Juan Quixote

You never know who’s going to turn up at your door. I was in the front yard digging out a goldfish pond one hot afternoon. I was sweating like a pig and from time to time Wulan, my wife, came out to cluck and shake her head. Here in Indonesia, everybody gets up at dawn and starts working well before the sun heats up if they have a tough job. Only a half-cocked bule would be slaving away in the blazing heat. Don’t ask me why we needed a fish pond. The house we rented before we bought this place had two of them and I kind of missed seeing those Koi swirling around, but not really enough to go through this kind of grief.

Digging a fish pond is more trouble than you might think. It has to be leveled out and you need to waterproof it with plastic. Then you line it with concrete and embed stones in the concrete. If the water is stagnant it gets nasty with fungus, so you have to have to rig a water source from above that breaks the surface and you need to install a pump for that. All this was turning out to be more than I bargained for and I kicked a bag of concrete and cussed a little.

Wulan came out and smiled at me. It was good to see her smile again. About a month before, we had a family crisis. Her younger brother, Amat, was a journalist for a pretty sleazy tabloid, one of those really popular rags here that publish grisly photos of murdered people and print exposes about politicians caught in bed with three teenage hookers.

Amat wrote a story that Wulan translated for me. I thought it was pretty funny. There are these plaster statues of policemen and policewomen all over Kota Kasar at street intersections. They’re life-size and painted to look just like real people. They’re set on top of pedestals in the middle of the street and they’re all raising their right arms. It’s cheaper to make them than to hire more traffic cops.

You ever notice how you take something for granted and never really see it until somebody points it out to you? The plaster police had been around for years before Amat wrote his story. He reminded his readers about an old Indonesian myth.

In the legend, a young guy from a poor family goes abroad to make his fortune. It about kills his mother to let him go. He’s really successful and

he comes home years later by ship with a beautiful, high-class wife and a lot of riches. His mother is waiting for him on the dock and when she sees him she starts screaming and crying.

“Who is that nasty old crone calling your name?” the kid’s snotty wife asks.

The kid’s ashamed now. “I don’t know, I never saw her before.”

The old lady hears this. “Law of karma! Law of karma on my ungrateful son!”

Wulan told me that law of karma is what people here say when they feel they’ve really been screwed over. It means you want some asshole to get his just reward. A wife might yell it at her husband if she catches him balling the maid.

So the old lady is screeching about law of karma and shaking her fist, then suddenly the kid and his wife turn into lifeless statues. They’re rooted to the spot forever and countless generations of birds shit on them. Mothers show the statues to their children and warn them about what happens to ungrateful brats.

Amat took the story a step further and wrote that the police — who are greedy as hell here and are always squeezing money from people — that the cops who were the most corrupt had been turned into statues by Allah and the ones who were still breathing and walking around had better heed the warning; they’d better straighten up and fly right.

Amat was the intellectual of the family and he went on to remind his readers that the female plaster figures were overly-endowed, and the big tits combined with the arm shooting straight out had a powerful message — something about orderly behavior inspired by erotic fascism. He kind of lost me there.

Anyway, Amat’s story made a big splash and the sales of that scandal rag shot up.

It was Amat’s turn to throw the monthly acara, the family get-together, and he did it up royally. We all had supper at a huge table in a four star hotel restaurant. You could tell that Amat was really basking in the limelight. People from other tables came over to shake his hand. I felt happy for him. Educated people like journalists and teachers make a miserable salary here and it seemed that Amat might really be going places now.

The next day Amat’s boss called Panca, Amat’s wife, and asked when he might be showing up. Panca’s heart stopped — Amat left for work three hours earlier. That was four weeks ago. No one has seen him since.

The men of the family made the rounds of the police stations. As a foreigner I couldn’t do much there, but I offered money to bribe anyone who might talk. The city cops didn’t have much to say, but they hinted that the really hard-core guys, the Mobile Brigade or the Military Police, might have had a hand in it. These are the really scary ones who make people disappear.

I worked on ships running to South America for many years. Every country has its own version of those bastards.

After two weeks we knew Amat was dead. We only hoped he wasn’t tortured.

Christ, how did I get so far off track? I gave up on the fish pond for the day and Wulan was wiping the sweat off my face with a towel when we heard the gate rattling.

It was a guy standing there who looked like one of those drifters that do odd jobs around the neighborhood, like trimming your grass or cutting dead limbs off your trees. He had on one of those Viet Cong type straw hats and his clothes were pretty ragged. Wulan is always leery about letting these people in to work. She says they might be casing the place for a gang of maling, thieves. She shook her head and told him we don’t need any work done, but there was something about this character that made me walk over to the gate. His head was hanging down, like the typical humble beggar, but there was a strange smile on his face and his eyes were glittering.

Holy shit! I knew this bag of rags! It was Juan, an American seaman, a shipmate from the Far East shuttle.

“Want your shrubs pruned, Ski?” he said, grinning, and I opened the gate and grabbed him to see if he was real.

He turned down the beer I offered and asked for a glass of tea. We were sitting on the veranda now and I was pumping him for his story. He was in no hurry to tell me. “You’ve got a nice place here, Ski.”

