Monkey Forest Road

a witch doctor down by the river, dancing among the snakes--this is not a good sign

We had stumbled out evening. Most of us were American and British engineers, consultants to the Aussies, who were opening a nickel mine on the Tessarim Coast; a couple of the French were with the Libyans, who were mining uranium up in Chauk. The old Canadian guy was already sitting at the end of the bar when we showed up, and at first only let on he was here in Myanmar building a hotel on Letsok-Aw, an island down the Mergui Archipelago.

The story he told us that night was about a hotel project he had worked on a few years back in Ubud, Bali. I had been to the beach at Kuta in Bali surfing the pipes in my wandering 20s, and had driven north in a bemo for a day at Ubud. It was north of the airport at Denpasar, in the layered emerald rice fields beneath the sacred mountains of Batur and Agung. At first all I remembered about Ubud was that Hindu priests had fled there 1000 years ago when the rest of Indonesia was overrun by Islam, and that Ubud was still virginal, in comparison to the southern peninsula of Bali, which in 15 years had evolved into a Buddhist Fort Lauderdale.

The Canadian, who said his name was Sherm Strickhauser, went to Ubud to build a hotel for the Crown Royal Hotels chain out of Singapore. He proudly rattled off some of the places he'd built hotels for Crown Royal over the past 30 years: Belize, Madagascar, Tobago, Thailand, Irian Jaya .... The list went on and on. Sherm kept repeating how he and his best friend Andrew Rouse had always kept their Crown Royal hotel projects "ahead of schedule and under budget." He pounded the bar a lot with his fist and said the two of them "always ran a tight ship."

Besides being his best friend, Andrew Rouse was also Sherm's boss. For 20 years Andrew and Sherm had been an international Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble while their wives Wilma and Betty hung out together in Toronto until the boys winged back from pouring concrete all over the globe. But just before the Bali project, Andrew Rouse had fallen for a Danish airline stewardess 25 years younger. Sherm thought it was just a bloody fling that had ended after their last project, but then Andrew disappeared from Toronto for a week and showed up in Bali with the stewardess Victoria Erickson literally on his back. This woman in the white tank top was riding piggyback on Andrew as they came out of customs in Denpasar, and Andrew threw an arm over Sherm's shoulder and led him toward a bemo for the bumpy ride up to Ubud.

Victoria sat in Andrew's lap all the way to Ubud. Sometimes she'd stick her pinkie in his mouth and he'd pretend to bite it. As they bumped over the potholes Victoria showed Sherm she had no fingernails on her pinkies. Victoria also told Sherm about how she and Andrew had just spent an incredible week helicopter skiing in the Canadian Rockies. When they got to Ubud at sunset, the two jumped out of the bemo and ran into the jungle like a couple of kids. Sherm stood on the road above and watched them laughing their way down to the golden river far below. There were monkeys chattering like lunatics in the trees over his head. Andrew and Victoria took off their clothes and lay down in the shallow river. Then Andrew stood up naked as a jaybird in the river and while pointing to his nose yelled up to his old friend Sherm, "Smell the perfume? The air here is perfume!"

At this point in his story, Sherm looked around at all of us engineers in the Rangoon bar and sniffed the air with disgust.

Sherm shook his head and ordered another Malang beer from the toothless bartender. And then at my prompting he went on with his story about his old best friend Andrew Rouse, the Danish stewardess Victoria Erickson and the construction of the Crown Royal Hotel in Ubud.

The original plan was to put up the hotel and 20 villas on Monkey Forest Road. Everyone who has been to Ubud has walked down Monkey Forest Road. I was mildly surprised to hear that they were building a hotel there---it was some of the only jungle land left around Ubud. Every other inch around Ubud was elegantly terraced emerald rice paddies for at least the last 1000 years. There's another thing I remembered about Bali as Sherm told his story---how every single drop of water from the mountains was channeled down the hillsides from rice paddy to rice paddy. The whole crazily elaborate Balinese culture was organized around worshiping this sacred water from the mountains.

But back to his story: Andrew and Victoria and Sherm and the other members of the Crown Royal construction management team rented a row of rooms at Poppie's Guest House while they hired hundreds of Balinese and began to order construction supplies from Djakarta and Melbourne. I should say Sherm did the hiring of the Balinese workers and the ordering of building supplies, because according to Sherm, Andrew and Victoria spent their days wandering around the rice paddies of Ubud as if stoned out of their heads. Although Sherm didn't agree and got pissed off when I suggested it, from what I remembered, Ubud was one remaining place on the globe where the culture and landscape could still alter your sense of reality---it was a certified Shangri-la.

So anyway, one day the bulldozers arrived up from Denpasar on flatbeds, and early the next morning the workers were ready to scrape out the roads and foundation sites on the 40-acre hotel site. Andrew Rouse was nowhere to be found on this day, but it was pretty clear what needed to be done, as by now the jungle was all surveyed and staked out. But then Andrew came roaring up to the site on this 350cc motorcycle with Victoria. He had a major announcement for the construction team. Andrew looked serious, like he was about to lay on them the Ten Commandments, and then took a deep breath and said that he had decided, after a great deal of thought, that the construction management team should wear sarongs "to exhibit their cultural sensitivity."

