I Am the River

by T. E. Grau

“That’s Sua, my brother in law,” Chapel says, gesturing to the man, then to the woman. “And this is Maiv, my wife.” He speaks to them in Hmong, and I detect my name.

  Sua nods his head slightly. Maiv stares at me, the disgust in her eyes dripping down and slightly twisting the forced inscrutability of her expression. It always comes down to the eyes.

  “The children?” I say.

  “What about them?” Chapel says.

  I don’t say anything.

  Their obligation to manners at an end, Maiv turns a glance to Chapel, then slips out of the room, Sua and the children in tow.

  Chapel watches her go. “She doesn’t like you.”

  “She prejudiced too?”

  “Isn’t everybody?”

  I don’t feel like having this talk. I didn’t come out here to have this talk. I should have kept my mouth shut.

  “She thinks you’re going to take me away from here,” he says. “Take me back to where I came from.”

  “I’m not taking anyone anywhere. I ain’t like you.”

  “Yeah, you are,” he says. “That’s why you’re here.”

  I can’t tell if he’s implying that I’m going to take him somewhere, or that I’m like him. Either way, he’s wrong.

  He watches me struggle inside, still gathering intel. In the dim light of the hut, without the squint, his wrinkles that once looked so proud and distinguished now just make him look worn out. Tired.

  “I’m here…” I shake my head, stand up and pull the pistol from my waistband, point it at his face. “I’m here to get some answers. Where you go after that is up to you.”

  “You don’t need to hold a gun on me,” Chapel says mildly. He seems neither surprised nor distressed. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

  “I do need to hold a gun on you, so you know what it feels like.”

  “You don’t think I know?”

  “Not lately. Not living out here, like this.”

  “Put the gun away, Broussard.”

  “I ain’t—”

  “Put the gun away, or you’ll be cut down where you stand.” Chapel nods to various corners of the hut. In each one, a rifle barrel pokes into the room. I never saw them, certainly didn’t hear them. I guess Chapel always rolls with ghosts.

  “They gonna shoot?”

  “Keep that gun in my face for another six or seven seconds and they will.”

  “Call ’em off.”

  “They won’t listen to me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not in charge here.”

  I hear several safety latches click to the “off” position.

  “Bullshit.”

  Chapel shrugs. “Okay.”

  My new eyes can see fingers tightening on triggers. I lower the pistol, then stuff it into the back waistband of my trousers. I look to each corner. The barrels are gone, as silently as they appeared. No shadow has replaced them. Not yet. That would be coming along shortly, sure as rain in the jungle. No way in hell Black Shuck is still on that porch. It’ll want to see what’s happening in here.

  “Sit?” Chapel says.

  “You giving me orders?” I say. “You think you’re my daddy? ’Cause you sure as shit ain’t my commanding officer.”

  “Will you please sit?” Chapel says, his tone unchanged.

  I hesitate, wanting to protest, wanting to shoot this motherfucker, let him feel my rage and hurt at being lured into the jungles of Laos to die with brothers that I barely knew, didn’t have time to know, for a cause that was madness from the inside out, but I don’t know how to say what I want to say, and don’t have a weapon in my hand, so I sit. I sink down two inches in the low rattan chair. I get up and move it aside, then sit on the floor, thinking about peeling the orange that’s in front of me.

  Chapel joins me on the ground, crossing his legs under him with some effort and a series of pops from creaky tendons. The sounds stab through the buzzing in my brain, as the River begins to reach out again, finding me here in Chapel’s hut. Always finding me, forever and ever and ever.

  “So,” Chapel says, his voice barely audible over the sound of the water now rushing around me. Black Shuck fills the doorway behind him, cutting off the light from outside. The hound doesn’t come into the room, because it doesn’t have to, not with the water flooding the floor. “Where do we go from here?”

  34. Orphans from a Different Tribe

  Broussard sat cross-legged in front of his hooch, shaking off a feeling of falling, or being pulled fast down a great black hillside. He might have dozed off, but he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t slept well since crossing over into Laos, haunted with queer dreams.

