Running with the Sharks

By James Eckardt

Running with the Sharks is a novel of stark human conflict set in the lawless isolation of an uninhabited island off Thailand’s Andaman coast.

Tony DeLupo, alias “Loopy da Loop”, is a man with a past. On an around-the-world orgy of spearfishing — “I enjoy killing things. And then eating them.” — he retreats to the coral world of Koh Adang in the Andaman Sea, but, instead of finding the solitude he seeks, meets up with a group of marine biologists from Hat Yai’s Prince of Songkhla University. Thai, British and American, the group includes Anna Briggs who is attracted to Tony and Terry Weeks who is jealous.

Montri Xuto, alias “Hassan bin Khalid”, is also a man with a past, a heroin smuggler who is trying to disappear from Phuket and retire gracefully to Australia. He washes up on Koh Adang with two ex-pirates, two Burmese crewmen, a .38, an M-16 and two ruckascks of Double Uoglobe #4 heroin.

The clash between the two groups leads to swift violence, devious power plays, painful moral choices, shifting allegiances — and the Adang Island Massacre.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Proglen
• Release date: Dec 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9786167817217

James Eckardt

James Eckardt lived in Thailand for 30 years, half in his wife's hometown of Songkhla, the scene of his novel "Boat People" and his first story collection "Waylaid by the Bimbos", and half in Bangkok, his base for the profiles in "Bangkok People" and his second book of stories "On the Bus with Yobs, Frogs, Sods and the Lovely Lena". A year in Cambodia furnished the material for "The Year of LIving Stupidly". A former Catholic seminarian, civil rights worker and Peace Corps volunteer, James Eckardt has also written the novels "Alabama Days" and "Running with the Sharks", a fourth story collection "Thai Jinks: Madcap Misadventures on Land and Sea in Thailand", and a memoir: "Singapore GIrl". "I was fascinated by "Singapore Girl", a love story like no other -- bizarre and oddly moving." -- Paul Theroux

Book preview

Running with the Sharks

James Eckardt

Running with the Sharks

Copyright © James Eckardt, 1993

First Published 1993

Smashwords Edition

eBook Edition published by

DCO Books

Proglen Trading Co., Ltd.

Bangkok Thailand

http://ebooks.dco.co.th

ISBN 978-616-7817-21-7

Thanks to Edward Stauffer of COMSET

Original typeset by COMSET

All Rights Reserved

This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and other elements of the story are either the product of the author's imagination or else are used only fictitiously. Any resemblance to real characters, living or dead, or to real incidents, is entirely coincidental.

To Boontong Lowtrakul, baron of the Nai Wan.

Contents

PART 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

PART 2

Chapter 6

PART 3

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

PART 4

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

PART 5

Chapter 12

PART 1

- 1 -

Pakbara was exactly the sort of godforsaken hole Tony DeLupo had hoped it would be.

A 150-mile ride in a Mercedes-Benz taxi with five fat Chinese who ignored him and an elderly Indian who wanted to talk about God all the way in the ferry across from Penang Island to Butterworth and north to the Thai border and the Sin City of Hat Yai where Tony soon stumbled upon the Pink Lady Coffee Shop and Massage Parlor and ordered up a sandwich — two white-skinned northern Thai beauties and him the meat between, supine on an air-mattress and slavered with soapsuds while over and under two tiny hot giggly soapy bodies squirmed shimmied and jiggled till he shot a wad that splattered his chin — and next morning a two hour tour-bus ride through parched paddy fields, zebu and water buffalo grazing on rice stubble, to Khuankalong where the road turned to dusty red laterite and a backcountry bus, rust-eaten and windowless, packed with market women and bawling babies, hauled him another thirty miles through rubber and coconut plantations to Langu and a spavined minibus which bounced him seven miles more on a potholed coastal road straight and true at last along the blue Andaman Sea to Pakbara.

Tony unlimbered from the bus, shouldered his seabag and headed for the docks. There was not much more to Pakbara than docks. Twenty tin-roofed shacks of bamboo and nipa palm, up on stilts along the tidal flats and milling in the black mud below the usual menagerie: pigs, goats, ducks, chickens, dogs, naked children. Racks of squid and cuttlefish dried in the sun, tended by dusky women in sarongs and turbans who paused at the sight of him, stared, muttered, giggled. Tony felt back at home: the Lone White Man again.

