Driving down the smooth, but almost perpendicular road to the main entrance of the Sentosa residence, Ab felt confusion rising up again. Waluyo seemed to be everywhere. If he was working for Sentosa, maybe he had killed Susilo and maybe even Soesanto, just to keep the peace. But would he have killed George? Sani was a businessman and a survivor. He would be too savvy for that.
If George had accidentally stumbled into the middle of this, and was killed because he knew too much, did he, Ab, also know too much? How much was too much?
What did Nancy know? Did she know too much as well? Ab felt his chest tighten, and realized again how much he missed her. Was this love, this intense sense of loss when someone was gone? Was love something one only knew by its absence, like home?
By the time the guard pulled open the gate and waved him through, Ab was already back in turmoil, arguing with himself. Once out of the yard, the driveway continued to plunge down, and, after passing through a clump of trees and down through a gully, joined the main road. Ab looked back from where he had come. From where he was now, the entrance to the yard was invisible.
He turned left and almost immediately passed the entrance to Gedong Songo, the nine-temple Hindu complex, built up over six hills, where the hash was to take place. Just past the main entrance, a small, hand-painted sign read: Yogya-Semarang Hash. He turned abruptly left and drove a short way up a gravel road. The road opened into a small field, where numerous cars and minibuses were parked. Knots of people, many of whom Ab recognized from Yogyakarta, were wandering in among the cars and trees. While some were dressed in actual jogging outfits, the majority wore only casual clothes with running shoes. He pulled his cap firmly on to his head and climbed out.
“Hey, Ab, over here!” Claudia called to him. Harold Wilkinson was there talking with John, but Marie was nowhere to be seen. She was not a runner, and her drinks ran to the harder stuff. Beer was not, she would giggle, her cup of tea. John and Harold paused in their conversation, and looked over at Ab, as if they had been talking about him. Ab nodded, raised his cap, smiled, then looked away.
“Should we ask about Nancy?” asked Claudia.
“I will need a lot of beer this time, if that answers your question,” he said. He was about to put his arm flirtatiously around Claudia, met John’s steely gaze with his own, and resisted the impulse. Could John have killed George out of jealousy? But he wouldn’t have killed Soesanto. Could there be two things going on? Could John have used the quarrels over land and politics to cover a personal revenge? The way the butchers in Boyolali had used the situation?
He suddenly wanted to run, and to drink, and to sleep. And, he realized, eat sunflower seeds. He dug into his pocket. Remembered that he had quit. That Nancy was the reason.
“How come we start here and not up from the real temple entrance?” he asked Peter Findlay, who had strolled up beside him.
“I guess because it wouldn’t look good to have a beer truck in the official government parking lot.”
Someone was blowing off-key on an old cornet. “Okay hounds, off we go,” a strongly accented Australian voice called. “Looks like we may have some rain, so try to stick close and don’t get lost.”
In a minute, the first keen joggers set off, soon followed by some eighty others in a long strung-out line. Ab took off after the last stragglers. “Save some beer for me!” he hollered back to the two Indonesians standing by the Bir Bintang truck. They laughed and waved.
The first part of the trail wound through the woods and upwards. Ab was panting within minutes, and had to stop periodically to catch his breath and walk. It was pleasant under the canopy of trees. John Schechter was the last of the runners ahead of him, but Ab quickly lost sight of him. The marked trail veered away from the main trail temporarily and zigzagged up an old stream bed before cutting across to the next hill. Ab kept his eyes out for the bits of paper that the hares had planted. The trail wound steeply upwards and he found himself suddenly at the first of the nine temples. He stopped momentarily to look at the delicate stone carvings, and then ran to the valley’s edge. The sun was low, and a slight mist was gathering in the gullies below. It was cool and fresh and beautiful. He took a deep breath. From the top of the hill, he could see some of the other temples rising up on rocky peaks nearby. He plunged down the trail into a ravine, where the mists were already rolling in. They were now following the main tourist trail and had to be careful to watch for horse droppings, since guides regularly brought city tourists through here on horseback.
By the time he was climbing the second hill, Ab was panting seriously, and a light pattering of rain was coming down. Physical exercise was not one of his strong points. Was it not St. Paul who wrote that “bodily exercise profiteth little”? A person had to keep some shred of moral integrity in his life. Not exercising was Ab’s little corner on the moral market. He stopped to take off his jacket and tie the arms around his neck. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and climbed the twisting path up to the second temple. By the second temple, the clouds had rolled in and he felt the moisture washing over, a combination of mist and light rain. He could only see a few steps ahead of him.
