I look at her. I don’t have the English for this either. Sensing this, she finds hers again, if only to give me back the voice of my adult life. My childhood in the bayou can’t keep me safe anymore. It never did anyway, acting only as an accomplice in bringing me here. The River drops out from under me, leaving me on the clammy rug, spongy from the rain and smelling like cats.
“Did you take a part of this man with you?”
I nod my head.
“Do you still have it?”
I nod my head.
Clotilde sits back, a look of concern tinged with disgust on her face. “Why would you do this?”
“I don’t know… I don’t remember…”
She looks at me for a long time, judging what she can see that’s coming to the surface. “You know what you must do.”
I hold my head in my hands, trying to keep it together before it explodes. Tears start to form in my eyes, and I pinch them away with my lids. “I don’t know where it is anymore. I never knew.”
“You must find a way.” She leans in closer, taking my hand in hers. “If you are to find peace, and remove the Furious One from your scent.”
Hell hound on my trail. The lyrics snake their way inside my head. The look on Clotilde’s face shows that they also came out of my mouth.
“The spirit realm knows nothing of hell, of heaven,” she says. “Only what is real, and what we think is real.”
I look up at the top of the grand staircase, hoping to see the girl, her wispy frame, standing in the darkness. “I’m sorry,” I say. But no one is there.
On the way back to the cave, cutting through the fog that dissipates the further I get from the house, no one calls me Night Man. No one looks at me at all. I’m not here anymore.
Underneath the Floating City, the River rushes on, leaching into the invisible jungle. Everything in life eventually ends up back in the jungle. I want it to take me there. I want the River to take me anywhere tonight, but it refuses, because it knows to leave me here, with myself and no one else in a city where I don’t belong, stalked by a cosmic hound and afraid to sleep, is the worst sentence of all.
24. Everything’s Green Here
Operation Algernon had been five days in the jungle. Chapel had promised no more than two before they reached their objective. The men noticed.
One would think that being drowned in the green hell for days on end would warp time, mash it down into one long smudge of wet, pain, sweat, and fear. But being in the jungle made them pay close attention to each and every hour, every second, spent there. Everyone in war hated the jungle, and especially in this war. Even Darby, who never complained about a thing related to the soldier’s life, muttered to himself as he slapped at the dizzying variety of invertebrates that assaulted every inch of exposed skin and each orifice in turn. Tiny biting sandflies whined inside ears. Fire ants crawled up legs and backs and necks, spiting acid into pinprick wounds like an army of miniature devils. Leeches, long and thin and reaching out like blind, gasping baby birds, showed up everywhere. And the mosquitoes, always the mosquitoes, the size of houseflies, digging into the flesh to find blood and deposit fevered madness. These were the first enemies of any and all wars, shock troops of the natural world, and every step was another battle in a crusade declared against the arrogant apes a million years ago. The boneless ones would outlive everything else in the kingdom.
Then came the plants and trees, branches whipping faces, thorns cutting hands, and low-lying creepers grabbing at ankles. Walls of bamboo blocking easy trails, each cane twenty feet high and strong as ferry poles. The land did not want men here, and grew things on its surface to keep them out.
The rain was always in the background, coming and going as it pleased, and the mud it created sucked at boots and rotted the feet inside them. Five days in, and everything from the ankle down was either pickled or blistered, silver dollars of skin coming off with drenched socks soaked in blood. Wet feet had lost wars, and this one was no exception.
Mammals didn’t even need to join the fray from their perch at the top of the chain. Grunt tales told of wild boars and a rogue tiger occasionally taking scalps from both sides, but they didn’t factor in the grand grind of material attrition, only weighing in on occasional nights of specialty death when gibbons in the high branches and muntjac sniffing through the leaves could sound like anything and everything the mind feared.
Whatever the percentage, the combination of the wilderness war machine could lay low a battalion before anyone with guns even showed up. Animalia and Plantae doing the jab and cross with an unlimited store of energy, and motivation that predated recorded time.
No one with guns showed up in the Laotian jungle for five days, and by the end of the fifth, the rigors of the elements without a clear end game in sight to keep them focused and moving forward wore the men down like spent wind-up toys, the keys in their backs turning one last time before they came to a stop. Chapel felt the exhaustion of the men, and sensed the growing frustration, and called to shut it down for the night an hour earlier than the previous two days. To the men, it felt like a holiday.
They bedded down in what passed for a clearing. Broussard arranged his hooch next to a small alcove in a rock escarpment pushed up from the damp ground, then set out to find Chapel before his body put his mind to sleep. He found him at the far end of camp, tending a fire built in the wet gap of a tangle of huge gray tentacle roots billowing out from a massive Australian fig tree that rose above him, standing vigil. Chapel poked at the flames with a metal rod, watching the sparks jump before being smothered by the damp air. Soldiers didn’t see many fires out in the bush, due to lack of dry fuel, concerns about visibility, and a host of more mundane issues, but Chapel had conjured one out of the mud like a gun-barrel wizard. The roots seemed to writhe and move in closer to Chapel as Broussard approached. Tricks of the tired mind. Ruse of the jungle.
“Where’s Morganfield?” Broussard said.
“What can I do for you, Specialist Broussard?”
Broussard paused, weighing out a portion of delicacy. “I just wanted to tell you that the men are getting a little…”
Chapel waited for him to continue.
“A little restless.”
“They nominate you to come tell me?”
“No, sir.”
Chapel ruminated, watching the fire. “I know they are,” he said.
“They want to know where we’re going.”
“I know that, too.”
“You going to tell them? Tell us?”
Chapel dug the rod deep into the flames, poking metal into the mud underneath it, striking one of the roots. “Do you like poetry, Specialist Broussard?”
“Some, I guess. Depends.”
Chapel smiled, looked off into the complete black of night, and blinked, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. Then he recited:
“We sow the glebe, we reap the corn,
We build the house where we may rest,
And then, at moments, suddenly,
We look up to the great wide sky,
Inquiring wherefore we were born…
For earnest or for jest?”
Chapel returned his gaze to the fire.
“I think I know that one,” Broussard said.
“Do you, now?” Chapel said.
Broussard reached back into his memory to freshman-year English, all that poetry that none of the other boys liked, but he secretly did. Some of it, anyway. He had to read in front of the class, in that northern school, and kids snickered at his accent. He only heard his own voice passing across his ears, not the words moving through his brain, but some of it lingered long enough to be folded up and stored away. He never spoke the same way again after that first day. No Yankee was going to hold anything over him. They were all the same anyway.