Cockpit (26 page)

I spent the following week installing my transmitting and receiving system: I hooked up most of the rooms in the main house, as well as the attic and basement of the guest cottage. Then I placed directional microphones and loudspeakers in the trees and even wired the abandoned wells and half-buried boat wrecks scattered among the dunes. These warning devices worked on various frequencies and
were controlled from a central switchboard in the attic of the guest house. They would alert me if anyone trespassed on the property or attempted to break into either house.

Late one evening, my sound monitor alerted me that a boat had pulled onto the beach: I distinguished three male voices. Soon I heard the men digging a pit, lighting a fire, roasting hot dogs and trying to improve the reception on their battery-operated TV. After a few beers, their comments on the ball game became increasingly raucous.

One of my speakers was hidden almost directly above the men, in the tall, dense grass of the dunes. Just before the ball game ended, I began bellowing Indian phrases through the speaker. The men panicked, splashed around in the water, and almost forgot to take the ice chest and television as they fled.

The Park continued to attract trespassers, by day and night. Trying to reach the beaches, some of the drivers simply lost their way on the Park’s unlit road. Often, a car would stop in front of the main house and its driver would knock at the door. I never bothered anyone who wandered into the Park by accident; I was interested only in those who came to play.

I saw the realtor when I picked up the boats I’d rented from him. On several other occasions, as a neighborly gesture, he and his wife stopped by the house. During one visit, I complained about the trespassers and reported that at night I often heard Indians chanting. The realtor nodded sadly and said that the reservation Indians often got drunk and celebrated some fertility rites at their cemetery bordering on the Park. He speculated that they might be using the Park as a place in which to sober up before returning to the reservation. There was apparently no legal way to stop them.

He warned me against taking matters into my own hands. The big-city radicals always took the side of the Indians, he said, and a violent incident could give the bank reason to
break up the Park. His wife agreed, assuring me that the Indians were irritating but harmless, and suggested that I should simply lock myself in, take a shot of whiskey and sleep through the howling.

The next morning, I paddled an inflatable dinghy out to my boat anchored in the bay, and spent a few hours hooking up my remote-control receiver-transmitters. As I worked, I recalled sitting on a quay in Monaco, gazing through binoculars at yachts anchored a few hundred yards off shore. I could see their crews, the stewards rushing around with trays, the passengers’ tanned bodies lounging on sundecks.

It was in Monaco that a small boy saw me staring at the boats and sat next to me. He was about ten years old, barefoot and thin, wearing clothes that he had outgrown. After a while, I asked him what he would most like to do. He pointed at the biggest yachts and said he would like to torpedo them. I asked how. He turned toward me, flushed with excitement, and said all he needed were a few battery-operated toy submarines loaded with real dynamite. He would stage the attack at night, when the passengers were returning from the casino. His deadly flotilla, ready to destroy on contact, would move slowly through the calm waters, passing unseen in the shadows.

The boy spoke rapidly as he described the explosions that would wreck the yachts, illuminating the port like fireworks. He imagined musicians forsaking their instruments, waiters dropping their trays, captains deserting their crews, men abandoning their women, women their children, and children their playthings. He described how the yachts would slowly sink in the darkness, servants and princes fighting one another for places in the dinghies.

Inspired by the boy’s scheme, on my last trip to the city I had bought several battery-powered miniatures of amphibious naval carriers. The toys could maintain a steady course for several hundred yards in smooth water as well as run on
the sand on their rubber wheels. I loaded each toy with a waterproof packet of explosive powder, which I could detonate by remote control.

One Friday night, I was awakened by sounds of boats and people. I quickly dressed and made my way to the dunes, scanning the waterline through infrared field glasses. Two pleasure boats had beached there and two young couples were busy setting up a midnight picnic. There was no moon, and, unobserved, I launched the dinghy and rowed to my boat. Through earphones attached to the directional microphones, I continued eavesdropping on my visitors, who were growing rowdier with every drink.

