All kinds of human flotsam washed up in highland New Guinea in the 1980s, riding the tides of God, or gold, or anthropological glory: missionaries seeking heathen sheep for the fold; multinational corporations eager for riches gouged from the earth; scholars re-writing their disciplines in light of these modern Stone Age people. Then there were the misfits, in search of adventure, or fortune, or simply an escape into the earth’s last wild frontier.
Linda McDonald was one of the missionaries.
And when the tiny Air Niugini prop plane turned to taxi away down the Mt. Hagen runway, it was all she could do not to bolt down the rutted tarmac in pursuit.
She told herself that it wasn’t fear making her heart pound, it was disorientation. Simple jet lag. The past two forty-eight hours had been Linda’s third time to leave Indianapolis in her whole life, and her first-ever venture out of the United States. She had crossed a continent, an ocean, and half of Australia before she’d hit the stupefying heat and humidity of Port Moresby—only to stand appalled before a wall in the terminal that seemed to be splashed with blood. Yes, the Papua New Guinea highlands had been home to cannibals a generation or two ago, but the missionary school hadn’t said anything about violence in the capital city. Maybe it was some weird kind of animal sacrifice? Primitives fearful of the jet age, ensuring a safe arrival through blood-letting? In that case (her fatigued brain went on) shouldn’t there be actual dead animals in the corners, or pens of live ones waiting…?
Her hallucinatory speculations were interrupted by a citizen, black of skin and short of stature, who strolled past one particularly gory wall and shot a precisely aimed stream of red spittle from between his teeth.
Ah: betel nut. She’d heard of that.
The plane out of Port Moresby—which was either the morning flight leaving very late or the afternoon one half a day early—worked its way up-country, landing in Mt. Hagen distressingly near dusk: an hour, apparently, when any sensible human, expatriate or local, was sitting down to dinner: the airport was deserted. The air smelled of smoke, and rain, and a whole lot of green.
The plane had laid tire-tracks across one of her Samsonites when it circled to leave.
Linda pulled her inadequate rain jacket together, shivering and bewildered. This was an airport, with buildings all around: why was there no sign of life? She wanted to sit on her luggage and weep. And might have, if it hadn’t been so cold—this was the tropics, but Mt. Hagen was a mile high. Come on, Linda: moving will warm you up. And you’re sure to find someone. Someone who isn’t a cannibal.
She picked up her two suitcases to stagger in the direction of what looked to be the Mt. Hagen terminal. Within ten steps, she was dripping with a horrid mixture of sweat and rain. The handles of the heavy cases became increasingly slick, and at one stumble over a rough patch of tarmac, the left one slipped from her hand, splashed down in a particularly deep pothole, and vomited its T-shirts and Keds into the mud. She said a word that missionaries do not say, and let the tears spill.
She managed to force most of the sodden contents back inside, and was struggling with the clasp when motion caught the corner of her eye: a scrap of yellow flitting rapidly behind the buildings. She forced the latch shut, clawed her wet hair from her eyes, and waited for the vehicle to zoom on by—but miracle of miracles, it turned in, roaring down the runway as if intending to sprout wings and take to the skies. Instead, it came to a halt next to Linda’s bedraggled self.
“You look rather stranded.” The man’s voice sounded too posh for an Australian.
He was a heavily tanned, clean-shaven, stoop-shouldered expatriate in his forties, high of forehead and bad of teeth; one glance and she was touched by a powerful aura of malaria-racked Victorian expeditions into West Africa, of the besieged administrators of troubled provinces, of wild-eyed Englishmen pressing into the desert on camels or the Antarctic on dog-sleds. Or highland New Guinea in an open-sided yellow jeep. The stranger set the hand-brake and stepped jauntily from the open door, dressed in a button-down, short-sleeved blue shirt, flip-flop sandals, and the sort of khaki shorts that everyone but that kind of man looks ridiculous in.
Later, making subtle inquiries that fooled no one, she would uncover few facts about him, and much rumor: He’d come to teach, and been fired—or quit in disgust. He was on the run from the law of Angola, or was it Albania? He was the father of three, fleeing a dangerous marriage to a drug lord’s daughter, or an aristocratic homosexual escaping repressive laws and social condemnation. He was a mercenary wanted for war crimes in some dry African nation.
He was, of course, English, the sort of Englishman who could only have been formed on the playing fields of Eton, his spine stiffened by a regime of genial parental abandonment followed by institutionalized brutality: unsparing of himself, impervious to mere bodily discomfort, and always a step removed from intimacy with his peers. Later, Linda came to realize that both his bone-deep humanity and his utter disdain for authority had been driven into him by the same rods of discipline.
But she knew none of that then; she merely grasped that rescue was at hand. Also, that his eyes were an interesting shade of hazel, or perhaps amber. “Well, yes, it looks like I am kind of stranded. I thought I’d be met, but I’m not quite sure what day it is, and the plane seemed to just sort of collect passengers, and someone told me that we were stopping at a place we weren’t scheduled to—” Linda heard her mouth babbling, and shut it.
