by Nick Cole
SFC HAN, KIA CHINESE SNIPER IN SACRAMENTO
CPL MALICK, KIA RENO
SPC TWOOMEY, KIA RENO
PFC UNGER, MIA RENO
PFC CHO, MIA RENO
PV2 WILLIAMS, KIA RENO
And . . .
LOLA
THERE WAS NO mention of Escondido’s “Auburn” on the map. The Boy traced the highway marked 80 as it crossed the mountain range and then fell into Sacramento in the State of California. After that, the road ran straight to Oakland. Written over Oakland, the Boy found I CORPS. Across the bay in San Francisco, circled in red, he saw the word CHINESE.
He stared at the broken feather and experienced the fleeting sensation of a memory. Which one, he could not tell.
Chapter 19
Horse had not died.
Winter broke and the Boy could hear ice crack in the river below. It was still cold.
The Boy led Horse to the bottom of the small mountain, down its icy ledges, watching Horse to make sure he didn’t slip. There was only one close call, near the bottom. In the silence that followed the recovery, Horse seemed angry at his own inability and cantered off into the forest, snorting and thrashing his tail.
The Boy let him go, knowing Horse needed to forget the incident as much as the animal wanted the Boy to never remember it.
He was embarrassed, thought the Boy, keeping even the look of such a thought to himself.
For the rest of the morning they rode the snowy forest carefully. In the early afternoon, they crossed the river and came upon the great curve of the highway that climbed upward toward the pass. For a while the Boy left Horse to himself, letting him crop what little there was to find.
This is good. We need to be back on this road again. Even if just for a few moments of sunshine. It feels good to have the road under my feet and Horse’s hooves. We have been too long away from the road.
He wandered back to their old camp.
Against the cliff wall, the Boy found the drawing of Sergeant Presley near the snow-covered remains of Escondido’s charred lodge.
That evening back at the cave, as both he and Horse drowsily watched the fire, he took a piece of charcoal and shaved it lightly with his knife.
He considered the wall of the cave and saw no face or image in the flickering light. And yet he wanted to draw something.
He thought of the bear and quickly dismissed the thought. There were nights when he awakened in the dark and the bear was chasing him across the forest floor, and no matter how hard he urged his withered leg to move, it would not. Usually he awoke just before the bear caught him, but there were nights when he didn’t, and in those nightmare moments, he could feel the bear’s hot embrace, and the terror seemed a thing that would swallow him whole.
So he did not need a reminder of the bear.
He drew the mane first. The mane of the Big Lion. The male. That was what he remembered most in the times when he thought back to the night the lions surrounded him.
Next he added the eyes, the eyes that had seemed so cool and yet communicative, and then the teeth and the body, and the shadows that were his females. He drew the female who had watched the big male. She had been at his side, still watching him. They were together.
When the Boy was finished he lay on his back, watching the portrait of the lions, remembering them this way and forgetting the skins and the blood of that hot day.
ON THE COLD morning when they finally left the cave the Boy was wearing the skin of the bear over his back and down his left side. The withered side.
This way others won’t be able to see where I am weak.
That’s camouflage, Boy, camouflage.
They rode out past the bubbling river and up the slope, onto the rising highway.
It was a cold day, and the wind came straight down the old highway, but the skies above were blue. Soon they left the familiar, and each new curve in the road was a strange and almost alien world of chopped granite, high forests, and cold, deep mountain lakes.
‘Winter can only last so long, and life in the cave would have made me weak,’ the Boy thought.
Horse can no longer survive on what little grass I can dig out from underneath the snow. For me, the bear meat is long gone and even the fish from the stream seem harder to catch because there are so few now.
For most of that day they rode high into the mountains, and in the evening they camped under the remains of a broken bridge.
The fire was weak and the air was cold enough to make him think maybe they’d left the cave too soon, but Horse seemed stronger in the evening than when they first began the day’s journey.
It was good for him to work so hard today.
The Boy slept, waking throughout the night at each new sound beyond the firelight.
IN THE MORNING they came upon a pole covered in the skulls of animals and garlands of acorns, a marker set in the dirt by the broken road.
You know what that means, Boy. Someone’s land.
High above he could see the pass that leads down into the foothills beyond. Beyond the pass, the city of Sacramento and finally on to the bay and I Corps.
I could ride hard and bypass the people who live here.
It was later, as they rode steadily up the broken grade, that the Boy realized they were being followed. Across the valley he saw movement. But when he stopped to look he saw nothing. Still, he knew they were watching him.
There was little left of the bent highway that once crossed over the pass. What had not been covered in rockslide had fallen away into a dark forest below. The years of hard winter had taken their toll on the old highway.
Men came out from the forest floor. They made their way to the foot of the trail the Boy was leading Horse down. Horse, sniffing the wind, gave a snort, and when the Boy looked behind, he saw more men coming out along their backtrail, high above them on rocky granite ledges. They carried bows, a weapon he couldn’t use because of his withered left hand.
