The Reckoning

by Jeff Long

  The wind howled and skipped across the canopy’s surface, and the branch moved. The impaled man rocked in space. His brother laid down his rifle and knelt before the carcass in the tree, hands pressed together.

  Molly could barely breathe. The man shuffled forward on his knees, unnerved by the death song, drawn to it.

  “He’ll never last,” Duncan said. Did he mean that living corpse or his brother?

  “Don’t move,” he said to her. “Do you hear me?”

  Stay with me, she thought. But he was Duncan, the savior. “Yes,” she said.

  Off he went, twig in hand, calling to the young man. The brother had entered a trance. He took no notice of Duncan scolding and commanding him. Duncan advanced by inches, touching the road, testing the fabric.

  The part of a man continued singing from the tree, a grotesque siren drawing his brother to wreck himself, too.

  Duncan refused to hurry. He tested each fallen leaf on the road, turning them with the tip of his stick. He skirted a patch of dirt and stepped over random pebbles.

  There didn’t seem to be any possible place to hide a mine out there. The road was all of a single piece, carved flat from a volcanic extrusion. Olivine, she guessed, keying on the color of the word. What a photo. Like the devil whispering in her ear.

  Duncan reached the rifle and stooped to take it. They would need that, she thought. The summer stretched before them, her forest idyll after all. They would subsist on fruit and nuts, and meat brought down from the trees.

  The brother was almost to the water’s edge. There his knee touched the mine.

  There was nothing flashy or pyrotechnic about the explosion, a sharp blast smaller than the heavy booming that had thrown the truck. Mostly it was a matter of dust. As the air cleared, Molly saw that the brother was gone. He had been pitched into the devouring water, though she hadn’t actually seen that.

  Duncan was standing in place, looking off across the pond. He turned to her, and his chest seemed to be smoking, though that could have been the rain driving against him. The rifle was missing from his hands, and his twig was only a few inches long now. He started back to her, more quickly on the return, his path memorized.

  Molly saw the wound gradually.

  Her T-shirt with the mountain-bike wheels was bleeding.

  Oh, Molly, she thought. Amazed, she plucked at the wet cloth and found a small hole through the spokes of one wheel. She lifted her shirt, and the hole went through her bra. She pried it open and looked inside at the top of her white, freckled flesh, and blood welled up where the shrapnel had entered her. The wicked thing was in there somewhere. But suddenly she didn’t want to know more. She let the shirt drop down again. Later.

  “Molly?” She heard the anguish in his voice.

  She managed to ask him first. “Are you all right?”

  Miraculously, the shrapnel had missed him. The gods were protecting one of them anyway. “You need to lie down,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “While I’m still on my feet, take me home.” To camp, she meant to say. Suddenly her legs quit on her. She sank to sitting. The red blood blanched to Barbie pink as it fanned lower across her wet shirt. There was no pain, really. She just had a need to sit.

  She looked out over the green water. Lily pads the size of doormats floated on the surface. Raindrops pattered the glass. That horrible birdsong had stopped. Thank God.

  Duncan materialized behind her. She felt his big hands on her shoulders.

  “It’s only a splinter,” she said.

  “I need to take a look.”

  It wasn’t how she wanted him to see them the first time, clinically, with her on her back in the rain, filling with fear. They were nice breasts, really, one of her best features. She would have liked to make him aware that a woman can blind a man with her body.

  He didn’t waste time with the bra hooks. She saw the clasp knife. The elastic released. She watched his eyes. He blinked. At her beauty? At her ruin?

  He lifted her breast with the fingertips of both hands, careful beyond need, though she appreciated the tenderness. Now she could feel the splinter of steel. It was lodged deep in the tissue, a metal tumor. “Can you feel it?” she pleaded. She suddenly, intensely, wanted it out of her.

  He glanced up with frightened eyes. “I’m trying.” He spider-walked his fingertips across the rest of her body, probing here and there. “Tell me if this hurts,” he kept saying.

  “No,” she said. “No.”

  He ran his hands down each leg. Nothing broken. Only the splinter.

