I Am the River Page 10

  Chapel started to laugh. Morganfield hid a smile. The other men looked at each other, confused.

  Movement came from behind them. Broussard turned to find fifty Hmong men, dressed identically in American-style fatigues, standing in a semi-circle around the mound of gear. No one had heard them approach.

  Chapel’s laughter settled into a smile. He walked to the Hmong and greeted them warmly in their native tongue, shaking hands and gripping shoulders. The mayor of every square inch he walked.

  Render slapped the back of McNulty’s helmet, knocking it askew. “There’s your fucking moving van.”

  Half of the Hmong soldiers lashed a crate or duffle or roll of cable to their backs, trudged down the plateau, and set off across the Plain of Jars without a word. The remaining two dozen Hmong marched noisily in the opposite direction, talking and singing as they headed toward the wall of trees to the southeast.

  “Where’re they going?” Broussard asked Chapel as the officer passed by, walking in the direction of the equipment.

  “They’re making a path,” Chapel said. “Our route from this drop, at least in the eyes on the VC. They’ll be sure to be extra noisy and obvious with the trail they cut, performing in the manner of the United States military and not like a local.”

  “So where are they going?” Broussard indicated the Hmong carrying the equipment, now well onto the plain below.

  Chapel smiled. “Our way.” He laid a hand on Broussard’s shoulder, then turned to the men. “Mount up and follow. Eyes open and powder ready.” Chapel walked away, joining Morganfield working the radio, and headed out in the direction of the gear.

  The men fell in behind them, adjusting their straps, checking their chambers, and finding their pace.

  “This is the only way to hump,” Medrano said with a grin.

  “If you think that, how all them babies of yours born?” Render said.

  Medrano grinned, too blissed out by the lightness of his load to talk any shit in return.

  “Don’t sit right with me,” Darby said, pinching out his cigarette and stashing the butt inside his vest. “We can all carry our own weight. Should all.”

  “Run up there and volunteer then,” McNulty said. “No one’s stopping you.”

  Darby frowned. “This division of labor into race and class is bullshit. Straight up.”

  “Ol’ Chairman Mao, right here in our unit,” McNulty said. “Can you beat that?”

  “I ain’t chairman of nothin’, and Mao can kiss my pearly white country ass. But right is right.”

  “Man, if Darby weren’t such a peckerwood, I’d swear he’s a brother,” Render said.

  “We all brothers on the inside,” Darby said. “All the way back to Africa.”

  “Say that shit when the gookers come for you,” McNulty said.

  “I have, and I will,” Darby said.

  “Ain’t that about something?” Render said with a laugh. “White man talking about some Africa.”

  “Redneck hippie,” McNulty said, shaking his head and spitting. “If that don’t beat all.”

  “Listen, y’all,” Darby said, “I’m gonna be real clear, okay? I’ve been hired by my country, by my employer, to kill, and I will kill. Continually, and with great effectiveness. But unlike some of these rock-kickin’ bozos out here—” he looked at McNulty—“I have respect for my enemy, as my enemy is my brother who just happened to be born on the opposite team, which makes him blameless in intent. Different uniforms, is all. Playin’ the same sport, all wantin’ to win the same game.”

  “See what I mean, Crayfish?” Render said, nudging Broussard. “Dude’s straight up Negro.”

  “Yeah, he’s something else,” Broussard said, mystified.

  “Will wonders never cease, Lord Jesus?” Render said, laughing.

  Darby smiled, lit up a cigarette. “I just see shit, man. I just see it how it is. Y’all could, too, if you’d just get out of your own goddamn way.”

  McNulty picked up his pace, lashing out with his machete at branches that weren’t in the way, muttering to himself. “Whole world’s gone batshit.”

  They’d walked for over an hour through the Plain of Jars, no one saying a word as they moved through the stone ossuaries. Some were still upright, but others had shifted in the eternally damp clay, veering sideways. Several were lying on their sides, and a few had been mostly swallowed up by the earth.

