I Am the River

by T. E. Grau

  “You need to call this in!”

  “I can’t,” he says, the end of his words cut off by explosions. Someone screams, a sound coming from a human throat, not from a speaker.

  “Why not?”

  “We kill them, the mission fails.”

  “That doesn’t make any fucking sense!”

  Chapel looks out into the valley and the wave of humanity heading our way.

  “Call in the strike!” I say. “You knew this would happen. You know like I do!”

  Chapel’s face stills, and he is about to say something, when the Hmong emerge from the trees behind us. Chapel looks at me, smiles, and pushes my rifle across my chest.

  He winks. “Good luck this time.”

  A mortar strikes nearby, and the concussion separates us, knocking me to the ground. Shrapnel grazes my leg, my hip. I stand up and when the smoke clears, Chapel is gone.

  The tape starts again, louder this time and skipping, adding an extra layer of confusion and horror to the sounds of mortars and men, rifles and bullets and screams of the dead and dying that braid together with the recorded nightmare. Now we can all hear it, but its meaning is wasted, as it’s been exposed as a sham.

  The first of the VC crest the ridgeline. The Hmong open up with their weapons.

  I run.

  36. Shedding Scales

  “‘Good luck this time,’ you said. ‘This time.’ Why did you say that?” I look at Chapel in the dim light of the hut, searching his face for any clue that his mouth isn’t giving me. The shine in his eyes has gone flat.

  “I don’t remember,” he says.

  “That’s bullshit. I remember all of it. Every second.”

  “Well, you would, wouldn’t you?”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “According to you, you’ve been there before. Experienced that night, a number of times.”

  “I have. You have, too. I know you have. What you said, how you said it, that look… You have, too.”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t remember…a lot of it. Most of it. I’m getting old.” He looks out the small window of the hut. “The jungle takes my memories from me. A few more every day. It’s why I’m here, I think. Why I stay here. I want the jungle to take all of them, and just leave me…empty.”

  “No, it’s not that. You do remember. Your brain remembers, but won’t let you see it. It’s in there. It’s all in there.”

  “Maybe,” he says.

  “Then let me fill you in.”

  37. Butcherbird

  I run to higher ground, away from the jungle and the ridgeline and the killing that’s happening there. I need to get my feet out of the mud and post up high, wait it out and then disappear. The moon is out now, and everything is lit up blue. I can see where I’m going, and others can, too, I reckon. So I climb higher, as the eruptions of death become more faint below me.

  Further up the incline, I climb the strewn boulders and granite blocks, jumping from surface to surface, surprised by my agility. Frankenstein’s monster. Chapel’s coward. I come to a stop on a flattop, crevices surrounding it on three sides where the stone split away when this massive stone hit the earth from wherever it was flung. Finding my feet, I turn back and look down to the fighting in the flashes of grenades and mortars. The moon is full now, the clouds have all bugged out with me, leaving the killing field illuminated and in sharp detail. I see McNulty being hacked to death with a machete. Then two, three more blades, taking off one of his arms, then his leg. Bayonets bury themselves in his torso. A barrel presses against his screaming head and takes off the top of it. He falls to the ground, dead before he lands.

  Yards away Render is standing his ground in front of the wave of hateful humanity and shooting his rifle dry, then his pistol, then picks up a rock from the ground and is dropped before he can wind up.

  Behind them Darby is on the move, in and out of the darkness, appearing long enough to take shots and drop weapons and pick up new ones and continue. A heavy machine gun assembled on the ridge tracks him, and begins firing as he disappears into the shadows. He doesn’t emerge.

  I can’t find Morganfield, or Medrano. I think one of the mortar rounds got Jorge early on. It’s a blur, the memory, but it’s there, seen by one of my new eyes. The son of California, the father and husband and uncle and son and grandson would never mix his ingredients back into the soil of the San Joaquin.

