Dark Places

14. Tetebatu Blues

The 10AM ferry eventually left at 2:30PM. But it was worth the wait. The ocean here was the purest blue imaginable. Like the green of the islands. It was as if only Indonesia used the real colours, and everywhere else had washed-out imitations. It took only four hours to reach Lombok, the next island over in Indonesia's endless chain, roughly the same size as Bali but according to Lonely Planet very different, Muslim not Hindu, poorer, more rural, not near as heavily traveled. My kind of place. The ferry was stuffed to the gills with about three hundred people, two-thirds of whom were backpackers. There were only four lifeboats and I thought uneasily about the occasional reports from Indonesia of Hundreds Dead In Ferry Disaster. But there was no disaster. We got into Lembar port in the middle of an astonishingly beautiful sunset, the sun enormous and crimson, the sky littered with pink cotton-candy cloud-dragons, the ocean so blue it was nearly purple.
   A gaggle of bemos awaited us, and their drivers herded us to Mataram, the biggest city in Lombok, maybe half a million people spread out over a long narrow snake of a city. We passed department stores, vegetable markets, men welding with cheap sunglasses as goggles in open lots that had been turned into mechanic's shops and decorated with a thousand dying machines. We overtook donkey carts and other bemos and Cadillacs. We were just in time to hear the sunset call to prayers from the mosques in town, that haunting atonal call that sounds like a terrible lamentation.
   Our bemo driver took us to the Hotel Zahir, which presumably gave him a kickback for everyone he brought who stayed there. Normally this arrangement irritates me but I wasn't in a mood to pigheadedly find somewhere else. The room had a fan and a mosquito net, and while there was no hot water, who wanted it in this sweltering hundred-degree heat? There were no names I recognized on the ledger. I got onto the hotel's computer to send an update to Talena, my eyes watering with sleepiness. I was nearly dead with exhaustion even though it wasn't that late. Bushwhacked by jet lag, I curled up in my mosquito net and fell asleep to the crooning of gecko lizards, crying out their name; geck-ooh, geck-ooh, geck-ooh.

   In the morning I took one of the local-transit bemos, which acted like buses, to the central market where Lonely Planet told me I would find the Sukarnoputri Cafe. I politely declined several offers to show me around the market, which did have an impressive array of carpets and sarongs and sculpture and extraordinary wooden masks, and checked out the Sukarnoputri. It was low-ceilinged, dark, and refreshingly cool, with dirt floors and a Bob Marley poster in the corner. Eight computers. Six people. Nobody I recognized. But again, what had I expected? That I would wander in just as The Bull II was there, and he would be so overcome by guilt that he would e-mail me a full confession right then and there?
   I went round the lodges. Mataram probably had hundreds of hotels, but most of them were for Indonesians, and only a dozen or so were mentioned in Lonely Planet. It took me a few hours to get around to them all. None had had any familiar names staying there recently. Another strikeout.
   I sat in a pleasant open-air park, concrete walkways around and over a gleaming blue pool, and reread my Lonely Planet to see what there was to do in Lombok. Hang out and get high on the Gili Archipelago — okay, they didn't explicitly say "get high", but the meaning was clear. Hang out and surf at Kuta Beach, which was apparently very different from the Kuta Beach in Bali, nearly deserted. Go east and take a ferry to the next island over. Or climb Gunung Rinjani, a real mountain more than 3000 meters high, in the center of the island. A three-day climb requiring tents and food and the works.
   If The Bull II existed, if he was still on the island, and if he was an adventure traveler, all of which I was seriously beginning to doubt, then he was probably on Gunung Rinjani. But even if he existed I thought he was probably moving on, island-hopping to the east, going to the real adventure, the real wilderness, of Irian Jaya. And I was beginning to feel that there was no point in following him. This was a very big country and he had a two-day lead.
   I found a compromise. Lonely Planet said that generally you climbed Gunung Rinjani up from the north and then down to the south, coming down to the village of Tetebatu in the middle of the island. Tetebatu was easily accessible by road, high enough at 1000m that it was noticeably cooler than the rest of the island, and a pleasant place to stay and wander around the verdant jungle and watch waterfalls and monkeys. That sounded fine to me. I felt more than a little like a monkey already for coming here at all. Maybe I could pick up some tips on appropriate primate behaviour.

