T. Boyle - Water Music

After a moment Mungo raises his head and focuses on a dark spot in the canvas just over Johnson’s left shoulder. “Three,” he croaks, as miserable as if he’d pushed them over the ledge himself.

“Hey, it ain’t the end of the world, Mr. Park. You still got what, forty left?”

“Thirty-nine, not counting myself. Or you.”

“So you made it through with none last time, right?”

Mungo looks away, and then, despite himself — the aroma is driving him crazy — tears into a dripping drumstick.

“The way I figure it,” Johnson is saying, blowing smoke rings, “the rain should let up about three or so. It’ll probably drizzle itself out for awhile, but if we’re lucky we can make it to Boontonkooran by dark, drizzle or no. It’s just a hole in the wall, but the Dooty ’s no fiend or anything, and if you willin’ to put up a little scratch — say five thousand cowries or so — he might be able to find you a dry hut or two and you can get yourself back together. What do you say?”

Heartsick, his lips glistening with grease, the explorer is slowly nodding his head. “You’re the boss,” he says.

♦ ♦ ♦

Boontonkooran is a way station, unremarkable but vital, given the circumstances. For sixty-five hundred cowries the explorer is able to rent three leaking, bug-infested shacks and purchase two day’s provisions — milk, corn and millet — for men and animals. For an additional sixty-five and three buttons from his greatcoat, he persuades a robust octogenarian woodcutter to give up a pair of matched asses and go into retirement. On the negative side, there is no meat available — at any price — and the rains, having set in with a vengeance, force the beleaguered explorer to extend their stay through three bleak days and nights, during which the soldiers — damp, yes, but not dripping — sprawl in ragged heaps on the earthen floors of the rented shacks, sniffling, scratching, huddled in mildewed blankets and dipping their snot-crusted tin cups into a bottomless pot of broth concocted by the new cook, Jemmie Bird, from salt beef, rice and a handful of wilted native vegetables. It tastes exactly like seawater, something you’d gargle with eight fathoms down, but at least it warms the innards. Outside, the rain beats down with unremitting intensity, like nothing in any man’s experience, not M’Keal’s, Mungo’s or Johnson’s. Even the sailors recruited from the Eugenia —the elder of whom once rode out a typhoon off the Marquesas — have to concede that this takes the cake.

The weather has the explorer concerned. It’s not so much the immediate problems of impassable roads, swollen rivers and slick precipices that worry him, but the long-range effects of the damp air on the men’s health. Well he knows how pernicious the climate can be, how the putrid exhalations from swamps, flooded streams and pools of standing water can undermine one’s health in the blink of an eye, how a host of mysterious diseases can reduce a man from a bruiser to a death’s head in a matter of days. He himself, long inured to it, has been feeling a bit under the weather lately. And if even he is affected, what of scarecrows like Bird or consumptives like Watkins? Will he have to carry them to the Niger? And if so, who’ll drive the asses and haul the supplies? Worse: who’ll fight off the Moors?

On the second night of their confinement at Boontonkooran, hunched in the command tent they’ve set up beneath the sievelike roof of one of the rented huts, he confides his fears to Zander.

At first his brother-in-law doesn’t answer. Just sits there, an open book in his lap, staring vacantly at the cold canvas wall. The explorer is struck by how drawn and wacted he looks, the skin pulled tight as a mask over his cheekbones, feverish eyes fled to the dark recesses of their sockets as if they’d gone into hiding. “Zander.” the explorer says, alarmed. “Are you all right?”

Zander sighs. “A little feverish, I guess. Runny stool. When I stand suddenly I feel lightheaded, as if I’d had too much to drink. Nothing really.” The explorer is staring at him, mouth agape, a look of dawning horror twisting his features askew. Zander snaps the book shut. “You were saying?”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure of what?”

“That you’re all right? No sore throat, vomiting, pins and needles in the fingertips?”

Zander’s laugh is feeble, tailed with a cough. “I may be a shrimp,” he says, coughing still, “but I’m tough. After all,” making a joke of it, “I come from good stock.”

The explorer attempts a smile but manages only a weird grin.

“Don’t you worry about me,” Zander says, his voice breaking on the final vowel to suppress a cough, “—just a cold, that’s all. Now: tell me what’s on your mind. Go ahead, shoot.”

Momentarily mollified, but with a new worry to add to the list, Mungo vents his fears and uncertainties, admits as he could admit to no one else but Ailie his self-doubt, the terrible burden that leadership has become, lives in his hands like grains of sand in an hourglass.

Zander’s reassurance is bland, rote. “You’ve done it before,” he sighs, “you’ll do it again.”

“But I haven’t. . don’t you see that? Eight years ago I had no one but myself to look out for. If I didn’t make it, so much the worse. But now I’ve got thirty-nine souls in my pocket, not to mention the horses and asses and thousands of pounds worth of supplies and equipment. My whole reputation’s on the line.” He is on his feet now, pacing. Suddenly he whirls round, almost shouting: “And the men — what if they can’t make it? What if the climate gets to them and deadens their spirit — what if they can’t go on?”

♦ ♦ ♦

It is no rhetorical question.

Sure enough, when the time comes to roll out and hit the road under lowering skies and a hint of light so vague even the birds are uncertain whether they should be chirping or not, three of the men refuse to obey the order. Or rather they are unable to. Unable even to stand. Rome, Cartwright and Bloore. Martyn has gone so far as to beat a quick tattoo on the bare soles of each of the malingerers, but without success.

“Sir!” he snaps at Mungo as the explorer is puttering over the arrangement of his saddlebags and cinching a load to one of the command asses. “Three of the men refuse to obey a direct order to roll out. Sir!” Martyn clicks his heels and jabs a salute into his forehead.

Won’t roll out? Damn. It’s just what he was afraid of. Jolted into martial consciousness by the towel-snapping tones of Martyn’s voice, the explorer throws back his shoulders and marches directly toward the hut in which the shirkers lie. Most of the asses have been loaded, and the men are standing about in the light drizzle, impatient, red-eyed, hawking up balls of vileness on the sodden earth. Mungo stalks into the hut, already bristling, ready to vent all his frustrations in a single outburst. The words are on his lips—“How dare you, you slackers!”—when he is pulled up short by the sight of them — the sight of them, and the smell of them.

The three lie huddled in the corner of the hut, too far gone to lift their eyes or even to brush away the festering hordes of mosquitoes that have mysteriously appeared with the onset of the rains, blackening hands and faces and sunscorched collars like smudges of dirt. Cartwright appears to be asleep, his cheek pressed flat to the ground in a puddle of his own vomit, Old Rome is gibbering away sotto voce, and Bloore, supine, staring at the thatch like a catatonic. The smell is worse than any sickroom. . there is the disagreeable odor of human functions gone awry, disordered by illness, but something more too, something earthy and essential; the sad stink of mortality.