Birds wheeled high overhead, fish and water snakes swam alongside the dugout. The sun, overhead at first, was soon lost behind stands of tall timber and eventually set, presumably in the west. We seemed to be pointed in a general southerly direction, but the river made so many dips and turns that it was difficult to say with assurance. Before long it was difficult for me to say anything, with or without assurance. There was no herb tea aboard the little boat, and without it the fever grew worse instead of better. I huddled in the stern of to canoe while the world went on around me and I paid it as little attention as I possibly could.
“You must sleep,” said Dhang in Siamese. “You must sleep,” said Tuppence in English. I agreed with both of them, but there was very little I could do about it. I kept my eyes closed most of the time because I couldn’t see very well anyway, and the light intensified my headache. I thought for a time that I might sleep after all, that the fury of the disease might induce some sort of coma.
This didn’t happen. What did happen was very odd, and I’m still not sure that I understand it. I gather that I descended into some sort of delirium. I wasn’t raving, actually. I stayed quite still and remained generally silent. But I slipped in and out of an eerie waking dream during which periods of fantasy and reality overlapped, so that it was impossible to tell which was which, and even now I cannot be entirely certain what was real and what was imagined.
A variety of this, I suspect, is what alcoholics experience in delirium tremens. I have heard that one of the problems of the alcoholic is that he does not dream; he is so besotted with drink that he falls immediately into a comatose state too deep for dreaming. And dreams, the psychologists have discovered, are a necessary means of expunging various tensions and strains and doubts and fears. So the theory goes that the alcoholic in the DT’s goes through a sort of waking dream, and the pink elephants he sees while conscious are just a version of the ogres that creep through the average person’s nightmares.
I had understood the theory before. Now I found out what it was all about. It was not at all pleasant, and perhaps the best thing to be said for it is that most of it has since faded from memory. The parts that I recall now include things that probably did happen and things that certainly did not.
Fragments-
“It was a groovy trip until those cats came down on us, Evan. And Bangkok was like the best part of it. The group had this very tough sound, and I was in good voice and all. And the king was too much. You hear how all these celebrities are jazz fans, and it turns out that what they have is one old Bix Beiderbecke 78 stuck in a closet somewhere, but the king of Siam really digs. He truly does. He sat in on clarinet for a while. I thought he would be bloody awful, but his technique is good, and he knows where it’s at. Chick went through some pretty deep chord patterns, and the king never did shake out. He stayed with it all the way to the end…
“I dug Bangkok, I truly did. They have this floating fruit market, I never saw anything like it. Little boats going up and down the river, and you go there to buy bananas and like that. You know I sent you that postcard? That was the day after the command performance. After we played, the king showed us the royal collection, and then he gave us each a present. Chinese jade, he said it was. I got a crazy pair of earrings, and there were cuff links for the boys. I don’t know what happened to them. And I figured it would say in the newspaper stories how we had viewed the collection, and what the presents were, so I wrote you that bit about selling my jewels. I guess it’s good I did, huh?”
Our boat is caught in a current and spins madly around. Dhang paddles furiously. On the starboard side a huge log bobs in the water. We paddle over to it, and the log turns and begins swimming for us. It is a crocodile. We try to escape. It swims closer. “How doth the little crocodile improve its shining tail,” it says, “and pour the waters of the Nile on every shining scale.”
“We’re on the Nile River,” Tuppence says. “We’re in Egypt, just in time for the ten plagues.” And then I was trying to mark the side of the house – the boat had turned into a house – with the blood of the paschal lamb, so that the angel of death would pass over the house, but it was raining endlessly, and the blood kept washing away, and the angel of death swept down and carried off Todor, and Annalya began to weep and wail.