  Broussard stopped to inspect one of them, running his hands over the rough fungi growing on the outside in one symbiotic community of feeding and breeding fibers. He looked inside, and found a pool of brackish water, twigs and bones protruding from black surface.

  “Keep away from there, Broussard.”

  Broussard turned his head and found Chapel watching him. “We don’t want to stir up what we don’t have to.”

  Broussard fell back into the line of walking men, thinking about how Chapel’s admonition hit his ears in an odd way.

  The number of stone jars thinned, then disappeared completely as the turf became thicker, taller, trading common brome for elephant grass that grew as high as a basketball rim. Up ahead, a hundred-foot-high barrier of jungle waited.

  Broussard turned around to take a last look at the jars, but they were above him now, bones in water, sitting out another eon.

  21. Come Tell Me Your Ghosts

  We walk together, the girl and me, through a warren of cramped alleyways under dark clouds clotting the sky. Just minutes ago, we were on a paved street bordering the Chao Phraya River, with its familiar sounds of the port, smell of sewage and rotting fish, and the buzz of scooter traffic. Now, a dozen steps and two turns off the street, I find myself instantly lost on a muddy track inside a part of the Floating City that I’ve never seen before, as I wasn’t granted access to take it in. But today I’ve been shown the way in, and creep through the filthy brown arteries of a beast I don’t fully understand.

  The alleys are narrow, littered with spat-out refuse of forgotten people, places, and things. Those discarded nouns. Weed trees and creepers split through crumbling cement-brick walls painted blue. A decaying train track bisects the block and disappears into a stack of ingeniously designed shacks and open-wall junk markets. The ground is slick but worn smooth, a mixture of old cobblestones and brick, recent cement, and pools of briny water seeping up from below. Trash is everywhere, fusing with the ground, the walls, filling in the cracks like mortar.

  We pass a skeletal man squatting on a piece of cardboard, looking out into nothing through a pair of large spectacles. A dog sits patiently next to him, staring at his face, as if waiting for instruction. Children huddle together over a hole in the brick, looking down into it and pointing, talking quietly in awed tones. I wonder what could be down there. I feel as if they know, and are waiting anxiously to show the rest of us what lives in the hollow earth. There is no wind here, but the sound of crushed humanity is everywhere, lingering on the dead air.

  The girl is holding my hand. I haven’t held anyone’s hand for longer than I can remember. Not like this, anyway. Her fingers are slender, grip strong, her skin warm and pale against my own. It’s that feminine hand that has so much more power in this world than one rough and hard. Soft hands build. Hard ones destroy. I feel as if I’m falling in love with her, this girl, but that doesn’t make sense. Not in the normal way I know. She’s a baby. She’s my baby, just starting to get grown, and we’re walking together to Sunday school for a few steps. We round a corner and I’m taking her to the winter dance. She pulls on my hand, leading me down a narrow passageway between crumbling buildings, and then I imagine for a moment that I’m walking her to school on her first day. I look at her and smile. A hard-faced woman hisses at us from an empty window, and the feeling slips away. The girl is a stranger leading me to what could be my doom, and I’m letting her, because I’ve been heading there for years on my own, and I appreciate the company. I don’t know her name, because I don’t need to. She doesn’t know mine, because I don’t have one t
hat fits anymore. I’m the Night Man, and that’s good enough for her.

  She stops and looks up, not letting go of my hand. I follow her eyes. In front of us is a massive old French colonial mansion, jammed between a collapsed cement building and a rectangular tower of scaffolding covered in corrugated tin roof panels wired together like a patchwork of poorly sewn sections of rusted skin. The dichotomy of the scene makes it seem as if a giant child hid away an elaborate doll house amid the ruins of a bombed village.

