The Reckoning (23 page)

Duncan left again, carrying on with his charade of inhabiting this island. It was getting dark beyond the flames. Molly wondered when he meant for them to make their move.

She emptied the camera bag, polishing the lenses, drying the camera, and setting the lenses in a neat row. Ten grand in glass and mirrors. Let the forest and the monkeys have them. The real treasures were her images. Those she could still keep.

It took a few minutes to transfer the last of her images to her digital wallet. Little bigger than a hand calculator, it held close to a thousand of her best shots. Wrapped in a plastic bag, it would fit into her pants pocket. Duncan would never know. If she couldn't manage to carry the extra few ounces, she wasn't going to make it anyway.

While she was at it, she decided to surprise Duncan with some of his own treasures. Just because he was sacrificing his briefcase didn't mean losing everything in it. Once they reached Phnom Penh and their escape was just a memory, she would present him with a few of his most precious mementos.

She reached for the briefcase. From the first day she'd met him, Molly had wondered what it held. The stainless steel was dented and raked with scratch marks. The hinges on the bottom and the lock combination were rusted. She'd never once seen him clean the mud or dust from it. In a way, his neglect made the contents that much more mysterious, because the case was nothing to him, only a shell.

She raised the lid and the smell of mildew poured out. Inside lay a clutter of papers, photos, news clippings, postcards, and letters mixed with rotted rubber bands and rusty paper clips. At first she only registered the strata of his accumulating. There were decades of stuff in here. The bottom layers were mottled with fungus and yellowed with time. On top, his most recent acquisitions were still unspoiled by the tropics.

Only then did she see what his newest artifacts actually were, the memorabilia he'd stolen from RE-1.

Duncan was their camp thief.

Here was the stolen
Hustler
the two marines had fought over. Here were the snapshots and mail that men had reported missing.

She was dumbfounded.

Here was a page of the
Wall Street Journal
dated six years earlier, and on it the bygone dot.coms and their stock earnings that he'd talked about with such freshness and authority.

Here was a monograph on Cambodian flora and fauna written in French in 1903.

Here was his sketchbook, and it was filled from end to end with mindless squiggles and scrawl.

Here was a chapter torn from a British text on pre-Angkor archaeology, word for word the lectures he'd given them.

Here was an article from the
New York Times,
“Giant Trees Hold Ancient Temples in a Deadly Embrace,' complete with
spong
and its scientific name,
Tetrameles nudiflora.

Here was the kitchen he had built by hand, the zebrawood cabinets, the butcher-block table, and the panel of green and brown and blue bottle bottoms leaded together like a stained-glass window. Only it wasn't his kitchen, it was a magazine ad.

Here was the red setter with the bandit's neckerchief that he'd grown up with, except the setter and the neckerchief belonged to three children in a snapshot with a digitized date, two months ago.

Here was Kent State in all its bloody details—in a paperback history of the war.

Here was Duncan, the scraps of him gathered like stolen homework.

He had dissected each thing. He had underlined sections, circled faces in snapshots, written marginalia, and then dropped it in here to be layered over with more of the same. He had memorized a life.

Who was he?

She looked out into the night. Logs detonated, splitting open with loud snaps and bangs, offering their white meat to be burned, renewing the fuel. The rain evaporated in a cloud above the fire. Eventually one would win out, the rain or the inferno. For now they were in perfect balance.

Duncan came in from the darkness. “Feeling better?” He began weaving shut the hut like a giant cocoon, braiding strips of bark into a front wall. “Once we close the front door,” he said, “we'll escape through the back door.”

“There is no back door, Duncan.” Samnang had woven solid walls to the rear and sides.

“That's what Luke will be thinking, too.” He went on knitting the raw strips into a screen.

She mopped the sweat from her face. Chills shook her. The hut seemed to be spinning. If only her body would make up its mind, hot or cold.

He was either her murderer or her savior. Maybe he was both, like a Jekyll and Hyde. Was he the one who had mined the road that he was so desperately trying to lead them away from? Could this explain his reluctance to follow Luke here, the knowledge that his other self, his forest self, was waiting to stalk him? But then, who was Luke? The son of a soldier who had lost his mind in the Cambodian wilderness? Had Duncan told her everything already?

Molly struggled to piece it together. Sweat poisoned her vision. The smoke was hard to breathe. While she was still able to aim the gun, she had to judge this man. Should she confront his fiction or let herself raft along on it and hope for the best? Would he confess his mimicry or stick to his innocence? Or was he so insane that he was incapable of guilt anymore? And what about her? If it came down to it, could she pull the trigger?

He didn't look like a monster sitting there, weaving strips of green bark. But he was Oklahoma all over again, sharing some food and talk while they waited for the night to pass and the highway to carry them on. This very morning she had lain in his arms and spun a romance in her head. She had trusted him.

She gripped the gun. This had to be done. “Who are you?” she asked.

He looked up with his farm-boy smile. “Me?”

She kept the gun along her leg, out of sight.

“I looked in your briefcase,” she said.

He looked at the briefcase and back at her. He was confused. “Yes?”

“I know who you're not,” she said. “I want to know who you are.”

