Ghost Point

by James A. Hetley

  “You know, you might want to drop that ‘diplomat daughter’ story. Guilt by association, it screws up your image big-time. Folks like Bouchard, like me, we thought the Saigon government really sucked. Mostly either Commie moles or a bunch of corrupt ass-kissers, lining their Swiss bank accounts while a few million people died. And the Diem regime, they were the worst. That background, I figured you were living off blood money and playing wildlife biologist as a hobby.”

  She coughed, almost dropped her mug, and set it down carefully. “You’re damned lucky I’d already swallowed before you said that. You’d have been wearing coffee or ham and eggs.” She closed her eyes, swallowed again, and took a deep breath. “You’ve never seen my car, have you? ’69 Dodge Dart with the fenders rusted through? Fucking Swiss bank accounts my little brown ass.”

  “Okay, okay, but you can see where the idea came from. Why don’t we just reset to zero, right here. I don’t know zip about you, you don’t know ditto about me. Clean slate.”

  She lifted one eyebrow. “Some things I’d rather not forget. Reset to the first night, maybe. You’ve got some damn nice treatments for hypothermia.”

  “Hey, you filed a request.”

  “And I might have filed it sooner if you hadn’t looked like a racist asshole from where I stood, okay? Mixed up signals both sides, I never gave a thought to combat flashbacks and other reasons you might be shook up by a Gook face in the coffee shop. Reset to that poor freezing orphan lost in the storm.” She lit a cigarette, stood up, and started clearing dishes away.

  He’d been worried about “morning after” hurricanes, particularly considering the . . . impromptu nature of their so-called courtship. Instead, she acted the same way Sandy had, a stray cat walking through the open door one spring morning like he owned the place. The cat had looked around for the food dish and litter box and complained because the dumb human didn’t have such basics waiting. The landlord had moved in, so the tenant had better shape up.

  At least Tranh seemed okay with a wood cook stove and plumbing that consisted of a hand pump and an outhouse. A Maine December outhouse—you don’t sit and contemplate philosophy and enjoy your cigarette because your ass will freeze to the toilet seat.

  He dumped the cat off his lap, earning an indignant shake of notched ears, and pulled the cast iron kettle off the stove, slid a cover into its hole in the cooktop, and poured boiling water into the dishpan. It’s gonna be . . . interesting . . . when she asks how you take a bath out here.

  She mixed in cold water from the sink pump, tested, added another half stroke from the well, and stared out the window over the sink. Which was fogged up solid with the steam hitting glass, so she couldn’t be seeing anything.

  Susan took another puff on her cigarette. “Spent some time thinking, last night. Couldn’t sleep.”

  He made some kind of noise, then added “I thought we wore each other out.”

  She glanced over at him and then went back to studying frost patterns on glass. “You woke me up. Nightmare, looked like. I moved off to give you some space.” More cigarette. “Anyway. You’re right about the self-esteem thing. Problem is, if the world kicks you often enough, you start to think you deserve it.

  “That’s probably why I get so nasty. It’s a wall. I need it. If I let someone inside it, I end up hurt. And now I have you inside it. And Aunt Jean, and Alice, and Grendel. Cruisin’ for a bruisin’. It hurts already.” Another puff. “But I know I have to try. Aunt Jean said the same thing about that word. Said it isn’t me, it’s a label my enemies put on me. So, no more Poor Little Gook Girl. From now on, it’s Vietnamese Warrior Princess.” She took a final drag and stubbed out the butt and lit another.

  Cigarettes.

  “Um. Dr. Tranh, about those cigarettes . . . .”

  “Look, you racist asshole, here’s a lesson in basic etiquette. You sleep with a girl, it puts you on a first-name basis. I’m Susan, got it? Easy to remember. Sunny Susan, the smiling smoker. What’s your problem with cigarettes? You think I’m a bitch now, try cutting off my caffeine or nicotine.”

  No, she hadn’t mellowed overnight. “Not my problem, Ms. Susan ma’am, just some of the animals get spooked by the smell of smoke. Not the permanent residents, they’ve gotten used to woodsmoke from the house. But if I walk around smelling like a brushfire, it’s likely to play hell with rehab when we start getting new animals in.”

