The Reckoning

by Jeff Long

  Kleat tsk-tsked. Dumb question. End of discussion. The fire snapped in their silence.

  The Americans and Samnang dried off under the thatch roof, all except Molly, who could not quit sweating. Suddenly ravenous, she pulled the box of MREs toward her. “Spaghetti and meatballs,” she said.

  She offered the MREs to Vin and his brothers, out by the fire, but they waved off her hospitality, too intent on toting up their riches with a hand calculator. She would have to think up some other way to mother them. It was imperative that they not forsake the Americans.

  The canopy leaked in episodes, dripping like a metronome, then spilling in vertical columns that released here, then there. It was all cause and effect, no mystery. A leaf brimming with rainwater would flip over, creating a chain reaction among lower leaves. Every few minutes another gush of water splashed in the darkness. It would go on until the canopy had lightened its load.

  One of the miniature waterfalls scored a direct hit on their fire. White steam billowed up and the hut went dark. The brothers jumped to their feet. “Ho,” they shouted, laughing. Then the flames jumped high again.

  The brothers settled back along the edge of the fire. The dirt and embers at one end of the pit seemed to twitch on their own, like someone struggling to break free from below. Molly passed it off as shadows.

  Vin was dispatched to offer the Americans a bottle of clear liquid, which he poured into their empty tea cups. Kleat took a sip. “God, you could clean paint off with that,” he said.

  “Not good,” Samnang murmured after Vin left.

  “As long as they’re happy.”

  “The happy part won’t last,” Duncan said. The brothers looked over, and he smiled and raised a toast to them. “I’ve seen men go at each other with hatchets on this stuff.”

  “And us without a gun,” Kleat said. He toasted Molly and took another sip of the hooch and adjusted his flak jacket.

  Molly wished she’d thought of the flak jacket, not for the armoring, but the warmth. Was she the only one who felt the cold? If only they would build the fire a little higher.

  Back in Kampong Cham, they had pledged to turn around at the first sign of rain. There was no question about staying through the night, though. It would be absurd to try to retrace the oxcart trail at night, and the river would not recede until morning. Neither Samnang nor Duncan could predict tomorrow’s weather. Without a radio or even a view of the sky, they were reduced to speculation. The mountain would act as a natural magnet for the first precipitation, and maybe this little shower was all the sky contained for now.

  They came up with every excuse to stay. They pretended the decision was theirs to make, that they were in full command of themselves. They pretended emotion had nothing to do with wanting to stay, that the very fact they were discussing caution meant caution still ruled. But the ruins were inciting them. Everyone had something to gain here. The nearness of the bones had Kleat in high gear, and the marvels of the city excited Duncan, and the plunder wound up the brothers. Even old Samnang had desires. Molly saw him lay out a row of incense sticks and knew he meant to return to the tower. They were all obsessed, herself included.

  It was agreed that the rain signified the beginning of the wet monsoon and had nothing to do with the typhoon. The typhoon might have died in the South China Sea, or it might still strike them.

  The bigger uncertainty was the brothers. Duncan guessed the truck held a half million dollars’ worth of relics now. They could simply drive away in the morning and leave the Americans. It was all a matter of their whim. Samnang said they meant to stay. They wanted more.

  The fire stirred again. Something was under there. Molly saw it again, like an invisible hand moving its fingers within the red coals. A root, she decided. The heat was drying its sap, making the root contract and twist.

  Kleat spread the pieces of the broken M-16 on the poncho. The rifle clip was empty. “Once his ammunition ran out, he clubbed the rifle. How many of the little bastards did he take with him?”

  “I saw that movie,” said Molly. “John Wayne. The Alamo.”

  “Explain this then.” Kleat held up the shattered rifle.

  “We’ve been there,” she said. “If there was a battle, there should be other signs. Not just in the tower, but down in the city. Bullets in trees or in the sandstone.”

  “Laterite,” Duncan corrected her. “Technically speaking. It’s a soft stone when it’s first quarried. Perfect for carving before it hardens.”

