by Jeff Long
Molly struggled to piece it together. Sweat poisoned her vision. The smoke was hard to breathe. While she was still able to aim the gun, she had to judge this man. Should she confront his fiction or let herself raft along on it and hope for the best? Would he confess his mimicry or stick to his innocence? Or was he so insane that he was incapable of guilt anymore? And what about her? If it came down to it, could she pull the trigger?
He didn’t look like a monster sitting there, weaving strips of green bark. But he was Oklahoma all over again, sharing some food and talk while they waited for the night to pass and the highway to carry them on. This very morning she had lain in his arms and spun a romance in her head. She had trusted him.
She gripped the gun. This had to be done. “Who are you?” she asked.
He looked up with his farm-boy smile. “Me?”
She kept the gun along her leg, out of sight.
“I looked in your briefcase,” she said.
He looked at the briefcase and back at her. He was confused. “Yes?”
“I know who you’re not,” she said. “I want to know who you are.”
“Molly?”
She had made a mistake. She didn’t have the strength for this. He was too practiced at his masquerade, or too far over the edge. But she had started it now. “I’m trying to understand,” she said.
“What is it?” He was earnest. He pulled the briefcase onto his lap and opened it. He lifted up papers, his sketchbook of nonsense, someone’s plastic booklet of snapshots from MotoPhoto, a decomposing British passport, a plastic badge that said UNTAC. He saw what she had seen, and none of the musty pile seemed out of order to him. Was he more harmless out of his mind than in it?
“Where did you get those things, Duncan?”
He frowned, trying to grasp her point. “My documents?” He spoke without a hint of self-defense.
“Are these your children?”
“My children?”
“In that photo of the setter.”
He studied it. A frown appeared. He had not seen the children before. Then his eyes clarified. “You mean my brother and sisters,” he said. “With Bandit. He was a dog’s dog. There’s his scarf I told you about.” He showed her.
“But you’re not in the photo,” she said.
He looked at it again. He thought. “Dad was teaching me how to use the camera.”
“How old were you?”
“Gee, probably eight. I liked Cheerios.” There was a box of Cheerios in another photo.
“Duncan.” She didn’t know what else to call him. “Look at the date.”
He couldn’t see it. He opened one hand helplessly.
“The digital numbers along the side,” she said. “It was taken two months ago.”
His lips moved. He held the photo closer and rubbed at the date with his thumb. Then he flinched.
His face aged. It was the firelight shifting, she thought. The laugh lines turned into deep creases. His forehead blossomed with worry.
“What’s this?” he muttered.
“I thought you could tell me.”
He was trying to think. The date confounded him. Plainly, he’d never seen the children before. He’d plagiarized the photo for a dog, nothing more. Where was the harm in that?
He pawed through more of his documents. The Hustler spilled open, all tits and labia. Postcards, photos, yellow news clippings.
“How long have you been doing this?” she asked.
“How long, what?” He was disoriented.
She chose her words carefully. No harsh accusations. He looked so frail suddenly. “Borrowing,” she said. “Stitching together a masquerade.”
“Molly?” He spoke her name as if it were a lifeline.
She wanted to believe in him. Amnesia would pardon him. It would make him a virgin almost, an understudy to everyone he’d ever stolen from. That would make sense of the skin mag and its nudes and all the rest. He was simply trying to catch up with the world.
She kept hold of the gun. Someone had planted those mines on the bridge. Someone had trapped them in here.
The light twisted again, and his face drew into itself. It didn’t collapse exactly, but some aspect of him seemed hollowed out. The shadows were invading. The furnace blast of light dimmed.
The rain, she despaired, not taking her eyes from him. It was winning. She’d made a mistake. Wounded and ill, she’d chosen the middle of a storm at the beginning of night to unlock this man’s asylum.
“The fire,” she said to him. If she could keep the light strong, if she could keep Duncan occupied, if she could wear him down, if she could make it to dawn, some opening would present itself.
He peered at her. His eyes had a glaze to them, a cataract glaze. Old, she thought again. “Sorry?” he said.
“The fire needs more wood.”
“Yes, I’ll do that.” He spoke softly. He sounded broken inside.
It took willpower not to reach across and pat his arm. He had saved her time and again. She didn’t want to have to pronounce sentence on him. What difference was there between an angel and the devil except for a fall from grace? Was it his fault that he had stumbled among the ruins?
He closed his briefcase and laid aside the plaited strips of bark. He brushed his legs clean. His big hands looked thinned. The fingers trembled.
He had never seemed frail to her. Her heart was racing. Had she broken his mind? Or was he only pretending…again?
He started to scoot out through the doorway, then stopped. Something stopped him.
Molly tightened her grip, praying he wouldn’t turn to her. But he kept staring ahead. She darted a glance through the doorway.
Luke was out there, waiting for them on the far side of the fire.
38.
Duncan’s steeple of logs collapsed. Sparks and steam erupted. Molly turned her face away from the fiery heat, and when she looked again, the flames were strong and Luke was still there.
He stood so close to the fire his rags of clothing were smoking. His shirt had torn open, exposing one very white shoulder, his mortality on display. The rain poured off the planes of his face as if over ceramic. His hair was gone. He’d shaved himself bald.