Up ahead sprawled a long low ramshackle shop, plank walls unpainted and rain-stained, shutters hinged from the top and propped open with sticks. The sort of establishment, Tony decided, where Judge Roy Bean might hold court. On stools flanking the doorway, two bare-chested teenagers sniggered at his approach.

You, one said. Hello, you.

You, you, said the other.

That’s me, Tony said, stepping between them and into the gloom of the shop. Slumped around three wooden tables, fishermen — with long hair and scraggly mustaches, tattoos and facial scars — slurped noodles, sipped iced coffee, smoked cigarettes. Alongside ran a wooden counter heaped with fishnets, floats and tackle; in one corner stood an old finger-smudged refrigerator and two gaping girls. Tony smiled at the prettier of the two and said, Co-ca Co-la.

The girl smiled back and moved toward the fridge.

Tony set down his seabag, leaned back against the counter and met the stares of a dozen fishermen. He let his gaze linger from table to table, long enough to show he was not discomforted, but not so long as to challenge their scrutiny. Sometimes Southeast Asia is one long spaghetti Western. Casting his gaze upward, Tony inspected green banana bunches dangling from the low eaves, strings of onion and garlic and red pepper.

# # #

Hemp hawsers held two otter-board trawlers and a purse seiner moored beam-ends to the dock. High-prowed and thick-planked, they were bigger — 70–80 feet — than anything Tony had seen in Malaysia or Indonesia. The purse seiner even had sonar and a conning tower and triple-tiered spotlights for night fishing. Sunlight gleamed on an extravagant paint scheme: turquoise hull, yellow superstructure, crimson trim. Piled on deck was a black nylon net, four feet high, atop which crouched a silent line of crewmen spreading still more layers.

Down the dock beefy women squatted around wicker baskets stuffed with squid, shrimp, jackmackerel and mullet. An old man scuttled past, barefoot, faded check sarong swathed on bony hips. One hand gripped the gills of a silver bonito. The big-jawed head dwarfed his hand; the scimitar tail dangled to his ankles. A good forty pounds, Tony figured. Spear one of those off Koh Adang and it’s soup and steaks for days.

Tony humped his seabag past an icehouse. Man-sized ice blocks rumbled down a ramp to the dock; teenagers with two-handed saws pared them down, then dollied them over to a diesel-powered ice crusher. Hoisted into a top-loader, the blocks disappeared in a crystal cascade through a trough to a line of wicker baskets. Which put Tony in mind of the tale told on the docks of Sheepshead Bay about the luckless button man of the Gambino Family who had been fed through just such a machine trigger finger first.

Away from the grinding racket, Tony reached the end of the dock and a dingy line of small stern-winch shrimpers. Some crew were hosing down decks; most lay dozing in hammocks strung under low-roofed cabins.

"Hello, you! Where you go?"

On the tiny foredeck of a particularly filthy 15-footer, in saggy underpants, draping a tattered and drenched sarong over a clothesline, a runty bow-legged fisherman favored Tony with a piratical grin: one trachoma-whitened eye, big yellow teeth in a sun-blackened face.

Where you go?

Slowly, Tony lowered the seabag to the dock. The Thai grinned wider, exposing a toothless bottom gum. Tony pointed seaward and said, Koh Adang.

# # #

Koh was a word he would have to get used to. Like pulau in Malay, hiva in Marquesan, île in French.

His back against the seabag wedged in the prow, legs stretched out on the fish hatch, elbows braced against the boat’s pitch and roll, Tony thumbed through a pocket Thai dictionary.

A couple miles astern, the harbor was fading into a low green smudge of mangrove swamp. Up in the wheelhouse, the skipper’s face had assumed the vacancy proper to a long sea journey. Course was nearly due south, for the headland of an island abeam: grey cliffs at the surf line, then green jungle swarming up a steep mountain ridge to a bare stone peak.

In his notebook Tony had penned the Thai words for: hello, thank you, where?, how much?, and the numerals up to a thousand. He hadn’t done badly in bargaining. Four hundred baht — 20 bucks — to reach an island 45 miles out to sea.

Now to compose his next speech: I will stay on Koh Adang five days. Then you come and get me. I pay another four hundred baht.

The New Zealanders had paid only three hundred. But what the hell. They were the pioneers; he was only the first of the tourist wave.

