The Impaler sm-2

by Gregory Funaro

  “You best not be visiting me no more,” he said finally, looking him straight in the eye for the first time in eighteen years. Then he motioned for the guard and left.

  That was the last time Edmund ever saw him.

  He drove around afterward for hours and ended up at an eighteen-and-over bar in Greenville. He’d purchased a tube of Chapstick first and coated the back of his hands so he’d be able to wash off the X with which the doorman would mark him as underage. Edmund did so in the men’s room, stepped up to the bar, ordered three shots of Southern Comfort, one right after the other, and then just started swinging.

  “You’re lucky the bar and them two other guys you floored ain’t gonna press charges, Eddie,” said his grandfather, parking the truck. “A good thing you ordered those shots, I reckon, too. Underage drinking and losing licenses—no one wants this to get any bigger than it already has.”

  Edmund was silent as he looked up at the sign for the Army recruiting center.

  “Sometimes you just gotta do what’s right cuz a higher power’s telling you to.”

  A sign—what he had been searching for all along?

  “But the Army will fix you up right, Eddie,” said Claude Lambert. “Best thing for your head now, I reckon.”

  Chapter 50

  Searching.

  But drifting now, too.

  Basic training, then the assignment to Air Assault at Fort Campbell. More assignments here, more assignments there. Commendations and promotions—E2 up through E5. Sometimes Sergeant Lambert was with women, sometimes he was with men, but the drifting, the new places and new faces helped with the searching; made him forget about it completely for weeks at a time.

  His grandfather had been right. The Army kept him focused; kept the fighting in his belly; kept the fantasies of doing to his lovers what he had done to his animals out of his head. Even when he was with the men, for a long time it seemed to Edmund that the only animal he ever thought about was the golden, seal-tailed lion on the crest of his 101st Airborne’s 187th Infantry Regiment patch.

  Perhaps that was why he took the ancient cylinder.

  Edmund came upon the stash of stolen Iraqi artifacts in October of 2003, while on patrol in Tal Afar, a city north of Mosul. The 101st Airborne’s 187th Infantry Regiment was making a big push to secure the city for the upcoming elections, and Edmund was in charge of a door-to-door sweep to root out insurgents. He killed one man inside the house where he found the cylinder; he’d thought at first the house’s occupants were terrorists, then later realized the two remaining men were part of a smuggling ring.

  The house secure, the men arrested, for the briefest of moments Edmund was left alone with the open crate. He didn’t know what the tiny cylindrical object on the top was at first, but knew it had to be valuable because of the other objects beneath it—stone tablets, figurines, a solid-gold jeweled bowl just like the bowl the soldier from the 3rd Infantry Division tried to smuggle back to Fort Stewart.

  Edmund had heard about that little incident back in May; knew he could get in big trouble if he was caught stealing, too. But that had been at the start of the war; that had been before the contacts had been put in place in Qatar—contacts who were willing to pay cash on the spot for stolen ancient Iraqi artifacts.

  Or so Edmund had heard.

  Yes, as hard as it was to get that kind of stuff back to the United States, word on the street was a man with the right connections could make a lot of money in Qatar if he was willing to take the risk. And although Edmund Lambert had never even stolen a candy bar in his life, when he picked up the tiny stone cylinder and saw the lion heads that looked so much like the lion on his 187th patch, impulsively he pocketed it before his soldiers returned.

  Afterwards, on his way back to the base, Edmund realized that for the first time since his enlistment his actions had not been his own—a feeling that reminded him so much of those days back on the tobacco farm in North Carolina. And when he was alone in the latrine, when he studied the carving more closely and figured out what the lions on the cylinder were doing, well, Edmund Lambert simply could not believe his eyes.

  At first he didn’t know the identity of the bearded man with the body of the winged lion; didn’t know why the lion-headed men were presenting him with impaled bodies, either. And although Edmund had seen similar objects during his time in Iraq, he wasn’t quite sure what the little cylinder was until he looked it up on the Internet. An ancient Babylonian seal, he discovered, most likely depicting the god Nergal.