He was the trickster, all along. Who else? Their captor. The devil.
Duncan was frozen. He couldn’t move. It occurred to her that he was Duncan’s monster. Or his master. Which was it?
As a photographer, she’d learned to shoot first, ask later. But that was with photos. And what if she was wrong? She kept Kleat’s Glock hidden behind her thigh.
“Where have you been, Luke?” she said. “We missed you.”
Luke didn’t answer. He was staring at Duncan. Into Duncan.
“You had us worried,” she said. “We called for you. We thought you’d left.”
“Our wandering brother.” Luke spoke to Duncan. Brother, not father. And Duncan had left, she understood. But now was back.
She tried bravado. “What the hell do you want?”
She brought the gun up from its hiding place. It held Kleat’s bidding in it, like a spirit resident. How else could she explain pointing it at another human being? This was her hand, but it couldn’t possibly be her willpower. The gun found its perch in the space between them.
“Did you lay those mines?” she said.
Luke turned to look at her. She remembered his eyes in the restaurant, cornflower blue. Now they were rolled up into his head, only the whites of them showing. She’d known a prisoner who did that. Every time she started to snap his picture, he would roll his eyes into his skull, a one-man Black Sabbath.
“You have a job to do,” he said to her. Just as she’d feared, they weren’t being allowed to leave.
“Duncan,” she pleaded. She didn’t know what to demand with this weapon. A declaration of guilt? A promise of aid? Surrender? An end to the war? Say something, she thought to Duncan. But he was connected to Luke, or Luke to him.
“We saw what you did to the bones,” she said
.
“There’s more,” he promised. More carnage? Or bones?
A movement caught her eye. The darkness shifted over Luke’s shoulder. She squinted through the flames. Animal eyes flickered in and out of view. A shape climbed down from the trees, then another. The monkeys were descending, she thought. Becoming jackals.
“What do you want?” Duncan’s voice broke. He was afraid.
“It’s time,” Luke said.
Duncan didn’t move. “You don’t make sense.” His neck was stooped.
“We said we’d follow you to hell and back,” Luke said. “We did. Only it took this long.” Out of his mind, she thought, him and us. Possessed by the remains of war.
Why hadn’t she listened to Kleat? He’d warned them in the restaurant. He’d said the man was a predator. And yet Kleat hadn’t believed his own warning. It was he who had pushed the hardest to follow Luke into this limbo of trees with bleeding names and the labyrinth and the hiding bones.
“Leave her out of it,” Duncan said. He sounded tentative. His brow tensed. He was trying to navigate. Searching for safe harbor.
“Out of what, Duncan?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” he pleaded.
“It’s almost over,” Luke said.
“It was you,” said Molly. “You mined the road.”
The fire sank under the downpour. For a second, Luke’s empty sockets stared at her. It was the darkness. Then the flames leaped up. His eyes returned.
“I told you to tell him,” Luke said. “He lost his place with us. Now Johnny’s not ever going to leave.”
“Johnny,” Duncan repeated, trying to remember.
“Leave him alone,” Molly said. She reminded herself that she was the one with the gun.
“Molly,” Luke whispered. But his jaw didn’t move. It wasn’t his voice. Us. They whispered from behind him.
The monkeys gained in size. They straightened. She was wrong. These weren’t monkeys, what she could see of them. Some were naked among them. Others wore rags. Some had skin. Not all of them.
She tore her eyes from the shadow shapes. They weren’t real. It was her fever.
The gun took on weight. It wavered. She slipped her arm from the sling to steady her aim.
“What do you want with him?” she said.
“Him?” Luke said.
They wanted her.
“What do you want?” She could barely hear herself.
“We’ve been waiting long enough, don’t you think?” said Luke.
The words came back to her, Duncan’s refrain at the dig.
Luke smiled at her, and she recognized them, the ruins of his teeth green with moss. Only now three more were gone, the three she’d plucked from his skull that morning. He hadn’t shaved his hair off. It was gone. She’d carried his scalp off in her pocket. Lucas Yale was no forgery. He was dead.
Molly pulled the trigger.
He had not made a move. He’d done nothing but smile. No witness on earth would have called it self-defense. And yet she fired. She killed his impossibility.
There was a cry, and the sound of a body pitching into the fire. Torches of wood catapulted from the flames.
The rain hissed. Steam and smoke pumped upward, sucked by the wind. The light nearly died.
“Duncan,” she shouted.
He looked at her, at the gun, at the body smoldering on the logs. He finished getting out of the hut. The shadow men—the monkeys—had fled.
Molly crawled from the hut with the gun in one hand. The rain whipped at her like cold stones. Her wound seemed distant, no longer clutched in the crook of her arm and held close to her face. It was, for now, beneath her attention.
Together, she and Duncan rounded the fire to the body. His clothes were too wet to combust quite yet. But there was that smell again, the stink of burning hair. What hair? And when had this rifle appeared across his back?
Duncan dragged the body, hair flaming, from the fire. They turned him faceup, and it wasn’t Luke staring at them with jade eyes, not with the crude tattoos along his arms and the gold teeth sparkling between his burned lips. She had just killed Vin.