  “Can you sit?” He lowered her shirt and fashioned a sling with his red and white kroma. The scarves were a whole magazine article unto themselves. Someday.

  Then she saw over his shoulder. “Oh God,” she whispered.

  Monkeys were flocking to the body in the tree. They were playing with it, pulling at the clothes, flopping the head. Looting him the way he had looted their city.

  Duncan moved to block her view. “Stick with me, kid,” he said.

  They were massing at the body, fighting over it. She’d never seen such a thing. He raised her to her feet. “I can carry you,” he said. “But it will be better if you can follow me. Can you do that?”

  “We’ll be fine,” she said.

  36.

  The wind mounted, but could not penetrate the canopy. It shrieked and beat at the forest, and great whirlpools appeared among the leaves. But the membrane held, and for now they were spared the full brunt of the typhoon.

  Her bleeding slowed.

  Here in camp, with the terminus walls at their back, Molly felt almost sheltered. The rain didn’t drive so hard. It spilled from the canopy in long, thick, silver shafts, and funneled through the barrel of the ACAV’s machine gun like a cherub peeing. Night seemed near, but she was learning that this was a constant in the permanent twilight of day.

  She lay propped on her side in the thatch hut in front of the fire that Duncan had revived with gasoline and a car flare. He was reviving it all, the whole camp, and their appearance of settling in. In fact, the fire and camp were his illusion. He intended for them to escape once darkness fell.

  There were two possibilities. Either Luke had rigged the mines on his way out, trapping them inside his shell, or he was still nearby, armed with a Vietnam-vintage arsenal, playing cat and mouse with them.

  “He thinks he’s God,” Duncan said to her. “Whether he’s watching or not, he thinks the walls contain us now. We’re like animals in his zoo. But even zookeepers sleep.”

  But God does not, she thought to herself. From the hut, she could see the half-closed Buddha eyes looming in the forest, and they seemed menacing with their wakeful dreams.

  Duncan stayed as busy as a beaver. She watched through the flames and the plumes of rain steam as he came and went, stripping the truck like a castaway. The brothers’ pit, dug to free the truck, brimmed with water now. The prow tipped higher as the truck slid backward into the earth in slow motion. With the machete, Duncan knifed open the canvas covering the truck bed, looting it from the side, lifting out whatever remained.

  He brought whatever he could carry, waxy boxes full of MREs, jerry cans of fuel, shovels, axes, burlap sacks, pieces of plastic and canvas, a screen for sifting relics from dirt, even a pair of sunglasses and a set of keys from the ignition. He stockpiled it at one end of the hut or cut big leathery wild banana leaves to cover it, more stuff than two people could use in a month, much less what was left of the afternoon. She drifted in and out of sleep.

  The wires of the truck spilled from one open door like colorful entrails, tangled by creeper vines tugging at them. The forest had disemboweled the beast.

  “You should fix the wires,” she told him. “You can make it run.”

  He bent to look at her eyes. She was cold again. Shock this time, or her fever? He wrapped a strip of canvas around her shoulders. It was hard and rough and reeked of fuel.

  “The truck’s gone,” he said. “We don’t want it a
nyway. The road’s a mantrap. Our only way out is through the ruins and over the wall.”

  Up the hundred and four stairs, through the labyrinth at night? “Are you sure?” she said.

  “Up and over the mountain. While the storm’s still raging. He’ll never expect that.”

  She wished he would just take her in his arms. She remembered that morning. It seemed so long ago.

  He made a steeple of wood above the fire so the wet branches would dry and burn. Kleat would have been proud. Another few hours and they would have themselves an Aggie-size bonfire. He brought her a tin cup filled with hot water sprinkled with ashes. He stirred in instant coffee from an MRE.

  “Rest,” he said. “Eat. Drink. Gather your strength. If I could just find the med kit. And a rifle. Just in case.”

  “I know where there’s a gun.” She gave him a secret smile.

  He glanced at her doubtfully. “Is that so?”

  “Go to the tree,” she said. “Pull the rope to the side, toward the tree. Pull it hard.”

