A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (15 page)

“Potassium cyanide.”

“—members in all—”

“Dead,” I said. “Men, women, children, old, young, black, white …”

Her eyes glazed over and she turned from me, walking rapidly in the general direction of the United Airlines ticketing desk. I followed along after her, the way so many of them had hounded my steps over the years in airports all over America.

“They were people who couldn’t look into themselves,” I insisted. “Good people. People who fed the hungry. Who helped others. And now they’re lying out there in that goddamned jungle …”

She stepped up her pace.

“… swollen. Grotesque. Nothing more than thirty or forty tons of rotting meat.”

She ran from me, her bag full of magazines and albums thumping against her hip. I felt both ashamed and full of fierce, brutal joy. There were a dozen of them at least, between concourse A and concourse H, and I got every one. All you had to do was “Jonestown” them and they fled like rats.

W
hile I was raging through the Miami airport, Tim Chapman, a husky twenty-eight-year-old photographer for the
Miami Herald
, was doing some of the best work of his life. In Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, he had talked his way onto a flight to Jonestown, where the bodies still lay, three days after the massacre that culminated in the death of more than nine hundred members of the Reverend Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple.

From the helicopter it looked as if there were a lot of brightly colored specks around the main building. At three hundred feet the smell hit. The chopper landed on a rise, out of sight of the bodies. Other reporters tied handkerchiefs over their faces. Chapman didn’t have one, so he used a chamois rag. It turned out to be a good idea.

Chapman was telling me all this about three in the morning
the day I arrived in Georgetown. He wasn’t drinking, but his words slipped out in slurry bursts. He hadn’t been able to sleep much.

“The first body I saw,” he said, “was off to the side, alone. Five more steps and I saw another and another and another; hundreds of bodies. The
Newsweek
reporter was walking around saying, ‘I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.’ Another guy said, ‘It’s unreal.’ Then nobody even attempted to speak anymore. It was overwhelming. Bizarre.”

Chapman talked about how he kept moving, shooting wide-angle shots of the hundreds of bodies. “There were colors everywhere: raincoats and shirts and pants in reds and greens and blues; bright, happy colors.” Chapman saw two parrots on a fence, a red and yellow macaw and a blue and yellow macaw. He moved around to get that angle: the contrast of life and death.

“I started moving to my left,” Chapman said, “and I was battered by the smell. It hit me. Went right into my chest. I started to gag and turned my back. Seeing it, plus the smell …” He wadded the chamois into his mouth, bit down, got some saliva into it, and tasted the leather. That helped some. “Then, I found if I kept my eyes moving and let my camera be my eyes, I’d never really see it. I shot verticals and horizontals, moving to my left. And then there it was.” Chapman shrugged helplessly. “There were piles upon piles of bodies. What do you call it? There’s no definition. Nothing to compare it to.”

Outside our hotel, a tropical rain battered the windows. Inside, an air conditioner cranked up to full-high howled mechanically. The bodies, Chapman said, were in grotesque disfigurement. One woman’s false teeth had been pushed out. He saw a child, maybe five years old, between a man and a woman who were swollen in death. He remembered that the child wore brown pants and a blue shirt. He wasn’t as swollen as the man and woman. The children didn’t seem to swell as much. Just for a moment Chapman stood there, hating the parents. They had a choice, and the child didn’t.

When the other reporters left for Jones’s house, Chapman decided to stay with the bodies, and he moved through them
alone. He stopped for a moment, and in the stillness, he heard a body working. “It was … gurgling. And it came from a black woman in a red shirt with
VIVA
written across the front. She wore gold earrings and she was arm in arm with a black man. Her head was swollen to the size of a bowling ball. Her eyes had popped completely out of her head. The entire eyeball was resting outside the socket.” Chapman paused. “It didn’t bother me then,” he said. “I knew it would get to me in a few days.

“This is going to change my life,” Chapman said softly. He lost the thread of his thought momentarily and his eyes went blank. In Vietnam, they called it the one-thousand-yard stare.

I waited for a while, then asked, “What else?”

