I Am the River Page 13

  “Watch,” Chapel said.

  Broussard did, focusing his gaze on the intersection point of the two mountains. He saw nothing at first, then noticed a faint, reddish glow at the bottom of the V, like a thin artery of warm blood coming to life inside a dead heart. The darkness all around and down below took a breath and stood up, moving higher, pushed by a strand of light that made its way down a dip in the shallow valley.

  The first head of flame emerged and slowly descended. It was the River, lit on the surface by fire. Not one tongue of flame, but a hundred, then a thousand, tens of thousands of tiny rafts carrying passengers of light from the mountain country beyond down into a channel plain on a placid current. Lanterns, shrines, dotted with flickering candles. Together, they made a River ablaze.

  “What kind of shit is this?” McNulty said.

  “Beautiful,” Darby breathed, full of awe. “Goddamn beautiful.”

  Broussard looked at Chapel, who felt his eyes and looked back. His white teeth were gleaming in the moonlight. “We found it, Broussard.”

  The men looked at each other, brows furrowed, shrugs of confusion curling up their faces.

  “Tonight, gentlemen,” Chapel said.

  26. Anniversary

  I fix up on the foot-wide lip of concrete separating the mud and humanity of the Floating City from the dead water down below. It’s only a quarter vial of half ’n half, but it feeds all the empty spaces inside me drained hollow by the horrors of the French house. I toss the spike and dangle my legs above the canal and watch the parade of plastic drift by.

  My mind revs as my body unwinds, and I try to process what I just witnessed and heard, and what I know I must do, but I’m pressed by the smell of this water, landlocked and tainted, itching to get out to sea and purge itself. The sheer stink of it, this ruined stuff. It’ll never get out of my nostrils, never leave my hair, my pores. If I ever escape this place, am somehow pulled from it kicking and screaming and weeping with benediction, I don’t think I’ll ever stop smelling it. I’ve never gotten used to it, and know that I will never stop smelling it. I try to remember the perfume of Louisiana, the flowers and grass, the smell of its own brand of brackish water, but I can’t. All of that died inside my nose a long time ago.

  Plastic bottles and bags move below me. A rubber bicycle tire looking like a black snake eating its tail. Chunks of pink insulation. A child’s sock and a naked, armless dolly, wide blue eyes staring sightlessly at the darkening sky. The lid of a large container, heaped with wet market flowers and dotted with dripping candles, burning brightly amid the dreary trash.

  I look upstream in the canal, and see more tiny teeth of flame flickering in the dying daylight. An armada of little shrines, drifting on a sluggish current. I can see them clearly this time, as close as I am, even in my speedball haze. Get their details. Two glass cats with a candle between them on a raft made of mismatched lengths of bamboo. A framed picture of a smiling North Vietnamese Army officer, distinguished in his jacket and hat. More pictures of other men, some of women, some of children. Each one died away from their home, their earthly remains never recovered. This was why the girl didn’t leave the house with me, why she wouldn’t let me pay her back. She didn’t take me to the French house to help me, she did it to help the one I killed, one of so many who inspired the construction of each tiny shrine, launched into rivers, streams, and the putrid water of the Floating City.

  It was an anniversary, and the girl knew it. The River was burning again for all of the wandering souls, set on their uninvited journeys by men just like me.

  Time for this one to go.

  27. A Love of Shared Disasters

  Back in a chair, waiting outside of a door. Chairs and waiting near killed me, and might kill me yet. We’ll see how this goes.

  Nothing followed me inside, from this world or any other. Black Shuck has never been here, and for the first time, I wonder why. I’m wondering a lot of things for the first time today, after my time in the French house, after getting gamed by the girl who made me feel like a hero just long enough to matter. But looking back, I’ve never felt the presence of anything in this place other than that of the general and the men, women, and children under his employ, who all make up a giant octopus with many tentacles, great and small, grasping and crushing whatever they can find.

