Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  Nurga, Weller called him. Under other circumstances Joanna would have found the man “colorful,” with his long black curls and heavy beard, scarlet jacket and high leather boots. In another life, she’d actually fantasized traveling with Aidan to places like Heaven’s Pool, encountering characters like Nurga and inhaling “native culture” while Aidan got his story. What a fool she’d been!

  The chief refused to address anyone but Weller. Back at the lake they’d stood awkwardly outside his tent, clearly expected but uninvited. Yes, the driver translated, a boy tending sheep had come upon the debris of a small explosion over the next ridge. Yes, a jeep. No, no bodies.

  How far? Weller had asked, looking up into the draining sky.

  But Joanna didn’t care how far. “Take us now,” she said with a command in her voice that she’d never known she possessed.

  So here they were, grinding up a path meant for horses and sheep. Lawrence had suggested they, too, ride, but the loathing with which Nurga regarded the Chinese warned that he’d never allow them on any of his ponies, and Weller wouldn’t hear of continuing without the escort.

  The jeep pitched to one side. Joanna saw Kamla brace herself against Lawrence’s knee. The girl’s presence flickered like a question on the tip of her tongue, but she could not hold on to the thought. Up front, Weller grimaced, and a spurt of voices intercut the grinding of gears. Lawrence to Kamla. The driver to Weller. The exchanges disintegrated before they reached Joanna. She gripped the frame above the door and kept her eyes on the ghostly twitch and step of the Kazakh’s enormous steed.

  Then the undercarriage hit something hard, and the driver, Chen, cursed as the headlamp beams swept the wall of trees. Joanna heard a loud metallic squeal. The vehicle shuddered to a stop, and behind them the escort driver jammed on his brakes.

  Lawrence reached across Kamla, addressing them both. “Steady now. Right?”

  Joanna looked down at his hand in the darkness, clasping her arm. After a moment she nodded.

  They’d stopped on an incline strewn with boulders and stones. The trail had vanished. At the top of the rise, washed by the headlights, the white horse turned in a circle. Nurga lifted one hand against the glare and with the other motioned them out of the cars.

  “The jeep’s all right,” she heard Weller say. Chen and the other driver had the hood open. “But this is the end of the road. We go the rest of the way on foot.”

  Lawrence pressed a flashlight into her hand. He’d brought three and gave the third to Kamla. Joanna couldn’t bring herself to turn hers on. The night was cold and clear with a newly risen three-quarter moon and stars like broken glass. The divided silhouette of treetops ahead of them indicated a clearing. From the same direction she heard running water and was suddenly intensely thirsty, but she’d left her canteen in the jeep and didn’t dare take even those few steps backward.

  “Doesn’t it work?” Lawrence asked, spotting her in his beam. She couldn’t see him behind it. The slam of the hood went through her like an electric shock.

  The clearing on the other side of the rise had originally been formed by a river. The bed was now mostly dry, and two tracks in the pale silt suggested it was used at least occasionally as a road. The slope down to it from their approach was so steep that the Kazakh’s horse had to nose sideways, and the rest of them scrambled just to stay upright in the crumbling earth, but the clearing itself when they reached it was flat and smooth—unbroken. Joanna dried her palms on her pants leg.

  Then Weller called out, “Nurga says it’s just around the bend.” He and the others had gone ahead. The beams of their flashlights and the broader glow of an electric lantern glittered through the trees. Joanna noticed the sound of water again, off to the right. At first she couldn’t see the actual stream, but as they approached the bend of a few yards on, what remained of the river curled close enough to the road that she could touch it with her light. The water looked icy and clear. Her mouth was so dry she could hardly swallow, but as she started toward the embankment, Lawrence placed his hand on the small of her back.

  “I wouldn’t,” he warned. “If the place is mined…”

  He handed her his canteen and she rinsed her mouth. The water was warm and tasted of iodine, but she forced herself to swallow and kept walking.

  Kamla moved beside her. Joanna took her hand. “Look what we’ve gotten you into.”

  The girl brought her other hand over Joanna’s. “Mem is afraid?” she said.

