The Reckoning (17 page)

He stirred the shells with a stick, and a whole colony of beetles began scuttling around their feet.

“All of these come from American guns,” Samnang said. “M-60, here, M-16, this one, and this.”

Molly felt Kleat's eyes on her, and knew what he was thinking: KR. The old guerrilla was exposing himself.

“This is detonation cord for plastic explosive.” Samnang held up a coil. “That explains the damage at the far end. C4
plastique.
And these I dug from the wall.”

Samnang opened his hand to show a half dozen lead slugs. “All from American guns. Also, you would think their fire would be directed at the door, yes? But the walls are smooth and untouched, you see. Only the wall of statues is scarred. They alone were targeted.”

“What are you getting at?” Kleat said.

“I have looked,” said Samnang, “and there is no sign of an enemy.”

Kleat's voice dropped to a growl. “They were fighting for their lives.”

“Perhaps,” said Samnang. “But against whom?”

“Okay.” Kleat mocked him. “Whom?”

Samnang let the mashed slugs fall from his palm.
“Âme damnée,”
he said. His French sounded like a song.

Kleat jerked. “What?” His voice thinned to a whisper. His hard-boiled expression crumpled. He stepped back as if the slugs were poisoned. Molly saw he was retreating from Samnang. Eyes round behind his thick lenses, he looked stricken.

Not certain what to make of Kleat's sudden affliction, Molly said, “Damned men?”

“Fallen from grace,” Samnang said. He acted oblivious to Kleat's recoil. “It is only my conjecture. But what if the men turned against one another?”

“Bullshit,” Kleat said. Molly wasn't sure what he was denouncing though, the guesswork or its author. Or something else. He was staring at Samnang.

“How then to interpret the knife?” Samnang asked.

Kleat blinked. “What knife?”

They followed Samnang to the wall of Buddhas. Molly had not spied it through her telephoto. You had to see it from the side, jammed to the hilt in a seam between the stone blocks, the handle protruding.

Samnang let them consider the knife. Up close, the Buddhas looked eaten by disease. The knife's presence was deliberate, like a judgment rendered, or a desecration.

“A K-Bar knife,” Kleat said, his certainty returning. “That's how I interpret it.”

“But why would anyone stab it into a stone wall?” said Molly. “Here of all places, this wall.”

“How would I know?”

“It looks so angry. Like adding insult to injury.”

“We're talking about a piece of stone,” said Kleat. “A dead city.”

“Molly's right,” Duncan said. “It does look…excessive.”

“Excessive,” Kleat scoffed. “They were fighting for their lives.”

“Samnang's got a point, though. The only damaged wall is this one. And see how the faces of the Buddhas were targeted? This knife didn't end up here by accident. Someone found a joint in the stone and hammered it in with all his strength. This looks less like a battle than a signature.”

“What does it matter?” Kleat said. “A bunch of old statues.”

He grabbed at the handle. He was arming himself, Molly realized. Let him have it. The knife would be a rusty old thing.

He pulled, but the wall held on. He braced his other hand against the stone to pull again. Just then a clap of thunder exploded directly above the canopy.

It was so close, Molly's knees buckled. She smelled ozone, a whiff of the upper stratosphere. The men's eyes went wide and white. They looked at each other.

The seconds passed, her ears ringing. More thunder rippled in the far distance. The sense of nature returned.

The knife and the sky had nothing to do with each other. It had been thundering since morning. Just the same, Kleat released the stubborn handle with disgust.

In the silence that followed, another sound descended to them, the hushing sound leaves make when they tremble. But it wasn't the leaves.

After a minute, water began dripping through the canopy.

The rain had finally come.

They fled the tower slowly. Rain fell in rivulets from the canopy. Water raced down the furrow in the winding staircase, forcing them to the edge. Molly had the advantage with her climber's balance and her youth. Twice she caught Kleat when he slipped. For a few minutes, the dangers unified them.

The forest grew darker by ounces. The rain diminished. Samnang guided them through the city to the stairs that led to camp.

The brothers had already returned from the gate. The thatch hut and campfire waited below like a lighthouse in a deep harbor. By the time they reached ground level, Molly's cold sweat had returned.

It couldn't be malaria, she thought. She was on proquanil. Then again, she was on proquanil because the Cambodian strain of malaria had grown resistant to chloroquine. Maybe the bug had morphed again.

The brothers, by the fire, were in high spirits, their gold teeth flickering like sparks in the darkness, their tattoos glistening from the canopy's slow drip. Molly arrived at the hut to find two dry green ponchos spread as a floor. Vin bustled over with a cup of steaming black tea loaded with so much sugar it made her teeth ache. She thanked him.

Kleat arrived, his bronze skull as slick as a muscle car. He was wearing the flak jacket from the tower room. Now he could pretend to be bulletproof like the brothers. The superstitions were layering over them. He didn't bother to remove his boots. Molly scooted deeper into the hut to make room for him.

He thumped her knee. “We're saved,” he said.