“Well, we’ll soon have you sorted,” he said briskly. And indeed, half her possessions were already inside the jeep. She handed him the plastic bag with her hair rollers, which she hadn’t been able to jam back into the suitcase, and walked around to what was here the passenger side.
“Just got in from Moresby?” He turned the key, put the vehicle into gear.
“That’s right.”
“Which mission are you with?”
“The Lutherans.”
“Whereabouts?”
“In Wape…er.”
“Wapeladanga? Father Albion?”
“I think so. Yes, of course. I’m sorry, I’m not too on the ball.”
“Understandable. You may not get up there for a day or two, I’m afraid. The S.I.L. lost a plane, and they’re flying in another from Oz.”
Oz: Australia. Lost, as in crash. As in, the plane they’d apparently intended Linda to get into. “There isn’t a car?”
The man had a nice laugh, even though it was at her expense. “The only way you’d get a car up there is if you lifted it in by helicopter or had it portaged a piece at a time. No roads.” He glanced over to see if she understood, but she must have looked lost, or near to breaking down, because his grin faded and he put out his hand—slowly, as if to a frightened child. “Terribly sorry, don’t know what’s happened to my manners. The name’s Gordon Hugh-Kendrick.”
She shook his callused palm. “Linda McDonald. Are you with one of the missions, then?”
“Oh no, no. Just a civil servant. Government employee. Glorified clerk.” He pronounced it clark. Circling the last of the terminal buildings, they came out on what was identifiably a road. “You’ll need a place to stay. You can contact the mission on the radio tonight and ask for instructions.”
“If you think that’s best.” Her voice wavered a bit.
“Happens all the time.”
“It must, if the airport is always deserted.”
One eyebrow lifted. “In fact, I’ve never seen it like this, not during the day. Must be something going on in town.”
And with that, they cleared a corner and the jeep stood on its nose to avoid plowing into Mardi Gras. The closest ranks of onlookers weren’t particularly colorful, being composed of children wearing nothing but a length of cord around their protuberant bellies and drably clothed women with heavy string bags hanging off their foreheads—bilums, they were called. But toward the center of the crowd came the men, and although some wore grubbier versions of what Gordon Hugh-Kendrick had on—and half a dozen displayed the Air Niugini uniform, which accounted for the deserted terminal—others wore skirts made of brilliant leaves, magnificent headdresses, face paint, and elaborate necklaces. Most of these figures had some object strung through their noses as well: bright feathers, long twigs, curling pig tusks, a yellow pencil. Linda gaped, and wondered aloud if a parade had just broken up.
“Why, the dress? Oh no, they just like to wear their best when they come to town. Gudai, yupela.” Mr. Hugh-Kendrick was greeting a tiny man with intensely black skin and a hugely ornate wig. “Watpo algeta dispela manmeri i stap hia?”
The man turned to glare, revealing a wide moustache studded with brilliant yellow feathers—and his fierceness split into a huge, betel-stained grin. “Eh, Gordon pren! Langtaim mipela no see yupela.” He shifted the stone axe he was carrying into his left hand, thrusting his right through the window. Gordon shook it vigorously, and the two exchanged greetings in a language that Linda did not think was Pidgin, although at that speed, she could not have been sure. Eventually Gordon turned to her.
“Do you speak Pidgin?”
“Liklik tasol.” Only a little.
Introductions were made, then to her surprise, Gordon waved the feather-man around to the back. Half a dozen others climbed in as well, squatting down on her suitcases, admiring the pink hair rollers, giving off a powerful miasma of wood smoke, damp, and primal maleness. Each one carried some deadly object, be it stone axe, spear, or bow and arrow—or a combination, such as the two-headed weapon that passed alarmingly close to her nose, with a lovingly polished wedge of black stone on one side and a viciously sharp claw-like object on the other.
Half the men wore shorts, the others nothing but leaves, and it was difficult to know how to greet them without confronting portions of their anatomy an Indiana girl was not accustomed to greet. So she focused on their hair decorations, which ranged from one man’s short afro threaded with feathers and bright flowers to his neighbor’s three-foot-wide crescent-shaped hat made of matted hair, shells, and black, glossy feathers. Gordon announced her name to his passengers, politely nudged a quiver of arrows away from her face, and put the jeep back into gear.
The conversation that followed was far too rapid-fire for her kindergarten-level Pidgin, but by the time they had cleared the crowd, Gordon had found out what was going on in the town.
“It would appear that a white man has been found dead.”
“Oh, how awful! What happened?”
“They’re saying it’s murder, although it sounds to me like a climbing accident. They found him at the base of a cliff.”
“Murder! Is there a lot…I mean, is murder commonplace here?”
That sparked another over-the-shoulder discussion before he replied. “None of these gentlemen can remember when the last waitpela was killed.”
“And you don’t remember it happening?”
He gave her a startled look, then his face cleared. “The last murder, you mean? Oh, I’ve only been in the highlands for a few weeks—certainly there hasn’t been one in that time. But you can ask Mrs. Carver. She’d know if anyone does.”
“Who is Mrs. Carver?”
