by Jeff Long
The captain’s lips pressed thin. Clearly he had argued. Clearly he had lost. “I have been advised to compress the operation to essential personnel only. We’re letting go of the work crew.” He added, “And you.”
“You can’t do that to us,” Kleat said. “I’ve paid my dues. Year after year—”
“Be ready to leave at 0700 tomorrow morning,” the captain said.
Duncan appealed, not for himself, but for Molly. “Without her, you’d have nothing,” he said.
The captain looked ill. He lowered his eyes. “That will be all,” he said.
7.
“Like outcasts.”
The words poured with smoke from Kleat’s mouth.
Molly was sitting with him and Duncan at a window table overlooking the Mekong River. It was a brand-new restaurant to go with the brand-new Japanese bridge leading east. Sunset lit the water red. Fans spun overhead, politely, enough to eddy Kleat’s cigar smoke but not rustle the pages of Duncan’s World Tribune. The starched white tablecloth was immaculate.
None of it seemed real.
“We find their pilot for them,” Kleat said, “and like that, adios, pendejos.”
“For the record, he’s not found yet, only his helmet,” said Duncan. “And one other thing, it was Molly who found him. Not us.” He raised a toast to her.
Molly gamely lifted her glass. Kleat passed.
The ice-cold Heineken was like culture shock. She sat there. Her farmer tan torpedoed the dandelion-yellow sundress she had been saving for just such an evening. It jumped up at her, the sunburn and freckles to her upper arms, then the shoulders as white as moons. She looked half naked to herself. And her hair, like something chopped to Goth with surgical scissors, which was what she’d resorted to. She lifted her chin. Nothing to do about it tonight. Beauty, skin deep, all that.
The sun went on sinking. Only this morning, the sun had seemed like a peasant disease, breaking them down all day, leaving them sore and weary by night. Now, with a drink in hand and the fans cooling the air, she did her best to see the sunset as a thing of great beauty. She tried to savor her postexpedition daze, to relinquish the heat and dust and insects. She put off thoughts of whatever came next. The day was ending. The month. A full month she had spent grubbing after the dead.
Kleat started in on her. This last supper was his idea. Molly had actually hoped they could part friends. Dumb.
“You were told,” he said. “Day one. Their first commandment. I heard the captain tell you. No shooting the dead. Anything but them. So what do you do?”
The scar at his throat turned purple. He never talked about the scar. He seemed to think it spoke for him. Most of the people on the dig thought it came from a sloppy thyroid surgery.
“We’ve been through this,” Duncan said quietly. “The camera was just their excuse.” He was still holding his World Tribune, five days out of date, devouring every word.
“We got pulled down with her,” Kleat said.
Molly sighed. He couldn’t help himself. She only wished he could have waited until after dessert. The waiters hadn’t even arrived with her salad. The restaurant was known for its salad Niçoise. For a month, she had been waiting for it.
“A deal was struck,” said Duncan. “They were given a week to recover the pilot. However they’re getting through those bones, it’s not for public consumption, American or Cambodian. They don’t want outsiders to see it.”
“Get this straight,” Kleat said. “I’m not one of you.”
“I don’t mean this harshly, John,” Duncan said, “but that’s all you are. One of us.”
The veins stood out on Kleat’s burnished skull. He leaned in. “I belonged.”
“I’ll say it again,” Molly said. “I thought the well was empty.”
“You knew. Somehow you knew.”
“She has a gift,” Duncan said. “Leave it at that.”
It was useless talking about it. The captain had been ordered to make a clean sweep. His three guests had been loaded into a Land Cruiser and sent away.
She looked from one man to the other, each freshly showered, their whiskers scraped off. The dig had thinned them. Their clean shirts hung on their shoulders like stolen laundry. They looked like sticks of hard driftwood among the last of the Europeans at the tables around them. The package tours had all but shut down. The monsoon season was almost here, and the typhoon was circling in the South China Sea.
