Wild Coast Page 9

  We drove back along the crimson road.

  ‘This is where we set up an ambush,’ said Duke, remotely. ‘We didn’t have much. A few men trained in the military and a couple of handguns. They had assault rifles. We thought they’d come back and kill us. It was a long night, a bad night. Then in the morning one of the survivors came down the road from Jonestown. He told us what had happened but of course we didn’t believe him …’

  An unforgettable night was about to become an unbelievable new day.

  Duke said he’d drive me out there, tomorrow at sunrise.

  ‘And bring your boots,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of snakes.’

  I didn’t sleep well that night, at the old Weekend Disco. Perhaps it was the breathing that came through the cracks, or too much of Big D’s boil-ups. I lay awake, taunted by the anguish of Poppy Speed, and the woman who dreamed of gunfire. Even when I did sleep, it felt like a dark trap, haunted by snakes and broken people and enormous lemons. Then at some point there were two explosions in the hall, and I woke in panic, unable to disentangle the imagined from the real. Perhaps the shooting had started again? Remembering that my windows were barred, I crawled across the floor and hid in the shower. Then, after an eternity of silence, I crawled back to bed and lay there, fitfully sifting the sounds of the night. In the morning I told King Charley about this, and he laughed. ‘Kids!’ he said. ‘Kids with squibs!’

  A surreal night was as good a preparation as any for a trip out to Jonestown. For almost an hour Duke’s jeep soared through the jungle, cresting one great rib of laterite before swooping down on another. The only people we saw were some schoolchildren with umbrellas and a group of Amerindians who rode along with us for a while, never saying a word. Duke didn’t say anything either, until we reached a clearing and a parade of blackened stumps. ‘Fruit trees,’ said Duke, ‘all planted by the Temple.’

  Then we turned off the track, between two posts; the old entrance. There had once been a sign here – ‘WELCOME TO JONESTOWN PEOPLE’S TEMPLE AGRICULTURAL PROJECT’ – but it had long since been devoured by the damp, along with a sentry box. ‘Security was very tight,’ said Duke, ‘they even had a watchtower, so they could see all around.’

  Not any more. Now the jungle had closed in again, and the path ahead was only a few feet wide. As the jeep passed through, I could hear the thorns squealing down our sides. Duke said you couldn’t walk through this stuff – Tiger Teeth and Hold-me-back – and it occurred to me that our day would end like this, lost in the prickles and dark. But then, suddenly, the trees fell back, and we were out in a miniature savannah. ‘Jonestown,’ announced Duke grimly. ‘This is where it happened.’

  I peered into the long grass. Out in the middle was a very tall plum tree, and beyond it a distant brocade of forest. From this rank scattering of weeds and scrub it was hard to reassemble the past. Everything had gone: classrooms, offices, a cassava mill and housing for a thousand souls. No one could even agree what it had looked like. Debbie Layton had said it was ‘squalid’, and Shiva Naipaul – who turned up three weeks later – said it was a ‘dismal constellation, half-ordered, half-scattered’. But the reporter Krause had described it as idyllic, like an old, antebellum American plantation. Who was right? Was this really an agricultural Utopia, or just a cranky sanctuary for the lost and dispossessed?

  I walked forward and pushed into the long grass.

  ‘Be careful,’ said Duke, ‘you don’t know what’s in there …’

  I hesitated, but then I noticed that he was following. I’d already detected that beneath Duke’s outer layer of indifference there was a vivacious seam of drama. We walked on. All around us the stalks swished and cackled, and little gnarly claws of thorn snatched at our legs. Along the way we found a ‘Made in the USA’ window fitting and an outpouring of giant amber ants.

  ‘Yakmans,’ said Duke. ‘Never try and stop them. They eats anything in their path – rats, insects, even snakes …’

  Stepping over these unstoppable gourmands, we found ourselves on the edge of the clearing and squeezed between the trees. Here was what I was looking for: the leprous hulks of the three tractors, a boiler, half a dozen engine blocks, a vast workbench and the crumbling chassis of an old army truck. Whatever else was happening in Jonestown at the moment it imploded, it was in the throes of agricultural effort.