Then Annalya spoke, but it wasn’t Annalya, it was Tuppence again. “I couldn’t get what it was all about,” she was saying. “They came into the hotel in the middle of the night and chloroformed us. I guess they had already stolen the jewels. The next thing I knew we were on our way up through Thailand and into Laos. They didn’t feed us anything but rice, and anybody who asked questions got hit. And nobody understood a damn word they were saying. But I got some of the drift of what was happening or at least I think I did. They’re Laotian Communists, they’re hooked up with something called the Pathet Lao, or maybe that’s somebody’s name. The bit was that they were going to make it look as though the five of us stole the jewels from the king and took them to Laos, the part of the country that’s not run by the Communists. And then when we came north, they snatched us and executed us and returned the jewels. They were going to make the United States look bad and they were going to make the other government of Laos look bad, and it was supposed to do a lot of good for them and for the guerrillas in Thailand. Or something like that. And then they went and executed Kendall and Chick and Miles and Jimmie, just chopped their heads off one after the other. I thought they would do me, too, and maybe they would have or maybe not. I don’t know. There was some kind of a snag on account of my being Kenyan, and maybe it would have screwed up their relations with Africa or some such. Or else that fat little mother just didn’t want to deprive himself of the pleasure of balling me every day on his goddamned floor.”
“I was beautiful, and soft and warm and sweetly formed, with golden skin and long black hair,” said Tuppence, who had suddenly turned Oriental. “And I wanted Dhang and would have gone with him, and just as he was on the point of making a woman of me…”
“Just as I was on the point of taking her,” Dhang said, “just then her father came into the room, and furious he was, and they put me in that room and beat the soles of my feet with long strips torn from old auto tires, and hung me up so that I had to stand on the tips of my toes, and told me they would cut off my purick, and swore they would cut off my head as well. I did not try to rape her, for she wanted me as I wanted her, and I would have been tender with her-”
“Evan, baby, I get the feeling that Dhang here is up tight sexually. You tell him to forget it, dig? He’s a sweet little cat and all, but if you could tell him that this is just not my scene-”
“Heaven, friend, the black woman is your woman, yes? You said that you would get a woman for me, Yevan. I feel myself tortured and torn apart by demons. I will not touch the black woman, Evan, but I ache with desire and yearning. Yevan…”
The old man was riding on water skis pulled by a blazing bullock. Fire danced in his hair. He sang the “Marseillaise” at the top of his voice and poured kerosene over himself and burned without being consumed. Then the bullock veered sharply to its right, and the burning old man bore down upon us, capsizing our boat, and the entire river turned into a sheet of icy flame.
“You should never have run away from us,” Barclay Houghton Hewlitt whispered in my ear. “Don’t you ever go down to the end of the town unless you go down with me.” I looked at him, and he turned into Abel Vaudois. “A good idea,” he said sagely. “To grow opium poppies in the Jura, separate it from Switzerland, and sell the poppies to American veterans for Memorial Day. Is this not a typical American breakfast?” I agreed that it was, and he grinned like the Cheshire cat and turned into the Chief. “That’s a good cover story,” he said, “but you’ll need a cover story for it and then another cover story for that cover story, and we’ll put them all together and bind them as a book and put your name on the cover. Now wait a moment,” he said, and he stepped around the corner and locked the dugout in the men’s room of Kennedy Airport. I grabbed the locked door and began banging furiously on it, but it wouldn’t open. I drew my pistol and shot at the lock, and the bullets bounced off and released clouds of cyanide gas, and I breathed it in and gasped, and the men’s room taxied down the runway and was airborne, and we soared high over the blue Pacific until a divine hand reached out to snare us with a butterfly net and drag us down, down, down into an ocean of inky blackness.
“I think he’s coming out of it,” a soft voice said. “Him come out of big sleep. Oh, the hell with it.”
I opened my eyes. Tuppence was leaning solicitously over me; Dhang was looking over her shoulder. We seemed to be on dry land. I started to sit up, but they both reached to push me back down and told me to save my strength.
“I’m all right,” I said. And I was. The fever was gone now. I groped for memory and couldn’t get the handle of it. I did not know where we were or how we had gotten there.
“What happened?”
“We almost lost you,” Tuppence said. “Baby, you were in very bad shape. Feverish, and seeing things that weren’t there, and talking to people who weren’t around. All kinds of crazy languages. Dhang couldn’t understand you, and neither could I. And Dhang and I couldn’t understand each other, either, which made things like interesting. I tried to teach him a little English, but it didn’t take very well. The only words he knows are the kind that get you thrown out of places. Did you teach him?”