  “Other signs,” she continued. “Rocket scars on the walls. Things blown up.”

  “You’ll see. The bones will tell.”

  “They could have left or been taken prisoner.”

  “Explain the dog tags then.”

  “Explain Luke,” said Duncan.

  Circles within circles. The sweat stung her eyes.

  Night was a frame of mind. The ACAV flickered in the heights like a box-shaped moon. There were even stars, the fireflies and sparks. And constellations of animal eyes glittering red and yellow in the trees.

  Like a museum curator, Duncan began delicately appraising the pages from inside the radio set. They might have been the Dead Sea Scrolls, the four curled pages of lined notepaper. Minuscule termites had wormed their way across the pages, etching in their own account of time. Ink foxed the paper in blotches. Duncan teased the pages apart and held them to the firelight, trying to candle out any legible words. When that didn’t work, he gently pressed them flat, and the pages crumbled like dead leaves.

  Kleat seemed gratified. “They wouldn’t have told us anything anyway.”

  Duncan pieced the fragments together as best he could, side by side, and pored over them with Kleat’s big krypton flashlight. There was precious little to decipher: “ ‘…can’t not stay anymore, where else…darkest before dawn, oh, God, your false promise…in the life of the stone…’ ”

  “No atheists in the foxholes,” Kleat said. “The boy was stoked on the Bible.”

  “Here’s part of an inventory: ‘morphine, 7 amps, .50 cal, 3….’ ” Duncan leaned down and ran out of words.

  “That’s all?” said Kleat.

  It took another five minutes to turn the fragments onto their flip side. Duncan found a little more. “ ‘…he was right, but we were wrong to listen…let him go like Cain, but west, from Eden on foot. Maybe we should have’…And this, ‘another visit last night. They come every night now. I know I shouldn’t speak to them, but we spoke…’ ”

  “What’s that all about?” Molly said.

  “Regrets,” Kleat said. “The ‘he’ must have been their commanding officer. And it sounds like one of them got out of Dodge before it was too late. Obviously, they wished they’d never listened to their commander. And they wished they’d followed the man who left.”

  “But who are his visitors at night, the ones he shouldn’t speak to? Maybe tribal people coming in?”

  “Here we go, a bit more in pencil, along the margin.” Duncan read several lines of a poem, something about wild cats growling, wind howling, and two riders approaching. He looked up. “They must have heard a tiger. The monsoon was coming. And they were the two riders, you know, their two ACAVs approaching the city walls.”

  “Useless,” Kleat said. He seemed, Molly thought, glad to be done with it.

  But Samnang bent closer. “Bob Dylan,” he said.

  They looked at him.

  “Yes, those are the final words of a famous song.” Samnang was excited by his discovery. ‘All Along the Watchtower.’ One of my students wrote an essay on its true meaning.”

  “What true meaning?” said Kleat. “It’s plain. They were trapped. They were dying. They wanted out of here.”

  “And yet the soldier chose this song,” said Samnang. “A song about revolution. Why?”

  “Forget the watchtower crap,” Kleat said. “Forget last wills and testaments. What we need is positive identification.”

  “Let me take a turn,” Molly interrupted.

/>   “You have better eyes?”

  She held up her camera. “Let’s see what it sees.”

  She knelt above the fragments and took a picture of the front side of each page. Duncan began patiently turning them over.

  Out by the fire, Doc snapped a command. Hands planted on his folded legs, elbows out, he looked almost like one of the kings she’d seen carved in the stone. His voice was too loud. He was drunk.

  Vin hopped to do his bidding, shoveling at the coals with his machete. After a minute, he levered up the edge of a helmet. At least that’s what Molly thought it was, the helmet that Kleat had found. They were using it to cook their dinner. She was wrong, though. It was a turtle.

  They must have trapped it from the baray swamps and buried it under the coals to roast. Molly lifted her camera and zoomed in. She’d never seen a turtle eaten. Steam vented from the leg holes. The camera autofocused in the witchy light, blurring, centering, blurring. She thumbed the focus to manual and stabilized the image.

