The Reckoning

by Jeff Long

It was one of the terra-cotta warriors’ heads, its neck a long, rounded plug with a hole at the bottom. The jade pebble eyes glared up at them. The painted circles had mostly washed away, but the expression was still ghastly.

  “Is this some kind of joke?” Kleat said.

  The brothers, watching from the fire, saw that the head was safely inhuman. They came over from the fire. Hunkered down by his water pot, Samnang saw it, too. He approached more slowly, his expression incredulous. “Those eyes,” he said.

  “You’ve seen them before?” Molly asked. He couldn’t quit staring at them.

  “Once,” he said. “I can never forget.”

  “The soldiers must have brought the head down from the gate,” Duncan said. “Like Molly said, a souvenir to show they’d been here. It means they were getting ready to leave. But for some reason, they never left.”

  “That’s all you found?” Kleat said to Molly.

  “No bones,” she said. “It was mostly empty. There’s a big machine gun, rusted solid. And these.” She gave him a handful of rotted currency.

  “GI scrip,” said Kleat. “They didn’t use dollars in the field.”

  “And these.” She pulled out a set of maps in plastic.

  Duncan took those. “Nice,” he said. “Very nice. These could tell us where they were going and why they came here. And where we are.”

  “Do you think that’s the end of it?” Kleat said. He tossed the currency away. “Funny money and a piece of pottery and some maps?”

  “No.” She had wanted the city for herself and Duncan. But for a little longer they were going to have to put up with Kleat’s hunger and the brothers’ ransacking. Somehow she and Duncan could turn this to their advantage, but it would come at a cost. The question was, how much of a cost? “We’ll keep looking for the soldiers. That comes first.” His departure came second.

  Kleat held out his hand. “My gun.” He hadn’t forgotten.

  She reached behind her. She planted her feet. She’d rehearsed it in her mind. He would go ballistic when she confessed, would maybe even hit her, but not if she could help it.

  Without a word, she brought her fist around in a long arc. It wasn’t a graceful boxer’s roundhouse, and it wasn’t very fast. His surprise was almost sad. His face turned slightly away. She landed against his ear. The shock of it ran up her arm bones.

  Kleat dropped to the ground with a bellow. The terra-cotta head fell from his hands and rolled across the leaves.

  The brothers fell silent, astonished. First she’d slapped him, now she’d brought him to his knees. It was so strange to them, the alpha-femme twist. It was strange to her.

  “I didn’t bring it down.” She was breathing hard, wondering how it could have come to this.

  Kleat looked at her. His blank expression was changing, the rage getting traction.

  “I left it,” she announced loudly. “Before someone got killed.”

  The worm veins surfaced. “Do you know what you’ve done to us?” he shouted at her.

  Duncan came alive, thankfully. He stepped between them, pressing his back against Molly, forcing her back. He faced Kleat. “There,” he said, “it’s done. Not finished, just changed. I’m with Molly.”

  “You two.” He spat at Duncan’s feet. A drop of blood trickled from his ear. She hadn’t meant to draw blood. She hoped his ear was okay.

  “The gun was a crutch,” Duncan said. “You were a threat to us all.”

  Off to one side, Doc picked up the head and was gawking at the jade eyes. His brothers gathered around him.

  “You’re going back up that rope,” Kleat said.

  “No, she’s not,” said Duncan. “There’s nothing more in the ACAV for us. The soldiers went someplace else. We’ll do what Molly said. We’ll keep searching.” He paused, with a glance at Doc. “And plundering.”

  He offered his hand to help Kleat stand, and of course Kleat pushed it away.

  They ate a hurried lunch while the brothers rooted through their truck for sacks to carry relics. Molly could see the terra-cotta head resting on the front seat, a baleful passenger. Duncan studied the map she had brought down.

  “You can still see traces of grease pencil,” he said. “They went east at Snuol and kept on going. Who knows why? The fog of war. But the interesting thing isn’t the map itself or where they thought they were or weren’t. It’s this little bit of marginalia.”