Rather than start bulldozing that day, Andrew walked the nine incredulous Westerners back up Monkey Forest Road to Ubud, where he supervised the purchase of sarongs. When all the men were fitted out like parrots he walked them to a local Balinese house. The lady of the house led them from room to room, while Victoria explained how the house was set up like the human body. At the entrance or head was a shrine to the ancestors, and the living areas on either side were like the arms, and the kitchen was farther in, and out back was the asshole---the garbage dump. Andrew took them back around to the front of the house and pointed up toward Mount Agung and said the ancestor's temple, or head of the house, always pointed toward the sacred mountain, as this direction was kelod, or good, and the asshole of the house pointed toward the sea, as this direction was kaja, or evil. Rain came from the mountains, rain gave the people rice and life for thousands of years, thus the mountain and its rain were good.

Andrew and Victoria completed this baffling lesson and then hopped on their motorcycle and took off for a pilgrimage to Mount Agung. The next day after breakfast Andrew came in with the architectural plans and dramatically tore them up in front of the Crown Royal men. He then led the men back to the Monkey Forest Road site and had the men raise their palms and try to "get an intuitive feel" for "the best vibrational zones" for the placement of the villas. He said they were going to start from scratch, build the villas facing in the kelod direction. Sherm said the other men went along with this crazy shit because he had made the mistake of asking them to do so as a personal favor to him.

At first, on the next steamy morning, Andrew seemed his old all-business self when he rushed everyone down Monkey Forest Road for a dawn start. But a couple of the guys came late in Western clothes, and Andrew sent them back for their sarongs. So eventually all the men stood in sarongs near the river in a heavy mist listening to the chatter of monkeys when, as if on cue, thousands of brightly colored birds erupted shrieking from the jungle, and then these young Balinese girls came down a path out of the jungle mist and started passing out colored rice cakes. After them came these old Balinese men playing gamelan tinkle-tinkle music, and then some beautiful half-naked women with four-foot-tall towers of fruit on their heads sashayed down, and then two guys carrying roosters (continued on page 86)Monkey Forest Road(continued from page 76) in cages of bamboo came running out of the jungle.

Andrew Rouse stepped forward and explained to the men that, according to Balinese custom, before they begin construction of the hotel they had to make a blood sacrifice to the evil spirits. Then this old Balinese guy came out of the woods in a white robe with his hair done up in a little silver knot on top of his head, chanting mantras and sprinkling holy water on the men. The roosters were removed from their cages and pushed together, but they refused to fight. The holy man---called a pedanda---looked on, shaking his head as if this was a bad omen. So the gamelan musicians got a big basket and put the roosters in it. Ten seconds later one of the roosters was dead from a sharpened spur to the heart. The pedanda muttered some prayers holding the dead rooster up in his hand, and this Balinese kid named Wayan translated the pedanda's prayers from Bahasa Indonesia for Victoria, who explained to the men, "The holy pedanda's prayers are like a ladder inviting the good spirits to descend, and the music and sacred dances of the women and girls are here to welcome the visiting deities."

This is when Sherm finally spoke up and said to Victoria, "We're the visiting deities here, sister."

Sherm was proud of this one-liner, you could see that. He ordered all of us a shot in the bar that night in Rangoon and we drank to the wisdom of this line a few times. He told us how the men of the Crown Royal construction team kept repeating it, describing over and over the look of hatred on Victoria's face when Sherm said to her, We're the visiting deities here, sister.

•

The next day when Andrew Rouse again didn't show up to bulldoze the jungle, the men looked to Sherm to give the work order. There were a couple of hundred Balinese workers there too, all looking to Sherm to take command of the troops. But Sherman couldn't bring himself to do it, and took off to find his best friend Andrew Rouse. "If I had any brains left in this old head I would have lowered the boom on Andrew right then," said Sherm.

Sherm found Andrew in the house of the village pedanda and took him outside and tried to knock some sense into him. He didn't come down too hard because over 20 years it had always been Andrew who had cut Sherm slack or covered his ass when he screwed up, plus, he didn't see the point in alienating his friend totally over what he still read as a midlife crisis. As Sherm tried to bring him around to at least talking about hotel construction, Andrew kept glancing up at Mount Agung and finally told Sherm he was waiting for the pedanda to pick an auspicious day to begin construction. Andrew kept smiling and said how he understood from Victoria that Sherm wasn't totally convinced about his new "low impact" methods (Sherm called them "no-impact" to big laughs that night in Rangoon), and that, although it might seem impossible to believe, he and Victoria had stepped off the plane in Denpasar and had become suddenly drugged by Bali and its landscape, and that on their long walks through the rice paddies had decided that on this construction project they would try to prove that building a hotel does not have to be culturally confrontational or overly destructive.

Sherm had the engineers pounding the bar when he told how he asked his friend Andrew Rouse at this point, "And it wouldn't be bloody confrontational if a bunch of saronged Balinese showed up at The Queen's Park in Toronto and started bulldozing the place for their resort?"

As we all laughed at this, Sherman just stared blankly at us. It apparently wasn't funny to him. He leaned forward and said to me while the others around us laughed, "Andrew Rouse was my best friend. All I wanted was for him to get his head out of his bloody ass. So I made the mistake of giving him enough rope to hang himself and kept the Crown Royal management in Singapore in the dark about how this Victoria was messing with his head." Sherm leaned closer and, tapping me on the arm, said, "But it was me who had his head up his bloody ass. I let my best friend of 20 years down."

