The Reckoning

by Jeff Long

“Duncan?” she called to his spirit. Had he joined that never-ending patrol around the tower? Or flung himself up into the canopy? “Where are you?”

  Suddenly she was afraid. She wanted reassurance. She had no answers, only more questions. Would she go out into the world with him now, or would they stay to wander through the ruins? How did it work? Would they take on disguises? Enter cities? Cross the oceans? Haunt the future? They could live a thousand lives. But in giving birth to themselves, would they forget their anchoring bones? Would they come to forget each other?

  They had voices. Where was his voice? “Duncan?”

  The flak jacket had fallen open. There was something in the pocket, an edge of plastic. She tugged and it was a sandwich bag containing a snapshot.

  The photo was dog-eared and harshly faded. Even without the “Dec. ’69” penned on the back, Molly knew the era by its chemicals and paper. She could have guessed the basic image. It was straight out of a war movie, the girlfriend picture.

  Wife, she amended, glancing at Duncan’s wedding band. The young woman had one, too. She was flashing it proudly, with bravura, grinning at their in-joke. Six or seven months pregnant, she was dressed—barely—in a polka-dot bikini. She’d snagged her man in the nick of time.

  Molly laid her head on the flak jacket and studied the photo, sliding into its story. Duncan had taken it. They were on a beach. It was Hawaii, in the middle of his deployment to Vietnam. She wore a flower lei. Molly liked her. She was audacious, ripe to bursting, and wildly in love with the photographer. A real firecracker.

  She did the math. Duncan had been twenty. A few months later, he had become a dad. A few months after that, he had faced his killer in this city of the dead.

  Her face eluded Molly. The girl’s hair cast a shadow, and that bulging tummy drew the eye. But that wasn’t the difficulty. The face made no sense to her.

  The girl had a hundred-watt smile and a sloe-eyed green gaze. A pair of rose-colored sunglasses perched on top of her bushy black hair. The humidity had blown her pixie cut to chaos. Molly could relate. Atomic hair, she called it. That’s why she’d chopped hers short with surgical scissors. Black Irish did not go well with the tropics.

  Molly stopped. The air leaked from her.

  She was looking at herself.

  She refused it. She had to be projecting. The fever was scrambling her mind. The ruins were stealing into her the way she had stolen into them, in darkness and fog. One step deeper, it seemed, and she might disintegrate.

  The picture blurred, then sharpened. She struggled against it, then with it, finding her way into the impossible image. How could something so familiar feel so alien? The eyes, their shape, the nose, the smile, the hair…there was no denying it. That was her face in the photo.

  Molly glanced at Duncan’s silent bones, trying to fathom it. What did it mean? Had she died and wandered and finally been led to her lover? Could she be her own orphan?

  A drop of rain fell from the trees. Not yet, she commanded the sky. There were facts. She recalled them, an obituary in the Denver Post dated 1971, a coroner’s report, a grave marker among the wildflowers.

  She fumbled at the belt holding her passport wallet and ripped open the Velcro and drew out her relic, a driver’s license issued in 1967 in Bay City, Texas, to one Jane Drake, age eighteen. The black hair was long and ironed straight, Cher style. The eyes were green and full of blue sky, as if all her life lay ahead of her. It was the same face Molly saw in her mirror, though younger and sweeter and smooth. But it was also the face in a photo buried next to the heart of a dead soldier. How could that be?

  Rain began leaking from the canopy. A drop splashed across the photo. Molly raced on.

  Once upon a time, she tried desperately. Once upon a time, a war bride lost her one true love. When he went missing, she went missing, too. She wandered off into madness, into the midst of mountain gypsies, and finally, into the mouth of a blizzard. That much was true. Jane Drake had died in a roofless miner’s shack in a blizzard on Boreas Pass.

  Had she returned from the dead then, one ghost hunting another?

  She searched her memory for Hawaii and young Duncan and the diamond on that finger, and the miner’s cabin and the blizzard. She tried to feel them as memories of her own, but none of it came to her.