  It’s Chapel I’m waiting for, because I know he’s alive this time, as I’m sitting right in front of him at the other end of the River. I didn’t see him before, but this time I do. He’s fighting with the Hmong, his true tribe. We were hired guns, window dressing, or maybe just a part of the game I don’t understand.

  Dozens of VC are rushing the Hmong position, which is arrayed like a rotating shield formation, rifles firing rounds until spent, and then those behind moving to the front, while the replaced move to the back to reload and check and cool their weapons. Chapel fires his M-1 like a patient hunter taking down a herd of buffalo too far away to hear the shots.

  Bodies stack up on both sides, creating a picket wall between them. The Hmong stand their ground. Chapel continues to fire. A new platoon of VC rush from the jungle to their flank, and they’re caught in a half-pincer. Charlie swarms the Hmong position like ants, offering up their lives to crush the tribesmen. The last I see of Chapel he’s buried by bodies, both living and dead.

  My head buzzes and I swoon backward, almost losing my balance, then run into something big. I turn and find a Vietnamese man—a boy, probably, by the pudginess of his face—looking down at me, as he stands almost a foot taller. He seems surprised, not noticing me as he watched the carnage below us. His face is open, curious, full of wonder. Just like a child’s. He’s strapped with boxes of ammunition and bags of provisions, hundreds of pounds of it. He’s a mule, not a soldier. A giant mule.

  He coos and his hands reach for me. I slap them away, stepping to another boulder, stumbling over a crevasse. He takes a step forward, covering all the ground with one stride, and the hands come again, aiming for my face, the cooing getting louder, and I grab one of them, bending back the fingers. They pop, and two of them come loose from their joints.

  The giant frowns and sticks out his chin shiny with drool. He forms his good hand into a fist and hits me in the ear.

  The world explodes, then recedes with a keening whine, bound up with the buzzing. I grab the side of my face and red washes over my vision. I am furious. A furious one, in the flesh, and I rush at him, arms swinging wildly. My blows have no effect on the huge body, just like they don’t in so many of my dreams where I have no strength, raining down punches soft as feathers on one dangerous figure after another.

  He shoves me and I fall. On the ground, I kick out at his legs, and catch him on the side of the knee. The giant falls, as well, and I’m on top of him. My fists do nothing but bounce off his skin, so I claw, I bite, as we roll back and forth. When he’s on top, I can’t breathe, and feel the darkness closing in to take me. I scream with whatever air I have left in my lungs into his face, which gets very close to mine, his hot breath suffocating me, his teeth bared like animal. Like a dog. A giant dog perched on my chest.

  A stray mortar shell whistles fast and hits nearby, and he is blown to the side, releasing me from his weight. He rolls twice and hits his head on a rock, dazing himself. I kick him in the face, breaking his nose, and he slumps onto his back. I jump on his chest and straddle his huge shape, my legs spread wide. Making a sound I never knew I had in me, and have never uttered before, I tear into his face with my fingers, digging with my nails, mashing at his damaged nose with my palm, poking out an eye with a thumb, catching the inside of his lip with three fingers and pulling with all my strength. The skin gives and rips open, a feeling that horrifies me, fuels me. His arms lift me from his chest but I redouble my efforts, grasping for his slimy tongue, reaching down into this throat, grabbing what I can of anything inside of him.

  My nails push through
his mouth under his tongue and I grab hold of a hard, thick bone. My other fingers join the first, and I get a firm, five-finger grip. I extend my legs and find purchase with my feet, then heave toward the sky, my hand locked inside his mouth. With a rip and then a pop, the bone comes loose, and I am flung backward with the release.

  I fall on my ass, bounce, and end up on my side. The giant gets to his feet, his back to me, then slowly turns. His face is a seeping nightmare. Slime oozes from a hollow eye socket, his good eye wide, the iris black. His nose is gone, and his lips are torn back, revealing his top teeth. Below that, there is nothing but a lolling tongue, writhing like a leech through a torrent of blood, searching for something to catch it. A gurgling roar rises from his wrecked throat.