What happened next is typical if you have ever worked for an international company in a Third World country. If there is one thing Bali has it is fruit. Guavas, mangoes, pineapples, papayas, bananas, but also horny green durians and belimbing and a dozen other oddities jumping out of the volcanic soil. As for oranges, Bali had three different kinds. But, according to Sherm, Crown Royal Hotels of Singapore insisted on shipping in two dozen Florida orange trees air freight from Indian River. It was like shipping ice to Eskimos.

The orange trees showed up about a week later, while Andrew Rouse was still waiting patiently for the village pedanda to proclaim an auspicious day to begin construction. As Sherm had been in charge of landscaping on all their previous hotel projects, on the day the trees show up, Sherm grabbed some of the happily snoozing Balinese workers and a backhoe and planted the trees as per the old landscaping plans. The orange trees came with a triple dose of good old American chemical fertilizer, so Sherm doped up the soil around them. For the next week he invented reasons for Crown Royal management in Singapore why construction on the hotel hadn't begun, and then the next week began to submit false reports about how the roads and foundations were in and construction was coming along slowly but steadily. Every day when he saw Andrew he tried to talk some sense into him, but he still didn't come down too hard, because he still thought the right thing to do was cover his friend's ass, and hope when Andrew was tired of screwing Victoria he'd get his head back on straight.

Sherm took to taking a hammock down to the river after faxing his false noon progress report to Singapore. One day he saw Victoria and Andrew running down the riverside. Andrew came charging up to him holding out an orange the size of a softball, and started going on to Sherm how the orange trees from Florida didn't have any fruit when they arrived, but now three weeks later they were giving off these massive oranges. Victoria took the orange from Andrew and waving it in Sherm's face said how this very orange in her very hand was proof of the sacred fertility of the Balinese soil.

Sherm tried to explain to the two of them that the orange trees did have small oranges on them when they arrived from Florida and that he had hopped them up with a fertilizer cocktail powerful enough to propel the trees to the moon, never mind juicing out a couple of oranges. But Andrew and Victoria wouldn't listen to logic, and walked up the riverbank with the orange held before them as if it were the Hope Diamond.

The next day the surprising word came that the pedanda had decreed it was a good day to build a hotel. Sherm ran around gathering the remaining Balinese workers, many of whom had headed back to their villages or Denpasar. When Sherm walked down Monkey Forest Road to the construction site, he found Andrew already directing the bulldozers through the jungle. It was then Sherm spotted a half dozen Balinese workers chomping happily on Florida oranges. Andrew noticed at the same moment, and jumped off the bulldozer and ran over with the translator kid Wayan and told the workers in no uncertain terms that no one was to eat the oranges from the special Florida trees. Most of the (continued on page 92)Monkey Forest Road(continued from page 86) workers ran off, but one old Balinese guy planted his feet, adjusted his yellow and silver sarong, and spit a rind at Andrew Rouse's feet before turning and slowly walking off.

Andrew and Sherm worked until sunset that first day. And the next day Sherm and Andrew worked hard together again, just like the good old days, and then about noon Sherm heard yelling and ran over to the orange grove. The old Balinese guy who had spit out the rind the day before was standing in front of the trees with a grinning mouth bulging with Florida orange. At his feet were a dozen half-eaten oranges. Suddenly, Andrew was truly the old ass-kicking, take-no-prisoners Andrew Rouse. Sherm said he almost broke into a jig as Andrew ripped into the grinning old eater-of-magical-oranges.

But when Andrew went back to the bulldozers, Sherm saw the old Balinese guy reach up and pluck another orange. The old guy grinned at Sherm and then prowled around tearing orange after orange from the trees and tossing them over his shoulders. A couple of hours later, while everyone was taking a water break, the interpreter kid Wayan came up screaming. Andrew Rouse followed Wayan at a trot, and behind them ran a couple of dozen curious Balinese workers. Sherm figured it was about all the oranges yanked off the orange trees, but when he got there he saw the ground around the trees was squirming with iridescent green and yellow snakes.

Sherm said he immediately grabbed a machete from one of the workers, and waded in there among the snakes and started hacking off their heads. He said he'd never felt so angry and didn't give a shit if the snakes were poisonous. And then, as snake heads were flying, he felt someone grab his arm on a backswing of the machete, and it was Andrew pulling him away from the snakes, saying how they'd try to deal with the snakes in a peaceable fashion.

At Poppie's Guest House that night Andrew and Victoria walked over to Sherm during dinner. The two asked to sit down and Sherm waved to the empty seats. Sherm said he was pretty depressed at this point, after thinking when Andrew ripped into the old orange eater that his best friend was over his midlife crisis. Andrew Rouse took a long time explaining that evening in Ubud, as the cicadas sent up this roar, how he had talked it over with Victoria and the village pedanda, and they had determined that the snakes appeared in the orange grove because he, Andrew Rouse, had restricted access to the oranges. Andrew said he had learned from the pedanda that he had acted in an evil manner by yelling at the old Balinese man and the other local workers for eating the oranges, and that the snakes were a manifestation of his evil action. He went on and on about how it was important Sherm understand that there was a delicate balance of good and evil on Bali, but Sherm tuned him out after a while and listened to the roar of the cicadas.