  Phuong appears in the hallway, her face hard as ever. She’s the hardest person I know. She served in the war. Fought, I should say, as no one “served” on their side, as it was a given. No service required, as much as breathing and smiling isn’t a service. She did serve the general, then as she does now, and rose to his right hand, being brilliant and ruthless and madly efficient in the killing of Americans. Once the general died, or was killed, or snatched up in the middle of the night by the Americans that they didn’t have a chance to kill, she’d take over.

  I smile at her, and Phuong breaks that warlord mask and smiles back, the only one around here who does. “Brou-ssard,” she says, as well as she can. She learned my name, practiced it, the only one around here who did. I’d allow myself to think that she liked me, maybe even more than liked, but that would more than likely get me killed. Instead, I take it for what I probably is—general politeness in the workplace—and leave it at that.

  Phuong gestures down the hallway, to the big reinforced-steel door at the end of it. I’m here for my next commission, which isn’t out of the ordinary. That it will be my last most definitely is. I’m not here for business today, I’m here for barter, and certainly not with the general. I’m taking notes, and making lists, and will leave Phuong off of them, because I know that the business of the general will always continue, no matter who is conducting it, as nature and the nature of crime and man’s failings abhors a vacuum. When it all goes down, and Uncle Sam kicks down the big reinforced-steel door of One Time Uncle Charlie and mashes faces and shoots holes in the brittle old guard, Phuong will wear the gold bars, and maybe, maybe, all of the places touched by all the arms of the octopus general will be just a little bit better off. The way I reckon, if every king was a queen, there would be far less tears in this world.

  I get up and walk down the hall, Phuong letting me pass and following behind, her steps silent, just like she learned moving swiftly through the jungle from the time she was a teenager, scared and angry and learning how to make her mask. She killed so many of mine because mine killed so many of hers first. Give and take and then take some more. Motherfucking tug-of-war.

  I reach the door and knock the required number of times, and it opens up before me. I step inside, one last time.

  28. Spook Money

  The joint is mostly deserted as I take a seat at the bar, perching up on a wobbly stool. The boonie hat fits loose on my clean-shaven head. Back in the war, I let my hair grow out as much as I was allowed, making me feel taller. Today, right now, I wanted to feel sleek and fast, able to knife through anything.

  The bartender walks over and looks at me with an implacable expression that he either practiced or earned the hard way. He’s never said a word to me in the five years I’ve been coming here. I don’t think I’ve ever heard his voice. He raises his eyebrows and waits.

  I ask for water. His eyebrows bunch into a furrow of genuine confusion, the most expression I’ve ever gotten from the guy. I don’t add anything to my order, so he shrugs, and gestures with his chin before walking off to fetch a glass.

  I look down the bar, and the man is sitting on the corner stool. I didn’t see him when I sat down. Fucking spooks.

  He checks out my weekend fatigues. “You going to war?”

  I rub the horseshoe outline in the pocket of my trousers, surrounding three plastic baggies filled with medicine in a protective semicircle. Not exactly military issue, these pants, but sturdy. New ones, purchased just for the occasion at what passes for an Army surplus in Bangkok, selling war supplies creatively re-routed a decade back by enterprising quartermasters who only wrote in pencil and kept their stock binders loose. />
  “I think so,” I say.

  The bartender brings my glass of water and sets in front of me. He drops a lime into it, gives me the smallest grin, then walks away. It’s a day of firsts.

  “What brings you here,” the man says, “Other than the quality of the tap water?”

  “I got something for you.”

  “Oh?” he says, actually surprised.

  I take my hat off and rub my head. I’m sweating, and not from the heat. I’m trying to get my mind right, and the chemicals are leaking from my body, clearing up room for a fresh shipment from the shelf of the general that’ll certainly be my last. A day of firsts and lasts.

  “Nice haircut,” he says.

  I ignore him. “I’m not writing anything down, and I’m not signing anything. I’ll tell you what I know, and it’s up to you to do with it what you want.”

  “Okay,” he says.