  I scramble to my feet. In my hand, I hold the man’s—the boy’s—jawbone, teeth white through the blood, meat and connective tissue still attached.

  The giant reaches out his hands, one broken, the other whole, and comes for me. I take the jawbone into my fist and meet him halfway, slashing for anything soft.

  38. South of Heaven

  I look at the orange in my hand. I poke it with my thumb, but only make a dent in the skin. It doesn’t tear. Chapel watches me.

  “I told the people who found me, in the jungle, after, that I peeled his face like an orange.”

  Chapel remains silent, still processing what I just told him.

  “I killed that boy, and I don’t think he wanted to kill me. He was just…curious, and I killed him for it.”

  “We’ve all killed for lesser reasons.”

  “Yeah,” I say, this stupid word not even coming close to expressing it all.

  Chapel waits for me to continue.

  “I killed that boy.” Tears stream down my cheek as I press my thumbnail lightly into the orange, opening the skin. “I killed my brother, I think. Long time ago. I killed him, I think.”

  I’ve never told another human being not related by blood about this. Only my family knew, and that was narrowed to a select few. My daddy knew, which is why he left. Never laid a hand on me for it. He never had to, because the removal of his eyes from me that day forward hurt more than any hands he could have put on me. After my daddy left, my momma left, too, in a different way. Just faded and faded until she wasn’t there anymore. Then it was just me and my grandmother, but she didn’t know. Or if she did, she never told me, or acted like it, all the way until she was taken from me, too, tongue sticking out like a strangled bird.

  “I killed my brother, I think. Long time ago. Then I killed that boy on the rocks. Stuffed his body into a hole and left him there, and then I ran until everything went black.”

  The tears stream hot, expelling years of guilt and shame and rage. They burn my cheeks.

  “Those eyes found me when I woke up. At the edge of the jungle, way back in the fog. Yellow. Looking at me. Knowing me, what I’d done. So I ran again.”

  The jawbone is now in my other hand. Chapel looks at it, then back at me. “I’ve been carrying this around for five years,” I say. “This and all of it. And I ain’t had a good day or night’s rest ever since that time on the rocks.”

  “I’m sorry,” Chapel says. “About all of it.”

  “Fuck you.”

  That’s fair,” he says. “You’re angry.”“

  “Angry? Nah, I’m fucking furious.” The gun itches in my waistband. I’ve never wanted to kill a man more in my life.

  “I suppose you are.”

  “Why did you lead us out there? There were hundreds of them. Thousands. We were sitting ducks. Everyone died. Medrano, Render, McNulty, Darby…”

  “Not everyone.”

  “Everyone,” I insist. “Except maybe you.”

  He looks away, brows furrowed, holding something inside his eyes.

  “What happened?” I say, almost pleading.

  “Tactical error.”

  “How did you think that would ever work?”

  “I believed in a belief,” Chapel says, turning back to me, more sure with his words now that he’s back on message. That old bullshit message. “I had faith in faith.”

  He’s trying to be clever, and I almost gag. “Faith dies when it meets a bullet,” I say. “Lead and iron cure faith real fucking fast.”

  “No they don’t. Lead and iron make it stronger.”

  “It didn’t out there, on that night.”

  “Something went wrong…” he says, a twitch shooting up the side of his face. He rubs it.

  “You went wrong, and we all paid for it.”

  “You don’t think I’ve paid?” he says, rising to his feet, his voice elevating with him. “You don’t think I’ve suffered each and every second of my life since then? The dead have it easy. They just disappear into nothing. It’s the living that go on suffering.”

  “They don’t disappear,” I say, thinking back to the French house, to every waking moment since I came to after they found me in wandering, half mad, in a Thai jungle. “Not all of them.” I slump back, dropping the orange. It rolls on the clay floor and disappears into the shadows of a corner.

