by Peter Straub
This is serious, he said. Most of the people in the world I do not despise are already dead, or should be.
There was more, and I cannot swear that this was exactly what he said, but it’s pretty close.
Then he said, in that same flowing Vietnamese that even to my ears sounded as stilted as the language of a third-rate Victorian novel: You should remember what we have brought with us.
It takes a long time and a lot of patience to clean and bleach bone. A skull would be more difficult than most of a skeleton.
Your prisoner requires more drink, he said, and rolled back in his chair, looking at me with his hand on his gun.
“Whiskey,” said the burly soldier. Mike was already pulling the bottle off the shelf. He understood that the officer was trying to knock himself out before he would find it necessary to shoot someone.
For a moment I thought that the burly soldier to his right looked familiar. His head had been shaved so close he looked bald, and his eyes were enormous above the streaks of dirt. A stainless-steel watch hung from a slot in his collar. He extended a muscular arm for the bottle Mike passed him while keeping as far from the table as he could. The soldier twisted off the cap and poured into all three glasses. The man in the center immediately drank all the whiskey in his glass and banged the glass down on the table for a refill.
The haggard soldier, who had been silent until now, said, “Something is gonna happen here.” He looked straight at me. “Pal?”
“That man is nobody’s pal,” the drunk said. Before anyone could stop him, he snatched up the gun, pointed it across the room, and fired. There was a flash of fire, a huge explosion, and the reek of cordite. The bullet went straight through the soft wooden wall, about eight feet to my left. A stray bit of light slanted through the hole it made.
For a moment I was deaf. I swallowed the last of my beer and stood up. My head was ringing.
“Is it clear that I hate the necessity for this kind of shit?” said the drunk. “Is that much understood?”
The soldier who had called me “pal” laughed, and the burly soldier poured more whiskey into the drunk’s glass. Then he stood up and started coming toward me. Beneath the exhaustion and the stripes of dirt, his face was taut with anxiety. He put himself between me and the man with the gun.
The captain began pulling me toward the door, keeping his body between me and the other table. He gave me an impatient glance because I had refused to move at his pace. Then I saw him notice my pupils. “Goddamn,” he said, and then he stopped moving altogether and said, “Goddamn” again, but in a different tone of voice.
I started laughing.
“Oh, this is—” He shook his head. “This is really—”
“Where have you been?” I asked him.
John Ransom turned to the table. “Hey, I know this guy. He’s an old football friend of mine.”
The drunken major shrugged and put the .45 back on the table. His eyelids had nearly closed. “I don’t care about football,” he said, but he kept his hand off the weapon.
“Buy the sergeant a drink,” said the haggard officer.
John Ransom quickly moved to the bar and reached for a glass, which the confused Mike put into his hand. Ransom went through the tables, filled his glass and mine, and carried both back to join me.
We watched the major’s head slip down by notches toward his chest. When his chin finally reached his shirt, Ransom said, “All right, Jed,” and the other man slid the .45 out from under the major’s hand. He pushed it beneath his belt.
“The man is out,” Jed told us.
Ransom turned back to me. “He was up three days straight with us, God knows how long before that.” Ransom did not have to specify who he was. “Jed and I got some sleep, trading off, but he just kept on talking.” He fell into one of the chairs at my table and tilted his glass to his mouth. I sat down beside him.
For a moment no one spoke. The line of light from the open space across the windows had already left the mirror and was now approaching the place on the wall that meant it was going to disappear. Mike lifted the cover from one of the lamps and began trimming the wick.
“How come you’re always fucked up when I see you?”
“You have to ask?”
He smiled. He looked very different from when I had seen him preparing to give a sales pitch to Senator Burrman at Camp White Star. This man had taken in more of the war, and that much more of the war was inside him now.
“I got you off graves registration at White Star, didn’t I?”
I agreed that he had.
“What did you call it, the body squad? It wasn’t even a real graves registration unit, was it?” He smiled and shook his head. “The only one with any training was that sergeant, what’s his name. Italian.”
“Di Maestro.”
Ransom nodded. “The whole operation was going off the rails.” Mike lit a big kitchen match and touched it to the wick of the kerosene lamp. “I heard some things—” He slumped against the wall and swallowed whiskey. I wondered if he had heard about Captain Havens. He closed his eyes.
I asked if he were still stationed in the highlands up around the Laotian border. He almost sighed when he shook his head.
“You’re not with the tribesmen anymore? What were they, Khatu?”
He opened his eyes. “You have a good memory. No, I’m not there anymore.” He considered saying more, but decided not to. He had failed himself. “I’m kind of on hold until they send me up around Khe Sanh. It’ll be better up there—the Bru are tremendous. But right now, all I want to do is take a bath and get into bed. Any bed. I’d settle for a dry place on level ground.”
“Where did you come from now?”
“Incountry.” His face creased and he showed his teeth. The effect was so unsettling that I did not immediately realize that he was smiling. “Way incountry. We had to get the major out.”
“Looks like you had to pull him out, like a tooth.”
My ignorance made him sit up straight. “You mean you never heard of him? Franklin Bachelor?”
