Excerpt from work in progress
July 3rd, 2008I’m coming to the end of a major revision of a novel, this one not young adult. Here, without fanfare or further ado and explanation, is the first chapter …
Somebody was poisoning the street dogs.
The latest victim, a half-grown puppy, slumped dead in a cardboard box on the back seat of Wayan “Sunny” Suniarta’s Bali Airport taxi. A grayish tongue dangled from slack jaws. The middle-aged tourist perched beside the dog had hailed Sunny with a vigorous flapping of her pink arm as he drove by the Sanur Veterinarian clinic, near Expat Alley. Beach sand dotted her jogging shoes, and despite the cool of the morning perspiration still blotched her top.
“The vet thinks rat poison, probably stuffed into a sausage,” she said. “This is the third one in three days. It’s mass murder.”
“I am sorry, Madame,” Sunny said in the gentle voice he used for upset passengers. She had not yet told him her destination. “Where do you wish to go?”
“Oh. Sorry. The police station.”
Sunny looked at her in the rearview. “The police station?”
“I know they’re mangy and dirty and I can’t stand their constant barking at night, but is that any reason to poison the poor things? I’ve reported to the villa management where I’m staying but they just shrug their shoulders. Now I am reporting to the police.”
To be honest, Sunny mostly thought of street dogs as traffic obstacles to avoid, with occasional pity and part of his lunch for a starving puppy, but no creature deserved such an awful death. Still, reporting a poisoned stray to the police? “These dogs aren’t pets, Madame. I’m not sure what the police can do.”
“You speak good English. Would you help me with the interpretation? I’ll pay you for your time.”
Sunny kept his sigh to himself. “I will be happy to help. No need to pay.”
“Thank you. I’m Miss Lucy Taggert, and you are…” she squinted at the ID tag on the dashboard. “Wayan. That means first born child in Balinese, am I right?”
“Yes, but everyone calls me Sunny.”
“I understand all Balinese families keep dogs. I think that’s marvelous. What kind do you have?”
Kind? Apart from the imported breed dogs that rich Balinese owned as status symbols, there only one kind, the standard Balinese mutt, a dead specimen of which was on his back seat. Fleas were probably escaping into his upholstery. “My daughter is allergic.”
Miss Lucy nodded at the photo of Ani on the dashboard. “Is that her? How old is she?”
“Four.”
“A shame. She looks like a girl a dog would love.”
The local police station was only minutes away. The policeman on front desk duty took one look into the box and didn’t let Sunny finish his translation of Miss Lucy’s complaint.
“You’re wasting your time,” he said in Balinese. “Bring in a dead person, then we’ll be interested.”
“She’s a guest to our island, my brother. Let’s make her happy.”
“Tourists,” the cop said.
In the squad room, a rookie typed up Miss Lucy’s report on a manual, using two fingers, hunting for each letter. He had inserted carbon paper for the four required copies. The dog, unloved in life, was receiving a bureaucratic honor in quadruplet. Sunny noticed a tick scrabbling across the tiles. He reached out a heel and squished it.
Miss Lucy signed the reports and carried the box with her back to the taxi. “They police aren’t going to do anything, either, are they?”
“I am afraid dogs are not a high priority, Madam.”
“Somebody’s poisoning them, and I’d want the bastard who’s doing it. Do you know a good private detective I could hire?”
A private detective? In Bali? The absurd question prompted a wistful reply. “Travis McGee,” he said.
She glanced at her watch. “Take me to him.”
“He lived in Florida, Madam, a long time ago.”
“That doesn’t help, does it? Anybody else?”
“I’m sorry, Madam. There are no private detectives in Bali.”
She asked him to take her back to the Sanur Sapphire Villas. She would bury the dog in the garden, she said, and she hoped its ghost would haunt the callous management.
~~~
Miss Lucy’s request for a private detective stayed with Sunny like an itch he couldn’t scratch.
When he was sixteen and the star pupil of the Sanur Tourism Secondary School, he had written an English essay for a government-sponsored, nation-wide contest on the topic of building cultural bridges. His essay, “When a Balinese Dancer Flutters her Fingers, a Rainbow Appears Over Boston,” won second place. The first place winner was the son of a government minister, whose entry “Building Cultural Bridges” had been written by one of his father’s speechwriters.
The first place winner was feted with a trip to the United Nations and a jaunt to Disney World.
Sunny was awarded a place on a student exchange program and ended up in Kansas.
Never in his young life had Sunny seen such a horizon, corn fields stretching into the distance. As his host family drove him to their home, he shot half a roll film through the window.