“Okay. I moved to my left. There was a vat, and then I saw Jones. As I moved toward him, I got a real bad whiff. I stepped away, almost tripped on a body, stumbled to get my balance, and as soon as I bent down, I was suddenly too close to one. There was a tremendous adrenaline shot, a fear.” He had then stepped back and tried to tell himself that he had to go on, that he was an instrument of history.

“It was really sickening at this point. The bodies were all, well, they were oozing—literally. Fluids running out of the bodies on top of bodies. Some of them had guts hanging out. They had burst in the heat. Eyeballs, intestines, bodies virtually held in by clothing. Somehow it all reminded me of Salvador Dali’s
Resurrection of the Flesh
. Did you ever see that? And I thought, ‘What I’m doing here is a form of art.’ ”

Chapman told me he saw seven needles. One was sticking out of a man’s neck. Another was totally bent, as if it had been shoved into someone or something with a lot of force. There was about half an inch of milky fluid in the syringe.

There were some dogs that had been shot and some dead cats. Chapman decided not to photograph them. He thought there were a lot of sick people in the world who would be more angry about them than “this mind-boggling, nihilistic thing, this questioning of the very value of human life.”

Chapman chose not to shoot any photos of Jones. It had
been done, and besides, he felt that somehow any more photos would glorify the man. He never got closer than fifteen feet to Jones. “He was wearing a red dress shirt, and it looked to me as if it had burst open because of the swelling. From where I stood, it looked as if he wore a soaked white T-shirt. Either that or his skin was bulging out, because you could tell it was holding in liquids and goo.

“His head was all blown out of proportion. There was a wound under his right ear, and it was oozing. One arm was up over his head, stiff in rigor mortis. The skin was stretched tight over the hand, and it looked desperate, like a claw.”

There was something else, something about the arrangement of the bodies that struck Chapman. Jones was on his back. Most of the others were face down, their heads pointing to Jones. “I could tell,” Chapman said, “that it wasn’t their final statement. It was Jones’s.”

Somehow that single thought was the most terrifying thing Chapman said that morning.

T
he Park Hotel is a big, faded, white, four-story frame building surrounded by palms. Someone in the Guyanese government had decided to put all the survivors of the massacre on the same floor with the survivors of the Port Kaituma ambush (during which Representative Leo Ryan of California and four others were murdered; he had traveled to Guyana at the request of some constituents who were troubled about relatives living in Jonestown).

On the second floor of the Park is a large ballroom. A white ribbed dome rises some seventy feet above the floor, where there are a dozen or so tables with three or four chairs apiece. Just under the dome is a balcony, which leads to the rooms. The ballroom is open to the wind on three sides. A white wooden railing keeps inebriated guests from stumbling off the floor and plummeting onto the gardenias below. In deference to the periodic downpours that last an
hour or more, there is a green metal awning, hung with pots of various tropical flowers and ferns. I thought of the place as the Graham Greene Room.

Guyanese soldiers stood about conspicuously. Reporters occupied most of the tables. The survivors were confined to the third floor, sometimes two, three, and four to a small, un-air-conditioned room. They were forced to leave their doors and windows open for the breeze, and they lay sweating under yellowing canopies of mosquito netting. When they couldn’t stand the rooms anymore, they came down to the ballroom, where the reporters swarmed around them like hungry locusts on a single ear of corn.

One afternoon a steel-drum band called the Pegasus Sound Wave took the stage and played lilting versions of popular songs. The musicians wore red baseball caps and enjoyed their own music. They liked Christmas carols in particular and smiled and laughed their way through “Jingle Bells” and “Jolly Old Saint Nick” several times, to the obvious delight of the local crowd.

Off to the side, over bottles of Banks beer, the survivors talked to reporters. You’d hear the most heartwrenching, bloody awful details—“Part of her skull landed in my lap”; “Lost five children out there …”; “My child was dead, and my wife was dying”—over the din of laughter and applause and Christmas carols.

I
t began to rain, cooling the room. Rain hammered on the awning, then let up. The sun burst through, and its light glittered on the wet palms swaying in the trade winds.

The survivors, some of them children, stared at the reporters with vacant, ancient eyes. There were literally hundreds of journalists from at least five continents in Georgetown. It was madness. Virulent lunacy. And when you tried to assemble bits and pieces of the story, none of it fit together. There was no perspective, no center.