•

The village pedanda convinced Andrew Rouse that the best course of action, given the snakes in the orange grove, was to hold off on construction again until the various deities were properly propitiated and the balance of good and evil was, well, balanced. Given the general aura of things going noticeably awry, the cheery Balinese workers were growing dour, and then the guards posted at night to protect the machinery at the Monkey Forest Road site started reporting seeing leyaks---evil spirits---in the trees of the surrounding jungle. Apparently the Balinese Hindu workers took leyaks very seriously, because most of the remaining workers packed up and left Ubud.

In a strange way, Sherm said, he was pleased by the appearance of the leyaks, because at least he could be straight with the Crown Royal management in Singapore, and report something truthful about what was slowing down the Ubud project---not that he, Sherman Strickhauser, believed in leyaks for a second, but it was the truth that the superstitious Balinese workers were leaving Ubud. Sherm also was pleased to be able to quickly solve the problem of the leyaks, as he immediately started importing Muslim workers from Lombok and Java and other Indonesian islands. The Muslims didn't buy easily into leyak superstitions.

One afternoon after signing up another bemo-load of deadly serious Muslims, Sherm headed down to the river to take a bath. When he got down there he found a couple of dozen Westerners busily setting up a fashion shoot for CNN. Out of the crowd milling around the silver light reflectors came Victoria. She came right up to Sherm and said, "You're trying to hurt Andrew, aren't you?"

Sherm was flabbergasted. All he wanted was for his friend Andrew to pull his shit together and not throw away his job. He stood there shaking his head.

"You think it's me," Victoria said next.

Sherm was so pissed off at this woman that he just shook his head again.

"Yes, you do," said Victoria.

Sherm finally found his tongue and said, "I've known the guy since before you were born."

Victoria said, "Yes, well, you don't know him that well. Andrew is making up his own mind here. I like where he's going, but I'm not leading him there."

"Bullshit," said Sherm.

"Every day Andrew is more alive," said Victoria. "I watch him coming alive faster and faster."

Victoria took a step closer to Sherm, put her hand on his shoulder and added, "Everyone is feeling the negative energy you carry everywhere you go, Sherman. Your vibrations precede you like a storm front. You need to open yourself a little bit, expand your sensitivities."

Victoria walked away from Sherm, and then he took note of the gold Rolex on her wrist. He called after her, "Nice watch." Victoria turned on the path, and Sherm said his next famous one-liner, "I'll tell you one thing I know for sure---sensitivities didn't buy that Rolex on your wrist, princess."

The sensitivities didn't buy that Rolex struck a chord with our crowd of engineers in the Rangoon bar. When things quieted down, Sherm went on with his story. Right after his zinger line, he saw all these models coming down the side of the river, the models being led down the riverbank by none other than the old orange-eating Balinese coot with the shit-eating grin. Sherm decided to stand around and watch the fashion shoot, but as soon as the models started splashing around like children in the river, the skies blackened up and there was a dramatic downpour. Sherm saw the director of the shoot run through the sheets of rain over to the old orange-eating Balinese guy and enter into a serious powwow. Then the old Balinese guy started spinning around on the shore of the river like a dervish. For an old guy he was really kicking up his heels. Everyone from the CNN shoot watched the old guy spinning with a serious-as-shit look on their faces. Sherm asked a German model what this was about, and she said the old orange eater was a locally famous witch doctor called a balian, and that the director of the fashion shoot had hired the old guy to stop the rain.

The old Balinese guy danced and danced, with the same shit-eating grin on his face. The fashion shoot crowd slowly drifted away from the old guy dancing on the riverbank in the cold rain and scrambled up the muddy hillside on their hands and knees in twos and threes. Sherm and the German model were the last to leave, and when Sherm looked down from the top of (continued on page 100)Monkey Forest Road(continued from page 92) the riverbank through the shifting sheets of rain, the old guy was still dancing alone down there. As Sherm walked up Monkey Forest Road he bumped into Andrew Rouse, and was suddenly so pissed that he was barely able to speak but managed to push out another one-liner, "Witch doctor, down by the river, dancing to stop the rain---you probably want to check it out."

Sherm banged his fist over the laughter of the engineers in the Rangoon bar. "And right when my best friend Andrew Rouse goes down to the river and sees the witch doctor dancing, what the hell happens?"

"The bloody rain stopped!" yelled one of the engineers.

All the engineers in the Rangoon bar sympathized with this bad luck. It was obvious to all that for a guy with his head up his ass as far as Andrew Rouse, this sort of bullshit coincidence of the rain stopping was bound to lead to more trouble.

•

The engineers groaned when all the candles suddenly blew out in the Rangoon bar. The bartender hobbled over and angrily slapped the wooden shutters shut on the windows and barred the door. As the bartender looked for a match back in the rear of the bar, Sherm told us in the dark how the next day when he showed up at the Monkey Forest Road construction site with a cup of java in hand, he saw his best friend standing in the orange grove with the same old rain-dancing, orange-eating Balinese balian.