  Duke looked sceptical. ‘They wasn’t farming. It was something else …’

  I said nothing, and we walked on. The undergrowth was being quietly snipped up by leaf-cutter ants, building a farm by instinct, uncluttered by ideas. At one point we came across an area where the soil seemed to have boiled up, or been ransacked by badgers. ‘People,’ noted Duke, ‘looking for small scraps of metal.’

  Further along, there was an old miner’s cabin, made from twigs.

  ‘This is where Jones had his house,’ said Duke.

  ‘Did you know him?’

  He nodded. ‘Funny guy. Always in shades. Never looked at you straight.’

  ‘And did you see inside this place?’

  ‘Nope, never crossed his gate.’

  We both peered through the twiggy framework. There was nothing there but ant-works and Tiger Teeth. Duke explained that in the days following Jones’s death looters had picked the place clean. I’d also heard that they’d discovered a grisly, parallel economy; the Prophet lived quite differently from his disciples. Apart from the trappings of office – books, electric lights, a fridge full of del Monte fruit, a double bed, cotton sheets and two dead mistresses – there was also a large quantity of Thorazine, sodium pentathol, chloral hydrate and Demerol. It was like a sort of pharmaceutical armoury, with every weapon you’d ever need in the practice of coercion.

  ‘The Pavilion was over there,’ said Duke, pointing back to the plum tree.

  We set off towards it. Above us, in the tree, a chicken hawk watched, coldly appraising our vulnerability. Then something caught my eye. It was a tiny rotten fragment of a shoe: a woman’s sandal, white with slingbacks.

  ‘This is where the bodies were,’ said Duke. ‘All piled up, three deep.’

  Here’s what happened to the lady in the white slingbacks.

  Shortly before dusk, she heard the tannoys blast into life. ‘Alert! Alert! Alert!’ She made her way to the Pavilion. The gunmen had returned from the airstrip, and Jones was calling a meeting. She could see him on his throne, beneath a notice that read: ‘THOSE WHO DO NOT REMEMBER THE PAST ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT.’ Over 900 people now pressed towards their leader. He was recording his last great speech, a valedictory. ‘Death is not a fearful thing! It’s living that’s cursed …’

  She could also see that there were guards posted around the pavilion, and that the doctor was supervising a concoction of Flavor Aid and chemicals. She didn’t know that these included cyanide and tranquillisers, but she knew that this was no rehearsal. It was the final ‘White Night’, and this time even the cooks weren’t exempted from the drill. ‘It’s over, Sister,’ rasps Jones, ‘we’ve made that day! We made a beautiful day …’

  Everyone’s frightened, and there’s wailing on the tape. ‘Stop this hysterics!’ snaps Jones. ‘This is not the way for people who are socialist communists to die!’ But it was the children who went first, with a squirt in the mouth from a toxic teat. ‘Take our life from us!’ drones Jones. ‘We got tired. We didn’t commit suicide! We committed an act of revolutionary suicide …’

  Then it was the turn of the woman in white shoes. The crowd were still compacted around her. She could hear The Father’s voice above the moans of grief and pain: ‘Die with respect! Die with dignity!’ Few of her friends had disobeyed (and those that did had been dragged to the ground and injected with the poison). She’d watched as those around her took their little cups and drank. They’d wince at the powerful industrial taste, and then lie down as they began to feel the breath no longer working in their lungs. It was not an instant death, she’d notice, but a determined, chemical asphyxia. Confused and pan
icky, she’d gulp down her own dose and then take her place among her friends. No one would ever know the agonies she experienced in those last few minutes. She, like all the others, would be found in an attitude of sleep. It was almost as though they’d just lain down for a moment, not even bothering to remove their shoes.

  A few weeks earlier I’d met a man who was one of the first outsiders to get to Jonestown, once news of the massacre broke.

  Joe Singh, it seemed, had been present at almost every momentous event in modern Guyanese history. As a soldier, he’d quelled revolts, fought the drug gangs, negotiated truces with Amerindians and beaten off foreign incursions, and then – eventually – taken command of the army. During the African years this was no mean feat for an Indo-Guyanese. He had the almost unique status of a hero among each of the races. People were always writing to the papers asking that he be made president, or that a street be named in his honour. He was, I suppose, the nearest that Guyana had to a national institution. He also happened to be a friend of a friend, and so we agreed to meet.

