The Sleepwalkers (18 page)

“It was them,” says the kid, as still as stone now. “It was the sleepwalkers.”

Wasn’t as far of a walk to the gas station as Ron had thought, praise God. He left the kid in the car, walked maybe half a mile down the road, and returned with two gas cans. One he emptied into the tank, the other he put in the trunk for the next time the fuel gauge crapped out on him.

The kid was pretty wet and pretty dirty, so Ron had pulled an old towel out of the trunk and covered the car seat. Now they’re rolling. The kid sits on the towel, still gripping his flashlights, not moving. Ron glances over, hoping the kid won’t notice the scrutiny. No worries there. The beleaguered youth leans back against the headrest, staring up at the treetops as they pass, his eyes looking glassy. Something about that kid’s eyes . . .

Wide boy’s eyes, narrowed to slits.
Ron hasn’t seen eyes like that in a long time. Not since—

June, 1969. Huge drops of rain fall from the thick, green canopy
above, tapping on his helmet, slipping down his face and away.
Nobody’s talking in the jungle today. There’s nothing to say. They’ve
been marching for a lot of days now. Everyone else keeps track of days,
dates, holidays, birthdays, but not Private First Class Ron Bent. He’d
rather not, thanks very much. He measures time in incidents. Today is
three days since Pvt. James McPhereson, a handsome, quiet, probably
secretly gay kid, was walking point and tripped a booby trap, lost his
legs, and took six hours to bleed to death waiting for a lift that never
came. Three weeks since they left
Lai Khe
for Dodge City. Maybe four
days since their squad of fifteen guys broke off from the rest of the company.
Two days since they encountered heavy resistance trying to rejoin
the platoon and realized they’d been cut off, with the goddamn radio
crackling and hissing, some kind of malfunction, and no way to call a
taxi for a ride out. One day since they ran out of food.

Now, there’s just the dripping of rain, the sloshing of mud—the mud
isn’t just at their feet, it’s everywhere, under his fingernails, in his hair,
caked in the moving parts of his M16, in his mouth, gritty and nauseating,
even between the cheeks of his ass, God knows how. In the
distance: the rumble of a mortar going off and the dry snap of gunfire.

Somebody stepped in shit. Maybe the rest of their long-lost platoon.

The man on point (it’s hard to tell from the back, but he thinks it’s Dirty)
raises a fist and the men all stop, crouch, and listen, scanning the foliage
around them for any sign of Charlie—as if that’ll do any good; there could
be a whole regiment of North Vietnamese regulars on the other side of the
next leaf, and the only way to know would be to smell ’em, since they’re so
goddamn supernaturally
quiet
and vision is so limited.

“Charlie’s so quiet,”
for some reason, makes him think of playing
hide-and-seek as a kid. He would cover his eyes and Paul would hide
and Ronnie Bent would count his little ass to one hundred as fast as
his lips could move, and then he’d look around for his big brother, only
Paul was
gone.
Impossibly, completely gone—not under the dining
room table, not in the pantry—so impossibly gone that little Ronnie
would look for him for hours and start to think maybe goblins snatched
him away. (Paul would really make use of his vanishing abilities ten
years later, when the draft came around. Then he vanished so completely
that even his loving family never heard from him again.) Little
Ronnie finally surmised that his brother probably snuck up the stairs,
out his bedroom window onto the roof of the porch, climbed down the
sycamore tree, and walked to the drug store for a soda. Or a root beer
float. Probably laughing his smug ass off the whole way.

Private First Class Ronald Bent was still thinking about root beer floats
when the first tracer round whistled past, maybe two inches in front of his
face. He felt it more than anything, a puff of wind on his cheek. Then the
guns were rattling off rounds, littering all that mud with piles of spent brass
as the leaves around them danced a strange, flicking, bullet-induced jig.

Ron’s gun was jammed. He tried to clear the round out of the chamber,
but it was the mud, the goddamned drying, cracking mud that
wound its way into everything and strangled his M16. He crouched
lower. It was raining bullets now.

He heard “Corpsman up!” behind him, to the right, and there was
Pvt. Jack Spagnoli, facedown in the mud.

Ashes to ashes, mud to mud.

Jack was funny and mad about cards. Texas hold’em and blackjack.

Red
Jack was his game now, as blood from the gaping exit wound
wicked into his fatigues, dark as Rorschach ink.

