It seemed strange to be thinking of those innocent little cats at a time when the whole world was coming apart at the seams, and while all he knew of reality went up in flames. It was an important distinction, however, because the old version of him, the one who had known that Vietnamese woman in the rain, thought mostly of himself, of death and survival by any means necessary. And the violence that made both possible had not only been necessary, it was often praised, considered heroic even.
But he wasn’t that person anymore. That man had been dead and gone for years. He’d seen to his death personally.
I’m far from perfect, but I’m better now, he thought. I’m reborn.
But you are not forgiven.
The storm beckoned, lured him back. Despite limited moonlight and her decayed face, Duck had recognized the woman in the yard the moment he saw her. He’d never forgotten that face, never would. Burned into his mind like a brand, it had been seared into his body and soul until it became a part of who he was, who he’d been, and who he’d one day become. Even her clothing looked familiar. Funny, how he could remember such trivial things after so many years. Details he convinced himself he’d safely buried away had clawed their way back with alarming ease, proving nothing stayed buried no matter how deep you sunk it. Not people or memories, sins of the past or the ghosts they left behind.
Clint Palmer and Texas Pete Hayes had been with him that day, guys he’d known for months and been to Hell and back with. Duck and Clint had known each other since their first day in country, and he’d met Texas Pete a few weeks later, sitting in their webbed seats in a plane with the rest of the guys flying over the South China Sea, barely listening as a sergeant old enough to be their father rambled on about what was to come. The darkness had seemed alive that night too. Below, the water reflected the moon and stars with startling beauty. As ocean became rice paddies and jungle, none of them realized it would be the last bit of beauty many would see for a long time to come.
And for others, the last they’d ever know.
Sometimes, at night, Duck could still see their young faces looking at him from the darkness of his dreams. Most of them just kids, really, and already dead. But more often than not it was Clint’s screams for help, the look of horror and astonishment on Texas Pete’s face, or visions of that burning village that smelled of fish and shit and the burning flesh of humans and animals alike.
For years he’d awakened in a cold sweat with memories of Clint bursting through his mind, calling for him, lying in the mud just outside the last hooch they’d set afire, drenched in his own blood, intestines lying on the ground next to him like a mass of eels as he called for his mother and begged for help. Now and then he’d dream of Clint standing over his bed at night, staring down at him and dripping blood, raining it down on him.
Maybe we all should’ve died that day. We all could have, so why was it you, Clint? Why you? Who decided you’d be the one to die in that village on that day and in that way?
What had at first appeared to be a harmless old man limped over to them and smiled toothlessly, raising his hands as he did so to show them what he had. Two grenades, pins already pulled.
As Duck and Texas Pete and a few others dove for cover, Clint gunned the old man down. But it was too late, and he took the brunt of the explosion. Although he was still conscious, he’d really been dead before he hit the ground, doomed from the moment the old man approached him.
Clint died like the rest of them, never really knowing why they’d been there or what the hell the point had been. And they never would.
VC had been reported in the village but who knew for sure? In the end, they very well may have simply been people defending an unprovoked attack on their homes. Politics and bullshit aside, wouldn’t most people defend their homes and loved ones from attack?
But there had been no sense in those jungles; no rhyme nor reason, and all Duck and the others had seen that day was a village they’d been ordered to burn to the ground and a bunch of nameless, less-than-human beings running around screaming and crying and carrying on in a language most didn’t understand and fewer cared to. And after what the village elder had pulled, they were all seen as imminent threats from then on, which sealed their fates.
Vi sao… Vi sao…Vi sao…
What Duck and the others hadn’t known until moments later, when he and Texas Pete crossed into the last hooch, was that the old man had tried to stop them as a means of defending his granddaughter, a young woman they found huddled inside, wide-eyed and trembling with terror.
“Take care of it,” Texas Pete muttered. “I’m lighting it up.”
As he left, Duck and the young woman stared at each other for what seemed an eternity. Her long dark hair was matted with mud and her otherwise pretty face was smeared and speckled with blood. She held out her hands, as if to stop him, and then shook her head frantically, as if he might understand.
“Go,” he said flatly, motioning with his M-16 to the doorway. “Go now.”
Even then, as Duck lifelessly spoke the words, he’d somehow known she wouldn’t comply.
The young woman lunged for a blanket a few feet away, and Duck fired a single shot, hitting her in the center of her back. The blow launched her forward and onto her stomach, and as she landed, something stirred beneath the blanket she’d gone for. And then that something began to cry.
She hadn’t been going for a weapon, but for her child, a baby wrapped in a blanket and hidden beneath a reed mat.
Hidden…from me…a baby…
He dropped to his knees, rolled the woman off of the child and held her in his arms. Blood pumped from her in time with her heartbeat, covering them both. As her child cried, he held the woman and wept along with her.
It was the first time he’d allowed himself to cry since he’d been there.
It would also be the last.
Just before she took her final wheezing breath, the young woman whispered, “Vi sao,” again and again, until she could speak no more.
And then death took her. Quietly.
Vi sao.