  The house is mesmerizing, weather-worn but still lushly ornate and somehow profane with its cornices and baroque touches in such a mean place. Angels and demons taunt each other at the peaks of gambrel roofs topping mini balconies and stairways that wind behind the walls, leading to secret places or possibly nowhere at all. Every window still holds its thick leaded glass, crisscrossed by corroded brass framing, splitting the human faces that look out from them, watching the two of us down below. Generations of damp and the unstable underbelly of the Floating City have shifted the structure several degrees, its stone foundation sticking up above the street, giving the impression that it had been knocked in the head and stayed that way. The tilted porch is lined with people, mostly old women, who look down on us with no expression.

  The girl points to the top floor, where a single window has been shuttered, held tight by a knotted chain of copper given over to a tarnish of green. Her face is grave. “Nói với họ những bóng ma của bạn,” she says.

  “I don’t understand,” I say.

  The rain begins to fall, the sky unable to hold back any longer, and bathes everything below it. A chewed-up river of water pours down in increments from the universe miles above the clouds.

  The front door, set deep in the porch, opens, but no one emerges. It’s an invitation, and we take it.

  22. Dead Between the Walls

  We escape the rain through the open door, and drip onto a threadbare rug that was clearly once a thick, glorious piece of work worn down by years and the comings and goings of a million pair of feet.

  Benches are set up in the spacious foyer, where dozens of people sit quietly, even the babies not making a peep. A wide staircase bisects the back of the structure, leading up in a gently segmented spiral to the floors above. There’s a hush to the entire house, except for the rain outside and the sounds coming from the upper levels. Thumps, groans, guttural words and growls. Someone screams for what seems like a minute straight. I can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman, so stripped down and raw are the tones of it. Chimes tinkle above the door without the aid of wind.

  I find myself looking at the ceiling like everyone else in the room when a woman enters from a side passageway. She stands in the exact center of the foyer, her greenish eyes expressionless.

  “I am Clotilde,” she says, her enunciated English clinging to the vestiges of a French accent. Her face is lined and handsome, chestnut hair shot with silver, and her attire looks as if Victorian finery slowly went native, adding in colored silks and flowers to the dour black of formal dress. I could imagine that she was born with the house, and arrived with it from wherever it came from, weathering the elements and adapting with the creep of age.

  She waits for us to say something, hands clasped in front of her, but I have no idea what to say, nor why I’m here. The girl continues staring at the ceiling, listening to the disturbing noises and moving her mouth in silent prayer.

  “Is this your place?” I ask.

  “Mine? No, monsieur, it is yours.” She points at the girl. “And it is hers.” She looks at the faces from the porch through the window inside. “It is theirs.” She folds her hands in front of her and regards us evenly.

  The girl puts her hand on my chest. “Anh ta có một con ma,” she says.

  The woman nods.

  “What is she saying?” I ask.

  “She says you have a ghost.”

  The girl nods. “Con ma đang cố giết nó.”

  I look at Clotilde.

  “She says it is trying to kill you.”

  My mouth goes dry. “Yes.”

  “Tôi nghĩ anh ấy đã chết.”

  Clotilde walks up to me and looks into my face. She pokes my cheek with her finger, pinching the skin. She pries open each of my eyes, then my mouth, and looks down my throat, sniffing the air leaking out.

  “What are you doing?” I say, pulling away. I don’t want anyone touching me. Not like that.

  “She thinks you might be dead already.”

  I try to say something, but pause. “Am I?” The question sounds stupid, but I’m genuinely curious.

  “We shall see.”

  She takes us up the staircase, which seems to ascend four or five floors. Maybe more. It’s hard to tell, as the darkness clouding the uppermost ceiling takes in the staircase without showing there it ends. Standing outside, I could have sworn this was a three-story affair, but the house seems to climb forever. At each landing, there are several shrines set up in corners, shallow alcoves. Most of them appear to be Buddhist. Some of them are in supplication to something else, sporting animal bones arranged in crowns, skins stuffed with dried herbs and flowers long dead. Thorns piercing through shriveled bits of mummified flesh. Death magic. Ghost worship. The sounds from the upper rooms have gone quiet.