  It was still alive.

  Molly kept the camera between her and it. Through its glass and mirrors, she could stand almost anything.

  The turtle filled her frame. There was no mistake. Its legs paddled at the air. Its neck stretched and moved. That explained the embers stirring.

  The middle brother snatched the machete from Vin. He gave a light, expert chop across the belly plate. The turtle opened like magic.

  The firelight pulsed. The stewpot of organs pulsed separately from the light. Alive, still alive. They used sticks and knives to spear pieces. Doc saw her shooting and, with exaggerated hospitality, held up a slippery organ to her. She shook her head no, and they laughed. Kleat laughed, too.

  “There,” announced Duncan, unaware of the little incident. His puzzle of fragments was ready for her. She leaned over and snapped pictures of the reverse sides. A drop of her sweat fell on one page, staining it as black as blood.

  Samnang was frowning at her. He’d noticed her sweat. She rested against the box.

  “Whoever the man was,” Duncan said, “he rolled the pages up, closed them in a layer of condoms, and hid them inside a radio that was dead. A message in a bottle.”

  “No name, no date.” Kleat shrugged.

  “Did Samnang show you the name at the base of the tower?” Molly asked. She referenced it on her camera display. “ ‘C. K. Watts. August 20.’ It gives us some context. And the monkey remains,” she added, keeping her eyes away from the turtle, “more context. We’re not without clues.”

  “It’s a dead end, I’m telling you,” Kleat said. He fished a cigar butt from his shirt pocket and whistled at Vin, who brought a lighted twig.

  Molly frowned. Kleat was acting so oddly, so detached, even hostile to the possibilities. But, to borrow Samnang’s French, this was her spécialité. She was a journalist, a detective. “We know the approximate date of their arrival. We know they left at least one of their vehicles here. They took gear and weapons and barbed wire, and some or all of them climbed into the city and apparently made a decision to hide here.”

  “A bad decision.” With the stogie and the flak jacket, Kleat made a poor General Patton.

  “Once the decision was made,” she went on, “they were stuck with it. They tried to radio for help, but the radio was dead. They tried to signal passing aircraft, but no one saw them.”

  “A lot of nothing.” It was as if he were trying to sabotage her.

  “Seven weeks later,” she said, “at least one of them was still left to carve his name on the tower. We know they were hungry, and despairing. There’s that fragment about darkest before dawn and God’s false promise. The boy sounds so desolate, like there’s no hope on earth.”

  “The only relevant question is where they died,” said Kleat. “I need teeth, whole jaws, the entire skull if possible. Pieces of bone for DNA analysis. Wedding bands, class rings, wristwatches with initials. Words don’t matter.”

  “Of course they matter,” Molly said. “They’re our best clues at this point.” She continued scrolling through the images on her display, landing on the photos of the journal pages. The LCD was chewing through the batteries, stealing from the future to pay for the past, so to speak, using up power she could be saving to take more pictures. But she justified it as part of the interview process. The evidence was speaking to them.

  She studied the images, goosing the light, enlarging sections, penetrating the inky ruins of the manuscript. “There’s more,” she said. “I can’t tell what order the pages go in. And anyway, he seems to have written things wherever there was space”—she turned her camera—“even upside down. Here’s more of the inventory list. And some words to fill in around the segments, and a number on this page, ‘7/17/70.’ ”

  “Three weeks after they arrived,” said Duncan. “A month before C. K. Watts carved his name.”

  She tilted the display, straining to see. “ ‘We can’t not stay anymore,’ ” she read. “ ‘Where else could we have gone? It was finished the minute the TC took the wrong turn. Now we have to live with what we’ve done. The TC gets the tower for his tomb, the first of us to go. And now we know it’s not true that he loved the city more than us. He was only trying to preserve us all.’ ”

  “The TC?” she said.

  “The team commander,” Kleat said. “There would have been two of them, one for each ACAV. But one would have had seniority. He was the fool who brought them here.”