  The raindrops splattered across the photo. The image was melting before her eyes.

  Hurry, she thought. Today was for keeps. Darkness was her last call. The forest would render her to bones. She would join the wandering spirits and never know more than her name.

  Molly blinked away the rain. Put away the ghosts. She was too full of ghosts. Trust your eyes. What was she missing?

  She brought the snapshot closer. She looked at the tipped skull.

  Here stood a young woman in her glory.

  Here lay the bones that had broken her heart.

  And—it was suddenly so obvious—in that womb slept their daughter, Molly.

  The muscles in her face relaxed. The labyrinth unraveled around her. No longer a stranger to herself, she let the city take her over. Its canals became her arteries. Its stone told her story. Her tangled threads were simply paths among the ruins.

  Had her mother sent her, Molly wondered, or had her father drawn her? Did it matter? They had never meant to lose her. They’d done the best they could, but the world had taken them away, the soldier in war, his bride in sorrow. She only needed to forgive them for their love. She leaned the photo among the bones. The rain ran from her eyes.

  45.

  Molly took turns. She traded bodies with the gecko clinging to the wall, and prowled a Buddha’s palm. She hitchhiked on a parrot perching in the branches. She became a butterfly hiding from the rain. She spied on herself down there.

  She looked like one of MacBeth’s witches haunting the edges of a battlefield, knife in hand. Her bloodshot eyes burned too bright in that mask of ash and smoke.

  The thunder was majestic. She’d crawled to the knife. It looked like an Iron Age thing in her fist.

  She knew the Blackhorse missing now. Even the bones still hidden in the forest had recited their names to her. They were all present and accounted for, even their ninth man, the rebel leader who had shot her father. His name was on the blade, “John Kleat.”

  There was no telling where Kleat had traveled after they’d banished him from the city. She understood his hatred of the Khmer Rouge better than he did now. His bones remembered what he did not, the enemy who had slit his throat. Maybe someday he would rise up from the black water in the barays, and escape these walls, and resume the search for his own remains. Maybe someday he would find the nonexistent brother who was himself buried in the hills or in a paddy or thrown down a well. More likely he would forget and join the creatures in the mud.

  They were driven by urges, these unburied dead. Where memory began and ended, she couldn’t say. They clung to their names, that much was certain, speaking them over and over. Also, no matter what they had become, they could not escape who they had been. She had been right to believe in Duncan’s goodness. Wherever he was.

  “Duncan,” she called out.

  She drifted in and out of delirium. The rain fell in slow strings. Now she was the gecko, now a butterfly, now a woman.

  “Molly,” she heard. Let me sleep.

  They kept calling her name from the forest, the birds and monkeys and ghost warriors, enunciating all the varieties she might answer to, Molly, Maw-li, Moll-lee. They were helping her remember her name in the next life. That was her hope, that they would be kind and welcoming. On the other hand, they had summoned her to carry home her father and them, and she had failed. There was no reason to believe in their mercy.

  She caught herself whispering a Hail Mary to the Buddhas.

  “Molly.” The voice was just outside the door, and it wasn’t Duncan’s.

  She lay still. Her heart galloped. If only Duncan would come.

  The doorway darkened. He was an emaciated thing made of rags. P
art man, part bone, he entered.

  She closed her eyes. The tip of bone ticked closer.

  “Molly,” he commanded.

  He’d come for her eyes, not to take, but to give. She belonged to the city now. Would he use a spoon? What shade of green would her jade eyes be?

  Please, she thought.

  He heard her whisper, or maybe smelled it. “You’re alive,” he said.

  She opened her eyes. His leg was a stick, not bone, lashed to his thigh with vines.

  She thrust with the knife. It was a feeble act, and he stepped on her wrist and took the knife away. She knew better than to fight. Lie still. Let him do it.

  “Lie still,” the ghost said.

  He stood overhead like a butcher sizing up meat. She searched for his eyes to connect with, but the rain smeared her vision.