  After climbing an unknown number of floors, we step off onto a long hallway. Much like the height of this house, the width and length confuse the brain, as it seem far too wide or long or deep for the outside visual constraints. Closed doors line the corridor. There are so many closed doors, with one at the far, far end of this passageway open and waiting for us. A tiny woman stands in the doorway, her small eyes reaching out and finding mine, somehow digging in behind them and slowly burrowing down.

  The hum starts at the base of my skull and works its way forward, grabbing for my eyes from the back. The River is near again, winding its way toward me from wherever it comes from. Right now it’s below, at the bottom of the hole in the cement surrounded by children. The River is underneath this entire city, making it float. It wants to open up the floor—all the floors—and take me from here.

  Does Black Shuck control the River? Does it use it? Is it part of the River, or does it flow from it, like a stream of blood, flaming like the River burning straight through the two mountain peaks and down into the Laotian jungle?

  Floor planks begin to soften, and I’m sinking. Falling back into the current, wondering where it will take me this time. Back in the jungle. No matter where I started, I’d always end up back in the jungle.

  I reach out for the girl before being swept away, and a firm hand finds mine. It belongs to Clotilde, and she leads me up from the swamp in the hallway, away from the buzz and noise of the River, and into the room with the open door. The girl is beside me. My feet find firm floor as soon as I cross the threshold.

  “Welcome back to dry land,” Clotilde says.

  I sob for some reason. Maybe relief. Maybe resignation. There’s so little difference between the two these days, even on a day where a human hand doesn’t let the water take me. I now realize that sob was shock.

  “I almost…” I begin, not sure how to finish, dazed. “I was almost gone.”

  “I know,” Clotilde says. “We will not let you get away this time.”

  I look around the room, noting the low table on the rug, the pillows, the pastoral artwork on the walls. In a corner, four musicians are prepping what appear to be instruments. I don’t recognize any of them except for the flute. The tiny woman is gone.

  “Before we begin, I will need whatever money you have,” Clotilde says.

  “I don’t have…” I don’t know what I have on me at this point.

  “You do not need much. But we will need certain…des offres.”

  I reach into my pocket and dig around for bill, coins, anything.

  “I will need your shirt also.”

  I look at her, suspicious.

  “And boots.”

  I’m startin
g to not like this, exposing myself in this way. “Why?”

  She holds out her hand. “S’il vous plaît?”

  I place whatever baht I have in my pocket into her palm. She hands the money to the girl, says a few words in Vietnamese, and the girl quickly leaves the room.

  I look around, and see that everyone is watching me. I shouldn’t be surprised, or suspicious. I’d watch me, too. I begin to unbutton my shirt. “Where’s the…person that’s going to do this?”

  “She is coming,” Clotilde says. “She is preparing.”

  I remove my shirt and hand it to her.

  “You need to prepare, as well.”

  23. The Furious One

  My palms have been pressed together for so long that my arms shake. Could be sore muscles, the wound in my side, or the dope sickness, as I’ve been away from the cave for what seems like weeks. Lazy tendrils of sweet incense smoke weave through the space between my hands and face, making shapes of things I almost recognize, before dancing away into nothingness.

  I’m seated in front of a table where offerings have been laid out, all my pockets could afford, which wasn’t much. A bowl of noodles, a glass of whiskey. A small paper pig rests next to an empty Coke can, surrounded by flowers. A cheap bracelet laden with such an array of rhinestones that it could only be priceless or worthless, depending on who owned it. The four musicians sit cross-legged in the corner, waiting to begin.

  The medium finally entered the room after an hour wait, which was about an hour ago. Her age was hard to determine, as she was wearing stage makeup, alabaster base with red and black accents, creating the effect of a mask. Her body was covered in a long, flowing robe of brightly colored silks. She sat in front of me, her palms out, holding thin candles between each finger. Her eyes rested on me, her painted lips a tight red line. I didn’t need to be a psychic to know that she didn’t want me here.