  But at this Joanna balked. Kindness right now could devour her. “I’m sorry,” she said, squeezing Kamla’s palm tighter even as she pulled away.

  “Jesus Christ.” Weller’s voice drilled through the trees. Its hard saw-toothed edges launched Joanna into a run.

  As she rounded the corner she saw the light beams tracing a hole the size of a small fishpond. She smelled pine and mud and honeysuckle shot through with burnt metal and motor oil. The jeep lay by the side of the road, its undercarriage facing her. She stopped just short of it.

  Then everything seemed to stop.

  The blast must have caught the front left tire, which, along with the engine and windshield, no longer existed. The gas tank would have burst into flame, incinerating what was left of the vehicle after the initial concussion. Here and there, scraps of scorched canopy fluttered like dead leaves, several of them caught in a spider’s web spun from the metal frame.

  Weller stood turning a piece of shrapnel between his fingers while his men peered and poked at the wreckage. One of the Chinese nervously laughed and held up the electric lantern. Another ran his finger along the twisted door handle. As Joanna came within range she saw the finger come up black with soot. The man wiped it on his trousers. Her flashlight wavered as she passed it over the shell of the jeep’s interior.

  The seats had burned down to the springs, the windshield and rearview mirrors shattered to a fine gravel of blackened crystals. Because the jeep had been hurled sideways, these glass pebbles coated the ground. The crunching they made under Joanna’s boots turned her stomach. She lifted her head. A white strip of cloth maybe two inches long fluttered from a birch branch several feet above her.

  “Where are they?” She whipped around to confront Weller. “Nobody could survive this. Where are the bodies?”

  The consul stretched his neck, glanced at the scrap of cloth. “I just got here, Joanna. Same as you.”

  “Ask him, then.” She pointed to the Kazakh, who sat on his horse watching them from the far side of the blast crater.

  Weller grimaced, but he summoned Chen, and they made their way around the depression.

  Nurga’s eyes traveled from Joanna to Weller as he answered their questions. The two boys who had found this place touched nothing. They had seen no bodies, no bones, no indication who the driver might have been. No cargo in the vehicle.

  He pointed. Even if there had been cargo, he said, it would be of no use to anyone after the fire. His boys had touched nothing, he repeated.

  Joanna’s mind filled with the memory of Ben Eldon’s knuckles rapping against his prosthetic knee as he described Aidan standing on the rim of that other minefield, futilely shooting off rounds of film as if the record mattered. Witnesses. He wanted to capture the witnesses. But what if there were no witnesses? Now she was the one with her eye at the lens, and the only images that came into view were a succession of charred twists of metal, a mangled steering wheel. A tire melted above the earth. And that scrap of white.

  She saw Lawrence step down into the crater while Kamla stood watching from the edge. High above them the wind shuffled through the treetops. Weller and the Kazakh continued talking, but they would tell her nothing. The Chinese soldiers were now combing the dirt with birch branches they’d picked up from the knoll behind them. Kamla found a branch for herself and began to follow suit.

  “Jo?” Lawrence beckoned her closer.

  “He’s not here,” she said. “Nothing about him is here.”

  Lawrence lowered his voice. “
I heard what they told you. One or both of them are lying. Someone’s been here before us and picked this place clean.”

  “What are they looking for, then?” She motioned with her chin at the soldiers.

  “Maybe it’s for our benefit. Maybe they’re making sure nothing was left behind. Or maybe they’re hoping to find an intact screw or bolt they can sell back to our Russian friend. I don’t think they’re having much luck.”

  Out of the corner of her eye Joanna saw Kamla bending over the far edge of the crater, poking at something with her stick. The child’s flashlight was turned on a small square flap, which looked to Joanna like skin. She glanced around to make sure no one else was watching. Then she touched Lawrence’s wrist and switched off her light. They reached Kamla just as she dislodged her find from the soil.

  “Easy,” Lawrence said to the girl. “This is our secret.”