“Ho! Ho!” called some of the runners. Ab followed the sound. They seemed to have cut away from the main trail, down into a ravine, and were now moving along another old stream bed. His foot slipped on a wet rock and he slammed down on to his side. “What ho!” someone called from somewhere in the mist. “Watch for slippery rocks!” Ab pushed himself to his feet and rubbed his painful thigh. “Thanks a fucking lot,” he mumbled to himself. He put pressure down on his foot and winced, then hobbled on after the sound of the hounds. The air smelled thick and sulfurous. He bent over to look at the stream which he had thought he was beside and realized that he had almost slipped into a steaming, bubbling pool of sulfurous water.
The cloud was thicker now and the drops of rain were bigger and heavier. He heard the voices of the runners in the distance, but could not place exactly where they came from. He thought he remembered that, at the top of this ravine, there was another group of temples. From there, he could catch the main walking and riding trail and make his way back to the parking lot, and from there back over to where the hash started. He began to clamber up the slippery rocks, pebbles clattering eerily down into the sulfur pools below him.
At the lip of the ravine, he was greeted by an eerie silence. He could just make out a grove of trees in the gulley ahead of him, and what appeared to be a path down into it. Out in the open, the rain was now pelting down, and, passing into the grove, he was glad for the shelter of the branches. He was now clearly on a path, heading back downhill, walking among the close, ghostly trees. The path was wet and muddy, and he was soaked through. A little way into the grove, a circular, grassy space opened up, from the middle of which arose a grey stone statue. He approached for a closer look. It was Hanuman, the monkey god and great warrior. There were little baskets of flowers scattered around the base of the statue, now being washed into the mud. Down on the plains, where Islamic sensibilities prevailed, one would not see such signs of continuing veneration around Hindu statues. Here, the mountain people kept their own counsel on religion.
Ab placed his hand on the stone and caressed it absent-mindedly, then sat down. Either the rain had let up, or the surrounding trees were sheltering him from it. He listened for the sounds of the Hashers. He thought he heard something in the distance, but could not pinpoint where the sound was coming from. He stood up. Soon it would be dark, and then he would really be lost. When he looked around, he realized that the only way out of the grove was the way he had come. He heard a clattering, and something hard and sharp struck him on the shoulder. There was more clattering, and a small shower of pebbles came down on him. In a moment, he heard the sound of a horse blowing its breath out through its lips, stepping its way carefully down from the lip of the ravine above him: one of the guides, no doubt. For a price, Ab knew, he would be given a ride down. He was not beyond such cheating on a Hash run.
Ab recognized the horse first, that peculiar, white, snake-like blaze. Then horse and rider materialized from the mist, as if the cloud had taken solid form. For a moment, Ab was even relieved to see Waluyo’s dark face, a familiar landmark in this unnerving fog, but then realized his precarious situation. What if this man was the killer? Ab had just begun to back away when he felt the sharp sting of a horse whip across his cheek and neck. Stunned, Ab stumbled and then turned to run off the path and into the trees. He could see Waluyo reach around behind him, and draw something from behind his belt. He heard the snap of the whip again and the cloppering of the horse. Ab slipped, scrambled to his feet, and clawed into the underbrush, where he froze. Waluyo could not see him in the thick fog, but Ab could make out the silhouette against the paler mist where the path entered the grove. Waluyo had a hand raised over one shoulder, and Ab could see the gleam of steel. A knife. In a minute, Waluyo’s eyes would adjust. Ab made a lunge through the underbrush, heading downhill, and heard a whizz and a thunk over his head. He stumbled and fell and scrambled down the steep slope between the trees. “What ho!” he shouted. “Hashers, where are you! What ho!” His feet fell out from under him and he scudded two meters down a gravelly rock face into a cloud of sulfur. He landed at the very edge of a bubbling pool, got to his feet, and stumbled down the ravine. An old stream bed, it would have to go down the mountain. That was where he wanted to go.
Lunging through the mist, he tumbled headlong into the horse and rider. There must be a zigzag path down. He rammed against the horse, screaming, “What ho, Hashers!” at the top of his lungs. The horse reared just as a hand grabbed his jacket. The jacket arms pulled away from around his neck, the horse stumbled, and Ab plunged on down the ravine, still shouting the same refrain at the top of his voice.