When Sherm walked over to the balian and Andrew Rouse that morning, he noticed the orange grove was still full of the squirming yellow-and-green snakes. He didn't have to tell us engineers what was going on: Andrew Rouse had hired the old balian to get rid of the snakes. Sherm said he was finally going to take off the gloves, try one last time to shake up his old friend. Sherm said he had gotten a fax from Crown Royal management that morning telling him he had better get the project up to speed, or they were sending a troubleshooter from Singapore, and he and Andrew would be on the next plane to Toronto.

But just as Sherm walked up to Andrew Rouse that morning, the old Balinese balian slipped off his sandals and stepped in among the snakes. Sherm had heard that the snakes were puff adders and deadly poisonous. The balian stood there amidst the snakes in his bare feet, and soon workers were running from all directions to see the performance. The balian closed his eyes---Sherm was sure he was looking---and started to walk back and forth among the snakes. Sherm decided the old coot was going to get himself killed, and went forward yelling at the bastard to get the bloody hell out of there, but Andrew ran over and grabbed him by the arm and told him to let the balian work. The balian bent over and appeared to be talking to the snakes, and then raised his arms and danced. Sherm said the balian was doing the same tired dance routine he did to stop the rain, except his eyes were apparently closed. Then the balian suddenly reached down and snatched a snake from the ground, and wrapped it around his neck. He danced now facing the crowd, motioning with his hands as if he were asking them to join him in his snake-charming dance.

Sherm said the dance went on way too long, and he suddenly couldn't stop laughing. He said he laughed because the other snakes were sunbathing and ignoring the dancing old coot, and he was sure at that moment that after 20 years of busting his ass for Crown Royal, he was about to lose his job because of this crazy old snake charmer. The old balian heard him laugh, stopped dancing and opened one eye and surveyed Sherm from among the snakes. The balian said something quickly to the kid translator Wayan, who ran over to Andrew Rouse and whispered in his ear. Then Sherm saw Andrew Rouse open his wallet and start handing over thousands of rupiahs. Sherm watched as the old balian made a small pile of the rupiahs on the ground, whipped out a lighter from nowhere and started burning the cash. He fanned the flames and motioned for more cash from Andrew, who without hesitation ran over among the snakes and kept feeding him the rupiahs. Sherm stopped at this point in his story, and at the same moment the bartender found a match and lit a candle in front of his face. He looked around at all us expatriate engineers as if he wanted us to finish this part of the story, and one engineer yelled out, "And a couple of hours later, no bloody snakes!"

Sherm pointed at the engineer who had yelled the right answer, and downed a shot with his free hand. There was some sympathy expressed to Sherm at the bad luck of the snakes vamoosing, strengthening as it clearly would his best friend Andrew Rouse's growing delusions.

Sherm raised his hand, and the engineers grew quiet. The monsoon was rattling the windows as if there were leyaks out there in the streets of Rangoon. Sherm had a puffy drinker's face, and the flickering candlelight coming from almost under his chin didn't flatter. He didn't look like the same hearty beef-faced Canadian guy he did with the fluorescent lights on. He almost could have been a leyak himself there in the candlelight at the end of the bar.

And then one of the engineers yelled out, "What about Victoria?"

Sherm nodded and went on with his story. Neither Andrew Rouse nor Victoria showed up at Poppie's Guest House for dinner that evening. After the sun set, the kid Wayan came to him out of the shadows as he sat drinking scotch on the porch, and said Victoria wished to see him at the construction site. Sherm walked down Monkey Forest Road with a flashlight. He said there was the smell of burning pig in the air. He heard a kul-kul drum beating in a banyan tree from a nearby village. I remembered those drums: Each Balinese village had its own kul-kul drum language, though I had heard that fewer and fewer young Balinese could understand their village drum as it spoke to them.

When Sherm got to the construction site he found Victoria sitting on a bulldozer talking to one of the Muslim guards. The guard faded away as Sherm came up. Without saying a word Victoria handed Sherm a dogeared pamphlet. He shined the flashlight on the hand-written cover and read in English under Bahasa Indonesian: How to Stop the Rain.

"The balian's book," said Victoria in the dark. "Andrew's gone off with him for the night."

"You didn't go?"

"I told you already, Sherman. It isn't me."

"Where's Andrew?"

"The balian's going to purify him tonight up at his village. The ritual's supposed to take all night."

Sherm said the way she spoke, it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out she was no longer too pleased with her middle-aged lover-boy Andrew Rouse.

Victoria was quiet for a while sitting there in the bulldozer. Sherm said he could still hear the kul-kul drum in the distant banyan tree. Without another word to Victoria, Sherm left the construction site. As he made his way back up to Poppie's Guest House, he came on the kid translator Wayan and asked him if he knew where this balian lived. At first, the kid Wayan didn't want to talk, but Sherm kept peeling off rupiahs in the darkness, and eventually the kid whispered, "I know where."

Sherm said he grabbed his bottle of Dewar's off the porch at Poppie's and jumped in a Suzuki jeep with the kid. (continued on page 144)Monkey Forest Row(continued from page 100) He spun out of Ubud and bounced along a narrow road up to a village called Penestanan. Wayan then led him along a maze-like path among the rice paddies. A couple of times he stepped off the path and sank up to his knees in the mud.

