Post by The Evil Biscuit on Jan 23, 2018 18:51:44 GMT -5
[Note - so this is my entry for Choobs' 10K writing challenge! I know I had initially promised everyone a gripping tale of cosmic horror befalling the famed Lost Colony of Roanoke (and that's still coming!) but I got about 4000 words into it and realized I was forcing the story way too hard. I couldn't make it work, and the parts I could make work were disingenuous and, frankly, bad to read. So I decided to follow where my head was at, and dug up an old draft of this story, a story I've been working on for probably close to ten years now. I had never quite known how to end it previously, but as soon as I started reading over the old words everything clicked into place and I knew just where to go. If you feel like you've read this before, you probably have - I posted a very short (and very unfinished) alternate draft of this... uh, somewhere on the board. Anyway, here is about 75% of the story, with a climax to be posted next week when I return from a company trip. I hope you enjoy it!]
HUNGER
PART ONE
HUNGER
PART ONE
Now the corpses are decayed, not into dust, but have become one with the arid and sun-soaked soil of the deserts. Sun illuminates the sands, and pries into those dark places where rocks are red and lighter grey. Even the skeletons (one supposes) have become soil, although no doubt a polished white fragment is occasionally unearthed in the dunes by ceaseless wind; the bone glowing spectral and jewel-like in an orange sea. Houses are rebuilt. Crops are tended. If ghosts walk that dry land – and ghosts always have – perhaps we who did so much killing there are still remembered. The living try to forget.
We came in convoys and aircraft, and we breathed the hot screams of war. We left, as if blown by a cold exhalation. A sigh, a murmur from the congregated dead.
You ask which war? It makes no difference. They are all the same. Only the terrain differs sometimes. Every few years there is an improvement in weapons. There is never an improvement in illusions.
I was amazed to find I still had illusions when I received the phone call from Bjorn North. He lived in a small town on the Llano Estacado in northwest Texas. He hunted sometimes, drank much of the time, and when the hunting was bad he ran drugs in a small way.
‘I called the Blackbird,’ he said. ‘Blackbird is coming. I want you both here.’
‘The Blackbird is insane,’ I said. ‘He isn’t just radicalized, the way we may be. The Bird is genuinely insane.’ There is a reason for Bird’s insanity, and we both knew it.
This is more than a reunion,’ I said into the phone. ‘What do you want?’
‘I have to make a judgment call,’ North said, ‘and only you and Blackbird will understand.’ North’s voice cracked, whispered, lingered over syllables like a man hesitating as he fumbled in a foreign language. I could imagine him hunched into a derelict pay phone behind a dusty Texan last-gas. The man was as tall as I am, but without the balding head and hook nose. It is a dry, brown land in which he lived. His long legs would swell the seams of his pants at the shanks. His narrow chest would seem dubbed onto the body of a wrestler, and above it would ride his equally narrow and Scandinavian face, like a new moon with blonde hair. He was a man who looked built in two parts; from waist down like a football lineman, from waist up stretched like a swimmer.
‘Are you drinking?’ When he was drinking he had a bad habit of laughing – a white face turning red – a red mouth grotesque. Obscenity often amused him.
‘Not enough’ he said. ‘If you mean am I sober, the answer is I’m afraid to get drunk.’ The phone connection carried an echo, one muddled and faint.
‘Stay sober. Stay dry for two days. It will take me that long to get there.’ I paused. North was not fundamentally a liar, although there has probably never been such a thing as a completely truthful soldier.
‘What are you afraid of?’ I asked.
His voice was a guarded whisper, like a man dredging a secret from the deep well of fright. ‘I’m afraid there is no safe place to die.’
----
War is normal. If it were not, we would stop having so many of them. One problem with war is that the men who fight are generally voiceless. Even if they find their voices no one listens. No one can afford to listen. When the war is over the men who survive put on civilian clothes and disappear into the crowd. Occasionally one of them camps alongside a freeway with a rifle, or he tosses his girlfriend from a seven-story window, or he bunkers up and dies in a firefight with the police. Newspapers report the event. People shake their heads and say ‘My, my,’ and ‘Good God.’ They are surprised, but the real surprise is not that a few do it, but that thousands do not.
A war produces corpses, but it does not bury them. At least it doesn’t bury them deep. I suspected that North’s corpses were coming back to greet him, for we all have a string of spirits trailing at our back. They are like the anchoring tail of an enormous kite. If you handle them with respect, they only whisper a little bit sometimes, and the trail behind you is faded and vague. Handle them wrong – as North was now finding out – and your corpses turn from a mist to the dark smoke of napalm.
‘Are you dying?’
‘Not right away,’ he said, ‘at least not if I can help it.’
‘I will not help you kill yourself. I’m no longer tuned to it, even to help a friend.’ I nearly added, ‘Even when that friend is in such a state of fear.’
He was shocked. Not because of what he heard, but because I spotted a weakness he tried to conceal.
‘I want to live,’ he said. ‘If I need killing I’ll ask the Blackbird.’
It was then that I discovered I still had illusions. A friend was in need. Maybe it was possible to help. ‘Sit tight,’ I told him. ‘Forty-eight hours.’