  The secret of his survival was soon obvious. Although Joe was generous and magisterial, with his dark tropical suit and hair like silvery pins, he was also deftly illusive. It was as though he only ever revealed a fraction of what he felt. He didn’t even appear in his own stories very much – nor did anyone alive. Instead, he preferred to foray deep into the past, well out of range of possible ambush. I wondered whether Jonestown was far enough back in the temporal hinterland, and so I asked him. For a moment I could see him calibrating the possible fall-out. As the old Georgetown adage goes, whatever is said today is on the president’s desk tomorrow.

  He hesitated. ‘Yes. Of course, I remember. How could anyone forget?’

  This is the soldiers’ story:

  News of trouble came through that afternoon. By midnight the army had managed to fly some troops to the far end of the ridge. Under the command of Joe Singh – who was then a colonel – they’d marched all night and reached Port Kaituma at dawn. Later that day they reached Jonestown.

  The sight that greeted them was incomprehensible. At first they thought that the clearing had been strewn with rags, and then they realised they were people. The bodies lay on their fronts, some with dried blood in their nostrils. Jones himself lay on the altar in the Pavilion. He’d not taken poison but had got someone to shoot him, and now his shirt was bloody and pulled up over his head.

  It was impossible to count all the bodies, such was the tangle and stench. At first, there seemed to be only 400, so a helicopter was sent out with a loudspeaker, urging the others to come in from the forest. ‘We were there some days,’ said Joe, ‘just searching the site.’ Then the bodies were counted again. There were 909, including 276 children. Even the dogs and cows had been poisoned, and Mr Muggs the chimpanzee.

  Few survivors emerged. Among them was a 76-year-old woman, and a handful of others who’d fled. Strangest of all was the TV presenter Mike Prokes, who turned up with a gun and a suitcase full of money and said he was heading for the Soviet embassy. (Six months later, I discovered, he gave a press conference in a motel in Modesto and read out a forty-page testament before retreating to the bathroom and shooting himself in the head.)

  Looters had already begun to prise the place apart. Martial law was imposed. There’d been some curious pickings: spice racks, boxes of Flavor Aid (which no one dared drink) and books donated by the Russians. Meanwhile, Joe’s soldiers would retrieve twenty bows and arrows, thousands of dollars in cash (together with half a million in uncashed welfare cheques), about forty automatic rifles and a trunk containing 800 American passports. As for the mountains of foul, stained clothes, all the soldiers could do was scrape them into heaps and set them on fire.

  The dead had been harder to deal with. It was obvious the soldiers couldn’t cope. There were said to be only thirty body bags in the entire country. What’s more, the heat was relentless, and – as his parting gift – Jones had poisoned all the water. For days nothing happened. When the journalists called by (including Krause and then, later, Shiva Naipaul), the troops just waved them through at gunpoint. ‘Keep moving! Don’t touch anything!’ they screamed. They’d had as much as they could bear, and now it was time for the United States to come in and scoop up the mess. ‘Well,’ said Joe, defiantly, ‘it was their problem. Jonestown had nothing to Guyana.’ Most Guyanese believed this. As Naipaul put it, in life the disciples of the People’s Temple had been hailed as socialist heroes, and in death they were ‘hopelessly American’.

  A few days later another small army arrived. They were specialised battlefield technicians, the people who clear up the pieces once the pruning of humans is done. Under the command of four colonels they moved among the dead, tagging, heaving, bagging, zipping and boxing. They untangled every corpse and gathered every document. Then they sprayed the clearing with so much disinfectant that, according to pilots, it’s never been quite the same colour again. People like Joe were so astonished at the speed and complexity of the American operation that they began to wonder if they’d prepared it all in advance. (‘It was as though they knew something,’ he said, ‘or at least had something to hide’.) Then they were gone: a vast dead decampment, shuttled away in relays of Jolly Green Giants.

  For the sad, swollen followers of Jones the ordeal was not, however, over. As I’d soon discover, they had a journey ahead of them that’s never quite come to an end. But it was different for Jonestown itself. Haunted, lifeless and antiseptic, it would now lie empty, probably for ever.

  ‘Since that sad day has strucked,’ said Duke, ‘no one has ever lived here.’