My littlest tottered out and stared at him. She was just old enough to walk. Juan started crooning an Indonesian children’s song and the kid was delighted — she clapped her hands to her face.

“Alright, Juan, don’t play the coy bitch. Out with it. How the fuck did you end up here? And what happened to you,” I said, pointing to his tattered clothes.

Juan Lopez’s family came to the States from Colombia when he was no older than my youngest. He didn’t like school and after getting his GED he joined the seaman’s union. He was still pretty green when he signed on my ship, it was only his third.

Juan’s gift — and maybe it was his curse — was languages. He already spoke Spanish and he learned Italian from the street in his Queens neighborhood. The only courses he did well in at school were French and German. His previous ships ran to the Middle East and he picked up Arabic, at least enough to chat with people over there.

So I’ve got this polyglot wonder boy on my watch and I wasn’t sure what to make of him. He was a decent enough kid, but his seamanship was very mediocre, at best.

The Bos’n was a little rough with the kid, calling him ‘numb nuts’ and ‘half-ass’. I took him under my wing and showed him some stuff, knots and splices and helmsmanship.

We were shuttling between Japan and Indonesia. The Japs are a very aloof people, so it’s hard to make friends there, but Indonesians are open-hearted. Juan took to Indonesia like a Polack to vodka. He paid guys to stand his port watches and he hung out with locals every chance he got.

We called on two Indo ports, one in Borneo and one in Sumatra. The Borneo town was pretty wild. Lots of young girls came in by boat from Java to make money hooking and there were bars with cheap, black market booze. Juan didn’t mess with any of that. He hung around the town mosque and talked with the respectable people while everybody else blew off steam in the whore compounds. The Sumatra port was in Aceh, the really religious part of the island.

You have to be careful in Aceh. Those people fought the Dutch for generations and then they fought Sukarno after Indo independence. We’re talking about some bellicose people here. They don’t take insults lightly.

The other guy on our watch was Keeper, an Alabama boy in his early twenties. Keeper hadn’t changed with the times. He wore his white skin like a uniform. Even a died-in-the-wool bigot has to tone down his jazz when he works with other races, but Keeper let everyone know he was damned proud to be a white man.

Like I said before, the port in Sumatra is in a really religious area. The people are very conservative. Women cover their hair and the men wear those little black caps all the time. We’re in port and Keeper goes ashore looking for booze and pussy. He gets on a bus and there’s a good-looking woman sitting next to him.

This is Keepers first time in Aceh. After running to the Borneo port he’s decided that all the women in the country are whores and he grabs the woman next to him. He starts mauling her tits and after she screams, the bus driver walks back to see what the ruckus is. Keeper slaps his face.

What happened next was the kind of teamwork you only see in poor countries. The men on the bus grabbed Keeper and hauled him out. They held him down and the driver ran the bus over his legs. Then they tossed him back aboard and took him to the nearest hospital. The doctors had to cut off one of his legs.

We heard about Keeper’s little adventure back on the ship, and I can’t say there were any tears shed. He was pretty much despised by everybody. The only guy who went to see him in the hospital was Juan, this despite Keeper always calling him ‘spic’ or ‘beaner’.

Even though Keeper already paid a price for his asshole behavior, he wasn’t off the hook yet. The whole town was churned up. The police wanted to hold him and put him on trial for insulting the purity of Aceh womanhood. Juan did some fast talking. He told Keeper that his only chance of not going to prison was to grovel and ask for forgiveness and then Juan had a long talk with the cops. I think the authorities were impressed with this young guy who spoke their language and they let Keeper get flown out.

I’m not finished with our boy Keeper yet. Instead of suing the ship owners for a huge settlement, he let the company lawyers talk him into dropping all legal action and accepting a guaranteed, lifetime job on their ships. Later he used his hollow plastic leg to smuggle weed from Indo to Japan, where the stuff is expensive and hard to get. One night he slapped a girl in an Osaka gin mill and she ran to the cops. Keeper ended up drawing four years in one of those total silence Jap prisons.

But that’s another story and I mention it only to show how big-hearted Juan was. There was no percentage for him in going to bat for that scumbag, but Juan did it anyway.

Juan transferred to another ship and I lost touch with him Later on I heard he was living in Aceh. This wasn’t so strange as it might seem; as long as there’s been an American Merchant Marine, there have been US seaman who have lived in every imaginable place in the world.

He married a local girl and started a family. He also became a devout Muslim.

What I didn’t know was that his wife’s two brothers were guerillas in the uprising against the government. Because of the gas and oil there, Aceh should be one of the richest provinces in the country, instead of being dirt poor. The Regime siphons off all the profits. The dictator then was Suharto and Suharto’s son, Tommy, used to be in all the papers and on TV here. You saw him getting out of a Rolls Royce with a starlet or two under his arm. People in Aceh watched this while their children cried from hunger.

A status quo like that can’t last forever. We started seeing rebel battle flags flying over the mosques. The few discrete beauty parlors where a seaman could get laid were smashed up by mobs and the girls had their heads shaved. Aceh was a tinderbox now and American ships stopped running there.

