"Where did you come from now?"
"Incountry." His face creased and he showed his teeth. The effect was so unsettling that I did not immediately realize that he was smiling. "Way incountry. We had to get the major out."
"Looks like you had to pull him out, like a tooth."
My ignorance made him sit up straight. "You mean you never heard of him? Franklin Bachelor?"
And then I thought I had, that someone had mentioned him to me a long time ago.
"In the bush for years. Bachelor did stuff that ordinary people don't even dream of—he's a legend. The Last Irregular. He fell on punji sticks and lived—he's still got the scars."
A legend, I thought. He was one of the Green Berets Ransom had mentioned a lifetime ago at White Star.
"Ran what amounted to a private army, did a lot of good work in Darlac Province. He was out there on his own. The man was a hero. That's straight."
Franklin Bachelor had been a captain when Ratman and his platoon had run into him after a private named Bobby Swett had been blown to pieces on a trail in Darlac Province. Ratman had thought his wife was a black-haired angel.
And then I knew whose skull lay wound in rope in the back seat of the jeep.
"I did hear of him," I said. "I knew someone who met him. The Rhade woman, too."
"His wife" Ransom said.
I asked him where they were taking Bachelor.
"We're stopping overnight at Crandall for some rest. Then we hop to Tan Son Nhut and bring him back to the States— Langley. I thought we might have to strap him down, but I guess we'll just keep pouring whiskey into him."
"He's going to want his gun back."
"Maybe I'll give it to him." His glance told me what he thought Major Bachelor would do with his .45, if he was left alone with it long enough. "He's in for a rough time at Langley. There'll be some heat."
"Why Langley?"
"Don't ask. But don't be naive, either. Don't you think they're…" He would not finish that sentence. "Why do you think we had to bring him out in the first place?"
"I suppose something went wrong."
"The man stepped over some boundaries, maybe a lot of boundaries—but tell me that you can do what we're supposed to do without stepping over boundaries."
For a second, I wished that I could see the sober shadowy gentlemen of Langley, Virginia, the gentlemen with slicked-back hair and pinstriped suits, questioning Major Bachelor. They thought they were serious men.
"It was like this place called Bong To, in a funny way." Ransom waited for me to ask. When I did not, he said, "A ghost town, I mean. I don't suppose you've ever heard of Bong To."
"My unit was just there." His head jerked up. "A mortar round scared us into the village."
"You saw the place?"
I nodded.
"Funny story." Now he was sorry he had ever mentioned it.
I said that I wasn't asking him to tell me any secrets.
"It's not a secret. It's not even military."
"It's just a ghost town."
Ransom was still uncomfortable. He turned his glass around and around in his hands before he drank.
"Complete with ghosts."
"I honestly wouldn't be surprised." He drank what was left in his glass and stood up. "Let's take care of Major Bachelor, Jed," he said.
"Right."
Ransom carried our bottle to the bar.
Ransom and Jed picked up the major between them. They were strong enough to lift him easily. Bachelor's greasy head rolled forward. Jed put the .45 into his pocket, and Ransom put the bottle into his own pocket. Together they carried the major to the door.
I followed them outside. Artillery pounded hills a long way off. It was dark now, and lantern light spilled through the gaps in the windows.
All of us went down the rotting steps, the major bobbing between the other two.
Ransom opened the jeep, and they took a while to maneuver the major into the backseat. Jed squeezed in beside him and pulled him upright.
John Ransom got in behind the wheel and sighed. He had no taste for the next part of his job.
"I'll give you a ride back to camp," he said.
I took the seat beside him. Ransom started the engine and turned on the lights. He jerked the gearshift into reverse and rolled backward. "You know why that mortar round came in, don't you?" he asked me. He grinned at me, and we bounced onto the road back to the main part of camp. "He was trying to chase you away from Bong To, and your fool of a lieutenant went straight for the place instead." He was still grinning. "It must have steamed him, seeing a bunch of roundeyes going in there."
"He didn't send in any more fire."
"No. He didn't want to damage the place. It's supposed to stay the way it is. I don't think they'd use the word, but that village is like a kind of monument." He glanced at me again.
Ransom paused and then asked, "Did you go into any of the huts? Did you see anything unusual there?"
"I went into a hut. I saw something unusual."
"A list of names?"
"I thought that's what they were."
"Okay," Ransom said. "There's a difference between private and public shame. Between what's acknowledged and what is not acknowledged. Some things are acceptable, as long as you don't talk about them." He looked sideways at me as we began to approach the northern end of the camp proper. He wiped his face, and flakes of dried mud fell off his cheek. The exposed skin looked red, and so did his eyes. "I've been learning things," Ransom said.
I remembered thinking that the arrangement in the hut's basement had been a shrine to an obscene deity.
"One day in Bong To, a little boy disappeared."
My heart gave a thud.
"Say, three. Old enough to talk and get into trouble, but too young to take care of himself. He's just gone—poof. A couple of months later, it happened again. Mom turns her back, where the hell did Junior go? This time they scour the village. The villagers scour the village, every square foot of that place, and then they do the same to the rice paddy, and then they look through the forest."
"What happens next is the interesting part. An old woman goes out one morning to fetch water from the well, and she sees the ghost of a disreputable old man from another village, a local no-good, in fact. He's just standing near the well with his hands together. He's hungry—that's what these people know about ghosts. The skinny old bastard wants more. He wants to be fed. " The old lady gives a squawk and passes out. When she comes to again, the ghost is gone.
"Well, the old lady tells everybody what she saw, and the whole village gets in a panic. Next thing you know, two thirteen-year-old girls are working in the paddy, they look up and see an old woman who died when they were ten—she's about six feet away from them. Her hair is stringy and gray and her fingernails are about a foot long. They start screaming and crying, but no one else can see her, and she comes closer and closer, and they try to get away but one of them falls down, and the old woman is on her like a cat. And do you know what she does? She rubs her filthy hands over the screaming girl's face and licks the tears and slobber off her fingers."
"The next night, two men go looking around the village latrine behind the houses, and they see two ghosts down in the pit, shoving excrement into their mouths. They rush back into the village, and then they both see half a dozen ghosts around the chiefs hut. They want to eat. One of the men screeches, because not only did he see his dead wife, he saw her pass into the chief's hut without the benefit of the door."
"The dead wife comes back out through the wall of the chief's hut. She's licking blood off her hands."
"The former husband stands there pointing and jabbering, and the mothers and grandmothers of the missing boys come out of their huts. All these women go howling up to the chief's door. When the chief comes out, they push past him and they take the hut apart. And you know what they find."