“Were you involved in that? The bombing missions?”
“We all were. The buck never stops in a secret war.”
I look down at the kids smiling up at us, saying something in Lao. Laughing and pointing. I don’t understand it, but I’m pretty sure Chapel does. “Is that why you never left? Because you felt like you owed them something?”
“Is that why you didn’t leave?”
“I did leave. I laid low in Bangkok.”
“No, you didn’t. You’re still here, with the rest of us,” Chapel says, looking at the children, who slow down, stop, and head back to their village. “Waiting.”
41. Everything You Need
We’ve ridden for most of the day, but the sun doesn’t seem to move in the sky. Maybe we’re moving with it, in some perfect imitation dance to keep the nighttime at bay. Chapel and I haven’t said a word to each other since we saw the children. I keep looking behind us, up off the trail into the jungle and the stands of trees when there’s a break in the wilderness, wondering what’s following us, moving from shadow to shadow. Knowing that I’m being followed, but not sure by what anymore. It feels like many things, a legion on my trail.
Chapel abruptly stops his elephant, or what counts for abrupt from a six-ton animal. I slow mine to a halt, as well, with much less success. I never was good at riding.
“What is it?” I say, my mount stomping and fussing. It doesn’t like me. Animals never did.
“Look,” he says, and gestures upward with his chin.
I follow his direction and see the twin mountain peaks girded in vegetation, the V carved between, making them. Down below is the river that burned that night, lighting up the way for us to unleash Chapel’s doomed experiment to win the war.
“This is it,” I say, my voice stilled by certainty as much as wonder.
“Yes, it is.”
I look around in every direction, trying to familiarize myself based on spotty memories. I hear the river now, and am not sure if it’s coming from inside me, or down in the valley. This worries me, because one of them might take me away from the other just as I’ve finally arrived.
“Can you find it?”
I look at Chapel.
“The place,” he says.
“I think so.”
Chapel points. “We were set up all along that ridgeline, so use that as a guide. A starting point.”
I get down off my elephant, it waiting patiently as I do so without much grace. Chapel tosses me a wad of fabric. I shake it out. It’s a woven grass bag, large and sturdy.
“What’s this for?”
“To carry what you find.”
The reality of the situation begins to creep up on me, and the realization that what I’m looking for might not be here, or I might not be able to find it. Both options are too harrowing to contemplate, so I shake them off and busy myself with inspecting my gear and provisions, meager as they are. Nothing in my pack will take me very far, including the pistol.
“You have everything you need?” Chapel asks.
I hold up the jawbone. Chapel regards it grimly. He is the only one outside of the cave, outside of me, who has ever seen it. It hasn’t been in the sun for a long, long time.
He nods once. “Good enough.”
I turn to the high ground, then to Chapel. “If I’m not back… If I don’t come back…”
Chapel waits for me to finish. I don’t, changing the angle instead. “If I don’t say goodbye, I’ve never left.”
“Then let’s not,” he says. “We need you in this world.”
He says no more. I can tell he’s done talking. Maybe he’s been done for years, which is why he came out here, to Laos, to live out the remainder of his clock and to die in silence, without having to talk about it to those who would demand that he tell his story. I’m done talking, too. I’ve said my piece.
“Thanks, sir,” I say.
“It’s the least I can do, Specialist Broussard.”
I look down at the jawbone, turn it over in my hand. I remember looking at it in the jungle, when I was on the move, heading toward nowhere that brought me to Thailand, then to Bangkok, and then right back here. I’m remembering more things now, away from the cave and the things done there, which scares me, thrills me. I’m starting to remember how it was before, and it makes the now all the more wretched. So much wasted everything.
The teeth are white and straight. There are burn marks on the bone from where I charred off the muscle and sinew. The meat. I couldn’t leave it behind, bury it in the mud. I had to have a trophy, a memento that told me that I finally became a killer. A real man. A good soldier. The shame of that has murdered me a little more each night since then.
I grip the sharp bone tightly in my hand, and give one last look to Chapel, who clamps his grandfather’s pipe between his teeth.
Then I set off up the hill, gaining ground, elevation.
42. The 21st Chapter
I move from boulder to boulder to slab, my legs feeling stronger, feet searching for the right spot, while I survey the ridgeline below where my unit all died that night. Well, not all of it, as Chapel said. It looks different during the day, and five years on. The natural world has reclaimed the blood and bodies, erased the holes in the ground dug by exploding shells and filled them with living green. It seems a strange violation of the recovered peace to remember the horror of what happened here that night, so I ask the jungle forgiveness for my trespasses.
I keep moving, climbing higher, until my feet stop me. They’ve found it before my eyes have a chance. In front of me is a gap in the arrangement of rock, just large enough for a man—or the body of a smiling mule—to fit. I’d know this place in my sleep, as one does the familiar terrain of a recurring dream, which are the only dreams I’ve known since my rebirth on these rocks.
I peer down into the space between the two boulders, and see only moss and a wet blackness below. I get down on my hands and knees, like a Malay Muslim in prayer, and press my face to the opening. My eyes see nothing. My old eyes. My new eyes see it. See them. A collection of bones, withered by time, twisted by weather, and picked clean by the insects of the jungle. Jumbled yellow parts of a complicated puppet. They’re big bones. Those of a giant.
I reach my arm in to grab the nearest bone, but my fingers don’t reach. I’m going to have to go down there.
I was ready to be terrified, slithering into that tight space, clawing my way into my bloody, freak-out past. But I’m not afraid, I realize, almost as an afterthought, too busy figuring out the logistics of fitting myself in. I make myself into the snake, and get to slithering.
The opening is tight, but I squeeze through, scratching both sides of my body, which isn’t much more than a stuffed scarecrow these days, ratty with old skin. Freeing my legs and feet, I drop down into a small, hollowed-out compartment, and drag my pack behind me. This is my first time here, as I never entered that night, just shoved what I had done down a hole, as if that would erase the act and exonerate me for eternity. Out of sight and off the books. Fat fucking chance. The past has a way of showing up like a bad penny, jangling at the bottom of your pocket until you’re driven out of your mind, or at least as far as Bangkok.
The bones rest on a shelf higher up from the floor, near the fissure, waiting for me at eye level as I crouch. I can touch them now, and do, expecting something akin to a bee sting. But they’re just bones, damp and cold from the dark. I move my hands through them, finding something round at the back of the pile.
He rotted away facing the wall, like a punished schoolboy.
I remove the skull that falls free from the spine with a dry clatter, and turn it to face me. All of the teeth of the maxilla are intact, wide and gleaming white. The bottom part is missing.