Twilight

by Brendan DuBois

  A FEW MINUTES later, the three Land Cruisers were back on the road, engines idling. Peter had a map in his hands and was talking to Sanjay and Jean-Paul. Charlie shot me a dark look and I guessed he wasn’t my best buddy any more, which was something I could live with. While that was going on I got into the nearest Land Cruiser and took out my duffel bag. I went over to the side of the road, to the place where the Mylar blanket was. I unzipped my bag and took out my Sony digital camera. I took a number of photographs and then knelt down and removed the rocks securing the blanket. I pulled it back to reveal the gray-white features of John. His face and name were probably familiar to hundreds of thousands of viewers back in the land Down Under, but right here and now he was just another statistic, another little checkmark. I centered his face in my camera’s viewfinder and took one picture. Then another. And then another.

  After I put the blanket back Karen was there, brushing her hair back away from her tear-stained face. “What the hell are you doing here? Taking souvenirs?”

  “No, I’m not,” I said, gingerly placing the stones back around the edges of the blanket. “I’m just doing my job.”

  “Job? What do you mean, your job?”

  I looked up at her angry expression. “What the UN pays me for. To document war crimes. And it’s just my luck I got to cover a fresh one.”

  Karen shook her head and walked away. A moment later I followed her.

  PETER LED THE way, driving one of our vehicles, and I sat up front with him and Miriam was in the rear. We headed down the slope, away from the highway that had once promised us a way out. Riding once more unto the breach, in the dirty and crowded and now smelly Toyota Land Cruisers. I was becoming heartily sick of being inside them. The other Land Cruisers were right behind us and we sped down the road, coming to an intersection. As we blew right through it, I yelled out, “Hey, what the hell are you doing?!”

  “What’s your problem?” Peter said.

  “Stop the car, stop it—you’re passing the intersection!”

  Peter said, “So what?”

  Maybe it was the time of day or what had just happened, but I reached over with my left foot, plunged it past his legs and punched the brake. Peter flailed at me with his right hand, and Miriam was saying something, and I punched the brake again and again, and finally the Land Cruiser slid to a halt. There was another thump as we were struck again from the rear. Miriam said, “Oh, damn, I hope that wasn’t Sanjay.”

  I reached over, turned off the ignition, grabbed the keys and got outside. Peter scrambled right after me, swearing, his London accent now very thick. “You bastard, you stupid bastard, I’m going to fucking nail you!”

  Jean-Paul and Charlie came up to us, the Marine with his weapon in his hand. Jean-Paul said, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

  Peter grabbed the front of my coat with one hand while Miriam held back his other arm. He said, “Damn fool stopped us for no reason.”

  I held the keys behind me, like we were in a schoolyard brawl, and said, “He passed the turnoff.”

  “What turnoff, you idiot?” Peter said, tugging at me, his face scarlet. “What fucking turnoff?”

  Jean-Paul pulled him off me. Karen was now out with us but Sanjay was still in the other Land Cruiser, the one that had rammed us, probably happy that I was getting the brunt of Peter’s anger. I said, “Go right. That’s what John said. He said go right.”

  Jean-Paul said, “Is that true?”

  “Bloody fuckwit, no, it’s not true,” Peter said. “He said go straight. That’s what he said.”

  “Karen?” Jean-Paul asked.

  “Shit, I don’t know,” she said, folding her arms. “I was too busy trying to keep the poor guy alive.”

  I said, “I know what I heard. He said go right. That’s what he said.”

  “Bloody Canuck, that was his Aussie accent you were hearing. He said go straight. That’s what he said. He didn’t say go right.”

  Jean-Paul started saying something and Charlie said, “Well, shit, let’s take a right, see where that goes. If it doesn’t look promising, then we go back.”

  Jean-Paul nodded. “Makes sense.”

  Peter stalked off. “Well, you drive with the little shit, then. Fucked if I will.”