* * *

   "Easily accessible" turned out to be a wee bit of an exaggeration. It was a small island, but the trip took six hours. A bemo to the transit center in Pao Montong, and an hour-and-a-half wait as the next bemo driver negotiated with the authorities there. I quenched my thirst by eating a bushelful of tasty rambutan fruit, familiar to me from Thailand. Then a bemo up to Kotoraya. Then a horse cart up a slow, muddy road. To top it all off the rainy season decided to make its first official appearance, and a monsoon poured down on me as I sat in the back of the rickety horse cart, as if God had picked up Lake Superior and decided to dump it on my head. After a few minutes of this my wizened driver looked back at my drenched condition, stopped his horse, went to the side of the trail, and cut a huge banana leaf free with one of the parangs all rural Indonesians carry. He gave it to me and when I draped it over my head I found it made for a remarkably effective umbrella.
   When we finally got to Tetebatu I ate a very tasty meal of nasi goreng at the first bamboo-walled cafe I found and watched the rain hammer down all around, wishing I had brought more reading material. An hour later the torrent abruptly turned into a trickle and then vanished, the transition taking maybe three minutes. The sun was already breaking through the crowds as I gathered my pack and squelched towards the second LP-recommended lodge. The second, because the first one mentioned in The Book tends to be overcrowded.
   Tetebatu was indeed very green. It consisted of a couple hundred wooden buildings spread along a single steep wide winding dirt road, plus one stone mosque, surrounded by miles of rice paddies. The whole town was patrolled by wandering packs of mangy dogs, and goats and chickens picked their way along the road. Rural bliss. If I was Indonesian I'd rather live here than in the crumbling, filthy, crowded shantytowns that I had seen on the way out of Mataran. I knew that growing rice was literally backbreaking work, but it had to be better than the shantytowns.
   The Mekar Sari lodge was about a hundred feet off the main road. It was run by a very pleasant Dutch woman named Femke, who gave me a room and showed me where I could dry out the soaking wet contents of my pack. My room was a tiny free-standing wooden cabin, and when I opened the windows I could see Gunung Rinjani rising above miles of rice paddies, with the dark shadow of jungle barely visible at the end of the cultivated area.
   I spent a day in Tetebatu doing virtually nothing. I was woken early by the keening dawn call to prayers, which cued a hoarse symphony of shrieking dogs that lasted for half an hour; by the time it had ended, I was firmly and irritably awake. I had a shivery-cold mandi bath. I halfheartedly checked the lodge registers, but I knew before I did so that there was no point. I had drinks with two very nice French girls before they left town, on their way to Flores to see the Komodo dragons, and we practiced each other's language. I played chess against one of the village elders, our every move watched and criticized by a crowd of a dozen children, with the soundtrack provided by the ever-present duo of Bob Marley and Tracy Chapman. I eked out a two wins and a draw after losing the first game. I ate satays and pineapple and fresh coconut. I sent Talena the depressing lack of news from Mekar Sari's shiny new computer. I wandered through the madman's checkerboard of rice paddies that surrounded the town, walking on the muddy ridges that separated the paddies from one another. At two o'clock the monsoon hit. At four o'clock it cleared away. I ate with a Dutch couple, Johann and Suzanne, and we chatted and showed each other matchstick tricks. I fell asleep feeling deeply frustrated. I had come here for nothing. But I didn't know what to do.
   The next day Johann and Suzanne and I hired a twelve-year-old boy to lead us into the jungle to one of the waterfalls. We passed fields of sunflowers and clouds of butterflies. We saw black howler monkeys dancing from branch to branch, ooking and whooping at one another. We descended steep, slippery wooden steps and swam in the waterfall, which plummeted 60 feet down a cliff, beautiful and so strong that Suzanne could not stand directly beneath it, and even Johann and I were nearly knocked over. The boy led us back to town for noon. Johann and Suzanne left for Kuta Beach, the Lombok one, and invited me to come along. I almost accepted but decided to wait a couple of days. I was beginning to accept that my mission had failed, and I was growing to like it here. My kind of place. My kind of pace.
   Around two o'clock I walked from Mekar Sari towards the elder's house, intending to see if he was up for another afternoon chess game. I passed the Harmony Cafe, where four people sat on the patio; two remarkably pretty blonde girls in sarongs and bikini tops, and two men wearing only shorts, one with red hair, the other with a shaved head and a gallery of tattoos. Pretty risque for Muslim Lombok, I thought, without really paying attention to them. But then the Indonesians were used to tourists behaving outrageously. Most of them didn't really mind. Or, they minded, but didn't really care to make an issue of it so long as we brought them money. Picking white coconuts, that was what they called the tourist trade.
   As I passed, the man with the shaved head and tattoos cried out: "Paul! Paul Wood!"
   I turned and recognition hit me like a lightning bolt. Morgan Jackson. Wearing the world's biggest shit-eating grin.