Molly tried to evade his good cheer. But it was hard not to feel some camaraderie. Two nights ago they'd been licking their wounds in a restaurant, banished and irrelevant. All that was changed. Fame and wealth and great dreams were almost within their grasp. It did feel like salvation. She had her camera in her lap. The display screen flickered with images of the strange, beautiful city.

Duncan came in from the darkness. “Have you looked in the truck? There must be ten heads in there. You've got to get a photo of it,” he said to Molly. “It's like they've decapitated the city. The heads are always the first things to be plundered. They're portable. Collectors go wild for them. They move like lightning on the art market.”

Samnang entered from the night, wordless, and crossed his legs. Raindrops clung to his white burr cut. Cutting a glance at him, Kleat looked confused and at the same time annoyed, like a man who has misplaced his keys.

“They must not do this,” Samnang said. “Taking the heads like barbarians.”

“It's a small price to pay,” said Kleat. “Play it through with them. You'll get what you want. We all will.”

“You don't understand?” Samnang asked Kleat.

Kleat tsk-tsked. Dumb question. End of discussion. The fire snapped in their silence.

The Americans and Samnang dried off under the thatch roof, all except Molly, who could not quit sweating. Suddenly ravenous, she pulled the box of MREs toward her. “Spaghetti and meatballs,” she said.

She offered the MREs to Vin and his brothers, out by the fire, but they waved off her hospitality, too intent on toting up their riches with a hand calculator. She would have to think up some other way to mother them. It was imperative that they not forsake the Americans.

The canopy leaked in episodes, dripping like a metronome, then spilling in vertical columns that released here, then there. It was all cause and effect, no mystery. A leaf brimming with rainwater would flip over, creating a chain reaction among lower leaves. Every few minutes another gush of water splashed in the darkness. It would go on until the canopy had lightened its load.

One of the miniature waterfalls scored a direct hit on their fire. White steam billowed up and the hut went dark. The brothers jumped to their feet. “Ho,” they shouted, laughing. Then the flames jumped high again.

The brothers settled back along the edge of the fire. The dirt and embers at one end of the pit seemed to twitch on their own, like someone struggling to break free from below. Molly passed it off as shadows.

Vin was dispatched to offer the Americans a bottle of clear liquid, which he poured into their empty tea cups. Kleat took a sip. “God, you could clean paint off with that,” he said.

“Not good,” Samnang murmured after Vin left.

“As long as they're happy.”

“The happy part won't last,” Duncan said. The brothers looked over, and he smiled and raised a toast to them. “I've seen men go at each other with hatchets on this stuff.”

“And us without a gun,” Kleat said. He toasted Molly and took another sip of the hooch and adjusted his flak jacket.

Molly wished she'd thought of the flak jacket, not for the armoring, but the warmth. Was she the only one who felt the cold? If only they would build the fire a little higher.

Back in Kampong Cham, they had pledged to turn around at the first sign of rain. There was no question about staying through the night, though. It would be absurd to try to retrace the oxcart trail at night, and the river would not recede until morning. Neither Samnang nor Duncan could predict tomorrow's weather. Without a radio or even a view of the sky, they were reduced to speculation. The mountain would act as a natural magnet for the first precipitation, and maybe this little shower was all the sky contained for now.

They came up with every excuse to stay. They pretended the decision was theirs to make, that they were in full command of themselves. They pretended emotion had nothing to do with wanting to stay, that the very fact they were discussing caution meant caution still ruled. But the ruins were inciting them. Everyone had something to gain here. The nearness of the bones had Kleat in high gear, and the marvels of the city excited Duncan, and the plunder wound up the brothers. Even old Samnang had desires. Molly saw him lay out a row of incense sticks and knew he meant to return to the tower. They were all obsessed, herself included.

It was agreed that the rain signified the beginning of the wet monsoon and had nothing to do with the typhoon. The typhoon might have died in the South China Sea, or it might still strike them.

The bigger uncertainty was the brothers. Duncan guessed the truck held a half million dollars' worth of relics now. They could simply drive away in the morning and leave the Americans. It was all a matter of their whim. Samnang said they meant to stay. They wanted more.

The fire stirred again. Something was under there. Molly saw it again, like an invisible hand moving its fingers within the red coals. A root, she decided. The heat was drying its sap, making the root contract and twist.

Kleat spread the pieces of the broken M-16 on the poncho. The rifle clip was empty. “Once his ammunition ran out, he clubbed the rifle. How many of the little bastards did he take with him?”

“I saw that movie,” said Molly. “John Wayne.
The Alamo.”

“Explain this then.” Kleat held up the shattered rifle.

“We've been there,” she said. “If there was a battle, there should be other signs. Not just in the tower, but down in the city. Bullets in trees or in the sandstone.”

“Laterite,” Duncan corrected her. “Technically speaking. It's a soft stone when it's first quarried. Perfect for carving before it hardens.”

“Other signs,” she continued. “Rocket scars on the walls. Things blown up.”

“You'll see. The bones will tell.”

“They could have left or been taken prisoner.”

“Explain the dog tags then.”

“Explain Luke,” said Duncan.

