Outlaw, Page 3

  It wasn’t the same as my dream, but I felt as though I was finding myself.

  On the seventh day I worked up the courage to venture out to sea, a prospect that was both exhilarating and a bit frightening, seeing as how I had never actually been on a boat before this trip.

  Following the recommendations of Father Reuben at the Catholic mission, I contacted a local captain named Moses, who agreed to take me out the next afternoon for a reasonable price.

  So it was that I boarded that little white sailboat with my two-year-old son and headed out to sea on that fateful day.

  I chided myself relentlessly in the hull of that battered boat. I begged God to put me back in the safety of my home in Atlanta. I felt like Jonah in the belly of a whale, having made an error of my calling, which was surely to anywhere but there. Or, more likely, I had naively made absurd dreams out to be more than they were.

  But I now know that there was also perfect reason to what seemed madness in the belly of that whale. If my mother had not died when she did, my father would not have gone into a depression and demanded I marry. If I had not married Neil, I would not have given birth to Stephen. If I hadn’t given birth to Stephen, I might have never dreamed of that distant jungle. If both Neil and my father had not died when they did, I might not have been predisposed to pursue that dream across the ocean.

  And if I had not visited Thursday Island and gone under with that white sailboat, the harrowing events that followed would not have allowed me to see what I was meant to see.

  Which, as it turned out, was a place of terrible loss and death.

  Chapter Three

  IT WAS dark when I awoke in the sea. Pitch-black. For several seconds I hung limp, lost to any understanding of where I was or what had happened to me. My head throbbed. Slowly details filtered into my mind.

  I was floating on my back, staring up at a vast empty space. Or I was dead. But no, I could feel something pressing into my back, keeping me from sinking into the water. I was alive.

  Other details drifted into my mind. I had been on a boat. A white sailboat. We had sailed into a storm. The captain, Moses, had been swept overboard. The boat had capsized.

  Stephen had been in the boat with me.

  I jerked up and tried to steady myself by kicking my legs and flailing my arms. My feet found nothing but water beneath me. My head, however, struck something solid only a foot or so above me. I was under the hull?

  I spun, searching for my baby, but I could see nothing.

  “Stephen!”

  My scream sounded hollow in the body of the overturned sailboat. The sea was calm, which meant I had been under this bubble long enough for the gale to subside.

  “Stephen!”

  Visions of my baby being lost in those towering waves immobilized me. He’d been dragged into the depths. Consumed by sharks.

  Then I remembered that I’d secured him to the seat with a strap so that he wouldn’t be thrown about. I sucked in a lungful of air and dived, straining my stinging eyes.

  I could see nothing below but dark water. I twisted back and up and saw the surface—green water filtering daylight around the dark hull of the boat, most of which was nowhere to be seen. Air trapped in the bow had kept afloat the section that saved my life.

  But there was no sign of my Stephen.

  In my panic I sucked in a mouthful of salt water. It burned my lungs and I was immediately aware that I might drown. I struck out toward the lighter water, cleared the edge of the jagged hull, then surged straight up.

  My head broke the surface and I coughed up the water, desperate for oxygen. But my mind was on Stephen, and even as I gasped for air, I twisted back and forth, looking for my baby.

  I saw that I was in a glass sea in early dawn light. A thin layer of fog perhaps six inches deep drifted over the water.

  “Stephen!”

  But how could any baby have survived such a pounding? He’d been tied to the bench seat. Unless that cushion had come free of its frame, he’d surely been dragged under and drowned.

  If Stephen had drowned, then I too was dead, lifeless in my mind and soul, because he was my life. I spun around and screamed his name again.

  “Stephen!”

  The morning sea swallowed my cry. I twisted and yelled at the top of my lungs.

  “Stephen!”

  I first set eyes on them then. The seven tall dark figures towering over the fog twenty feet from the broken hull looked like wraiths. Black vultures watching me with unblinking eyes, waiting for their turn at my carcass.