Tony smiled at the thought, and the memory of the New Zealand couple. In his notebook too were their names, Kevin and Cindy, their Christchurch address, and a pencil-scrawled map of Koh Adang. An X marked the beach where they had camped for two weeks. Two weeks might suit him fine too, if only he had the company of a little honey like Cindy. Blue eyes ablaze in a lean tanned face, helmet of sun-bleached hair. Kevin and Cindy, just out of college and off on the old Aussie-Kiwi round-the-world walkabout. He’d stood them a beer in a Singapore bar and for once wished he wasn’t alone.

To sleep with the natives — brown Tahitians, black Fijians, yellow Javanese — or travel in tandem with your own white bedmate? Well, you’d have to be in love. And anyway, a stiff dose of island solitude would do him good. Along the lines of a Jesuit retreat. To return to the world then, purified and randy.

For the world, just now, was too much with him. At least the Asia Tourist World: Singapore was plastic-and-glass shopping centers, somnolent white freaks moping about Bencoolen Street flophouses; Pulau Tioman: a Malay-style Holiday Inn full of drunk redneck oil riggers; Pulau Lankawi: condominiums and a casino and rat-faced Chinese croupiers; Kuantan: highrise Merlin and Hyatt hotels and geriatric Australian tour groups; Trengganu: Club Mediterranée, fashionable frogs and wops, a gente bella adrape in native batik… Since setting foot on mainland Asia, Tony had mostly wasted his time.

Best to find Koh Adang, a cathedral of coral, fit place for recollection and the old Jesuit questions: who am I, why am I here, where am I going?

The boat chugged past the jungled cliffs of the headland. Hundred-foot trees clung impossibly to bare black slate, foliage brown, yellow and every shade of green, entangled with liana and vines, and scurrying on the lower slopes a whole tribe of macaques: bushy-humped papas, mamas clutching babies. A rippling splash of water nearby. Tony turned in time to see a shoal of needle-nosed bait leap into the air, fleeing some pelagic predator. Beyond the headland, a cove came in sight. Atop a densely wooded escarpment stood towers of basalt, cracked and crenelated like Mayan ruins. High above the tallest tower floated a seahawk. Tony smiled in admiration: white-tufted head and languid brown wings spiralling upward in the thermals…

As the boat bore away to the east, out of the lee of the island and into the heavy swells of the Andaman Sea, Tony felt he was heading in the right direction.

# # #

Ten miles further out, the boat passed the northern tip of Koh Tarutao: jungled peaks and ridges rearing fifteen hundred feet above the sea. The New Zealanders had told him that Tarutao, Turtle, named for the hawksbills that once hatched there, had been a penal colony in the 1930s, a Thai Devil’s Island. With the coming of the Japanese in 1942, warders and prisoners patched up their differences and banded together as pirates, preying as far afield as the Bay of Bengal. This enterprise flourished till two years after the war, when the Thai permitted a pair of British destroyers to steam north from Penang and wipe out the pirates’ den. Now it was a national park.

Around a headland appeared a creek mouth, a small pier, a few thatch-roofed buildings — park headquarters? Tony saw no people. The park business seemed not to be flourishing. A wide beach, backed by coconut palm and casuarina pine, stretched southward for miles. Tony decided to go to sleep.

# # #

Koh Adang? he asked, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. A small swaybacked island loomed off the starboard bow. The mountains of Koh Tarutao were twenty miles astern, the sun at three o’clock.

The skipper shook his head —Koh Ta Nga.— then rotated his forefinger and thrust it further ahead. Eek sawng choomung mee Koh Adang.

Right. Whatever the fuck that means. Tony curled back down on the deck.

Koh Adang?

Koh Adang!

As islands go, this one was world class. Right up there with Tahuata and Nuku Hiva. Limestone outcroppings jutted like teeth from the jungle; russet monoliths tumbled down to the beach; foliage heaved and swelled over the mad contours of foothills asprawl in the shade of a two-thousand-foot peak. The beach was deserted, backdropped by an unbroken wall of jungle thinning only toward a narrow point and a grove of fleecy-leaved casuarina. This was the southeast coast. Some miles north, behind the mountain, there was supposed to be an abandoned fishing village, though the New Zealanders had never bothered finding it. Tony kept his eye out for a waterfall. This fed a creek that led to the beach where Kevin and Cindy had camped.

