seated. “This is not our country; it’s theirs,” she said. “Ashley, what will you do if someone touches you?”

  “I’ll say Permisi, uh…selamat jalan.”

  “And just walk away,” Mrs. Darnel finished it for her.

  A few chuckles rippled around the table. The others wouldn’t let Ashley forget her fight with Pupun. She must have been really scared to hit someone like that. Bobby had been that scared only a few times before. There wasn’t much to be afraid of in Newton, Missouri. One time a growling dog had cornered him in an alley. He’d grabbed a rock and thrown it. He’d missed, but the dog had backed off. He hadn’t thought about throwing the rock, it had just happened. Danger had a way of changing people.

  Bobby, Carlos, and Addison burst through the door onto the street. The air smelled of strange food and pigs. Barefoot walkers and bicycle riders were everywhere, some with bundles balanced on their heads or hanging behind them from straps across their foreheads. Two Papuan men wearing only horims walked by, holding hands and talking to each other in Dani. Across the street a Papuan woman sat on the ground. Two naked children rolled an empty can around in the dirt next to her. An Indonesian boy, waiting with combed hair and white clothes for his mother to finish talking to someone, watched them play but didn’t try to join them.

  The three students decided to head for the Pasar Nayak market. As they walked, they passed Papuans squatting in the dirt with small piles of sugar cane, ginger root, or yellow tomatoes spread out on cloth before them. Bobby couldn’t imagine they could make much money selling these, and he was tempted to give away the last of his own money. He thought about the Papuans they had met at Lorentz Park. Pupun and his friends had few possessions and maybe no money at all. But unlike the Papuans here, Bobby hadn’t thought of those men as poor.

  At the Pasar Nayak market, which was open on the sides but covered by a metal roof, they wandered for over an hour through endless rows of goods. Carlos couldn’t find a necklace he liked, so finally he bought a machete in a sheath decorated with animals and the words, Wamena, Indonesia.

  When they left the market, a Papuan man carrying a pile of t-shirts stopped them. He held up a shirt emblazoned with the Morning Star flag. The man had a warm smile and friendly eyes, and the boys liked what the teachers had told them about the freedom fighters, so they each bought one. This depleted Bobby’s remaining money.

  Addison shed his pack and pulled his new shirt on. He said, “How’s it look?”

  “Like a dumb-ass tourist,” Carlos said, stuffing his into his pack. Bobby stowed his away, too.

  They turned north on Sudarso, a street busy with activity, but as they made their way north, things seemed to change. People were shouting and running. Soon Bobby saw a mass of people in the street several blocks ahead. He stopped walking.

  “Guys. I don’t think we should go this way.”

  Addison kept walking. “Come on, I want to see what’s going on!”

  Suddenly two Indonesian policemen, wearing stiff tan uniforms and black berets, stepped in front of them, blocking their way.

  “Mau ke mana?” said one of the policemen. The men were not smiling, and their brown faces sparkled with sweat. A pistol hung from each of their belts, balanced on the other side by a black club.

  Carlos said, “Sorry, we speak English.”

  Suddenly, smoke billowed from the middle of the crowd ahead, followed by angry shouting. The two policemen turned and ran toward the crowd, leaving the boys staring in fascination. As Bobby instinctively began backing away, the crowd erupted into chaos and violence. Police billy clubs thrashed in the air above the heads, and people tumbled over each other trying to escape.

  “Addison! Thank God!”

  Bobby turned, startled. It was Mrs. Darnell.

  “Where the hell have you boys been?” She grabbed the neck of Addison’s t-shirt and started hustling them away from the violent crowd. She pulled out her walkie-talkie as she walked. “Quentin?”

  Brief static and then a voice, “Yeah, Linds. Any luck?”

  “I found them. We’ll be at the airport in less than ten.” She lowered the walkie-talkie. “Change of plans. We’re leaving for Sentani now.”

  “Why are we leaving early?” Bobby asked as he tried to keep up.