It was August, a droning time in my San Francisco law office. The place could run without me for a week. My secretary is a private person. She asked only essential questions. My secretary, Miss Molly, is a forty-five year-old spinster in a day when spinsters are supposed to be extinct. She did not mean for it to be that way. Miss Molly’s mother died young. Molly was the youngest daughter. His career was first housekeeper, now nurse, to her aged father.
‘The Blackbird,’ she said. ‘It sounds like bad television.’
‘That’s how it sounds,’ I told her. ‘The smart shrimp lawyer, the Norse huntsman, and the hulking black wrestler. But for once you’re wrong. The Bird is small. He even looks like a bird.’
Albert Bird is so black that he seems pure African. He could kill Miss Molly while he was shaking her hand. She would be dead before the smile of greeting left her face. The blackbird is not a highly trained killer. He simply has a talent.
‘This is real,’ she said, as she packed a folder of legal work in my briefcase. ‘Just in case things get unreal.’
The odds on my killing again seemed long. Not impossible. When I returned from war it was to discover that when men hate their lives, or cannot come to terms with them, they must fight against killing those who are familiar or loved. It took a long time to learn. My wife divorced me, largely, I think, because she feared the forces she sensed lying behind my tenderness. At any rate, wives are in danger, and secretaries. Miss Molly is as rare as dinosaurs. It would be a crime to throw the last dinosaur from the roof of this thirty-story building.
Sometimes the men kill each other, and for those same reasons of love. But more of that later.
‘I believe,’ she said, as I packed a pistol in the briefcase, ‘I’m supposed to remind you to save the last round for yourself.’ She was not being sarcastic, exactly. She was not being humorous, because she was not smiling. She is small, dark haired, unsmiling. A cynic, but not bitter.
I like her for her toughness. Miss Molly does not ask for sympathy, and does not give it in matters short of a death in the family. She knows what sort of monster she works beside. Maybe she thinks of me as the last dinosaur.
---
The route from San Francisco wound through the outskirts of Chinatown. Many-colored banners. Tourists. Shops selling imitation jade, bamboo, rice paper, tea, goldfish. All of it a façade, or maybe not. Further out into the East Bay, new monuments of the Orient emerge. Mosques. Bazaars. ‘Handmade’ Persian rugs, powerloomed in Tamaulipas. Opium. Sweatshops. Money. Smuggling of every commodity. We fight war after war in the Orient. The Orient always wins. It absorbs, takes us over; we disappear into its enormous yawn.
Bad television? The Blackbird’s insanity makes him unable to lie. It makes him consult with pigs, dogs, goldfinches; long conversations. He hears their voices. Insanity causes his celibacy. He fears children, or rather, he fears fathering them. Were a daughter or granddaughter to climb on his knee and ask what he did in the war, the Blackbird would say: ‘I killed little girls just like you. They got in the way.’
But to Molly it can only seem like bad television. She does not know the Bird, although she knows some of the rest of us. The rest of us do not suffer the Blackbird’s affliction. The rest of us know how to lie.
If my daughter asked what I did in the war the answer would be: ‘I sat in the CIC of an air-conditioned FOB, eating donuts, and piloted drones.’ I would not tell her those drones were aimed at quadrants on a grid, a list of quadrants chosen by a computer programmed to probability of enemy movements. I would not tell her it was impossible to know what was in each quadrant – an enemy camp, a marketplace, a convent, a grade school. I would say nothing about those days in the desert with North and the Blackbird.
---
San Francisco to Texas is a hard day’s drive if you take the freeways. I took the border route which is interminably slow; a two day drive. It was a matter of self-protection, a matter of preparation. The mind is not always so strong and exact as we like to believe. I was driving toward some dark hysteria, perhaps toward a dying friend. The very land toward which the car pointed is a land of shadow, of darkness, a land of gray rivers and blood-red canyons. A land of Indian ghosts and white fear. The sun bakes those rivers. Mesquite grows brittle and thorny on the skeletal trees. Red stone gullies are whipped by wind, by the pressing gusts which lap at the land like an enormous beast – a cat perhaps – or maybe something not so agile. Something ancient, geologic, a beast blinking only once while a century passes.
Just past the border into Nevada color began to drain from the sky and return to the land. The Mexican mist rolled across the badlands, across overpasses and turnoffs. It lay like a chill gray thought that comprehended the glistening hood of the car, distilling as flickering raindrops in the corners of the windshield. It coated plastic menus outside diners, and it dimmed streetlights into luminous disks in the late afternoon. The fog seemed a well-tailored recollection for a man on a journey toward the dead.
The Blackbird wears a watch on each wrist. One is a Mickey Mouse watch, a black mouse wearing yellow gloves, a mouse trapped in timeless semaphore as it measures seconds and days and years. On his other wrists the Blackbird wears a watch made for combat or diving. It is precise and nearly indestructible. He began wearing the watches to cover the scars on his wrists where he cut them after he killed the spy Corporal Azeem, the man they called Medji in hushed tones around weak campfires. These days the Blackbird wears the watches for other reasons.