Circles within circles. The sweat stung her eyes.

Night was a frame of mind. The ACAV flickered in the heights like a box-shaped moon. There were even stars, the fireflies and sparks. And constellations of animal eyes glittering red and yellow in the trees.

Like a museum curator, Duncan began delicately appraising the pages from inside the radio set. They might have been the Dead Sea Scrolls, the four curled pages of lined notepaper. Minuscule termites had wormed their way across the pages, etching in their own account of time. Ink foxed the paper in blotches. Duncan teased the pages apart and held them to the firelight, trying to candle out any legible words. When that didn't work, he gently pressed them flat, and the pages crumbled like dead leaves.

Kleat seemed gratified. “They wouldn't have told us anything anyway.”

Duncan pieced the fragments together as best he could, side by side, and pored over them with Kleat's big krypton flashlight. There was precious little to decipher: “ ‘…can't not stay anymore, where else…darkest before dawn, oh, God, your false promise…in the life of the stone…' ”

“No atheists in the foxholes,” Kleat said. “The boy was stoked on the Bible.”

“Here's part of an inventory: ‘morphine, 7 amps, .50 cal, 3….' ” Duncan leaned down and ran out of words.

“That's all?” said Kleat.

It took another five minutes to turn the fragments onto their flip side. Duncan found a little more. “ ‘…he was right, but we were wrong to listen…let him go like Cain, but west, from Eden on foot. Maybe we should have'…And this, ‘another visit last night. They come every night now. I know I shouldn't speak to them, but we spoke…' ”

“What's that all about?” Molly said.

“Regrets,” Kleat said. “The ‘he' must have been their commanding officer. And it sounds like one of them got out of Dodge before it was too late. Obviously, they wished they'd never listened to their commander. And they wished they'd followed the man who left.”

“But who are his visitors at night, the ones he shouldn't speak to? Maybe tribal people coming in?”

“Here we go, a bit more in pencil, along the margin.” Duncan read several lines of a poem, something about wild cats growling, wind howling, and two riders approaching. He looked up. “They must have heard a tiger. The monsoon was coming. And they were the two riders, you know, their two ACAVs approaching the city walls.”

“Useless,” Kleat said. He seemed, Molly thought, glad to be done with it.

But Samnang bent closer. “Bob Dylan,” he said.

They looked at him.

“Yes, those are the final words of a famous song.” Samnang was excited by his discovery. ‘All Along the Watchtower.' One of my students wrote an essay on its true meaning.”

“What true meaning?” said Kleat. “It's plain. They were trapped. They were dying. They wanted out of here.”

“And yet the soldier chose this song,” said Samnang. “A song about revolution. Why?”

“Forget the watchtower crap,” Kleat said. “Forget last wills and testaments. What we need is positive identification.”

“Let me take a turn,” Molly interrupted.

“You have better eyes?”

She held up her camera. “Let's see what it sees.”

She knelt above the fragments and took a picture of the front side of each page. Duncan began patiently turning them over.

Out by the fire, Doc snapped a command. Hands planted on his folded legs, elbows out, he looked almost like one of the kings she'd seen carved in the stone. His voice was too loud. He was drunk.

Vin hopped to do his bidding, shoveling at the coals with his machete. After a minute, he levered up the edge of a helmet. At least that's what Molly thought it was, the helmet that Kleat had found. They were using it to cook their dinner. She was wrong, though. It was a turtle.

They must have trapped it from the
baray
swamps and buried it under the coals to roast. Molly lifted her camera and zoomed in. She'd never seen a turtle eaten. Steam vented from the leg holes. The camera autofocused in the witchy light, blurring, centering, blurring. She thumbed the focus to manual and stabilized the image.

It was still alive.

Molly kept the camera between her and it. Through its glass and mirrors, she could stand almost anything.

The turtle filled her frame. There was no mistake. Its legs paddled at the air. Its neck stretched and moved. That explained the embers stirring.

The middle brother snatched the machete from Vin. He gave a light, expert chop across the belly plate. The turtle opened like magic.

The firelight pulsed. The stewpot of organs pulsed separately from the light. Alive, still alive. They used sticks and knives to spear pieces. Doc saw her shooting and, with exaggerated hospitality, held up a slippery organ to her. She shook her head no, and they laughed. Kleat laughed, too.

“There,” announced Duncan, unaware of the little incident. His puzzle of fragments was ready for her. She leaned over and snapped pictures of the reverse sides. A drop of her sweat fell on one page, staining it as black as blood.

Samnang was frowning at her. He'd noticed her sweat. She rested against the box.

“Whoever the man was,” Duncan said, “he rolled the pages up, closed them in a layer of condoms, and hid them inside a radio that was dead. A message in a bottle.”

“No name, no date.” Kleat shrugged.

“Did Samnang show you the name at the base of the tower?” Molly asked. She referenced it on her camera display. “ ‘C. K. Watts. August 20.' It gives us some context. And the monkey remains,” she added, keeping her eyes away from the turtle, “more context. We're not without clues.”