  And, after extensive research, Edmund concluded that the winged god to whom the impaled bodies were being presented had to be Nergal. The Raging Prince, the Babylonians called him; the Furious One; Lord of the Underworld—part man, part winged lion—just like Edmund himself in his 187th Infantry Regiment uniform.

  The lion and the wings on the seal—just like his patch. Yes, it was all connected somehow. Edmund could feel it.

  He figured the ancient artifact would fetch him a lot of money if he dumped it off in Qatar, but he had no desire to part with it—he didn’t tell anyone about it and studied the seal whenever he was alone. Eventually, Edmund was able to close his eyes and see the carved figures in as much detail as if they were right there before him. He kept the seal on his person always; carried it in his pocket for months while on patrol. His good luck charm, he thought; it got him out of a number of scrapes when others only a few feet away bit it for good.

  But toward the end of January 2004, a week before he was scheduled to come home, Edmund Lambert’s luck changed—for better or for worse, he wasn’t sure at first.

  His grandfather was dead.

  Edmund spoke with Rally on the telephone, and received the news calmly, with little or no emotion, as Rally explained how he found the old man facedown in the cellar.

  “Looks like he drank too much of that stuff,” he said, his voice tired and strained with tears. “Heart just gave out is what the coroner is saying.”

  “I see,” Edmund said.

  “The sheriff was there, too, Eddie, and—”

  Rally was suddenly quiet.

  “You still there?” Edmund asked. “Rally?”

  “Yeah,” Rally said finally. “I’m still here, Eddie. But do you know if the Army tapes these calls?”

  “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “Well, I’m not sure how to tell you this, but, well, all your grandfather’s stuff in the cellar—in the workroom—you know what stuff I’m talking about?”

  “The stuff for the farm experiments?”

  “Well, yeah, but … you see, that’s what he told you all that stuff was for when you was growing up. So you wouldn’t tell no one, and so your ma and grandma wouldn’t worry and give us shit. But, you see, Eddie, that stuff down there we was making for other reasons.”

  “The moonshine, you mean?”

  “Yeah, the moonshine was part of it. But there were two different batches of the moonshine, mainly. One, you drank for fun. Well, you remember. You seen us drink it.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, we called it moonshine, but it wasn’t really moonshine the way most other people make it. It was something else, from a recipe that’d been in your family before they moved to North Carolina. The other batch of that stuff was kind of like that, at its base, you know, but mainly different in that it was stronger and had different effects when you drank it. And, well, let’s just say you could use it for more important reasons other than just drinking it for fun. We’d been close to getting the formula right for a long time. But before we could market it, we had to have the right patents to protect ourselves.”

  “Rally—”

  “Some of that stuff, the ingredients for the second batch, I mean, was illegal, Eddie. A lot of it we’d already used up—and we ain’t nearly been doing it as much as we used to—but, when I found the old man, well, there was still some of the illegal stuff that I needed to get rid of. I woulda dragged the old man upstairs and put him in the den so
the sheriff wouldn’t have found it, but I’m too weak now, Eddie. And they found the stuff in his system. I mean, I got rid of what I could—Christ, Eddie, eighty fucking years old and I’m running around like a chicken with my head cut off. I can’t breathe good no more and my back don’t work and I’m—”

  “Rally, calm—”

  “—worried it’s only a matter of time before they trace it back to me. I thought it best to leave everything else, all the equipment and books and stuff, so they could see he cooked it up and done it to himself—”

  “Rally, calm down. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “Look, Eddie,” the old man said, exhausted, “I really don’t want to talk about this on the phone—especially you working for the government. When you coming home?”

  “I’m scheduled to process out in a week.”

  “You can’t get here no earlier?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Eddie, I’m only telling you about all this so you won’t be shocked when you get home. I thought the old man would’ve told you himself by now.”

