by Jeff Long
“We thought you’d turned around,” he said. She saw him look at the scarf Duncan had placed around her neck. He made his assumptions.
“We’ll make camp here,” Duncan announced. He had a tent sack in his hands.
“Sleep?” said Kleat. “The sun comes up in two hours.”
“But the light will lag behind in here. That’s triple canopy above us. For now, we need to rest.”
“I will instruct the men,” said Samnang. He had no weapons Molly noted.
He held out his hand for the tent. It was an important moment. The old man with one leg was anointing Duncan, not Kleat, as their leader. He issued an order to the brothers, who took the tents and hurried toward the ledges.
Kleat carefully laid aside a shovel. Nodding his head, he measured the alliances. His eyes flickered at the brothers moving in and out of the headlights. He studied Molly. “By all means,” he said, “sleep.”
Molly went to the back of the truck for her mule bag, a huge black duffle made of ripstop nylon, to root for her warmest clothes. For a month, she’d smothered in heat so thick men fell over in it. Now the slight mountain chill had her trembling, even as sweat trickled down her neck. She wished her body would make up its mind, hot or cold. A mountain girl, she knew to layer clothing and find the equilibrium.
There had been no time to sort her laundry at the hotel before their farewell dinner. Unzipping the bag was like opening a dead animal. Bad smells rushed from the interior, and when she thrust her arm inside, the contents were still warm and clammy from the dig. She grabbed the first thing that came to hand, the Vicious Cycles T-shirt, and pulled it over her sundress. It smelled like a hunter’s buckskin with her body odor and weeks of soil and Off! Deep Woods cooked into the threads. Deodorant and regular mosquito spray only attracted the bugs, and she’d quickly gone native with the soldiers.
She pulled on a second shirt, then found her Gramicci climbing pants still bloodstained from her encounter with the cockpit metal. The canvas thigh was sewn back together with bright pink thread, prettier than the scar on her leg.
She wasted another minute rummaging for her toilet kit, but it was too dark to find it or, more likely, Kleat had not bothered to pack it for her. She’d have to brush her teeth with a twig. Maybe Duncan would loan her some toothpaste to use with her finger.
The Heng brothers were bustling along the terrace ledges above, farther away than she would have liked. Their lights looked small and moved rapidly up there as they assembled tents for the Americans. Molly guessed they would sleep in the back of the truck, and that would have suited her fine. But Duncan had won his showdown with Kleat, and she wasn’t about to scramble the outcome with any complaints.
She returned to the crisscross of headlights looking like a bag lady, the sundress half buried by shirts on top, toting her camera bag, pants, and a neoprene sleeping pad. Heading into the tropics, she hadn’t thought to bring a sleeping bag, and her final act before leaving the dig site had been to give her sheets to a Khmer family. She could manage with her own body heat for the next couple of hours. In the morning, she’d see what covering the brothers might spare.
“I’m ready,” she said.
Kleat had already started up the staircase to the tent ledges.
“In the morning,” Duncan promised, “it will all look different.”
14.
The birds woke her.
Her eyes came open.
She found herself curled in a fetal ball on the sleeping pad. In her sleep sometimes, her knees would pull up and she would roll onto her right side like this. It was an old arrangement of her limbs, an occasional habit. It happened in times of stress and signified surrender.
Not moving a muscle, she wondered, Surrender to what? What had her ears heard while she lay sleeping?
With her higher shoulder draped with Duncan’s red and white kroma and her head pillowed on the camera bag, she listened to the birds. She listened closely, but could not connect to their alien song. The whistling and clatters and caws were more like a secret code.
She went on hugging her knees, sifting for a clue. The long ride had pummeled her, that and the hard ground and scant sleep. She ached. Even the image of those ancient stairs rising up through the night could not budge her.
Her plastic Timex said 0730, military time. Kleat was right. Maybe they should have stayed awake. Three hours of sleep felt worse than no sleep at all.
She lay there, assembling the world. At this hour yesterday, they’d been starting into exile from the crash site. Last night they’d eaten dinner in a restaurant. The colors were vivid, the red lobster, the black dirt on the white tablecloth, the sunset. The details crowded in like eager children. The moonlit highway, the green grass, the silver stream, the frogs, the fortress walls.
But none of that explained why her body was afraid. Had she heard something in her sleep? Was there danger out there?
Her fetal curl was like an early warning device. She knew it all too well. There was no controlling it; she’d tried. The trauma posture would seize her in her sleep, a dream signal that something threatened. It stemmed from tension sometimes, or simply vague bad vibes. Usually it was just echo behavior, residue from Oklahoma. Boyfriends complained that they could not hold her at night. She would clench into an animal ball at the edge of the bed, as far from them as possible. It’s not you, she would explain in the morning, but then would explain no more. It freaked them out. They felt like monsters. One by one, they always left her.
Lying on her tent floor, Molly did everything in her power to stay in the moment and feel for any real menace. Recycling the past was a dead end. She’d been through it so many times with therapists. But memory has a mind of its own. This morning, spent and dull, with her bones arranged just so, she was too weak to stop it. From deep inside, it rose to the surface. Oklahoma mounted her all over again.