---
The killing came in the wake of lunacy that happened when we were in country and on base –
North and the Blackbird went afield in the bright light of dawn. Our hare-brained executive officer had detailed them to a supply route with cases of canned peaches, boxes of phosphorus grenades, three cases of ice cream mix, forty canned hams, tins of Dutch cheese, foil packets contained ketchup and honey, sixteen bottles of whiskey, twenty cases of beer, boxes of laxative, fifty pounds of apples, sixteen gallons of gray enamel, four teams of U.S. Navy stationary, an enormous cooking pot, twenty pairs of Army boots, a huge world globe on an elaborately carved mahogany stand, a case of ten-gauge shotgun shells, eight dozen assorted brassieres (no one ever figured out how those had ended up in the supply room of a FOB) cartons of menthol cigarettes, cases of aspirin, twenty gross of carpenter’s pencils… and I do not recall the rest. The Blackbird still has the original manifest. He claims that it now hangs in a frame on his bedroom wall.
In war no one knows why anyone does anything. The most astounding and incoherent things occur with slim reason. Maybe the exec was trying to be helpful to a brother officer in the Army. Maybe he was paying off a gambling debt. Maybe the supply officer was trying to dump inventory he did not want or could not account for. At any rate, the cargo was destined for an Army command area, a captured town twenty miles into the interior.
North and the Blackbird got hold of a truck, loaded the stuff after reserving the whiskey for trading purposes, and headed inland while drinking beer. It was their first encounter with the desert. At first they drove fifty miles an hour. The dirt tracks, which passed for a road, were gradually swallowed by the shifting dunes. The sun bore down like an oven. The road became more and more incongruous, before disappearing altogether. They suspected they had gotten the wrong directions, that they were driving across open desert to nowhere. Ten miles into the interior the desert gave way to rocks and hills, and the path led into a dry riverbed, buttressed on either side by high, crumbling canyon walls. As the canyon narrowed, they feared they would no longer be able to go forward, and there was no space to turn around. They were inching forward in low gear. The Blackbird recalls that he feared he could not stand the silence or the claustrophobic grasp of the canyon.
They were captured by the U.S. Marines. The whole affair seemed a burlesque, a mouse show, a convocation orchestrated and spoken by clowns.
The marines were desperate men, but men strangely efficient and polite. They were not fools. That was proven by the fact they were still alive. They were combat-ridden. Their faces were burned with sun. Blackened with soot. The Blackbird at first had trouble discovering which of them were white. Their faces seemed to exist solely for the purpose of raising crops of hair; for all of them had beards which were chopped short by knives. Beards and mustaches existed only as circling frames for teeth. The men spoke between their teeth, or in whispers.
North remembered their seriousness and their efficiency. He recalled that he had the choice of giving up the load and not dying, or giving up the load after he died. He felt vaguely violated. After all, the stolen whiskey was his by right. Now it was being taken from him.
Imagine them there: North, a green Sergeant, the Blackbird, a supply grunt. Two soldiers accustomed to seeing death fall from the air, shells exploding on projector screens, death painting the slickness of blood across PowerPoint slides. Imagine them standing among crazed men in a dust-choked canyon where death poked its snout through dry underbrush, where blood became only a dark and soaking comment in the sand.
The marines once had been a full company. Now they amounted to a platoon, although they had native interpreters with them. One native was little more than a boy. His nearly unpronounceable name had been distorted to Sidney, then to Sidrey. Sidrey was a tiny fellow. When he stood beside the Blackbird, even the Blackbird seemed a full-sized man.
The Marines unloaded the truck. What they did not want, they stacked to one side. North figured that he and Blackbird would be left with the ketchup and the gray enamel and the Army boots. Until the last moment, neither North nor Blackbird had the least intimation that before the affair was over, they would walk three hundred miles through desert mountains as they carried canned peaches and the rifles of dead men.
The Blackbird vividly remembers the enemy attack. He remembers it in slow motion. He recalls watching the boy’s face. Actually, he was watching Sidrey’s mouth. The Blackbird was having trouble understanding the interpreter’s version of English. Blackbird watched the lips moving, listened carefully, was aware in a vague way of a growing stack of canned goods beside the skinny road.
Then the boy’s face disappeared. A bullet entered the back of the skull and exploded. The Blackbird found himself carefully listening for a voice to continue from the inner bones of that faceless skull. He was vaguely aware that his own face was covered with soft matter and liquid. To this day he swears that he stood there for two minutes listening for jumbled language to come pouring from the skull of a standing corpse. He did not, of course. It was only a matter of a second, perhaps – no more. The native Corporal Azeem dived forward and knocked the Blackbird to the road. The both rolled behind a small fortress of canned peaches. Until that point the Blackbird swears he had not heard a single unusual sound. Once on the ground he heard the deafening clatter of gunfire. An enemy patrol had laid in ambush.
The history of war contains thousands of futile and desperate battles fought over inconceivably stupid objectives. This battle in the desert was as desperate as any battle ever waged, and it was between men who were mad for ham and cheese and peaches. When the firefight was over, not one carton had been hit. The Blackbird swears he was safer behind that narrow stack of canned goods than at any other time in his life.