  “Oh.” She pulled the cigarette from her mouth and stared at it. “Eagle never minded smoke. Aunt Jean says it’s sacred, sorta like Communion to the spirits. Gonna have to think about this.” She plugged the cigarette back into her face and went back to washing dishes.

  Apparently Eagle didn’t mind washing dishes, either. He’d offered to wash up, trying to be a sensitive and sharing modern male. Eagle had told him to fuck off, she’d seen what men called ‘washing’ and didn’t care to die of ptomaine. Thank you for asking.

  Eagle. Naskeag spirit guides, messing with human lives. Eagles have been nesting out here a hell of a lot longer than Carlssons. Longer than Naskeags, even. Maybe that’s why she’s settled in like this—this has been Eagle’s home for as long as it’s been Bear’s.

  Snow crunched outside, the loud icy crusty snow of rain followed by freezing. Noises fumbled at the door, and Dennis opened it. Grendel still had trouble with knobs and latches and such. Something about the way her hand-bones worked, or maybe those retractable claws. She smelled fishy again, breakfast hunt successful.

  He hoped she’d managed to hide from any official eyes. The weather had been a bad-news/good-news joke. Bad news was, Aunt Jean and Alice hadn’t been able to get over here for two days because of the storm. The good news part was that the weather had kept the Navy’s paranoia confined to barracks, and wiped out tracks. Now the choppers were back in the air. He felt them. But Grendel had wanted to hunt, and he knew he couldn’t stop her without grabbing that M-1.

  Grendel sniffed him. “Susan.” She walked over to Susan and sniffed her. “Dennis.” She nodded, must be a gesture from her Spirit Land as well. “Nest. Good.”

  Yeah, he hadn’t really minded being snowed-in with Tranh. With Susan, the revised version.

  Susan looked at him funny, her wry smile a mixture of amusement and irritation. “I’m not sure, but I think our pitiful human noses serve a social purpose. It’s better than having everyone for miles downwind know exactly if you’ve scored, and with precisely whom. A woman wants to leave a little mystery. Even in these decadent times.”

  Dennis shook his head. “You want privacy, you’ve come to the wrong town. Might have slipped under the old-hen radar two nights ago, what with the storm. But I’d give us about three days after you first poke your nose outside, before the story’s on the street in Naskeag Falls.”

  “Oh, fuck the Sunrise County News Network and the moose it rode in on. What about her?” She waved at Grendel. “What about Aunt Jean and Alice?”

  “Remember what I told you about Sunrise County rules. White gloves or black gloves, help or hurt, nobody notices Aunt Jean. Not unless she’s doing something public. Even then, you’re not allowed to talk about it. That’s against the law. Alice gets the same immunity. Comes with the job. I told you that when we were talking about . . . the other day, and witnesses. Believe me, nobody saw you. Nobody.”

  “And Grendel?”

  The Swimmer turned away from her seat by the stereo, noticing her name. Dennis shook his head and waved her off. She went back to her Beethoven symphony.

  “Nobody’s looking for her. She doesn’t exist. And remember, we’re way to hell in the back woods, nearest year-round house is over two miles. She wouldn’t be a problem if the damned Navy didn’t have their asses in a pucker with two corpses and one MIA on their hands. They’re running around in circles looking for Russian subs and Spetsnaz commandos in rubber boats.”

  Susan froze, a half-washed pan in her hands. “Corpses?”

  “Top Secret, forget I mentioned it. But Navy spooks are why we’
ve had choppers and jets and unmarked cars and offshore patrols up the ass for weeks, even before Grendel hit ’em. You can blame Uncle Sam for those Black Hats thinking you were a DEA cop watching for their next delivery.”

  She set the cast-iron pan down in the dishwater, careful as if it was some of the ancestral cut-glass crystal. “You knew she’d killed three men, probably three armed men, that’s how she got shot in the first place, and you walked up to her with a tranquilizer dart on a goddamn stick? You are fucking crazy.”

  Dennis shrugged. “Dedicated. The word I prefer is ‘dedicated.’ You’d rather I killed her? Then you could have dissected her, done all that taxonomy stuff that was gleaming in your eye the first time you saw her.”