And then I thought I had, that someone had mentioned him to me a long time ago.
“In the bush for years. Bachelor did stuff that ordinary people don’t even dream of—he’s a legend. The Last Irregular. He fell on punji sticks and lived—he’s still got the scars.”
A legend, I thought. He was one of the Green Berets Ransom had mentioned a lifetime ago at White Star.
“Ran what amounted to a private army, did a lot of good work in Darlac Province. He was out there on his own. The man was a hero. That’s straight.”
Franklin Bachelor had been a captain when Ratman and his platoon had run into him after a private named Bobby Swett had been blown to pieces on a trail in Darlac Province. Ratman had thought his wife was a black-haired angel.
And then I knew whose skull lay wound in rope in the back seat of the jeep.
“I did hear of him,” I said. “I knew someone who met him. The Rhade woman, too.”
“His wife,” Ransom said.
I asked him where they were taking Bachelor.
“We’re stopping overnight at Crandall for some rest. Then we hop to Tan Son Nhut and bring him back to the States—Langley. I thought we might have to strap him down, but I guess we’ll just keep pouring whiskey into him.”
“He’s going to want his gun back.”
“Maybe I’ll give it to him.” His glance told me what he thought Major Bachelor would do with his .45, if he was left alone with it long enough. “He’s in for a rough time at Langley. There’ll be some heat.”
“Why Langley?”
“Don’t ask. But don’t be naive, either. Don’t you think they’re …” He would not finish that sentence. “Why do you think we had to bring him out in the first place?”
“I suppose something went wrong.”
“The man stepped over some boundaries, maybe a lot of boundaries—but tell me that you can do what we’re supposed to do without stepping
over boundaries.”
For a second, I wished that I could see the sober shadowy gentlemen of Langley, Virginia, the gentlemen with slicked-back hair and pinstriped suits, questioning Major Bachelor. They thought they were serious men.
“It was like this place called Bong To, in a funny way.” Ransom waited for me to ask. When I did not, he said, “A ghost town, I mean. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of Bong To.”
“My unit was just there.” His head jerked up. “A mortar round scared us into the village.”
“You saw the place?”
I nodded.
“Funny story.” Now he was sorry he had ever mentioned it.
I said that I wasn’t asking him to tell me any secrets.
“It’s not a secret. It’s not even military.”
“It’s just a ghost town.”
Ransom was still uncomfortable. He turned his glass around and around in his hands before he drank.
“Complete with ghosts.”
“I honestly wouldn’t be surprised.” He drank what was left in his glass and stood up. “Let’s take care of Major Bachelor, Jed,” he said.
“Right.”
Ransom carried our bottle to the bar.
Ransom and Jed picked up the major between them. They were strong enough to lift him easily. Bachelor’s greasy head rolled forward. Jed put the .45 into his pocket, and Ransom put the bottle into his own pocket. Together they carried the major to the door.
I followed them outside. Artillery pounded hills a long way off. It was dark now, and lantern light spilled through the gaps in the windows.
All of us went down the rotting steps, the major bobbing between the other two.
Ransom opened the jeep, and they took a while to maneuver the major into the backseat. Jed squeezed in beside him and pulled him upright.
John Ransom got in behind the wheel and sighed. He had no taste for the next part of his job.
“I’ll give you a ride back to camp,” he said.
I took the seat beside him. Ransom started the engine and turned on the lights. He jerked the gearshift into reverse and rolled backward. “You know why that mortar round came in, don’t you?” he asked me. He grinned at me, and we bounced onto the road back to the main part of camp. “He was trying to chase you away from Bong To, and your fool of a lieutenant went straight for the place instead.” He was still grinning. “It must have steamed him, seeing a bunch of roundeyes going in there.”
“He didn’t send in any more fire.”
“No. He didn’t want to damage the place. It’s supposed to stay the way it is. I don’t think they’d use the word, but that village is like a kind of monument.” He glanced at me again.
Ransom paused and then asked, “Did you go into any of the huts? Did you see anything unusual there?”
“I went into a hut. I saw something unusual.”
“A list of names?”
“I thought that’s what they were.”
“Okay,” Ransom said. “There’s a difference between private and public shame. Between what’s acknowledged and what is not acknowledged. Some things are acceptable, as long as you don’t talk about them.” He looked sideways at me as we began to approach the northern end of the camp proper. He wiped his face, and flakes of dried mud fell off his cheek. The exposed skin looked red, and so did his eyes. “I’ve been learning things,” Ransom said.
I remembered thinking that the arrangement in the hut’s basement had been a shrine to an obscene deity.
“One day in Bong To, a little boy disappeared.”
My heart gave a thud.
“Say, three. Old enough to talk and get into trouble, but too young to take care of himself. He’s just gone—poof. A couple of months later, it happened again. Mom turns her back, where the hell did Junior go? This time they scour the village. The villagers scour the village, every square foot of that place, and then they do the same to the rice paddy, and then they look through the forest.
