Headhunting in Kansas 10

But this was still 1999, and Cheyenne and his two flip-flop friends were still high on Kansas in the front seat, guiding two foolish foreigners, through a war zone they hadn’t even realized existed, to a refuge they didn’t even know they needed.
Our Land Cruiser, the color of war, passed through the life-affirming montane forest of Lore Lindu National Park, containing birds that laugh like people, others that lay their single egg in hot sand, pigs that look like hippos, the largest snake in the world, and midget buffalo. I asked Cheyenne whether there was a chance of seeing any of these creatures.
“We may see one, or we may see God.” He said. “The odds are about the same.” The reason for that presented itself in the form of illegal new settlements we drove through, squatters clearing large patches of forest for agriculture. The National Forest was being destroyed by the National Migrants from Java and Bali. We stopped to admire the Balinese Aging Jagad Raya temple complex in Toini village, seven years before it would be pipebombed by Muslim terrorists. It seemed that Hindus would have the same chance as the other creatures of Lore Lindu, of seeing God.
Even though we had transmigrated the Poso War, we still had 170 kilometers of Trans-Sulawesi highway before we would arrive in Palu. Cheyenne and his flip-flop friends chain-smoked Kansas, and jabbered away in Bahasa, while Robyn and I watched the unpaved mountain roads getting narrower, and more precipitous. Just when we thought it couldn’t get more treacherous, the violent forces of chaos returned once more, to prove us wrong. As Cheyenne negotiated a particularly tight turn around the track, cut out of where the mountain once was, the road disappeared. We stopped in disbelief. It hadn’t actually disappeared, but it had appeared that it was buried beneath a landslide. No ordinary landslide, it was more like and tropical soil avalanche, come to reclaim the profile it had been born with. No one was going anywhere. We weren’t going forward, and Robyn and I were determined that there was no way we were going back. Cheyenne and his flip-flop friends squatted on the edge of the universe, smoking their way through the rest of Kansas. Robyn and I kept an eye out for rare creatures, or God. We waited on our side of the mountain road, for all of three hours, before we heard the sound of deliverance. What finally broke through the earthen wall with a mighty roar, made us pinch ourselves, and rub our eyes. A brand new bright yellow D9 Caterpillar bulldozer, Kansas hanging from the operator’s lower lip, tore through the topography like the US Corps of Army Engineers. It took another hour before anything like a roadbed was deemed safe enough for us to pass, but when it was, we did, and the last roadblock was behind us.
The eelation we all felt, as the black Toyota pulled into Palu, was eelectric. It was like driving down the Champs-Élysées in Paris, if Paris had been in the middle of a drought, and bombed by the CIA. Cheyenne motioned to us in the rear view mirror.
“Golden?” He asked. That sounded good to both of us, and we nodded in unison. A few minutes later, down Jalan Raden Saleh, we pulled up outside the Hotel Palu Golden. There were no words.
We paid Cheyenne and shook hands, and wished them well, on their road back to the Poso War. Inside the magnificence of the Palu Golden, none of what we had experienced was on any radar screen. We were checked into one of fifty-five of their three-star rooms, with quiet refinement, and invited to dine in their Ebony restaurant before it closed at ten. We had koktel udang prawn cocktails and Guinness, before returning to our room. There was a stick man sign in the bathroom. Penggunaan kloset yang benar perawatan. Use proper toilet care. I wondered about some of the clientele.
Robyn and I awoke to the sun’s diffused dawn glow on the two swimming pools below, and Palu Bay and the mountains beyond. And the dilemna we had avoided all night. Where do we go from here? How the hell do we get there? And how long would that take? It was still a thousand kilometers from where we were, to our other area of interest in Manado. We needed to fly, if we could, and soon.
Robyn and I tripped over each other, down the open marble staircase to reception, to find out. Our desk clerk made several telephone calls. Yes, there were flights to Manado, but only once a week. Yes, it appeared it was today. Yes, there were seats left, but only two. On Robyn’s ticket, she was identified as ‘Robun.’ No one cared.
The Merpati plane was an old Spanish Casa C-212, which had been put together by Dirgantara Indonesia, Indonesian Aerospace. I had never seen those two words nailed together before and, looking at the thing, had to agree that the original Spanish name, house, not only more than described its appearance, but its probable aerodynamic properties as well. And we were not to be disappointed for, despite the fact that our only way out of this part of Kansas was in this flying garage, it soared exactly like the box it was. The first hundred kilometers wasn’t terrible, but when we flew into the mountain ranges of North Sulawesi, we almost flew into the mountain ranges of North Sulawesi. It probably didn’t help that that plane was full, and that no one had weighed the luggage. It probably didn’t help that we had entered a patch of particularly inclement weather and heavy turbulence. But it definitely didn’t help that the lone pilot was making an effort to meet and greet the two foreign passengers, who had chosen to grace his route that very day. He lit up a cigarette in the aisle, while his aircraft played handball with the sky outside. He wanted to know all about us. I wanted to know who was flying the house.
“Autopilot.” He said proudly, blowing Kansas from between his yellow teeth. We entered the tornado in the Wizard of Oz, when he excused himself for ‘something important.’ To our relief, he headed back to the cockpit, and we slowly, very slowly, found level flight.
Things didn’t go much better on the ground, after Robyn and I left Central Sulawesi. In 2003, ‘unknown masked gunmen’ killed thirteen Christian villagers in Poso District. Two years later, Palu suffered both a 6.2 Richter scale earthquake, and a Muslim nail bomb at a market stall selling pork to Christian Minihasa for New Year’s eve celebrations, killing eight people and wounding another 53. The same year someone killed another 22 Christians with a bomb in Tentena’s public market, and Islamic militants in Poso beheaded three Christian schoolgirls.
The message found next to one of the heads was fairly clear.
A life for a life. A head for a head.