  “I understand,” Edmund said. “You just keep him on ice until I get back to you.”

  He hung up feeling irritated and confused, but at the same time curiously empty. He supposed he had loved his grandfather, but he never told him so. If he did love him, it was a love colored with fear. Where the fear came from, Edmund was never sure. Claude Lambert never laid a hand on him; was never violent, never even raised his voice at him—not even when he got kicked off the baseball team.

  Indeed, looking back, it suddenly occurred to Edmund that after his fight with the catcher Claude Lambert never touched him at all; never hugged him or tousled his hair like he used to when he was a boy. It was almost as if his grandfather was afraid of him, too. True, sometimes when his grandfather had spent too much time in the cellar, he would squish Edmund’s cheeks together and stick his finger in his mouth and feel around his teeth. Edmund asked him why once, and all his grandfather would say was that he was checking to see if he was healthy. But for some reason Edmund didn’t believe him.

  And perhaps that was it, Edmund thought. Maybe the fear of his grandfather came from the knowledge that he would never really know the man who had become his guardian. Of course, there were plenty of things about Edmund that Claude Lambert didn’t know, either. And often Edmund wondered if that was where the searching came from—a quest for the thing that would finally close the distance between them.

  But now that his grandfather was gone that could never happen; now that Rally had told him the truth about what was going on in the cellar, Edmund didn’t know quite how to feel about the whole thing.

  Only that the searching was still there.

  Chapter 51

  “I’ve arranged for you to fly home, Lambert,” said Edmund’s commanding officer. “We can have you manifested on the next bird to Kuwait.”

  “No thank you, sir,” said Edmund. “I’d like to finish up my time here. I’ve squared it so we can delay the funeral. It’s only a week, and my men need me.”

  This was true. The 187th was scheduled for a raid on an insurgent stronghold that evening in the southern part of Tal Afar. The intel had come in that morning, and Edmund had organized the mission himself—needed to move fast before the enemy changed position again.

  But his men were angry with him; thought the whole thing poorly timed. Edmund couldn’t blame them. With less than a week of their tour remaining, no one from the 187th wanted to be the last to bite it. There was no question as far as Edmund Lambert was concerned. He knew what he had to do.

  “Are you sure your head’s on straight for this?” asked his commanding officer. “You’ve got a lot of men depending on you tonight, Lambert.”

  “Yes, sir,” Edmund replied. “My grandfather and I weren’t very close.”

  Later that night, Edmund and his unit set out in a convoy of unarmored Humvees that were to bring him and his men along a main road to the outskirts of the city, about a quarter mile from their target. The remainder of the distance would be covered on foot.

  Everything had been going according to plan until the convoy passed through an intersection about a hundred yards from the drop-off point.

  Edmund watched in horror as the Humvee at the head of the convoy was hit dead-on in a hissing streak of white. Then came the explosion, and Edmund knew the gunner was dead. Two men scrambled from the disabled vehicle. One of them was on fire.

  Another explosion—screams of “RPG!” and “Medic!”— and all at once Edmund and his men were under attack from small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades.

  Time seemed to rush forward in leaps—the poppity-pop-pop of returning fire; the metallic thunder of Edmund’s gunner above his head shooting wildly. Then the pump of boots on the hard-pack street—screams of “Down there, down there!” and Edmund found himself crouched behind the corner of a building, the green of his night-vision goggles illuminating his surroundings.

  More gunfire, and Edmund peered down the side street as a Humvee rolled past him, the gunner firing at the fleeing insurgents. It was a trap. Edmund and his men had seen this before. Edmund radioed for the Humvee to hold its position. It did, and kept firing down the street as an IED exploded up ahead.

  Then they were running—Edmund and three of his men on the main road—rounding the corner of the next block; the back and forth of orders, the salute report, the request for rerouting and reinforcements on the radio.