  He looked over at Darby, who was reassembling his M-14 in the dying light of day aided by a kerosene lantern, oiling each part and metal surface and buffing it with a small stained rag.

  “It’s gonna be sundown soon, and then…” Darby said, sensing that Broussard was awake and watching him.

  “Yeah,” Broussard said. “And then.”

  “Why ain’t you sleepin’?”

  “I don’t know. I’m starting to forget how.”

  “You always the first one sleepin’,” Darby said with a chuckle. “Sleep through the apocalypse, ol’ Broussard.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Me neither,” Darby said with a sigh. “Never was much for sleepin’. Too much mischief to get into.” He grinned, exposing a missing bicuspid.

  “You scared?”

  “Nah,” Darby said, looking up from his work to gaze out into the wall of trees around them, the sky and clouds above them starting to pinken, cut by fingers of purple. “I kinda wish I could say I was, because I know that I ain’t somethin’ that’s probably considered normal. But, I ain’t ever been accused of bein’ somethin’ like that.” Darby returned to his work.

  Broussard regarded Darby, watching the man instead of what he was doing.

  “Something on your mind, Crayfish?” Darby said. “I mean, aside from the obvious.” He grinned again. Calm as a peeled cucumber.

  Broussard didn’t speak for a long time. “I just wanted to let you know that I had you all wrong.”

  “Do tell.” Darby didn’t sound the least bit surprised.

  “It’s just… I saw you, you know? The outside stuff. White dude. The accent. Kind of rough around the edges. All that.”

  “Yeah, all that.”

  “I had you figured for someone that you weren’t.”

  “I get that a lot.” Darby looked down his detached barrel.

  “I bet you do.”

  “I reckon you do too,” Darby said, looking through the barrel at Broussard.

  “Yeah.”

  “Listen, man,” Darby said, carefully setting aside his oil and folding his rag, then lighting up a cigarette. “I wanna say this now, cuz, well, a soul never know what tomorrow’s gonna bring, you get me? So I wanna say that I think it’s powerful sad the way y’all get treated, here and back in the world. I seen it. I know ’bout it. I grew up the only white kid in the colored part of town. So I get it, as much as I can get it.”

  “Yeah, I reckon you probably got it from both sides.”

  Darby nodded. “But be that as it may be, I can leave that part of town, put on a proper city suit and head to the other side of that dividing line that ain’t marked on no map but everyone can see plain as Mary like a stripe of bright orange paint. I can walk on them streets, act like one of ’em, blend in.” He spits. “I been blendin’ in my entire life. Hell, I’m half a chameleon at this point. But out here, where the rules is different, governed by different judges prayin’ to different gods, I can be myself, at least up to a point. We all orphans and freaks out here.” Darby took several drags from his cigarette.

  Broussard noticed the way Darby kept glancing over at him. He waited for him to go on, because he knew he needed to. For the first time since they’d met on the other side of the border, Darby looked nervous.

  “I’m a homosexual, Brou
ssard.” Darby took a drag of his cigarette, held it in like he was hitting a joint, then exhaled.

  Broussard kept his gaze on the lantern. “Yeah, you get it from all sides, all right”

  Darby looked at him, then broke into a smile. “Pun intended?”

  Broussard didn’t get it at first, then he did. He smiled, as well. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Darby laughed quietly, nodded and looked off into the jungle. “I guess so, too.”

  The two men sat in the loud quiet of the jungle evening, each hearing something different coming from the trees as the sun finally dipped below the horizon line, bringing its light to a different hemisphere of the earth, and leaving this one to darkness.

  “Gentleman.”

  Darby and Broussard turned to find Chapel standing at the edge of the trees, Render, McNulty, Medrano, and Morganfield just behind him, dressed, geared, and holding their weapons.

  “It’s time to take our positions.”