“It was never your brother down there anyway,” said Duncan. “We knew that from the start. You said he went missing along the border. That’s a hundred miles to the east. And this was a crash site. We were looking for a pilot, not a soldier on foot.”
“You don’t get it.” Kleat was plaintive. “They’ll never have me back again.”
The sunset trembled. Thunder, too low to hear, vibrated the window in the frame. The glass buzzed like locusts.
The typhoon qualified for a name, an Asian name for a change, Mekkhala, Thai for Angel of Thunder. It was only the coming monsoon’s daily grumble, but everyone tied to it the angel’s thunder. The restaurant owner had sheets of wood ready to protect his expensive windows. The glass vibrated again. It would come soon.
“I’m sorry,” Molly said.
Kleat wasn’t prepared for that. His eyes seemed to crouch. “Tell it to the captain.”
“I mean about your brother,” she said.
The stub of cigar flared.
“I hope you find him someday.”
“Because you know how it feels?”
“Yes.”
“Not your orphan story,” he said. “Again.”
This was a mistake. “Forget it,” she said.
“No, really. Sharing losses while you gave them haircuts? You think that made you part of the team? We came to locate soldiers.”
“I know.”
“Molly,” he said. “Your mother was just some hippie chick.”
“Enough,” Duncan muttered.
“Why?” said Kleat. “I’m curious. You make me wonder, both of you. We didn’t come together by accident. We draw up the dead for a reason. It was a rough, dirty, hot toilet of a month. You suffered for this.”
“We all suffered,” said Duncan.
“But the thing is, you didn’t have to. I need to be here. And the captain and his team, we have a duty to perform. Not you, though.”
Duncan shrugged. “Just lending a hand.”
“The boys have waited long enough.”
“Something like that.”
“You talk like it was your war.”
“Wrong address, friend.” Duncan flashed a peace sign.
“Tell me, sitting on your campus back then, were they all just fools to you?”
“Not a single one of them. I’m only saying that it wasn’t my war. I wasn’t here.”
“And yet here you are,” said Kleat.
“In the flesh.”
“Of all places.”
Duncan gestured at the glorious river. He took a deep lungful of the air, and Molly smelled it, too, the scent of bougainvillea as thick as hash smoke. “It grows on you,” he said.
“I didn’t mean the territory in general. I was talking about our little dig. Where you had no real business. Professionally speaking.”
“Professionally speaking,” Duncan agreed, “no business at all.”
“Getting right with God? The old pacifist burying old warriors?”
“That must be it,” said Duncan.
“And you?” Kleat said, turning to Molly. Duncan wouldn’t fight him, maybe she would. “Do you mind me asking?”
How could she mind? She was an inquisitor herself. “Go ahead.”
“Just to connect the dots, you know. We’ve got a soldier, my brother,” he opened one hand, then the other, “and your mother. A suicide.”
She blinked at his malice. “I never used that word.”
Kleat considered his cigar, one of the captain’s Havanas. “She parks her baby with a friend, leave
s twelve bucks and a week’s worth of cat food. Then takes a hit of LSD and wanders off into a blizzard. That is what you told us.”
“Not like that, I didn’t.”
Not until it came time to fill out her college application forms had Molly learned that she was adopted. She had taken it hard. She’d actually made her parents—her stepparents—apologize. Then she’d run off to hunt for her birth mother. Over the coming years, she had changed to her mother’s maiden name, and her sleuthing skills led to journalism. That was her point in telling the soldiers on the recovery team, to identify where she came from, not to infiltrate them with a sob story.
“So you found her, and it made you whole,” Kleat said. He wanted blood.
“It took me three years to find a picture of her,” Molly said. She had it now, in her passport wallet, a Texas driver’s license issued in 1967. But no way was she going to share that with them, at least not with Kleat. “It took another two years to find her grave.” She did not describe the miner’s cemetery in Breckenridge, altitude 9,600 feet, wildflowers everywhere.
