The smaller gray objects were oblong, hollowed out like urns, a yard or two high, worn rough by weather and mottled by lichens. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, as it was difficult to tell them apart from the large stones scattered between them.
“Gravestones?” Broussard said, more to himself.
“Something like that,” Chapel said.
“What kind of place is this?” Medrano said, performing the sign of the cross across his chest.
“The Plain of Jars,” Chapel said.
The men stared down at the ancient stone structures scattered out for a mile in front of them. Patterns emerged briefly, but were easily scattered. Whatever had survived the grind of history only offered hints now, not secrets revealed.
“We walking through that?” McNulty said.
“Right through,” Chapel said.
“Can’t we walk around it?”
“No, we cannot.”
“Don’t seem right.”
“You superstitious, McNulty?” Darby said.
“I never used to be,” McNulty said. “These days, though? Man… If ghost are real, they live out here.”
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.