  She returned to the display. “ ‘There is death in the life of the stone. We see that more every day. We try not to notice, but the walls talk to us. The statues speak. The city sings. The eyes see. The rain is killing us. Every day gets worse. We hide from each other, not sure who is who now. I’ve never been so lonely.’ ”

  “Out of his mind,” said Kleat.

  Molly scrolled to another section. “ ‘…he was right, but we were more wrong to become his rebels. It was mutiny…’ And this. ‘We let him go like Cain, but west from Eden on foot. Maybe we should have killed him for it. But we let him lead us into sin. So we were part of it, and now it’s done. And now we are scattered.’ ”

  They were quiet for a minute.

  “And?” said Kleat.

  “They were at war all right,” she said. “You want glory. You want heroes. They were scared. They were boys trying to deal with an ugly, dirty little dead end. And they had themselves a mutiny. A revolution. And then they died off like animals.”

  “Journalists,” Kleat snorted.

  “Something happened here,” she said.

  “How about this?” Kleat said. “Their commander fucked up. They believed in him, and he betrayed them with his stupidity. They could have killed him, but they spared him and drove him out like Cain. The man who led them wrong. He’s lucky they didn’t put a bullet through his head.”

  “There are other ways to read this,” said Molly. “This says the commander got the tower for his tomb.”

  “Whatever that means.”

  “Part of this was written three weeks into their confinement. The rest of it sounds like it was written later, maybe over the coming weeks or months. But one thing is clear, they were at odds with one another. He talks about rebels, his rebels. There was a troublemaker. Tensions must have been running high. Nine men found themselves caught in a cage. Think about it. They were bound to start laying blame for their troubles. And somehow their commander died. Whoever wrote this sounds guilty. He talks about sin.”

  “He also talks about talking statues and a singing city,” said Kleat.

  Molly stopped. “Which is it, Kleat? Either the writer was insane and none of it mattered, or his words are fact, but muddled by time. You can’t have it both ways.”

  Kleat released a cloud of smoke. His steel rims glittered. “None of it matters.”

  The brothers had finished the turtle. They were passing the shell back and forth, sipping the gray broth.

  Molly flipped the off switch. The camera display went black. “I’m going to b
ed,” she said.

  She fit her camera into the bag, got her shoes and flashlight, and climbed down from the hut. Duncan started to follow. “Please don’t,” she said. She didn’t want to talk anymore.

  He lagged back. “Don’t give up on us, Molly,” he said. “You’re right. I don’t know what, but something happened here.”

  26.

  She woke suddenly, in the middle of the night. Samnang’s fire cast a glimmer on her tent wall. Hours had passed. Her clothes had dried. Some second sense told her not to move.

  It was raining again. Water grazed the outer skin of the forest with a muffled hiss. A rain to sleep by, she thought, drifting off.

  Then she saw the shapes. The fire animated them. Their silhouettes trickled across the panels of her dome tent, bent low and ranging their rifles back and forth. The brothers. They’d come for her.

  Crouched like cats, they stole along the terrace edge. She held her breath, looking for Vin’s thin figure. Maybe he could stop his brothers. Then she saw that there were more than three out there. That made no sense.

  Just then, gunfire crackled up from the depths of the camp. Molly huddled behind her screen of nylon and fiberglass poles, thinking these stalking men must be the target. She braced for the explosions they would unleash in turn.

  But none of the silhouette men returned fire. Instead they grew more misshapen, even their rifles, twisted and melting. Their arms trailed tendrils and became vines. The metamorphosis left her wondering what she’d seen in the first place. Pieces of the forest, nothing more.

  The gunfire rattled again in the distance. That much was real. Her knees drew up against her chest. Her eyes squeezed shut.

  The tent wall rustled. One of them was trying the door.

  She willed herself invisible.

  “Molly,” the man whispered.

  He was the dark apparition of Oklahoma. She couldn’t help herself. Be a good girl. Fear squeezed the air from her lungs.

  “Molly.”

  Quiet, she instructed herself. Stand aside. Don’t be part of it. Return when all is safe again.

  More gunfire.