“I guess so. Tuppence-”
“You hungry, baby? There’s some fish baking. Dhang’s pretty cute at catching fish. I guess it’ll be done in a minute. He’s got this way of cooking it, you dig a hole and build the fire on top of the fish, and you have them all wrapped up in leaves-”
“I know. It’s his one recipe.” I sat up and looked around at the two of them and the fire and, a few yards off to the side, the river. Our boat was beached on the bank.
“How long was I like that? A couple of hours?”
“Oh, wow.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Would you believe three days, baby?”
“Frankly, no. Was I-”
“Three days. If we cut out of Tao Dan on Monday, then this is Thursday afternoon. Except that I sort of lost track of the days in Tao Dan, so it could be anything. But it’s been three days. We just went on floating down the river all the time. Dhang kept turning up with things to eat, and we got a little water into you now and then but no food. Feed a cold and starve a fever, or is it the other way around? But whatever it was, you were in no kind of condition to eat anything.”
“How did you and Dhang manage?”
“Sign language, mostly. Tell you the truth, I was pretty useless most of the time. I did a little paddling, but he took care of the hard part, like pulling up on shore for the night and making the fires and scaring up something to eat. We took turns staying up with you. You don’t remember any of it?”
“Bits and pieces.” I drew a breath. I was suddenly ravenous and I turned to Dhang, who had been maintaining a respectful silence. “About that fish,” I said in Khmer.
“It will be ready soon, Heaven.”
“Good.”
“Your soul left your body and soared through the open reaches of the universe, Evan. But the woman and I waited for your soul to return, and from time to time it came back. The woman is good. She washed your head with water and helped me with your hair.”
“My hair?”
He lowered his eyes. “It is gone, Evan.”
I put my hand on the top of my head. Nothing – I was as bald as a newly laid egg. I looked at Tuppence, who was trying bravely not to giggle. I said, “What the hell?”
“It fell out in handfuls,” she said. “Must have been the fever. You looked pretty patchy there for a while. You would lose some here and some there, you know, and you got to be something of a sight.”
“I can imagine.” I ran my hands over my bald dome. “Dhang said you helped him with my hair. What’s he talking about?”
“I’m not sure myself. We both gathered up all the hair as soon as it fell out, and at night we burned it in the fire. Very bloody tribal.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know. He was very tense about it, and I figured like maybe he knew something.”
I asked Dhang. It seemed to have some deep religious significance, but either he couldn’t explain it or I couldn’t follow him. He seemed to feel that I owed my recovery at least in part to the ordeal by fire through which my hair had passed. For all I knew, he was right, so I didn’t argue.
“It’s just as well,” I said. “My hair never did look very Oriental. I must look pretty unusual.”
“When Yul Brynner does it, it looks pretty sexy.”
“I suppose it’ll grow back in eventually. Do I look as sexy as Yul Brynner?”
She raised her eyebrows. “You better look in the mirror.”
“What mirror?”
“You know – the river.”
I got unsteadily to my feet. I was very dizzy at first, but this passed quickly. I crossed the few yards to the river bank, dropped to my knees, and looked at my reflection.
It was shocking. I had lost an incredible amount of weight, and my skin was stretched tight over my bones. My skin did not need the tobacco juice treatment any more. I had turned a uniform yellowish hue all over. All of this combined with the utterly bald head left me looking not at all like myself. I had changed to fit my environment, all right. I looked more at home in an Indochinese jungle than I would have looked in Manhattan.
“Not exactly sexy,” I said.
“Not quite,” Tuppence agreed.
“I guess I can stand it if you can. Does anybody have any idea where we are?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Lost.”
“Is that the best you can do?”
“We’re on a river in the middle of a jungle,” Tuppence said. “When you’ve seen one river, you’ve seen them all, and that goes for jungles as well. We’ve been paddling downstream, but I don’t know how far. I suppose if you follow a river long enough, you get to an ocean. I’m not exactly Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, but I seem to remember that that’s the general bag rivers are in, they flow into oceans.”
