The Reckoning (26 page)

The afternoon thunder arrived. It came up from the earth, not down from the sky. It was still too far away to hear. The vibrations buzzed against her skull. She remembered sitting in a restaurant along a river long ago and how the sunset had trembled.
Let it rain,
she thought.
Come what may.
She was finding her happy zone.

But then she saw the soldier. He was sitting at the far end of the wall where the rubble had cleared itself away. Thirty years ago someone had buried him violently, with plastic explosives. Now he was bared to the world.

His legs and boots were crushed flat. The rest of his skeleton rested precariously upright. It must have been hot the day he died. He had no shirt. But like Kleat, expecting trouble, he wore a flak jacket.

She knew him, or at least of him, not his name or his face, but his legend. The fragments of the journal had spoken of him. He was their commander. Here was the man who had gotten them lost and found them sanctuary, and doomed them by preserving them among the ruins. This was the tower of his tomb.

She dragged herself closer, a creature of her curiosity.

Their discoverers would link them, a man and a woman, a soldier and a civilian, two Americans caught in a faraway land. Never mind that she was as old as he was dead. Details. The story was too good. They were as good as married, a Romeo and Juliet for the ages.

The rubble had flattened his left hand in his lap. It looked like some complicated fossil. He wore a wedding band.

His skull leaned on his chest as if he were in mid-siesta. His sole wound, it seemed, was a crease along the temporal bone. The bullet had not pierced his skull. It might only have stunned him, in which case he'd been buried alive.

Molly touched nothing. The skeleton looked like a house of cards ready to fall. She lay beside him, resting her head, hunting for clues.

This was not another of their suicides. For one thing, there were more certain ways to put a bullet into yourself, and the bone was not scorched or powder burned. Also there was no weapon lying close at hand. And again, the bullet did not seem to have been a killing shot. Someone had shot him, and then buried him. Her eyes wandered higher. All in front of the Buddhas.

How had it gone?

He had caught them in the act of savaging the statues and gotten between their weapons and the wall. The journal fragments whispered to her.
It's not true he loved the city more than us. He was only trying to preserve us all.
They had looted the city, or part of it, planting that terra-cotta head on their exhaust pipe. Had he tried to protect the Buddhas? Had someone kept on firing?

There was just one wound that she could see. She couldn't find any bullet holes or bloodstains on the flattened fatigues or the flak jacket. Just the single shot along his head. Just one shooter.

Had it been an accident or an execution? Had they tried to revive him, or panicked and given him up for dead? No matter. They had blasted this section of the wall and hidden their deed under a ton of debris. That much was no accident. Someone had deliberately tried to conceal the evidence. The body, living or dead, damned them. And so they had shut it from sight.

The journal spoke of one man whipping up the mutiny. But once the commander was killed, the rebels had realized their fall from grace. At least the journal writer had expressed repentance.

The story took shape, a murder. The soldiers had driven the shooter from their midst…like Cain, the killer of his brother. He was the same man who had led them in mutiny. Molly knew it. The murder had shocked the rebels from their rebellion. They had scattered after the killing. The mutiny had dispersed.

The shooter had set off on foot,
west of Eden.
Did that mean he'd fled toward Phnom Penh or gone out the western entry, or was it simply the writer carrying through his biblical strand? No matter. Somewhere out there the killer had met his end. The rest of the Blackhorse men had stayed in the city, languishing, divided, hungry and diseased, drifting into madness, and, like her, too weak to leave, dying in animal niches among the ruins.

End of story. Everyone, it seemed, had paid for the sin. In a way, the commander was lucky. Of all the bones she'd seen in the city, his had come the closest to a permanent burial.

But the knife still bothered her. It could have been their way of marking the grave, but why mark a grave you wanted no one to find? No, she thought. Someone had added it to the wall as a finishing touch, after the shooting, after the killing, probably after the blast, a final piece of rage.

It was the shooter's knife. Molly knew it instinctively. He had stabbed the wall.

Thunder rippled far away. A breeze stirred the canopy.

She clutched her cold, fiery self.

“Now what?” she whispered to the bones.

It didn't seem right. They'd brought her here.
Her.
Luke had said so. But all this way for what? This was just another dead soldier from a dead war. Vietnam had nothing to do with her. She had a life. For a little while longer.

The trees moved. The floor shivered, or she did. It was like a dock that seems to move because the water is moving. The big river was waiting.

“Not yet,” she said.
Where's my circle?
She deserved that much. A bit more beta. Some raw connect. Her missing link.

The tremors upset the careful construct of his bones. With the clatter of sticks and empty spools, the soldier spilled to pieces. The skull landed facing her, mouth parted, his jaw still wired in place with tendons. Weighted with vertebrae and ribs, the flak jacket tumbled into her hands. It was a simple matter to pluck the dog tag from inside.

The name was perfectly legible.

She should have known.

“ ‘O'Brian,' ” she read aloud to him, “ ‘Duncan A.' ”

The jaw stayed frozen, half open, caught in the act.

There was his date of birth. She made the calculation. He'd been shot on his birthday, or shortly after, twenty-one years old. She'd fallen for a younger man.

Molly cocked her head to see the skull.

His features emerged clearly now. It was almost like lying with him in her tent, watching his young face while he slept. There was his thick brow and his thin cheekbones, and the white teeth he'd brushed so religiously. She purged from her mind the poor creature dwindling in the rain last night, losing his long hair in her fingers, that phantom crumbling beneath her doubts. She closed her eyes and saw Duncan at dawn in the blue-green light.

Had he suspected his flesh encased a ghost? She recalled his briefcase full of tidbits and his confusion when she'd confronted him. And his odd reluctance to follow Luke to these ruins.

