Ghost Point

by James A. Hetley

  Aunt Jean shrugged and climbed behind the wheel of the Jeep, while Alice slid into the back seat. Click, click, click, click, all the seat and shoulder belts, a whole line of bullets loading. Stop it, dammit, you’re imagining things!

  Aunt Jean started the Jeep, the engine firing at the first crank of the starter, smooth and quiet, once again that contrast between the rough ratty appearance of the car and the reality of its function. That had surprised Susan the first time, but now she began to understand it. The Haskell witches made a practice of messing with the enemy’s head—fool him into underestimating what he faced, make him mis-figure the odds. Probably always him. Someone who didn’t know Aunt Jean, didn’t know the history, would just see a fat old brown-faced woman. He’d never notice the Panzer division behind her or the Stukas circling overhead.

  Susan shivered again. She wondered where these images kept coming from.

  They drove out of Stonefort the other way, roads Susan hadn’t traveled much—back roads, away from water and into the interior of the island, not a place where eagles hung out as a general rule so the roads never mattered to her. They drove fast, Aunt Jean holding the Jeep to just under the edge of comfort on the fresh-plowed road, a sense of the changing traction Susan found uncanny.

  “Where are we going?” Something—Alice’s face, Aunt Jean’s face, that bag Alice slung over her shoulder—something in the scene pounded on Susan’s nerves like a lead hammer.

  “We go to meet the man you shot.” Aunt Jean spoke as if they were headed over to tea at the rectory.

  “But . . . .” Susan remembered the hints Alice had dropped, the way Carlsson had said Susan would be happier if she didn’t go along. “Aren’t those guys drug dealers? Dangerous?”

  Aunt Jean downshifted the old Wagoneer and turned off the highway onto a plowed gravel road. “Eh bien, that may be. That makes more sense than fearing your study of the eagles. We live far from the white man’s law out here, and that law was not made for poor men. Vraiment, that law was most surely not made for poor men and women with brown skin. Easy to think that law does not apply to me.”

  She downshifted again and turned up a rising trail that looked more path than road, hadn’t been plowed out this morning. Goat path, narrow, rough, and winding, but the old Jeep took it in stride. “But we have our own law, Naskeag law. Naskeag law says that you do not do the things they did. We go to talk Naskeag law with a Naskeag boy who should know better.”

  Drug smugglers. Drug dealers. Susan knew them from the streets. Those guys killed people who got in their way. Maybe Carlsson had been right.

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “Eh? That is in God’s hands, my daughter. The man you shot and those behind him will decide what happens. I do not judge.”

  Susan didn’t like the sound of that. Not at all.

  The Jeep whined up the trail, four-wheel drive and low gear, lurching over things unseen under the layer of snow thinner here than at Carlsson’s. They pulled up at a mound of dirty ice, the end of the old plowing, and the dooryard of a small swaybacked trailer that made her state-owned slum look good. The state-owned slum that used to be her temporary home, now a pile of ash and charcoal.

  The place looked like Appalachia East—rust-streaked dented siding, torn plastic sheet over broken windows, cockeyed TV antenna sticking up from a beheaded spruce out back, ’59 Buick stripped of tires and transmission lying on its side in the snowdrifts. All it needed was a coonhound dozing in a doghouse kept in better shape than the trailer.

  What it had instead was a big new high-powered Arctic Cat snowmobile sitting under the trees by one end of the assembled mess—that stood out against the trash like a pimp’s Lincoln on Fourteenth Street. A fresh-packed trail led back from it into the woods. Susan remembered the snarl of a snowmobile, coming and then going, back out on the point where she’d found the butchered eagles and someone had slashed her tires.

  Aunt Jean stared at the snowmobile for a moment, glanced over her shoulder at Alice and got a nod back, and then wrestled the Jeep into a three-point turn, backing and cranking the steering wheel and rolling forward, pointing the nose of the Wagoneer down the slope before setting her brake and shutting off the engine. “Voila, we are here. Since you have come this far, you might as well come inside.”

  They climbed out. Aunt Jean dug into her jacket for a pack of cigarettes, pulled one out, lit it, and puffed smoke to the four winds. She chanted something in a guttural monotone, Susan assumed it was in Naskeag and invoked ancestral spirits or totem animals or something. Right now, she’d prefer to invoke Alice’s 9mm automatic, standing out in the open looking at those blank windows that could hide Colombian thugs with Uzis.

