Lost at Khe Sanh

by Steve Watkins

  “You could still sneak out your window,” I said. “Just promise me you’ll come, okay?” I wished he’d come with me now, in case the new ghost was already waiting in my bedroom.

  Greg let out a giant sigh. “Yes,” he said. “I promise. But you owe me.”

  “Owe you what?” I asked.

  “You have to be the one to tell Julie that she can’t hold a tune,” he said. “And even if my voice is cracking or whatever, her voice is a whole lot worse.”

  And with that Greg pedaled off into the growing darkness. I climbed on my own bike, but I sure wasn’t in any hurry to get home.

  Mom and Dad were already sitting down to dinner when I came in. I took off my beanie and slid into my chair at the table, trying to be cool about it, as if I’d been in my bedroom all afternoon doing homework.

  Mom put down her fork and knife. “Anderson,” she said. “Is there something you want to say to me and your father?”

  “Sorry I’m late for dinner?” I said.

  Apparently, that wasn’t it.

  “The police called a few minutes ago,” Dad said. “Something about a hand grenade.”

  I didn’t say anything this time.

  “You could have been hurt,” Mom said, her voice rising. “You could all have been killed. What on earth were you thinking, Anderson?”

  “I guess I wasn’t thinking,” I said, adding a few I’m sorrys afterward. I wished I could explain that it almost didn’t seem like it was me picking up the grenade, and that it felt glued to my hand — I couldn’t have put it down if I’d tried — until we got upstairs and found Uncle Dex. But no way would they understand all that. Or the voice Greg and I heard.

  I didn’t understand it myself.

  Dad lectured me for a while about using my head, and about safety first, and then Mom took over, though she had a hard time getting too steamed up because of her multiple sclerosis. It’s this disease she’s had for as long as I can remember that affects her muscles and all, and gets pretty bad sometimes so it’s hard for her to even get out of bed. I could tell she was fatigued just sitting there setting me straight.

  I didn’t mind, in a way, because the longer we sat there at the table — and I hadn’t even started eating yet — the longer it would be before I had to go to my bedroom and maybe meet another ghost. Thanks to Greg, I was spooked about this new one with (or now without, I guess) his lucky hand grenade, because what if Greg was right and the ghost was mad at us, not friendly at all?

  I somehow made it through the rest of the lectures, and dinner, and I even got dessert, though usually when I mess up that’s the first privilege to go. Probably Mom and Dad were happy and relieved, deep down, that I was okay and I suppose they were right about what they said before — that we all could have been killed.

  “How about if I do the dishes tonight?” I asked once we finished up.

  Dad smiled. Usually he and I took turns the nights we were all home to eat together, and Mom wasn’t in bed with her MS. Tonight was supposed to be his night.

  “I think that’s a good idea,” he said. “A little penance can do the heart good.”

  “What’s ‘penance’?” I asked, already stacking the plates to bring them to the kitchen.

  “Doing something good to make up for doing something you shouldn’t have done,” Dad said, which was kind of what I figured.

  I not only cleared the table and rinsed all the dishes and put away all the leftovers, I also unloaded the dishwasher, dried everything and put it away, and reloaded it after that. I even scrubbed the dirty pots and pans. It was a lot of penance, but I wanted to make sure I’d done enough good so the whole hand grenade situation wouldn’t come back to haunt me.

  Finally, I couldn’t put it off any longer, so I went to my room. I hesitated at the door, my sweaty hand on the knob but afraid to open it.

  “Please, not another ghost,” I muttered to myself. It wasn’t a prayer exactly, but it wasn’t too far off from being one.

  “Okay,” I said. “This is it. I’m going in.” I held my breath, turned the knob, closed my eyes, pushed the door open, and forced myself to step inside.

  I fumbled for the light switch and turned it on, then counted down: “Three, two, one …”

  There was nobody there. I checked behind the door, in the closet, even under the bed.

  Nothing.

