The Airmen and the Headhunters Read online

  With their jungle packs empty, Phil hesitated. Then he pulled out of his pocket the last item salvaged from the plane wreck, the leather gloves, and handed them to the chief. The chief threw the gloves back to Phil, who slipped his hand into one of them. The chief's men bolted to their feet and reached for their machetes. Phil quickly put his other hand in the remaining glove and wiggled his fingers. The chief cackled, the others laughed and Phil continued to wiggle his fingers wildly.

  The atmosphere was suddenly less strained. Two women appeared, wearing long, dark skirts made of vegetable fiber, their long, brass-weighted earlobes swinging against their nipples, their hands and feet tattooed in elaborate black swirls. They brought Dan and Phil big portions of cooked white rice in leaf packets along with unfamiliar cooked greens in blue-and-white Chinese bowls. Later, when the airmen looked around in the light of the resin torches that illuminated the interior of the longhouse they could see ancient-looking Oriental ceramics—huge, high-shouldered, dark brown jars and brilliant blue-and-white plates. For now, Phil and Dan did not think to wonder how or why these treasures were there.

  The chief rubbed his stomach to invite his guests to eat. It was now dark outside and surprisingly chilly—further confirmation they were in the uplands. Three of the chief's men built a fire in the hearth in front of the airmen. Ignoring their survival pamphlet instructions—"Don't stay in native houses and don't eat native food"—the airmen began to eat. Using the thumb and three fingers of the right hand, the way they saw the others do, they got down as much as they could manage of the huge pile of plain, unsalted white rice. They tried the stringy, dark green vegetables alongside and found them bitter. But they eagerly accepted some roasted ears of corn. When they had finished, not knowing what else to do, they put the cobs on the mat beside their Chinese bowls. Their hosts snatched up the discarded cobs and tossed them off the veranda to the noisy pigs and chickens down in the mud below. Phil and Dan put their hands on their bellies to show they were done with the food in front of them. Their hosts gave them green bananas that tasted surprisingly ripe and sweet.

  After dinner one of the tribesmen came crouching up to the airmen and offered them dried tobacco tied up neatly in a big green leaf. Phil and Dan sensed that this creeping while squatting on one's haunches was a friendly gesture. The man took out a match from a tiny matchbox. He had started to light the tobacco when Dan and Phil both noticed that the cover of the matchbox was decorated with the emblem of the rising sun, the dreaded Japanese imperial symbol.

  The airmen recoiled instinctively. Then they tried to hide their feelings but they could see they were fooling no one. The man lighting Dan's cigar made a gesture as if to throw the box away, which the airmen took as reassurance that these headhunters—if that was what they were—were on the Allied side. Still, the airmen continued to wonder anxiously how and when the man had come by that matchbox.

  After the women had cleared the food away, one of the men took Dan and Phil out on the veranda and showed them how to relieve themselves over the edge while keeping their genitals modestly covered. Upon their return inside, the longhouse chief pantomimed sleep by closing his eyes and pointing to the floor by the fire. Although Phil was reluctant to sleep with twenty pairs of lashless eyes on him, he spread out his parachute, lay down on it and closed his eyes. Dan did the same, and the young men, having agreed to stay awake by turns for two-hour stretches, were both soon fast asleep.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The D.O.'s Dilemma

  If Makahanap had looked up from his still incomplete report on the Mentarang District's rice production, he might have seen four Lun Dayeh tribesmen standing in the doorway of his office waiting to be noticed. (The Lun Dayeh do not break in on another person's thoughts or dreams abruptly, for fear of making the inner spirit ill.)

  Eventually, Makahanap saw Yakal and his brother, Busar, and two other young men he did not know, who must have made the trip with Busar from Long Gavit. For Yakal to be at the D.O.'s door was no surprise. Yakal was staying in Long Berang while Makahanap helped him study to be the first Lun Dayeh pastor of the Kemah Injil, an evangelical Protestant church.