“What’s so interesting?” the mother asked in bemusement.
“The nothing,” Sunny replied. “In Bali, we don’t have so much nothing.”
Sunny studied at the local high school, marveling at its air conditioning and its PA system. The students treated him like exotic royalty, a prince of the Hindu realm who when home rode elephants to school, escorted by servants who fanned him with palm leaves. Sunny rather liked this image and only reluctantly pointed out that Bali had no elephants and that he rode to school on a bicycle. Over the next few months, he shopped in his first mall, ate his first McDonald’s hamburger, attended his first church service, and threw his first snowball.
The snow turned into an ice storm that cut off all power. “Just like home,” Sunny informed his panicked host family.
For something to do, he read a paperback selected at random from the bookshelf. A Purple Place for Dying.” He devoured it in a sitting, and then chose another in the series. Sunny was thus introduced not only to the private detective novel but to that most American of all-American private eye heroes, Travis McGee.
Sunny was fascinated by this big tanned man, a lazy beach bum who only worked his unique brand of salvage business when he was running out of money. Travis McGee was a magnet for beautiful women and general mayhem, and had a fierce moral code that led him into constant battle with the bad guys. Why, he was the American equivalent of the great Hindu playboy and hero Arjuna.
Upon his return to Bali, Sunny mentioned these novels to his father, a Master Teacher of English. His father sighed and shook his head. Why hadn’t Sunny read something more dignified and edifying, like Shakespeare, master playwright, or Georgette Heyer, mistress of the regency novel? Sunny was undeterred. He told his father that he wanted to be a private detective like Travis McGee. His father did not understand the concept. “What is there in Bali that is private to detect?” he asked.
The future, his father declared, was in the growing tourism industry, and he envisioned the heights that his son would attain as the first Balinese general manager of a five star hotel. To this end, Sunny enrolled at the Institute of Hotel and Tourism. Still, Travis McGee’s allure remained strong.
Then Sunny’s father had unexpectedly died of a heart attack, and Sunny had to take over the taxi business in order to support the family. His boyhood dream of becoming a private detective faded away.
Until this morning, when Miss Lucy flagged him down, a poisoned dog in a box under her arm.
~~~~
Sunny’s banjar, one of the neighborhood communities that made up the village of Sanur, nestled in a back corner of Sanur’s few remaining rice fields. The lane leading to his family compound curved around a bamboo grove, in the shade of which was a volleyball court. When the youth club practiced, Sunny had to time his crossing, for the club had several spikers who could pound a ball across the net with sufficient force to break off a side view mirror. When they weren’t practicing, the athletes lazed on the common hut by the court, chatting about girls and sometimes napping in the hut’s shade and dreaming of them. Sunny had done the same when he was younger, even though he hadn’t been much of an athlete.
That night, in his small brick house in the family compound, Sunny couldn’t sleep. Ani was curled up beside him. She had her own cot, but many nights she climbed into his bed and poked him to move over.
He lay on his side, facing the closed window. He studied the nearly full moon, tangled up in the branches of the mango tree in the courtyard. In the distance a dog barked, a healthy yap-yap-yap. Were any of its street brethren dead this night by rat poison?
Putting the pillow to his nose, he inhaled deeply. The sudden and bewildering divorce had been a year ago, and Laksmi’s fragrance had long faded, but he could not bring himself to wash her pillow cover.
What would she say if he told her his boyhood dream was blossoming back to life, that he was thinking of becoming a private detective? But this was a meaningless question. If he was still married to her, he wouldn’t be having such thoughts. He was having them precisely because her absence allowed them.
What did he know about being a private detective? He was a taxi driver. That was how he put food on the table and kept the roof over his head from leaking. He also owned a tour group mini-van, but he let his relative Timon drive that. Sunny preferred the taxi, which provided a constant and stimulating change of fares. Imagine, the whole world, brought to his back seat! He had driven passengers from 31 countries and all the continents. It had taken him a while to add Antarctica to the list, but a few months previously he had picked up a man who’d just come off a year’s duty at an ice station. “Take me to the nearest beach,” the man had said.
But he didn’t have to give up the taxi. Come to think of it, taxi driving would be a perfect cover for detective work. And what could be so hard about detecting? It was essentially a matter of helping people find things, or find out things, and as a taxi driver, Sunny had much experience in exactly that.
The moon slipped free of the branches. Sunny’s doubts began to ease. By the time the rooster started crowing, he’d made up his mind. He would open a private detective agency and name it Sunny Salvage.