  But I wasn’t about to relax. I texted Greg. The coast is clear. No ghost so far. Come over soon.

  He texted me back right away. Did you tell Julie yet that she can’t hold a tune?

  I lied and said yes. Then I asked how it went with his dad. Greg said his dad just yelled at him some, but that was all — no restrictions and no punishment except he had to do a few extra chores. Greg said to give him an hour and he’d come over.

  I was too nervous to do my homework, so I just lay on my bed for a while, still waiting for this new ghost to show up — certain that he would. I kept thinking about his whispery voice from the Kitchen Sink basement: “That looks like my lucky grenade.” You can’t ignore something like that, or pretend you didn’t hear it, no matter how hard you try. Especially after you’ve already had one ghost show up in your room and hang around for a couple of weeks until you solved his mystery and he could go to his final rest.

  I still had the feel of the grenade in my hand, too, and remembered the writing on it: Z & Fish. DMZ 68.

  What in the world was that supposed to mean?

  I couldn’t make sense of it, so got up and turned my computer on to do an Internet search. Nothing came up when I typed in “Z & Fish” except a bunch of random stuff that didn’t make any sense.

  “DMZ 68” was a different story. DMZ was a comic book series set in the future where the five boroughs of New York City were at war with one another, and #68 was one of the issues. It sounded kind of cool, but I had no idea if it was what I was looking for. The last ghost I’d met was from World War II, after all, which was real.

  It was hard to imagine that the hand grenade might belong to a character from a comic book. Then again, it had been hard to imagine I’d ever meet up with a ghost in the first place, so anything was possible.

  A tapping on my bedroom window jolted me out of all that speculation. I jumped, but it was just Greg. I opened the window and helped him climb in.

  “Well?” he asked, looking around.

  “No ghost,” I said. “Yet.”

  “Okay,” he said, throwing his book bag on the floor and throwing himself on my bed. “So what about Julie? How did she take it when you told her her voice sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard?”

  “Uh, oh yeah, that,” I said. “Actually, I kind of might have not quite told her. But I will. I promise. I just have to figure out a way to do it so it won’t hurt her feelings.”

  Greg frowned and crossed his arms over his chest. “I should have known,” he said. “You’re such a chicken.”

  “I’m a chicken?” I said, incredulous. “I’m sitting here all by myself, waiting for a ghost to show up, and you’re calling me a chicken? Thanks a lot, Greg.”

  He wasn’t about to let me get the upper hand, though. “You’re a chicken when it comes to standing up to Julie,” he said. “You’re a Julie chicken.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Why don’t you tell her, then?”

  “I already have,” Greg answered. “Sort of. I mean, I didn’t put it quite that way — about the fingernails on the chalkboard and all — but I did tell her she might not be the best person to be our singer. You heard what she said to me about my singing. And speaking of that, how come you didn’t stick up for me when she said all that stuff about my voice cracking and all?”

  I was about to say that I didn’t want to get in the middle of the two of them and their fight over who should be our lead singer, but somebody interrupted me.

  A gravelly voice that didn’t sound too happy with the way our conversation was going.

  “Will you two ladies give it a rest already,” the voice sa
id.

  Greg and I both froze, our eyes fixed on something — or rather somebody: a man sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the wall just past the end of my bed.

  “Much better,” the man said. “I was starting to get a headache having to listen to all that yammering.”

  “Sorry,” Greg whispered.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry.”

  The man had an unlit cigar in his mouth. He took it out and looked at it as if he’d just remembered it was there, then he stuck it back in and sort of chomped down on it so it stuck out to the side and he could still talk.

  “Either one of you boys happen to have a match?” he asked.

  “Sorry,” I said again. “I don’t think you’re allowed to smoke in the house.”

  The man let out a hollow laugh, which pretty much got rid of any doubt I might still have about him being a ghost.

  I guess Greg wanted to be totally sure, though. “Are you, like, you know, a ghost?” he asked.

