American Romantic by Ward Just Page A

sinister. They seemed to promise harm, even the meow of the camp cat. Harry stood in the doorway of his hut, jungle darkness all around him. He started when something brushed his ankle, God knows what it was. He was damp with sweat on his chest and back, sweat slick as a mirror. They had not bothered to shackle him. If he escaped, where would he go? This terrain might as well have been a concentration camp, the jungle as forbidding as any barbed wire. The first half hour en route he had been blindfolded, slow progress, one bend after another, and then they removed the blindfold. What was the point? One bend was much like another and the path itself monotonous as a piano’s middle C struck again and again, all the grace and variety of a jackhammer. The going was easier without the blindfold. He saw no villages on the trail and no signs of human life except the occasional mark of a sandal’s tread. He was sorry now that he had thought of the piano analogy. The piano put him in mind of Chopin, and Chopin was not helpful. It would be good to think of something that was, but nothing came to mind.
    Harry saw stars through the trees and guessed the time near dawn. They had taken his wristwatch, for safekeeping they said.
Une garantie,
according to Comrade Fat, the one who seemed to be in charge. There were four of them, Comrades Fat, Thin, and Tall, and Comrade Mao, for her round face and sour disposition. The names were Harry’s inventions. None of then offered their actual names. Harry was called Yankee. Now someone murmured in his sleep and shifted position, a rustle of bamboo and what sounded like a fart. Harry had a vague idea of direction, and by starlight he could see the two huts opposite his own, and a little apart from them the third hut, occupied by Comrade Mao, and the pit where the fire had been. Harry moved slowly into the clearing, and when he heard the creak of his rubber flip-flops he removed them from his feet and put them in the pocket of his khaki shorts. His mind was working slowly, the effect of fear. He did not know if this was fear of the known or fear of the unknown but it was surely one of the two. His thoughts were discomposed. They were residue thoughts, slippery and barren as slush. He moved slowly, but not so slowly as to lose his balance. Unbalanced, he would stumble. In a few moments he was at the camp’s perimeter—and how long had that taken him, three minutes, four? The earth was damp beneath his feet and he remembered now the water along the way, water sometimes an inch deep, other times a foot or more, and he had blundered along while the others complained. He was in the middle of the file, entirely disconcerted when he was blindfolded, Comrade Mao muttering directions. Go straight. Now we turn left. There had been an argument over the blindfold but Comrade Fat insisted on it and then relented when Harry stumbled and fell twice in the space of five minutes. Evidently they were awaiting instructions from a senior comrade, supposedly arriving from a base camp farther south. Days passed and the senior comrade did not arrive. Harry’s escort became restive. Without instructions they were adrift. They were difficult to tell apart, except one was fat, one thin, one tall, and one female. They were Munch-faced, featureless; not the Munch of
The Scream
but the Munch of the dead or the ill. Of course when they spoke they might as well have been speaking Norwegian.
    And then the senior comrade arrived without warning, striding into camp at high noon—that was yesterday—wearing a pressed khaki uniform with the shoulder pips that signified captain. He ordered the girl to prepare a pot of tea and he and Harry sat cross-legged in the largest hut and talked. The captain did not offer his name so Harry thought of him as Captain Munch. His English was very good. He knew Harry’s rank in the foreign service, knew that he was born in New York, had graduated from Columbia, was