Pecked to death by ducks (22 page)

it did to have lead in the old pencil if you had nothing to write on.

The fishermen gave us a large yellowfin tuna for our dinner, and we invited them to share it with us. Long after sunset they still hadn't come over to our camp.

"They're very shy," Paul said.

"We'll fix them," Steve said. He had brought along some bottle rockets to amuse the children this last dark night on the beach. We set them off one at a time, and called out the names of the fishermen: Jorge—boom—Mauricio—bam—Rene—ka-bloom— Ramon.

The fishermen could hardly refuse. After dinner Oceana abandoned me for Mauricio, a handsome, curly-haired young man. She sat on his lap, half under his jacket, and made him hold her doll. You had to be careful with a baby, Oceana explained. And sometimes they pooped. Did Mauricio know about the poop? He nodded his head gravely. Mauricio couldn't speak a word of English. Oceana prattled on for over an hour.

Jorge said he drove the catch all the way to Mexico City. It was a scary place, and he never went out after dark there.

We passed around a small bottle of tequila, but Mauricio shook his head when I offered it. He didn't want to disturb Oceana, who was asleep in his arms.

The next day, the same Mexican driver we had before pushed his van down the red rutted road, and we packed up our gear in a little less than an hour. When we hit the paved highway, I suggested we stop at the first roadside cantina for a cold beer. I wanted to say good-bye before we hit Loreto and scattered.

The cantina was a porch, open to the wind. We were sipping beers and reminiscing already, as if the trip had happened a decade ago. What about those sea lions near the arch? And the fishermen: great guys. That last sorta scary point. The wasps . . .

Oceana said she would not come back to Montana with me and be my little girl. Her parents might cry if she came with me.

"I have to go back to Alaska," she said seriously.

It felt like the last scene in Casablanca.

"We'll always have Paris," I said.

"I like you very much," Oceana said. Human females, I thought, it's in the genes.

"When you go back to Alaska," I said with what I thought was a good measure of nobility—Oceana nodded seriously—"don't eat the yellow snow."

"Why?" She cogitated on the matter for some moments. "Because of pee?"

"That's right," I said, and then we all had to pile into the van, go back to Loreto, fly north, and face up to the various varieties of yellow snow in our lives.

tpeak Oz

Most of us flaming septics visiting Oz either shoot through like the Bondi tram or muck about playing silly buggers and never properly apprehend the lingo. I was pondering this phenomenon one day while demolishing several dozen stubbies in the cattle-ranching country of far North Queensland, specifically at a rub-bity in the town of Coen, whose quaint motto is "Eat Beef, You Bastards." Three weeks into my trip to Australia I was aware that "bastard" is a term used to describe acceptable and pleasant members of the human race. The rubbity was located in what had been the Exchange Hotel, but the new owner—in the interest of economy and typical Aussie bullsh—had altered the name with a single letter, so that the only sign of any size in this town of some forty houses now read, drink at the sexchange hotel.

One of the bastards doing just that was having a go at me: "Geez," he said, "there must have been fifty flaming roos out there that night." The image of fifty kangaroos leaping and lurching about in an agony of fire tugged at the mind, though I knew perfectly well that "flaming" is a universal adjective often applied to perfectly uninflammable objects, just as the word "bloody" is used to modify any noun: "I twisted me flaming ankle on a bloody rock."

Much of what is unique about Australian English derives from the flash talk of transported criminals, and rhyming slang—"I have some Gene Tunney [money] in me skyrocket [pocket], and I'm going to the rubbity [dub-pub] for a pig's ear [beer]"—is dinki-di (a dinkum Aussie term meaning genuine Oz speak.) Another ridgi-dige bit of lingo has it that Americans are "seppos" or "septics" (septic-tank Yank.)

As the only septic at the Sexchange, I had to ask directions to the snakes (rhymes with snake's hiss) so I could unbutton the mutton and wring the rattlesnake. There are dozens of phrases for this particular activity, and they range from drain the dragon to syphon the python to simply "go a snakes."