Jack was dead.

Ronnie pulled the M16 out of the already-stiffening hand that
would never hold an ace again and turned it on the enemy. Spitting
lead. Somebody was hit off to the left and was moaning. Somebody else
kept telling the wounded guy to shut up. Finally, Ron saw Dirty (Dan
Dawson, Dirty Danny) up ahead, frantically waving the men on.

They hightailed it out, those of them who could, through the slashing
leaves of the jungle. They all knew they were running blind, but they
followed Dan all the same, because to sit still when badly outnumbered
meant death, just as running might mean death—you could run into
a booby trap or a machine gun nest or worse. As fast as they ran, the
machine gun fire still didn’t abate; tracers kept whizzing past on either
side, heavy pops of hand grenades burst not too far behind. Several
times, he heard cries of pain behind him, or cursing, but he didn’t look
back. He had become like a jungle cat now. It was a primal thing: death
was behind him and death was the enemy. He ran until his breath
was a loud wheeze and his heart filled his head with throbbing, always
staying a few steps behind Dan, Dirty Dan, who wound up to be from
a town right near Ron’s, a football rival, in fact.

When, at last, the rattle of gunfire had fallen off and the only sound was
the slap and swish of leaves, Dan slowed and finally stopped, his hands on
his knees. He looked at Ron and past him, then stood up straight.

It was then that Ron noticed it. Dan’s eyes had changed. They were
drawn into a tight squint, implacable as burnished steel. Nobody in
northern Ohio had eyes like that, Ron thought, and Dan’s hadn’t been
like that either—not before the war, not before today. Now they had
changed—and it was frightening.

Ron followed Dan’s gaze back over his shoulder, and he saw what
Dan was looking at: nothing.

There was nobody behind them. None of their comrades had made
it. There was only the rain.

All this flashes before Ron in an instant. The memory fills him up to the point of spilling over. He glances at the boy in the seat next to him, wanting to share the memory with him, wanting him to know that he isn’t alone, that the feelings consuming him right now aren’t insurmountable. They can be conquered. Ron wants to say a thousand things, but as so often happens, the words just won’t come. Finally, he says:

“I lost my daughter. She was kidnapped too. I’ll help you however I can, I promise.”

The kid doesn’t answer him.

Ron turns on the radio, an oldies station, and sighs.

In the sick-clean smell of Hudsonville’s only doctor’s office, Caleb sits staring at a children’s toy. It has a flat board as a base and stiff metal wires protruding upward from it, four or five of them, each painted a different color. The wires twist and loop around each other like roller-coaster tracks. On them are brightly painted beads. There are yellow beads on the blue wire, blue beads on the green wire, red beads on the blue wire, purple beads on the orange wire . . . Caleb remembers these things from his childhood. They were always touted as a “game” or a “toy.” And with the festive, eye-catching colors and the complex shapes, it looked pretty exciting; until you started playing with it and realized all you could do is push the beads to one side and back, and back again, and back again. It wasn’t a game. It wasn’t fun. It was something else. A distraction. It makes Caleb so angry he could smash it into the bland-papered wall of the waiting room, watch the beads explode and scatter . . .

And he wonders how many other things in his life have been nothing but distractions. Maybe everything.

“Caleb,” a heavyset nurse in a white smock says.

Caleb rises, glancing at the old fella sitting next to him (Ron? Was that his name?)

The guy nods back. “I’ll wait for you,” he says.

“That’s okay,” Caleb says. “Thanks for the ride.”

The old guy doesn’t respond, and Caleb doesn’t wait for him to. He follows the woman through the door and back down a long narrow hall.

The exam room is like all exam rooms. The nurse takes Caleb’s temperature, takes his blood pressure, and looks at his arm.

She leaves.

He sits, as uncomfortable on that crinkly paper as a fish in the bottom of a boat.

But all doctor’s visits are like that.

He waits for maybe ten minutes, his arm aching like hell, until finally the doctor shows up.

In the sterile light of the exam room the memory of the catacombs, the witch, the sleepwalkers, Bean’s disappearance, all seem like the stuff of B horror films, so unbelievable as to be laughable. Here, there are no shadows, no eerie feelings, not even the ticking of a clock. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t see it coming.

Ron sets down his
National Geographic
. The “Lost Incan Cities” article was interesting enough, but when he started checking out the naked aborigine chicks, the shame just got to be too much.