The old balian lived in a shack of sticks and mud. There was the faint glow of a kerosene light. When Sherm knocked, the old balian came to the door and started grinning away when he saw Sherm, who figured he was thinking: Another Western sucker here to pay me to stop the rain. The balian invited Sherm inside, where he tripped over a chicken. There were pigs in the hut too, running around with half a dozen naked kids. Sherm shined his flashlight on the wall on all these Balinese calendars and astrological charts. Then he saw his friend lying on a cot in the back in some sort of trance where he was just grinning away staring into space. Andrew slowly rolled his eyes upward as Sherm played the light near his face and repeated over and over how he wanted Sherm to understand that for the first time in his life he felt in harmony with all things.

Sherm didn't want to listen to this crazy shit, and got Andrew standing with a lot of cursing and dragged him out of the shack. The old balian just stood there grinning like an idiot while the pigs squealed underfoot. Sherm said that as he dragged him down the path, Andrew was totally out of his head and kept trying to explain to Sherm shit like how the balian had said things had gone wrong on the project because we're out of touch with the spirits.

Andrew Rouse was in his own world all the way back to Poppie's Guest House. Sherm said he kept trying to sing some goddamned Balinesian song, but knew only about three lines. Wayan tried to help him out, until Sherm told Wayan to knock it the hell off. Andrew stopped singing to announce to Sherm, as if it was supposed to be great news, that the balian had promised to come to Monkey Forest Road in the morning to seal off the site with energy lines and drive away the negative spirits. When they pulled up to Poppie's Guest House and Sherm turned off the jeep, Andrew Rouse jumped out and stripped off his clothes and said he was heading down to the river to pray to the goddess Rangda and added over his shoulder as he took off at a trot down the road, how his one wish now was that Sherm understand what was happening to him.

"Sherm understood!" yelled one of the engineers. "You've fucking gone local!"

"Bloody loco!" yelled another engineer, banging his shot glass on the bar for a refill. Soon all the engineers were banging on the bar with their shot glasses. When I shut my eyes it sounded strangely like my memories of a kul-kul drum in a distant banyan tree.

•

To the engineers that night in Rangoon, it was clearly time to ship Andrew Rouse home to Toronto. Heads nodded when Sherm said that the morning after Andrew Rouse went streaking to the river for a quick prayer to the goddess Rangda, Crown Royal Hotels called to fire him and put Sherm in charge of the Monkey Forest Road project.

After he got the word he was in charge, Sherm headed out from Pop-pie's Guest House to find his friend. He found him down at the Monkey Forest Road site, running like a lunatic after the balian, who was charging around the grounds waving what looked like a tennis racket covered with long colored strings. Sherm figured this must have been the sealing off the site with energy lines and driving away the negative spirits that Andrew had been all excited about the night before. Sherm yelled over to Andrew, who glanced over at him but kept charging after the balian. At least, Sherm thought, he's got his clothes on. He couldn't tell his best friend he was fired if the guy didn't have his clothes on. He decided to tell Andrew later, and gathered a couple dozen workers and a bulldozer and headed up to the north end of the property. There was still a lot of flattening to do up there that had been called off by Andrew when he realigned the design plans on kelod lines. Sherm got to work and tried to put out of his mind what he was going to tell Andrew, but suddenly, after pushing down some trees with the bulldozer, they found their access to one of the villa sites blocked by a few large boulders. It was going to be a bitch moving them, and Sherm was considering dynamite, when the balian rushed by him waving his tennis racket, followed by Andrew and Victoria.

According to the balian, as translated by the kid Wayan, the boulders were an ancient pura dalem shrine---one so ancient the primitive carvings were barely visible, though the balian ran his fingers over the stone as if reading braille.

Sherm said he didn't know why he didn't tell Andrew he was fired right then but instead listened to his friend go on and on about how it wasn't their right to destroy the ancient sacred property of the Balinese. Suddenly Victoria interrupted Andrew to say she thought the boulders should go. Sherm said (to big laughs in the Rangoon bar) he figured Victoria was thinking in her pretty head, It's either these boulders, or no more helicopter skiing for me and Andrew in the Canadian Rockies.

While Andrew Rouse explained his view of things to Victoria, Sherm had a big idea, and sent the kid Wayan off with a mashed handful of 1000 rupiah notes and told the kid to find the village pedanda and drag him out here into the bush. The pedanda came running up the jungle path 15 minutes later, and Sherm took him aside and laid rupiahs on him until the pedanda suddenly had an inspiration.

The holy village pedanda said in his opinion it would be OK to transfer the spirits in this ancient shrine into a temporary structure until Crown Royal Hotels was able to build a large temple to house them properly. Sherm winked at us all in the Rangoon bar and asked us if we could guess who was told he'd get the permanent cushy job as pedanda in this new temple.

So under the pedanda's excited direction, the workmen built a temporary spirit holder in an hour; it looked, Sherm said, just like an oversize birdcage. With another ten minutes of hocus-pocus the pedanda had the ancient spirits out of the shrines and into the birdcage. Victoria was so excited---she must have figured there was still a chance Andrew wouldn't lose his job---she asked to carry the birdcage to the pedanda's house back in the village, where the spirits would reside until the new shrine was built. Andrew Rouse sat down on the jungle floor as if exhausted, and watched Victoria walk away with the birdcage down the freshly torn-up road.