  “And then I want that favor you were talking about.”

  The man looks at my glass, then at the bruises and cuts on my face. “You quit drinking?”

  I touch the glass, then adjust the wound in my side, wincing. “Yeah.”

  “I hope it was nothing I did.”

  “Can we talk about that favor, or what?”

  “Depends on what we talk about before that.”

  I look around. “You got any place more private?”

  He gestures to a booth in the back of the bar, a location normally reserved for five-dollar blowjobs and cheap street gangsters, or often some combination of the two. Seems fitting, somehow. I get up slowly, favoring my side, and walk deeper into the shadows of the place.

  I haven’t said anything for two full minutes, and he’s still scribbling in his little notepad. Finally, he underlines something three times, clicks his pen and stows it inside his jacket pocket.

  “Well, I’ve got to say,” he says with a grin, “you’re either very connected, or very nosy.”

  “I prefer ‘observant.’ A machine ain’t too complicated when you look at it from the inside, where all the wiring is.”

  “Well said. At any rate, this should keep me busy for a while. Thank you, Mr. Broussard.”

  “It’s Specialist Broussard.”

  A smile plays across his thin lips. That pallid face is waxy as ever. “Yes, of course it is.”

  I point to the notebook on the table, resting under a protective hand. “Does that earn me a favor?”

  “I’d say it does.”

  “Anything I want?”

  “No, certainly not. I’m not a fucking genie. Something within reason, of course.”

  “Okay…” I take a deep breath, coming in ragged, blowing out cold. My hands are shaking again, atoms in motion. I need to back down off the shit slowly, because I know I can’t get through the day like this. Forget about the night, and what always happens then. It’s the nights that got me started in the first place. “I need you to find some coordinates for me.”

  “Oh?”

  “They’re in Laos. A ridge above a river valley cutting through two symmetrical peaks. About five days hump from a place called the Plain of Jars.”

  “Well, that sounds perfectly simple.” He grinned with those thin lips. This was sarcasm, and it didn’t come naturally to the man.

  “Check Operation Algernon.”

  The man writes this down. “Any name to cross reference?”

  I haven’t said it for five years. Maybe longer, now. But it’s always on the tip of my tongue, dancing to get out. Finally, I let it. “Augustus Chapel.”

  “Branch?”

  “I don’t know. Your branch.”

  “I don’t have a branch.”

  I nod. “Neither did he.”

  The man nods. “I’ll see what I can do.” He stands, slipping his notebook inside his jacket, rejoining the pen. I get to my feet, shaking the whole way, holding my side. “You okay?” he says.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You need a lift home? I can send someone…”

  “No. I’m not going home.”

  “You got a place to stay?”

  I shrug. I’m not really sure. Doesn’t matter either way at this point.

  “Meet me back here tomorrow. Same time. I’ll know by then if I can help you. If I can’t, we’ll see about doing you a different favor.”

  “If you can’t, I won’t need a different one.”

  He doesn’t understand this. I honestly don’t either, but my mouth said it, and I’m going to take it at its word, as my body doesn’t seem to be working in unison with my head anymore. I’ll let instinct guide me from here on out.

  The man pats the notebook inside his jacket. “Thank you for this. It’ll do a lot of good.” He holds out his hand.

  “I’d like to believe that, but I don’t,” I say. The man’s smile wavers just the slightest bit. “Call it professional skepticism,” I say, taking his hand and shaking it. It’s a small hand, but firm.

  The man nods. “Fair enough.” He releases my hand. “Tomorrow, then.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  29. (Four) Seeds of the Pomegranate

  The vibration of the helicopter is different than what I remember, the roar of the engines softer. Less rattling and wind. Maybe it’s the machine itself, but maybe it’s just me. I’m different, too. Smaller, but harder, like the man’s hand. None of it feels the same, or remotely right.