It wasn't that he'd tried to fool anyone. Duncan had been as truthful as he could remember, in fragments, with an Ace comb in his pocket, just a spirit borrowing himself together, the same as Luke and all the rest.

When had he escaped from the ruins? Obviously, Luke had been sent to fetch his restless brother back to the source, back to the underworld. But why bring her?

She had daydreamed about taking Duncan home with her. Over these last few days, that seemed to be what she was meant to do, to usher him back into America. But he'd turned the tables on her, not knowing himself. He'd brought her home with him.

More chills, more salty sweat. Her eyes rolled back in her head. Darkness threatened. Molly fought back to consciousness.

What were the laws of this place? The rain would purify them. Her bones would mingle with his. But then?

“Duncan?” she called to his spirit. Had he joined that never-ending patrol around the tower? Or flung himself up into the canopy? “Where are you?”

Suddenly she was afraid. She wanted reassurance. She had no answers, only more questions. Would she go out into the world with him now, or would they stay to wander through the ruins? How did it work? Would they take on disguises? Enter cities? Cross the oceans? Haunt the future? They could live a thousand lives. But in giving birth to themselves, would they forget their anchoring bones? Would they come to forget each other?

They had voices. Where was his voice? “Duncan?”

The flak jacket had fallen open. There was something in the pocket, an edge of plastic. She tugged and it was a sandwich bag containing a snapshot.

The photo was dog-eared and harshly faded. Even without the “Dec. '69” penned on the back, Molly knew the era by its chemicals and paper. She could have guessed the basic image. It was straight out of a war movie, the girlfriend picture.

Wife, she amended, glancing at Duncan's wedding band. The young woman had one, too. She was flashing it proudly, with bravura, grinning at their in-joke. Six or seven months pregnant, she was dressed—barely—in a polka-dot bikini. She'd snagged her man in the nick of time.

Molly laid her head on the flak jacket and studied the photo, sliding into its story. Duncan had taken it. They were on a beach. It was Hawaii, in the middle of his deployment to Vietnam. She wore a flower lei. Molly liked her. She was audacious, ripe to bursting, and wildly in love with the photographer. A real firecracker.

She did the math. Duncan had been twenty. A few months later, he had become a dad. A few months after that, he had faced his killer in this city of the dead.

Her face eluded Molly. The girl's hair cast a shadow, and that bulging tummy drew the eye. But that wasn't the difficulty. The face made no sense to her.

The girl had a hundred-watt smile and a sloe-eyed green gaze. A pair of rose-colored sunglasses perched on top of her bushy black hair. The humidity had blown her pixie cut to chaos. Molly could relate. Atomic hair, she called it. That's why she'd chopped hers short with surgical scissors. Black Irish did not go well with the tropics.

Molly stopped. The air leaked from her.

She was looking at herself.

She refused it. She had to be projecting. The fever was scrambling her mind. The ruins were stealing into her the way she had stolen into them, in darkness and fog. One step deeper, it seemed, and she might disintegrate.

The picture blurred, then sharpened. She struggled against it, then with it, finding her way into the impossible image. How could something so familiar feel so alien? The eyes, their shape, the nose, the smile, the hair…there was no denying it. That was her face in the photo.

Molly glanced at Duncan's silent bones, trying to fathom it. What did it mean? Had she died and wandered and finally been led to her lover? Could she be her own orphan?

A drop of rain fell from the trees. Not yet, she commanded the sky. There were facts. She recalled them, an obituary in the
Denver Post
dated 1971, a coroner's report, a grave marker among the wildflowers.

She fumbled at the belt holding her passport wallet and ripped open the Velcro and drew out her relic, a driver's license issued in 1967 in Bay City, Texas, to one Jane Drake, age eighteen. The black hair was long and ironed straight, Cher style. The eyes were green and full of blue sky, as if all her life lay ahead of her. It was the same face Molly saw in her mirror, though younger and sweeter and smooth. But it was also the face in a photo buried next to the heart of a dead soldier. How could that be?

Rain began leaking from the canopy. A drop splashed across the photo. Molly raced on.

Once upon a time, she tried desperately. Once upon a time, a war bride lost her one true love. When he went missing, she went missing, too. She wandered off into madness, into the midst of mountain gypsies, and finally, into the mouth of a blizzard. That much was true. Jane Drake had died in a roofless miner's shack in a blizzard on Boreas Pass.

Had she returned from the dead then, one ghost hunting another?

She searched her memory for Hawaii and young Duncan and the diamond on that finger, and the miner's cabin and the blizzard. She tried to feel them as memories of her own, but none of it came to her.

The raindrops splattered across the photo. The image was melting before her eyes.

Hurry,
she thought. Today was for keeps. Darkness was her last call. The forest would render her to bones. She would join the wandering spirits and never know more than her name.

Molly blinked away the rain. Put away the ghosts. She was too full of ghosts.
Trust your eyes.
What was she missing?

She brought the snapshot closer. She looked at the tipped skull.

Here stood a young woman in her glory.

Here lay the bones that had broken her heart.

And—it was suddenly so obvious—in that womb slept their daughter, Molly.

The muscles in her face relaxed. The labyrinth unraveled around her. No longer a stranger to herself, she let the city take her over. Its canals became her arteries. Its stone told her story. Her tangled threads were simply paths among the ruins.

Had her mother sent her, Molly wondered, or had her father drawn her? Did it matter? They had never meant to lose her. They'd done the best they could, but the world had taken them away, the soldier in war, his bride in sorrow. She only needed to forgive them for their love. She leaned the photo among the bones. The rain ran from her eyes.