  What had appeared to Joanna as skin turned out to be a small glassine envelope caked in dirt. Lawrence put his arm around Kamla’s shoulders, and the three of them faced away from the others as if to comfort the girl. Lawrence aimed the flashlight. Joanna had already rubbed the envelope clean with her fingertips. Now she opened the flap and removed its contents: a photograph about three inches square, with the lower left corner torn off.

  The white scalloped margin was fraying, the image in the center so badly soiled that Joanna at first did not recognize it. Or perhaps she couldn’t bear to recognize it. She focused first on the rounded hat with a brim like an American cowboy’s. This rode flatly on large, splayed ears. But the ears belonged to a five-year-old child wearing a checkered shirt. His cheeks were wide and high, chin pointed, eyes round and wary. A tooth was missing between lips that were almost, but not quite smiling.

  Joanna remembered like yesterday the hot, muggy evening in July when Aidan took this picture. Simon’s fifth birthday in the yard of their house in Rockville. Aidan’s present had been a set of three finely tooled leather collars and name tags for Simon’s beloved cats, so after dinner they’d gone out into the yard, and Simon had posed with each cat in turn wearing its new finery. Something had gone wrong with the camera. Only one of the pictures had turned out, the one with Simon holding his favorite, a cross-eyed tabby named Willy. They’d left Willy with their friends the Bermans before moving to New Delhi. The cat’s head had appeared in the lower left corner that now was missing from the photograph.

  Lawrence brought his palm up underneath her hand. At first she thought he was afraid she would drop the picture. Then she realized he wanted her to turn it over.

  Aidan’s neatest print was smudged across the back. What matters most, he’d written, then, along the bottom in smaller letters, If lost, please return to Joanna Shaw, 39 Ratendone Road, New Delhi.

  A sound emerged from Joanna’s throat as if someone inside her were drowning. She wanted it to stop, but her teeth were chattering so hard she had to open her mouth to silence them, and when she did that, the drowning sound only grew louder.

  She felt Lawrence’s arms around her rigid body, rocking her back against him as Kamla extinguished the light. He guided her hand to her jacket pocket and pried open her fingers, patting the photo into safekeeping. He was trying to help. She knew that, but the sensation of his breath on the back of her neck was like acid. Her lungs and ribs hurt. She lurched away from him, doubled over by that recurring thirst, now compounded by a wave of nausea. She heard the croon of the stream to her left and pushed toward it through the moonlit undergrowth.

  She slid down the sandy bank and crouched over the water, dipped her hands in it, splashed it into her mouth and over her eyes and cheeks and neck. The cold was like a slap in the face, the taste unspeakably foul. She spit it out, gagging.

  “Jo?” Lawrence called down to her.

  Her hand went to her pocket. She could feel the photo’s scalloped edge. The torn corner. She gathered her wits.

  “Weller’s rounding up his troops. He wants to head back.”

  “No!” She scrambled back up the bank. “There’s more here. Aidan dropped this on purpose. I know it.”

  Her eyes fell on Kamla crouched a few feet away. The girl was using her hands to sift through the dark, damp earth. Joanna looked again at the crater, the distance and angle at which the vehicle had been thrown. The flutter of white in the birch tree. She pictured a body flung through the air, the trajectory arching up and outward. The stream twisted around the point just beyond the birch, and the bank widened.

  Weller and the Kazakh knew this place. Others had been here before them.

  “You’re right,” she said. “Give me back my flashlight.”

  “About what?”

  She took it from him. “Stay here with Kamla. Don’t let her follow me.”

  “Joanna, you can’t—”

  She ignored his protests and shook his hand from her elbow. “Just keep Weller and the others occupied for a few more minutes.” She returned to the water’s edge and made her way as quickly as she could over the tumbled rocks and branches that littered the narrows. Her boots were soon drenched, her feet numb with cold, and her teeth again began to clatter uncontrollably as she rounded the turn to the stretch below the site.

  Looking up over the top of the bank now, she could just make out that ghostly flag from which she drew a mental line to the stream, and played her flashlight over the surface of the water. It ran swiftly but was nowhere more than a foot deep, and contained nothing more noteworthy than a dead badger tucked under a tree root on the opposite shore. She brought the light back to the wide berth of sand on which she was standing. Chunks of moss and black earth and pine needles made a patchwork, as if the ground had been dug up and haphazardly reassembled.

