Killing the Monkey: A Jungle Memory

For unknown reasons this recollection of an odd "adventure" in Guyana began burbling a couple of days ago. As noted before--here, here,  and here, for example--I served in that colorful and desperately poor socialist paradise, 1978-1980. A relatively comfortable, though sleepy backwater when given independence from Britain in 1966, it quickly became a semi-authoritarian, anti-US, Third World socialist farrago with the most vile racial politics imaginable. Guyana vied then and now with Haiti and Paraguay for the title of poorest country in the Americas--having visited all three, I assure you that you're better off in Haiti or Paraguay.

This post, however, is not a political screed. It is a little tale about decisions we make re what is and is not ok to kill.

The Diplowife and I lived in a modest home. We were young, recently married, and didn't have many material possessions or needs. We had two old cars, and my almost $14,500/yr salary seemed more than adequate. Georgetown was, well, boring; there was little to see or do, and almost nothing to buy. We would go days without electricity, and often without water, too. The crime rate was very high, and we went everywhere armed.

We became good friends with the Colombian Charge, Jose, and his wife, Ines. With these delightful people, we would venture out to the old movie theater downtown on weekends or to the rather run down drive-in on the outskirts of the city. At the theater, we would pay an extra fifty Guyanese cents (about twenty US cents) to sit in the balcony, and away from the boisterous drunks and homeless who made the place their low rent hotel: for about fifty Guyanese cents, they could spend nearly the entire day in the theater. The movies were much-used American, British, and Indian films, often bootlegged and worse for the wear because of the heat and the humidity. Many would appear on the screen in two colors, pink and dirty white.

With our Colombian friends, we would sit in the first row of the balcony. Before sitting down, we would spray the area around our seats with powerful pesticide against the large cockroaches that inhabited the place, and then put towels on the chairs. Jose and I would sit with our wives between us, S&W .357 revolvers in our laps, and big walking sticks in our hands to whack the occasional rat that would cross the handrail in front of us. Once the lights went out and the show began, the bats that lived in the rafters would begin to circle above our heads, and often dive into the screen, some attaching themselves to it. I remember one night, watching a scratched pinkish print of Kubrick's "Barry Linden," Jose nailed a big rodent as it scuttled across the railing. He sent it flying out and, of course down--even socialists can't repeal the law of gravity--into the cheap seats below: a howl went up. We heard a lot of stomping. A good Saturday night.

One day, a newly arrived Embassy staffer, Dave, told me he could arrange a hunting trip up the Demerara river into the Guyanese hinterland. We would stay overnight in an Amerindian village that had a Catholic mission. The mission priest, a contact of Dave's, gave the OK, but asked that we donate some money to the mission. I don't remember the amount, but it wasn't much. We could bring a couple of other employees and our wives. We would go night hunting for a big jungle rodent called the labba, similar to the tepezcuintle one finds in Central America. While not crazy about the game, it was something to do, sounded exotic, and I had never gone hunting at night. To get to the village, we hired a boat, which looked much like a Disney version of a Mike Fink keel boat.

Very early in the morning, we began chugging slowly up the mighty river leaving behind the city and heading into the jungle. Having just reread Conrad's Heart of Darkness, I thought we would encounter Mr. Kurtz at the end of our voyage--but, no such luck. As we approached our destination after several hours, we could hardly hear each other talk because of the noise from the howler monkeys in the trees.

We pulled up to the village's rickety dock. The priest was neither around, nor, apparently, had he informed the chief of our plans. No arrangements existed. This, of course, entailed negotiations, the passing of dollars and a couple of whisky bottles--one scotch and one bourbon, if I remember correctly. In exchange, the chief, who proudly wore a John Travolta "Saturday Night Fever" t-shirt, allowed us two huts in the village. The women would stay in one hut, and the men in another. The women got the bigger and better one--or so we thought. The chief assigned a couple of guides to take us hunting in their dugouts. We four men went to unload the boat as it was starting to get dark, and we would go hunting soon. With the darkness, two unhappy guides showed up. Their unhappiness stemmed from the fact that the village would hold a festival that night, and they would miss it because of us. A few dollars proffered only slightly placated them, and they went to complain to the chief. He, however, ordered them to take us. Their hearts were not in the hunt.

After some delay occasioned by the slowness with which the guides got ready to go, two of us clambered into each canoe. We slowly cruised up and down some very narrow waterways, the morose guides, in a desultory way, shined lights into the growth and yelled at us to keep quiet. After puttering around for three or four hours, those guides decided we needed to eat before heading back. We ran the dugouts up onto the bank and headed for a thatch-roofed gazebo in a small clearing. Our guides started laughing as we four Great White Hunters went into the gazebo, sat on some rudimentary benches, put our Coleman lanterns on the table, and broke out the sandwiches. We had committed a major jungle faux pas: We had not bothered to check for snakes. Yes, snakes. A big issue in Guyana. Lots of nasty poisonous ones. I think our attendants would have died happy if one of us had died miserably from a snake bite.

After nervously eating our sandwiches, we headed back. None of us had burned off a single shotgun round. The guides, however, had no interest in more "hunting," and wanted to catch at least some of the partying. When, however, we slid back into the village, we found it cloaked in a deathly silence. By the very dim light thrown by a couple of smoldering fires and some weak light bulbs, we could see men strewn over the ground. I figured a neighboring tribe had attacked, and wiped them out. The truth proved not quite so dramatic: the whole village, at least the menfolk component, had gotten absolutely, lights-out-I-am-in-la-la-land drunk. The guides were very disappointed: the party was over.

As we walked to our hut, now compulsively checking for snakes, we neared the women's hut and decided to look in on the wives. It was about 3 am. One friend shouldered open the door with some difficulty, and almost got cracked in the head by an embassy wife wielding a club. As it turned out, while we had our adventure, the women had their own. Their hut contained the village's reserve barrels of "sleepy wine." All night, men in various stages of drunkenness, had come through the door, or, once the women blocked it, had crawled through window openings to get a cup or two of "sleepy wine." Our wives, needless to say, had not slept. My wife led the three other women over to our hut and announced that they would stay with us for the rest of the night.

Next morning, Dave could not let pass the failed hunting trip of the previous night. He had come to hunt, and hunt he would. The rest of us put away the shotguns, and went for a walk in the woods with our wives while waiting for our "Mike Fink" boat to return--it having sailed away for some reason. Everybody was in a cheerful mood, babbling about the great adventure, and "admiring" the huge spiders we saw along the way. Dave, however, had decided to engage a guide and hunt. They sped off ahead of us. About halfway through our walk, we heard two shotgun blasts in rapid succession, and Dave yell in victory. Well, I thought, he finally got himself a jungle rat.

No.

A few minutes later, he came around the bend, walking quickly towards us dragging what at first looked like a person. It was a large and very dead howler monkey. He dumped it at the feet of his horrified wife who immediately noticed the crying baby monkey clinging to its mother's blood-soaked body. The women began to scream at Dave, berating him for killing a mother monkey. Even we rough, tough macho dudes had a problem with this tableau. One said, "Hey, Dave, man, you killed a monkey? And one with a baby on her back . . . that's not right, not right."

Furious at the reception he had gotten, Dave did not say a word to us for the rest of the trip, and, in fact, rarely spoke to any of us again. Several months later, his much younger wife left him for somebody much wealthier than he.