  “Come.” And Aunt Jean crunched across packed snow toward the trailer door. Susan followed and then glanced around for Alice, wondering about that satchel she carried.

  Alice had vanished. Foot and snowshoe trails led into the woods, to an outhouse, here and there in the clearing. Alice must have headed around back to watch in case their target tried to sneak away.

  There were those damned thoughts again. Target. Why did she keep thinking of targets.

  They clumped up cockeyed groaning steps to a wooden front porch tacked onto the trailer as an afterthought. Whoever lived here didn’t feel like wading through snow to the outhouse unless they had to, unless he had to—yellow holes marked the fresh snow, just to the side of the porch.

  Aunt Jean opened the door, no bother with knocking, the door wasn’t locked. Country ways. She stepped inside. “Peter William Levesque, you have visitors.”

  Susan heard some kind of reply, couldn’t make out the words. She followed Aunt Jean into the trailer, the same kind of cheap fake-wood paneling and vinyl flooring and lost-door sagging kitchen cabinets she expected, with a layer of grease and dust and mud-smeared floors and a stink of garbage and unwashed male that matched what she’d seen in the dooryard, and a smoke-reek like burning rope—Susan knew that smell.

  She went to close the door behind them and Aunt Jean shook her head. “Let the stink out.”

  And they were in the so-called living room, and a man sat on a ragged sofa there, a young Naskeag-looking man in jeans and wool shirt with crutches beside him and his left leg up on a cheap-ass coffee table on a pillow. His jeans leg was slit up to the knee, grimy bandages wrapped around the leg at calf level.

  Jesus Christ. Aiming at his chest, and I hit him in the lower leg. Susan winced and shook her head.

  “Aunt Jean.” The man nodded to both of them. He didn’t get up. He kept his hand close to the gap between two sofa cushions.

  “Peter William Levesque, you bring shame to our people.”

  XXIII

  Grendel dropped to her hands and knees again, eyes squeezed shut against whatever the damned Navy transmitters did to her head. The stereo snarled rage for her.

  “Fucking swabbie butt-fucking asshole shit-lickers!”

  Dennis dropped back into Army language, his growl matching the drawn-out fart from the speakers. Too many things screamed for attention, all at once, no time for creative cussing. He let fly with another string of crude slang, already sliding the frying potatoes and pan of mackerel across the stove to clatter against the cool corner of the cook-top and grabbing a hypo. His hand shook with anger.

  Whatever Alice’s chi transfer actually did, he owed Grendel big-time. His back didn’t even ache today, and she got this for a paycheck?

  She looked up at him in the break between dots and dashes. “Sting.” She held out her arm. Informed consent.

  He smoothed back her fur to expose black skin, slid the long needle in through hide and blubber until he felt the harder muscle against the point, and then further until he judged he’d reached deep enough. He shoved the plunger home. He felt her relax under his hands and then she sagged away from the hypo and he eased her down to lie on the floor near the stove for warmth. Now he could calm down, almost as if he’d shoved the drug into his own bloodstream. H
is hands still shook.

  He covered her eyes with a damp cloth. She’d be out for an hour or so. Maybe the fucking Navy would have shut the fuck up by then. Maybe they fucking wouldn’t. Maybe he’d run the dinghy across the bay and blow up their fucking towers.

  Except he didn’t have any C-4 in the armory. And they’d doubled patrols along the shore since Grendel’s little raid, and stretched their goddamn “national security” exclusion zone damn near to the end of his boat ramp. Dennis wrestled with his anger. The bastard sons of three-legged mangy goats didn’t know what they were doing.

  Of course the fucking brass-hats wouldn’t care if they fucking did know. Like that shithead Marine looie. “National Security.” Fuck ’em.

  Sandy rubbed up against his shin, looked up with as much of a puzzled expression as a cat could muster, and cocked his head to one side.

  “Mrrrt?”

  “Don’t know, cat. We tried cutting back the dose, something that would dull whatever’s happening in her head without knocking her out. Didn’t work. If I had a lab full of tranquilizers and anesthetics and anti-seizure drugs and a VLF transmitter I could control, maybe we could fumble our way to something less drastic.”