  Then I saw the dugout canoe beneath them, and the sharpened paddles in their hands, and I knew they were human. They were naked from head to foot, without any covering except for bright yellow and red bands woven from some kind of palm bark, then wound around their muscled arms and thighs. Their skin was as black as midnight. Each wore a head covering made from the face and snout of a brown furry animal unknown to me.

  They stood in stoic formation, silent and unmoving, without a hint of emotion. Behind the canoe floated a second, this one holding only two men and cargo heaped in the space between them.

  I might have experienced some relief in being found, even if by savages such as these. They were in long canoes scarcely two feet deep; surely they had come from land nearby. But I was still in a state of dread. My mind could not process relief.

  “My baby!” I cried. I doubted they could understand my words, but such considerations weren’t at the forefront of my mind. “We have to find him.”

  The canoes were slowly drifting my way, I realized. I trod water close enough now to see the whites of the warriors’ eyes. Several wore curved bones through their nostrils. All of them watched me with the same expressionless stare.

  Not a shred of concern. No fear. No aggression. No hint of either amusement or sorrow. They might have been dead.

  But one look into their steady eyes and I saw that the beings before me were pillars of life. Like gods watching a lesser being at their feet. A new kind of fear edged into my mind.

  The first dugout canoe slid forward like a serpent, parting the blanket of fog in silence. I had seen photographs of natives before, certainly. But the man who stood on the bow of that canoe filled me with an awe and dread I had never experienced. I knew immediately that this man was their leader.

  Part of my reaction was to his unabashed stance—his perfect form, his boldness and unwavering confidence as he stared directly into my eyes. He was a tower of brute strength and poise, void of emotion at having found a woman alone in the sea. By the set of his jaw and his bearing, I knew that in his world he was master and I the humblest slave.

  A long thin scar ran down his left side, from his chest all the way to his hip bone. He’d survived someone’s attempt to gut him and looked no worse for the wear.

  Two of the men behind him gently lowered their paddles into the water to slow their drift. Water gurgled over the carved blades. It was the only sound beyond my own breathing as I continued kicking and clawing at the water to stay afloat.

  They came within arm’s reach of me, looming above the fog with brazen dignity. I cannot possibly do justice to that first encounter with the gods of the earth, as I quickly came to think of them. Tears swam in my eyes. I opened my mouth, desperate for their help, but only a whimper came out.

  The warrior on the bow lifted his eyes and gazed at the horizon, perhaps to a distant shore, though I could not see one. The men behind him dipped their paddles beneath the water again, as if responding to an unspoken order made by the single shift of his eyes. The sleek dugout slid past me, floating through the fog. Not one of the seven men in the canoe gave me another glance. Their eyes were fixed on the horizon.

  I stared after them, confused by their indifference. I was a white woman from an important family, flailing in the ocean next to a capsized sailboat, and they had shrugged me off as a bull might shake off a fly.

  The object that struck my head then could only have been a paddle, swung by the
first of the two men in the second canoe as I stared after the first. Sharp pain flashed down my neck, and I felt myself falling beneath the sea once again.

  Chapter Four

  IT WAS dark when my mind crawled from unconsciousness. Pinpricks of light that I first mistook for stars spotted my field of vision. I lay on my back in a puddle of warm water that sloshed gently around my legs and elbows. The strongest scent of rotting mud filled my nostrils and I found it hard to breathe.

  Only then did I realize my predicament. I was bound up like a mummy in the bottom of a dugout canoe, and the pricks of light were tiny holes in some kind of bag that covered my head.

  My first reaction was to cry out, but the moment I tried to open my mouth I learned that I was gagged as well.

  The canoe rocked under the thrust of heavy paddle strokes, pushing the dugout forward in unbroken cadence. I might have struggled, but I had the sense to know that any attempt to break free would be pointless. Clearly the men who’d taken me were not given to my concerns. If they’d asked me to climb into their canoe I would have been in no position to refuse. They could have thrown me a rope and dragged me to shore and bound me up there.

