IGMS Issue 34

by IGMS

  Evan's free hand, the one with the broken arm, gripped the gun and snapped it into position just seconds too slow to meet the whisper of a cutlass drawn and the pinprick of steel against the back of his neck.

  "Evens? Is, that's' your name, right? We were friends. And just. Wow. Wow, are you good. Slower than any of us and still --"

  Evan felt Gunless was looking at Kicker and Red. Neither breathed. Hearing a voice, thinking in words, pulled Evan out of his wildness a little, and as it left, the pain came. It made him wretch, cough a little, spit. He shook, it was done. His hand was played.

  "Shut up and stick me," he growled, "just promise to leave. Go back to the first place, get killed. Hope the Watcher does you in. Just get it done."

  "I . . . Evens, it's me, Dose --"

  "I just see a Bad Man. I'm not one, and not friends with them. They're the evil and the wrong, the unkind. I call you Gunless."

  "You could come with me, maybe, Evens. We were friends. And you're so young, but, but I can't stop. We can find somebody else -- you could go back. Don't you want to?" There was pleading and that same greed. Naked and needy and throbbing.

  Evan did want back, why would he want anything else? The Other place, the First Place, Before. That was home. That was where everything was right and clear and glowing. Evan thought of Carol, Elbows who might be his friend someday, bishop-men that'd cared enough to give him salt even when they thought he was crazy. No, that was before, this was after. And after was good too.

  Gunless couldn't see. He'd just do it to someone else. So only one chance. Evan sighed, sounded almost like a sob and the cutlass pulled just the slightest back. Either he killed him or he didn't. Probably he died, but Evan wasn't a Bad Man, or a lost boy, he was found. That meant something.

  "I'm not a lost boy anymore, not Evens, I'm found." Confusion behind him, did the sword pull a little more away? "And now --" This was gonna hurt, he hoped the bishop-man 'dult was right and his God liked brave little boys.

  Tense and spring, twist, move fast and trap the sword. How? He had a body. Evan slammed himself backwards. The steel slid into his chest, there was blood in his lungs, drowning him and the sword banged on his cracked rib. He screamed.

  "They call me Weirdo!"

  Gunless' face was where he stuck the gun, limbs already spasming too much to aim more than a little. For safety Evan stabbed the knife in his belly too, but only once. His strength was gone. He squeezed the trigger. A Bad Man died.

  Hobs-gold is freely given and even then, only to some. This boy had six pence of it and he was dying. He was a defender of hobs, and a hobs-friend and a good boy who found himself, but still dying. Laying on a sword and trying to crawl, till all the selfness of him drained out red on the grass and it was like he was sleeping. That's when they came.

  From the trees and the burrows, out of the tents and back to the woods is how they went. Till there were a hundred more hobs whispering together than there had ever been in this part of the world and it all started to slow. A decision was made in the whispers when a tiny teal hob, bleeding from his head and calling himself Jecke, lurched around picking up coins till they piled on the found-boy's chest, adding his own at the top. Heal a boy, seal a boy, sew a boy, friend.

  A big old one with a monkey's face and a white beard and a big blue cap rushed at the boy with a needle and some grass. A few others followed, some with packs of mud and leaves and one with a whiskey flask full of reddish goop that smelled of oranges and sockberries. They had at him, and pulled out the sword, and sewed him tight, and bound his bones till he could breathe, and examined their work.

  He would live. He would wear gashing-scars, and the flicker-me stitches of the hob folk that just sometimes gleam in the light, but he would live.

  They rushed off their ways and fled to shadows in the dawn when a little girl and a little boy and a Nun came bustling like boars through the wood. One of them, and it might have been Jecke-blue and it might not have been too, whistled like a bird to the humans-were-never-lost; and with that help, a boy named Evan was found.