  Although Busar was Yakal's best friend, as was often the case among Lun Dayeh siblings, the D.O. wondered why Busar came ten hours downriver by longboat during the hunting season on the Kinaye River, just before the heaviest monsoon rains began. Moreover, the men's wives would need help at home with the children and the old folks, because this was when the women were busy weeding the rice fields. Furthermore, enough rain had already fallen that the river's downward current was growing stronger every day. It would take Busar and his two companions—who, he now remembered, lived at Long Kasurun, the next village upriver from Busar's longhouse—at least thirty hours paddling against the flow to get back home.

  Makahanap greeted the group courteously, with the usual question: "You have come?"

  "We have come, we are three," replied Busar, rushing through the exchange of questions and answers that are the standard greeting among the Lun Dayeh. Busar's hasty replies alerted Makahanap that his visitor was anxious to move on to his urgent news, so the D.O. smiled an invitation for Busar to begin.

  Yesterday midday, Busar exclaimed, he and his neighbors Tawan Libat and Sugiang Baru had been out hunting together when they saw a huge object fall from the sky near Long Kasurun. When the big thing hit the ground, it burst into flames and made a lot of strange noises, louder than anything he had ever heard, louder than when a great tree falls. (He shivered. The sound of a tree falling on the mountainside when you are engaged felling a tree elsewhere is a terrible omen among the Lun Dayeh, even for those who are Christians, like Busar.) Busar and his friends had gradually come to realize that this burning metal thing must be an airplane, like those they had seen in the missionaries' magazines. But it was so much bigger than it had looked up in the sky. Imagine! It was as big as a longhouse. Up above, it had not seemed big enough to hold even one man. Busar's friends spoke up, confirming his story.

  Makahanap nodded. There being no roads in Borneo's interior, few Dayaks would have seen a wheeled or motored vehicle before, much less a flying one. Certainly the Lun Dayeh had no need for wheels or engines. They plowed their steep fields with a hoe dragged by water buffalo or by several men, and the women planted the rice seed in holes in the mud made by the men with pointed sticks. They traveled barefoot and single file up and down jungle slopes, going from the headwaters of one river system to another, the muddy banks serving as natural paths. In those few places upriver where the streams were navigable, they paddled a dugout canoe ( perahu). Where rocks and rapids made boating impossible, they would pick up the light craft with its heavy contents—maybe a buffalo calf or jungle products for market—and carry it on their shoulders.

  Busar waited for the district officer's response to his story, but Makahanap wanted to get a sense of how the plane crash had struck these Lun Dayeh without giving a hint of his own feelings. He merely stood there, looking interested. So Busar continued. He said that he, his little son, these companions and a dozen or so others who had been hunting with them had seen white, mushroomlike shapes coming down from the sky at roughly the same time as the plane was falling. As the shapes came nearer to earth, he and his friends could see that they were not mushrooms but men, hanging from ropes under white, cloudlike cloth tents. Two of the men had floated to earth behind nearby hills and could no longer be seen. Eventually Busar and his friends saw them again across the Kinaye River. Two foreigners with guns. Soldiers.

  This did get a reaction from the D.O., who interrupted to ask Busar to describe these soldiers exactly. Busar told Makahanap that he and his friends could tell from their skin color and faces that the soldiers were white men, not Japanese. But they did not seem to be Dutch; their bodies were not that bulky. Busar said he and his friends had stayed and watched them for some time.

  Makahanap smiled. It amazed him how these men who were often so noisy and boisterous in the evening gaiety of the
ir longhouses could, when out hunting, stay perfectly still for hours, even when a parade of fire ants walked across them. If the Lun Dayeh did not want to be seen, no stranger would know they were there.

  Busar went on. He and his friends had stood up and showed themselves from across the river. There had been a tense moment, he said, while they waited to see what the strangers would do. But finally, when Busar and the others had walked across through the water and thrown their machetes on the ground, they all had shaken hands and laughed.

  It was then that Busar had spotted a U.S. insignia on the gun holsters that were lying on the ground. It told him that these men must be Americans, from the same country as Brother John Willfinger.