  She wanted to let go, to cast herself into the animals and scamper and fly and slither away. But suddenly she was anchored in her flesh. She couldn’t leave her body. She struggled, a small motion, a whimper.

  He tugged at a pouch. A dozen or more round jade balls spilled onto the floor. The eyes rolled against her cheek, and she moaned and looked away. The city was preparing her, last rites, its funeral mask. But she was still alive, or had she passed to the other side? How to tell?

  “Don’t fight,” he said. “You’re having a dream. Can you hear me?”

  He lifted her shirt and looked underneath. She squeezed her eyes shut and the rain wept down her face. Would the eyes hurt as much going in as coming out? How loud would she scream? Where were her gecko and butterfly?

  “Drink.” He held a leaf to her mouth as a funnel. The rain trickled onto her tongue. A kindness before the maiming.

  “You’re leaving,” said the voice. “Take the others with you. They no longer belong. Do you understand?”

  “No.” They were dead. How could they not belong? Limbo had borders?

  “They were lost and the city took them in.” The voice chased like water through her mind. “It gave them shelter from the storm. Why them, barbarians? Compassion, perhaps, or God’s curiosity, I can’t say. The city took them in as children. It gave them sight. It showed them the path. But they refused to see. Do you know how many great warriors came and laid aside their armor here? Not these men. All except Duncan. He saw something, I think.”

  “They were only boys,” she whispered to the rain.

  “Blind they came”—the words were strict—“now blind they go. I’ve gone to each of them and taken back the dream.”

  On one knee, he worked Kleat’s knife. She felt the steel blade worm along her breastbone. With a tug, he split the shirt and peeled it away like skin. One leg at a time, he sawed away her pants.

  She was so afraid. But, oh, the rain felt glorious. It bathed her burning flesh. It warmed her like a blanket. Her lips opened to the water.

  His hands began moving over her, working away. She didn’t dare look. For all she knew, he had opened her and was squatting to one side devouring her organs. Were the monkeys gathering for their share?

  He pried open her eyelids and rain crashed into her brain. My eyes, she thought. The windows of her soul. “Please don’t,” she said.

  “A little while longer,” the ghost soothed her, plucking away leeches. “Everything will be clear.”

  Then he propped twigs under a large leaf to make a lean-to over her face and draped big banana leaves over her body and limbs. She was sinking.

  “You’re free. You freed them.” He held up one of the jade balls. “But these stay. Take nothing but the bones. Forget the city. Remember the dream.”

  Blackness rose up.

  She returned to consciousness just as he was leaving. The stick leg sounded like a clock walking away. Then she smelled the rich fragrance. Under another leaf, he had planted a handful of incense sticks. Slow smoke leaked up to the Buddhas. Only then did she recognize him.

  “Samnang?” she whispered.

  But he was gone, into the ruins.

  46.

  When she woke again, the rain was clattering on her shield of leaves and the incense sticks were ash. Her bloodstained clothes lay in a heap. She was naked and encased in black mud. Night was falling.

  They were shouting her name again. They were everywhere out there. Their voices were climbing the stairs. Duncan, she prayed. Save me.

  A light flashed in the doorway. Dark forms clustered behind it. More lights appeared. They wore sheets like Halloween ghosts. Ponchos, she realized.

  “Molly?” The voice boomed through the room.

  She watched from under her chrysalis of leaves, perfectly invisible to them.

  “She’s not up here,” one said.

  “But he told us a tower.”

  “It’s empty. We got the wrong tower.”

  “We should have gotten him to draw a map of the place.”

  “Too late now. It’s a miracle he lasted as long as he did. You saw what he looked like when they brought him in. Gut shot, bleeding out. The fuckers even took his leg.”

  “What the hell did she get mixed up with?”

  “Bad company, man.”

  One had a cough. Others were winded. Their voices thundered, as if her last few days had passed in whispers.

  The room lit green with distant lightning, then went dark. The sky rumbled.

  “We don’t belong here,” a voice complained. “The captain gave us two hours. Night’s coming. You could get lost in this place.”