  Portraits from the Shadow

  by D. Thomas Minton

  Artwork by Anna Repp

  * * *

  When Trung disembarked at LAX, the dead began whispering to him. In the underground tunnel connecting the international terminal to the domestic one, the spirit of a young woman whimpered from the murky shadows. He tried to console her, but only managed to attract the attention of a uniformed man who told him to move along. In Denver, the ghost of an angry teen hissed at him as he stepped off the rental car shuttle. All along the lonely road twisting up through the forest of snow-capped pines, lost spirits glared at him from the edge of the blacktop. America, like Vietnam, had a problem with ghosts.

  Trung was thankful when he arrived at Hampton McElvy's cabin and found no spirits haunting it. His fingers ached as he released the steering wheel and sat quietly, trying to collect himself. He had traveled halfway around the world to speak with McElvy. What if the man couldn't help him? Trung wasn't sure he could handle another disappointment.

  He touched the pocket of his jacket. The crinkle of the paper within reassured him. Trung dismissed thoughts of failure.

  After several deep breaths, he climbed onto the porch and rapped quietly on the plank door. The hinges creaked; an eye squinted out through the narrow crack.

  "I don't give interviews anymore," McElvy said, his drawl sounding like John Wayne. To Trung, every American sounded like John Wayne.

  The door started to close.

  "No interview," Trung said, putting his hand against the wood. He removed the yellowed rectangle of newsprint from his pocket and held it up for McElvy to see.

  "I don't talk about that anymore," McElvy said.

  "Please, I came from Vietnam to speak to you."

  The eye blinked at him.

  "I am hopeful you can tell me about this man," Trung said. "He is my father."

  Trung set the clipping on the table between them. Three weeks ago, he had found it among his mother's things after her funeral. Trung had never seen a picture of his father before, but his uncle had confirmed the identity of the man in the newspaper photo.

  McElvy studied his knuckles as his knobby fingers worked them over. Life had taken a knife to his face and carved fissures around his eyes and across his forehead. "Ask what you need to ask," he said.

  Even with the wood fire in the stove, a chill clung to the room.

  "My name is Nguyen Hieu Trung. I am from Vietnam. For twenty years I have searched for my father's spirit so I can bring it home, but I cannot find him. Do you remember this man?"

  The way McElvy's mouth twitched, it looked to Trung like he was having a conversation with himself.

  Trung shifted in the wooden chair. He thought about the money he had spent to get there and was starting to regret his decision. Impulsive and wasteful, he chided himself. Maybe his uncle had been right after all. Why would an American remember a single North Vietnamese soldier he had photographed over forty years ago?

  "I remember 'em all," McElvy said, his voice barely audible. "They don't let me forget . . ."

  In January of '68, I volunteered to go to Vietnam as a stringer for the Associated Press. If you wanted to make a name for yourself, that's what you did. I was fresh off the tarmac when the North launched the Tet Offensive. They took the ancient city of Hue, about fifteen miles north of where I was housed with the 5th Marines.

  Hue was crawling with NVA. Bullets and bombs. Booby traps everywhere, and not the kind that killed you fast, but the kind that took off a foot or a hand or cut you deep enough that you'd bleed to death 'cause they couldn't get choppers in with all the heat.

  I spent two weeks thinking I'd never see another day. I slept next to bodies, with their stink for a blanket. When I ate my rations, I ate death. At night, we'd hole-up in some dark building, and we'd hear screaming and groaning outside. Sometimes in English, sometimes not. Nothing we could do. We learned that lesson qu
ick, when a marine tried to help a little boy burned by napalm. He took a bullet in the neck and screamed until he finally died. Seemed like it took an hour, but couldn't have been more than a minute. We couldn't get to him; all we could do was watch and listen, listen to him gurgling and weeping, as he bled into his lungs.

  Lance Corporal Stillman. Nineteen. He had a girl back in Omaha and a baby on the way who would never see his daddy.

  McElvy's Adam's apple slid up and down his long throat like a yoyo on a string. "You can't learn to survive something like Hue," he said. "It was sheer dumb-ass luck who came home and who didn't."

  Outside, the day darkened as snow began to fall. The yellow light from the overhead bulb huddled around the two men, as if it was afraid to venture into the room's darkening corners.