  Instead they’d smashed my head and hauled me aboard like a large fish. For all I knew, they thought I was dead. Showing my discomfort now might only earn me another blow to the head.

  So I lay still and focused all my will on suppressing the waves of terror washing over me.

  The air was hot—no August in Atlanta could possibly compare to that heat. A steady chorus of insects surrounded us, punctuated by the calls of birds as we passed their perches. Trees. I could hear no crash of waves on any nearby shore.

  We weren’t out to sea. We were on a river driving into the jungle. To what end, I couldn’t begin to comprehend. Were we in Australia? I doubted it. These natives were vastly different from any photographs I’d seen of aboriginals.

  The only possibility I could think of was New Guinea, north of Australia, the fanciful paradise I had dreamed of.

  The eastern half of the island was hospitable, yes, but the southern coast of western New Guinea, known as Irian Jaya, was vastly unexplored and reported to be one of the most forbidding regions on the planet, inhabited by a mysterious and harsh people.

  My dilemma felt surreal to me. That I, an American citizen from Georgia, could possibly be bound and gagged in a canoe like cargo, refused to rightly align with my reality.

  That I had lost my son aligned even less.

  An image of Stephen’s tiny form drifted through my mind. He was lost to the sea, consumed by the deep, gone from this world. Had he struggled? I prayed he hadn’t awakened before drowning.

  The men whose cargo I’d become could burn my body, cut me into pieces, feed me to their dogs—it hardly seemed to matter. In fact, I think I might have preferred it. My life without my son was no life at all.

  Still the paddles gurgled through the water. Still the canoe surged forward.

  Grief and exhaustion finally coaxed me to sleep and only then did I find any peace.

  I dreamed that I was back in Georgia, a young girl playing tag around the large cottonwood in our backyard, chasing my sisters, who squealed with the certain knowledge that I would catch one of them, because I had always been the fastest runner. A spring breeze sweet with the scent of peach blossoms rustled through the tree. The grass was cool under my bare feet. We were joined by Betsy, the eleven-year-old colored daughter of our maid, who could outrun even me. She became it and then I joined my delighted cries with my sisters’.

  I was in church Sunday morning, wearing my favorite yellow dress, holding the microphone with a white-gloved hand, singing a solo of “Amazing Grace,” my mother’s favorite hymn. The enraptured congregation of two hundred faithful watched me, awed by my pure, angelic voice.

  “She’s even better than her mother,” they whispered. “And she’s got the looks. She’s going to be a star one day, you just watch.”

  We were on the south porch, Stephen and I, he cooing while birds chirped in the cottonwoods, I sipping a cup of hot tea with my mother, who had died before Stephen’s birth. Dreams could not hold the dead in their graves. Father sat across from us, smiling around his pipe.

  I was lying in the bottom of a dugout canoe driving deep into the jungle, but in my mind I was in Georgia, eating peaches and singing like a bird and holding my baby as he stared into my eyes, both of us lost in a world of wonder and love.

  It was all that I’d ever wanted.

  The next time I opened my eyes it was raining. We had stopped and I was being pulled from the canoe. I jerked against my restraints in a sudden panic.

  A gentle, low male voice spoke in a language that sounded garbled. Even so, its fluidity struck me as perfectly mathematical, like that of a master percussionist’s drum roll. I could not mistake his tone—he did not want me to struggle.

  A soft chuckle from the others reached me. They dragged me up a muddy bank by my ankles, then dropped my legs onto marshy ground.

  The bag was removed from my head and I blinked up at pouring rain. Lightning slashed through the sky and for a stuttering moment I caught a glimpse of my new world.

  The jungle rose in jagged angles on all sides, crawling with vines, and leaves a hundred times the size of any I’d seen before. We were at the bend of a muddy river. Rain poured from the sky in long unbroken strings. A tall, dark-skinned man stood over me, his scarred chest bulging, arms limp by his sides.