  “Sam said she’d be here. Here’s the city. Here’s the tower.”

  “That was yesterday. She could have gone anywhere since then. We’ll try again in the morning. It will look different in the morning.”

  It was like swimming up from a deep recess. Sam? The captain? She knew these voices. RE-1 had come for her.

  And now they were leaving. Molly tried to speak. But her tongue had turned to leather. There wasn’t enough breath in her lungs for even one word.

  Their lights twitched away. It was over. She would never last the night.

  But then the bones sighed beside her. “Boys,” they whispered. Duncan. His wisp of a spirit.

  Somehow they heard through the thunder. It caught them. Their lights swung around. One splashed on the skull.

  “Christ, there’s another one. And a flak jacket, look.”

  They came across the room in a siege of boots and the whip-whip of wet plastic and the one man coughing. One stumbled against her leg.

  “There’s something here.”

  They converged in a circle and stripped away the leaves, staring down at her from the caverns of their ponchos, faceless, awed. Even in the rain, she could smell them. That struck her, too, the smell of living men.

  “Is she still alive?”

  “What did she do to herself?”

  One bent to her. “Molly? Can you hear me? It’s us.”

  “What’s she staring at?”

  “We’ve got you now, Molly.”

  Voices like thunder. They filled the room. “Get a litter. Bring ropes. Tell the captain.”

  Shedding their ponchos to hold as a roof over her, they took on familiar faces, the hunters of the dead. As they pulled off their shirts, they made themselves half naked to warm her.

  They couldn’t seem to hear the hymn of the city. She looked into the rain, listening as it faded. It was harder and harder to hear for the clatter of gear and the thud of feet and the creaking of pack straps. Men were shouting down from the tower’s ledge, calling out the good news.

  So faithful, she thought, these warriors sent to harrow the underworld and unshackle every last American soldier’s soul. Year after year they hunted the bones, even as the fragments drifted deeper, towed under by insects, roots, and the shifting earth. In the end their quest would falter. The worm would win.

  But for the moment it was like a great battle had been fought, and they had carried the day. In finding one alive, even if she did not belong to them, the soldiers could put death aside. They coul
d dream of themselves tonight, free to believe they were more than a dream of the ruins.

  Acknowledgments

  The Reckoning takes history for its haunted house. In order to construct and inhabit it credibly, I sought out men and women who have lived various aspects of that history. They will be the first to notice my poetic license with procedures, details, and events. Any and all inaccuracies are mine alone.

  I wish to thank army lieutenant colonel Gerald O’Hara, army chief warrant officer Tom Monroe, and retired marine master sergeant Joe Patterson of Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC). They patiently detailed the grueling search and recovery process that seeks a full accounting of American soldiers who went missing in foreign wars, particularly in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Because my story takes place in 2000, three years before JPAC was formed, I refer to its two earlier sister entities, Joint Task Force-Full Accounting (JTF-FA) and the Central Identification Lab in Hawaii (CILHI).

  I am indebted to Earl Swift, a staff writer for The Virginian-Pilot. Though he was writing his own book about the military’s forensic quest (Where They Lay, a superb nonfiction account), this generous man did not hesitate to give me several hours of civilian perspective drawn from his trips with JPAC.

  Many thanks to retired army colonel Charles L. Schmidt for enduring my questions and offering his advice about the 11th Armored Cavalry in Vietnam. Thanks as well to Geof Childs, whom I peppered with spontaneous phone calls about the military and Vietnam.

  I am especially grateful to Sophea Chum Satterwhite for helping guide me through Cambodian customs, language, and history. My other guide through Cambodia was Melissa Ward, the bravest person I know, who led me through the devastation and recovery during her assignment with UNTAC in 1993. Wherever in the world you are, Tiger Lady, thank you. And keep your head down.

  I owe deep thanks to my editors Emily Bestler and Mitchell Ivers, who refused to leave me lost among my ruins. And with humble appreciation, my thanks to Sloan Harris, my agent and literary sensei.

  Finally, Barbara and Helena, you are the blessings I count each day.