  The man quit laughing and instead fixed his gaze on Greg and stared so hard that I thought Greg might actually melt. Then the man — or the ghost — checked himself out the way he’d looked at the cigar a minute before. He had on an old army jacket with the sleeves torn off and a stained black T-shirt underneath. Plus, camouflage fatigues and boots caked with red mud. Also long, greasy hair held back with a rolled-up bandanna. And a scary-looking knife half as long as my forearm, in a sheath attached to his belt.

  A gray, weathered bush hat sat on his knee where he must have taken it off when he came in, or materialized, or however he happened to show up in my room. There was something written on it that I couldn’t quite make out.

  He looked like he hadn’t shaved — or bathed, or changed clothes — in a long time.

  After taking inventory of all this — except for his face, of course, which he couldn’t see but we could — he nodded.

  “A ghost,” he said. “I hadn’t been able to put a word to it before, but that sounds about right.”

  “And you need us to help you?” Greg asked, already starting to sound more excited than scared.

  The ghost chewed thoughtfully on his cigar for a minute. He had seemed annoyed with us when he first showed up, but I was hoping that had passed. Unlike Greg, I wasn’t quite through being scared. Our first ghost had been really young, a sailor, still a teenager. But this guy was older, and harder, and looked a lot meaner.

  He didn’t answer Greg’s question. Instead, he turned his gaze on me and growled again. “Where’s my lucky hand grenade?”

  “You don’t know what happened to the grenade — your lucky grenade?” I asked. “I mean, you were there and everything, right?”

  The ghost just looked at me. “You mean when you picked it up out of that footlocker? Yeah, I was there. Sort of.”

  “But you didn’t see what happened when the bomb squad came? After we went upstairs?” I was definitely getting nervous about this.

  The ghost kept chewing on that cigar, though it didn’t seem to be getting any shorter or anything. “Bomb squad, huh?” he growled. “Don’t like the sounds of that one bit. But, no. Things kind of faded out on me after you boys and that Asian girl ran upstairs.”

  Julie is actually half Asian — or rather half Japanese since her dad is from Japan and her mom is American. She looks more like her dad than she does her mom.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to the ghost. “But they, um, I guess you’d say, well, sort of blew it up.”

  I braced myself for the ghost to yell at me or worse. I had no idea what a ghost might be capable of doing when he got mad at you.

  Instead, he waved his hand as if brushing away a mosquito — or dismissing the whole business about the grenade, which is certainly what I hoped.

  “I guess it wasn’t all that lucky,” he said, “come to think of it. Only lucky thing about it was it didn’t detonate when I pulled the pin. Don’t know why your bomb squad bothered. If it didn’t explode back then, I doubt it was going to explode on anybody now.”

  Greg had sat up on the bed and was leaning in so he could follow every word. “They said it was standard procedure,” he said, though I had no idea when he’d heard that from the bomb squad, since we were way down the street when they showed up at Uncle Dex’s store. “It’s just what they’re required to do with unexploded ordnance.”

  The ghost nodded. “Makes sense,” he said. “Can’t risk civilians getting hurt.”

  “So,” I started. “About that first time. You said you tried to detonate the hand grenade once before. When was that? And why? And also, who or what is ‘DMZ sixty-eight’? And ‘Z and Fish’?”

  “Whoa!” the ghost said, waving both hands now in front of him. “Slow down there, son! Too many questions. Don’t think I can operate that fast anymore.”

  Greg actually laughed. “He’s like that in school, too,” he said.

  The ghost’s face cracked into a smile — literally. Smile lines broke up patches of dried mud on his cheeks. He even managed to look sort of friendly for a second.

  But then he chomped back down on his unlit cigar. And he frowned.

  “All those questions you just asked me,” he said, shaking his head. “I should know all the answers. I know I should, and I almost do — like they’re on the tip of my tongue. But I just can’t seem to make them all come back to me just yet. Only how can that be? How can I know that was my lucky grenade, and that I pulled the pin on it one time, and that it didn’t explode, but I can’t remember anything else?”