  He turned the map for Molly to see, and the old, creased plastic reflected the light. She had to separate one layer of reality from the other, the underlying contour lines and typeset names on the map from the red smudge marks on the plastic. There were four numbers beside a circle on a road.

  “ ‘Oh-six, twenty-four,’ ” she read out loud. “Map coordinates?”

  “It’s a date, as good as an entry in a logbook. June twenty-four.” She gave the map back to Duncan to give to Kleat. He was brooding over his meal, convinced they were now the Khmers’ prisoners.

  Duncan tried to bring Kleat into it. “You said they went missing on June twenty-third. This means that a day later they were still trying to find their way.”

  “But to where?” she asked.

  “Not here,” said Kleat. “That’s certain. They were under deadline.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Duncan.

  “Because six days later the U.S. forces pulled out of Cambodia. Nixon was under siege at home. The traitors at Kent State had started a firestorm.”

  She had wondered how he might get back at them.

  “Those were American children who got shot there,” Duncan said.

  “Pawns,” Kleat said.

  “It’s old history,” she said. “You keep going backward.”

  “I’m dissecting an event. Establishing connections. And deceptions,” said Kleat. “History is our clue. Kent State is the reason the Eleventh Cavalry men died here. While our troops were getting slaughtered in these jungles, the college spawn in their bell-bottoms and tie-dyed T-shirts were tying the hands of our president.”

  Duncan didn’t rise to it. He let Kleat vent.

  “Invading Cambodia was a masterstroke,” Kleat said. “Then Kent State blew up and we had to give the hiding places and sanctuaries back to our enemy. June twenty-nine was the fallback date. That was the day the last American troops pulled out of Cambodia. All except for these men.”

  “I thought the motto was ‘Never leave a man behind,’ ” Molly ventured.

  “Within reason,” Kleat said. “But the clock was ticking. This whole borderland was about to return to enemy control. These guys had two options. Keep driving around the countryside. Or hole up and pray. Their commanding officer chose to hole up. He made the choice. Whoever the bastard was, he as good as pulled the trigger on them.”

  23.

  It was high noon, as best as she could tell inside the green bell jar of the canopy, when the expedition split into three teams. Kleat still seethed over the loss of his gun, but the Heng brothers treated Molly like a champion.

  “Rambo,” they said, still awed that a woman could hit like a man. For her reward, they paired her with Samnang and allowed her to keep her camera. Duncan was sent with the middle brother, So. Kleat went up the stairs watched over by Doc and Vin.

  Doc made clear that their first priority was to locate the terra-cotta guardians at the back gate. But if they happened to find American bones along the way, that was fine, too. There was no more strike talk. For now, the issue of leaving was moot, and a few extra dollars paled beside the prospect of priceless relics.

  Carrying burlap sacks and Molly’s emptied-out mule bag, and even bunches of little blue plastic bags like the kind in a deli, the searchers climbed toward the city. Molly and Samnang were quickly left behind. They had the most freedom, she realized. The brothers expected little or nothing from an old man with one leg.

  Every so often, she sat down “to enjoy the view” or “rest my knees.”

  Samnang was not fooled. “You’re a dangerous
woman,” he teased her. “You make us believe we’re stronger than we are.”

  “I’m serious,” she said. “Climbing that tree wiped me out.”

  “Yes, and I have two good legs,” he said, smiling.

  From halfway up the stairs, their camp looked borrowed from the forest. The green hut was already surrounded by the tiptoe of grass. Their fire lay banked under gray ashes.

  They heard Kleat arguing, high above them. One of the brothers, probably Doc, snapped back at him. The argument died away.

  “Have I done the wrong thing?” she wondered out loud. Samnang knew what she meant. By disarming Kleat, she had made them defenseless. They were at the mercy of the brothers and the typhoon and fate now.

  “You took the fangs from a serpent, and left him alive. It is up to him now, what he does with his poison. As for the others, their hearts are still uncertain.”

  “The brothers treat you badly.”

  “They blame me for their miseries,” Samnang said. “That is natural. I survived, you see. Their parents did not. They have poison in them, too. We must wait for them to decide what they will do with it.”