“What happens next is the interesting part. An old woman goes out one morning to fetch water from the well, and she sees the ghost of a disreputable old man from another village, a local no-good, in fact. He’s just standing near the well with his hands together. He’s hungry—that’s what these people know about ghosts. The skinny old bastard wants more. He wants to be fed. The old lady gives a squawk and passes out. When she comes to again, the ghost is gone.
“Well, the old lady tells everybody what she saw, and the whole village gets in a panic. Next thing you know, two thirteen-year-old girls are working in the paddy, they look up and see an old woman who died when they were ten—she’s about six feet away from them. Her hair is stringy and gray and her fingernails are about a foot long. They start screaming and crying, but no one else can see her, and she comes closer and closer, and they try to get away but one of them falls down, and the old woman is on her like a cat. And do you know what she does? She rubs her filthy hands over the screaming girl’s face and licks the tears and slobber off her fingers.
“The next night, two men go looking around the village latrine behind the houses, and they see two ghosts down in the pit, shoving excrement into their mouths. They rush back into the village, and then they both see half a dozen ghosts around the chief’s hut. They want to eat. One of the men screeches, because not only did he see his dead wife, he saw her pass into the chief’s hut without the benefit of the door.
“The dead wife comes back out through the wall of the chief’s hut. She’s licking blood off her hands.
“The former husband stands there pointing and jabbering, and the mothers and grandmothers of the missing boys come out of their huts. All these women go howling up to the chief’s door. When the chief comes out, they push past him and they take the hut apart. And you know what they find.”
Ransom had parked the jeep near my battalion headquarters five minutes before, and now he smiled as if he had explained everything.
“But what happened?” I asked. “How did you hear about it?”
He shrugged. “I probably heard that story half a dozen times, but Bachelor knew more about it than anyone I ever met before. They probably carried out the pieces of the chief’s body and threw them into the excrement pit. And over months, bit by bit, everybody in the village crossed a kind of border. By that time, they were seeing ghosts all the time. Bachelor says they turned into ghosts.”
“Do you think they turned into ghosts?”
“I think Major Bachelor turned into a ghost, if you ask me. Let me tell you something. The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people.”
I got out of the jeep and closed the door.
Ransom peered at me through the jeep’s window. “Take better care of yourself.”
“Good luck with your Bru.”
“The Bru are fantastic.” He slammed the jeep into gear and shot away, cranking the wheel to turn the jeep around in a giant circle in front of the battalion headquarters before he jammed it into second and took off to wherever he was going.
PART
THREE
JOHN RANSOM
1
ONCE I HAD STARTED REMEMBERING John Ransom, I couldn’t stop. I tried to write, but my book had flattened out into a movie starring Kent Smith and Gloria Grahame. I called a travel agent and booked a ticket to Millhaven for Wednesday morning.
The imagination sometimes makes demands the rest of the mind resists, and Tuesday night I dreamed that the body Scoot was busily dismembering was my own.
I jerked awake into suffocating darkness.
The sheet beneath me was cold and greasy with sweat. In the morning the blurry yellow pattern of my body would be printed on the cotton. My heart thundered. I turned over the pillow and shifted to a dry place on the bed.
2
IREALIZED AT LAST that the thought of seeing Millhaven again filled me with dread. Millhaven and Vietnam were oddly interchangeable, fragments of some greater whole, some larger story—a lost story that preceded the fa
bles of Orpheus and Lot’s wife and said, You will lose everything if you turn around and look back. You turn around, you look back. Are you destroyed? Or is it that you see the missing, unifying section of the puzzle, the secret, filled with archaic and godlike terror, you have kept from yourself?
Early Wednesday morning, I showered and packed and went out onto the street to get a cab.
3
IGOT TO THE GATE, boarded the plane, took my seat, buckled myself in, and it hit me that, at nearly fifty years of age, I was traveling halfway across the continent to help someone look for a madman.
Yet my motives had been clear from the moment that John Ransom had told me his wife’s name. I was going to Millhaven because I thought that I might finally learn who had killed my sister.
The stewardess appeared in front of me to ask what I wanted to drink. My brain said the words, “Club soda, please,” but what came out of my mouth was “Vodka on the rocks.” She smiled and handed me the little airline bottle and a plastic glass full of ice cubes. I had not had a drink in eight years. I twisted off the cap of the little bottle and poured vodka over the ice cubes, hardly believing I was doing it. The stewardess moved on to the next row. The sharp, bitter smell of alcohol rose up from the glass. If I had wanted to, I could have stood up, walked to the toilet, and poured the stuff into the sink. Death was leaning against the bulkhead at the front of the plane, smiling at me. I smiled back and raised the glass and gave myself a good cold mouthful of vodka. It tasted like flowers. An unheeded little voice within me shouted no no no, o god no, this is not what you want, but I swallowed the mouthful of vodka and immediately took another, because it was exactly what I wanted. Now it tasted like a frozen cloud—the most delicious frozen cloud in the history of the world. Death, who was a dark-haired, ironic-looking man in a gray double-breasted suit, nodded and smiled. I remembered everything I used to like about drinking. When I thought about it, eight years of abstinence really deserved a celebratory drink or two. When the stewardess came back, I smiled nicely at her, waggled my glass, and asked for another. And she gave it to me, just like that.