CHAPTER THREE
Greg Heinz pulled off the crude road that wound itself through the dense and tangled rainforest of the New Guinea jungle.
Shutting off the engine of the old Land Rover, he jogged the twenty feet of sand separating the edge of the jungle from the beach, shouting and waving his long arms to a fisherman whose boat sidled up against the rudimentary dock made of bamboo and rope.
“Hai!”
The Islander paused his tying nets and ropes, and Greg noticed a boy about the age of eleven, sitting in the stern of the small motor boat. Shirtless, his caramel-colored skin glistened with sweat and water.
“Hai,” the older man said, “Yu stap gut?” With bare feet, long shorts torn at the knee, the button-up he wore hung loosely on his body.
“Mi stap gut,” Greg replied, wracking his brain for the right Tok Pisin phrases. The New Guineans outside the tribe spoke little English, but he’d managed to pick up a few phrases of the native pidgin spoken around the island.
“Plis…” Greg said, pulling a 50-toea coin from his pocket and holding it out. “You take me across?” He used what hand motions he could to explain his desire and the older man nodded in understanding.
“Ahh, yes, yes, yes,” the native smiled hugely and motioned for Greg to enter the boat. He did, careful his weight didn’t rock it unnecessarily.
Greg pulled his dry-fit shirt away from his chest, the heat of the day already plastering it to his body.
He wiped the sweat from his forehead and smiled at the boy as his father started up the engine with a sputter.
Gas fumes and smoke filled the space, and they eased from the dock at a slow pace, picking up speed farther into the river.
Greg shifted uncomfortably in the small space.
“Longpela bun man,” the little boy grinned from ear-to-ear, his father smiling at Greg.
Oh, he’d heard that one before. ‘Long bone man.’ Greg already stood out from among the kind people inhabiting the area of the Naukata Island with his blonde locks and white skin, which was now much tanner after a month in the radiant sun of New Guinea.
But his height was the source of much talk among the more mesomorphic, shorter inhabitants of the Makia village.
With the wind roaring in his ears from the speed of the boat, he was thankful for a half hour of quiet to think through the events of the last few days before meeting Sidney.
The last attack had been fatal. Three Makian militiamen had died in the makeshift field hospital they set up just three days ago.
He’d known it was mostly futile to try and save them.
One, with an arrow in his back. Greg suspected a punctured lung by the way he’d gone so quickly.
The others’ internal wounds kept them alive for two days until they both passed within thirty minutes of each other.
Losing a patient was never easy. He knew the situation between the Makia and Hundi tribes was grim, but hoped the work the mission was doing with the peace talks was extinguishing the hostility built by the malefactions of both tribes—it was clearly only making things worse!
Greg wiped the spray of water from his face as the boat continued to chop along the river. This was not the trip he’d signed up for! This conflict was worse than the mission made it out to be. He hadn’t slept much in three days, hadn’t shaved—water droplets clung to his rough stubble.
He missed Sidney—was ready to crush her body into his—feel her warmth—her comfort.
Thinking of comfort brought Rachel to his mind. The young linguistics specialist employed by the mission had stayed with him during the night, keeping watch over the wounded, knowing their time was short.
“You’ve done all you can for them,” she’d whispered, her hand resting on his bicep as he stood between the cots. Her touch had sent gooseflesh up his arms. Rachel was an attractive woman and they’d flirted plenty in the last thirty days—another reason he was ready for Sidney to get here.
Greg sighed. There was much work to be done to reconcile the tattered relations between the tribes, but it wasn’t his fight.
He had come to offer medical aid and would be gone in another two weeks when he would leave with Sidney back to the states, and back to their life together.
He’d only agreed to come on the trip in exchange for a letter of recommendation from Mr. Hallston himself.
Surgical residency was cut throat and he needed every advantage he could get.
Try as he might to ignore the attraction of the indigenous people, there was something about them that piqued his interest. They lived so free, so untethered to the world he knew and he envied them for the simple peace their ignorance afforded them.
He glanced back at the boy who sat stony-faced against the wind and spray of the river.