  She shot him a glance. “Do you really need to ask that? There are conflicts at the north end this morning. Remember talking about the OPM, and the flag?”

  “Yeah. We bought t-shirts. Addison’s wearing his.”

  Mrs. Darnell looked at Addison’s shirt for the first time. She stopped walking. “I told your dad this was a bad idea.” She shook her head and started walking again. “It’ll be okay, Lindsey. They’ll stay out of trouble! Oh, and let’s not buy local SIM cards for their phones, Lindsey. Why would they ever need them?”

  Bobby had never seen her this upset.

  “What about the OPM?” Addison said.

  “Some Papuans demonstrated by raising the flag. Things are getting out of hand. Now they’re trying to get tourists out of Wamena.” She nodded at the shirt. “Take that off. Now.”

  Addison started to pull it off, but when she looked away he shoved it back down.

  As they approached the green domed roof of the air terminal, it became clear that something was very wrong. Tourists were everywhere, slinging luggage around, fumbling for money and paperwork.

  Mrs. Darnell plunged straight through the crowd and into the building. Angry shouting and the odor of sweat filled the crowded space. She guided them through the confusion and out the other side. There they saw Mr. Darnell and the other kids sitting next to the airstrip. The luggage was piled on the grass beside them.

  “Nice of you guys to join us,” Russ said. “We’ve missed our plane like four times.”

  Mr. Darnell rose to his feet. “We should be able to board one of the Twin Otters,” he said. “The larger planes are filled.”

  Bobby’s excitement grew as the plane bounced and rolled to the grassy edge of the airstrip, coming to a stop just in front of him. They had flown from Sentani to Wamena on a big Fokker F-twenty-something, and he’d had a lousy seat far from the window. But this was a proper jungle plane—rugged-looking and dirty white with blue letters that said Merpati. A door near the Twin Otter’s nose popped open, and an Indonesian pilot climbed to the ground. He glanced at the Americans without smiling and then opened a baggage door at the rear of the plane and one on the side of the nose cone. He attacked the pile of luggage, throwing it in like he was angry at every bag. He was not having a good day.

  Inside the plane, Bobby counted eighteen seats, jammed into a cabin not much larger than the minibus. Each row had two seats on the right and one on the left.

  “Move your butt, Roberto. Miranda, don’t touch me there!”

  “Bite it, Russ!”

  The older boys took the first row, then Ashley and Miranda, and then the Darnells. Addison and Carlos took the two seats behind the teachers, leaving Bobby by himself. He chose the single seat across from them, happy to have his own space by the windows.

  The cabin was hot and smelled like fuel. Tattered fabric covered the seats. In fact, everything seemed worn out, like his dad’s old car. Dents and gashes stippled the cabin wall. Suspicious substances caked the floor, gumming up the seams and screws. Bobby felt the same rush as when he boarded a roller coaster—helplessness mixed with anticipation. He looked out the window, his own private window, at the mountains encircling Wamena and the Ba
liem Valley.

  It had been an exciting day, so far.

  Three

  The hotter the goddamn plane, the longer you have to sit and wait, thought Quentin. By the time Lindsey had found the boys, the larger planes had departed, leaving only a handful of Twin Otters. The airline’s resources must have been stretched thin, for it appeared there would be only one pilot on this flight. Through the window, Quentin watched the pilot quarrelling with an airline official. Apparently the pilot’s goal was to argue with every person at the airport before taking off.

  Quentin moaned and shifted position. He twirled a small object in his fingers, a habit developed in his first year of teaching that helped calm his nerves. It was a raccoon baculum, or penis bone, that a student had bought while on a family trip to the Ozarks. The student had joyfully explained that Ozark boys once gave the four-inch bones to their girlfriends as tokens of love. Quentin had jokingly offered it to Lindsey when they’d first met, and she’d surprised him by revealing that she’d already collected bacula from a dozen different mammals to show her students. Every day since then he had carried it with him in the pocket of his trousers.

  Lindsay smiled at his nervous habit. “Things could be worse.”

  “How?”