“At least she got a grave.”
Molly stared at him. From the start, he had treated her like treason waiting to happen. She’d thought it had to do with her occupation, but it was both more and less personal than that. He was one of those troubled souls in constant need of a scapegoat, and for some reason, she’d been filling the role for a month. Going along to get along, maybe. Not anymore. The story was stone cold. Let the bastard go find another punching bag.
Molly looked out the window. The river was on fire with red. Small boats ferried back and forth, the far shore going dark.
The cocktail hour was dying. Soon the waiters would bring their dinner. The evening could end.
A tiny desperation crept in. Tomorrow was almost here, and her future was in tatters. She’d banked everything on the Times. From this piece others would flow, then book deals, and film options. But the world was no longer her oyster.
Kleat was making a quick escape, back to his twelve-cent beers and five-dollar wives. He’d already booked a flight out of Phnom Penh, two hours to the south, for tomorrow afternoon.
Duncan had decided his restoration work in the north could wait until the rainy season passed. He was going to the big city. Though he must have resupplied in Phnom Penh countless times over the years, he acted like Marco Polo about to enter the marvels of Xanadu. He couldn’t wait to investigate its streets and markets and temples.
In short, one of them was going, one was staying, and Molly was torn. Nothing waited for her at home, no obligations, no cat, no boyfriend, and no deadline. It had been too early to plant her herb garden on her little deck before leaving, and it would be too late by the time she returned. There was a friend’s wedding in July, a half marathon for breast cancer in August, her yoga classes at the Y, and an astronomy class up at the university. And bills to pay and work to scare up.
But she was here. Asia no longer intimidated her. After a month in the field, she was toughened and road ready, and Duncan had caught her eye. He was an islander, of sorts, solitary and curious and uncomplicated.
She was going to ask him to guide her through Angkor Wat. Not tonight, but once Kleat left, she meant to propose a short adventure before the storm. It was a whim, one that hadn’t occurred to her before an hour ago. She suspected it might lead to other things between them, other cities, maybe another life, a bend in the road.
She wasn’t quite sure how to handle their age gap. Kent State was ancient history, though Duncan didn’t seem old enough for it by a decade. She had tried to imagine him thirty years ago. He would have had a little more meat on him, and fewer creases around the eyes. But he would have had the same sweet calm. A keeper. Thirty years ago.
She’d never tried a winter-summer relationship, never even thought about it. On the other hand, he wasn’t exactly winter and she wasn’t exactly summer. She told herself it shouldn’t matter. If things didn’t work out, the typhoon was all the excuse she’d need to flee.
The glass trembled again.
8.
The restaurant grew quiet.
Kleat looked at his watch. “Six sharp,” he said. “Send in the clowns.”
Molly turned as the entrance lit with the color of tangerines. Three old monks filed in, led by a child. Bits of the sunset seemed caught in their saffron robes.
She had heard of them. They were blind. The owner let them in each evening.
All around, tourists hushed reverently, even the Germans at the bar. Chairs creaked as people twisted to see. A woman started to applaud, and stopped herself. This was not like on the sidewalks where the amputees and widows leaped out at you. The monks were well washed and stately, a taste of Cambodia to go with your umbrella drinks. The waiters backed against the wall and bowed, theatrical with their white gloves pressed together at their foreheads.
“Tanto quiso el diablo a sus hijos que les sacó los ojos.” Duncan said.
“What?” said Molly.
“It’s an old saying. ‘The devil loved his children so much that he poked out their eyes.’ ”
“Only it was the KR, not the devil,” said Kleat. “And they used spoons.”
She was reminded of Brueghel’s painting, the blind leading the blind, stumbling among the rabble. No rabble here, though. Nor stumbling. The young boy’s head was shaved to the skin, a novitiate. They wove among the tables with serpent grace, gathering their alms, American dollars mostly. Molly saw one couple sign over a traveler’s check. The man and woman pressed their palms together in an awkward sampeah, but of course the monks could not see them.
