by T. E. Grau
Chapel and I stand in the village clearing, each of us with a pack of gear at our feet. I wonder if this place has a name, or appears on any map, but knowing Chapel, I realize the question is ridiculous.
Aside from Sua, who speaks a few low, terse words to Chapel and then walks away without a look in my direction, no one comes out to see us off. Not a sound comes from any of the huts.
I look down to the far end of the village. All the windows and doorways and porches are empty. Not a human or dog in sight. It’s a ghost town.
“Where’s your wife?” I say.
He sighs. “She won’t come out.”
“Why?”
“Because she doesn’t believe that I’m coming back. If she doesn’t say goodbye, I’ll never have left.”
I think about this for a few moments. “Is that what marriage is like?”
“It is for me,” he says with a grin. The radio in his hand crackles. He speaks into it, muttering a few words in Hmong.
“What was that?” I say.
“Our rides are coming.”
“Chopper?”
“Not quite.”
“Jeep?”
He smiles at me again. “Tanks.”
40. The Fire in our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw
We ride on the backs of mountains, each of us, moving as the mountain moves. I am astride an elephant, and it feels like a dream. This was the mode of eastern kings, and for a brief second, I close my eyes, fill my lungs, and feel like one.
When I allow my eyes to open, we are far into the wilderness again. An ocean of trees and clouded blue skies broken occasionally by farms and patches of ruined ground, dead trees that stand out like burnt bones arranged against a blanket of green that slowly tries to cover it out of slow-motion sadness. It’s impossible to forget the war here, in a country where it wasn’t officially fought, no matter how hard all of us involved might try.
To my left I see the partially buried wreckage of a burned-out American bomber jutting up at the edge of an abandoned rice paddy not yet reclaimed by the land. The jungle licked at the crumpled outer hull, tasting it and deciding to come back to it later. Long swaths of moss cover the jagged parts that stick out into the air, giving shaggy beards to twisted metal.
“One of ours?” I say.
Chapel nods. “Douglas B-66. One of our Easter bunnies, sent to drop all the eggs.”
“Eggs?”
He gestures to a tiny farming village adjacent to the field, just up from the path. Children play, while others stand in a line, watching us with fascination. Some smile and call out, holding up two fingers. Others, the ones leaning on crude crutches or absently itching at a stump that stops at their elbow, shoot us hard looks. It’s impossible to forget the war here.
“What happened to them?” I say.
“Cluster bombs. The country is covered with them, buried in the ground, waiting to go off, like hidden Easter eggs.”
Our two mountains carry us past the children. Those that can run give chase. The others turn their backs.
“Every day, someone steps on one, or digs it from the ground and plays catch, maybe a little soccer. Then…” Chapel gestures toward them. “That’s our legacy in Laos, Broussard. That and a hundred thousand wandering souls.”
“Were you involved in that? The bombing missions?”
“We all were. The buck never stops in a secret war.”
I look down at the kids smiling up at us, saying something in Lao. Laughing and pointing. I don’t understand it, but I’m pretty sure Chapel does. “Is that why you never left? Because you felt like you owed them something?”
“Is that why you didn’t leave?”
“I did leave. I laid low in Bangkok.”
“No, you didn’t. You’re still here, with the rest of us,” Chapel says, looking at the children, who slow down, stop, and head back to their village. “Waiting.”
41. Everything You Need
We’ve ridden for most of the day, but the sun doesn’t seem to move in the sky. Maybe we’re moving with it, in some perfect imitation dance to keep the nighttime at bay. Chapel and I haven’t said a word to each other since we saw the children. I keep looking behind us, up off the trail into the jungle and the stands of trees when there’s a break in the wilderness, wondering what’s following us, moving from shadow to shadow. Knowing that I’m being followed, but not sure by what anymore. It feels like many things, a legion on my trail.
Chapel abruptly stops his elephant, or what counts for abrupt from a six-ton animal. I slow mine to a halt, as well, with much less success. I never was good at riding.
“What is it?” I say, my mount stomping and fussing. It doesn’t like me. Animals never did.
“Look,” he says, and gestures upward with his chin.
I follow his direction and see the twin mountain peaks girded in vegetation, the V carved between, making them. Down below is the river that burned that night, lighting up the way for us to unleash Chapel’s doomed experiment to win the war.