With that freedom, there was also a fierceness born of necessity.
Young boys like this were taught to hunt at a young age, to fish, to build things, and to work with their hands with what the land gave them.
The inhabitants were always amazed at the Americans, but it was he that was amazed by them and their simple, solitary lives, untouched by the wiles of modernization.
Why couldn’t he seem to attain what they had?
He envied that fierceness but the thought was absurd—why should he envy them?
No matter how many different places he visited that jarred him awake from his luxurious stupor, he always seemed to be lolled back to sleep in the cradle of security, rocked by the hands of affluence and predictability.
Disputes at home, in America, were often caused, and hashed out by cowards behind a screen, or in a courtroom with a representative—not hand-to-hand or arrow-to-arrow, ending in the possibility of bloodshed like they were here.
Raised as a trust-fund kid within the upper class medical community, he often found it difficult to reconcile what he saw on his trips to the complaints he heard and often made himself, in the first-world-country he called home.
It never ceased to escape his notice that the people who seemed to have ‘nothing’, according to the world’s standards, seemed freer, happier, and more fulfilled than those who had it all.
He wished he possessed those attributes, and the emotion sat like lava on his conscious.
Was he really more privileged because he lived in a place where he not only could afford clean drinking water, but insisted it come in a bottle, free of BPA?
Was he really better off when the very comforts he came to expect seemed to blind him from what is truly needed for a thriving life?
What did these inhabitants have that he didn’t?
Why couldn’t he attain the peace they seemed to possess?
He felt things were backward. It wasn’t the more you had, the happier you were. It seemed the less you had, the more grateful you had the opportunity to be—but he wasn’t about to give up the luxuries of his life.
Sometimes he thought it would be nice to settle disputes hand-to-hand, where the doctrine of societal norms didn’t overrule the primitive urges for violence.
But that wasn’t the world he’d been born into and he had to play by the rules if he wanted to be successful—and he wanted to be.
More than anything he wanted success born from his own work—not his father’s.
The shore came into view, and Greg found himself more settled after the long boat ride. He hopped out into ankle-deep water, and assisted the fisherman and his boy, pulling the boat ashore.
He stood, hands on his hips, staring for a brief moment, at the sapphire blue of the water, crystalline and majestic against the mountainous green and black of the island. This place was other-worldly in it’s beauty.
The river was actually the Goschen Strait that channeled between the East Cape and the island of Nuakata, where Greg had been for the last two weeks, living among the Makians. He, Rachel, and Tom, worked with the local elders.
The Makia had no chief, or Big Man, as they called it, but the tribe led through their version of democracy. The elders had called in reinforcements over the course of the past six months as relations with the Hundi tribe went sideways after land disputes.
He checked his watch, thankful for the small generator that allowed for electricity to power a few things at the mission outpost, like his Apple watch and a small coffee pot, but inwardly chuckled at his contradictory thoughts.
If the comforts of modernization make a man weak, he was the weakest of them all.
Sidney’s charter was set to take off from Port Moresby an hour ago. It should have her arriving on the landing strip, which lay on the other side of the row of palm trees, anytime. He paid the fisherman another 50 toea.
“You stay?” Greg asked, to which the man nodded.
Greg sat in the sand among the bracken, watching the man and his boy walk down the beach with their fishing poles and nets.
He swallowed a worried thought that something had delayed her again.
Sidney was nothing if not independent and Greg often found himself doubting where he fit in her life.
She kept him at arm’s length emotionally, so he’d consoled himself with side flings at work.
She’d never found out of course, and they didn’t mean anything, but he tired of waiting for her to be ready.
She had baggage, but who didn’t? He loved her.
His parents loved her. She fit nicely into his life, and image was everything in his world.
Thirty minutes later, he was awakened by the rattle of a single-engine plane hurtling down the runway behind him, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake.
Traversing the hedge of vegetation that separated the beach from the landing strip, he watched her climb down from the small plane.
Her khaki cargo pants hugged her hips and bottom, tightly, and the white tank top was tucked in around her small waist, making her breasts seem bigger than usual. Had they grown?