“She prejudiced too?”
“Isn’t everybody?”
I don’t feel like having this talk. I didn’t come out here to have this talk. I should have kept my mouth shut.
“She thinks you’re going to take me away from here,” he says. “Take me back to where I came from.”
“I’m not taking anyone anywhere. I ain’t like you.”
“Yeah, you are,” he says. “That’s why you’re here.”
I can’t tell if he’s implying that I’m going to take him somewhere, or that I’m like him. Either way, he’s wrong.
He watches me struggle inside, still gathering intel. In the dim light of the hut, without the squint, his wrinkles that once looked so proud and distinguished now just make him look worn out. Tired.
“I’m here…” I shake my head, stand up and pull the pistol from my waistband, point it at his face. “I’m here to get some answers. Where you go after that is up to you.”
“You don’t need to hold a gun on me,” Chapel says mildly. He seems neither surprised nor distressed. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”
“I do need to hold a gun on you, so you know what it feels like.”
“You don’t think I know?”
“Not lately. Not living out here, like this.”
“Put the gun away, Broussard.”
“I ain’t—”
“Put the gun away, or you’ll be cut down where you stand.” Chapel nods to various corners of the hut. In each one, a rifle barrel pokes into the room. I never saw them, certainly didn’t hear them. I guess Chapel always rolls with ghosts.
“They gonna shoot?”
“Keep that gun in my face for another six or seven seconds and they will.”
“Call ’em off.”
“They won’t listen to me.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not in charge here.”
I hear several safety latches click to the “off” position.
“Bullshit.”
Chapel shrugs. “Okay.”
My new eyes can see fingers tightening on triggers. I lower the pistol, then stuff it into the back waistband of my trousers. I look to each corner. The barrels are gone, as silently as they appeared. No shadow has replaced them. Not yet. That would be coming along shortly, sure as rain in the jungle. No way in hell Black Shuck is still on that porch. It’ll want to see what’s happening in here.
“Sit?” Chapel says.
“You giving me orders?” I say. “You think you’re my daddy? ’Cause you sure as shit ain’t my commanding officer.”
“Will you please sit?” Chapel says, his tone unchanged.
I hesitate, wanting to protest, wanting to shoot this motherfucker, let him feel my rage and hurt at being lured into the jungles of Laos to die with brothers that I barely knew, didn’t have time to know, for a cause that was madness from the inside out, but I don’t know how to say what I want to say, and don’t have a weapon in my hand, so I sit. I sink down two inches in the low rattan chair. I get up and move it aside, then sit on the floor, thinking about peeling the orange that’s in front of me.
Chapel joins me on the ground, crossing his legs under him with some effort and a series of pops from creaky tendons. The sounds stab through the buzzing in my brain, as the River begins to reach out again, finding me here in Chapel’s hut. Always finding me, forever and ever and ever.
“So,” Chapel says, his voice barely audible over the sound of the water now rushing around me. Black Shuck fills the doorway behind him, cutting off the light from outside. The hound doesn’t come into the room, because it doesn’t have to, not with the water flooding the floor. “Where do we go from here?”
34. Orphans from a Different Tribe
Broussard sat cross-legged in front of his hooch, shaking off a feeling of falling, or being pulled fast down a great black hillside. He might have dozed off, but he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t slept well since crossing over into Laos, haunted with queer dreams.
He looked over at Darby, who was reassembling his M-14 in the dying light of day aided by a kerosene lantern, oiling each part and metal surface and buffing it with a small stained rag.
“It’s gonna be sundown soon, and then…” Darby said, sensing that Broussard was awake and watching him.
“Yeah,” Broussard said. “And then.”
“Why ain’t you sleepin’?”
“I don’t know. I’m starting to forget how.”
“You always the first one sleepin’,” Darby said with a chuckle. “Sleep through the apocalypse, ol’ Broussard.”
“Not anymore.”
“Me neither,” Darby said with a sigh. “Never was much for sleepin’. Too much mischief to get into.” He grinned, exposing a missing bicuspid.
“You scared?”
“Nah,” Darby said, looking up from his work to gaze out into the wall of trees around them, the sky and clouds above them starting to pinken, cut by fingers of purple. “I kinda wish I could say I was, because I know that I ain’t somethin’ that’s probably considered normal. But, I ain’t ever been accused of bein’ somethin’ like that.” Darby returned to his work.
Broussard regarded Darby, watching the man instead of what he was doing.
“Something on your mind, Crayfish?” Darby said. “I mean, aside from the obvious.” He grinned again. Calm as a peeled cucumber.
Broussard didn’t speak for a long time. “I just wanted to let you know that I had you all wrong.”
“Do tell.” Darby didn’t sound the least bit surprised.
“It’s just… I saw you, you know? The outside stuff. White dude. The accent. Kind of rough around the edges. All that.”
“Yeah, all that.”
“I had you figured for someone that you weren’t.”
“I get that a lot.” Darby looked down his detached barrel.
“I bet you do.”
“I reckon you do too,” Darby said, looking through the barrel at Broussard.
“Yeah.”
“Listen, man,” Darby said, carefully setting aside his oil and folding his rag, then lighting up a cigarette. “I wanna say this now, cuz, well, a soul never know what tomorrow’s gonna bring, you get me? So I wanna say that I think it’s powerful sad the way y’all get treated, here and back in the world. I seen it. I know ’bout it. I grew up the only white kid in the colored part of town. So I get it, as much as I can get it.”
“Yeah, I reckon you probably got it from both sides.”
Darby nodded. “But be that as it may be, I can leave that part of town, put on a proper city suit and head to the other side of that dividing line that ain’t marked on no map but everyone can see plain as Mary like a stripe of bright orange paint. I can walk on them streets, act like one of ’em, blend in.” He spits. “I been blendin’ in my entire life. Hell, I’m half a chameleon at this point. But out here, where the rules is different, governed by different judges prayin’ to different gods, I can be myself, at least up to a point. We all orphans and freaks out here.” Darby took several drags from his cigarette.
Broussard noticed the way Darby kept glancing over at him. He waited for him to go on, because he knew he needed to. For the first time since they’d met on the other side of the border, Darby looked nervous.
“I’m a homosexual, Broussard.” Darby took a drag of his cigarette, held it in like he was hitting a joint, then exhaled.
Broussard kept his gaze on the lantern. “Yeah, you get it from all sides, all right”
Darby looked at him, then broke into a smile. “Pun intended?”
Broussard didn’t get it at first, then he did. He smiled, as well. “Yeah, I guess so.”
Darby laughed quietly, nodded and looked off into the jungle. “I guess so, too.”
The two men sat in the loud quiet of the jungle evening, each hearing something different coming from the trees as the sun finally dipped below the horizon line, bringing its light to a different hemisphere of the earth, and leaving this one to darkness.