After waiting an hour, I began broadcasting through one speaker my single Indian incantation. The picnickers were startled but I heard the men assuring their women that as long as there was only one Indian they could easily chase him off. Armed with driftwood, they crawled inland looking for the drunken native. I waited for a while, then I activated the second speaker hidden in the bushes, creating the impression that the Indian had moved away from the beach. Next I turned on a third speaker at the opposite end of the woods. Through various directional mikes I followed the progress of the pursuers, who still thought they were chasing only one Indian.

With the men in the woods, I launched my amphibious toys. The little boats bobbed through the water and rolled onto the sand.

I pressed a button, and the first boat exploded in a white flare with the noise of a firecracker. Seconds later, I sent moans and Indian phrases through several of the Park’s most powerful speakers. Stunned by the explosions and the ghostly voices from the depths, the picnickers rushed back to the shore. I stopped the chanting but rapidly detonated the remaining toys. When one of the women screamed that she saw Indians arriving in canoes, the couples fled, abandoning their belongings, their boats churning
up the shallow waters of the bay. I went back to the guest house, had a shot of whiskey, as the realtor’s wife had suggested, and slept till late morning.

The summer was at its peak, and the Park was full of wild flowers. When I drove down the path, my car had to plough through lush foliage and blossoming shrubs. The meadows abruptly changed their color as gusts of wind blew back and forth across them.

One afternoon, from my attic, I saw a girl of about twelve bicycling slowly down a narrow path, with a boy of six or seven trotting behind her. I immediately switched on a speaker in one of the wells and began moaning and sobbing. The sounds were multiplied by echoes. The girl whirled around and bicycled furiously back toward the gate. The little boy ran after her, weeping.

In less than two hours, they returned with nine other children, ranging in age from about six to thirteen. Carrying slingshots, stones and bows and arrows, they crawled through the bush like seasoned guerrillas. When the band approached the main house, I activated a speaker hidden in the grass several feet from them, and started my incantations in throaty whispers gradually rising to howls. The children were ready for their prey and shot their missiles directly at the voice. I began to moan as if I had been hit, and, suddenly frightened, the children ran from the Park, shouting.

I called the theatrical supply company and asked if it could provide a life-size dummy of a dead male Indian, which I needed for a play. They told me the company accepted orders for dead Indians only by the dozen, and that a single body would be quite expensive. I called several shops in the city before finding one that had recently acquired top-quality dummies from a bankrupt Hollywood studio. I made arrangements and drove in to pick up the dead Indian.

Following my specifications, the make-up man at the
supply company had dressed the Indian in only a headband and loincloth. I asked him to cover the body with bloody wounds supposedly inflicted by the sample arrows and slingshot pellets I had taken with me. Because the play was to be staged outdoors in the daytime, I explained, it was important that the corpse look real. The make-up man complimented me on my feeling for detail. He advised me that, although standards had slipped elsewhere in the business, his mannequin was made of high quality plastic that closely resembled the texture of skin.

In a few hours, my Indian was ready. His skin was mottled with gray spots, and the blood seeping from the wounds around the arrows was amazingly realistic. To prevent his wounds from chipping and smearing, I wrapped the dummy in a blanket and placed him carefully in the trunk of my car. Next to him I stashed a can of imitation blood I had bought from the make-up man.

In the Park, I removed the speaker and placed the dummy in the grass at the exact spot where the children thought they had attacked an Indian. I scattered their arrows, stones and pellets over and around the dummy, then soaked the ground with imitation blood. I dribbled clear corn syrup on the wounds, and by the time I left, a swarm of flies had arrived to feed on the syrup.

As I had expected, the children returned to the Park after school. Carrying bows, arrows and slingshots, and axes, hammers and wrenches, they crept through the woods quietly. I loaded my camera, hung my wooden submachine gun on my shoulder and fastened the microphone of a tape recorder on an outside pocket of my military jacket. Soon two of the children had spotted the flies and discovered the dead Indian. The other children gathered around.