  "We lost a lot of good people over there, but then, so did you."

  Every person Trung knew had lost family members in the war: fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, millions of Vietnamese people. Many of them had never been found or properly buried, leaving their ghosts trapped in the shadow between the pain of the living and the peace of the afterlife. As long as their loved ones were lost, the living had failed their ancestors and would not prosper.

  Trung had devoted his life to using his gift to reunite families with their lost dead, or just as often, the dead with their lost families. Yet, after years of searching, he had never been able to find the one ghost he truly needed to.

  McElvy's bloodless-white knuckles gripped the edge of the table. "In Hue, I was sure death was looking for me," he said. "I couldn't have been more right and more wrong."

  The day after Stillman died, we got lit up by the NVA. In that craziness, I got separated, which is not a good place to be with nothing but a Nikon F. Not knowing what else to do, I ran. No care for how or where.

  I ran until I got my wits back enough to realize running like that would do nothing but get me killed. I ducked into a building that at least had walls and a roof. I found a dark corner and sat there and shook and shook. Couldn't stop myself.

  About that time is when I saw him. He came in through a doorway from another room. A marine, young, face smeared with dirt and paint, all quiet like. He squatted next to me, leaned on his rifle like it was a walking stick, and that's when I recognized him.

  I thought I was hallucinating or maybe it was his brother. I didn't know. I said, "Is that you Stillman? You okay?"

  He had this look on his face, serene, like the world no longer mattered to him, like he was beyond it all, aloof. Yet I could see a sadness in the tilt of his eyes and the way he looked past me, like watching something faraway, something wonderful that he could never get to.

  I touched his arm to get his attention. It was cold, unnaturally cold, and my stomach dropped out of me like I fell out of an airplane.

  I did then what I was trained to do. I took his picture. I shot his face wide open at a thousandth, because of the light. Soft on the edges, but the eyes were sharp enough to see right into his soul. Right in, like lookin' down a well. Then he stood up.

  I hissed at him to stay down or Charlie might see him, but he didn't need to worry about that anymore. He paused at the doorway he'd come out of, and motioned for me to come with him. Then he was gone.

  McElvy's mouth worked like he was chewing a piece of gristle. "I saw Stillman die, but there he was."

  Realizing he hadn't been breathing, Trung drew a sharp breath. He couldn't decide if McElvy was telling the truth or if the stress of combat had caused him to see things. Vietnam was full of spirit mediums who claimed to have the gift to commune with the dead, but in Trung's experience, few people had the true gift to do that. Most were charlatans taking advantage of people's need for closure. "In Vietnam, we believe the dead can haunt the living. They can be helpful or they can hurt you. Vietnam is a land of ghosts, many from the War with America, and we cannot forget the lost ones. To do so dishonors them and dishonors us."

  McElvy looked up from his hands with weary eyes.

  The room seemed cold enough to crystallize the old man's breath, but only words came out of his mouth.

  After Stillman went through that door, I sat there for a long time trying to figure out if I was hallucinating. It crossed my mind that maybe I was already dead, and to be honest, to this day I don't know if I am or not.

  But I was a photographer, a journalist, and my curiosity wouldn't let me be.

  As I neared the doorway, I heard a droning sound. Some light came in through a hole on that side of the building, so I could see into the other room. It was filled with flies, everywhere, like a cloud of black pebbles. The biggest flies I've ever seen, but then, with all them bodies, what did I expect?

  Must have been two, three hundred of 'em, laying on the ground like they were knocked over bowling pins. Women still clutching little kids, old men with their hands tied behind their backs. Many of them gaped up at me appalled, like I'd crashed some private party. They was all shot in the back of the head, execution style.

  I just stood there, looking, 'cause I didn't know what else to do, and that's when I saw her. A young woman, movie-star beautiful. Sitting there with no expression I could read on her face, sort of as if she had no opinion one way or the other about what had happened. She looked through me, with eyes like Stillman's -- faraway. The pupils big, so I could see right into them. I could see flashes of who she was, her life, like little vignettes played out with shadow puppets.