He saw it soon enough, a thin silver line down a black slate cliff. Breaking through the jungle wall, the creek cut a lazy curve to the sea. Tony waved to the skipper, gestured for him to steer for the waterfall. The skipper shook his head, swept his hand around the point.

"I don’t know where you want to go, Tony said. I’m getting off here."

Much sign language later — heads nodding and shaking, fingers stabbing wildly in disparate directions — the skipper shrugged and wheeled the boat toward shore. Water turned from turquoise to aquamarine, splotched randomly by the darker blue of coral heads. Going over the reef, the skipper throttled the engine down, then threw it into idle as the hull slid over a white sandy bottom. The boat settled into a slow roll, twenty feet from shore. The skipper stepped out on the foredeck.

Ha wan, Tony reminded him, holding up five fingers.

Ha wan. Five days.

Si loy baht. Tony tucked in a thumb. Four hundred baht.

The skipper nodded, smiling.

You up the return fare later, I’m in a piss-poor bargaining position.

Bracing himself on the rail, Tony slipped down into warm chest-deep water. He pointed to the seabag. The skipper gripped the bag’s strap and yanked upward, and nearly pitched headfirst into the sea. The bag stayed on the deck. Tony laughed; the skipper laughed too. Heaving and straining, he swung the bag around till the bottom lay over the rail. Tony lowered the bag onto his head. Hands braced on each end, he turned carefully and made for shore.

"You! he heard the skipper shout. Bye bye!"

Yeah, bye bye.

By the time he had stowed the bag under an acacia tree, the boat was already bobbing back over the reef, black smoke puffing from an exhaust pipe astern.

Bye bye, world.

# # #

Beyond a brown thicket of branch coral, the bottom dropped sharply. Tony sucked air through the snorkel and dove for depth.

Brain, staghorn, rose and lace coral; a magnificent fan coral, pristine white, as tall as a man, spires spread in perfect symmetry and weaving amid them opal-and-orange angelfish and a shimmering school of yellow fingerlings. A pop-eyed grouper slowly rose, then veered away as Tony plummeted past. He sailed over a rocky outcrop encrusted with acorn barnacles, cowries, fist-sized oysters. A blue crab scuttled sideways toward a summit crowned by sea urchins. Tony plunged for the bottom — more crabs, fat sea cucumbers, a purple crown-of-thorns starfish — and braked for a landing beside a brain coral. Atop its convoluted dome a pink sea anemone waved plump tentacles and darting amid them were three yellow-striped scarlet clownfish, thumbnail-sized. Tony peered closer. The clownfish skittered for shelter deep into the anemone; then, curious, stuck their heads out to look at him with black pinprick eyes. Tony waggled his fingers; they ducked back, snuck out for another look, ducked back as he waved again.

There is nothing better than this, Tony thought as he kicked for the surface.

He dove, found a school of butterfly fish, gave chase, lost them, surfaced, dove again, dipped and glided aimlessly amid rocks and coral, spooked a sluggish blue-green parrot fish, caught up with the butterflies just as he was losing air, surfaced, blew out his snorkel and took deep breaths, keeping the school in sight twenty feet below and just as he was about to dive again saw, gliding out from behind the big fan coral, a silver sea bass.

He let out a little moan of joy, felt his heart kick into high gear. His lips loosened in a smile around the mouthpiece as he reached down and flipped the safety off his speargun. The sea bass, as long as his forearm, angled off toward a cluster of barrel sponge. Now how to get down and behind him?

Tony dove for the rocky outcrop, skimmed along the bottom to the fan coral. Ten feet beyond, the sea bass was wheeling around the barrel sponge. Tony stretched out his arm and sighted upward. The bass moved away. Tony followed. The bass flicked his tail for speed, then banked sideways to eye what was coming behind. Tony squeezed the trigger. The steel shaft hit the bass just behind the head, skewering him neatly, dual point flanges splaying outward to pinion him fast. Tony raced forward, hauling in line. When he grabbed the shaft, the bass was barely wiggling — his spinal cord severed. Beautiful.

Breaking the surface, Tony spat out the snorkel, took a great heaving lungful of air, pushed the mask up on his forehead. The beach was a couple hundred yards distant. To the west, a crimson sun hovered just over the horizon.

Suppertime.

As he swam for shore, he held the impaled bass up out