  He wagged a finger at her, delighted by the trick. “Kleat’s gun? You said you left it in the ACAV.”

  “I did. But it should slide down to you. Unless the monkeys took it.” The wicked monkeys.

  “After dark,” he decided, “in case he’s watching. For now, keep up the charade. I’ll keep salvaging and gathering firewood. And you…you keep bleeding. I want him to think we’re on our last legs.”

  He went back into the rain. The truck had sunk to the windshield. Duncan balanced on the hood and hit the glass with a pry bar. The windshield crazed and pouched in, and he hooked it out like a carcass. Then he lowered himself inside.

  She didn’t like his disappearing into the earth this way. Minutes passed. At last some packages heaved into sight. She recognized his steel briefcase, and then came more boxes of gear and food.

  He emerged through the windshield muddy and with his face beaming. He held aloft the med kit like it was the greatest treasure.

  Her wound became the first order of business. He untied the sling and opened the med kit, and it even had a pair of latex gloves for him.

  It was different this time. Out on the bridge, they had both been frightened. Here the moment was more considered. She watched him trying to confront her breast, and it amused her. He blinked diligently. He cleared his throat.

  Part of his dismay was the forbidden fruit itself. Her areola was wide and brown, and though she was thirty-something there was still no southern drift, no stretch marks, no erosion of her supremacy.

  But also he was perplexed, and she was, too. A broken bone you straightened. A cut you stitched, a burn you bandaged. But a soft breast with a tiny wound? He clenched his gloved hands.

  The shrapnel seemed to have migrated deeper. Again she felt panic and loathing, and again she made herself remote from it. “It’s in there,” she said. “It’s hard to describe. I can feel the sense of it.”

  He tore open a Betadine swab and painted the area orange. She feared he would make himself brusque and surgical and go digging into her flesh. Instead, he confessed.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “It will get infected if we leave it in there, but I’d probably infect you trying to get it out.”

  In the end, he simply placed a Band-Aid over the hole and lowered her shirt and retied the sling. He rummaged through the med kit, picking up vials and packets and reading their contents. “I haven’t heard of half this stuff.”

  “Let me look,” she said. She found a bottle of Cipro. It wasn’t penicillin, but she figured something was better than nothing. She downed a capsule with some coffee and pocketed the bottle.

  “We’ll get you to a doctor,” he declared. He covered her with the canvas again and built the fire higher. The flames licked close enough to curl the edges of the green thatch. But she couldn’t seem to get warm.

  “Eat,” he urged. “We have a long night ahead of us.”

  “Tomorrow morning,” she bargained. “I’ll be better then.”

  “You’ll only stiffen up,” he said. “Besides, we need the storm. It will give us wings.”

  He went back into the clearing to haul gear and further their illusion of staying. He positioned jerry cans of gas and diesel along the walls inside the hut, which worried her. With the fire so close, they seemed like bombs waiting to go off. But she trusted his judgment.

  When everything that could be pulled from the vehicles had been collected, he started making rounds of the clearing, pulling up rotten stumps and hauling more firewood. His ruse even fooled her. Coming in from one of his forays, he dumped an armful of wood on the pile, and slipped the gun to her.

  “You are so clever,” he said. That cheered her.

  The hurricane roar rotated in Dolby surround sound from one side to the other. Logs fell into the fire, setting off explosions of sparks. The rain hissed and vaporized in bursts of haze.

  “How can I help?” she asked.

  “We’re going to need your camera bag, but without the camera. It’s got to stay. I’m sorry. My stuff stays, too. We can’t afford the weight, and we have no backpacks. I’ll need your bag to carry food and meds. We have a long trek ahead of us.”

  She wanted to argue. But they were running for their lives.

  “Don’t make a big show of it,” he said. “Just take the camera and lenses out. Line them up. Polish the glass. Remember, he could be watching.”

  37.

  Duncan left again, carrying on with his charade of inhabiting this island. It was getting dark beyond the flames. Molly wondered when he meant for them to make their move.