“This is it,” I say, my voice stilled by certainty as much as wonder.
“Yes, it is.”
I look around in every direction, trying to familiarize myself based on spotty memories. I hear the river now, and am not sure if it’s coming from inside me, or down in the valley. This worries me, because one of them might take me away from the other just as I’ve finally arrived.
“Can you find it?”
I look at Chapel.
“The place,” he says.
“I think so.”
Chapel points. “We were set up all along that ridgeline, so use that as a guide. A starting point.”
I get down off my elephant, it waiting patiently as I do so without much grace. Chapel tosses me a wad of fabric. I shake it out. It’s a woven grass bag, large and sturdy.
“What’s this for?”
“To carry what you find.”
The reality of the situation begins to creep up on me, and the realization that what I’m looking for might not be here, or I might not be able to find it. Both options are too harrowing to contemplate, so I shake them off and busy myself with inspecting my gear and provisions, meager as they are. Nothing in my pack will take me very far, including the pistol.
“You have everything you need?” Chapel asks.
I hold up the jawbone. Chapel regards it grimly. He is the only one outside of the cave, outside of me, who has ever seen it. It hasn’t been in the sun for a long, long time.
He nods once. “Good enough.”
I turn to the high ground, then to Chapel. “If I’m not back… If I don’t come back…”
Chapel waits for me to finish. I don’t, changing the angle instead. “If I don’t say goodbye, I’ve never left.”
“Then let’s not,” he says. “We need you in this world.”
He says no more. I can tell he’s done talking. Maybe he’s been done for years, which is why he came out here, to Laos, to live out the remainder of his clock and to die in silence, without having to talk about it to those who would demand that he tell his story. I’m done talking, too. I’ve said my piece.
“Thanks, sir,” I say.
“It’s the least I can do, Specialist Broussard.”
I look down at the jawbone, turn it over in my hand. I remember looking at it in the jungle, when I was on the move, heading toward nowhere that brought me to Thailand, then to Bangkok, and then right back here. I’m remembering more things now, away from the cave and the things done there, which scares me, thrills me. I’m starting to remember how it was before, and it makes the now all the more wretched. So much wasted everything.
The teeth are white and straight. There are burn marks on the bone from where I charred off the muscle and sinew. The meat. I couldn’t leave it behind, bury it in the mud. I had to have a trophy, a memento that told me that I finally became a killer. A real man. A good soldier. The shame of that has murdered me a little more each night since then.
I grip the shar
p bone tightly in my hand, and give one last look to Chapel, who clamps his grandfather’s pipe between his teeth.
Then I set off up the hill, gaining ground, elevation.
42. The 21st Chapter
I move from boulder to boulder to slab, my legs feeling stronger, feet searching for the right spot, while I survey the ridgeline below where my unit all died that night. Well, not all of it, as Chapel said. It looks different during the day, and five years on. The natural world has reclaimed the blood and bodies, erased the holes in the ground dug by exploding shells and filled them with living green. It seems a strange violation of the recovered peace to remember the horror of what happened here that night, so I ask the jungle forgiveness for my trespasses.
I keep moving, climbing higher, until my feet stop me. They’ve found it before my eyes have a chance. In front of me is a gap in the arrangement of rock, just large enough for a man—or the body of a smiling mule—to fit. I’d know this place in my sleep, as one does the familiar terrain of a recurring dream, which are the only dreams I’ve known since my rebirth on these rocks.
I peer down into the space between the two boulders, and see only moss and a wet blackness below. I get down on my hands and knees, like a Malay Muslim in prayer, and press my face to the opening. My eyes see nothing. My old eyes. My new eyes see it. See them. A collection of bones, withered by time, twisted by weather, and picked clean by the insects of the jungle. Jumbled yellow parts of a complicated puppet. They’re big bones. Those of a giant.
I reach my arm in to grab the nearest bone, but my fingers don’t reach. I’m going to have to go down there.
I was ready to be terrified, slithering into that tight space, clawing my way into my bloody, freak-out past. But I’m not afraid, I realize, almost as an afterthought, too busy figuring out the logistics of fitting myself in. I make myself into the snake, and get to slithering.
