Ransom had parked the jeep near my battalion headquarters five minutes before, and now he smiled as if he had explained everything.
"But what happened?" I asked. "How did you hear about it?"
He shrugged. "I probably heard that story half a dozen times, but Bachelor knew more about it than anyone I ever met before. They probably carried out the pieces of the chief's body and threw them into the excrement pit. And over months, bit by bit, everybody in the village crossed a kind of border. By that time, they were seeing ghosts all the time. Bachelor says they turned into ghosts."
"Do you think they turned into ghosts?"
"I think Major Bachelor turned into a ghost, if you ask me. Let me tell you something. The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people."
I got out of the jeep and closed the door Ransom peered at me through the jeep's window. "Take better care of yourself."
"Good luck with your Bru."
"The Bru are fantastic" He slammed the jeep into gear and sho away, cranking the wheel to turn the jeep around in a giant circle in front of the battalion headquarters before he jammed it into second and took off to wherever he was going.
PART THREE
JOHN RAMSOM
1
Once I had started remembering John Ransom, I couldn't stop. I tried to write, but my book had flattened out into a movie starring Kent Smith and Gloria Grahame. I called a travel agent and booked a ticket to Millhaven for Wednesday morning.
The imagination sometimes makes demands the rest of the mind resists, and Tuesday night I dreamed that the body Scoot was busily dismembering was my own.
I jerked awake into suffocating darkness.
The sheet beneath me was cold and greasy with sweat. In the morning the blurry yellow pattern of my body would be printed on the cotton. My heart thundered. I turned over the pillow and shifted to a dry place on the bed.
2
I realized at last that the thought of seeing Millhaven again filled me with dread. Millhaven and Vietnam were oddly interchangeable, fragments of some greater whole, some larger story—a lost story that preceded the fables of Orpheus and Lot's wife and said, You will lose everything if you turn around and look back. You turn around, you look back. Are you destroyed? Or is it that you see the missing, unifying section of the puzzle, the secret, filled with archaic and godlike terror, you have kept from yourself?
Early Wednesday morning, I showered and packed and went out onto the street to get a cab.
3
I got to the gate, boarded the plane, took my seat, buckled myself in, and it hit me that, at nearly fifty years of age, I was traveling halfway across the continent to help someone look for a madman.
Yet my motives had been clear from the moment that John Ransom had told me his wife's name. I was going to Millhaven because I thought that I might finally learn who had killed my sister.
The stewardess appeared in front of me to ask what I wanted to drink. My brain said the words, "Club soda, please," but what came out of my mouth was "Vodka on the rocks." She smiled and handed me the little airline bottle and a plastic glass full of ice cubes. I had not had a drink in eight years. I twisted off the cap of the little bottle and poured vodka over the ice cubes, hardly believing I was doing it. The stewardess moved on to the next row. The sharp, bitter smell of alcohol rose up from the glass. If I had wanted to, I could have stood up, walked to the toilet, and poured the stuff into the sink. Death was leaning against the bulkhead at the front of the plane, smiling at me. I smiled back and raised the glass and gave myself a good cold mouthful of vodka. It tasted like flowers. An unheeded little voice within me shouted no no no, o god no, this is not what you want, but I swallowed the mouthful of vodka and immediately took another, because it was exactly what I wanted. Now it tasted like a frozen cloud— the most delicious frozen cloud in the history of the world. Death, who was a dark-haired, ironic-looking man in a gray double-breasted suit, nodded and smiled. I remembered everything I used to like about drinking. When I thought about it, eight years of abstinence really deserved a celebratory drink or two. When the stewardess came back, I smiled nicely at her, waggled my glass, and asked for another. And she gave it to me, just like that.
I idly turned around to see who else was on the plane, and the alcohol in my system instantly turned to ice: two rows behind me, at the window seat in the last row of the first-class section, was my sister April. For a moment our eyes met, and then she turned away toward the gray nothingness beyond the window, her chin propped on her nine-year-old palm. I had not seen her for so long that I had managed to forget the conflicting, violent sensations her appearances caused in me. I experienced a rush of love, mixed as always with grief and sadness, also with anger. I took her in, her hair, her bored, slightly discontented face. She was still wearing the blue dress in which she had died. Her eyes shifted toward me again, and I nearly stood up and stepped out into the aisle. Before I had time to move, I found myself staring at the covered buttons on the uniform of the stewardess who had placed herself between April and myself. I looked up into her face, and she took a step back.
"Can I help you with anything?" she asked. "Another vodka, sir?"
I nodded, and she moved up the aisle to fetch the drink. April's seat was empty.
4
After I sauntered dreamily out into the clean, reverberant spaces of Millhaven's airport, looking for another upright gray wraith like myself, I didn't recognize the overweight balding executive in the handsome gray suit who had been inspecting my fellow passengers until he finally stepped right in front of me. He said, "Tim!" and burst out laughing. Finally I saw John Ransom's familiar face in the face of the man before me, and I smiled. He had put on a lot of pounds and lost a lot of hair since Camp Crandall. Except for an enigmatic, almost restless quality in the cast of his features, the man pronouncing my name before me might have been the president of an insurance company. He put his arms around me, and for a second everything we had seen of our generation's war came to life around us, distanced now, a part of our lives we had survived.
"Why are you always wrecked whenever I see you?" he asked.
"Because when I see you I never know what I'm getting into," I told him. "But this is just a temporary lapse."
"I don't mind if you drink."
"Don't be rash," I said. "I think the whole idea of coming out here must have spooked me a little."
Of course Ransom knew nothing of my early life—I still had to tell him why I had been so fascinated by William Damrosch and the murders he was supposed to have committed—and he let his arms drop and stepped back. "Well, that makes two of us. Let's go down and get your bags."
When John Ransom left the freeway to drive through downtown Millhaven on the way to the near east side, I saw a city that was only half-familiar. Whole rows of old brick buildings turned brown by grime had been replaced by bright new structures that gleamed in the afternoon light; a parking lot had been transformed into a sparkling little park; on the site of the gloomy old auditorium was a complex of attractive concert halls and theaters that Ransom identified as the Center for the Performing Arts.