  “Okay, so we’re both assholes. Universal human trait. Maybe we should take turns. Today’s your day.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  More snow crunched outside, hollow-sounding like an icy drumhead, he’d been waiting for that. Snowshoes on the crust. Dennis tensed, but voices came after, female, one young and the other hoarse with age and decades of unfiltered cigarettes. That would be Aunt Jean and Alice—not a patrol on edge, twitchy fingers playing with automatic weapons, searching for killer Russian spies.

  Still, Dennis felt his heart sink. If this spirit door thing scared Aunt Jean . . . .

  The crunching went on, the voices went on, Aunt Jean lecturing Alice on something just beyond the range where he could make out words. Susan looked up from the last of the breakfast dishes and lifted an eyebrow.

  “They going to stay out there all morning?”

  “Lesson in basic etiquette, backwoods style—they’ve made more noise than necessary, approaching the house. Now they’re giving us a chance to finish and get dressed. You don’t just walk in on a pair of newlyweds.”

  “Oh, fuck. Some people jump to conclusions, you know? What makes her think that would be a problem?”

  Dennis sighed. “Aunt Jean has been watching people, manipulating people, for maybe seventy years. She’ll have checked the garage and seen your car. After a while, patterns repeat on you. I think she’d paired us up before we even met. ‘Eagle and Bear are not enemies,’ she told me. ‘They can make alliance.’ Even Alice figured it out. That kid doesn’t know what her own hormones want, but she knows the signs in other people.”

  “That old witch . . . .”

  “Exactly. I wouldn’t be surprised if she told Bouchard to mention our eagles to you.”

  Then he grimaced, remembering things. “Are you sure you’re okay with this? Not screwing around with the heart of Spirit Point, but with seeing Alice and Aunt Jean?”

  She took a deep breath, let it out, and took another. “American girl must be strong.” She said it in her own voice this time. And nodded.

  Dennis opened the door and stepped out into the cold wind, spotted Aunt Jean explaining something about the burned-out house to Alice, and waved to them. They shed snowshoes and snow on the porch, clumped winter-booted inside, and the old woman hugged first him and then Susan. She looked around the kitchen, at Susan’s underwear drying on a clothesline strung behind the stove, and nodded.

  “You have settled your differences?”

  Dennis shrugged. “We haven’t killed each other. Yet.”

  “That is a start. It is bad when two good people fight.” She focused those dark knowing eyes on Susan. “News on the radio, a man missing on a snowmobile. He did not leave route or destination, and Sunrise County is a large place. The storm erased his tracks.”

  And then she hugged Grendel, the Swimmer careful of her strength and claws. “Now we must try to send you home. Bear says that you can smell the way to your nest, if I open a door for you. I hope the hell he knows what he is doing. Oui, I hope.”

  Profanity, from Aunt Jean? Even something that mild shocked Dennis. Aunt Jean always acted as if she feared neither God nor man, and here she was afraid.

  Grendel nodded. “Door. Smell. Nest.” Dennis wondered just how much the Swimmer really understood.

  Aunt Jean nodded back, looked from Grendel to Susan to Dennis, and nodded again. “Come. We must move before the searchers reach this place. Oui, it is also better that we do this while the sun still climbs in the sky. Spirit friends are stronger then, spirit enemies are weaker.”

  And with that, she turned and crunched back out through the snow, along the path Dennis had beaten down from the boathouse door to that cellar entry and also to the battery shed, the old garage, down to the boat ramp and open water, no need for the snowshoes, no funny tracks from Grendel left behind. Get a move on, get it over with, that was the signal. Dennis took a deep breath and felt his muscles ease, the change that always came over him when the waiting ended and action began. Combat had been bad, very bad, but the waiting had always been much worse.

  He slipped into his jacket heavy with spare ammo, picked up Dad’s M-1 from the corner and slung it over his back, buckled the Webley around his waist, and followed her. He didn’t have a clue what dangers waited, just what had Aunt Jean spooked, but he knew how to shoot things. That, apparently, was his job. Not fighting the Navy, or the Army support like Bouchard. Fighting the Spirit World, with human weapons. Aunt Jean and Alice would open the spirit door in the old cellar, Grendel would walk through it, and he’d shoot anything that tried to come the other way. He didn’t know what Susan was supposed to do. Supply innovative variations on profanity, maybe.