“The waiters will be taking a cut,” Kleat observed.
As the monks approached, Molly saw old scars glistening at the center of their wrinkled foreheads. Their third eyes had been ritually mutilated. They held their heads high, each connected by a few fingertips to the shoulder ahead of him.
“What, no sins to pay for?” Duncan asked Kleat. He was opening his steel briefcase to get his wallet.
“At these prices, I’d say it’s already built into the menu,” Kleat said.
Molly stood to get a dollar bill from her pocket.
That was when she noticed the gypsy from their dig. He was standing in the doorway staring straight at them. She jerked with surprise.
“What’s he doing here?” she said. The two men looked up at her. “There,” she pointed.
Just then the line of monks passed in front of the doorway, blocking her view. When they had moved on to the next table, the opening stood empty.
“Never mind,” she said.
He’d never come within two hundred yards of them, so why would he be here? His place was in the mirages, along the horizon, in the ball of the rising or setting sun.
She started to sit down, but he had moved, and was watching them.
“There,” she said, startled all over again.
He had maneuvered across the room and was standing by a table with a French couple. He had gray peasant pants and a green and black camouflage T-shirt with ragged holes. He was barefoot. The French pair was not pleased by his presence.
They all saw him now. It was as if he’d stepped out of her camera.
“Incredible,” said Kleat.
The baggy gray pants had once been black. The cuffs stood at his knees, shredded by dogs. His shins were crisscrossed with bite wounds.
Some of the soldiers back at the dig had thought he might be a freelance journalist down on his luck, way down. Or, as Kleat had suggested, a heroin addict lost in inner space. Duncan wondered if he might be the son of an MIA, shipwrecked by a lifetime of hope. There was even the possibility that he could be an actual, living MIA, though no one on the dig really believed that. It was a powerful piece of MIA mythology, the POW who was still out there, or the defector who’d decided to stay into infinity. One such man, a marine named Garwood, had in fact surfaced in Vietnam years after the war. Ever since, Molly learned, the Garwood factor had become red meat
for the MIA movement. They fed on it endlessly. The official military forensics teams viewed themselves as an antidote to such wishful thinking. Their only prey was the bones, though they tipped their hat to the MIA movement.
The stranger didn’t nod at them. He was gaunt. A hundred twenty pounds, Molly guessed, no more. Duncan had said he must eat weeds and insects, like John the Baptist. “He must have followed us from the dig,” she said.
“Impossible,” said Kleat. “It took us five hours by car to get down here. We would have seen him behind us.”
“One way or another, here he is.”
“He’s stalking us,” Kleat said.
It did feel like that. But which of them was he after?
The man began walking toward them. The boy. He was much younger than she’d thought. His blond hair was almost white from the undiluted sun. He had a cowlick and reminded her of Dennis the Menace, on smack. All he lacked was a slingshot in his back pocket.
Kleat placed one hand on the table. Molly looked twice. His hand was covering his dinner knife.
“Relax,” said Duncan. “He probably just wants some of our peanuts and beer.”
The fans loosened the countryside from creases in his clothing and his hair. The sunset lit the fine dust into a fiery nimbus. The French couple covered their food.
Molly expected bad smells, the reek of old urine and feces and sweat, but he only smelled like dust. He came to a halt behind the fourth chair at their table, with the window—and the sunset—behind him. It was hard to see his eyes. A thin corona of red dust wafted from his shoulders.
“What are you doing here?” Kleat demanded.
“I see you out there,” the man said. “Going through the motions. Wasting away.”
“Is that so?”
“Like starved hogs. All that dust for nothing, Jesus.”
For all his raw bearing, he had a voice like the breeze. Molly had to strain for it. He was American, no faking the West Texas accent. Twenty years old probably, going on a thousand, one of those kids. He’d seen it all.
“It don’t work,” he said. “You can’t hide.”