  She found a long, firm stick and prodded the first stretch of ground. The light in her hand was shaking, but she soon determined that only the surface of the earth had been disturbed. She moved on to the next patch, and the next, keeping her eye on the white cloth and her ear open to the sounds of the men on the other side of the rise. Nurga’s voice, low and impatient, now rumbled under Weller’s. Lawrence announced that Joanna was answering a “call of nature.”

  The wide beachlike shore ended abruptly at a massive boulder. She had almost reached this natural obstacle when the breeze shifted into her face. She gasped and covered her nose, took an involuntary step backward and stumbled over a buried log, dropping her flashlight. It came to rest at an angle, so that the light seemed to glaze the earth.

  The glaze shimmered, undulating.

  Joanna screamed. She grabbed the flashlight back and got to her feet as two rats sprang from the moving ground and darted under the boulder. The seething motion, though, was caused not by rats, but by a mass of maggots working their way up and over the leaves.

  She turned and vomited into the water. The first of the Chinese soldiers were stomping down the bank with Weller close behind. She forced her eyes back to the ground, holding the flashlight with both hands in order to steady it.

  A hasty, single grave. The spread of sand and leaves made a flimsy coverlet in which the escaping rats had torn a hole several inches wide. Joanna pressed her mouth and nose into the shoulder of her jacket and crept as close as she could bear. She trained the light on the head of the grave. From under the blanket, freed by the breeze, rose a spray of pale yellow hair.

  3

  Lawrence and Kamla were standing beside Weller when Joanna screamed.

  “Shit,” Weller said under his breath. Even in the moment, it struck Lawrence as a curious reaction. The consul seemed less alarmed than annoyed and, almost before the others could register what was happening, started off in Jo’s direction.

  Kamla had frozen like a startled animal. “You okay?” he said. She nodded, but took his hand.

  From the top of the embankment they could make out Joanna crouched at the edge of the stream, her back heaving as the Chinese soldiers stepped past her. Farther on, Weller pulled a bandanna from his pocket and tied it into a mask over his nose
and mouth.

  “Go to Mem,” Lawrence instructed Kamla. “Maybe you can help her.” The child gave another solemn nod and fingered the end of her braid. Together they slid down the bank, and only when he saw her touch Joanna’s shoulder and Joanna’s arm slide around Kamla’s waist did Lawrence move ahead.

  One soldier held the electric lantern while the others raked at the earth with sticks because no one had bothered to equip them with gloves or shovels. Weller stood with his hands on his hips. He glared at the corpse his men were uncovering. He’s pissed off, Lawrence thought again. This wasn’t in his bloody game plan.

  Then he looked down and saw the exposed head. Shiver of flies crawling over the tongue, necklace of shiny black beetles, the mass of maggots solid as spectacles under the brow. He couldn’t even see where the eyes had been—gone now, in any case, to judge by the hole in the cheek. He’d seen enough decomposing bodies in the war to know that this one had been dead just about as long as that jeep had been lying on its side. In this climate, one, maybe two weeks. Moisture and easy access had given the blowies their way with her.

  Her. Not Aidan. It came to him late, the hair. Long hanks of it pale as straw where it wasn’t crusted in mud.

  Weller barked at one of the Chinese soldiers to check the pockets. The lad did his best, but his hands were trembling, and the consul pushed him aside. “Want a job done, do it yourself. Give me your knife.”

  The Chinese stood back beside Lawrence as Weller kneeled over the body and skillfully slit first the outer pockets, then plucked off the buttons and flipped the jacket open to rifle the interior compartments. Every one was empty, and the movement of insects inside the chest cavity made the body appear to be panting. For all his disdain of the young soldier’s squeamishness, Weller was careful to keep his own hands a dagger’s length clear at all times, and he made no attempt to turn the corpse over before declaring the hunt a lost cause. “There’s nothing. Cover her up.” He stood, ripping the cloth from his face, and stepped back into Lawrence.