Duck remained there for a while, holding her limp body against his, the nearby child’s cries mixed with those of the villagers and soldiers just outside the hooch. Screams of agony and horror, the sounds of Hell.
With those terrible memories still vivid in his mind, Duck left the cottage window, heart racing and brow knit, the past clinging to him and refusing to let go, wrapped around him like a disease-riddled blanket.
“What is it?” Lana asked.
“She’s out there again.” He grabbed a bottle of tequila from the cupboard, broke the seal and poured some into a shot glass. “An old ghost, memory or…”
“They’re not real. They’re a lie, that’s what you said.” Lana motioned to the bottle. “We need you sober. We need you here.”
Duck threw back the shot then slid the glass away across the counter. “Maybe you’re putting your faith in the wrong guy.”
“You’re all we’ve got. You don’t have the luxury of being the wrong guy.”
He watched her saunter over to the table and collapse into one of the chairs. She pulled the elastic from her hair, releasing the ponytail. Her hair fell free, and she ran her hands through it, shaking it out and combing it with her fingers. Then she collected it, pulled it back into a ponytail and expertly secured it as she’d obviously done countless times before. Her sneakers, spattered with mud, were no longer quite so bright, and her khaki shorts were wrinkled and still damp from the rain. The sleeveless white top was stained along the sides with perspiration smears, her skin was slick with sweat, and the look on her face was an amalgamation of sheer exhaustion, bewilderment and scarcely controlled panic. But just beneath that veneer, there was strength.
“I don’t know,” Duck said. “You don’t exactly strike me as the type who can’t take care of herself. Maybe you’re all we’ve got.”
“Better hope not.” She glanced at the 9mm on the table. “I’m a pretty patheti
c excuse for a hero.”
Duck felt the tequila burn through him, tempting him to down another shot, but he restrained himself, stared at the floor a while and listened to the storm.
“Long time ago,” he began a moment later, “I was somebody else. Did things I’m ashamed of.”
Rain…powerful tropical rain falling like bullets from a dead sky…
“In horrible little places tucked into the jungles…Mud and filth everywhere, nothing but lost and damned souls, foreigners like me, dumped out in the middle of nowhere, fighting a war that wasn’t a war nobody seemed to have any idea how to fight, much less win, with little or no hope of ever getting out.”
Lying on a reed mat…rainwater dripping everywhere…bugs crawling grimy walls…
“That place was truly Godforsaken.”
“The woman,” Lana said, sitting forward. “Who is she?”
Slowly, for the first time in his life, Duck told the story of what had happened in that village so many years before.
By the time he’d finished, both were doing their best to hold back tears.
“What does it mean?” she asked. “What the woman said to you.”
“Vi sao,” he said. “Why? For what purpose? Never did give her an answer. Still don’t have one.”
“What happened to the baby?”
“Turned it over to the first villager I saw. From there, I don’t know.” He let out a slow sigh. “All I do know is that just being there was enough to make me realize there’s more to this life—and the next—than we think. It’s all connected, like a puzzle. There’s a synchronicity, a purpose to all of it. It’s woven together and controlled. By God or some superior force or whatever label you want to give it. When I got there I believed in all of it. God, the saints, Jesus, you name it. But within a few months I didn’t believe in anything. I was wasting away inside and out, and sure I’d never get out of that hellhole. There were days I’d wish I’d die there so it would all just stop. Eventually I got to believing something was watching over me, had to be, because I’m nothing special, no better than those other boys who died over there. Clint died in the mud that day. He was nineteen years old. Couple weeks later, a sniper got Texas Pete few months short of his twenty-second birthday. Why’d I get the pass? Why me? Why not them? If God was there, wasn’t He watching over them too?”
“Maybe this is your chance.”
“At what?”
“Finding out,” she said softly. “It was a long time ago. You’re a different person now. Maybe it’s a chance at redemption.”
“Why do I get a second chance?” Hesitantly, Duck returned to the window. The woman was gone. “Have I earned it?”
“You’re the only one who can answer that.”
“Thing is, there’s a price to be paid for no matter what you do.” He looked at her a moment. “It’s like the cats out there I care for. I built that house to protect them. It shelters them, makes their lives a little easier, it even makes them happy. But it also takes them out of their natural state. It confines them in a way, changes them…alters them. When I look in their eyes, I can see it. There’s gratitude and beauty, but there’s also primitive fear. They’re no different than we are. God’s in all of us, even a sorry-ass piece of shit like me.”
Lana’s face turned cold. “Until He isn’t.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning whatever’s stalking us isn’t in our hearts or minds, it’s out there.”
“But the question is where does it come from?”
“Hell?”
“Been to Hell. This ain’t it.”
“Then you tell me.”
He turned back to the window, watched as the night thickened, the rain fell heavier and fog continued to swirl and roll in through the darkness, enveloping them like dragon’s breath. “I don’t know. But something tells me before the sun comes up we might just find out.”
Just feet away in the other room, Perry stared maniacally at the video recorder’s screen, replaying his footage again and again while mumbling quietly.