What caused the attack? The question haunted North and Blackbird. Why would a single squad on patrol – and even owning the element of surprise – take such a desperate chance? That squad attacked a platoon of veterans in the game of killing.
The attackers were not starving. North saw whitish fat peeled away from a gut wound opened by a fragmentation grenade. The enemy belly pulsed as the man died, the belly digesting.
The marines were not starving; the enemy was not starving; and yet somehow – and North could never even speak of this – somehow the root of the battle was enormous hunger.
These marines carried no esprit de corps. Such foolishness is good enough in bars and on drill fields, not so good in a desert. Instead they carried a rough honesty. They regarded North and the Blackbird as supercargo, as men of inexperience who would shortly die. Between the time when they would be killed and then, the two soldiers could serve as carriers. The marines did not actually press the Blackbird and North into service. They simply pointed out that the truck radiator sported a bullet hole. They encouraged the Blackbird and North to discuss the matter. The two men did this as the marines buried the boy Sidrey in a shallow grave. The Bird and North could walk ten miles along a road which might sprout an enemy patrol, or they could walk with a platoon of killers while carrying goods. North recalled being furious about the choice. After all, they were supposed to be in a secured zone. They had been so certain of their safety that they left their helmets in the canteen when they departed the FOB. They were nearly weaponless. North carried an antiquated .45 automatic.
The Blackbird, who was raised on the streets of Philadelphia, did not waste his time in anger. He foraged among the enemy dead for helmets and rifles. Then he made one of those obscure, but somehow significant, gestures for which he would become notorious. The Blackbird stood the huge globe in the middle of the dry riverbed. The narrow band of sunlight peeking through the canyon highlighted the reliefs of the globe. Sunlight and shadow. Colored continents, green and red nations. Orange nations, blue seas.
The Blackbird put his brown cap on the globe. North recalled his last sight of that canyon as the platoon faded into the hillside. A fresh grave lay beneath a crumbling rock wall, and above it a world globe wearing a soldier’s cap stood in silent benediction.
No one on our FOB saw them for months. I was the one who found them. Then the war got in the way, and no one on the FOB saw the three of us for another two months.
---
I can’t explain the exact difference between memory and recollection. Memory is something a person consciously tries for, while recollection more or less comes unbidden. But, with recollection, it seems that you chew a little longer; maybe work harder at understanding what pushed it into your mind. Is is like analyzing a dream. I thought of the problem as I drove toward Bjorn North and his demons, and as the narrow Nevada road turned into a narrow Arizona road.
I spent the night in a gloomy roadside motel on the Arizona border. It was one of those places where the walls are in need of washing, but where blue light floods the toilet seat and gives the illusion that foul diseases are being washed away. A narrow paper strip across the seat brags of sanitation.
Another problem with war is that men in combat assume patterns which make the civilized world ridiculous. When, for example, the main disease is bullets, no one going to a whorehouse worries about using prophylactics.
Then the men return to a sanitary world where tobacco and alcohol and drugs are supposed to be supplanted by antiseptic and good manners. One never meets good manners in battle, although one occasionally meets compassion. Men find it hard to make the switch from mortar fire to sanitary toilets.
In the desert you are always surrounded. So is the enemy. There is no clear demarcation. It is a deadly game of hide-and-seek where the enemy will never appear before your guns. The enemy will be to one side, or at your back. Day after day, week after week, surrounded. English and American men develop cautious patterns of insanity; Middle Eastern men as well.
Encirclement continues when the war is over. Then the sanitary people – the ones who started the war in the first place – insist you join their illusions. ‘Work hard. Get ahead. Don’t kill anybody. Find some way to look at children and not imagine burned flesh, empty eye sockets.’
The antiseptic people insist that you be nice to the waiter who stiffs you for a dollar. They ask that you think kindly of the politicians who even now plan a war to kill your sons.
‘Because,’ they say, ‘we are all in this together, my friend. Think kindly thoughts and love us.’
I fight back by wielding the law. It makes a little sense to be a lawyer. Not much else does. I’m a good lawyer because I’ve launched drones, because I’ve spent two months in the desert.
The marines in that platoon were outlaws. In military terms those marines were operating independently. Their commander, back at Group, could never be certain what they would do. They were roving, honed, horribly efficient. Their missions was to protect the perimeter of that large Army camp.
In practical terms they walked and killed. They were phantoms fading through the sands, phantoms turning to the sudden heat of amazing flame when they encountered resistance. They were survivors because they killed on the basis of probability. If an old native had the bad luck to see them as they crossed a road, the old native was shot. Maybe the old person would have said nothing about their location. The marines stayed alive because they always tilted probability in their favor. They were statistical killers, more easily and intimately understandable than computers which navigate drones.
The Blackbird and North became immersed in this. If the marines regarded them as supercargo, Blackbird and North did not. They understood that if they were to survive, they would have to learn fast. The Blackbird learned almost right away.
---
It happened this way – one more part of the madness.