  Maybe it’s because I’m getting sick. Sicker. I can feel the bugs poking out from their cocoons in my elbows and knees, ready to start their march up and down my arms and legs, fester in my lower back, spit poison into my stomach. I didn’t fix enough before I left, and didn’t bring enough with me for the long term. Just whatever I had in my pocket, which put me in ration mode, because someone or something had set fire to the cave. I watched from the street as it burned, catching the other buildings next to it, which went up like the cheap props they were. Paper-thin structures built only for the illusion of house and home. People all around me ran and screamed and ran and screamed. It looked like a napalm dance, back in the day. Running and screaming, holding hands to heads, eyes wide, mouths wider. I might have set the fire. I might have. The River might have, too. Shrines on parade, tiny torches in the paws of ceramic cats. I can’t remember, but my hands did smell like gasoline, but they always smelled like something that could burn.

  That’s all behind me now. A five-year yesterday back in Bangkok, the city that collected me from the drain as I sluiced down the trough, picking me up to wait out a sentence of terror and sleepless nights, shot up with chemicals to keep a cosmic hound from coming to steal my air and kill me and take me away to the void. I wonder if Black Shuck was inside, waiting for me, when the first licks of flame carved through the walls, destroying its favorite doghouse where the wall met the ceiling.

  I vomit on the steel floor of the chopper. The pilot doesn’t turn around, nor does the man from the bar, whose face I can’t see. Professional courtesy, I suspect. Just like Phuong, and maybe with the same temperature of low-level loathing. Nothing exists to spooks, not even themselves, and here I am out to find King Spook, living far far underground in his castle in Hades. Will he exist? Did he ever? Where the fuck am I? God lord, am I sick…

  The chopper banks suddenly. I pitch to the side and vomit again, the bugs applauding inside me. I might die out here in the jungle without a bullet being fired.

  The applause twists into a buzzing, and the sound of water. That old familiar reverberation, fueled by the natural laws and older than the land. The firstborn baby on this dumb spinning rock. The rush of the River gets louder, flooding the engines and slowing the spinning of the X above my head.

  With my eyes closed, I can see the blur of green rushing below me like a limitless River as the sound rises up with the water, deafening. With my eyes closed, I can see Black Shuck running on top of the jungle canopy, taking great, bounding leaps at a leisurely but impossible speed. The helicopter is a small, defenseless bird just a little ways ahead and sli
ghtly above.

  Black Shuck leaps with the sound of a roaring River, exploding into a cresting wave that engulfs the chopper and pulls me back into the water, swallowed up by the current.

  30. The Ghosts Will Come For You

  By the time the men struck camp the next morning and headed up to the ridgeline above the valley, the Hmong were already there, cracking open crates with great efficiency and very little sound, removing sturdy black cabinets, cables, rope, poles, industrial-size battery packs, and other delicate contrivances that seemed at odds with the rough surroundings. Judging by the treatment of the boxes and packaging, and the remnants of it disappearing into the jungle as if by a line of giant leafcutter ants, it looked like there was no plan to take any of the equipment back with the group.

  Chapel walked among the tribesmen, exhorting them in their native tongue. Morganfield walked just behind Chapel, calculating figures on a clipboard and whispering suggestions, noting corrections.

  The American soldiers were instructed to provide cover, rifles up, scanning every direction in complete confusion as to what was going on.

  “Stay sharp,” Chapel said, moving over to the troops. “We have nine hours ‘til sundown.”

  “We staying out here for nine hours?” Medrano said.

  “I hope you got your beauty sleep last night, Medrano.”

  “I didn’t,” Medrano said with a frown, thinking of his comb and mirror.

  “What happens then?” Render said.

  “When?” Chapel said.

  “Sundown.”

  “Everything,” Chapel said.

  The men exchanged looks.

  “No sleep?” Broussard said.

  Chapel turned to him. “Pardon me, Specialist?”

  “I mean, we’re not going to rest, to sleep?”

  “Not tonight. You can sleep for the rest of your life. For the next eighteen hours, we do our work, and hope they don’t sleep either.”