  They were in the southern neighborhoods—close to the city’s small wooded park, beyond which were pockets of farmland and then the desert. Intercept them before they get to the park, Edmund thought; take up position and mow them down before they lose them in the trees and then on to who knows where.

  Edmund waved his men ahead in three-to-five-second rushes, covering each other as they cleared and passed the narrow alleyways between the houses. Edmund was at the end of the line, was about to take up his next position when his NVGs picked up something strange approaching in the alleyway. Instinctively, he stepped forward and raised his weapon—but when his mind finally registered what he was seeing, Sergeant Edmund Lambert froze.

  It was a large male lion.

  Edmund had heard the stories at the start of the war; knew that in the days leading up to and immediately following the U.S.-led invasion, the sight of animals wandering the streets of Baghdad was quite common. Most had either escaped or were freed by looters from the Baghdad Zoo, which had been home to a large number of lions. Many of the big cats had been rounded up by American soldiers in armored vehicles; others were rescued from the Hussein family’s personal menageries, as well as from the appalling conditions of many private zoos.

  Yet the rumors among the locals had persisted; sightings of man-eaters believed to have once belonged to Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, who was notorious for feeding his lions with the flesh of his enemies.

  Rumors. Just rumors.

  But here, north of Mosul, so far away—this couldn’t be happening.

  The lion was closer now.

  It stopped about ten feet away and looked back over its shoulder down the alleyway. Edmund registered in the back of his mind that the lion looked well fed. And at the same time he realized he was not afraid, he felt a crack inside his head—the lion, the alley shifting crooked across his eyes, along with a high ringing in his ears. He was vaguely aware of the sound of gunfire and shouting behind him, but felt himself being pulled forward, as if a hand had been placed on the barrel of his rifle, gently pushing it down. He let it fall but didn’t hear it hit the ground as the ringing in his ears grew louder.

  The lion turned back, lowered its head, and stepped closer—looked meekly up at him with eyes both sad and full of greenish white fire. Edmund felt as if the air around him had turned to lime Jell-O, his movements heavy and not his own. A dream, a swirly dream of shadows, of bright green crumbling brick and a presence—no, two presences—whispering somewhere be
hind him.

  “Be a good boy and carry that rope for me, okay?”

  “C’est mieux d’oublier.”

  Then Edmund saw the word G-E-N-E-R-A-L—a flash of silvery letters, stitched in cursive across a dark blue background. It was as if the word was sneaking up on him from behind; as if he was catching only a glimpse of it before it faded back into the black.

  “C’est mieux d’oublier.”

  Then another crack.

  Now, there was only the lion again, staring up at him from the green. Edmund stroked its mane, his hand tracing slowly down to caress its face. Another flash of memory, and Edmund’s fingers were inside the lion’s mouth. He registered somewhere the feel of its teeth, but at the same time saw his fingers as his grandfather’s, the lion’s mouth his own.

  The lion licked Edmund’s hand—not his hand, but his good luck charm; the ancient Babylonian seal between his thumb and forefinger.

  “C’est mieux d’oublier,” Edmund whispered, and suddenly felt a hot wetness in his groin—felt it running down his legs—and realized his face was cold and moist, his breathing labored as if he was sobbing.

  Sobbing?

  Edmund could not remember crying since his mother died, since that TV show with the happy little boy who looked just like him got canceled.

  “Be a good boy and carry that rope for me, okay?”

  “It’s not my fault,” Edmund said—and all at once the alley shifted again, this time with a whoosh, and the green of his NVGs grew brighter. The lime Jell-O dissolved, the air grew thinner, and now there was only the sound of someone calling his name.

  Edmund looked down at his hands. The Babylonian seal was gone, and the lion was moving away—did not look back as its heavy paws carried it quickly around the curve of the alleyway and out of sight.

  “Come back,” Edmund heard himself whisper. “Come back.”

  He felt someone touch his shoulder—heard his name, closer now—but the world had already begun to iris into black.