Our FOB ran out of rockets. Incredible. No one had paid attention to my inventory reports. The base fielded two fleets of drones that would only depress far enough to take the top off a mountain at a four-mile range. We mounted some old heat-seeking missiles, which any attack pilot old enough to shave could avoid by dropping a few flares. There was lots of maple syrup in the pantry, jugs of whiskey in the generals’ quarters, but by God there were no more rockets. Convoys would have to be sent to Command to requisition more.
Before they departed, that same idiot executive officer put me afield in a Jeep.
‘You caused this,’ he said. ‘You made us run out of rockets. No rockets, no gunnery officer.’ He was a man with Yankee eyes, and with cheeks like marinated beef steeped in booze and tropic rum. A great leader of men. A great thinker: with slumped shoulders and a great belly and a large butt. He was the only officer in battalion history to crash a truck into a loading dock while pulling away from it.
‘File charges’ I told him.
He knew, and I knew, that if he could get me killed there would never be an inquiry. No one would ever ask why a FOB had run out of rockets if the officer in charge of reports had died in action.
‘Bring them soldiers back,’ he said, ‘and the brass will be happy.’ He was pleased. ‘If you don’t come back the exec will be happier.’
I went afield, under protest, and I was afraid.
Rumors were coming back to the FOB; of two soldiers who were crazier than most marines. Each of the men had shown up once at that large occupied town. They came in a captured truck. They drew supplies for that outlaw platoon.
The white soldier was a jolt of savage fear. He arrived unaccompanied, and he wore rotten-smelling scalp locks stitched to his shirt. He eventually went on an alcoholic binge and tore a whorehouse to pieces after bedding every woman in the place. That, of course, was not unusual. The unusual event happened before the drinking began.
The white soldier had become radicalized, but worse than most. Usually men just mumble through convenient Islamic customs, or play at being Muslim. This soldier was sardonic. His laughter was cruel; his large teeth and flushed face were like a caricatured troll before a carnival funhouse. Before he began drinking he sat beside a praying mullah for three hours, sitting in what seemed complete and reverent silence. Then he stood, bowed, and shot the unsurprised and undismayed cleric in the face with a .45 pistol. He left town through crowded streets and at high speed. He was indifferent to screams and thumps and rag-like, rolling bodies.
It was not, the rumors admitted, that the white soldier did unheard of things. It was simply, the rumors said, that when other men did such things they usually had some excuse, no matter how flimsy. This soldier, North, was like an animal snarling above a carcass. He seemed pressed by fear that there would be a shortage of bodies, of women, of whiskey; a shortage, in fact, of omnipotent illusions which galloped through the corridors of a mind gone wild.
But it was the black soldier who gave pause to even the most seasoned men. The black soldier arrived in the same truck, but accompanied by the interpreter Corporal Azeem. The two men were efficient. They were quiet while drinking, unremarkable while bedding, and they drove carefully through crowded streets.
Where the white soldier sported scalp locks sewn to his shirt, the black soldier simply wore black feathers in his hair. The feathers were intermingled, stitched and braided, so the man’s head was aruffle with black. He looked like a surprised crow.
The black soldier left live grenades with unbent pins as calling cards. The things were harmless enough, so long as no fool pulled the pin. When he left a bar, a grenade lay on the table. When he left the supply depot, a grenade lay of the supply sergeant’s desk. The soldier left grenades on the beds of women. The soldier was pleasant, even courteous; and both he and the interpreter Corporal Azeem seemed to think of the grenades as not tips for service, but party favors. There was an abstract gaiety about the men that seemed to define the war as a cotillion; or a clambake. They were great friends.
I had the bad luck to find them on the day the war heated up, the day the enemy mounted a counteroffensive. An army truck dropped me, and supplies, at a rendezvous point.
There was a clash of helicopters above the desert, a whip, whip, whip of rotors thumping like pulse. Along the roads a frightened native population streamed ahead of the enemy, while overhead the helicopters hosed the buildings with rockets and gunfire. The sounds seemed gratuitous. The flames were real. The fire sprays everywhere, along roads, or is absorbed by the whirling storms of dust. Occasionally a rocket hits the top of a low building and shatters it, raining heavy chunks of concrete and mortar into the alleys below.
North saved my life, and not only once. I was green, confused, vulnerable in the shocking push and shove of forces exploding around us. North was not particularly pleased to see me – ‘What the hell are you doing here,’ he said – I was, after all, an officer – but we hailed from the same battalion. That called on some loyalty that still lay curled and embryonic in North’s notions of righteousness.
There was also this: he knew that sooner or later a court-martial was likely. It was obvious that the marines were not holding the soldiers hostage. North may have protected me because I was a lawyer. He kept me alive as counsel for his defense.
---
For the next two months North and the Blackbird were never far from my side. We saw, and did, a number of things. ‘As sweet as Hell and Hallelujah,’ the Bird would say of those things. North remained silent. He stopped taking scalps.
