In the grayness of the morning mist, he hunted with a sharpened spear.
"We'll eat well, mates," Pete whispered with a sure nod, stepping silently through the thick flora ahead of the two teens, who came to watch, like cubs behind their mother. They followed in his footprints, as he told them to do, so as not to break twigs.
Pete was shirtless, and he fluttered quietly through the undergrowth like a moth. The jungle had become a magic elixir for him; his senses had become acute again, and he swiveled back to the kids and put a finger to his lips ...
The boars were snorting on the other side of some fallen trees.
He crept closer. Another step. Pete could make out the high-pitched grunts of a baby; that's the one he wanted. Roast boar was a delicacy on the menus of even the five-star hotels.
Pete took one more step, shifted his weight, raised his spear,..
The small question of marksmanship remained-Could he throw the crude weapon with accuracy? He thought so. Slowly, he leaned over the downed tree and hovered over the three boars ...
And for that moment Pete saw himself in a picture, some old daguerreotype photograph of a bygone age. All he needed was a headpiece with horns to appear the consummate warrior-just before he hurled the spear, just before he killed ...
"La-la-la-la-laaaa!"
Sudden music resonated through the trees, some preposterous pop song in a language of gibberish. And the three boars screeched and jumped like panicked roaches, charging will-nilly from underneath the fallen tree.
Pete bowled over first, then Windy, then Pinky Bell, her pink fanny pack flying high, and her wallet, her money, her photos, her cards, came fluttering down like confetti at V-Day as the boars disappeared into the forest behind them.
Flat on his flipside, Pete was crestfallen. "Well, answer it, then."
Pinky Bell pulled a pink cellular phone from a pocket in the pack, the ringtone merrily chirping some youthful Japanese tune.
Pete sat up, grumbling at the ill-fated turn of events, and picked up the spear he had mislaid in the disturbance.
"Moshi-Moshi?" he heard her say into the phone several times.
Then the boy grabbed the phone from her. "Hello, hello?" He fiddled with it, but appeared to get no reception.
"A man was speaking French," she said, stooping to pick up the cards that had flown from her wallet.
Nothing made any sense to Pete. "What would the blasted French be doing out here? And cell phones don't work in a jungle-there are no towers."
The girl just stood there in her no-nothing witlessness, staring from Pete to the phone, and then back at Pete again.
Meanwhile, the strange camel they were calling Personal Growth-for lack of anything better-gave an impatient "PFFFFFFFFFFFF" from back in the clearing.
Pete would get them home, sooner or later-he was sure of that. They'd get help, everything they needed-at the village. All the familiar landmarks were guiding him right in like beacons on a runway-the mountains to the east, the same, snaking river to the west; it didn't matter that it was nearly seventy years ago.
He began whistling the tune again, something he knew as Colonel Bogey. The camel also seemed to know where they were headed, and it often led the way as they trooped south, gaining altitude as they hiked. The trees grew higher, and the forest grew darker, and the rain fell in steamy drizzles.
It was a long day of walking, and the cold began to suck at their wet, ruined clothing, which hung limply off them like the wet moss all around. They hiked upwards, following Personal Growth like dutiful offspring.
The American boy was bareheaded now, the headpiece of his sniper outfit crammed into his backpack. The Japanese girl's dainty, pink heels were now black, and the sole of the right shoe flopped like a giant tongue that wanted to protest its ill handling. The noise of it began to irritate Pete to no end, and he slashed tersely at a smooth, speckled rubber tree with the machete. Soon thick, white drops, like glue, oozed from the gash.
"Fix your shoes," he snapped, marching on. "Don't want to go visiting folks looking like some ragamuffin."
The parasites were particularly malevolent on that day, but Pete brushed them aside like an old hand, pulling the leeches off, and then rolling them in his fingers to release their madly searching suckers, before flicking them back out into the forest.
The Japanese girl watched Pete with what looked like a seething envy. She tried to imitate him and pick them out, but she was too slow-the leeches simply reattached themselves to her fingers faster than she could flick them.