“Molly?”

She had made a mistake. She didn't have the strength for this. He was too practiced at his masquerade, or too far over the edge. But she had started it now. “I'm trying to understand,” she said.

“What is it?” He was earnest. He pulled the briefcase onto his lap and opened it. He lifted up papers, his sketchbook of nonsense, someone's plastic booklet of snapshots from MotoPhoto, a decomposing British passport, a plastic badge that said UNTAC. He saw what she had seen, and none of the musty pile seemed out of order to him. Was he more harmless out of his mind than in it?

“Where did you get those things, Duncan?”

He frowned, trying to grasp her point. “My documents?” He spoke without a hint of self-defense.

“Are these your children?”

“My children?”

“In that photo of the setter.”

He studied it. A frown appeared. He had not seen the children before. Then his eyes clarified. “You mean my brother and sisters,” he said. “With Bandit. He was a dog's dog. There's his scarf I told you about.” He showed her.

“But you're not in the photo,” she said.

He looked at it again. He thought. “Dad was teaching me how to use the camera.”

“How old were you?”

“Gee, probably eight. I liked Cheerios.” There was a box of Cheerios in another photo.

“Duncan.” She didn't know what else to call him. “Look at the date.”

He couldn't see it. He opened one hand helplessly.

“The digital numbers along the side,” she said. “It was taken two months ago.”

His lips moved. He held the photo closer and rubbed at the date with his thumb. Then he flinched.

His face aged. It was the firelight shifting, she thought. The laugh lines turned into deep creases. His forehead blossomed with worry.

“What's this?” he muttered.

“I thought you could tell me.”

He was trying to think. The date confounded him. Plainly, he'd never seen the children before. He'd plagiarized the photo for a dog, nothing more. Where was the harm in that?

He pawed through more of his documents. The
Hustler
spilled open, all tits and labia. Postcards, photos, yellow news clippings.

“How long have you been doing this?” she asked.

“How long, what?” He was disoriented.

She chose her words carefully. No harsh accusations. He looked so frail suddenly. “Borrowing,” she said. “Stitching together a masquerade.”

“Molly?” He spoke her name as if it were a lifeline.

She wanted to believe in him. Amnesia would pardon him. It would make him a virgin almost, an understudy to everyone he'd ever stolen from. That would make sense of the skin mag and its nudes and all the rest. He was simply trying to catch up with the world.

She kept hold of the gun. Someone had planted those mines on the bridge. Someone had trapped them in here.

The light twisted again, and his face drew into itself. It didn't collapse exactly, but some aspect of him seemed hollowed out. The shadows were invading. The furnace blast of light dimmed.

The rain,
she despaired, not taking her eyes from him.
It was winning.
She'd made a mistake. Wounded and ill, she'd chosen the middle of a storm at the beginning of night to unlock this man's asylum.

“The fire,” she said to him. If she could keep the light strong, if she could keep Duncan occupied, if she could wear him down, if she could make it to dawn, some opening would present itself.

He peered at her. His eyes had a glaze to them, a cataract glaze.
Old,
she thought again. “Sorry?” he said.

“The fire needs more wood.”

“Yes, I'll do that.” He spoke softly. He sounded broken inside.

It took willpower not to reach across and pat his arm. He had saved her time and again. She didn't want to have to pronounce sentence on him. What difference was there between an angel and the devil except for a fall from grace? Was it his fault that he had stumbled among the ruins?

He closed his briefcase and laid aside the plaited strips of bark. He brushed his legs clean. His big hands looked thinned. The fingers trembled.

He had never seemed frail to her. Her heart was racing. Had she broken his mind? Or was he only pretending…again?

He started to scoot out through the doorway, then stopped. Something stopped him.

Molly tightened her grip, praying he wouldn't turn to her. But he kept staring ahead. She darted a glance through the doorway.

Luke was out there, waiting for them on the far side of the fire.

Duncan's steeple of logs collapsed. Sparks and steam erupted. Molly turned her face away from the fiery heat, and when she looked again, the flames were strong and Luke was still there.

He stood so close to the fire his rags of clothing were smoking. His shirt had torn open, exposing one very white shoulder, his mortality on display. The rain poured off the planes of his face as if over ceramic. His hair was gone. He'd shaved himself bald.

He was the trickster, all along. Who else? Their captor. The devil.

Duncan was frozen. He couldn't move. It occurred to her that he was Duncan's monster. Or his master. Which was it?

As a photographer, she'd learned to shoot first, ask later. But that was with photos. And what if she was wrong? She kept Kleat's Glock hidden behind her thigh.

“Where have you been, Luke?” she said. “We missed you.”

Luke didn't answer. He was staring at Duncan. Into Duncan.

“You had us worried,” she said. “We called for you. We thought you'd left.”

“Our wandering brother.” Luke spoke to Duncan. Brother, not father. And Duncan had left, she understood. But now was back.

She tried bravado. “What the hell do you want?”

She brought the gun up from its hiding place. It held Kleat's bidding in it, like a spirit resident. How else could she explain pointing it at another human being? This was her hand, but it couldn't possibly be her willpower. The gun found its perch in the space between them.