  We were walking back across the clearing, watched by the hawk. Duke was now deep in thought, and I asked him how the locals had reacted when the town next door had died. He stopped and turned, looking back over the scribble of thorns and rust. At first, it seems, people had hardly given it a thought and seen only a field of booty.

  ‘Nothing went to waste,’ he said. ‘They took the tin and the windows, and all the timber. There’s still plenty of people in Port Kaituma with bedsheets from Jonestown, or perhaps a couple of chairs. I remember they had a big freezer. It was full of food. Full! I tried it, but it was locked …’

  We walked on. Others had told me that, once everything portable had gone, the urge to forage was replaced with doubt. No one could quite believe that a town just like theirs – except bigger and richer – had simply self-destructed. A greater agency was at work. Suddenly mythology was sprouting everywhere, like luxurious clumps of forest. Duke himself thought that Jones was mining uranium, and that there were tunnels deep beneath the forest. ‘That why they never found the cement he ordered. Five hundred bags! You see any concrete now?’

  I couldn’t. ‘But that’s only two truckloads?’ I tried.

  Duke wouldn’t have it, and nor would anyone else. Back in Port Kaituma I met people who believed that Jones was still alive, that he and his assassins had escaped by plane, and that there was a massive cache of gold. Meanwhile, in Georgetown, it was often assumed that the CIA were involved, and that Jonestown was a dangerous psychological stunt. One politician even told me that the Russians had placed a missile silo there, and they’d all been killed by special forces.

  ‘So there was no treasure?’ I asked Duke.

  ‘Nah,’ he sneered, ‘no one find nothing.’

  This wasn’t what everyone said. In fact, Duke’s father was famous for having found $250,000 in cash. His mistake was to tell everybody. He was murdered a few weeks after Jonestown, on the path to Venezuela.

  Jonestown carried on killing for years after the massacre. It was a curse, like one of those ghostly plastic gill-nets that breaks free of its trawler and travels the oceans in a state of perpetual slaughter. To begin with, there were the unfinished suicides, such as the woman who trimmed her children’s throats in Lamaha Gardens, and television producer Mike Prokes, who ended it all in Modesto. Then there were the reprisals. Even years after the cult’s demise, def
ectors were still being hunted down and killed. Perhaps the saddest story of all was that of Bonny Mann, the Guyanese ambassador to the United States. Two years after Jonestown he discovered that his lover, who was also the mother of his child, was not the girl she said she was. Instead, she’d been planted in his life by the People’s Temple and had recorded all their trysts. As Mann’s world fell apart, he killed both mother and child, before turning the gun on himself.

  But it wasn’t just the cult’s survivors who were restless; so were the dead.

  ‘Ask Caroline George,’ said Big D. ‘Her brother was among them.’

  Ah, yes, David George, the Amerindian boy adopted by the Revd Jones.

  Caroline George had a small shop, which sold salt and dried fish, out in Bottom Floor. On my last day I walked out there and found her stall, up to the eaves in weed. Inside, standing at the counter, was a customer with huge, knobbly hands like claws, and a face as wild as the forest. When he heard me mention Jonestown, his eyes widened, and I found myself staring upwards into two great rings of curdled yellow.

  ‘If you kill one man,’ he growled, ‘you’re a murderer. If you kill nine hundred, you’re a conqueror!’ With that, he tottered imperiously for a moment, and then lurched for the door.

  Miss George looked at me without any perceptible expression. She was a short woman, rounded by poverty and thickened by work. Yes, she murmured, she’d tell me what happened. I thanked her, and then I must have hesitated, uncertain what I’d find when I clicked the latch of this person’s grief. She sensed my anxiety and forced an unhappy smile.

  ‘I think about Jonestown,’ she said, ‘almost every day of my life.’

  A heartless saga emerged. She told me that her mother was a Carib, that she’d been born at the mouth of the river and that her father had died when she was small. For much of her childhood she and her siblings had drifted around like human flotsam. They’d fished and begged, and lived on the water. All that they’d had was each other. At some stage they’d ended up in Port Kaituma, and then into their lives came the Revd Jones. He was adopting Amerindian children and took on three of the siblings: Philip, Gabriella and ‘Baby’ David, who was ten.