And it was possible.  Someone–it must have been Bleakley, Golas or Gouveia, for no-one else knew Kamerang, but I can’t remember which–told us that only a few houses away there lived an exceptionally beautiful Amerindian girl.  Better still, she currently had no man around, she lived alone with her mother.  We would mate the Young Agronomist with her forthwith.

     The Young Agronomist squirmed and protested, but two of us grabbed his arms, I picked up the Colt.22 and stuck it in his back, and we marched out into the night.

     The bungalow loomed white in the darkness.  Someone started hammering on the door.  Nothing happened.  The hammering was repeated, more violently this time.

     It was only then that there began to foregather in my brain some motley collection of those cell assemblies that philosopher Dan Dennett calls dumb homunculi, and that happened, on this occasion, to constitute my Conscience.

     What the fuck do you think you’re doing, my Conscience said.  You know perfectly well the people in the world whom you most despise are men who use violence on women, sexually or otherwise.  So how come you’re about to participate in the forcible violation of a woman who, to make things worse, is of a different ethnicity, and one that’s been fucked over by people your color for too long already?  Shame, double and triple shame on you!

     “Okay guys,” I said.  “Show’s over.”

     There were shouts of protest.

     “Look,” I said, holding out the automatic.  “I have the gun.”

     Would I have used it, if they’d persisted?  I don’t know.  You can’t know these things till they happen.  I certainly might have.  I was extremely drunk, I lack the inhibitions against violence found normally among the educated middle class, and one of my heroes is the helicopter pilot in Vietnam who, landing in the middle of a My-Lai type massacre, ordered his door gunner to open fire on his own comrades.

     Fortunately, with a lot of grumbling, and denunciations of me as a party pooper and general wet blanket, the group broke up and we all staggered to our respective beds.

     I’m still baffled by it.  The real question for me is not, why do bad things happen to good people, but why do good people do bad things?  For they do, sometimes, though it makes us feel better about life and ourselves if we pretend otherwise.  Two of us at least I would have said were good people, Bleakley and Jerry.  Yet we could think up and plan and be prepared to execute a horrendous act.

     The answer can only lie in the mechanisms of male bonding.  These were reinforced, on this occasion, by a number of factors: heavy consumption of alcohol, the high we were still on from our successful trip, and the free-floating violence released by our shooting contest.  And once the demon is at large, the ingredient members of this fearsome composite animal feel all the familiar pressures to conform and not to wimp out, as well as the joy that comes–I hate to say this, but it’s true, I’ve felt it–from careering unrestrained towards absolute freedom from society’s control.

     A few hours later I woke with one of the worst hangovers of my life.  Somehow I managed to board the plane.  The morning was grey and stormy, the plane pitched and tossed as we made our way through the passes of the Merumes, doubling the aches of heads and queasy stomachs,

     Looking up I saw the pilot strolling down the aisle, chatting to people.

     My God, I thought.  There’s no co-pilot on these flights. 

     “Who the hell is flying this thing?” I asked my neighbor.

     “Golas.”

     “What?”  He had just gotten his pilot’s licence and he was flying a scheduled Guyana Airways flight?

     Well, that’s Guyana for you.

     My alarm was justified.  Golas turned out to be a piss-poor pilot.  He crashed the plane he had just bought, and he crashed the next couple that he bought.  But he had the same luck that made him a millionaire when almost all the other pork-knockers went broke.  He walked away, every time.

     But the best luck in the world doesn’t hold for ever.

     He bought a fourth plane in Canada and decided to fly it down to Guyana himself.  Ten minutes out from San Juan, Puerto Rico he contacted the tower.  That was the last anyone ever heard of him.

     A couple of days after my return from the bush I flew to Trinidad.  It had been a great trip, but I seldom go back anywhere I’ve already been, and I had no plans to make Guyana an exception.  However, there’s an old Guyanese saying that if you eat labba and drink creek water, you’re doomed to go back there. I never to my knowledge ate labba–a kind of dog-sized rodent, much prized in the bush–but I’d drunk creek water by the bucket, so I suppose it was inevitable that I would eventually return.

                                                      THE END