* * *

   I froze and just stared at him. He turned to his companions. "Paul's an old mate of mine. He was on that Africa truck I was telling you about." He turned back to me. "Come join us for a beer!"
   And I did, too. I don't really know why. Maybe habit. God knows how many times I'd sat down and had a beer with Morgan Jackson in Africa. Maybe I was surprised that he was with friends. I'd never imagined The Bull not traveling alone. Maybe it was just the social pressure of the situation, stupid as that sounds. Whatever it was, I broke my promise to Talena, and I didn't turn and collect my things and head straight back to California. Instead I sat down next to Morgan. I even shook his hand and smiled.
   "This is Kerri and Ulrika, they're Swedish," he said, pointing to the girls, and "and my mate Peter, he's Dutch. We just came down from the mountain." He gestured to Gunung Rinjani. His three friends smiled and said hi.
   "So how you been?" he asked. "What are you doing here?" There was an edge to his voice. His body language told me he was uncomfortable; hunched up, defensive. He was one of those rare big men — and he was big, I'm not small but he had three inches and probably forty pounds of muscle on me — who usually seem totally comfortable in their skin. I looked into his eyes and realized he was as surprised and alarmed to see me as I was to see him.
   "Just traveling," I heard myself say. My mouth seemed to be speaking without any direction from my brain. My brain was still in shock. "I got laid off a few days ago and figured, you know, why not the road?"
   "Damn straight," he said, and took a long swig from his Bintang as mine arrived. I studied him for a moment. He was even more heavily muscled than he had been in Africa. The shaved head was new. So were the tattoos: a sinuous dragon around each bulging bicep, a complicated pattern of what looked like razor wire across much of his back, and a chain of Chinese characters down the front of his chest.
   "How long have you been on the road?" I asked.
   "Couple months," he said. "I was in Nepal for awhile, then a few days in Bangkok, and then down here."
   "No kidding?" I said. "I was in Nepal last month. Did the Annapurna Circuit." Again I can't imagine why I said this.
   "Is that so," he said. "Why, I was there myself. Surprised we didn't run into one another." We glanced briefly into each other's eyes and then both of us flinched away. What felt like a long silence followed. I think his friends could tell there was tension between us and didn't know what to say.
   "How about the rest of the usual suspects?" I eventually came up with after desperately searching for a way to break the silence. "Still in touch?"
   "I am," he said. "I'm based in Leeds these days, and they're mostly in London, but we stay in touch, saw Lawrence a few months ago. How about yourself?"
   "Most of them, yeah," I said. "E-mail and so on."
   "You still working in IT?" he asked.
   "Was 'til they laid me off," I said.
   "How long are you staying in country?"
   "Don't know," I said. "Few weeks. You?"
   "Not too long," he said. "Another week or two. Long as the money holds out. Don't start work up 'til January, but I'm pretty near dead skint as is."
   Silence fell. We drank from our Bintangs. I tried to tell myself that I was sitting next to a serial killer, to the man who had murdered Laura, and I couldn't really believe it. That wasn't the sort of thing that really happened.
   I realized that though it was only midafternoon it had grown much darker since I had sat down. When I looked up I saw that storm clouds were beginning to gather. The afternoon's monsoon was en route.
   "I should get back to my lodge," I said, hastily getting up as the wind picked up and the first few fat raindrops smacked into the ground. "Don't want to get rained out."
   "Well," Morgan said. "I'll see you around." His expression could have been a big smile. Or an animal baring its teeth.