In a rubbity like the Sexchange a bastard would be a flaming galah not to demolish several dozen stubbies (small bottles of lager), and a polite bastard steps out back to have a bit of a chunder. This process of enjoying oneself in reverse may be one of Australia's most popular indoor and outdoor sports, judging by the sheer number of phrases used to describe it: "cry ruth," "hurl," "chunder," "play the whale," "do the big spit," "park the tiger," "have a nice technicolor yawn," "laugh at the ground."

Since there were no jam tarts in evidence, a bit of the talk concerned certain Sheilas with norks like Mudgee mailbags. One potato in particular was known to root like a rattlesnake, and one of my companions expressed a desire to be "at her like a rat up a drainpipe." The preferred organ in an R.U.A.D. situation is known as "the wily old snorker," or, alternately, and more graphically, "the beef bayonet," the "pork sword," or the "mutton dagger."

In all fairness I should mention that certain proper residents of Australia—wowsers of the worst ilk—object strongly to such conversation and feel that some of the words and phrases used here are "best left written on the wall in an outback dunny." This attitude, I think, does not do justice to the distinctiveness of Australian usage. All the above words and phrases may be found in the new Macquarie Dictionary, a dinkum Aussie dictionary published by Macquarie University, New South Wales, after eleven years of research.

191 A OTHER PEOPLE S LIVES

Very few of the bastards at the Sexchange were concerned with verbal propriety, however, possibly because most of us were full as a bull's bum. The English language as spoken by Aussies— toilet talk and all—seemed robust and important. Several dozen stubbies'll do that to a bastard, of course, and when someone referred to the local dentist as a "fang-ferrier," I got to laughing in an entirely hysterical manner. Someone decided, quite loudly, that "the bleeding septic is as silly as a bagful of arseholes," and I couldn't stop laughing.

"He's gone troppo," they said.

"Fair dinkum."

"Meself," one bastard opined, "I blame the climate."

ning amok. Oh, I tell you, the man who is sanghyang has much strength. Sometimes it takes twenty men to hold him down and bring him out of the trance."

On the island of Bali men and women routinely fall into bizarre and sometimes violent trance states during certain carefully prescribed religious ceremonies. Bali is a small island, just one and a half kilometers east of Java, one of the over thirteen thousand islands that comprise the nation of Indonesia. The people, to Western eyes, are uncommonly attractive. They are fond of music, dancing, stage plays, and festivals. The extraordinary trance dances occur in a state of spiritual ecstasy and are religious in nature.

In the seventh century a.d. Indian traders brought the Hindu religion to Bali. When Islam triumphed over Hinduism in the sixteenth century, Bali became a refuge for Hindu intellectuals and nobles. Today it is the last bastion of Hinduism in Indonesia.

Balinese life is centered around the religion known as Agama Hindu. It is an amalgam of Tantric Buddhism, Malay ancestor worship, magical beliefs, and various animistic rituals that have survived a thousand years or more on the island. The ancient animistic faith is strong and has been incorporated into the overlying Hindu belief structures.

To an outsider it sometimes seems that the old animistic beliefs properly define the people and religion of Bali. Often the rituals of classical Hinduism seem a mere afterthought, especially in the extreme case of violent trancing ceremonies.

The animistic elements of Agama Hindu are so ingrained in the people that few can actually explain their meaning. When asked why a man goes into a trance at a certain time during a certain ceremony, people will shrug politely. It is a question that has little meaning to the Balinese. "It is the way we do things," they will tell you. In Europe there are few animistic rituals still surviving, though I suspect very few people could explain the "meaning" of the Christmas tree. "We do it because we have always done it," people will say. "We have Christmas trees because we like them." So it is with the Balinese.

As in Europe, there are some few people familiar with the origin and meaning of the ancient rituals. I. Ketut Suwena was one. He was fifty-two, the klian, or headman, of the banjar of Jangu. A banjar is an organization of households—usually several hundred of them—and is the most important social unit on the island. The banjar dispenses justice according to the traditional law called adat.

The banjar of Jangu is famous for its folk trances: nighttime ceremonies in which the people gather and sing while men in a state of trance perform feats of strength or dexterity that they could not do in a waking state. They climb trees like monkeys, lift heavy objects with the small finger of the right hand, or run barefoot through three-foot-high mounds of blazing coconut husks.