  “We could be stuck here. The Papuans are uprising, and we’d be caught in the middle of it, an international incident. ‘American Teenagers Involved in Civil War.’” She framed the headlines with her hands. “The kids would join the separatists. We’d have to go back and tell the parents they’re now freedom fighters.”

  Quentin felt his stress soften. “You’re a little disturbed.”

  She smiled again. This time Quentin was struck by the glint in her eyes and felt a surge of passion. But his fervor did not suit the setting. Soon we’ll be home, he reminded himself. He decided the conversation could serve as a distraction. “More likely they’d join the Indonesian police,” he said. “They’ve got aptitude for making people suffer.”

  “Why don’t you ask them which side they’d choose? Did you see Addison’s new shirt? He wore it all over town today. I told him to take it off, and he ignored me.”

  Quentin turned around to look, noting Addison’s shirt for the first time. He was secretly pleased at the thought of his son siding with the indigenous Papuans. “I guess you’re right; they’d join the Papuans. Maybe start a village in the rainforest and live on sago grubs.”

  Quentin glanced around at the other students. At the front of the cabin, Russ and Roberto appeared to be sleeping. Both girls bobbed their heads to music from their headphones. All three younger boys were doing something on their smartphones. A young Indonesian couple sat at the back of the plane, talking intimately together. A policeman whose apparent purpose had been to convince the pilot the Indonesians were legitimate passengers had escorted them onto the plane some minutes ago.

  Quentin said, “Whose idea was it to let the students out on their own, anyway?”

  Lindsey wiped her smile away, not acknowledging humor in this. “You really don’t want to go there right now.”

  A thud-click broke their thoughts as the pilot slammed and secured the passenger door. The pilot clambered into the cockpit. Both engines started. He revved them up, and the entire plane bucked. An open doorway separated the cockpit from the cabin, exposing the pilot’s right side and most of the instrument panel. On the instrument panel was a worn piece of masking tape with a series of marks on it. In what must have been a safety check, the pilot pointed to the instruments one at a time and moved his finger to the next mark on the tape, as if he might lose track of the process. The pilot looked over his shoulder like he was pulling out of a supermarket parking lot, and the plane surged forward onto the airstrip.

  In no time, they were rising toward the mountains enclosing the Wamena Valley. Quentin noticed that Miranda was apparently praying. Her cropped blonde hair allowed Quentin to see that her eyes were closed and lips were moving. It was the first inclination toward religion he had seen in any of the students—peculiar, considering they’d been together for over a week. The others watched through the windows as the tin roofs of Wamena gave way to scattered, thatch-roofed huts surrounded by neatly-divided sweet potato gardens.

  As they flew north to the peaks of the Maoke Mountains, Lindsey pointed out the road gradually being built from Wamena to Jayapura. Forging a road through hundreds of miles of mountainous and lowland swampy rainforest was beyond Quentin’s comprehension. He wished they would give it up, as it seemed like a vicious assault on this remarkable wilderness.

  Huts and gardens thinned out and then disappeared entirely, leaving only rainforest and mountaintops to the horizon. Quentin gazed at the expanse. He and Lindsey had traveled here four times but had experienced only the highland area around Wamena. The vast forest below was a different world, dark and mysterious. Other than the atrocious road being constructed, it had changed very little since Alfred Wallace, the first naturalist to set foot in New Guinea in the 1850s, spent several months to the north and published a fascinating account of his adventures.

  Wallace’s time had been a grand age of discovery, but in all his wisdom, Wallace clearly had not considered the long-term impacts of his contact with the indigenous people. And like Wallace, Quentin’s own parents had neglected to appreciate the fact that when people of vastly different cultures met, diffusion of customs and values was inescapable, and they were forever changed. And such changes were not always good.

  Twenty minutes later, as the mountains gave way to lowland rainforest, the only breaks in the scene below were occasional glimpses of the brown water of winding rivers. Of the students, only Bobby still seemed spellbound by the passing forest, his face glued to the window.