Just then I stepped from the brush, and aiming my gun, ordered them to drop their weapons and put up their hands. I shouted that anyone who disobeyed my orders would be shot. The children were terrified. They dropped
their weapons and clasped their hands behind their heads. The younger ones started to cry. Pointing at the dead Indian, I told them I had seen them kill him when he was peacefully returning from the cemetery, where he had gone to pray. I had not moved the body or reported the crime only because I knew that sooner or later the killers would come back.

I put the gun in the crook of my arm and raised the camera to photograph the children. In unison, they shielded their faces from the camera with their hands, like criminals being led into court. I raised the gun and threatened to present the police with their corpses instead of their photographs. They dropped their hands. After I finished the group photographs, I took a full-face and profile picture of each of them and had them dictate their names and addresses directly into my tape recorder. I warned that lying would implicate them even more seriously.

I announced that they would all be charged with the murder of an unarmed, innocent Indian. Each one of them would be sentenced to many years of solitary confinement, and their disgraced parents would have to change their names and their jobs and move to another state. Their coldly premeditated crime would make headlines in the newspapers and the whole world would see their vicious faces on television.

As I talked, some of the children turned pale; others trembled and cried, begging me not to denounce them. They whimpered that they would do anything for me. The older ones, with what they considered adult arguments, pointed out that, after all, Indians never went to church or to the movies or to shopping centers and didn’t send their kids to school, but just drank and slept all day, living off the taxes of the whites who worked.

I hesitated for a long time, as if deep in thought, then told them I had reconsidered my decision and decided to protect them for the sake of their families. I promised that
the body would never be discovered. The children flocked about me, sobbing with relief. After they calmed down, I said I wanted to take one final photograph for my own private album.

Willingly, the children now formed a tight circle around the Indian. Great hunters displaying their kill, they smiled proudly at the camera. I promised that, in a day or so, I would leave a photograph for each child in a plastic bag under the oak tree near the main gate. To protect the cover-up, I said, I would keep the negatives in my bank vault. One after another, they swore themselves to secrecy and thanked me for what I had done.

I suggested that, in case we were being watched by the Indians, they should not leave the Park together. They scattered obediently, some through the gate, others by the dunes and beach.

I buried the dummy near the guest house, developed the film and made dozens of wallet-sized prints of each picture. As promised, I left the photographs in plastic bags near the gate, and the next morning, through my binoculars, I watched the children come one after another to collect them. Later in the day, a few of the older ones sneaked back to the Park to make certain no traces of their crime remained.

In the following days, I continued to lead a quiet life, going into the village only when necessary. But, whenever I drove my convertible through town, men and women waved to me, and I knew I was considered a member of the community, like it or not.

Soon, I discovered the children had not kept our secret. One man complimented me on my handling of the young intruders in the Park. A couple remarked how generous I, a newcomer, had been to the neighborhood kids. A local door-to-door cosmetics saleswoman gave me two complimentary sets of her men’s products, as a reward for what she called a “communal service.”

One weekend, I went to the local bar where men were spending the evening sitting in front of their beers, hypnotized by the flickering image on the television set suspended high over the bar. Although we had never met, the bartender shook my hand. He poured me a double and said it was on the house. All the men turned toward me, and those sitting in the back moved closer to get a better look. Others kept on toasting me and slapping me on the back. I toasted them in return, downed my drink and left. Five of them left with me. Outside, their spokesman launched into a speech of gratitude. He said that he was the father of one of the children that I had saved. Everyone realized, he told me, that it was only to protect the children that I had put the fear of God into them.

Looking to the others for approval, he announced that all five men were members of a group devoted to civic betterment. Whenever any group member needed help, the others rallied round him. My deed entitled me to become one of them. I told him I was grateful, but that I was shy and tended to avoid groups in favor of more intimate contacts. They again assured me that they would be standing by if I ever needed them. We parted like old buddies.