Victoria tripped on a root on the way back to the village and crushed the birdcage under her. The balian had followed right behind her. Sherm said the old witch doctor really bloody carried on when he saw the crushed birdcage.

•

Sherm told us how a couple of times that night he walked down the hall of Poppie's Guest House to Andrew Rouse's room but just stood there before the door in the dark thinking about all their years together. Sherm went back to the porch and drank scotch. And then he noticed that he could hear himself think---that the cicadas had turned off their racket for the first time since he arrived in Bali. But all he could think about was how he had to go back in and tell his best friend Andrew Rouse that it was all over---that Crown Royal Hotels had fired his ass. Sherm, in his words, "never found the guts that night in Ubud to do the tough thing, the thing that needed to be done, the thing that should have been done much earlier."

So Sherm sat in a wicker chair and got drunk, and it started to rain. At first it was only a couple of scattered drops on the metal roof of Poppie's, then there were gusts of clattering drops, and then it was a torrential downpour. It wasn't the rainy season yet, but the street in front of the porch was suddenly a brown river. Sherm said he sat there thinking how they were going to need a damn boat, and then Sherm heard, over the roar of the rain, a woman screaming. The power went out right then in the whole village. The screaming was coming from inside Poppie's, and Sherm stumbled back inside and felt his way down the dark hall. He banged on the locked door, and then put his shoulder hard against the door and the lock snapped off. It was pitch-black in the room, and he felt his way to the bed, and then felt the shape of a foot. He ran his hands up Victoria's legs, felt her squirming on the bed. The kid Wayan arrived and held a kerosene lantern in the doorway, and Sherm could see Victoria. She was clutching her stomach and twisting her head back and forth in the pillow as she screamed.

Sherm held her glistening face in his two hands. The rain was so loud on the roof he had to yell at Wayan twice about finding a doctor, and the kid just looked at him and shook his head. Sherm said he looked down at Victoria and said he knew whatever the bloody hell her problem was, she had to see a real doctor soon, and he picked her up and ran with her out to the jeep. When he got to the road he was sloshing up to his ankles in a river of mud. He got about 200 yards down the road in his jeep before he slid off the road like he was on brown ice, and the jeep wedged at an angle against a banyan tree. Sherm stumbled with Victoria back up through the rain to Poppie's. Some of the men helped carry her back inside. The power blinked on for a moment, and then went off again. In the flash of light he saw Victoria shivering from head to toe. He yelled for some blankets. In the hallway he could hear some of the men yelling that the phone was still down.

It was then that Andrew Rouse and the balian ran into the room. Both of them were covered with the dark brown mud, and all you could see were the whites of their eyes taking in the scene. The balian stood looking at Victoria with a distressed look on his face, but Andrew fell to his knees next to Victoria and started yelling over the pounding drum of the rain how sorry he was that he didn't stop her from carrying the birdcage---as if, Sherm said, the bloody birdcage had a damn thing to do with her being sick.

Sherm said the witch doctor and Andrew Rouse had a private conversation in the hallway, and then Sherm suddenly stopped telling all of us in the Rangoon bar his story, and just sat at the end of the bar tapping an empty shot glass. He didn't respond to any of the engineers yelling at him to go on, just sat there tap, tap, tapping his shot glass. The bartender tried to fill the glass, and ended up nervously splashing scotch all over Sherm's hand. Then the bartender retreated out of the candlelight, and the engineers stopped yelling, and we listened to the rain pounding on the metal roof of the Rangoon bar. Sherm started up again, and said so quietly that I had to repeat it for everyone, "The balian and Andrew took off into the rain, leaving me to take care of Victoria."

Sherm said he sat on the edge of the bed holding a damp towel to Victoria's head for the rest of the long night. He sent his men running through the rain down the road to get a doctor. When she groaned he held Victoria in his arms like she was his daughter, and all that night he started to realize that he would be to blame if this young woman died. I didn't understand why at the time, but let him go on with his story. Sherm said at dawn the pounding rain slacked off slightly, and little by little Victoria's fever started to break. It was still raining at noon when Wayan brought in some food on a tray, and Victoria at this point was able to sit up and take a few mouthfuls of fruit. It was then that Sherm left her to go in search of the balian and Andrew.

Sherm suddenly stopped and looked around at us in the Rangoon bar with a look of disgust---as if he suspected the balian or Andrew was hidden among us engineers. He then closed his eyes and shaking his head in disgust told us he found the old Balinese bastard and Andrew out at the Monkey Forest Road site. They had rigged a tarp up in the trees over the site where Victoria had fallen on the birdcage with the ancestor spirits. Sherm absolutely didn't want to tell us what they had done. He kept shaking his head and looking into his empty shot glass. Turns out Andrew Rouse and the old balian had burned all the Crown Royal payroll for the month in a metal bucket. Millions of rupiahs went up in smoke that night to appease the ancestors.

Sherm said he stood there in the jungle and told the two of them that Victoria was better, and said he just about wanted to cry when they hugged and grinned at the smoke coming from the old bucket.