The two months were spent in retreat, circling, counter-attack, retreat, and more circling. Somewhere, sitting in the state-room of an aircraft carrier, a few admirals and generals may have known the overall situation. They probably drank together, and called each other by first names: Pete, Tom, Bob. They spoke of strategy and women. We spoke only of tactics, and we called each other by any vulgarity that was convenient. Toward the end of the second month there seemed some hope we would leave the desert. The military situation steadied. It much resembled what it had been when North and the Blackbird first entered that narrow canyon. There were no clear lines of defense and offense. We and the enemy were once more surrounding each other. The area was declared secure. The deadly game of hide-and-seek continued.
At the time there seemed a second reason for hope. At the time.
Looking back on it – as I looked back on it during the final leg of the drive through New Mexico and into Texas and my meeting with North – that second hopeful reason was at the root of any horror which dwelt in the dark deserts of North’s mind. It dwelt in much of the horror that lay ancient in my own mind, a horror darker than the moonless thickets of West Texas, darker than the shrouded black riverbeds of Llano Estacado.
The second hopeful reason was this. The convoy returned to the FOB with a fresh bellyful of rockets. The rockets went on the drones and the drones went into the air and the rockets fell in the countryside and made men fearful; but mostly the rockets wrecked a little foliage, changed the smells from arid desert to the sharp scent of high explosive. Once we saw them fall on a village, saw mud rising in fire, mud changed to dust, then to flame. At the time all I could really understand was that the computers still functioned.
And then – and may all Gods there are, if there are any, protect us – the rockets one day fell in a graveyard.
---
There were plenty of fresh graves in every graveyard of that country. The native population continued to practice its ceremonies. A part of their ritual was to erect small fences around each grave. The fences were called ‘spirit fences’. Most of them were white. Most of them were made of plain wood. Some of them were ornate. The small fences kept away the hungry spirits of the dead which flew across the world in their relentless, and hopeless, and eternal quests. Or, the fences kept tormented spirits contained.
Our drones took care of the spirit fences. The spirits were released. We saw final degradation as graves were upturned, as corpses tumbled upward in geysers of flame.
To North it was a thunderous joke. Lightning and thunder. The absurdity tickled his fancy. He laughed like a demented inquisitor. North’s Protestant God was one of the Scandinavian versions, a god consorting with Valkyries. He thought it one more fine offense against one more pagan religion. He was red-faced as a he laughed, although his blond eyebrows were strangely white, as white as his sun-bleached hair. Recall that North had already murdered one Muslim cleric.
To the interpreter Corporal Azeem, the affair with the graveyard was another matter. All through the two-month ordeal, Azeem and the Blackbird had retained their insane gaiety. They shared food. They fought well and trekked well. They worked together like fingers on the same hand. They sent the enemy to heaven or hell with impartial joy. When Azeem laughed his eyes were wide and seemed almost round. He had a small mouth. When he laughed his mouth and eyes were like three flat circles of mirth across his flat face.
After the business with the graveyard Azeem became morose. His eyes were heavy-lidded, and they looked toward North with an occasional flat stare. Azeem no longer laughed. North laughed in defiance, but he kept his holster flap unbuckled. He was careful about which direction he pointed his back.
Why did Azeem take the rockets so seriously? Was it North’s laughter? At the time, none of us knew. Azeem had been called Medji by other natives, suggesting he were some sort of supernatural figure in his religion, which seemed older and more primal than the Islam of that day. The exact definition was not clear to us. Perhaps those spirit fences had been Azeem’s symbolic bunker against reality. The fences might have had the same illusory protection as, say, two-inch steel plate behind which we hid on the FOB. Neither fence nor steel plate is at all effective, if viewed sanely. The problem is that no one was sane.
Azeem and the Blackbird became even closer. They often sat in silence. What Azeem confided to Blackbird was unknown, because the Blackbird did not discuss it.
The final, killing act arrived on the heels of a miracle. It was a mindless miracle, true – a part of the great absurdity of battle – but a miracle which even the Old Testament Joshua would have praised.
We were caught in high grass in the middle of fields. We were crossing fields just after dawn. Our position was such that if the enemy were close he should be blinded by the rising sun.
‘It’s a sell out.’ Those were North’s first words when the gunfire began, and when everyone was hitting the deck. North yelled the words before he was fully stretched on the ground with his weapon pointed. Off to the left a man screamed. An enemy voice yelled and laughed. North’s face was as white as his eyebrows.
North was right. This was not an error in command. The platoon was sold. Euchred. Somebody had been consorting with the enemy. We were jammed. Pinned. Enfiladed. We were the same as dead men.
Automatic weapons opened up from under the cover of tall grass – only grass – on our left flank. Machine guns opened up from an area of hillside that curved across fields and toward the left side of our line. A narrow neck of trees jutted on our right, and from them machine guns began spouting. The gunfire was solid. It was actually mowing the grass.
Dead men. We could attempt to retreat two hundred yards across flat grassland, or we could lie pinned until the enemy brought up mortars. The air seemed full of flying seeds, pollen, stem heads. The weapons were working by sectors, in much the way our FOB’s computers worked by sectors. Our problem was that these sectors were small, and there were not many of them. North and I wriggled forward, holding grenades, trying to get in throwing distance. Stupid. Every time we moved, the grass moved. A machine gun hosed above us.