The opening is tight, but I squeeze through, scratching both sides of my body, which isn’t much more than a stuffed scarecrow these days, ratty with old skin. Freeing my legs and feet, I drop down into a small, hollowed-out compartment, and drag my pack behind me. This is my first time here, as I never entered that night, just shoved what I had done down a hole, as if that would erase the act and exonerate me for eternity. Out of sight and off the books. Fat fucking chance. The past has a way of showing up like a bad penny, jangling at the bottom of your pocket until you’re driven out of your mind, or at least as far as Bangkok.
The bones rest on a shelf higher up from the floor, near the fissure, waiting for me at eye level as I crouch. I can touch them now, and do, expecting something akin to a bee sting. But they’re just bones, damp and cold from the dark. I move my hands through them, finding something round at the back of the pile.
He rotted away facing the wall, like a punished schoolboy.
I remove the skull that falls free from the spine with a dry clatter, and turn it to face me. All of the teeth of the maxilla are intact, wide and gleaming white. The bottom part is missing.
With my free hand I reach into my pack and pull out my shameful memento from that savage night. I hold up the jawbone and fasten it under the temporal plate, completing the skull. A full set of teeth smile at me, black-hole eyes not giving away if the grin is one of madness or mirth, or murder. None of this feels like Shakespeare, and none of the world is a stage, because the actors don’t die in a play.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “For all of it.”
The skull says nothing, and I’m glad it doesn’t.
I emerge from the tiny catacomb, bring up my pack and the bag full of bones. The sun is beating down brightly now, the early clouds chased off to the horizon. I squint up into the sky, then look down at the boonie hat in my hand. It’s empty, all of its teeth gone. I tent it open with my fist, then put it on my head, the brim shading my eyes. It barely fits over my hair, but it fits.
I look down the hillside toward the path, where I’d left Chapel and the elephants, but all of them are gone. I knew this would be the case, even though I was hoping I’d be wrong. I wanted to talk to him a little more, if he was willing, about this and a lot of things. All those things I wish I’d asked and said, but he’s just a ghost now like the rest of them, and was heading back home.
I work my way down from atop the boulders and stand on the hillside, overlooking the valley and the river that once burned, ringed by the ridgeline that burned even hotter, soaked with the blood of that terrible night of horrors. The river would be set ablaze again soon, when the season was right, from now until the very end of things. Each flame a tribute to a wandering soul that wasn’t forgotten by those left behind. Hopefully there would be less this year, and less the year after. With any luck, there’d be one less flame on some other river further to the east very soon. Or as soon as I could find a place to properly bury what was I was carrying.
The bones in the bag rattle as they shift. I hold them up, hoping they’ll tell me something. A direction. An acceptance of my apology. But they don’t. Bones don’t speak. They’re only spoken for.
I lower the bag and look across the valley, toward the twin mountains. On the far end, just outside the tree line, Black Shuck rests on its haunches, watching me.
We regard each other, the valley stretching out between us, the river flowing silently down below.
Black Shuck stands, turns and begins to walk, its corded muscles gently rolling with powerful ease, shining in the sunlight. It stops after a few yards and turns its massive head back to me, tongue lolling over its long teeth, just like a dog. Not a hound. But a dog.
I shoulder my pack and collect my bag, contents clinking together with a peculiar music like marimba keys, and walk around the rim of the valley, heading toward the dog.
Black Shuck turns and walks again, slowly enough for two human legs to keep up. It’s heading east, the sun tells me. It’s heading to Vietnam—the bones tell me, mute no more—to where it was born, to where he was born, and where both of them need to return, to rest, and to die.
The dog is heading in the direction of the River, and so am I, traveling to where the water drains into the Great Nothing that waits for everything that escaped but eventually finds its way home.
Our steps find the rhythm of the other, four legs and two and two more in the bag, and we walk together, not side by side, but moving in the same direction, just like always. But this time, neither of us runs. We let the current take us.
About the Author
49.
50. T.E. Grau is the author of the books They Don’t Come Home Anymore, Triptych: Three Cosmic Tales, The Lost Aklo Stories, The Mission, and The Nameless Dark (nominated for a 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Single-Author Collection), whose work has been published in various platforms around the world, translated into Spanish, Italian, German, and Japanese. Grau lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter, and is currently working on his second collection and second novel.