  It was a staggering canvas, here on the edge of the world that tested the bounds of human sanity. And then the lightning was gone and I was in darkness once again.

  The form remained still for a moment, then squatted, pulled the gag from my mouth, and tilted a gourd to my lips. Cool water flooded my mouth. I choked and sputtered, then lifted my head and gulped.

  When he thought I’d had enough, he removed the gourd, replaced the gag, and dribbled water on it so I could suck at it. Then he pulled the bag back over my head and threw a covering over me. At the time I thought it might be plastic, but later I learned it was thatched palm leaves. Rain pelted the hood over my face.

  They made no attempt to feed me. If they had, I doubt I would have eaten. I was too heartbroken, too exhausted, too ill to eat. There was nothing I could do but lie still in the steady downpour and cry, mind filled with thoughts of my son.

  I knew that Stephen hadn’t been found by these men, at least not alive. I would have heard his cry by now. There was no way to silence such a young child indefinitely. The image of his limp body, bound up in one of their bags, haunted me for a long while, but I finally reasoned that they would have no use for a dead baby. In this I found a sliver of comfort. I much preferred him returned to nature than seized by cruel hands.

  I, on the other hand, was alive and worth their taking. To what end, my imagination knew no bounds. I begged God to save me, but he remained utterly silent. I felt betrayed, abandoned, and a fool for having thought a dream could be more than wild fantasy. My sisters had been right. And now my son was dead.

  And yet I clung to the barest hope that God would somehow rescue me.

  Little sleep came to me that first night. I replayed the dream in my head, desperate to find the beauty of that song that had lured me from safety into the jaws of death. But each time I recalled the dream, the once-enthralling and -haunting tones sounded more and more like a mocking melody.

  Calls and howls from unseen creatures in the jungle replaced that song, and I soon found myself hating, even cursing the once-loved call in my dreams. I could not stop imagining leeches and snakes crawling over my legs and belly. My captors had wrapped me like a mummy, but slippery creatures could surely find a way in through the seams.

  I had just slipped into an exhausted and thankfully dreamless sleep when I felt the wrapping on my legs being unwound. The rain had stopped. Daylight dotted the tiny holes in the bag over my head. Words were mumbled, melodic and low. The man caring for me began to prod my legs with a hot st
ick. But the hiss of burning, wet flesh wasn’t of my own. It took me a few minutes to realize that he was burning leeches off my skin.

  When I was twelve I tried out my mother’s razor on my legs. The blade was loose and I managed to scrape a strip of skin off my shin before pain convinced me to jerk the razor away. By then it was too late, and blood seeped out of a two-inch wound. After firmly scolding me, my mother took the greatest care of my wound.

  Now I was at the mercy of a native jabbing at my beautiful legs to burn off engorged leeches. The thought of it nauseated me.

  My caretaker pulled the worms off one by one, and despite being burned they did not come off easily. I could feel their tenacious grip on my skin. Leeches do not squeal, but in my mind they put up a horrid fuss when forced to let go. I imagined that each took a chunk of my flesh with it. When the man dug into one on my inner thigh, a full foot above my knee, I felt I might pass out.

  Job completed, he coated my arms and legs with a cool mud and bound me up again. He was only protecting his possession, but to the extent that a Southern belle from Atlanta was able to appreciate such generosity, I suppose I did. Somehow I got it into my head that the mud’s awful odor might keep carnivores larger than leeches from taking a bite out of me.

  Hood still over my head, I was hauled back into the canoe and we pushed off the bank. Then we were sliding through the river once again.

  I could hear the steady breathing of the two men on the canoe that carried me, otherwise only an occasional cough or the sound of spitting betrayed our journey through the infested jungle. I guessed that they saw no need to advertise their passage along this river, perhaps because it was enemy territory.

  It’s interesting how the mind can dredge up the most hidden bits of knowledge when left to itself for long stretches. I knew next to nothing about Irian Jaya, because the missionary who’d first spoken of the island had come from New Guinea proper, the tamer, eastern half of an island the size of California.