Two Songs This Archangel Sings

by George C. Chesbro

  The gun bore touching his forehead didn’t seem to bother the man. His expression didn’t change at all as he rolled his eyes in my direction and raised his eyebrows slightly. “Mongo? Tell me why I shouldn’t be who I say I am.”

  “You don’t match up with the report we got. Gary Worde’s supposed to be the wild man of these mountains, and nobody’s even seen him for nine years. You don’t look or sound very crazy to us, but you do look too Goddamn well fed and well dressed to be the man we’re looking for.”

  “Who told you all this?”

  “A friend of Worde’s in Colletville.”

  The man frowned slightly. “Then Veil didn’t send you?”

  “No. As a matter of fact, you might say we’re looking for him.”

  “Why are you looking for him?”

  Confused and uncertain of what to say, I said nothing. While it was certainly true that this man casually sitting on a boulder in the middle of a dry streambed didn’t match up with anything Jan Garvey had told us about Gary Worde, it was also true that it wouldn’t make any sense for our trackers—assuming they knew about Gary Worde, which was a big assumption—to sit this man down in our path to try to trick us. It bothered me, as did the man’s seeming indifference to Garth’s gun at his head.

  “You’d best answer my question,” the man cautioned in a tone of voice that sounded oddly like a threat.

  “When was the last time you saw Veil Kendry?”

  “I don’t measure time the way you do. It was three seasons ago.”

  Spring. Veil had pulled one of his disappearing acts in the spring, for about three weeks. “He came here?”

  “Yeah. He visits me at least once, sometimes twice, a year.”

  “Why does he visit you?”

  “Because he’s my friend,” the man said with a slight shrug of his shoulders. “We practice together in these mountains.”

  “Practice what? Martial arts?”

  His answer was to execute a series of maneuvers so fast I couldn’t follow them. The bearded man ducked forward and to his left beneath Garth’s gun, which clattered to the rocks as the side of the man’s hand hit Garth’s wrist. In what seemed less than the flicker of an eyelid, Garth had been disarmed and turned around, with one of his arms held in a tight hammerlock. The bearded man’s right forearm was across my brother’s windpipe.

  Feeling like nothing so much as a winded commuter who has just seen his train pull out of the station, I drew my Beretta and started to circle around to where I might get a clear shot at the man who called himself Gary Worde. “Let go of my brother, or I’m going to put a bullet through your head.”

  “Put the gun away, Mongo,” the man said easily. “You’re lucky I recognized you as the Frederickson brothers, or you’d both have been dead a few seconds after your brother here pulled his gun on me. Put yours away.”

  “Let go of Garth first.”

  “No.”

  Garth was turning blue. I released the hammer on the Beretta, flipped it in my hand, and offered it to the bearded man butt first.

  “I didn’t say I wanted the gun,” the man continued. “I just asked you to put it away.” I dropped the gun into the pocket of my parka. The man immediately took his forearm away from my brother’s throat—but he didn’t release the hammerlock. “You still haven’t answered my question, Mongo. If Veil didn’t send you, what are you doing here?”

  “We think you’ve got some answers we need to know.”

  “What are the questions?”

  “What was Veil doing in Saigon near the end of the war, just after he’d been pulled out of Laos? Do you know?”

  Shadows moved in the man’s eyes, and his jaw muscles clenched and unclenched. “Why do you need to know?” he asked softly.

  “It’s a long and complicated story. The bottom line is that Veil’s in big trouble; somebody wants him dead, along with us. We believe that the key to who’s hunting Veil, and why, lies in something that Veil was involved in during the war. It’s Veil’s past we’re hunting, and that’s why we’re here.”

  “Oh, shit,” the man said as he abruptly released Garth and half turned away. He waved one hand in front of his face, as if trying to chase away invisible gnats—or something else. “So that’s finally going down.”

  Garth and I glanced at each other in surprise as the bearded man suddenly started walking away. Garth picked up his gun, then ran after the man and grabbed his arm.

  “Gary, I’m sorry! We don’t understand. What’s going down?”

  Gary Worde shoved Garth’s hand away, kept walking. His shoulders were hunched now, as if against the cold. Without looking back he motioned for us to follow him.

  Garth and I walked in silence on either side of Gary Worde as he walked west in the dry streambed. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets, and his shoulders remained hunched. After a half mile or so he turned to his right and climbed up out of the bed. We found ourselves on a cleared path running up the face of the mountain on which the lookout tower stood. Panting and sweating from the quick pace Worde had set, Garth and I stopped to adjust our backpacks. Still silent, Worde helped us by removing some of the heavier articles from both our packs. He wrapped the articles inside my sleeping bag, hoisted it over his shoulder. Then we started off again.

  “What you heard about me in Colletville is true,” Gary Worde suddenly said in a quiet voice so low that Garth and I had to strain to hear him. “At least it was true back then. I couldn’t—can’t—make it anywhere there are people just going through their regular routines day in and day out. The fact that they don’t know or think about the things that happened in the war only makes me think about them more; if you will, my memories are like air rushing into the vacuum of other people’s forgetfulness or indifference. That’s when I get … crazy. It’s when the bad dreams come.”