And so we assaulted the survivors in the Graham Greene
Room at the Park. There were three distinct groups. First came the voices of dissent: those who had gone with Congressman Ryan and survived the shootout at Port Kaituma. This group included the Bogue family, the Parks family, and Harold Cordell. They hated Jones and Jonestown. The press counted them as the most reliable sources.

The second group consisted of those who had escaped the carnage at Jonestown. Odell Rhodes and Stanley Clayton made up half of the total number. Both were articulate, both had witnessed the final moments.

On Saturday, the third group—Tim Carter, thirty, his younger brother, Mike, and Mike Prokes, thirty-one—came walking up the steps of the Park to the Graham Greene Room. Both Tim Carter and Mike Prokes had held leadership positions in Jones’s organization. They were accompanied by several Guyanese soldiers, and they looked terribly frightened.

They sat at one end of the tables, and the press pounced. Lights, cameras, microphones, tape recorders, half a dozen people shouting out questions. Tim Carter, in particular, fascinated me. It was his eyes. He looked like a beaten fighter in the fifteenth round, one who just caught a stiff right cross he never saw coming. Tim Carter was a beaten man, and his eyes had the watery, glazed, and unfocused look of a boxer who can no longer defend himself and who is simply going to absorb punches until he falls.

“I heard a lot of screaming,” Carter said, his voice breaking, “and I went up to the pavilion and the first thing I saw was that my wife and child were dead. I had a choice of staying there”—he continued, close to tears—“and I left. And these people [referring to the dissenters who had lived through Port Kaituma] are saying we are after them and it is ridiculous.”

We heard a remarkably similar story from the dissenting survivors. Jim Jones had promised that anyone who left Jonestown would be tracked down and killed. And yet, leaders of the organization had left in the midst of the suicides. They had with them a suitcase containing $500,000 in American currency.

“The money was given to us by one of the secretaries,” Prokes said. He identified Maria Katsaris, a top aide and mistress to Jones. “She said, ‘Things are out of control. Take this.’ We left. The money was in the suitcase.”

Prokes and the Carters said they were running for their lives, and the suitcase was too heavy, so they buried it. When they arrived at Port Kaituma, they told the police about the suitcase and took them to it.

“You saw your wife and child take poison?” someone asked Tim Carter. His eyes swam. “I didn’t see them take poison. My baby was dead. My wife was dying. I’m trying to forget about it. Everything you thought you believed in, everything you were working for, was a lie, it was, it was … a lie.

“All I can say is that it was a nightmare, a nightmare. It was the most grotesque thing I’ve ever seen. We were there two days later and I couldn’t even recognize people I’d known for six years.” [The Carters and Mike Prokes had gone back to help identify bodies.]

Prokes said, “We’ve all lost loved ones. We feel we’ve been more than cooperative. We would like to be alone for a while.” They got up and sat by themselves at a far table. I saw one reporter label his tape
PUNKS
.

The band was still playing Christmas carols. I bought a beer and watched the “punks” from across the room. They were constantly checking the position of the Guyanese soldiers, and, I imagined, looking for an escape route. They feared the dissenting survivors and feared they might be killed because of the nature of their escape and their leadership positions. They refused to go to their rooms on the third floor. Escape routes were limited.

So the “punks” were forced to stay in the Graham Greene Room. Despite their wishes, reporters would still try to sit with them. When this happened, it triggered another rush of cameras and microphones. “The circumstances were different,” Tim Carter said for the fourth or fifth time. “We were asked to leave. We were given a suitcase and told to take it to the embassy. I heard crying and screaming. And I went up, like I said, and I saw
my wife and son … please, I don’t want to talk about it.”

But they had little choice. As long as they stayed in the Greene Room, one reporter, bolder than the rest, would approach them, and it would start all over again. I was reminded of the way a bitch weans her puppies. She may be sleeping when they waddle over and begin to suckle. Annoyed, she gets up and walks to the far side of the room. The puppies regard one another in dismay. Soon enough, one, bolder than the rest, waddles over to mother. The others, fearing that they won’t get their fair share, make a mad comic dash.