Molly let the gun drop from her hand. In her fever state, she had mistaken the missing boy for a phantom. Or the rain had infected her. It was dark. The night was diseased with shadows.
Duncan picked up the gun.
She was too horrified to care.
He aimed the gun. She saw it through a foggy lens. Her mind was shutting down. The bang of shots rang in her ears. He was firing point-blank into the hut.
She had forgotten the jerry cans stacked inside. The smell of fuel reminded her. It was leaking downhill, toward the fire.
Before her eyes, he’d built a bomb.
“Run,” Duncan said.
She tried, and fell.
He caught her, and she thought he would carry her up the stairs. They would fly into the night, the typhoon for their wings.
But he was too weak. After a few steps, Duncan groaned, “I can’t.”
Her superhero lowered her back to the ground. He seemed frail, or injured. As they set off with her arm draped over his thin shoulder, Molly couldn’t be sure who was carrying whom.
39.
The clearing lit like a chalice of light. Like Lot’s wife, Molly could not resist glancing back at the destruction. Jerry cans pinwheeled out of the hut walls, whipping tails of flame. The hut was just fire squared on the edges, an idea of civilization. The ACAV glinted among the branches.
She looked for her phantom ape-men, but the light had banished them. All that remained was the body. She had imagined Luke, a dead man, even spoken to him, and then pulled the trigger. But in killing off a hallucination, she had murdered a poor lost boy. Blinded with stones. Or had she imagined his eyes, too?
She wanted to blame her fever, but feared the worst. Madness was built into her genes. Her birth mother had finally come home to roost.
“Climb,” Duncan said.
Another jerry can ignited. The faces of stone giants throbbed among the trees. Shadows fled and reassembled.
“We need to go back,” she said. “I need to bury him.”
Who were they running from except themselves? Luke was imaginary and she had killed a child and panicked this fragile hermit into detonating the fuel. It occurred to her that she might have imagined that, too, that she was the one who had emptied the gun into the jerry cans and destroyed their final hopes for survival. It was in keeping with the family tradition, slow suicide, only by jungle, not by snow.
“Climb,” Duncan whispered. “They’ll be coming for us.”
She forced him to stop, a matter of leaning on his shoulder. Where had all his strength gone?
“You saw them?” She spelled out her delusion. “Those others in the shadows?”
“I don’t know.” But his urgency was certain. “We need to keep moving.”
They were being hunted. Duncan didn’t speak it out loud. Maybe he thought she would stop functioning.
By midway up the stairs, the rain had drowned the scattered fires and the hut and their bonfire. The darkness gave her hope. Maybe Luke and his death squad would be reduced to hers and Duncan’s same blind groping.
They climbed the stairs, resting more often than they wanted. Duncan’s exhaustion mirrored hers. He seemed every bit as weak and confused as she was. She faltered, he faltered. She had wounded him with her doubt. It had to be more than that, of course. She remembered the smoke coming from his chest that afternoon, and feared he’d caught some of the shrapnel after all. Had she been so preoccupied with her own wound that she had missed his?
Near the top they huddled like invalids. Resting her head on his back, she could feel his ribs against her cheekbone. In her mind, his grip was big and meaty, but now his hand felt narrow. She blamed herself. He had shielded her so often that she’d built him into more than he was, a man, a tired man at the end of a long, terrible day.
They finished the stairs at last.
/> The city was alive tonight. She remembered Duncan’s embrace that morning, and his marvelous heartbeat and the swelling of his lungs, and the city was like that. It pulsed with water. Its clockwork was in motion. The rain had resurrected it.
The rain had stopped, even the wind. But the city was activated. Runoff coursed through its veins.
Molly thought the storm was over. The raindrops quit biting at her eyes. The great sea roar above the canopy was silent. But Duncan wanted the calm to be just the eye of the typhoon. He wanted more tempest and fury to cover their escape. “It’s our only hope,” he said.
Moonlight trickled through the leaves, not in straight pencils of light, but reflecting, from one leaf to the next. It alloted a silver murk to the ruins, enough to give her sight.
To their right and left, all along the rim, water poured from the cobra mouths of naga gargoyles. Monuments and spires formed silhouettes with flame and flower profiles along their edges. Massive heads drifted like asteroids bearing human features.
They crept deeper into the ruins.
The city was a hydraulic monument, a celebration of the water that had once powered an empire. Even terrified and hurting, Molly was astonished by the intellect within the ruins. Two thousand years ago, architects had designed the buildings to make music with the water.
Stealing among the moon shadows, she could hear the notes. Water overflowed from one huge bowl to another, cascading harmoniously. It streamed through stone flutes, forcing air through whistling pipes. It beat rhythms against panels lining the canals.
Each structure seemed to have a song built into its vent holes and gutters. The trenches and pipes were more than simple veins to drain away the water. They were throats designed to sing.
The Blackhorse men had heard it, the journal fragments said so. Had they felt her marvel? Had they listened to the music? It called to her from side paths and stairways, even from underfoot, beneath the paving stones. She wanted to linger and search the city, listening to its parts.