  I suppose I should have said something about what I had seen earlier, the quiet moment in the woods when Peter had been talking with radio gear to someone. But then I thought about Mick and Alice, the producer who wanted to go back and see her children. So I got into the Land Cruiser, driving for the first time since I had been here, and Charlie joined us, sitting up front. That made me feel better.

  WE TOOK THE right, like I was sure John had said, and we’d driven down the road a couple of klicks, past abandoned farmland and areas of woodland, when Charlie said, “Slow down, Samuel. Slow down.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked, and Miriam said, “Oh. To the left.”

  I slowed down and stopped, and we all got out. Charlie stood there, weapon at the ready, and he said, “By the side of the car. Now.”

  The other Land Cruisers stopped. Our little group assembled behind Charlie and I saw what he had noticed. The brush and grass on the left side of the road had been disturbed and there were fresh tire tracks. I sniffed the air and said, “I smell smoke.”

  “So do I,” Miriam said.

  Jean-Paul came up and said, “Charlie?”

  “I think we might find something, if you give me a minute,” he said.

  “All right,” Jean-Paul said.

  Of course, Charlie wanted all of us to stay behind but none of us were listening to him. We straggled after him, our pathetic little parade following our armed Grand Marshal, and then Miriam grabbed my hand again as we all spotted the rear end of a white van. An attempt had been made to burn it but whatever fire there had been had since died out. But the van was still smoldering, the windows were shattered, and the side door was open. The stench of burned plastic and scorched metal was stronger now. Charlie motioned us back with his free hand, but we kept walking forward. Bullet holes had perforated the side and front of the van. I circled around and saw a shape in the front seat, slumped over. Charlie went over to check and then Sanjay was there, saying, “Is he wounded? Is there something we can do?”

  Charlie shook his head. “Don’t think medical science knows how to fix blown-off heads, now, does it?”

  I stepped closer, recognizing the shape and clothing of Mick, the cameraman, and nothing else. He was slumped over the steering wheel, his arms dangling down, and something in my stomach did a queasy flip-flop as I noticed the pulped mass of bone and brain and blood and hair that had once been his head. Just a few hours ago, this combination of muscle and tissue and ligament had been breathing and living, talking to me about being a cameraman in the service of journalism. Now it was all dead flesh, growing colder and colder with every passing minute.

  Peter finally spoke, saying, “Anybody see the producer woman? Alice?”

  “No,” I said. “Not yet. Maybe she went straight, like you thought.”

  If Peter heard me, he didn’t say anything. He started going through the brush and bramble, and then Karen yelled out, “Over here! Over here!”

  We ran up the side of a small hill, to a place where the grass hadn’t grown up as much. The woman called Alice was lying there, eyes staring up blankly, legs spread wide open. Her arms had been staked to the ground. Her slacks were gone and a pair of white cotton panties was tangled around one ankle. Her blouse had been torn and it looked like someone—or several someones—had worked on her torso with knives. The area around her had been trampled and disturbed, and there were empty bottles of Budweiser beer scattered about.

  “The bastards,” Karen whispered. “The filthy, murdering bastards.”

  Sanjay whispered back, “What about the cease-fire agreement? What about the truce?”

  “Guess somebody didn’t get the word,” I said.

  Jean-Paul slowly walked up to join us. He was carryin
g several satchels and dropped them on the ground. “Charlie?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Is this place relatively secure?”

  Charlie looked up at him as though Jean-Paul had just announced that he intended to flap his wings and fly to the moon. “That’s a hell of a word, ‘relatively’,” he said. “You want my advice, we all get back in our wheels and head back to the highway. This place is going to the shits pretty quick, and I can’t defend a crew like you by myself.”

  “True,” Jean-Paul said, kneeling down on the dirt and unzipping the bags. “But we have work to do, right here. And we cannot leave. Peter? Miriam? Karen? Samuel?”

  I looked at the group. Peter was stolid, not showing any emotion, but the others looked like the poor producer woman had, a few hours ago. Terrified and wanting to go someplace safe, someplace away from this madness. I took a breath, walked over to my own bag. I took out my Sony and said, “I’m ready to go to work.”