  Talking to Sandy helped calm him down. Yeah, he’d gotten in the habit of talking to the animals. It came from living alone and working with them every day. Plus, they made more sense than most humans he’d met. Apparently Tranh did it too, and look how that had worked out. The animal had talked back.

  He thought he might have to change his mind about Tranh. Abrasive as hell on the outside, true cast-iron bitch, but look at what she’d done with Grendel. And she seemed able to put up with Alice, which took some doing at this phase of the kid’s life. Both of those said things about what hid inside that armor.

  And there was the thing with Eagle, an outsider speaking with the Naskeag spirit guides. That was fucking weird, like him with Bear. Aunt Jean seemed to think Tranh was worth a second or third look. Her voice sounded in his head again, paired with visions of that sidelong look, “Eagle and Bear are not enemies. They can make alliance.”

  The cat rubbed his leg once more and then walked over to Grendel and licked her face twice before settling down against one arm and grooming her fur. How the hell did Sandy know she wouldn’t eat him? Cats were weird.

  Maybe he was just drawn by the taste of lobster or fish on her fur. The boathouse already smelled like mid-morning at the Stonefort Lobster Co-op—time to sluice fish gurry off the dock from the trap-bait sales. That was why he’d breaded up some mackerel for lunch.

  Grendel. The name grated, but she had accepted it. Tranh said her real name was her smell, her particular blend of wet fur and musk and fish-oil pungency, a name humans weren’t equipped to hear or speak. They had to find some way to get her back to the Spirit Land where she belonged. That transmitter was torturing her. Even the cat didn’t like it, though Sandy always played with his mice or broken-wing birds or chipmunks before he ate them.

  Aunt Jean had the beginnings of a ghost of a plan, one she didn’t like but that seemed better than none. It involved that cave locked up under the old house, the Spirit Path of Spirit Point. Which apparently worked both ways. Could they open a path for Grendel without getting a shitload of trouble back?

  Eating. He stood up and shifted the frying pans back onto hotter stove lids. Bachelor cookery—apply heat to grease and cook until brown. He never bothered much with food. If Bouchard brought a roadkill moose for the critters, Dennis ate moose steak or moose stew along with them. If he’d picked up a hundred pounds of herring and mackerel from the Co-op to feed a fish-eating homicidal monster from the Spirit Lands, he ate fish. Food was fuel. Having Alice around cooking up fancy stuff, having fresh home-baked bread or fancy pork sausage from Aunt Jean, that moved him into a different world. He wondered if Tranh could cook.

  Nah. Alice had made that wisecrack about a can of beans. Campbell’s beans. He guessed food was fuel to Tranh, as well. Some folks live to eat, others just eat to live. Hell, he’d wolfed down Army chow and asked for more.

  He poked a fork into the fish. Done. Same with the hash browns. He pulled Sandy’s portion of fish off the warming shelf, just thawed, not cooked, and set it on the floor. The cat deigned to saunter over and nibble a few bites before returning to groom Grendel’s other arm and lick her fingers.

  They must taste of lobster. The damned cat was going high-rent on him.

  Dennis felt thumping in his gut before he heard it—damned choppers again, Hueys again. Fucking Navy, waking up ghosts. The pounding beat grew and grew and rattled the windows and stove lids and pans until the chopper roared low overhead, treetop height, and Den felt the sting of the grit blown by the rotors and he searched through the mud and stink and smoke of one of those fucking strategic hamlets, Cong had just hit it and blown everything to shit and lined up the local troops and shot them all. And now Charlie had faded away into ghosts before death swooped down from the sky, ghosts vanishing the weapons and surviving women and children into the triple-canopy as if they’d never been.

  Someone was crying, off in the smoke and crackling burning thatch. He followed the sound, thin whining tortured sobs almost like a hurt kitten mewing, and found a small brown foot sticking out from under wreckage, he’d never noticed just what the crap was because it was just in his way, something long and wide and heavier than a single man could move but he’d just set his feet and called on Bear and grabbed and lifted and tossed it to one side and found the kids. Two of them. Small, maybe eight years, ten years old, he couldn’t tell ages with Viets. Filthy. Bloody. Shrapnel wounds, mortars or grenades, whatever had blown their hooch to shit. Girl had a mangled foot. Boy had chest wounds. Other stuff.