  She emptied the camera bag, polishing the lenses, drying the camera, and setting the lenses in a neat row. Ten grand in glass and mirrors. Let the forest and the monkeys have them. The real treasures were her images. Those she could still keep.

  It took a few minutes to transfer the last of her images to her digital wallet. Little bigger than a hand calculator, it held close to a thousand of her best shots. Wrapped in a plastic bag, it would fit into her pants pocket. Duncan would never know. If she couldn’t manage to carry the extra few ounces, she wasn’t going to make it anyway.

  While she was at it, she decided to surprise Duncan with some of his own treasures. Just because he was sacrificing his briefcase didn’t mean losing everything in it. Once they reached Phnom Penh and their escape was just a memory, she would present him with a few of his most precious mementos.

  She reached for the briefcase. From the first day she’d met him, Molly had wondered what it held. The stainless steel was dented and raked with scratch marks. The hinges on the bottom and the lock combination were rusted. She’d never once seen him clean the mud or dust from it. In a way, his neglect made the contents that much more mysterious, because the case was nothing to him, only a shell.

  She raised the lid and the smell of mildew poured out. Inside lay a clutter of papers, photos, news clippings, postcards, and letters mixed with rotted rubber bands and rusty paper clips. At first she only registered the strata of his accumulating. There were decades of stuff in here. The bottom layers were mottled with fungus and yellowed with time. On top, his most recent acquisitions were still unspoiled by the tropics.

  Only then did she see what his newest artifacts actually were, the memorabilia he’d stolen from RE-1.

  Duncan was their camp thief.

  Here was the stolen Hustler the two marines had fought over. Here were the snapshots and mail that men had reported missing.

  She was dumbfounded.

  Here was a page of the Wall Street Journal dated six years earlier, and on it the bygone dot.coms and their stock earnings that he’d talked about with such freshness and authority.

  Here was a monograph on Cambodian flora and fauna written in French in 1903.

  Here was his sketchbook, and it was filled from end to end with mindless squiggles and scrawl.

  Here was a chapter torn from a British text on pre-Angkor archaeology, word for word th
e lectures he’d given them.

  Here was an article from the New York Times, “Giant Trees Hold Ancient Temples in a Deadly Embrace,’ complete with spong and its scientific name, Tetrameles nudiflora.

  Here was the kitchen he had built by hand, the zebrawood cabinets, the butcher-block table, and the panel of green and brown and blue bottle bottoms leaded together like a stained-glass window. Only it wasn’t his kitchen, it was a magazine ad.

  Here was the red setter with the bandit’s neckerchief that he’d grown up with, except the setter and the neckerchief belonged to three children in a snapshot with a digitized date, two months ago.

  Here was Kent State in all its bloody details—in a paperback history of the war.

  Here was Duncan, the scraps of him gathered like stolen homework.

  He had dissected each thing. He had underlined sections, circled faces in snapshots, written marginalia, and then dropped it in here to be layered over with more of the same. He had memorized a life.

  Who was he?

  She looked out into the night. Logs detonated, splitting open with loud snaps and bangs, offering their white meat to be burned, renewing the fuel. The rain evaporated in a cloud above the fire. Eventually one would win out, the rain or the inferno. For now they were in perfect balance.

  Duncan came in from the darkness. “Feeling better?” He began weaving shut the hut like a giant cocoon, braiding strips of bark into a front wall. “Once we close the front door,” he said, “we’ll escape through the back door.”

  “There is no back door, Duncan.” Samnang had woven solid walls to the rear and sides.

  “That’s what Luke will be thinking, too.” He went on knitting the raw strips into a screen.

  She mopped the sweat from her face. Chills shook her. The hut seemed to be spinning. If only her body would make up its mind, hot or cold.

  He was either her murderer or her savior. Maybe he was both, like a Jekyll and Hyde. Was he the one who had mined the road that he was so desperately trying to lead them away from? Could this explain his reluctance to follow Luke here, the knowledge that his other self, his forest self, was waiting to stalk him? But then, who was Luke? The son of a soldier who had lost his mind in the Cambodian wilderness? Had Duncan told her everything already?