  Miriam joined me. “So am I.”

  Karen said, “Oh, fuck. I guess I am, too.”

  HOURS LATER, AS we were cleaning up, I stood next to Miriam and said, “I have a proposition for you.”

  “That sounds interesting,” she said, wiping her hands dry with a dirty towel.

  “Would you care to share my tent tonight?” I asked.

  She smiled and nudged me with her elbow. “Do you have something naughty planned?”

  I coughed and took the soiled towel from her. “I wish I could say that. But I don’t want to be with Sanjay tonight and have him play musical tents again, and Peter is about ready to strangle me, and the other two … Well, Miriam, you went right to the top of the list.”

  I winced as I dried off my own hands. The fingers and palms were blistered from having dug three shallow graves for the Australian television crew. Karen and Sanjay and Peter and Miriam had gotten tissue samples, swabs and even some latent fingerprints from the burned-out and shot-up van. I had done my own work with camera and computer, but I’d had no success when I’d tried later to upload the information. Either the satellite uplink was malfunctioning or maybe the jamming from the militias was active again. Working with the camera this time, I was grateful for having the viewfinder between my eyes and what was on the ground before me. The burned-out van, the shattered body of Mick and the brutalized and violated body of Alice seemed only to exist in the space beyond the camera, and I found that comforting.

  Now we were parked under an oak tree, a number of klicks away from the shooting site. We were drawn up in the by now familiar triangular formation. After maneuvering our way into some woods, Charlie had gone out with us and directed us to drag branches and pieces of brush around to hide the fact that we had gone in among the trees. We had a cold dinner of cheese, bread and water, and a cold wash-up, and by then I was exhausted.

  Miriam nudged me again. “All right. That’s a deal, then. I’ll share your tent tonight.”

  “Thanks.”

  Miriam smiled. “My pleasure.”

  I wanted to believe her.

  JEAN-PAUL GATHERED US together and said, “I … I am tired, as are all of you. We will be here tonight, and tomorrow we make our way back to the highway. I … I …”

  I stood there, hands in my coat pocket, shivering, wishing we could have built a fire. But there would be no fire tonight, not even something hot to heat up water. We were standing in a loose semicircle, Sanjay holding a cupped flashlight, throwing off just a little illumination. Then my throat tightened as I saw that Jean-Paul’s eyes were filling with tears. I felt bad for a moment, about all the times I had thought poorly of him. Poor guy was just overwhelmed. He coughed into his hand, rocked back and forth on his heels for a moment, and then went on. “I … I am very proud of you, all of you. Get a good night’s sleep.”

  We went back to the tents, one beside each Land Cruiser. Sanjay was heading toward the closest one. “Not so fast,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “What I mean is that I’ve already made other arrangements,” I said. “My tent-mate tonight is Miriam.”

  “Oh … really?”

  “Yep.”

  “Then where am I to sleep?”

  I was very tired and wanted to end this quickly. “Shit, Sanjay, sleep on a rock for all I care. Go crawl in with Karen.”

  He shook his head. “That may not be possible. We had a fight earlier.”

  “Well, there might be some people in New Delhi who’d be happy with that—wouldn’t they?”

  Sanjay muttered something and stalked off. I wish I could say I felt bad about it, but sometimes wishes just don’t come true. All in all, I felt pretty good, considering.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Miriam climbed into the tent soon after I got settled in. I aided her with my own small flashlight, cupping the beam with my hand to keep the glow down. Her blonde hair was loose and her cotton nightgown was dark green, and when she was in I shut the light off.

  “Samuel?”

  “Still here,” I said.

  I felt her body shaking beside me. “It’s damn cold.”

  “It sure is.”

  “Can we do something about it?”

  In the darkness I smiled. “To quote someone you know quite well, do you plan something naughty?”

  “Not at this moment,” she said.