“It’s a good general rule.”
“I’d love to be more specific-”
“I wouldn’t mind it myself.”
“Anyway,” she said, “the fish is ready. I suppose a person could get sick to death of fish, sooner or later. And more sooner than later. Let’s eat, Bwana.”
I had two fishes and could have eaten more, but I was afraid of hitting my stomach with too much too soon. Dhang wanted to make camp for the night. I talked him out of it. He and Tuppence could sleep as safely in the boat as on dry land, and we would make much better time if we kept going through the night. I didn’t mind paddling all night long. I felt it would be less nerve-wracking than sitting around listening to the jungle noises while the two of them slept.
We drowned the campfire, climbed into the boat, and pushed it back into the current. The river seemed wider than when we had started out, which rather stood to reason, since widening is a propensity of rivers, along with flowing into oceans. Tuppence sat in the stern this time, Dhang took up his post in the bow, and I was in the middle. This was ideal from a conversational standpoint; since I was the only one who could converse with both of the others, it was a logical spot for me.
First I talked with Dhang, who assured me he had kept his hands off my woman, although he admitted that the effort was becoming exceedingly difficult for him. He launched into an unembarrassed discussion of Tuppence’s anatomical virtues and the uses to which various portions of her could be put, and I decided that it was just as well she couldn’t understand a word he was saying.
Then I talked with Tuppence, and she went over the story of the capture and all the rest. It came through more or less as it had while I was delirious with fever but made a little more sense this time. Evidently the musicians were picked as pawns in a rather elaborate plot to discredit both the United States and the Souvanna Phouma neutralist regime in southern Laos. By returning the jewels and the heads of the Kendall Bayard Quartet, the Pathet Lao would show himself to be a staunch friend of Thailand and an implacable enemy of the thievery and deception that characterized U.S. imperialism. Now I could appreciate Tuppence’s insistence upon recovering the jewels before we left the Tao Dan command post. If they stayed in Communist hands, the whole scheme could have been carried out more or less as planned.
But now, if our side returned the gems, the diplomatic tables would be turned. The Pathet Lao would get a black eye, American intelligence would come off looking good, State Department goodwill tours would not suffer a loss of prestige, and the Chief’s faith in Evan Tanner would burn more brilliantly than ever. The CIA would retain its mandate to use Bangkok as a launching pad for Oriental fun and games, and the old Francophile in Tao Dan would not have died in vain.
I frankly wonder how much effect these little international ploys and counterploys have on the course of world events. Not very much, I suspect. Another report is filed in capitals throughout the world, another affair makes newspaper headlines for a day or three, and then the world returns to its usual routine of hypocrisy and intermittent violence. One throws a stone into a pool and attaches great significance to the manner in which ripple after ripple passes concentrically outward to the water’s edge, but in truth once the ripples stop, the pool is as it was before, with the same water in it.
The Chief, I know, finds worlds of meaning in little gambits like this one. This only stands to reason – it is a rare man indeed who plays down the significance of his own life’s work. Or perhaps, professional that he is, the Chief has outgrown the habit of looking at the greater implications of things. Perhaps instead he merely sees each little affair as an incident in an international game, worth a certain number of points on a worldwide scorecard, worth other points on another scorecard in which he is pitted against the CIA and military intelligence and the other game-playing agencies.
I decided that I did not too much care. I had come here because I thought Tuppence was in trouble, which turned out to be a massive understatement, and I had found and rescued Tuppence, and now we were on our way back to what we persist in calling civilization. If it made the Chief happy, that was an added bonus.
I just wanted to get home.
After the sun went down, there was a brief spell of rain. We got fairly well soaked, but it didn’t last long enough to be really bad. Then the sky cleared, and there was enough of a moon to provide adequate visibility for nighttime paddling. Dhang paddled until he got tired. Then I took over. Tuppence stayed awake for a while before dozing off in the middle of a conversation. I kept paddling on through the night. The river was quite empty, the jungle alive with night sounds that I now found rather comforting. A jungle, I decided, was not quite so hostile a place as we are led to believe. I could understand now how people might choose to live their lives in it.