It was April, thirteen years past, the morning after.
I don’t want you, she thought. But the memory pinned her.
The playground grass was brittle and yellow and rimed with frost. Like this, exactly like this, on her right side, eyes open, she had watched the town come awake. The cold sun climbed. A man stocked the newspaper box. After a time, a school bus had passed. No one noticed the bundle of rags in the park. It was mid-morning before the lady who owned the stationery store saw her and called the police.
They never did find the guy. They never really looked. He was just another nomad like her. Like her, he’d given up trying to thumb a ride the night before and had walked to the town park to find a little shelter. That’s where they’d met.
She didn’t have to be bumming rides. Her parents would have given her the money if they’d known how serious she was. But part of the exercise in running away was to hurt them the way they’d hurt her. It was stupid. They loved her more than their own lives. They said that over and over. And yet they had confined her in a fiction for all her conscious life, and how loving was that? In running off to search for her birth mother, she had invited suffering for them all.
They treated her like one more case of the suburban blues. The ER nurses were kind. They swabbed her with Q-tips and cleaned her cuts. One of the cops said that it wasn’t what you would call an actual rape. She’d overheard him outside the ER room. These kids, he said, they couple up on the road and then something goes sour and all of a sudden it’s a 911. She just doesn’t like how it turned out.
His words had made her wonder. After the first few minutes, it was true that she’d just let the attack happen. She had quit fighting and stood off to one side and watched him go at her underneath the swing set. She’d heard of out-of-body experiences. It was true. She’d quit smelling his breath and tasting the canned spaghetti on his teeth.
When he was done, she’d gone back into herself. Her knees had drawn up into her chest like rawhide constricting. She’d hugged herself through the dawn.
She heard her name. “Molly.”
She thought it was pa
rt of the memory. He’d asked her name. He’d shared his SpaghettiOs before doing it.
When the cop had come in to take a description, he’d asked her for her parents’ phone number. In that instant, Molly had realized that her search could end right there. She could return to their sunny fiction, defeated by reality. Or she could accept the ugliness and get on with her journey.
He’d fucked her so hard she could barely stand. But she somehow got to her feet and took the cop’s report and crumpled it into a ball to drop at his feet. With blood leaking down her thighs and one eye swollen shut, she told him, sure, she’d made it up. They released her that afternoon.
Only later, years later, did it occur to her that the animal who’d mounted her that night might have been her own father. Not her very father, of course, but a man like him. Because who could say what violence her poor mother had accepted in the name of love? Who could say where she’d come from?
“Molly.”
This time the birds fell silent.
She listened. Men were calling her from far away. She clung to the sound of her name. “Moll-lee.”
She stirred.
She felt earthbound. It took an act of will to get her hands to let go and her legs to straighten. Oklahoma faded. She sat up in the center of the tent.
It was her home away from home, the same dome tent she’d used to grand-slam Colorado’s fourteeners and photograph the Pleiades meteor shower and sleep by high lakes and wake to vistas of light. Only this morning, she noticed, it had leeches.
Their silhouettes showed through the fabric. They were as graceful as dancers waving their bodies out there. She passed her hand underneath them and they bent to her chemical signature or whatever leeches go for. At the recovery site, she’d never seen more than a few at a time. The forest was more abundant. Here they waited for her by the dozens.
Unconcerned, Molly put herself together, what little there was to put together. She pulled off the layers of shirts and quickly shed the sundress and pulled the shirts back on and tightened the belt on her canvas pants. She folded the yellow dress and laid it in one corner. If all else failed, it could serve as her blanket tonight.
Shedding the night, warming up, she rolled her shoulders and tried a simple yoga position. But the voices called her again, dragging the syllables out, like grappling hooks. Did they think she was lost?
“Moll-lee.”
They wanted to start their morning, though the day was still dim, with no hint of eastern light. “Coming,” she said under her breath.
She tried rattling the tent to shake the leeches loose, but that only agitated them. She reminded herself that they were slow, blind and mindless. A little haste on the exit was all that was needed.
She scooted to the door, arranged her camera bag, and wrapped Duncan’s scarf around her head. On three, she pulled down the zipper. Feet first, she slipped out through the opening and, that quickly, her African Queen moment was over.
Now that she was standing outside, there were even more leeches than she’d thought. The tent wall was covered with them, glistening and stretching for her, maybe not so mindless or blind after all. She zipped the door as tight as a drum to prevent any bedtime surprises, and made a note to get her hands on a flashlight.
Blue mist had replaced last night’s patchy fog. Her tent stood on a wide stone ledge, and below that she could just make out another ledge. The men were invisible down by the trucks, but she could smell their cook fire and coffee and cigarettes wafting up. Oddly, their voices were coming from above. Could they have started exploring without her? Kleat wouldn’t care, but surely Duncan would have come to wake her. They were in this thing together.
The stone terrace was cool and slippery under her bare feet. Her shoes were somewhere in the mule bag, a first order of business once she got down. Her flip-flops were set at the entrance to the tent, or at least one of them was. The other had been tipped upside down during the night.
