Chapter One - Richard Lewis

Chapter One
The backhoe operator didn't notice when the bucket ripped through the first of the
skeletons.
With the villa construction behind schedule, he'd climbed into the cab shortly
after dawn to start excavating the seaside pool. The sun rose plump as a tangerine, orange
light spreading across the ruffled waters of the Bali Straits and into the calm lagoon.
Upon the beach, a Balinese woman led four pale tourists in meditation.
The operator was a Javanese Muslim, and there was no God but Allah, but he
respectfully waited for them to finish. He smoked a clove cigarette, yawning plumes,
tired after spending half the night in a whorehouse, where his favorite girl was more
interested in the radio bulletin about former President Soeharto being rushed to the
hospital than she was in her client.
"I don't care what people say, he was a good President," she said. "He did a lot for
my village. Habibie took over and the first thing he did was give away East Timor."
"I'm not here to talk politics," the operator complained.
She shucked off her dress. "Never let a rocket scientist be president, that's what I
say."
The operator startled as the supervisor rapped on the side of the cab and gestured
for him to start digging. He fired up the engine, which belched smoke that drifted through
the few palms the landscaper had left standing in the last of Batu Gede's beachfront
coconut groves. Some lucky villager had struck it rich. What had been arid land good
only for a coconut plantation was now some of the island's most expensive real estate.
The bucket scooped through a bed of loose sand and bit into hard volcanic loam.
Several scoops later, a pale round object tumbled loose from the dark loam and lodged
against the bucket's teeth. The back of his neck prickling, the operator shifted the bucket
close to the cab window.
A hollow-eyed skull grinned at him.
"Iyallah," he breathed. He rested the bucket on the ground and jumped out of the
cab. Gingerly picking up the skull, heavy with clogged dirt, he noticed on its rear a
depressed fracture the size of his thumb, as if from a heavy blow. In the mound piled to
the side, what the operator had first taken to be broken driftwood and decayed roots were
yellowed bones. Using a bamboo stake, he dug away soil from what appeared to be a
clam shell but was another skull, with a similar fracture.
At the bottom of the pit were more bones.
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