He took a long pull on the pipe and slowly exhaled another cloud of smoke. “Besides,” he said, “Liz took up with Alex and they married two years later. Ask her about that.”
“Who was Alex?” said Beth.
Now it was Liz’s turn to shift uncomfortably. “One of our friends,” she said.
“One of my roommates,” said Kevin. “Not one month after we broke up she was with him every night in the bedroom next to mine. I didn’t get a lot of sleep.”
“I thought this wasn’t any of Beth’s business,” said Liz. She frowned at him.
“She asked,” he said with a note of sarcasm.
Liz picked up a pebble and threw it at him. He twisted and it hit his back. “Bastard,” she said.
“I don’t blame you, Liz,” said Beth. “You loved Alex, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, Liz,” said Kevin, “you did, didn’t you?”
“I’ll remember this, Houdek. You’ll pay.”
“I already did, if you remember.”
“What does Dad mean?” said Beth.
“He means he thinks I did it to get back at him,” said Liz.
“Did you?”
“Sweetie,” she answered, “it’s hard to tell from this distance. Maybe.”
She sighed. “No, probably. I was pretty hurt. I wanted to hurt him back, or at least to make him sorry.”
“But you married this guy,” said Beth. “Did you do that to hurt Dad?”
Liz shook her head. “No, in the end I did love Alex very much. He was a good and honest man. Loving him happened over time.”
Beth laughed. “And now you and Dad are friends?”
“We may not live forever, but Kevin and I lived long enough to set this one straight.”
“What happened to Alex? You’re not married now.”
Liz shook her head. “He died, sweetie. We were married about eight years and he developed a brain tumor.” The ache of it sank into her stomach and she drew up her legs, hugging them close to her chest and resting her chin on her knees.
“Do you miss him?” said Beth.
“Every day.”
“Did you have any children?”
“I think that might be enough questions for tonight,” said Kevin softly.
Liz shook her head. “Better to finish this one now and be done with it. Yes, we wanted children. I wanted them very much. I thought there was plenty of time. I didn’t know that I couldn’t keep Alex. The cancer came on very quickly and then he was gone. Maybe your dad isn’t sorry about anything, but I am sorry for that. I wish we had made a child together.”
Hampton sat next to Liz and licked her face.
Liz grimaced. “How does he know I need a big sloppy kiss right now, even if it’s full of dog slobber? He is too strange.”
“Hampton always knows when someone needs a kiss,” said Beth, “don’t you, boy?” She reached over and rubbed the dog’s head.
Liz stood up and stretched. “What time is it?” she said.
“I don’t know,” said Beth. “Dad took my watch.”
“What difference does it make up here?” Kevin said. “When you’re tired, you go to sleep. When you’re awake, you get up.”
“Well, Mr. Natural, I’d still like to know,” said Liz.
“Well then, it’s time to go to bed,” said Kevin. He stood up and looked across the lake.
Liz sensed him tense up as he suddenly peered intently into the dark.
“Something the matter?” she said, her fear of the wilderness returning.
He stood silent a moment and then relaxed. “I’m sure it’s nothing. It’s just I thought I saw something across the lake.”
“An animal?” Liz said nervously.
He shook his head. “I thought it might be another camper but that’s silly. There’s no campsite over there and no one would be roaming these woods at night. You couldn’t find your way without a flashlight and we’d see that.”
“You’re sure?” said Beth, also standing.
“Yeah, come on,” he said, walking to their tent.
Liz observed that the tent looked like a beach ball half buried in the ground, and thought glumly that it would probably offer about as much protection as a beach ball from anything in the woods that wanted to do them harm.
She ducked inside it and realized she was freezing. She threw open her sleeping bag and Hampton dove into it, crawling to the bottom.
“Hampton,” Liz scolded, “get out of there.”
Kevin turned on a flashlight and shone it on her bag. The large lump at the bottom did not budge.
“I think he’s cold, too,” said Beth. “I’ve never seen him do that before.”
“Come on, Hampton,” ordered Kevin. “Get out of there.”
The dog whined but did not move.
Liz was so cold she couldn’t wait any longer and after kicking off her shoes she slipped into the bag. Hampton made way for her feet.
“I knew I’d end up smelling like a dog,” she grumbled.
“At least he’s warm,” said Beth, shivering as she slid into her own bag.
Liz sighed and rolled on her back. Directly overhead a screened window on the back of the tent framed the outline of a tall pine tree towering over her and beyond that a splash of stars in the night sky. She thought it was one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen, and then she slept.
Chapter 11
Africa
The next day Kevin found the whole clinic repeating the story of how Bill drove off a demon the night before. The harder Bill protested it had been a dog, the more the story grew of his courage and power. Everyone talked about it except for the young boy named Muctar, who Kevin had noticed on his first day holding his pigeon.
As usual, he was in the examining room with his bird, sitting silently in a corner carefully watching every move. Kevin found him to be like the raven in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, always watching and always perched there on his stool while his dark empty eyes seemed to declare, “Nevermore.” It was immediately obvious that there was something wrong with him, an off-center feel to the way he reacted to things. Kevin thought he might be retarded.