At one point, a small clearing allowed Pete to look behind at the jungle they had traversed. The afternoon sun had washed the clouds away, imparting a stage set of pinks and lavenders like the soft colors inside seashells. The forest looked like supple, green waves, broken only by gigantic trees that reached high into the sky as if owning their own elitist roads to the heavens. To Pete the scene was jaw-dropping in its magnificence, and he felt gabby.
"Lived in this jungle for over a year, I did-courtesy of this little thing's ancestors." He nodded at Pinky Bell.
"You were a prisoner of war in World War Two?" the Yank asked, running silent calculations in his head. "You must have been a kid then."
"That was a long time ago," the Japanese girl said, choosing to instead watch a line of ants crawl over her shoe.
"I was a child, all right. Grew up mighty fast ... Joined the Merchant Seamen at fourteen. We were hauling supplies in forty-four and the ship got torpedoed off of New Guinea... Japs brought us here. When I escaped, she helped me. Time to give a proper 'thank you'."
Pete knew she would still be alive. He felt in his being that she was waiting for him. Maybe it was there that he would die, because it was there that she had saved his life.
They crossed into Indonesia in late-afternoon, though they didn't know it, because the hills, the canyons, the streams, the never-ending shroud of green all around them did not concede, or even recognize, something as fleeting as an international border. There were no guard shacks with crossing gates, as there were no real roads. The land was inhospitable, and primeval, and the unbounded canopy above had no interest in visas.
The Yank's device dogged them in the canopy overhead, and would say something unhelpful like, "Owing to insufficient source material, there may be considerable positional discrepancies."
It was a grueling jungle trudge, hiking up and down through the thorn pricks and the stinging whip of the slapping branches. At times, the trees grew so close together they seemed impenetrable, yet their nimble animal guide rarely vacillated. Sometimes they slid sideways in their shoes, skiing in the mud down the hills. But Pete never fell; he walked like a slinky twenty-year-old, cat-like and sure.
He was going home, and he almost giggled in heady anticipation. But he didn't, because the kids would surely think him insane, then. So he just kept whistling, like a broken record, the River Kwai tune-the Colonel Bogey March, over and over again, while the children stumbled along behind him, exhausted and near-starving.
"My Dad's going to kill me if I lose that GPS," Pete heard the boy grumble.
"You'll already be dead, boy, what can he do?"
This seemed to cheer the Yank up. "Yeah, I'll already be dead!"
And the girl would say something kooky like, "Za ass is round".
But Pete understood-the girl had pronunciation problems; couldn't say the "TH" or "R" very well. And he sighed for her troubles. "You'll really have to work on that one."
It was official - Pete had never felt this good in his life, and his euphoria was even rubbing off on the Japanese girl, who began humming the silly J-pop tune on her phone, because it had gotten stuck in her head like resin.
Kiss me, kiss me
I want you to kiss me
The girl broke into the English version of the song.
Kiss me where I am from...
Pete stopped cold. "Kiss you where you're from? - You're from your mother's coot, darling. You're no different. You want the boy to kiss your mother's coot?" He shook his head, "Bloody Japs, you've got yourselves some strange courtship rituals."
Pinky Bell rolled her eyes like a sick cow as if Pete had missed something, though Pete didn't see it.
"How about: 'Sit On My Face And Tell Me That You Love Me'? - Now that, Dearie, is a classic!' ... Or how about this:
Was on the isle of Borneo that I met her,
She was naked and tied to a tree...
He crested another hill and came up to what seemed a beaded curtain of climbing vines, their thick, woody stems winding around the trunks of the trees below for support, as they climbed upwards to the sunlight.
I could not resist the temptation,
And now I'm the father of three!
Pete then saw it - Through the vine curtain laid the huts of the kampong below them.
They had come to the village.
A dozen houses were thrown together on stilts in a row along the side of a river. A few of the small homes had metal-sheeted roofs, though the majority seemed just plunked on the hillside, with thatched-roof huts, the abodes of the have-nots who could not afford the corrugated metal.
What bothered him somewhat were the teenage boys, a half-dozen or so now aware of their presence on the hillside above the kampung.
Then they swung the things they carried, strapped from their necks, toward Pete's ragged band-black submachine guns.
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