The sun lay like a carpet on the grass. I remember lying with the lip of my helmet pressed against the ground, and I was suddenly smelling soil. It was almost like I could hear movement in the soil, of insects, bacteria, growing roots.
Then the clang and bang of mortars began. Another man screamed, and for a few minutes he continued screaming. I recall thinking silly thoughts about the law. This is a divorce, I thought, a matter of community property.
And then the miracle arrived on the heavy sound of engines. The sky was clouded with transport planes. Shadows of planes were whipping over us like shadows at a light show. It seemed that every plane owned by every air force in the world had decided to converge over those fields. There must have been enough planes that a man could step from wing to wing, walking across the sky. In less than two minutes, men – and corpses – began falling around us.
Somewhere, at an army headquarters, a general had looked at a map and seen an area of fields in a zone marked ‘secured’. He ordered a low-level jump for parachute troops, a training exercise. Two thousand men dropped in about fifteen minutes; two thousand dropped into fields enfiladed by machine guns.
A corpse collapsed beside us. The morning was windless. The chute billowed, then fell to cover the dry grass like a comforting thought. The dead eyes still held more excitement than surprise. There was very little left of the thing from the chest down. The aircraft engines continued pulsing, pulsing.
A living parachutist dropped on the other side of us, rolling on his back, releasing the chute and screaming. He was yelling ‘Ted, Ted,’ and then he was yelling ‘Medic, Medic.’ He tried to crawl over us in a desperate attempt to reach the dead man.
‘Teddums is deadums,’ North told him, and giggled. North was hysterical with relief. Color returned to his face. The planes thumped and droned, the shadows flickered. ‘Lock and load, my man,’ North said. ‘Ready on the right, ready on the left, ready on the firing line…’ North’s hysteria clanged like mortars. He clung to the ground and listened to the cacophony of machine gun fire, the surprised screams, the curses. It was a shooting gallery, but the enemy could not shoot them all. It was just a matter of time. North lay flat. He began screaming vulgarities, and jokes, at the enemy. The planes droned.
‘There is nothing you can do,’ I told the paratrooper, ‘except to save yourself. Let the men who land behind the guns take care of it.’ He was a young Native American. The physical type is easy to spot. The brown, fleshy face dropped its grief and took on fear. The boy hugged the ground. He did not even ready his weapon.
At most, it took an hour. Grenades exploded. The machine gun fire gradually dwindled. Before the last gun was silenced we heard the thumping of helicopters. They were arriving to bring men back from a successful jump. Instead they began a long and busy day carrying wounded and the dead. An incident of war. The general who ordered the action was later commended for taking out the last pockets of resistance in the area. Another incident of war.
We rose from the tall grass like resurrected men. Like men discarding the shrouds of their graves to stand confused and blinking in sunlight. Like men released to once more wander the streets of some unholy city.
Azeem and the Blackbird stood. Face each other across the sunlit grass. Azeem was calm but the Blackbird was shaking. Azeem smiled, a tan face smiling without fear at a black face. Azeem’s smile was not apologetic. The Blackbird murmured, whispered. Azeem shrugged. His weapon was resting at his side. With his free hand he pointed a finger at his chest, searching with the finger, the exact location. Nodded. The Blackbird whispered, ‘No.’ Azeem smiled, insisted. The Blackbird shot Azeem precisely, exactly where the finger had pointed. It was over in less than ten seconds.
We had all once more hit the deck.
‘He ought to pay attention where he points that thing,’ North complained. ‘He could mess around and actually kill somebody.’ North’s voice was whining with disbelief.’
‘What are friends for,’ I said – an incredibly stupid thing to say.
We were all shocked. Azeem had asked an awful thing of the Blackbird. Yet it was easy to understand. Azeem knew it was all over for him. Half of the remnants of that platoon had already figured that Azeem was the betrayer. They had thought through our movements of the past fre days, recognized that only a scout – Azeem – could have made contact with the enemy. Azeem no doubt figured it better to die quickly and with dignity, than to die in the way those marines would have killed him.
Why had Azeem betrayed us? The Blackbird knew, but he was not talking. The whole affair was small and private. When the men from that platoon once more stood, viewing Azeem’s body lying in the grass, a few paratroops were looking our way. Then they shrugged and went about their business. One more Middle Eastern face, one more execution; it was routine. What was not routine is that the Blackbird was passing from the insanity of battle into the permanent insanity that would hold him like a bone in a wild dog’s teeth.
The Blackbird lay beside Azeem all that day. Sometimes he embraced the body, but mostly he lay beside Azeem as two lovers might lie beside each other in a field. It was strangely sexual, although nothing of that sort had gone on between those men. At the same time it was as wise as a living beast lying hopelessly beside a dead mate. The Blackbird held long conversations that day. He spoke to Azeem, and – at least in the Blackbird’s mind – Azeem answered. Sometimes the two of them argued, although we only heard Blackbird’s side of matters. If anyone approached them, the Blackbird raised his weapon. After the first few minutes everyone left him alone.