  Worde shuddered, cast an anxious look at Garth and me. We returned his gaze and nodded, but remained silent. Garth reached out, squeezed his shoulder.

  “Some people would say that the army let me out of their nuthouse too soon,” the hidden veteran continued as we reached the top of the mountain and walked along its crest. Around us was nothing but forest, rolling hills, more mountains. “That isn’t true; I never would have gotten better there. They had me doped up with chlorpromazine, and all I did was sleep all the time. But I still dreamed. I would have died there, and I guess they finally came to realize that. They gave me a permanently refillable prescription for lithium, the name of a shrink at a V.A. hospital in the Albany area, and let me go. I came home to Colletville.”

  We started down the opposite side of the mountain. Halfway down, beside a swiftly moving stream, was a log cabin which looked sturdily built and came complete with glass windows. Perhaps three-quarters of an acre of forest had been cleared around the cabin, and there were a number of patches of broken ground where I assumed vegetables were grown in the spring and summer. Pelts of raccoon, fox, muskrat, beaver, and deer were curing on stretch racks in the cold air and sunlight. A skinned deer carcass, half butchered and covered with a muslin cloth, hung from an eave of the cabin, and on a chopping block next to the stream lay an ax and a rifle. Cords of firewood were stacked around the sides of the cabin, and smoke drifted up from a stone chimney.

  Gary Worde had again lapsed into silence for some time before we’d approached his cabin, and Garth and I sensed that he was trying to center and gird himself for the psychological turmoil talking about the war would entail. Garth and I helped him prepare a meal of venison and vegetables, served on skewers, which we ate sitting on wooden stools around the huge, open hearth in the center of what served as the cabin’s living room. Afterward, he brewed coffee and served it to us in carved wooden cups. It was almost sundown before he spoke again.

  “Nobody knew how to react to me when I came home,” Worde said quietly as he sipped at his coffee. “A lot of people were downright hostile, as if they considered me responsible for getting us into the war in the first plac
e, or for losing it. Most of the people were kind; they tried to understand and help. But others asked the strangest questions; one guy wanted to know how many women and children I’d killed. Pretty soon I stopped answering any questions. I never did fill the prescription for lithium, because I knew it wouldn’t help. I began to drink heavily, but that didn’t help either. During the day, I couldn’t forget all the horrors I’d seen, and every night I’d have nightmares and relive them. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, screaming. After a while I started … screaming during the day. I’m sure you were told that I started to believe there were Viet Cong surrounding the town, waiting to come in and get me.”

  Without warning, Gary Worde suddenly set down his cup on a corner of the hearth, slipped off his stool, and crouched with his hands over his head. Garth started to go toward him, but he sat back down when I shook my head, signaling danger.

  Slowly, like a cobra rising from a basket, Gary Worde straightened up and began to dance to the deadly music he heard in his head. His eyes glowed in the firelight as he flung one arm out, then the other, spun and kicked high into the air. He continued these graceful but deadly karate moves, a series of kata, for close to fifteen minutes, spinning, lunging, punching, and kicking his way around the cabin as he did battle with the demons in his mind, his imaginary enemies marching out at him from twenty years in the past. When he had finished, he wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, sighed heavily, and sat back down on his stool.

  ‘“There was nobody to talk to who could understand,” the man continued in an even tone, as if nothing had happened. “Nobody except Veil.”

  “You were in touch with Veil back then?” I asked quietly.

  “Yes. The war was over, and Veil had just arrived in New York. Somehow, he’d heard—or guessed—that I was back in Colletville, and he called me. He called a number of times; usually he’d call me from a pay phone, and I’d call him back. We’d talk for hours. He asked me to keep everything a secret—where he was, and even that we were in touch. I did as he asked, even though at the time I didn’t understand his reasons.”

  “You do now?” Garth asked.

  The question had come too soon, and once again we were treated to a prolonged period of silence. Garth and I looked at each other inquiringly, but neither of us spoke. Gary Worde’s strange and violent dance had convinced us that the man was, indeed, dangerous, and could not be pressed. If he was going to tell us anything, it would have to be in his own time, in his own way, at his own pace.

  “Once, I went to New York to visit Veil, without telling anyone where I was going,” Worde said at last. “Veil thought that coming to New York and staying with him might be good for me. Fuck, it didn’t take me long to see that he was crazier than I was, although for different reasons. Also, he handled his craziness differently; he was always brawling, and he could kind of hold things together in his head as long as he was fighting. I’d had enough fighting and seen enough blood and broken bodies to last me a lifetime. I had no way of freeing myself the way Veil did. I figured there was no sense in my going to hell in his handbasket, so I came back to Colletville. Still, that visit to New York helped me in one way; it helped me to realize that the only time I really ever felt good was when I was by myself, up in these mountains.

  “Still, for some reason I thought I just had to learn to live my life like everyone else—work, and have a family, and be a part of society. I’d come up to these mountains on weekends, but during the week I’d try to be … like them. It didn’t work; everything got worse. I was rapidly becoming an alcoholic, and I started to get DT’s to go along with my nightmares. Once, I nearly killed a man because I thought he was a VC sneaking up on me; he was just a businessman in a blue suit walking down the sidewalk in the middle of the day.