  It was the closest he’d ever come to discussing the Pol Pot years with her. Molly waited for him to volunteer more, but Samnang added nothing. She could have asked him, but told herself it didn’t matter who he had been, only who he had become, this gentle old pilgrim.

  They reached the top of the stairs and found that the others were long gone. They started in among the ruins, strolling slowly, and it reminded her of their mornings, before the dawn, at the crash site. She thought of the pilot, and then of the Blackhorse soldiers.

  “They could have gone anywhere,” she said.

  Samnang glanced at the ground. “Mr. O’Brian went this way with the middle boy,” he said. “Mr. Kleat went through there with the other children.” Children, he called them.

  “The missing soldiers, I meant. Thirty years have passed.”

  “We have a saying, ‘Don’t despair on the winding river,’ ” Samnang said. “Patience. They will reveal themselves to us.”

  They went straight, following a once orderly avenue between the spires and temples and palaces. The tiles were split apart by roots and subterranean forces. The forest blocked their view. Rounding the flanks of monstrous banyan trees, they saw more trees, more buildings. Eliminate the trees, restore the order, and the city would still have been as complicated as a perfume. The canals and side streets and winding avenue formed a puzzle. If the architects had not designed it as a labyrinth, the city had accumulated a labyrinth within it. As they worked deeper into the ruins, Samnang began braiding grass into knots and bending saplings into Os to mark their path. That made her feel less stupid. She was not the only one feeling overwhelmed in here.

  It was a kingdom of eyes, the enormous heads beholding their trespass. Molly tried to imagine the Blackhorse soldiers drifting through the ruins with her same hushed wonder, their rifles at the ready. There were a thousand hiding places in here, and she realized that the soldiers would not have left their bones in plain view. They were jungle fighters. They would have squirreled themselves away into the most unknowable spots, burying themselves wherever the enemy might overlook them. What chance did an untrained civilian have of finding them a generation later?

  They came to a quadrangle in the center of the city. She and Samnang decided it had to be the center. Four avenues met here at a broad square, or park, mobbed with grass and trees.

  In the middle of it all, dominating the city, stood a tower. It was a strange hybrid of a structure, both round and square. It had a dozen angular sides and as many levels, though they were really only one level ascending in a single, steady, candy-cane spiral. A staircase corkscrewed around the exterior, and doorways led off that. The tower rose into the trees. Parrots sailed back and forth to its upper doors.

  Like in the canyon she and Duncan had found yesterday, its walls were carved with bas-relief. The tower was a giant storybook. Samnang recognized some of the images, here and there pausing to press his palms together and bend his head. He explained what he could, the scenes from the Bhagavad Gita and the stages—like the Stations of the Cross—of the Buddha’s enlightenment.

  “This goes back to the beginning of my people,” he said. “But so much of it escapes me. The kings, the alphabet, the battles, I should know them. I’m Khmer. I do know them. Here.” He touched his heart. “But not here.” His head. “This comes from before the Angkor, long before.”

  “Duncan thinks it could be two thousand years old,” she said.

  “Yes, Duncan,” Samnang said. “He has made this his spécialité.”

  “He said it might have been the model for Angkor Wat.”

  Samnang looked at her. “Angkor and this place, or the Sistine Chapel or Notre-Dame, they are expressions of an idea. Like the statues of Buddha, or Michelangelo’s God with a white beard, magnificent attempts to imagine a face for what has no face.”

  “Have you been to the Sistine Chapel?” she asked, hoping he might offer more of his past.

  “In another lifetime,” he said.

  She dropped it.

  The green light kept dimming. Somewhere above their hemisphere of leaves and limbs, storm clouds were eclipsing a sun they could not see. Thunder rolled like a subway train.

  There was a crack of rifle fire. One of the search parties had discovered the gate and the terra-cotta statues. The others would join them. “Should we go to them?” she asked.

  “Are the statues something you want?”

  “No. You saw the head. Those eyes. They’re terrible.”

  “Then let us not suffer for their desire,” Samnang said. “We can stay here, deaf to the world. Anyway, we will see their treasures in camp tonight.”