  35. We the Devastating Machines

  The men stand on the ridgeline above the valley, rifles ready, minds racing, hearts in throats. The mystery threatens to end them all.

  I am one of the men.

  I remember.

  And so

  here

  I

  am

  again.

  The River has brought me back here. To here. My past is my present and my future doesn’t fucking matter now, or ever.

  Present future past, past perfect nightmare.

  The drain at the bottom of the world swirls with the River water of everything that has collected above it. The hound, sent here for reasons beyond my understanding, guards this drain, looking for scraps. I am one of these scraps. That is how it found me.

  I am here, just as the River wants it, a passenger along for the ride of the grand nostalgia tour inside my own body, playing out the great cosmic mindfuck created to entertain whatever is watching and taking notes. I know that I will probably come back here again, and again, and again, for all eternity. This is my fate, written on this very night. It has become canon. Good God in heaven and anyone or anything else that is watching, please take me from here. I know what’s coming. I can’t take it again.

  Chapel served me an orange. A single fucking orange, the size of a child’s head.

  The trees behind us—I see, I remember, I see again—stand black against the pink of the darkening sky. They’re rigged with heavy speakers mounted inside black wooden boxes, spread out at intervals, bowing forward just the slightest bit with the weight of bearing these strange fruit.

  Chapel stands in front of the four plus one which is me which equals five. He regards each of us with a proud, solemn look, as Morganfield walks from man to man, handing out a small plastic baggie to each one.

  “What are these?” McNulty says, holding up the baggie and squinting at the two small round pieces of foam inside.

  “Earplugs.” Chapel says. “I’ll let you know when you should use them.”

  The men look at each other, all formulating their own vision of what sort of horror would necessitate a total negation of sound by those issuing it.

  “You don’t want us to hear the tape?” McNulty says.

  Chapel says nothing.

  “Why can’t we hear the tape?” McNulty is now asking anyone who will listen, his panic rising. “Why can’t we hear it?”

  The sun finally dies in the western sky. The dome above them is black at the apex and dropping slow like a curtain toward the edge of the world, peppered by the salt of a billion billion stars, most of them dead a trillion years back. Maybe I died then, too, and came back to the third planet orbiting this tiny star each and every night as the candlelight shadow of the long dead. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.

  “Gentlemen, please insert your ear plugs,” Chapel says.

  We all do, stuffing plastic into our ears with shaky, clumsy fingers. My plugs don’t fit very well, and sound leaks through the gaps. I jam my fingers into each ear in a real-time déjà vu, doing this again and again by habit, pushing at the plugs, hoping they’ll hold this time.

  “Morganfield, would you do the honors?” Chapel says. I can still see his face, as the last of the light hasn’t yet be sucked from the world. He looks triumphant, and looking back with my new eyes through those old ones, Chapel looks smug, a vainglorious portrait of Varro at the dawning moments of the Battle of Cannae.

  “Sir, I’d be honored,” Morganfield’s mouth says, the words coming seconds after the movement, the sound of his voice still making its way to my brain as it links up with an additional host. He walks to an electronic setup fixed with two reel-to-reel spools, powered by four large battery arrays stacked in the grass behind it. The back reel is full. The front is empty.

  Morganfield presses a button, then steps back, cocking his .45.

  Chapel puts his unlit pipe into his mouth then crosses his arms, a look of intense concentration on his face.

  The fat spool spins, growing the empty one.

  The shaking of my atoms and the sweat running down my head pushes one of my ear plugs free, and it falls to ground in the darkness. I don’t even bother looking for it, because I know what’s coming, because I remember now.

  The sounds that whisper, stretch, then pour from the speakers in the trees surrounding the valley feel like tendrils of a living thing, tentacles of a huge creature buried somewhere in the ground, only showing hints of what it really is.

  These are nightmares turned inside out. Roars of beasts, pushed to higher registers by male human screams that seem ripped from constricted throats seconds before death. Moans, whispers and guttural curses in two dozen Southeast Asian dialects. Chittering sounds of insects, claws and teeth scraping across polished stone. And a rumbling, throbbing bass note captured as the death rattle of a distant black star. I can’t understand how anything living or mechanical could create such sounds, and don’t believe anything can.