Ordinarily she wouldn’t have noticed, but local custom had seeped into her habits. It wasn’t just a matter of taking off your shoes or sandals when entering a temple or someone’s house. Footwear was always positioned neatly, side by side, and always upright. Even Samnang was superstitious about such things. And so she’d very exactly placed her sandals with the soles flat to the ground before climbing into the tent last night.
The culprit was a thin green shoot of bamboo that had grown up through a joint between the stones. It was three inches high, and she definitely hadn’t seen it there last night. There was only one explanation. The bamboo had sprouted through the crack while she was sleeping, tipping her sandal out of its way. She pressed at the sharp nub, charmed in a way. Duncan was right. Things grew fast in the rain forest.
“Moll-lee.” They were up there all right, and it was more than one voice calling her to join them. Possibly there hadn’t been time to wake her. Duncan could be trying just to keep abreast of Kleat’s predation. What were they finding?
15.
Slipping her sandals on, Molly shouldered her camera bag and hustled along the ledge toward the stairs. A red tent materialized on the lower shelf, then atomized in the mist. Giant airborne faces floated off to her right, their tonnage elevated by dharma smiles. Invisible animals shifted in the brush. Dewdrops hung like jewels.
She glanced up the steps, tempted by the pale brightening in the upper forest. Instead she started down into the thick of the mist where coffee was brewing and her socks and shoes waited in the truck. A quick cup of St. Joseph, then the proper footgear, and she’d double-time the staircase. With her long legs and jogger’s lungs, she’d overtake the men before the amazement died from their eyes. The mist would bead her lenses, but this green light was gorgeous. You couldn’t get more saturated color. She wanted to sprint down the steps, but they were steep and greasy with moss, forcing her to pick her way carefully.
She passed two more ledges, expecting the white Land Cruiser or the truck and the fire to appear, but the mist concealed them. Reaching the ground, she worked across her memory of the clearing. The floor had a slight tilt to it, to drain off the rain no doubt.
Trees bulged up, sudden immense pillars that evaporated overhead. Molly looked up and stopped, not trusting her eyes. Twenty feet above the ground, the remains of a name seemed to hover in the mist. She went closer and it disappeared. She backed away and it reappeared, letters carved into the skin of the tree. Years of growth had lifted them high, and their once neat incisions were stretched apart and rutted and ribbed. The scars were only slightly lighter than the smooth bark, and the wood had absorbed whole sections.
She circled around the base of the tree. “Helen,” the letters said. She went a little farther, and found a final a. Helena.
The Blackhorse soldiers had been here.
She turned to another tree, and the name Barbara hung in the mist. There was an Ada and an Emma and a Rosita, each upon its own tree. She was in a forest of lovers. The men had taken their knives to the trees and left this much of themselves. It was magical. How much more was hidden in here?
She would have gone on wandering, but after another few minutes, she saw the fire’s orange glow. Its heat had melted an opening in the mist.
Vin and his two brothers were squatting on a ledge above the bright orange flames, their eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep or from the wood smoke. They did not look like happy campers. Propped within easy reach against a fallen tree, their rifles gave them the air of bounty hunters.
“Ah-roon soo-ah-s’dai,” she tried. But none flashed his golden teeth for her this good morning, not even Vin. She blamed her awful accent. She was a total linguistic cripple. Some days, faced with her blank screen and a couple of thousand words to crank out, she could barely manage the King’s English.
A little distance off, Kleat and Duncan were leaning over a squared foundation stone strewn with rolled maps, and that was strange. She’d heard them calling her from above. Samnang was here, too, hunkered inside the pall of smoke l
ike a gnome, his plastic leg stowed away from the fire. She shrugged. So the forest had wiggy acoustics.
Kleat was stabbing at the forest and the sky and the map. By this point, she would have been surprised if they weren’t arguing. Whatever the concern, Duncan appeared to find it pressing, too. He glanced at Molly, then returned his attention to Kleat.
That left Samnang as her official greeter. “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” he said, welcoming her. “I have for you a coffee.”
“Is that how you keep all your wives so happy?” she said.
Samnang smiled. He had no wife or family. He had no one. The wars had eaten them all, and she knew it. But they could—and did—pretend. She played his saucy American daughter. The light would come on in his brown face.
He reached through the fire for the covered pot and poured the coffee into a white teacup on a white saucer. Probably he’d brought it from his own kitchen, probably just for her. He knew she liked it black, but went through his daily ritual of offering her sugar.
For all its noisy crackling and the billowing white smoke, the fire was a small thing. The wood was green. It was a miracle the stuff had lit at all. Then she saw the jerry can of fuel, their miracle, parked behind a stump.
“Ar kun,” she said, thanking him, and sat underneath the plume of smoke by his side. The fire was warm. “I didn’t mean to sleep so late.”
“No matter,” Samnang said. “You see this mist. Duncan said to let you sleep.”
Then why, she wondered, call her name? “Will the mist lift soon?”
“The forest decides these things.” He looked more closely at her. “Be still a moment, please.” He reached over.
She knew without asking what it was. The leech clung to the skin of her throat before coming away. She touched the spot, and her finger came away bloody. She looped the kroma around her neck to hide the tiny wound.