Which piqued his curiosity as well as his sense of obligation. His money was running out and he was getting ready to sign up for pipeline work, but he caught a ride upcoast and hiked a couple of miles to the breaker compound and started asking questions. One of the breaker bosses remembered Turk's face and told him his friend had got sick, and that was too bad, but they couldn't let a sick sailor take up time and attention, so Ibu Diane and some Minang fishermen had hauled the old man back to their village.

Turk bought dinner at a tin-roofed Chinese restaurant at the crossroads, then hitched a ride farther upcoast, to a horseshoe bay turning gaudy colors under the long Equatorian dusk. The driver, a salesman for some West African import firm, pointed Turk at an unpaved road and a sign marked in a curvilinear language Turk couldn't read. Minang village down that way, he said. Turk walked a couple of miles through the forest, and just as the stars were turning bright and the insects bothersome he found himself between a row of wooden houses with buffalo-horn eaves and a lantern-lit general store where men in box caps sat at cable-spool tables drinking coffee. He put on his best smile and asked a local for directions to Doctor Diane's clinic.

The pedestrian smiled back and nodded and called out to the coffee house. Two muscular young men hurried out and positioned themselves on each side of Turk. "We'll take you there," they said in English when Turk repeated his request—and they smiled, too, but Turk had the uneasy feeling he'd been politely but firmly taken into custody.

"I guess I was pretty fucked-up when you finally saw me," Tomas said.

"You don't remember?"

"Not much of it, no."

"Yeah," Turk said. "You were pretty fucked-up."

* * * * *

Pretty fucked-up, which in this case meant Tomas was bedridden, emaciated, gasping for breath in the back room of the big wooden building Diane called her "clinic." Turk had looked at his friend with something approaching horror.

"Jesus Christ, what happened to him?"

"Calm down," Ibu Diane said. Ibu was what the villagers called her. He gathered it was some kind of honorific.

"Is he dying?"

"No. Appearances to the contrary, he's getting well."

"All this from a cut on his arm?"

Tomas looked as if someone had stuck a hose down his throat and siphoned out his insides. Turk thought he had never seen a thinner man.

"It's more complicated than that. Sit down and I'll explain."

Outside the window of Diane's clinic, the Minang village was lively in the dark. Lanterns hung swaying from eaves and he could hear the sound of recorded music playing tinnily. Diane made coffee with an electric kettle and a French press, and the resulting brew was hot and dense.