When the backup cops arrived, Suradi
Later, when Suradi and the others did an equally thorough search of Tullock's room, they would certainly find a second ball of opaque green glass in the chest of drawers . . . where, minutes earlier, I had placed it. . . and what remained of a bag of Burmese heroin—heroin for which a Rangoon bank draft, wired to Norvin Tomlinson, still awaited my final approval.
But that was Raymond Tullock's problem, not mine.
Still . . . Lieutenant Suradi didn't like it. Like all cops, he was cynical and suspicious. Coincidence and drug smugglers were two things he did not suffer gladly. Before releasing me, he took my passport—my real passport— along with my tourist card. 'When you leave Medan?' he asked.
I told him truthfully that my plane was due to leave in less than an hour. Pictured Rengat waiting at the airport with my ticket and luggage— luggage full of wood scraps, taped tight—although it was more likely that Rengat had dropped both ticket and luggage at the Garuda counter before taking his family into the mountains for a convenient vacation.
Suradi shook my passport meaningfully. 'You no go to airport tonight. You no go to airport till I say.'
I promised him that I would not go to the airport.
Outside, on the busy night streets of Medan, the cab I had hired was waiting, my new duffel bags locked in the trunk. I opened the trunk and took out one of my false passports . . . not the passport I had recently had made; not the one that listed my name as Raymond Alan Walley; not the one I had used to clean out Tullock's bank account earlier that afternoon. Could hear Tullock saying,
I put the false passport in my pocket, swung into the back seat with the briefcase. Told the driver, 'Port of Belawan,' as I checked to make sure that I still had the torn halves of the hundred-dollar bills so that I could pay my passage to the captain of the red teak junk out of Rangoon.
Epilogue
Here is why I decided, and how I decided, to return to my home at Dinkin's Bay, on Sanibel Island:
Because I did not trust the betel nut-chewing captain of the Burmese junk, and because I became convinced that he and his crew of Bougie pirates planned to rob me, I jumped ship at the island of Phuket on the Isthmus of Thailand, and spent the next few weeks traveling around Indochina. I needed the time; felt I had rooted myself too deeply in the community that was South Florida, and now was an opportunity to sever those roots. Why had I stayed on Sanibel so long? The accoutrements of a modern life—and the obligations they imply—grow as slowly but as surely as a strangler fig. They also suffocate just as completely.
One night, at Raffles Hotel in Singapore, I sat outside in the tropical garden and realized, with some surprise, just how completely I had allowed myself to become entwined by the bonds of my island home. I was on committees, I was on boards, I paid electric, water, phone, and insurance. I had become a convenient source of advice and comfort and conversation for the dozens of friends who had come to depend on me almost as much as I had come to depend on them. I had a schedule; I had a routine. I had become one of the
I wanted to cut free. Revolted at the idea of ever risking it again. Tomlinson believed, he truly believed, in the symmetry of life and in a Creator's universe that was warmed by what he called sentient consciousness. Hannah had possessed the same mystic instincts. She
But the only thing I knew or believed was that all life—my life included—was a definable, weighable process. That process was brief indeed. For a while at least, I wanted to be free of the tethers. I wanted to be wild and alone and on the loose. So what I did was buy a big-frame backpack and a jungle tent from another one of my Gurkha friends—this was in Kuala Lumpur—and I set off on foot, and by public bus, on my tour of Indochina. What I found was what I expected to find: Asia was on the move. It was chopping, building, and bulldozing its way out of the oxcart world, directly into the world of computer chips. It was financing the transition with the bounty paid— usually by the Japanese—on rain forest timber and increasingly rare sea products. Denotations on maps such as 'national park' were euphemisms meaningful only in that they marked regions that bulldozers had not yet reached. The term 'net ban' was meaningful only in that it symbolized the increased value of Asia's own unregulated and desperately overused fishery.
I roamed around, observing, taking notes. Americans who call themselves environmentalists would have found the wholesale destruction I saw shocking. I did not. It was tragic, yes. But not shocking. When stray dogs become a part of the citizenry's menu, professorial speeches about the long-term benefits of virgin forests and sea conservation won't turn a single head—particularly when those speeches come from people who have never had to stalk their neighborhood's pets.
I loved the people, but ultimately, I grew tired of Indochina. The people I met were as smart as they were kind; they were as generous as they were tough. The reason I left was trivial: I yearned to hear English spoken. It happens sometimes, when you have been away too long in a foreign land. I had my portable shortwave radio, true. And in places such as Thailand and Cambodia, the V.O.A.—Voice of America—came in fairly strong. But it wasn't enough, so I caught a Qantas flight in Phnom Penh and flew to Darwin.
Australia and its Northern Territory are the English-speaking world's future . . . just as Asia is currently designing the rest of the world's future. After Cambodia, I was unprepared for the horizon of wild space and pure sea light that rims Darwin. The land has a hot, primeval aspect. Tendrils of steam seep upward, as if the process of chemical genesis still continues. Darwin is an outback town; a frontier town, despite its parks and modern architecture. In too many cities around the world, sidewalk travelers wear expressions of introspective rage. Not in Darwin. In Darwin, people had a blue-collar glow, as if they were just damn glad to live in a world that had electricity and indoor plumbing. Strangers grinned at me on the street, tipped their Akubra cowboy hats and said, 'Ga'day!' or, 'How ya goin', mate?'
It was from Darwin that I mailed—via a buddy of mine in Managua— the second of my only two letters to Mack at Dinkin's Bay. The first had included a brief note explaining that I had decided to do some traveling and would be back in about a month. The second letter, sent seven weeks later, explained that I might be gone for six months, maybe more. It included private notes to Janet Mueller, Jeth, and Rhonda and JoAnn aboard the
East of Darwin, I had a friend who owned six hundred square kilometers of land. It was grazing land and eucalyptus forest that fronted the Timor Sea. My friend was reluctant—didn't think it was hospitable—but he finally agreed to chopper me out to the most desolate stretch of beach on his property, and leave me there. I told him I wanted to spend a few weeks living off the land, collecting specimens from the mud flats. My friend told me that I was bloody nuts, unloaded my gear, and flew off.
That is where I decided to return to Dinkin's Bay. But here is how and why: I had built a sapling hut that was close enough to the sea so that I could feel the rumbling surf, but far enough away from the beach so that the giant estuarine crocodiles wouldn't crawl up and eat me in the night. I had covered the hut with a tight palm-frond thatching to keep out the monsoon rains, and I had constructed what I thought was a very ingenious all-weather fire pit. Made myself a nice little jungle camp, complete with everything but a sign outside that read:
For food, there were plenty of mud crabs, plus the occasional snare-dumb feral hog. I also caught barramundi—a fish which looks and behaves remarkably like a snook. For water, I had the monsoons, as well as a Pur hand-pump water filter. It was a good life. I loved the solitude of it... all the potential that the sea and that wild country offered. Some days, just for the hell of it, I'd pull out the little mirror in my toilet kit and take a look at myself: long tangle of salt-bleached hair ... red beard . . . sea-gray eyes that gradually, very gradually and over