  “I knew I was going to have to be sent back to the V.A. mental hospital, and I knew I’d die there. Then I realized what I had to do. I made one phone call—to Veil, telling him what I planned to do. Then I walked up into these mountains, and I’ve been here ever since. It was a good decision; I can only survive where there’s solitude.”

  Gary Worde refilled our coffee cups, and for a time we sat quietly, watching through a window as a huge moon rose into the night sky.

  Finally Worde continued: “When I walked into the woods, I had nothing but the clothes on my back and a hunting knife. Fortunately, it was summer, so I had time to build a crude shelter for the winter. I’d been in … Special Forces. I was well trained in survival craft, and that helped. But that first winter was rough. I don’t know how I survived, but I did, literally living in caves, like an animal. I built snares, ate the flesh of whatever I caught, and used the pelts for warmth. As strange as it may seem, in the middle of all that physical misery I was happy. And I was so exhausted every night just from doing what I had to do to stay alive that I slept without dreams. I didn’t miss booze; in fact, I didn’t miss anything. For the first time in as long as I could remember, my mind was clear.

  “I moved around a lot in that first year, and I looked pretty ragged, to say the least. I know I scared the shit out of a couple of hunters who came across me. Also, some people may have been caught in large snares I set for deer. After that, I think people became afraid of running into me because the hunters and hikers stayed away.

  “Some time later, Veil—who’s one hell of a tracker, in case you didn’t know—found me up here. He’d changed, mellowed; he’d found a new way to fight off his own nightmares. I’d found peace in isolation, and he’d begun to find it in art. I think we must have talked for two days straight, without sleeping. He’d brought me things—canned food, tools, medicine, clothing—that he’d lugged all over creation while he was looking for me. He hadn’t come to ask me to go back with him, because he understood why I had to be where I was. He just wanted to see me, and do what he could to make things more comfortable for me.

  “He came back four more times that year when he found me, bringing me more things and helping me to build this cabin. After that, his visits became routine things, and I looked forward to them very much. He’d brought me steel traps, and I was able to set up good traplines. I cured the pelts of the animals I caught, gave them to Veil on his visits to sell back in New York to pay for the supplies he brought me. While he was here we’d talk and work on certain martial arts techniques that are difficult to describe, but are best practiced in places like these mountains.”

  I thought I had a pretty good idea what Gary Worde was talking about; I remembered the silent walking technique Veil had taught me, and which I had used to sneak up on Loan Ka’s sons in Seattle. I wondered what other deadly arts the two men had practiced here, but did not ask.

  Garth and I helped the man wash the dishes and cooking utensils, using water drawn from a spigot in a rain barrel suspended near the open hearth to keep the water from freezing. When we had finished, Worde removed one of four carved pipes from a rack, filled it with a mixture, and lit it. Almost immediately, the air inside the cabin was filled with the sickly-sweet smell of marijuana. He offered the pipe to us, and we declined. And we waited. As Gary Worde had told us, and as he had made abundantly clear, his sense of time was not ours. He would tell us what we wanted to know, assuming he possessed the information, when he was ready, and not before.

  “Veil told me certain things which you’d proably like to know about,” the hidden veteran continued at last in a flat, matter-of-fact tone as he stared out the window into the moonlight-washed night. “There were two reasons why he felt he could talk to me about these matters. First, I’m up here where nobody can find me; second, he knew he could trust me to keep my mouth shut even if people could find me. It’s very dangerous information—dangerous to Veil, and dangerous to anyone else who shares it.”

  “We’re well aware of that, Gary,” I said quietly. “But now that information may be the only thing that can save Veil, and us. A lot of innocent people have already died because of Veil’s secrets.”


  “Veil’s not responsible for that.”

  “I didn’t say he was, although it’s difficult to understand why he’s done certain things the way he has. All we want to do is stop the killing, and nail whoever is responsible. Do you know who that is?”

  Now Gary Worde slowly turned toward us; half his face glowed in the flickering orange light from the fireplace, the other half remained hidden in shadow. “Maybe now is the time to talk about those things, maybe it isn’t. I hear you when you say Veil’s in trouble, and that you need this information to help him. That’s heavy. But what I know about Veil is heavy, too, and I’m not at all sure I’m going to share it with you unless you can convince me that you have a very good reason for wanting to know it.”

  “We believe Veil wants us to have the information, Gary.”

  “Then why didn’t he tell you himself?”

  “Because we live in the city, not in the mountains, and that made us too vulnerable. We believe Veil wanted, rightly or wrongly, for us to discover things this way, bit by bit. This is a guess, but I think that in Veil’s mind he believed this was the best—maybe the only—way to get the truth out with any chance for his survival, and ours.”

  “Convince me of that,” Worde said, sitting back down on his stool by the hearth. “We have all the time in the world.”

  “Veil doesn’t.”

  “Tell me what’s happened.”

  I did, starting at the beginning when I had walked into an unlocked, brightly lighted—and empty—loft.

  16.

  Apparently, I was convincing.