  So we went back and forth for a bit, and unzipped our bags and tossed them together, and Miriam cuddled up against me, putting her head on my chest. Her fine hair tickled my nose and I inhaled the scent, feeling a knot of tension at the base of my skull start to loosen up. I thought about other women, mostly college women I had known, from York University or the University of Toronto. And Pamela, a copy editor at the features desk back at the Star. Right now they all blended together in one flash of memory. Lots of laughs, lots of giggles, cell phone numbers exchanged and quick couplings in a rented flat somewhere. Nothing like now. Nothing like Miriam. Nothing at all.

  “It gets quite cold back home,” she said.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “I love skating, especially on the canals,” she said. “It’s flat and beautiful, and you can skate for hours and hours. There are warming shacks and little restaurants where you can get hot cocoa or spiced wine to drink … Oh, I do miss that … You must skate, am I right?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  Miriam laughed. “You’re Canadian. I thought all Canadians skated.”

  I gently squeezed her shoulder. “Well, you got me. You’re right. I do skate, though it’s been a while. But no canal skating. Just frozen ponds and lakes.”

  “Did you play ice hockey?”

  “Didn’t have the coordination,” I said. “I can skate a fair piece, but trying to skate while holding a stick, chasing a puck, when other people on skates are getting in your way … nope, I just loved skating. Being out there, gliding, enjoying the breeze in my face.”

  “Me, too,” she said, and we lay there for a while, just breathing. I felt her move and then her chin was resting on my chest. “Samuel …”

  “Mmm?”

  “You did something brave today.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes. I … I think we were all waiting for someone to say something, something about leaving, but you followed Jean-Paul. You said we should stay and do our job. You were the first one to say that. And I found that very brave.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I touched her hair with my free hand and then moved down to the smoothness of her cheek. She gave a slight intake of breath as my hand reached her lips and my forefinger gently stroked the skin beneath her nose. Her mouth opened slightly. I felt the touch of her tongue and I leaned up and kissed her. It was a miracle, moving in the darkness like that, but our lips met, gently for a moment or two, and then, with a sudden intensity that I think surprised us both, we gasped and embraced, our arms and legs entwined.

  “Oh, please …” she said.

  “Miriam. Whatever you want
. Whatever.”

  She kissed me again. “Stop talking. Please.”

  “Yes.”

  Miriam pressed harder against me, now lying on top of me, supporting herself on her elbows, breathing more harshly, her hair falling about me. I held her head with one hand and with the other moved up her side, cupping a breast, feeling the nipple stiffen. I gently pinched and rubbed, and then started unbuttoning her nightgown. In turn, she tugged down my pajama bottoms, freeing me, and I gasped as her hand held me tight. There was more confused tumbling around as she eased off her panties and then she said, “Samuel, Samuel,” and slid down upon me. I gasped at the sensation, feeling the cold staleness of the tent air and the sleeping bags around me, and how it contrasted with the sweet, wet and hot delight of Miriam’s inner warmth. She rocked back and forth, moaning and whispering to me, and I whispered back, holding her tight as both of us forgot everything that was going on, save for within those few safe feet inside the tent.

  “Miriam …”

  “Shhh,” she said. “Just don’t stop. Please.”

  “Of course.”

  LATER SHE WAS cuddled up with me again, idly scratching my neck and chin. Her bare breasts were pressed pleasantly against my chest, and she said, “That was a delight.”

  “It was the best.”

  “Not too naughty?”

  I bent to kiss the top of her head.

  “No, not too naughty, not at all.”

  “Mmm,” she said. “Ask you a question?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Jean-Paul mentioned something earlier, about you and your father. He said he knew your father. Is that true?”

  Talk about killing the moment. Thanks, Dad. “Yes, it is true.”

  “So is that why you are here? Because of your father?”

  “Partially true,” I said, trying to remember everything Miriam and I had just done a few minutes earlier, trying to recall each taste, each scent, each sensation. Nothing like the other few women in my life. Not even close.