Kevin observed that one of the nurses looked after him. He was small, but appeared strong and he had the same facial scarring as Peter. Later, Kevin would reflect that this should have tipped him off to what he was, but it never occurred to him that, like Peter, he had been a rebel. He looked to be only about eleven years old. Maybe younger.
“The kid, Muctar,” Kevin asked Bill during a break, “why’s he always in the room? He’s too young to be a nurse, and he never does or says anything.”
“I can’t put him in the camp,” said Bill, shrugging, “because as a former rebel he’ll be killed. He was a sniper and he shot a Nigerian peacekeeper, a popular unit commander. The soldiers hunted him down and were beating him to death when I turned up. It wasn’t easy, but I got the kid away from them.”
“Has he really been a soldier?” Kevin asked, shocked. “For one thing, he looks too passive and mentally incompetent, not to mention too small and young, to be a killer.”
Bill nodded absently. “Yeah,” he said. “They showed me his rifle. It was damn near as tall as he is. I don’t think he’s retarded, although traumatized doesn’t begin to describe him. What he is, is closed off in a way that you and I can never understand, thank God. He lives in some other place.”
“But he’s a kid,” said Kevin.
Bill nodded. “That’s why,” he said, “I can’t just put him in the camp. He can’t defend himself.”
“What would motivate a kid like that to join a rebel army? How could his parents permit it?”
Bill slumped back in his chair and sighed. “Permit it? Are you kidding? When the rebels enter a village to recruit soldiers they usually go for the children. They have a simple but effective means for testing the suitability of young boys for the army. If they can get them to shoot their own parents, the emotional and social bonds to family and village ar
e immediately and irrevocably broken and they become excellent soldiers. Those boys who won’t do it are executed in front of the others and then their parents are killed, too. Often, the parents actually beg their children to kill them, since they know they’re doomed anyway and at least the child will then survive. If you call that survival.
“Ironically, the commanders who order kids to kill their own families then become the surrogate parents to those same children. A kid has to have a parent. But it’s all twisted, of course. The normal restraints children have against killing are shattered. And the reason the rebels prefer to recruit children is that in combat they are absolutely fearless and cold-blooded when it comes to following orders. Having been forced to kill those closest to them, either their empathy just withers and dies and they become the most deadly and unfeeling of soldiers, or their sense of guilt eats away at them until they wither and die.
“I can’t return Muctar to his home village. They’d consider him a demon, or at least possessed by demons, and certainly kill him. So he stays here in the clinic and I pay one of the nurses to look after him. Of course, what he needs is professional help, and I’m trying to find a place where he can get it. There aren’t many psychiatrists around and those that exist are overwhelmed already.”
Later, during another break, Kevin sat next to Muctar. The boy merely stared blankly at him, not uttering a word while stroking his pigeon. In his detached stare Kevin saw himself reflected in the boy’s eyes. It was one of the most horrifying moments of his life. It felt to Kevin like Muctar was not seeing him as another person but as an object, one no more alive than a large tumbleweed that rolls across the desert because the wind blows it.
Kevin smiled but Muctar did not smile back. It was a face, smooth except for the scars across his forehead and cheeks, that looked as though a smile had never touched it. Kevin reached into his pocket for a piece of hard candy. He held it out to him and the boy’s icy gaze shifted to Kevin’s hand. He did not react.
Fatou, the nurse Bill paid to take care of him, watched all this. She urged Muctar to take the candy.
With a little prompting, he finally did what she said, quickly unwrapping the treat and popping it into his mouth. He then continued to stare at Kevin, his expression betraying no sign of pleasure or gratitude. It was simply a look of guarded watchfulness, the kind a cat gives a strange dog. Kevin thought his eyes were not dead, but that the world they stared at was dead to them. His isolation was more total than death itself. Even the taste of the candy in his mouth seemed of no great interest to him, not pleasant or unpleasant, just there and as unimportant as the sound of the seconds ticking away on a clock. If he were locked in a dark closet and left alone everyday, Kevin doubted he would protest. One dark corner of the world was, to him, just the same as any other. He had been made to destroy all that he loved, Kevin reflected, and he could kill because murder was of no more significance to him than was crushing a brown, dried leaf in his fist.
Kevin felt that seeing this was like placing his hand on a red-hot stove. It hurt. Muctar needed help and Kevin had none to give. He might even be unreachable. Better, Kevin thought, that the rebels had killed him outright than to have left him like this, or so it seemed to him just at that moment.
“What’s the name of your friend?” Kevin said, looking at his pigeon.
Muctar said nothing.
“He calls it Gracie,” answered Fatou. “It’s about the only word he ever speaks.”
“Gracie,” Kevin said. “That’s a good name.” He reached out to pet the bird.
Faster than Kevin’s eye could follow, what he thought was a nearly comatose child suddenly, and with blinding speed, swept a scalpel off the counter next to him and slashed Kevin with it, hissing and sheltering the startled bird in his lap. Kevin clutched his arm where the blade had cut him and staggered back, knocking his chair over. Muctar held the blade straight out at him, and when Fatou rushed in he turned it on her. She stopped.
The room went completely quiet.