His chest hurt. His sides hurt. His legs hurt. His eyes were stinging from the sweat. The ravine seemed to broaden out and open into a field, but he could not see anything clearly through the cloud. His breaths coming in great, heaving gasps, he sat down on a rock. Everything was still. No, wait. Down and to the left he could hear, “Abner Doo-eck, calling Mr. Abner Doo-eck.” The voice had a strong Australian accent. In proper form, the hares were out looking for stragglers.
Ab pushed himself to his feet and walked down in the direction of the voice. “Halloo down there, Duck here,” he called, mocking himself. In a minute, he could see the bobbing lights of two lanterns.
“Got a little off the trail, I see,” laughed one of the two hares as he approached Ab. “You’re the last one. We were beginning to get a little worried. It’s going to be dark soon.”
Back at the Hashers’ camp, Ab took a beer and leaned back against the truck. Most of the runners were gathered in a big circle, already drunk, in high spirits, singing “down-downs”; if the object of the down-down didn’t finish his drink by the end of the song, he would have to pour the remainder of the drink over his head. Ab’s hands were trembling. He felt his whole body beginning to shake uncontrollably. “Ab, Ab, where did you get off to?” Claudia pushed up to him good naturedly. “And where did you get that mean welt across your cheek and neck?” He threw his arms around Claudia and hugged her, wordlessly, tightly. When he let her go, she stepped back.
“Ab, is there something wrong? What’s going on? I mean, we’re friends right? Can we help?”
Ab ran his hand over his head. His cap was gone. Damn. That was the last straw. It was ridiculous to even worry about it, yet somehow it seemed to him that he had lost the last, small remaining scrap of what passed for normality back home. Fuck it. There was nothing left to lose. He took a long guzzle from his beer. “Do you have an extra couch or a piece of floor I could sleep on in your cottage tonight?” he said. “I can’t explain. Don’t ask.”
“Down-down for the last straggler!” somebody called from the group. “Where’s that Duck fellow, out swimming in the rain again?” This was followed by uproarious laughter.
Ab set down his bottle on the edge of the truck. They were already pouring him a fresh drink for the down-down. Claudia put her hand on his arm as he started to walk to the circle. “Yes, of course, you can stay with us.”
He finished his beer before they had finished the first line of the song, opened a second, finished it, and finally, at the end of the song had part of a third bottle left to pour over his head. “You guys are going to have to learn to sing faster,” he said, returning to the darkness away from the lanterns and the singers.
That night, he lay awake on the lumpy couch in the large family room of the cottage which John and Claudia had rented. The building was old, of yellowish plaster and a high, clay-tiled roof. Rust-coloured stains spread across the walls, and mildew crept up from the corners. It reeked of urine. From outside, faint sounds of Indonesian music wafted up from the town and through the leaky windows. Claudia and John were creaking and thumping with suppressed squeals in the next room. Ab stared at a cecak, motionless on the ceiling. My Zen master. Dear lizard. Enlighten me. His body ached all over, and his mind was in complete turmoil. He wished this place had a big bathtub with hot water, maybe even a bubble bath, instead of the cold, dank concrete mandy and a metal bucket to pour cold water.
He drifted into a fitful sleep, his mind racing in circles through the phantasmagoria of possibilities that could explain his current predicament. He was awakened in what seemed like minutes by shouting in the next room, and crying.
“Oh go fuck yourself. I do my job, and you do yours. Yours is fucking around, isn’t it? So why don’t you just go in there with him, take your mind off fucking George!” This last whispered in a sharp, intense, growl. Ab, strangely, found himself wondering whether fucking was used as a verb or an adjective.
He waited to hear more, but heard only quiet weeping. Just before dawn, he fell asleep again, and then was awakened moments later when a young boy clattered open the front door, without knocking, and carried in a tray of coffee, toast, and boiled eggs, which he set on the table. The boy looked around. No, Claudia isn’t up and about in a towel or something. We all wish, kid. The first rays of sunlight were just paling the sky. It looked as if it would be clear and hot. Ab sat on the edge of the couch, pulled his sarong tight at the waist, and stood up. If only Nancy were here to help him sort this out. But his only hope now seemed to be to go to Bali and meet this Sani once and for all. The sooner he got back down to Yogya, the sooner he could begin to find some more answers.