  He slung his weapon and picked them up, one over each shoulder. They stank, sour rotting fish sauce dripping off them, must have hid behind the vat, in the vat, in a spider-hole under the vat, something. They screamed. The girl clawed at him, as if he’d done this thing to them and was going to do worse. He hadn’t bothered to stop her.

  He trotted back to the LZ, back to the looie and Red with the squawk-box, call in dust-off for the kids, the looie started to give him a ration of shit and he’d just stopped and stared the lieutenant in the eye and something, maybe Bear, showed in Den’s face and the rotsie-boy backed off rather than risk fragging where he stood. Loaded the kids and a couple of cuts and scrapes from the platoon on the medevac and waved them off and that was that. Got word back in a few days that the boy had died en-route, girl lived, was the darling of the ward hopping around on cut-down GI crutches.

  Dennis blinked. The chopper roar passed on and faded back to something felt rather than heard. Even the feeling vanished. Sandy had levitated into his lap and bumped noses with him, concerned. Fish breath.

  Fuckin’-A, flashbacks. Haven’t had them this bad in years. Must be the stress. Sounds. Sights. Smells. All of those triggers.

  Couldn’t blame Grendel. Couldn’t blame Tranh. Couldn’t really blame the Navy, those were Army Guard choppers and he wouldn’t have moved out here on the point if they’d made a habit of raping the airspace over his head and messing with his dreams. Blame the smell of fish. It sat in front of him. He could do something about the fish. He ate it. He ate the potatoes savory with bacon grease. Food was fuel.

  And the animals needed refueling. He shrugged into his jacket, tested the straps on his GI foot, pulled the snowshoes off their pegs, and headed out the door to do his rounds. Life goes on.

  Flashbacks, yes, but they were going rational on him. He’d never thought about Bear in one before. And he’d never landed in one of the good scenes before, a place where he’d eased pain rather than piling it up.

  And he’d looked at the scene from a distance. He’d known he sat in Maine, sat in the boathouse kitchen on Ghost Point and nobody was trying to kill him. Weird. He felt prickles on the back of his neck.

  The shrinks said that eventually, eventually, most people could work through the memories
and come out the other side. You could shove them in a pigeon-hole on the mental roll-top desk, not hidden, not forgotten, but set apart as truly in the past and done. They still hurt when you thought about them, but they didn’t force themselves on you in the middle of the night or sitting down to lunch.

  Eventually the ghosts shut up. Not like the fucking Navy. The stereo kept buzzing along, Morse code dots and dashes at glacial speed. They had to find a way to send Grendel back to whatever spirit land she came from.

  He slogged through wet snow, heavy on the snowshoes and taking perfect prints like a plaster cast, he could have tracked Grendel to hell and back. He could track the baseball-stitch prints of a mouse stealing a nibble from the rabbit chow. No need for Bouchard’s tracker wizardry in this stuff. He fed Hopalong, he fed Peg-leg Pete, he fed the other winter-over cripples. He changed water in the dishes.

  And then he nearly walked straight into Bear—silver, huge, glowing in the gray daylight like he’d glowed in moonshine. Bear just stood there, not dancing, standing and staring him in the face so close Dennis damn near shit himself from shock. No footprints—smooth clean snow in all directions—Spirit Bear, Naskeag guide from the Spirit Lands come to Spirit Point, but Dennis could smell him, the strong animal rankness of a healthy male bear in summer prime.

 

  Dennis felt the hair stand up on his arms. Bear turned and walked away, walked upright like a man. Like a Spirit Bear. He left tracks, heel and pad and toes and claws sharp and clean like a steel engraving but huge. Dennis followed, half in a trance, meat foot, plastic foot, equal, his trace of limp vanished as if it had never been. Bear led him past the old garage, past the generator tower and battery shed, to the old house wrecked by fire and the blows of twenty years of unchecked Maine storms.

  But the house stood strong, solid, roof lines square and straight and true, eccentric gables and tower etched against the sky. Spirit House, not the charred senile remnant slowly falling into its cellar-hole that he knew. Ghosts filled the landscape, Ghost Point.