The men stared down at this basin, a pastoral scene too perfect to not be suspect, and gripped their rifles tight, waiting for a sign of the enemy. Broussard was excited and terrified, not necessarily about fighting, but what he would do when it was time to fight. That old fear, whispering to him from the playground and the street corner, the barroom and the battlefield. Inflict pain or take it. Both equally horrifying to him. Embarrassing in the action and the reaction. He felt like he knew what he’d do this time, but there were no guarantees when war cries filled the air, the steel flashed, and gunpowder started to burn.
“I don’t see noth—”
Morganfield grabbed McNulty by the back of his shirt and yanked him to the ground, his helmet falling off his head.
“Keep your heads down, goddamn it,” Chapel whispered, now among them again. No one heard him approach. “There’s eyes everywhere.”
“Whose eyes?” McNulty mashed his helmet back on and wiped mud from his face, shooting Morganfield a hateful glare.
Chapel didn’t answer, peering intently out into the darkness of the valley below. The gray of his eyes sparked blue, catching the moonlight that somehow added color to them when it leeched it away from everything else.
“What is it, sir?” McNulty said, moving his head back and forth, trying to see what wasn’t seeable. Not with his eyes.
“There,” he said, pointing between the peaks. “It’s going to come from there. Where the twins meet.”
“What is?” Broussard couldn’t stand the anticipation, suddenly irritated with Chapel’s cryptic way of expressing himself when direct facts were desperately needed.
“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.