Peter barked something at the boy in a language Kevin didn’t understand. Muctar growled something back and Peter strode toward him and answered, more forcefully this time. They stared at each other a moment, Peter with his hand held out, and finally Muctar placed the scalpel in it. He remained seated clutching his bird all the more tightly and refusing to look at Kevin.
Peter turned away and handed Kevin the scalpel. “Doesn’t be touching de bird,” he said. “De boy, he no right in de head. Best Mr. Bill he look at dat arm.”
Bill had been out of the room, and when he returned Kevin explained what had happened. Without a word, he sutured Kevin’s wound, and when Kevin started to speak again he shook his head. “Later,” he said.
Chapter 12
Minnesota
Liz opened her eyes to daylight and just the tip of a large, black nose next to her face. Hampton’s nose. Inside the sleeping bag her right arm clasped him firmly to her.
“It’s a good thing you’re so warm because I’m a cat person,” she mumbled.
A stiff breeze ripped through the forest, setting dancing patterns of sunlight and shade flickering across the walls of the tent. Outside the screened entrance to the tent, the lake was no longer mirror-smooth but choppy. Although cool, it had warmed considerably from the night before.
Beth still slept but Liz found Kevin gone.
She got up, pulled on her shoes and stepped outside, followed by Hampton, who loudly groaned as he sat and scratched himself in an absentminded early-morning way.
Liz found Kevin seated with his back to her on the same rock outcropping where they’d talked the night before. His elbow propped on one knee, he was staring out over the water with his chin in his hand. He looked sad.
It’s so odd, she thought. He was never like this before. Not like this.
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Houdek. You worry me.”
He looked up startled and tried to smile.
“What’re you contemplating with such a down-in-the-mouth look on your face?”
He shrugged. “Bill. I miss him. I miss him a lot.”
“When are you going to tell me what happened?” she said, rubbing the top of his head. “You better get it off your chest.”
He took her hand and pulled himself up. “Soon,” he said, “but not yet.” He patted her on the ass. “You hungry?”
“Hey, watch it, buster,” she said. “And yes, I am, but first things first. Just where does one find the women’s room around here?”
“This way,” he said. He walked into the forest up a path away from the lake. The trail ended a short distance farther at a large wooden box set into the ground. Kevin grabbed a handle on the top and lifted the hinged lid, uncovering an oval hole beneath.
“There it is,” he said.
Liz clasped her hand to her forehead, closing her eyes. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You mean I’ve got to sit on that box and take a crap right here in the middle of these damn woods? You’re putting me on, right? Please say you’re putting me on or I’ll have to kill you. You leave me no choice. How could you do this to me?”
“Well, what did you think? There’d be plumbing with gold-plated faucets and a flush toilet?”
She waved her hand at the box. “Something more than this, for God’s sake! A porta-john. Something with a roof over it, at least. A proper seat. You know, maybe a gas station every ten miles or so. Something. This is a damn box over a hole in the ground and it stinks!”
She gasped when a large spider scampered across the lid.
“Oh, Christ, look at that!” She grabbed him by the arm. “It’s got bugs, Kevin,” she wailed. “There’s probably snakes down that hole. I can’t sit on that!”
“Sorry, kid. It’s this or hold it for a week.” He handed her a small roll of toilet paper from his jacket pocket and disappeared back down the path.
Liz watched him go in shock. Finally, she cautiously peered down the hole. It was dark but she saw that
the bottom was several feet down, far enough that it seemed doubtful anything could reach up and bite her ass, snake or otherwise. The spider was nowhere in sight.
Probably laying in wait, she thought. For all she knew, it was an ass-biting spider specializing in taking large chunks from the tender posteriors of campers.
When she finished with the toilet, she stomped back into camp and threw the toilet paper roll at Kevin, who sat heating a pot of water on the campfire.
“I have never…” she sputtered, pointing a finger at him. “You should have… I will never…”
“Have some breakfast,” he said. “You’ll feel better.” Standing, he handed her two empty plastic cups.
“What’s this?” she said.
“Breakfast.” He poured hot water into one cup, then retrieved a plastic box and popped off the lid. “One scoop or two?”
“Instant coffee?”
“Taster’s Choice. Only the best for you.”
“Two scoops,” she said with resignation.
He stirred in the powder and handed her a small packet of instant oatmeal.
“This is just one damn disaster after another,” she said, wrinkling up her nose. “I can’t eat this.”
Kevin shrugged. “That’s the regular. You could have apple-cinnamon or maple-raisin, if you prefer.”
“I’m starving, Kevin.”
“Try it,” he said. “It’s really not so bad.”
Glaring at him, she tore open the bag and dumped it into her other cup. Stooping to the fire, she added hot water and stirred until she formed a gooey, disgusting gray paste. She sat on a rock and stared at it. Hampton wandered up, sniffed the cup, and wandered away.
She sighed and tasted it. It was about as vile as she’d expected, except she was so hungry she wolfed it down. Kevin wordlessly held out a second packet and she surprised herself by accepting it.
“It’s the fresh air,” he said, “and the exertion. I’d never dream of eating this stuff back home. But up here…” he shrugged. “It’s not so bad.”
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