  Chapel begins pacing, his words taking on a rehearsed speed, called forward from many years ago. He’s not listening to me, lost in his old playbook. “We’d used it before, Operation Wandering Soul, and it’d worked in limited applications. We’d play on the Vietnamese belief of the Wandering Soul, where if a soldier was killed far from his homeland, and his remains weren’t returned and buried on his family’s land, his soul, his ghost, would wander forever.”

  Thoughts of the old woman, the girl. “They all believe that?”

  “Most of them. It’s an old Buddhist thing. Every year, they celebrate Vu Lan Day, an absolution for the soul, allowing all the wandering souls to come home if the remains are recovered and returned. They make shrines, set them free on the water.”

  “The river on fire…”

  Chapel nods. “We recorded a tape in Hanoi, calling in engineers from all over, sound effects experts, theater people, actors and actresses. Some old Hollywood buddies. Big production. Lots of eggheads and spiritualists brought in as consultants. Once the script was written, we put it on tape, with the voices of ghosts warning the VC that if they died away from home, in Laos, let’s say, their souls would wander, and they’d never find peace in the afterlife. The tape was good. One of the finest creations of the Central Intelligence Agency. It worked in small numbers, controlled tests on apartment blocks, villages, then we went wide with it at Nui Ba Den Mountain in ’70. Rooted out a hundred and fifty die-hard NVA without firing a shot. That’s what gave me the idea. When something works small, you build it out and it can work big. Scaling-up. It’s the nature of chemistry, business, cooking, whatever. A precisely controlled increase dedicated to a fixed ratio. You drop poison gas on three people, they die. You drop poison gas on a thousand people, they die just like the three.”

  “It wasn’t poison gas we were letting loose out there.”

  “It was worse. It was nightmares. A destruction of heaven.”

  “Charlie didn’t seem to agree.”

  He shrugged. “Like I said, tactical error.”

  “More like a technical one.”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “Why did the tape stop?” I ask the question that’s festered inside me for half a decade.

  “Pardon?”

  “The tape. It stopped. Why did it stop?”

  He looks at me with those gray eyes. In the low light of the hut, I think I see him smile. “Technical error,” he repeats.

  I get to my feet. “So that’s it, huh? That’s the story? Stupid plans goes to shit and all your men slaughtered, with the ending being you living up here like some great white god? Charming the native with baubles and trinkets? Sky magic and nightmares on tape?”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit. You know me better than that.”

  “No, actually I don’t. I don’t know you at all. I thought I might have, but realized I don’t know a fucki
ng thing about you. If I did…”

  “What? You would have stayed in that cell? Been shipped back stateside for a nice court martial for cowardice in the field and dragged ass to your hometown in shame?”

  “So you did me a favor?”

  “I allowed you to do yourself a favor.”

  “Did you do a favor to Render? To Medrano? To Darby?”

  “And to McNulty and Morganfield, too. I allowed all of you to fight for something right, for something that had value, meaning.”

  “And to die like sheep. Scared and confused and overrun by wolves come down from the mountain.”

  “To die with honor.”

  “There’s no honor in dying. Just death.”

  “But not in your case,” Chapel says, eyes narrowing. “You’re afraid to die.”

  “I am. But not for the reason you think.”

  “No, I think it is for the reason I think.”

  “You don’t know shit,” I say, the tears welling again. This time born from the frustration of unending fear that no one can see.

  “You’re shaking,” he says, in that tone I remember. “You’ve been shaking since you got here.”

  I don’t say anything. I can’t help it. My limbs need chemicals, and they’re not getting the proper amount. They’re rebelling.

  He looks into my face. “But you’re not afraid.”

  “Not of you.”

  “What happened to you?” he says, voice hushed with some weird sense of curiosity and wonder. Still the boy who needs to know. To see. “Afterwards, I mean.”

  “I brought a dog back from the jungle,” I say, holding up my other hand, clutching what was in my other pocket. “And this is its bone.”

  Chapel isn’t sure what I mean, but leans forward to learn.

  “I need to bury it for him.”

  39. Moons at Your Door