Back in the bedroom, with Lennox holding his hand, Dempsey slipped deeper into delirium, his fever mounting as his moans poured through the cottage, mingling with the fury of the storm and calling forth the dreams of the dead.
And outside, something waited.
27
The night was teeming with stories. They stirred like liquid through the darkness, slowly slinking weeds tethered to the embalmed and the howling winds cradling ashes of the cremated. Unearthed, their plots and characters seemed better suited to the realm of sleep, where things could rise up and enfold their victims without the burden of logic or clarification. Most had a familiar feel, though some were alien and strange, populated with mysterious people and anonymous storylines.
Through the continuing rush of images flying past—Lennox nude and on her knees, mouth full, eyes staring up into the camera; the ocean, something lurking on a rock just above the surface; a window bathed in darkness; a doorway, the curtains of rain falling beyond it not quite able to conceal the same black figure near the trees—came one night story in particular. The images replayed again and again, the small video screen bathing Perry’s face in artificial light, a lone beacon in the vast darkness of space. In time, the images began to mutate, blur and distend, eventually dissolving into something else entirely.
I remember, he thought. I remember.
A young boy sits on a bar, his father beside him on a stool. Stagnant clouds of cigarette smoke hang in the air as though penciled in, while swirling multicolored lights flash and blink to the beat of electronic drums and bass lines. Voices, the clinking of glasses, the shuffling of feet and the crackle of paper money are all absorbed by something greater. Yet it remains beyond the little boy’s comprehension as to exactly what it is. He knows it’s there, but cannot see or touch it. He smells cheap aftershave, booze, dirty ashtrays, the faint aroma of fried food…and sex. He doesn’t know what sex is, this little boy in a cowboy hat and kerchief, matching boots and a holster complete with plastic imitation pearl-handle revolver, but he knows it is forbidden.
He remembers the women parading around who looked nothing like his mother, hurrying back and forth on and off stage, their big teased up bleached hair, their funny outfits and loud, cackling laughter. His mother is always so quiet and sad, but these women are loud and happy and look like movie stars or some of the girls in his comic books. He remembers it is the first time he sees a naked woman, and how it makes him feel silly and embarrassed. He wants to laugh a little, and maybe he does, but he’s more concerned with his birthday gift, his cowboy outfit, so he fiddles with his revolver and the plastic bullets along the holster belt, each one slid into specific loops. They look like candy, he thinks, these little white plastic bullets.
“Jesus Christ,” someone says. “You can’t bring your kid in here, you idiot. How did you get in with him?”
“Don’t worry about it,” the little boy’s father says.
“But you can’t bring a kid in here.”
His father signals the bartender. “Just stopped in for a quick drink and a look-see,” he says. “Schlitz for me and a Rob Roy for my partner here, and make it snappy, it’s my kid’s birthday. Six today, come on, everybody sing him a song!”
The rest he cannot remember as clearly.
There are hazy flashes of burly men walking his father outside, and a woman that smells like sweat and sweet perfume, with big blue eyes and a tiny mole just above her ruby lips. She carries him back to his father’s car and tells him he’s the handsomest cowpoke she ever did see.
He thinks the men hurt his father. Not badly, but enough so that he’ll go away. He remembers being scared, his father in the car next him, head on the steering wheel as he sobs quietly. “I’m sorry, kid,” his father blubbers. “I get it wrong sometimes, I—your Dad gets it wrong sometimes—I’m sorry.”
He has never before seen his father cry, and it makes him want to cry too, so he does.
> “Goddamn women, that’s the problem. You hear me, son? They’re the problem. Don’t ever let them get under your skin. They’re a disease. Either whores like those bitches in there or tired old nags like your mother. Use them for what they’re good for then wash your hands of them, right? One day you’ll understand.”
There are other memories too, other stories—countless women that weren’t his mother in dingy motel rooms with his father while he played outside—but he doesn’t think of them just now because he begins to wonder if these really are his memories after all. Perhaps they’re someone else’s night stories.
No. They belong to him.
“I love my father,” Perry said softly. The sound of his own voice, however faint, returned his gaze to the images on the video screen. He shut them off, switched to record mode. The .38 in his belt pressed into his side and he reached down and pulled it free. Studying it a moment, he thought of that old plastic revolver his father had once given him. He placed the .38 on the couch, and the memories dissipated. He didn’t need a gun, he didn’t want it. I’m not a cowboy anymore, he thought. I never was.
A frenzied giggle slipped free. He covered his mouth, looked around.
It was later, darker, deeper into night—he could feel it—and though the storm raged on, the cottage had grown quiet. The muffled hum of voices in the kitchen had ceased, and the old man’s groans from the bedroom had gone silent. The spray of rain on the windows droned on, as did the faraway grumble of thunder, but he listened instead to the beat of blood drumming in his ears. As the video images ran through his head in an endless loop, it seemed to him there was another sound present as well; something that hadn’t been there prior. He listened intently, straining to make it out.
You can hear us, can’t you?
The Living and the Dead Page 16