I sometimes wondered about Juan and what he was up to. I figured he had flown his family to the States. I forgot what a determined young guy he was.

Juan came back to his family in Aceh every time he paid off a ship. With his dark features and fluency in the language he could pass for a local. He picked up the Aceh dialect without much trouble.

When I started sailing there was a guy on my first ship who had volunteered to fight Franco in Spain. He got shot-up pretty badly over there. He wasn’t able to pass the army physical during WW11, so he started sailing and got torpedoed by U-boats twice. But it was the stories about his time in Spain that I really liked to hear. The fire fights with the Fascists, his narrow escapes, the gypsy girls — I ate that stuff right up. It’s a pretty rare man who makes someone else’s fight his own.

So here’s Juan, a Catholic from Colombia who immigrates to the richest country in the world and then ends up as a Muslim in a desperately poor corner of the Third World. All hell is breaking loose around him and if he had any sense he would have gotten out of there, but instead he joins his wife’s brothers and starts totting a Kalashnikov in the hills.

The guerillas were too weak to take on the Indo army in a stand-up fight. They came down from their hideouts to pick off an occasional army patrol and then went to ground again. The government troops felt like they were fighting ghosts. They took out their frustrations on the people in the kampungs.

Sitting on the veranda of my house drinking beer and listening to this kid, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Juan would do a tour on a ship, then get off and fly to the Jakarta and then fly on to Aceh to take up arms against the Jakarta government for a few months before returning to the States to get another ship. His friends back in New York were shooting hoops and chasing pussy while he was blasting away at Indo soldiers with his AK.

The army had helicopters and heavy weapons. They surrounded Juan’s outfit on a hill one day and chopped them up. Juan’s brothers-in-law were killed and only Juan was able to escape. Once the government learned the identities of the dead rebels, their families would be rounded up. Juan got word to his wife and she grabbed their kid and ran off to Malaysia. She burned his passport and everything else incriminating before she left.

So now we have Juan roaming the hills and fields trying to stay alive. The government had a major offensive going — the locals were too scared to shelter him. He didn’t have a rupiah to his name. He figured on making his way down to Kota Kasar and hiding in the crowded city. Going from kampung to kampung he slept on the porches of mosques and bummed a few coins from worshippers. When he got to Kota Kasar he went from door to door doing yard work. He knew I lived here somewhere and he asked around about a fat, bald bule.

This is a city of two million people. It was only by sheer luck that he managed to find me after a couple months.

After he finished his story he leaned back and sighed. I stared at him, lost for words.

This kid had somehow survived war, starvation and months of misery, and he was nowhere near out of the woods. While Juan was on the run, the tsunami had killed two hundred thousand people in Aceh. The guerillas and the government brokered a truce. As a foreigner, Juan couldn’t get pardoned like the others and he could expect no mercy if he got caught. He’d get the electrodes on the balls and the near-drowning in toilets full of shit.

My wife listened to Juan’s story while standing in the doorway and she had a look on her face. The kid was putting us all in danger by being here. At the very least, I could be thrown out of the country and the house seized if it came to light that we had sheltered him. She motioned for me to come in.

I thought I knew what was coming. For her sake and the kids’, I’d have to turn him away.

“We have to help this poor boy,“ she said. “You know he’s killed a bunch of soldiers,” I told her. “Your brother served in Aceh. He would have killed your brother.”

“He’s your friend,” she said. That’s some wife I’ve got.

One of her cousins was married to a guy who worked for Immigrations. There was a chance the kid could get out. It cost around a grand. Juan layed low in our spare room for a week.

His timing was eerie. There was a golf course owned by the military on the edge of our neighborhood. Army and Air Force officers used it, but for a few days every year it was shut down. That’s when it was set up as the execution ground for the worst of Sumatra’s criminals. Heroin smugglers and murderers would by tied to stakes set in the ground around the eighteenth hole and a firing squad would end them.

It was pretty creepy. Last year a Thai woman caught with a kilo of junk was shot and we could hear the gunfire at my place. This year’s batch was on ice for a while. They were overdue for getting shot, but it rained every morning , so the game was called until we got a sunny day.

This was the only time you ever saw cop cars patrolling our neighborhood. Maybe they thought cronies of the people about to get shot would try to break up the party, but that was comical. The important criminals with gangs and backing didn’t get executed or do hard time. Crime pays here.

The cop cars got on my nerves. How far do you go for a friend? Juan would have done it for me, but he was one of those idealist types. People like that live in a world where right and wrong are so simple and clear.

Finally his fake Indo passport was ready. I held my breath while he went through the drills at the airport. He winked at me before he stepped into the passenger waiting room.

A month later I got his check for a thousand bucks. We still keep in touch. They live in Los Angeles and he works for UPS. His wife is after him to buy one of those horribly overpriced houses out there and go into lifelong debt slavery. His kid got into some trouble shoplifting.

Now Juan is like every other middle-class American slob and there must be times when he looks back on those days when he was hunted like a wild animal and free as one, too.