  They went on circling the base of the tower and came across a name. Carved in deep, square letters among the bas-relief it said C. K. WATTS. Underneath was a date: 8/20/70.

  Molly looked up at the tower. The logic slid together. “From up there you could see the whole city,” she said to Samnang. “I think that’s where they went.”

  “Among the birds,” said Samnang. “Certainly.”

  She ran her fingers over the incisions. According to the ACAV map, the lost souls of the Eleventh Cavalry had pulled into the fortress on or around June 24. If the graffiti’s date was right, the soldiers had languished here, alive, another seven weeks or more.

  The idea moved her. They hadn’t just burrowed into lairs to fight it out. They’d made their home here, and found time to roam among the ruins. One of them, at least, had passed beside the stories inscribed on this wall.

  She looked to see if there was a special context for the name, and it was carved beneath a monstrous warrior, one of Duncan’s wrathful deities, with a tiger circling his legs. He wore a necklace of severed heads.

  She snapped a picture of the name and the demon slayer. She doubted C. K. Watts ever knew this was a ritual slayer of ignorance. But what irony, an American kid with a gun and a knife, off course and vulnerable, unconsciously appealing for wisdom. More likely he’d been taken with the image’s ferocity.

  “That makes four of them,” she said. “Him, plus the three dog tags.”

  The tower reached into the middle canopy. The stairs stretched up and around, offering access to scores of gaping doorways. There would be a hundred and four of them, she remembered. Maybe she was getting the hang of the place after all.

  “I think this will be of interest to Mr. O’Brian and Mr. Kleat,” Samnang said. “They will want to be here.”

  She promised to wait at the base of the tower while Samnang went to find the others. He disappeared into a thicket of spires and trees in the direction of the rifle shot.

  Her watch read 10 A.M. yesterday. The second hand crept. She tried to restrain herself. With her macro lens, she stalked a small white gecko with red spots.

  But as the everlasting seconds dragged by, she chafed. The stairs lay right here before
her. And the brothers might have shanghaied Samnang to carry down their plunder. Even if they released Kleat and Duncan to explore the tower, another hour or two could pass before they arrived. The afternoon was marching on. The tower might go unexplored until tomorrow. And tomorrow was a toss of the dice. It was senseless to wait.

  24.

  She took the winding staircase slowly.

  The tower held answers, she was certain of it. Once it would have commanded a view of the entire city, maybe even of the far plains to the west, a man-made mountain on top of a mountain. Even with the encroaching forest, the tower was still the ultimate high ground. It would have given the soldiers a vertical fortress, with a honeycomb of doorways to watch for their enemies.

  The deep, wide steps spiraled in a clockwise direction. When she was a kid, her stepparents had taken her to Washington, D.C., and she still remembered the marble steps eroded by millions of feet passing up and down. Add to that twenty centuries of rainfall and you had these stairs. The inner half of the steps had melted into a single sluice for running water. It forced her to walk along the outer edge where the steps wobbled under her weight, and a slip could be deadly. But she felt only a growing sense of authority.

  On her left, always her left, the city unwound its maze, a great crossroads with the tower at its center. She spied more canals and lanes and corridors veining off without landmarks that she could see. Even from this height, satellite pyramids looked identical. The place seemed built to be lost in.

  On her right, the doorways yawned like ornate caves. She glimpsed statues and carvings inside, and it was entirely possible the rooms held more Eleventh Cavalry relics and graffiti. Their discovery would have to wait for another day. She wanted to see what lay at the top.

  Thunder rolled through the heavens. Vines hung like slow-motion rain. She came to a summit deck, and it held a crowning structure. Molly hesitated outside the entrance, a final door.

  The statue of a female lay in rubble to one side. Her twin, a half-naked Amazon with breasts as round as bowling balls, guarded the other side of the entrance with a stone sword, its point resting between her feet. Standing head and shoulders above Molly, the sentinel was voluptuous and beautiful, a change from the bestial glare of the warrior statues. She passed on the photo for now. It needed Duncan or Samnang for human scale. Not Kleat. When it came time to write the account, she didn’t want to have to explain him.