•

Crown Royal Hotels wanted Andrew Rouse arrested by the Indonesian authorities. Sherm hung his head in the bar in Rangoon and told us how he hung up the phone and went to his old friend's room at Poppie's. From behind the thin door he could hear Andrew arguing with Victoria about how he wanted to stay in Ubud and study with the balian. Sherm didn't knock just then but went back to the porch and his bottle of scotch. He could still hear Victoria yelling at Andrew from the porch, so he walked down to the construction site. When he returned later that night the kid Wayan told him Victoria was gone in a jeep with her bags, and Mister Andrew had walked up the road to the balian's village. Later that night Andrew showed up out of the gloom of the road as Sherm sat drinking on the porch, and asked to be taken on as a common Balinese laborer. Sherm said he just couldn't bring himself to say no to his old friend.

Sherm perked up as he told us how he worked around the clock to get the construction project back on track. He set up gas-powered lamps and had three shifts of workers. Sherm said if he saw some Bali boy taking time off to pray he had the guy fired before he was up off his knees. He said one day they were putting up pillars made from tree trunks on the front porch of the new hotel, and some of the workers insisted the root end of the tree trunks had to face the earth. Sherm said he didn't think twice, just fired the whole lot of them on the spot. One of the engineers asked the obvious question, and Sherm said, no, Andrew Rouse was not among those fired that day. He said Andrew worked harder than any native worker, and then every night went back up to the balian's village to continue his "studies."

Finally, the Ubud Crown Royal Hotel's basic physical structures were finished, and it was time to start thatching all the roofs. It was on that day that Andrew Rouse came up to Sherm and spoke to him for the first time in weeks and said, "The balian says it is not a good day to begin thatching." Andrew had a big handful of the wild grass that they were going to use in the thatching, and started waving it in Sherm's face and rattling on and on about how to the Balinese wild grass is sacred, how it has a living spirit and needs to be honored.

It was at this point that Sherm stood up in that bar on that monsoon night in Rangoon. He turned to us engineers and said simply, "That was the last straw. I fired him. I finally fired my best friend Andrew Rouse."

Sherm stood there and explained to us how the minute he uttered those magic words you're fired, Andrew, he saw his old friend crumble before his eyes. He said he understood right then that his friend's crazy delusions had been paper-thin from the beginning and had only been allowed to survive and even thrive by his not taking a hard line. Sherm shook his square head and said remorsefully, "If I had just got Andrew Rouse fired that first day he showed up in Bali and started sniffing the air and telling me it smelled like bloody perfume. . . ."

Sherm went on to tell us how he left Bali for a few days and delivered Andrew Rouse back to his wife, and paid for Andrew's stay in the best psychiatric hospital in Toronto. He announced to us somewhat triumphantly that Andrew Rouse was today still on antidepressants but working successfully as a consultant for a large commercial real estate development firm, and that he and his wife were happy again and looking forward to his retirement. One of the engineers in the Rangoon bar yelled out, "Bloody good for them two!"

Right then the flickering fluorescent lights came back on in the bar. The lights seemed to surprise Sherm, and he looked at his watch and said he had to run. He reached in his pocket and took out his wallet. He looked in the wallet and then raised his face and smiled at me curiously and reached into the wallet with his thumb and forefinger. He took out a small wadded clump of something and said to me it was some of the wild thatching grass Andrew Rouse had been waving in his face that day he had finally fired him. Sherm then nervously emptied the rest of his wallet onto the bar---enough money for us expatriates to drink for the rest of the night and through the next day. He shoved the empty wallet in his back pocket, and as he passed me he pressed the small clump of Balinese grass into my palm and closed my fingers around it. Sherm looked me straight in the eyes as he closed my fingers firmly around the grass, and I swear he looked strangely relieved. Then he almost tripped over himself to get out of the bar and into the monsoon.

When he was gone I looked down at the grass in my hand. At first I thought nothing about it, but then I looked again and then held the grass up to the fluorescent lights. The thing is this: That clump of grass was still emerald green. It was more than two years old and still hadn't dried out. You could put it to your nose and close your eyes and your head was filled with the scents of Bali. I showed it to the other engineers in the Rangoon bar that night, and they all cheered and toasted old Sherm for his "bloody good prank." One of the men took the grass, looked at it for a full minute and then as he handed it back said, "He must have kept it in his refrigerator." I sat there in the bar looking down at the moist grass in my open palm, thinking it was impossible it was still so fresh, and then remembered one of my last days on Bali back at the close of my wandering 20s.

I had been surfing the pipes all day at Kuta. That night at a bar called the Topi Copi I met this woman who had until recently been an ornithologist back in the States, working for Du Pont to prove a certain species of warblers was not in crisis. She told me how she had banded warblers in Massachusetts, and then moved down to the Caribbean, and the first bird she captured on Tortola was the first bird she had banded up North. She added another red band on its leg, and when she went back up to New England a few months later, she was sitting at her kitchen table having a morning cup of coffee when she looked out the window at her bird feeder, and there was a double-red-banded warbler cocking his head back and forth at her. She asked if I thought she was crazy for quitting her job, and I said at the time, a lot of ornithologists probably use red bands.

Sherm grabbed a machete and waded in there among the snakes and started hacking off their heads.