“Did you lay those mines?” she said.

Luke turned to look at her. She remembered his eyes in the restaurant, cornflower blue. Now they were rolled up into his head, only the whites of them showing. She'd known a prisoner who did that. Every time she started to snap his picture, he would roll his eyes into his skull, a one-man Black Sabbath.

“You have a job to do,” he said to her. Just as she'd feared, they weren't being allowed to leave.

“Duncan,” she pleaded. She didn't know what to demand with this weapon. A declaration of guilt? A promise of aid? Surrender? An end to the war?
Say something,
she thought to Duncan. But he was connected to Luke, or Luke to him.

“We saw what you did to the bones,” she said.

“There's more,” he promised. More carnage? Or bones?

A movement caught her eye. The darkness shifted over Luke's shoulder. She squinted through the flames. Animal eyes flickered in and out of view. A shape climbed down from the trees, then another. The monkeys were descending, she thought. Becoming jackals.

“What do you want?” Duncan's voice broke. He was afraid.

“It's time,” Luke said.

Duncan didn't move. “You don't make sense.” His neck was stooped.

“We said we'd follow you to hell and back,” Luke said. “We did. Only it took this long.”
Out of his mind,
she thought,
him and us. Possessed by the remains of war.

Why hadn't she listened to Kleat? He'd warned them in the restaurant. He'd said the man was a predator. And yet Kleat hadn't believed his own warning. It was he who had pushed the hardest to follow Luke into this limbo of trees with bleeding names and the labyrinth and the hiding bones.

“Leave her out of it,” Duncan said. He sounded tentative. His brow tensed. He was trying to navigate. Searching for safe harbor.

“Out of what, Duncan?” she whispered.

“I don't know,” he pleaded.

“It's almost over,” Luke said.

“It was you,” said Molly. “You mined the road.”

The fire sank under the downpour. For a second, Luke's empty sockets stared at her. It was the darkness. Then the flames leaped up. His eyes returned.

“I told you to tell him,” Luke said. “He lost his place with us. Now Johnny's not ever going to leave.”

“Johnny,” Duncan repeated, trying to remember.

“Leave him alone,” Molly said. She reminded herself that she was the one with the gun.

“Molly,” Luke whispered. But his jaw didn't move. It wasn't his voice.
Us.
They whispered from behind him.

The monkeys gained in size. They straightened. She was wrong. These weren't monkeys, what she could see of them. Some were naked among them. Others wore rags. Some had skin. Not all of them.

She tore her eyes from the shadow shapes. They weren't real. It was her fever.

The gun took on weight. It wavered. She slipped her arm from the sling to steady her aim.

“What do you want with him?” she said.

“Him?” Luke said.

They wanted her.

“What do you want?” She could barely hear herself.

“We've been waiting long enough, don't you think?” said Luke.

The words came back to her, Duncan's refrain at the dig.

Luke smiled at her, and she recognized them, the ruins of his teeth green with moss. Only now three more were gone, the three she'd plucked from his skull that morning. He hadn't shaved his hair off. It was gone. She'd carried his scalp off in her pocket. Lucas Yale was no forgery. He was dead.

Molly pulled the trigger.

He had not made a move. He'd done nothing but smile. No witness on earth would have called it self-defense. And yet she fired. She killed his impossibility.

There was a cry, and the sound of a body pitching into the fire. Torches of wood catapulted from the flames.

The rain hissed. Steam and smoke pumped upward, sucked by the wind. The light nearly died.

“Duncan,” she shouted.

He looked at her, at the gun, at the body smoldering on the logs. He finished getting out of the hut. The shadow men—the monkeys—had fled.

Molly crawled from the hut with the gun in one hand. The rain whipped at her like cold stones. Her wound seemed distant, no longer clutched in the crook of her arm and held close to her face. It was, for now, beneath her attention.

Together, she and Duncan rounded the fire to the body. His clothes were too wet to combust quite yet. But there was that smell again, the stink of burning hair.
What hair?
And when had this rifle appeared across his back?

Duncan dragged the body, hair flaming, from the fire. They turned him faceup, and it wasn't Luke staring at them with jade eyes, not with the crude tattoos along his arms and the gold teeth sparkling between his burned lips. She had just killed Vin.

Molly let the gun drop from her hand. In her fever state, she had mistaken the missing boy for a phantom. Or the rain had infected her. It was dark. The night was diseased with shadows.

Duncan picked up the gun.

She was too horrified to care.

He aimed the gun. She saw it through a foggy lens. Her mind was shutting down. The bang of shots rang in her ears. He was firing point-blank into the hut.

She had forgotten the jerry cans stacked inside. The smell of fuel reminded her. It was leaking downhill, toward the fire.

Before her eyes, he'd built a bomb.

“Run,” Duncan said.

She tried, and fell.

He caught her, and she thought he would carry her up the stairs. They would fly into the night, the typhoon for their wings.

But he was too weak. After a few steps, Duncan groaned, “I can't.”

Her superhero lowered her back to the ground. He seemed frail, or injured. As they set off with her arm draped over his thin shoulder, Molly couldn't be sure who was carrying whom.