  Makahanap nodded again. Brother John Willfinger of the Kemah Injil Church had been among the first to bring the good news about Jesus to the longhouses of the Krayan and Mentarang districts, before masa Jepun, "the Japanese time."

  The district officer now had an idea of the Dayaks' initial reaction to the arrival of the American airmen. He also sensed that Busar was about to change the subject. The D.O. had learned over the years that the Lun Dayeh greatly valued the spoken word, and they would tell and listen to stories that could go on for days. No Lun Dayeh story was ever meant to be told in a straightforward fashion, any more than a Lun Dayeh jungle trail could be made straight; there always had to be deviations and complications. But the D.O. was not to be distracted. He looked straight at Busar. "And then?"

  Busar, seemingly gratified that his listener was still eager to hear more, told how he and his friends had brought the Americans to Long Kasurun, where the village headman, though not a Christian, had welcomed the soldiers and tried to feed them rice. But the Americans did not know how to eat rice. Busar and his Long Kasurun friends gave animated accounts with comic gestures of how the strangers picked at the food. They told of everything their hosts had given the strangers to eat, all in vain, except for some corn. "So in the end we gave them bananas—and they ate them," said Busar, his recital at an end.

  Makahanap remained silent for a bit. When he spoke, it was quietly, soft speech being the way Lun Dayeh signal that what they are saying is important. Almost whispering, he said as emphatically as he could that Busar, Yakal and their companions must keep this story to themselves. Only Ama (Papa) and Mama Makahanap and a few others were to know. Busar and the others promised the D.O. they would not tell.

  After the young men had left, the D.O. stayed alone in his office. He needed to reflect on the question that could no longer be ignored, the question that had been like a dull headache ever since he had recognized the drone of the plane's failing engines. What should he do? Busar and the others would keep their promise not to tell. Even among non-Christians such as Busar's travel companions, a Lun Dayeh's promise was sacred.

  But news of the American airplane crash was bound to reach the Japanese occupiers, and Makahanap's current boss, the ken kanrikan (Japanese regional administrator) would no doubt be sending a party upriver from Malinau to look for survivors.

  Makahanap's Chinese trader friends here in Long Berang had all kept telling him that the war would end soon, and that the white people would win. That might be so, he thought, but at the moment the Japanese were powerful and close by whereas the Allied forces were not. Nor had the white men shown themselves ready to try to recover the territory that had fallen so easily from their grasp. And even if the Japanese were to lose the war, who knew for certain that white rule would return to this part of the world?

  The nearly three years that the Japanese had been in control of the Dutch East Indies had been hard for Makahanap to bear. Yet he was aware that he and his wife were among the few East Indians who regretted the departure of the Dutch. Under Dutch rule, Christians from his home islands, the Celebes, had been privileged above other natives. This favoritism was resented by the people of Java, who constituted the great majority of Dutch East Indians and who were Muslim, at least nominally. The Dutch had encouraged Christian outer islanders like himself and the "Indos," those of mixed European and Asian blood (who were also Christians for the most part), to attend Dutch colonial schools. Unlike the Muslims, they had been taught to read and write not only Malay but also Dutch, and had followed a Dutch curriculum. They finished school knowing more about the rivers of Holland than about those here. Thus qualified, they were able to find desk jobs in the Netherlands East Indies armed forces and in the Dutch colonial administration.

  But now, the Javanese—all eighty million of them—were enjoying a nominal rise to power under the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Makahanap suspected that the Co-Prosperity Sphere was just another colonial regime with a new name. But if, after the war, the white men did not return, the Javanese might really come to power, and people like himself and his family would lose their privileges. Prudence dictated, therefore, that he and his wife and other Christians keep their heads down now if they wanted to stay out of trouble later on.

  As a former missionary teacher, Makahanap knew his loyalties were already suspect to the Japanese and their local allies, especially the coastal Malays, whose history and Muslim religion gave them no reason to like the white man. What he ought to do, surely, was turn the airmen over to the ken kan rikan. It was his civic duty. No one could blame him if he did that. It was also the best way to ensure the safety of his district, his family and himself.