  “Maybe you just need time to think about it some more,” I suggested, trying to be helpful.

  “You mean mull it all over?” the ghost asked. “Like I’ve been mulling it all over for the past, well, guess I can’t even say how long.”

  “How about ‘DMZ’? Greg asked. “Could those be your initials, maybe?”

  The ghost frowned deeply again. Then he shook his head. “No. Don’t think so. In fact, I’m pretty sure they’re not.”

  He brightened a little. “But, hey, it’s something to go on, anyway. More than I had this afternoon. And those other things. The ‘Z’ and the ‘Fish.’ There’s something there, too. Just need to keep digging in my brain until I find it.”

  He looked at us for a minute. “Guess you boys are ready for bed. Probably got school in the morning, so I’m gonna check out here for a while.”

  “And mull things over,” Greg reminded him, as if he needed reminding.

  “Sure,” the ghost said, smiling. “And mull things over.”

  Greg and I lay in bed for ten minutes with the lights out after the ghost left, neither of us talking, waiting to see if maybe he would come back. He never did — at least not that night.

  Actually, Greg was on the floor in my sleeping bag, which was his usual place whenever he stayed over at my house. He only lived a couple of blocks away and kind of had permission to come over whenever his dad was drinking and went into a sort of dark place (that’s what Greg called it), which happened once every couple of months. I always offered to get the blow-up air mattress, but he always just said no, he didn’t want to be a bother. Even though we were best friends, I knew he was still embarrassed about his dad. This was different, of course — he’d come over because of the ghost — but I guess he was just in the habit of sleeping on the floor by now.

  I finally broke the silence. “That ghost didn’t sound like he came out of a comic book,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” Greg asked.

  “It was what I found when I looked it up on the Internet — that ‘DMZ 68’ that was written on the lucky hand grenade,” I explained. “It’s a comic book about all the boroughs of New York City being at war with one another.”

  “That sounds pretty cool, but yeah, probably not that,” Greg said. “DMZ must stand for something else. And anyway, that guy — the ghost — he was from a real war.”

  “But which one?” I said.

  “Pretty sure I know,” said Greg.
“I’ve seen a lot of pictures of guys that looked kind of like that, not exactly in their regulation uniforms and all.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  Greg didn’t answer right away, and I looked over the side of the bed at him. He was staring up at the ceiling.

  “Greg?” I said. “Are you okay?”

  He nodded. “My dad has all these photographs,” he said. “They’re in a box he keeps buried in his closet. He probably doesn’t know I looked through it. He has a bunch of medals, too. From when he was in Vietnam.”

  Greg didn’t talk about his dad a lot, so I didn’t say anything. Just waited for him to finish.

  “That ghost,” he said. “He was dressed like a lot of the guys in my dad’s pictures. I was just thinking he might have served in Vietnam, too.”

  Greg and I were dragging all the next day at school. We had lunch with Julie and filled her in about the ghost, but both of us kept yawning so much that she finally got annoyed and left our table. “You should get more sleep,” she said, though not in a mean way.

  Greg pushed his lunch tray to the side and laid his head on the table. “Not a bad idea,” he said.

  It was probably a good thing Julie left when she did because Belman and a couple of the guys in his band made a big point of stopping at our table right after.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” he said, laughing. “It’s the Bomb Squad!”

  “Go away, Belman,” Greg said, not even bothering to open his eyes.

  Belman was in eighth grade and we were just lowly sixth graders, so you’d think Greg would be more careful, but that was just how he was, not afraid of anybody. The first time Belman made fun of Greg — actually, made fun of his dad — Greg dumped his food tray all over Belman’s shirt.

  Belman grabbed the salt shaker and shook salt out on Greg’s head. “Show some respect for your elders,” he said as his friends burst out laughing. So did some kids at some other tables nearby.

  Greg still didn’t bother to move or even open his eyes, though he must have known Belman had just done something to him. Or maybe he was too tired to care.