The men were dressed for hunting: skins and bows. They were dark skinned, but every so often he saw fair skin among them.
Near the bottom of the trail he mounted Horse and adjusted the bearskin across his left side.
At that moment he thought it would be nice to have a piece of steel from an old machine he could hold onto with his left hand beneath the skin. A beaten highway sign with a leather strap perhaps.
He took hold of the tomahawk with his strong right hand, letting it hang loosely along his muscled thigh.
The men were mostly short and bandy legged.
All were covered in wide, dark tattoos that swirled like the horns of a bull on their bare skin.
A leader, long hair falling against the dark sweeping horns that coursed and writhed in ink across his considerable arms and torso, stepped forward and raised his hand.
Was this a warning or an order?
Be ready, Boy, you got speed with Horse, but arrows move just as fast. Maybe even faster.
In the end, he faced a semicircle of hunters and knew there were more behind him.
It’ll show weakness if you turn your back to check, Boy. It’s an interrogation. They just want to ask questions.
“Wasa llamo?” shouted their leader.
The Boy remained staring at them.
In the years of travel he had heard many languages. Sergeant Presley had taught him to speak English, though the Boy remembered that what his people spoke was different and yet the same.
English, Boy. English! Sergeant Presley had barked at him in the first years. One day, without remembering when, specifically, the Boy noticed Sergeant Presley never barked again. That lost language he had once spoken was yet one more thing the Boy could not remember about his people, just as he could not remember when he had first seen the feather in Sergeant Presley’s bundle and what, if any, was its meaning.
Who am I?
Focus, Boy. All that’s for another time. That’s who you were. Live past today and you might find out who you are.
“Wasa lla
mo?” barked their leader again.
The Possum Hunters had used llamo to mean “name.” He had learned enough of their language to get by during their year among them, enough when playing with their children.
The men jabbered among themselves, rapidly, like birds. It was too fast but the Boy caught words that may have once been English; words the Possum Hunters had also used, others that sounded completely different.
“Wasa llamo?” roared their leader.
Boy is what they called you, he heard Sergeant Presley say.
I have always just been Boy. It was enough.
And yet the broken feather from the bundle had once meant something to him.
“WASA LLAMO!” screamed the leader, unsheathing a curved hunting knife. It gleamed in the afternoon light of the bright sky. It was an old thing, a weapon from Before.
The leader turned to his troops, muttering something. The semicircle withdrew. It was just the leader now, facing the Boy.
The Boy tried to remember the words of the Possum Hunters. Words he could use to identify himself.
What was friend?
What was Boy?
How would he describe himself?
He remembered the children being warned to be careful of the bears that prowled the deep woods. “Oso,” he’d heard their mothers calling. Beware the oso. And the Possum Hunters, the men, had called themselves cazadores.
“Oso Cazadore,” said the Boy in the quiet of the high mountain pass.
Silence followed.
The Boy watched the troop exchange glances, muttering, pointing at the bearskin.
The leader, his face like a dark cloud, shouted a long stream of words at the Boy, their meanings lost.
Until the last word.
The Boy heard the last word clearly.
“Chinese!”
As though it were an accusation.
An indictment.
Then the leader shouted it again in the still silence and pointed over his shoulder toward the west.
“Oso Cazadore,” said the Boy again.
The leader laughed, spitting angrily as he did so.
Another string of words most of which the Boy did not understand and finally the word the children of the Possum Hunters had used when calling each other liars.
Pick the biggest one, Boy. When you’re surrounded, pick the biggest one and take him out. It’ll make the rest think twice.
The leader was the biggest.
The Boy dismounted.
Horse could take care of himself.
The Boy pointed toward the leader with his tomahawk.
The leader crouched low, drawing the blade between them, waving it back and forth.
Holding the tomahawk back, ready to strike, the Boy circled to the right, feeling his left leg drag as it always did after he had ridden Horse for long periods of time.
Get to work, lazy leg! Be ready.
The leader came in at once, feinting toward the Boy’s midsection and at the same time dancing backward to circle.
The Boy moved his tomahawk forward, acting as though he might strike where the leader should have been. Sensing this, the leader flipped the knife and caught it in his grip, ready to slam it down on the unprotected back he knew would be exposed if the Boy struck with his full force at the feint. Instead the Boy shifted backward, willing the weak left leg to move quickly. Once he was planted, he raised the checked tomahawk once more and slammed it down through the wrist of the leader as the man tried to regain his balance from stabbing through thin air.
What the Boy lacked in power and strength in his left side was made up for in the powerful right arm that had done all the heavy work of his hard life. Like a machine from Before, the triceps and biceps drove the axe down through skin and bone and skin again within the moment that the eye shifts its gaze.
The leader planted his feet, intending to reverse the knife with just an adjustment of grip and then swing wickedly to disembowel his opponent. He’d do it again as he’d done many times before.
But his hand was gone.