  But doing this went against his Christian conscience. And he knew—even before discussing it with her—that his wife would be scandalized if he handed any Americans over to the Japanese. Yet, if he were caught hiding them, it would mean a hideous death for himself and his family and probably serious repercussions for his district.

  He could not forget how the Japanese had killed his cousins in the Celebes three years before. At that time, the new masters had seemed to be trying to win the trust of the Celebes people. So when his cousins, who were pillars of the community, learned of Japanese soldiers putting a nice girl from their church group into a brothel for Japanese officers, they had complained to the Japanese civil authorities, expecting to have the matter rectified and the girl released. Instead, the couple's throats had been slit by one of the samurai swords the Japanese officers liked to display unsheathed, as a warning of their power.

  When the news reached the Makahanaps in Long Berang, their first thought had been for Christiaan, the cousins' only son, an orphan at age fifteen. Frightened as they were, William and Theresia had gone back east to the Celebes to get him.

  Makahanap's thoughts kept going off on tangents, but in his heart he knew why he was having such a hard time concentrating on what to do next. He was afraid. He feared the Japanese as he never had the Dutch, even the drunken ones.

  He was haunted by the many stories he had heard of torture, rape and murder of white prisoners of war at a prison camp in Sarawak, to the west, and at another big camp in the British state of North Borneo. More terrible still, because it was closer to home, had been the murder two years ago in nearby Long Nawang of dozens of Westerners, including Kemah Injil missionaries, their wives and even their babies. And then there had been the execution of Long Berang's own American, Brother John Willfinger. Makahanap could not bear to think about that now.

  Fortunately for his district, the people of upriver Borneo had been relatively unaffected by the Japanese occupation. The Dutch had rarely bothered with them, and the Japanese, after coming upriver to kill the foreigners living there in 1942, had not been back.

  The biggest annoyance to Makahanap's district during the masa Jepun was the wartime disruption of commercial shipping. That meant imported goods, such as the brightly colored cotton cloth the Lun Dayeh loved to use for sarongs and loincloths, was no longer available. However, the Lun Dayeh had always been fairly self-sufficient, growing their own rice and vegetables and catching their own fish and game. They made their own weapons, as well as bamboo fish cages and fishnets. Their hand-drilled hardwood blowpipes and poison darts they made themselves or obtained in tr
ade from the nomadic Punans of the deep interior rain forest. Some of the Lun Dayeh had their own dried springs containing iodized salt. The Lun Dayeh could even manage without the imported cotton cloth by pounding homemade fabric from tree bark or weaving threads spun from pineapple fiber.

  But in recent months, tribespeople living nearer the coast had been coming upriver to demand rice from local Lun Dayeh farmers because the Japanese were taking theirs. Makahanap had heard that when these downriver people got back home with the rice, the Japanese took half of it. Farmers who refused to give up their rice were taken away, and some had not been heard from since.

  And now, to complicate matters, there were American soldiers in his district. The Japanese would expect him to find and surrender them. Could he bear to court the risk to his family and his district—not to mention himself—of hiding American soldiers from the Japanese? His thoughts had come full circle without leading to an answer. He tried to pray for guidance but could not concentrate. He needed to consult the person who always seemed to have an instinctive grasp of the right thing to do. It was time to talk to Mama.

  When he walked next door to his house, he found Mama and eighteen-year-old Christiaan having a cup of tea during the quiet time while the four little ones napped. Seeing him enter, Mama served her husband tea in a porcelain cup brought from the Celebes. She listened tranquilly as he told her and Christiaan all about the Americans and the alarming problems their presence in his district could pose.

  As he had expected, Mama did not hesitate in finding an answer. She said she was convinced that the Allies would eventually prevail and that her husband would be held accountable for how these airmen were treated. "If the Americans die, William, you die," she said, exaggerating her argument slightly, as was her wont when her emotions were affected. Christiaan, when asked, said he could not imagine ever being on the same side as those who had murdered his parents.