The trances, or sanghyangs, Ketut explained, were originally performed in times of trouble, especially when the banjar was threatened by disease. "You see," he said, "when Sira Mede Me-caling came to Bali from the island of Nusa Pinida, he brought with him many butas and kalas." Mecaling is considered the overlord of the evil spirits. Butas and kalas are various demons whose joy in the spirit world consists of tormenting human beings with grief and illness. The overlord went to Bali's most powerful benevolent god, Ida Batara Dalem Besakih, and asked permission to bring sickness on the land. Permission was granted, though the butas and kalas could not afflict those villages where the proper sacrifices were performed.

"But," Ketut explained, "Sira Mede Mecaling is evil and sometimes does not keep his promises." Sometimes, even after the sacrifices are performed according to ritual, the demonic followers of the evil god visit sickness upon the land. The rice crop may fail. Epidemics may occur.

"If my family is sick," Ketut said, "I am helpless. Then I may see a monkey at the door. I know this monkey is an evil spirit, and I chase it away, but I cannot catch it, because I am not strong enough or fast enough. So I go to the god of my banjar, and I make an offering of flowers and food. I ask for the strength to chase the evil spirit. And the god allows me to go into a trance

and become the monkey. Then I can climb trees and am very strong. I do this in front of all the people in the banjar, and the women sing the old songs to help me chase away the spirit. Then, later, the sickness is gone."

In Jangu one night, on the hard-packed mud of the school yard, several hundred people gathered for a sanghyang ceremony. Men and women sat on long wooden benches while others stood five deep around a sturdy wooden corral constructed for the ceremony. In the center of the arena there was a young palm tree that had been recently cut down and propped up on the dirt with a clever arrangement of boards.

Over twenty men stood inside the corral, waiting. A man wearing a leather loincloth and a long, disheveled black wig stepped into the corral. He was led to a small bamboo mat at the corner of the arena. He knelt, looked up, and nodded to a woman holding a plate of offerings that consisted of some biscuits, many flowers, and a bottle containing a small amount of clear liquor. The woman took the offering twenty yards away to a small stone structure about five feet high. This was the "seat" of the god of the banjar. It was shaped like an elongated pedestal with an open box on top. When the offerings had been made to the god, the man in the loincloth bent his head over a small, exquisitely crafted silver dish. One of the guards lit some twigs that had been soaked in aromatic oil. The man in the wig began rocking forward and back as he breathed scented smoke. The women of the banjar sang the ancient song, begging their god ro inhabit the rocking man with the spirit of the monkey.

Suddenly, he fell over onto his back and writhed about on the hard-packed dirt. He leapt to his feet and ran around the corral with a strange simian gait. His eyes were completely closed, and his front teeth were exposed. He looked very like a monkey.

The man turned for the tree and climbed it rapidly, without looking for handholds. It is fair to say that he dashed up the tree. At the top he pulled against a branch, leaning far out over the dirt, and the tree pulled loose from the wooden struts that held it. This seemed to infuriate the monkey, and he pulled and swayed

in the topmost branches without regard to his own safety. The guards rushed to the tree and held it upright.

Some of the men tried to lure the monkey down with freshly dug roots. The women continued to sing. Eventually, the monkey descended a lower branch and ate the muddy roots. He seemed to notice one of the guards and began grooming him, picking imaginary lice from his hair and eating them. Some of the women laughed, and the song was briefly interrupted.

About ten minutes later, a kind of brittle tension seemed to animate the crowd. The monkey man's brow was furrowed, and his movements had slowed. There was an ancient anger in his face. He leapt at one of the guards. The crowd exploded in a single shriek that seemed composed of equal parts glee and fear.

All twenty of the guards fell on the man, but he fought them off in convulsive bursts of what seemed to be superhuman strength. It seemed as if the monkey man was suffering a kind of fit. Several guards were thrown across the corral. Others were knocked off their feet. One man suffered a bloodied nose. A minute later the guards had the man restrained: There were several men on each arm, several on each leg. The man was lifted high on many hands, and Ketut sprinkled him with water that had been blessed by a priest.

Slowly, the man came to his senses. I could see a distant bleari-ness in his eyes, a confusion there that you see in drunkards. He was lowered to the ground. Several of the guards spoke softly with him until he rose and walked away, stumbling slightly.