  My hands were shaking so much, I could barely lift my camera, but when I got it up to my eye, everything just changed. My hands went rock-steady. Without thought, they worked my Nikon's settings: f/16 at a thirtieth, because I wanted to see every strand of dark hair as it framed her face. I shot only one picture; then she got up and left. As she did, an old man sat down in her place. I shot him from slightly above, f/4 at one-five-hundredth, so his face would rise up out of the bodies beneath him.

  More came. Kids with their mothers, men not fit to fight, more women, some beautiful, some not. I never changed film; it never occurred to me. I just kept shooting and shooting and shooting, picture after picture, and then they'd get up and leave and go someplace I-don't-know-where because someone else always sat down. I took pictures until it got too dark.

  Then everything got quiet. No flies, no explosions, no screams. Just quiet.

  For the first time since entering Hue, I felt at peace.

  I sat in that room all night, so dark I could see nothing. The stink must have been incredible, but the whole damn city stank, so I didn't notice.

  I saw him with the first light. Where he came from, I don't know. He sat among the bodies, like a heron in a rice paddy. Sat there, perfectly still. He wore a NVA uniform, and scared me so much I nearly pissed myself. But then I saw his face, and I knew I had nothing to fear. I saw what looked like regret, maybe for things done, or maybe not done.

  We sat like that until the dawn moved across the floor and put light on him. Then I took his picture. It was the last one I remember taking.

  McElvy held the yellowed newsprint in his trembling hands. "I photographed your daddy wide open at a thirtieth. It never should have come out," he said, "but he wouldn't be denied."

  Trung's body thrummed. If he could find the building, maybe he could find his father's spirit, not to mention the hundreds of others that likely still haunted that killing ground. "Where was this place?"

  McElvy shrugged.

  Trung's face flushed hot. How could McElvy dismiss his question? Trung restrained himself from raising his voice. He was in McElvy's home, and as an American, McElvy could not understand the importance of bringing lost spirits home. Trung lowered his eyes as he tried to balance his challenge with a show of respect. "You must help me find that building."

  "It wasn't far from the place they call the Citadel, but I can't say more. Getting there was crazy. Getting out, I was crazy. A group from the 5th Marines found me seven days later, still sittin' there. They heard my camera clicking, and pried it out o
f my hands, so I was told some days later. I don't remember any of it after that first night. Finding that building doesn't matter, though, because he ain't there. None of them are there anymore."

  Trung exhaled a sharp breath. He closed his eyes and concentrated on slowing his pulse. What did this American know? It didn't matter that the bodies were no longer there; the bodies were not important.

  McElvy grabbed Trung's wrist; his cold fingers sucked away any warmth remaining in Trung's arm. "He ain't there." McElvy's eyes had a wild gleam to them.

  Trung pulled his arm away. His chair scraped back several inches with the sudden motion. He had seen that same glint in the eyes of some of the Vietnamese veterans, the ones who hadn't been able to leave the war behind.

  "There ain't no rhyme or reason," McElvy said. "Why does one man die when his buddy next to him lives? What makes good men do bad things?" McElvy rose. In the sepia halo of light, he seemed much taller than Trung remembered. "You came all this way to find your daddy, didn't you?" He retreated into the shadows lingering at the room's perimeter. He stopped at a door that Trung had not noticed before.

  McElvy tugged at the bolt with his knobby fingers until it gave.

  Trung rose and backed away. "What's in there?"

  McElvy pulled the door aside. The opening was a black rectangle etched on the darkness. Without answering, McElvy stepped through the doorway and was gone.

  Silence settled on the room like a snowfall. Trung hugged his arms and shivered. Out the window, snow collected on the windshield of his rental car. At the rate it was sticking, the road would soon be impassible, and he would be trapped here. Trung became uncomfortably aware of how little he knew about McElvy or his prejudices.