From time to time I pulled the paddle inside the boat and closed my eyes and rested. I felt completely recovered, and long before dawn I was hungry again. When the sky lightened, we beached the boat, and Dhang and I went out to look for food. I found some fruit that he told me was poisonous, and he brained a few lizards with the butt of his pistol and seemed surprised when Tuppence and I showed little enthusiasm for them. He managed to unearth some edible roots, and I picked some non-poisonous berries. Tuppence and I made do with them. Dhang roasted the lizards and seemed to enjoy them considerably.
Around noon we stopped the boat again, and Dhang and I went exploring. We saw smoke rising off to our right and headed toward it, moving silently through the jungle. We had been a long time without seeing any other human beings. Where there is smoke there is also fire and often food, and living off the jungle can have its limitations.
We crept close to the campsite. Through a break in the undergrowth I saw uniformed men sitting around a campfire, talking and laughing. I listened closely but could not understand what they were saying. Whatever language they were speaking, it was not one I recognized. Dhang couldn’t make it out either.
Some tribal dialect, I decided. I considered making ourselves known to them, then decided against it. If we didn’t have a language in common with them, things could be extremely difficult. In all probability they were Laotian regulars, probably an antiguerrilla force. Dhang was still dressed in the uniform he had donned in Tao Dan, the uniform of a Pathet Laoist. If we couldn’t tell them who we were, and if we couldn’t be sure just who they were, things could get sticky. So we slipped away as silently as we had come, found Tuppence, got back into our dugout, and headed downstream once more.
And then, late in the afternoon, we heard a plane flying overhead. Dhang noticed it first. We heard the engines droning long before we caught sight of the craft and we craned our heads upward for a look at it, and the pilot came down for a look at us.
It was a jet fighter. I couldn’t recognize the model but when it swooped downward, I made out U.S. Air Force insignia on the undersides of the swept-back wings.
“It’s one of ours,” I said, and Tuppence and I began to wave furiously, and the plane continued its downward sweep.
And bullets plowed a furrow in the water beside us.
“Evan! The mother’s shooting at us!”
He missed us completely on that run. He came out of his dive, swung into a graceful turn, and headed our way again, machine guns open. The silly son of a bitch was trying to kill us.
“Overboard,” I shouted. “Swim for shore! Fast!”
We leaped out of the dugout and into the water. Bullets riddled the water around us. I grabbed Tuppence and swam furiously for land. Dhang was off to the right, cutting the water with clean, brisk strokes. The pilot finished his run, made another illegal U-turn, and came back a third time.
We reached the bank, clambered ashore, dove into the cover of an overhang of vines and shrubs. The fighter let us alone and concentrated on the dugout. He made three more strafing runs at it and by now he was getting the hang of it. Bullets tore into the hollow wooden shell. By the end of the third run enough holes had been opened up, and the dugout had filled with water. It didn’t exactly sink – it was, after all, wood – but its days of service were over. It was filled with water to the top. It was useless to us, and so were our guns.
The plane finished its third run, made another pass over the ship with the guns silent, evidently to assess the probable success of the mission. Then the pilot banked smartly, headed skyward, and flew away.
“Now he can go back to his base,” I said bitterly, “and he can paint a dugout canoe on the side of the fuselage. The son of a bitch!”
“Baby, I don’t get it. Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe-”
“Evan – the jewels!”
I swam back to the boat. The two leather bags of jewels were where we had left them, happily untouched by the bullets. But the boat was a lost cause entirely. I rescued the two jewel sacks and swam back to shore. A U.S. plane, I thought, disheartened. Just what we needed. With friends like him we didn’t need enemies.
“Why did that mother shoot us up, Evan? And what do we do now?”
The second question was unanswerable. But I had the first one figured out and suddenly I knew where we were.
“Those soldiers we saw around noon were speaking Annamese,” I said. “And they weren’t Laotian regulars looking for guerrillas, but it still would have been a bad idea to join them.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re in the middle of North Vietnam,” I said.