  Quentin unbuckled and stood in the narrow aisle facing the three younger boys. “I’m sure you guys have a great story to tell about your morning and why Mrs. Darnell was upset.”

  Addison didn’t even look up from the screen on his smartphone.

  Bobby glanced at Quentin and returned his gaze to the window. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Well, I want the full story tonight. That’ll give you guys a chance to get it straight.”

  They all smiled at this, even Addison.

  As Quentin turned back to his seat, a prickly wave suddenly swept through his body. He nearly toppled over. He reached out to right himself, but his hand found nothing. He looked around and could see nothing. There was only a gray vastness. It was peaceful and demanded no explanation. After an indeterminable time, the gray expanse gave way, returning him to the harsh cabin light. He realized he was gripping his chest with one hand.

  A voice came from the side, “Great, what’s wrong now?”

  Quentin looked at the voice. Addison tapped his smartphone, irritated at something that didn’t work. Lindsey’s eyes were pinched closed, as if coping with a migraine. As Quentin’s equilibrium returned, he watched until she opened her eyes. She seemed as confused as he was.

  One of the older boys said, “What the hell was that?”

  Bobby’s voice screeched, “Mr. Darnell, something’s wrong! Look at the engine!”

  Quentin leaned over Bobby and pressed against the window. The left engine was mounted on the wing above their heads. Oil streamed from its housing, making a horizontal trail in the air, dashing the wing strut. The oil suddenly caught fire. Flames sputtered wildly in the slipstream. Quentin stared at it for a moment and then turned to the others. The Indonesian couple at the rear of the cabin caught Quentin’s attention. They embraced each other as if they were frightened, and he could not see their faces. His eyes were drawn to the man’s dark hands, gripping the woman’s clean, white shirt. Briefly he thought how strangely beautiful this was.

  “Quentin?” It was Lindsey. The students were silent, waiting.

  “It’s on fire,” he whispered, too quietly for anyone to hear. The plane suddenly pitched left. He caught himself on the seat and looked out the window. The engine h
ad shut down, the windmilling propeller creating enough drag to throw the plane into a turn.

  “Hey, man, you all right?” It was Russ, shouting to the pilot in front of him. Then he turned to face them. “There’s something wrong with him!”

  Quentin scrambled to the cockpit doorway. What he saw there made him freeze. The pilot’s back arched, pressing his shoulders against the seat. His legs kicked wildly. Gasping for air, the pilot’s breaths came in sickening whines: “HEE, HEE, HEE…” He was trying to remove the headset, but his hands flailed, scratching his face and eyes instead.

  With the controls neglected, the plane continued pulling to the left.

  Quentin pushed into the cockpit and kneeled by the pilot. “What’s wrong? What can I do?” The pilot’s arm thrashed out and struck Quentin viciously in the face. Reeling from the pain, Quentin grasped his mouth and then looked at his hand. It was red with blood.

  “HEE, HEE, HEE…” The pilot’s breathing became even more frantic, and his eyes bulged from his drenched face.

  Quentin grabbed the pilot’s wrists and held them to the man’s chest. He leaned over him, looking into his face. “Listen to me! One of the engines—it’s on fire.”

  The pilot’s eyes showed no understanding, only raw pain. “HEE, HEE, HUH, HUH…” His breathing changed from a whine to a gasp and seemed to slow down. His legs and arms stopped flailing and Quentin was able to release him.

  “HUH, HUH… HUH…” His breathing softened and then was drowned out by the remaining engine. Suddenly his body arched backward, as if every muscle were straining for air.

  Quentin watched the body contract again and again, a gurgle spewing from the man’s throat at the peak of each contraction. Finally, the pilot’s torso toppled out of the seat, jamming Quentin’s legs against the copilot seat. The man’s legs struck the control wheel and the plane pitched violently to the side. Quentin tried lifting the pilot, but there wasn’t room. That’s when he saw the man’s feet. His shoes had split apart and pink flesh protruded grotesquely from the rips, as if his feet had exploded.