He turned hard down a street and braked in front of a low, wide building with a rusting tin roof. The door opened and out stepped a rangy six-foot-tall woman with graying brown hair, hands on her hips and a scowl on her face.
“That’s Mrs. Carver.” The innocent phrase suggested a joke, hidden deep. “Maggie. This is her boarding house.”
Linda’s heart sank at the lack of welcome in the woman’s posture—but to her surprise, Gordon jumped out to trot up the stairs, seize the man-sized hand, and kiss it. The woman melted instantly into a near-simper; Gordon was no stranger here.
An assortment of passengers tumbled out of the back, each holding his weapon in one hand and something of Linda’s in the other. They meandered toward the house to heap the bags near the steps before climbing back inside the jeep. Gordon turned Linda over to the woman, politely refused her offer of tea, then walked back to the car amidst a hail of Pidgin.
Linda stood on the graveled walk in front of this nondescript house, the air spiced with the foreign odors of rain and smoke and jungle, and watched the spattered vehicle drive away. Just before it rounded the corner, a tanned arm in a blue sleeve emerged from the yellow jeep, two fingers raised like the touch of a hat-brim. It was a gesture of casual farewell rather than permanent goodbye. Obscurely comforted, she took a deep lungful of this foreign air and turned to meet the next challenge.
Things were indeed sorted out, as her knight-errant had promised. Mrs. Carver proved more maternal than Linda’s own mother (though that wasn’t saying much). She ordered the rooftop hot water tank stoked so Linda could shower, fed the newcomer a meal of rice and some stewed meat, then sent her to bed, assuring Linda in a broad Australian accent that she’d make radio contact with Linda’s mission when they came on that night. Twelve hours later, Linda woke to a cool, misty morning, the smell of cook-fires and diesel fumes in the air, the singing of children outside her window, and a mechanical thumping from somewhere in the building. A delicate green lizard hung from the ceiling beside the light fixture.
Downstairs, she found six guests dawdling over toast and eggs. Introductions were brisk: an American missionary couple on their way to a month in New Zealand, a trio of Catholic priests headed for a conference in Goroka, and a breezy Australian with ingrained grime under his nails and a proprietary attitude toward Mrs. Carver. This last held out his hand for Linda to shake. “G’day, name’s Barry. I service the planes here.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to ask, Including the one that went down? but she was saved from that faux pas by the American woman.
“Did you hear about our murder?”
“I heard a man died, but I thought it was an accident.”
The reply came from Barry. “They’ve got the bloke on ice until the coroner can get here from Moresby, but since no one seems to know what he was doing up there, and since he’s got important friends, they’re playing it safe.”
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize he was a friend of yours.”
“God, no. He worked for the mines.”
“Do they know what happened?” But what “they” knew proved little more than what Linda’s rescuer had learned from his passengers the previous evening: a man named Dale Lawrence was found by some locals, at the base of a cliff a hundred yards from the road, his head bashed in. Lawrence had been in the highlands about five months, had worked in the upper Sepik River area before that, and nobody much liked him.
When Mrs. Carver came in with Linda’s breakfast, Barry’s flow of information cut abruptly off. After the landlady left, he leaned over and lowered his voice. “Maggie doesn’t like it when waitpelas are rude to her staff. This Lawrence fella was here a coupla days—this was three, four months ago—and after she kicked him out, we heard he’d been in trouble up in the Sepik.”
“What kind of trouble?”
Barry looked uncomfortable. “Well, not him, exactly. Seems a friend of his attacked a woman there. A local.”
“Attacked?”
“Raped. And killed her.”
“Killed her?” Linda squeaked. “Did the police catch him?” What was done with foreign criminals here? Were they handed over to the Australians? Or tried by a jury of men wearing tusks through their septums?
“Sure. Though of course nothing happened.”
“Why on earth not?”
“He worked security, for the mines.” Barry saw that more explanation was needed. “Brutal bastards, all of ’em, pardon my French. ’Course, he said he was an engineer, but I’ve never met an engineer who wore a gun. Name was Abrams. He and Lawrence and another fella—Turner? No, Taylor, I think—they all stood up for each other. And wasn’t there something about a pen-knife? Ah, right—fancy little silver thing they found in the corner of the woman’s hut, like it’d been kicked there. It belonged to Abrams, but all three of them swore it’d been stolen the week before. The kiap couldn’t prove otherwise.”
Kiap. Linda’s stateside training offered a translation: cop—singular or plural. “So he just went free—Abrams did?”
“Not for long. The mine’s lawyer bailed him out of the kalabus, but a coupla weeks later he went missing. They figured it was the girl’s relatives, took ’em in for questioning, big palaver for a while, all kinds of accusations flying. They found him eventually in a place it was unlikely the family’d have got to, and it looked like an accident though the body was…well, it was hard to tell. Anyway, nothing much came of it except the other two, Lawrence and Taylor, were sent out of the Sepik area. Girl’s name was something flowery. Hibiscus? No: Jasmin.”
One fatal injury, and now another a few months later. Linda thought of those stone-headed weapons bobbing around the jeep, and shuddered. What kind of place had she come to?