  Puncturing this first wave is the high, screedling voice of Arceneaux the swamp witch, calling to me in Vietnamese from the edge of the swamp, her quivering nakedness peeking through the layer of mud, pale gray against her black skin, vines wrapped around her like a rotting shroud.

  And the gnashing bark of a hound, rumbling from a massive chest. I finally hear its voice, and did before I even met it face to face. It was there the whole time, waiting for me to arrive.

  The tape is transcribed as the reels spin, one diminishing as one grows, twirling twirling in the spiral that rules all things in this universe, and maybe all others.

  The mad symphony of horrors continues, human utterances joined by a low register organ crash, a baritone hum lingering, as the exhortations in Vietnamese and in Lao continue, cut by screams, cackles, and howls from human and hound. Over all of this is an entreaty in a mournful child’s voice, heartbreak in each word, warning all who listen. Warning them before it’s too late.

  This is data too big and alien to understand. The density cannot be properly absorbed and sorted. It’s the soundtrack of the abyss, sung by those who swirl around its rim, mad with fear and ecstasy.

  What comes out of those speakers is the most repulsive thing I’ve heard in my life, and yet it remains fresh and wet like an open wound, no matter how many times I’m forced to endure it.

  I drop my rifle and clamp my hands over my ears. I can’t hear this again. I couldn’t hear it the first time, and have never been the same since.

  On cue, Chapel grabs my arm and yells into my ear. “Guns up, Broussard!”

  “I can’t take it,” I say through gritted teeth. “Not again.” I don’t know if this is the first time I’m saying this, or is just my line to say in this insane cosmic stage play.

  “Yes, you can,” Chapel says. “And you will. Take it in, and let it come right out. You have the strength.”

  “I can’t. I can’t!”

  “It’s not for you. It’s for them,” he says, pointing at the two mountains across the valley. “Don’t fear that whi
ch doesn’t know you.”

  I look at his face. I’ve never heard him say this before. He must have broken the chain.

  He releases me and is gone. I stagger in the darkness, drowning in this horrible sound, projected out a half mile through two dozen speakers, and see activity up and down the mountains. Lights, flares, smoke of moving vehicles, the canopy of trees sway as things move past and through them.

  It’s working. This time it will work, and what comes next will not come. The tape continues to play, and it is working. Chapel will win his war, and everyone goes home. Everyone goes home alive.

  The tape stops, and there is silence. An awful, familiar silence.

  The chain has not been broken, because nothing can break the chain. What has occurred will occur, and will never stop.

  “What the fuck is happening?” a voice screams. It’s McNulty. “What the fuck is happening?”

  No answer. No sound.

  It’s so dark I can’t see my own hands. I remove my other earplug.

  Then there’s sound again. The sound of shells leaving long cylinders from high ground opposite our position.

  “Tubes!” Render shouts from the dark.

  The air fills with the whistle of plotted metal falling from the sky, then the thudding explosions as they make contact with the earth.

  The darkness is gone, replaced by fire. Orange, red, yellow, white, and blue. Flares in the sky and explosions on the ground all around us. Burning phosphorus, RDX, and TNT blossom along our ridgeline like deadly tulips, cradled on cushions of smoke, showering everything with hot shrapnel and shards of earth.

  The valley below is now crawling with movement as thousands leave their mountain hideaways and rush the valley floor, heading for the high ground on the other side of the bowl. Tripwires sing and claymores thud in mad syncopation. More flares cut the black sky, pink, green, and white, pushing back the stars and falling slowly like bleeding fireworks.

  I find Chapel yelling something unintelligible at Morganfield in a language that may or may not be English, or even human, as Morganfield’s hands dance over the audio player, making adjustments to a dead machine. I grab Chapel by the shoulders and turn him to face me.