  He stepped outside and felt choppers in his gut again, Hueys again, closer, harder, sharper, skimming low from the land out to the point, searching, searching, and they’d caught Grendel out in the open, caught the patrol in the open and didn’t recognize them. Friendly fire. She froze, gray against white, he unslung the M-1 and started to lay the sights on olive metal and plexi overhead but couldn’t get a clear shot through the spruces, the pines, the jungle canopy and something knocked his legs out from under him and the rifle spun into the snow and he was in Maine again. In winter again. His heart raced and he lay there, snow stinging his cheek and blurring his eyes, and caught his breath.

  The chopper passed on.

  The beat faded back to a mutter over the surf, didn’t turn, didn’t come roaring back to hover and spit death from the fucking side door gunner who couldn’t tell GI from NVA. Tranh unwrapped herself from his knees and stood up, dusting snow from her parka and pants.

  “Man, we’ve got to work on those nerves of yours.”

  Just that. Dennis picked himself up, stooped and picked up the M-1, brushed the snow off it, checked the bore. The trees, the huge old pines and spruces, they must have hidden him from above. Hidden Grendel. Praises be to Allah in His infinite mercy, that the ancestral Carlsson axes had targeted men, not trees.

  He wasn’t even shaking. He wondered about that.

  And then they were at the cellarway, under the portico, out from under the eye in the sky, and he sprayed WD-40 into a lock that hadn’t been opened in more than twenty years and shoved a key into it and the key even fitted. He’d never tried it before. It turned. The lock clicked and the door groaned and swung away from him into darkness, and musty air flowed out.

  He’d set tools handy, his chainsaw and hydraulic jack and come-along winch and other stuff. They were heading down into the cellar of a ruin, after all. Aunt Jean waved the tools away.

  “I do not think you will need this. It is well to have it ready, but wait and see.” Then she frowned. “Leave the rifle. It is a good weapon, but not suited to what we do. The pistol, the bullets are soft lead, oui? They will not bounce around if they hit something hard? Then you may bring it.”

  Dennis liked the M-1. He trusted it, trusted that he could hit things with it and that anything he hit with it would go down and stay down. And he could reload fast, much faster than the Webley. But Aunt Jean seemed to know where they were going, what they would face. He unslung the rifle and leaned it into a corner of the cellarway.

  She did pick up one of the flashlights he’d set with t
he other tools. The beam showed stairs leading straight down, no twists and turns to cause problems moving heavy stuff, stone treads where he’d been worried about rotting wood, a concrete floor. They descended past concrete walls, cold, his breath puffing steam in the damp air, the smell of decades coming from the shadows, icy patches underfoot from water leaking down from the burned-out shell overhead. He looked up and saw concrete there as well, slab and cast beams. He’d expected to find wood, rotten or burned through, collapsed, blocking the way. Hence the chainsaw, the jack, the other tools.

  Instead, he’d found a vault or bunker, almost no damage. They walked over ice, under icicles, the flashlight beams picking out a rusty furnace, a stair up into the house probably blocked by wreckage, racks of jars and bottles he couldn’t identify under the dust, a cord or so of firewood still stacked and coal in a bin, and Aunt Jean nodded. “Bien. The drains still work. I had feared we would need a pump.”

  No, he hadn’t thought of that. “This doesn’t match my dream, Bear’s dream.”

  She nodded again. “That was the spirit land, the spirit house. That was the way things should be. This is the way things are.”

  And then they turned a corner in the damp darkness and reached a door, had to be the door, barred on the outside. Barred, and locked. And that was a serious door, steel or at least steel clad, in a steel frame set deep in a poured concrete wall. With a serious lock that took a different style of key. Door barred to keep things in, locked to keep other things out.

  Grendel stared at the door, her fur standing up like the prelude to a cat-fight. She sniffed and growled.

  I think I’m getting some hints of why Aunt Jean is scared.

  “I don’t have a cutting torch.”

  “Eh? I am old, I forget. We have the key. An old agreement, Bear keeps the key to the house, we keep the key to the door. Without at least two fools together, that door stays shut.” She dug into a pocket and pulled out a ring of keys. She turned to Alice. “Make fire.”