His mouth, once pulling for air like a great bellows, now hung open and slack. The leader dropped to his knees, his other hand moving to the spouting bloody stump.
For a brief moment, he stared at his hand as though this was something the leader had just imagined and not something that had really happened. His eyes, his world, gray at the edges of his vision, remained on the severed hand.
At then he was gone from this world as the tomahawk slammed into his skull with a dull crunch.
There was a clarity that came to the Boy in the moment after combat, a knowledge the Boy had that all his days would be as such: days of bone, blood, and struggle. The blue sky and winters would come and go, but all his days would be of such struggles.
Finally, in the last moment of such thinking, he wondered, what did cities ever know that he never would? Their mysteries would be beyond him. Without Sergeant Presley he would become like one of these savage men the Sergeant had warned him of. And one day, like the body of the man in the dirt and rock at his feet, such would be his end.
Chapter 20
In the blue water of the high mountain lake lay the rusting hulk of the bat-winged bomber from Before.
Bee Two, Boy.
The early education of the Boy by Sergeant Presley had included the identification of war machines and weapons past.
Stealth tech, Boy.
The bomber lay halfway in the crystal blue of the lake and partway onto the sandy beach of the small mountain village.
The village of the Rock Star’s People, they called themselves in their weird mix of languages.
The Rock Star’s People.
They’re little better than savages, Boy. Stone age. Look at ’em with their bows and skins. Speakin’ a little Mex, occasional English, and a whole lotta gibberish. Livin’ out here in the sticks ’cause they’re probably still afraid of the cities. At least they’re smart enough for that. But other than huntin’ and gatherin’ and these huts, it makes you wonder what they’ve been up to for the last forty years. But I’ll betchu’ they got enemies, Boy. Betchu’ that for sure.
Never get involved, Boy, because some stories have been going on long before you showed up. You don’t know their beginnings, and you might not like their endings.
Yes, you would say that also, Sergeant. And yet, here I am. There was little choice for me in the matter.
With the death of the hunters’ leader, the moments that followed the fight had seemed uncertain. The odds, thought the Boy as the leader lay dying, were slim that he would have time to get back on Horse and ride away from the circling hunters. As the moments passed, the Boy could hear pebbles trickling down the ledge behind him, knowing the bow hunters were surrounding him.
The Boy lowered his head, letting his peripheral vision do the work.
The enemy will come at you from where you can’t see him. So look there, Boy!
But in the next moment the hunters lay down their weapons.
The conversation that followed was stilted, but from what the Boy gleaned over the course of the next three days’ march, the hunters were inviting him to their village.
“Oso Cazadore,” they repeated reverently and even approached to touch the skin of the bear.
Oso Cazadore.
Now, high in the mountains, at the edge of the water, the Boy stared at the final resting place of the Bee Two Bomber.
In the three days he’d traveled with the hunters they’d kept to themselves, disappearing in ones and twos to run ahead of the main group, returning late in the night. They’d ascended a high, winding course up through steep pine forests, across white granite ledges, through snowfields ringed by the teeth of the mountains.
In that time the Boy learned they were the Rock Star’s People and little beyond that.
In that time he heard the voice of Sergeant Presley’s many warnings, teachings he was taught and which he’d intended to fully obey.
Except for one.
I will go into the cities.
I will find out what is in them.
A woven door of thatched pine branches swung upward from the bulbous top of the ancient bomber resting on the lakeshore.
And here you are, Boy, gettin’ involved. I got involved once and ended up a slave for two years.
The Rock Star was what the Boy expected her to be. From the stories he’d heard. Stories not told by Sergeant Presley, but in the campfires of the Cotter family and even the Possum Hunters.
Old.
Gray hair like strands of moss.
A rolling gait as she crossed the fuselage and descended the pillars of stones that had been laid at the bomber’s nose.
The small, deep-set eyes burned as she approached him. When she smiled, the teeth, what few there were, were crooked, with ancient metal bands.
“Come down from that animal,” she commanded.
She spoke the same English as Sergeant Presley.
If I get down from Horse, the whole village will attack me. And yet, what choice do I have? What choice have I had all along, Sergeant?
Here you are, Boy.
Here I am.
The Boy dismounted.
She approached and reached out to touch the bearskin the Boy kept wrapped about himself.
He had found a place for Sergeant Presley’s knife.
Inside, behind the skin, waiting in his withered hand.
His good hand hung near the tomahawk. The carefreeness of its disposition was merely an illusion. In a moment it could cut a wide arc about him. In a moment he’d cut free of the rush and be up on Horse and away from this place.
So you think, Boy. If only it were so easy to get un-involved from things. If only, Boy.
“Bear Killer.” She stepped back, cocking her head to one side and up at him. “That’s what the children call you. Is it true? You kill a bear?”
After a moment he nodded.
“You’re big and tall. Taller than most. But weak on that side.” She pointed toward his left. “I can tell. I know things. I keep the bombs.” She jerked her thumb back toward the water and the lurking bomber.
“Bear Killer.” She snorted.