The Blackbird nearly died because he was left alone. As evening came on, and as the helicopters began switching on landing lights in order to find the beaten surface of the fields, it was time for us to leave. The remaining men of that platoon were being evacuated. I arranged to take my soldiers back to the FOB. North and I went to persuade the Blackbird. It was time to leave.
He was nearly dead when we got to him. He sat astraddle Azeem’s body. The Blackbird had cut his wrists, and cut them with a great deal of care. The cuts were just deep enough to give a steady but not gushing flow of blood. The Blackbird was dripping the blood into the chest wound of the corpse, as though Blackbird were trying to resurrect Azeem by the pouring of his own blood. He must have been at it for quite a while. The Blackbird was so weak from loss of blood that he could not struggle. He stared at us dumbly, as we stopped the blood and yelled for a medic.
Blackbird was airlifted out. He was sent to a hospital, then to a detention center while his wrists healed. He was discharged for mental disability said to exist prior to his enlistment. No pension. No disability payments. The military, which views routine destruction as a rational process, stands aghast when the subject is suicide.
For some years I received strange postcards from the Blackbird. Sometimes the only message was the drawing of a black face, a black feather, a scrawl in badly worded Arabic. He found work, I heard, in private military, a world where less questioned are asked. He killed kings, presidents, holy men. The postcards came less frequently, but never stopped altogether. Sometimes he drew flowers, or cactus. The postcards came from Milan, Vancouver, Morocco, Singapore, Minsk. Once he wrote that he was teaching horses how to fight cowboys. Sometimes his messages were scrawled in crayon.
And that is the history, except for a little tidying-up.
I represented North at his court-martial. He received a month’s restriction to the FOB, a one-half forfeiture of pay for that month. I was transferred as gunnery officer to a small training camp. A reprimand went with me. My fitness reports stated that I was totally inept at logistics. The reports did admit that I knew how to pilot drones. Tidying up. In the years that followed I saw North once, on a visit he made to San Francisco. I kept in touch with the Blackbird by mail, though I doubt he ever stayed in one place long enough to receive return post. Some vague thought of friendship, or of penance – something – kept me writing to him.
I figured that sooner or later he would need a lawyer.
---
It was raining lightly when I passed El Paso and into the deep dry basin of the Panhandle. The northern bend of Texas seemed almost consciously intent on showing its most somber tones. Highways were beaten and sick. Dark mesas stood as silent sentries over the barren plains, cut here and there by upturns of ragged rock and sudden drops into yawning ravines. The border road ran around vast swaths of yellow and brown farmland. It took a long loop through hand-cut canyons as it bypassed an Indian reservation.
It is a rare day, in the August summer, that the Panhandle gets rain. Jackrabbits and desert birds appeared like spirits from the ghostly mist. Huge rocks stood like ancient tombstones, water worn from some primordial sea that covered this now dry land millions of years before, testimonials to the twenty thousand years of human life and human death which have muttered through this rain.
In the small town the Mexican owner of a sagging and weather-worn restaurant gave me directions to North’s house. In the late evening, beneath a grey and purple-ringed sky, the house was a small beacon in the darkness of the surrounding canyon. Every light in the place was glowing. The pot-holed lane to the house was overhung with mesquite. Water filled the ditches and in one place crossed the lane. I parked beside an old pickup that was connected to a new horse trailer. The truck’s body was a patched-together shack. It looked like a tent made of shingles; but, knowing the Blackbird, it did not leak.
I stepped from the car. There was movement at the edge of the underbrush.
A deep memory of movement in the mountainside automatically pushed me down. I dove down beside the car, onto my knees in wet clay. The pistol was packed in my luggage. Defenseless. Then, remembering where I was, and silently cursing the desert and myself, I stood back up.
There were sounds coming from the edge of the mesa. A small dark figure stood beside a bulk of darkness that moved, stopped, moved. The darkness in the shadow of the mesa was intense, but not intense enough to cover the solid blackness of those two figures. Then a miniature spot of white, like fluorescence, darted between the two figures. It moved like a hand.
‘This is no fit place,’ the Blackbird’s voice said. ‘We’ll be out of here in a couple of days.’
He stepped from the background of the mesa, leading a large black horse with white stockings. The horse was giant, but it moved light-footed and graceful. It looked stern. Wary. ‘Stay away from this horse,’ the Blackbird said conversationally, ‘he’s a meat eater.’
I watched as the Blackbird loaded the horse back into the trailer, then rubbed it down. It looked likely that the horse would be more comfortable than any of us. There was enough room in that dry trailer for two horses.
The Blackbird’s right hand was white, like a hand dipped in flour. He was wet. Water soaked his feathered head and jean jacket. Water had glistened on the dark hide of the horse. In the growing darkness the only thing visible was that skeletal right hand.
‘You brought a horse,’ I said, speaking into the darkness. The license plate of the trailer was legible, just barely. ‘From Montana?’
‘I got nothing against Montana,’ the Blackbird said easily. ‘It’s just that nobody else can handle this one.’ He gestured back to the horse. ‘I’m saving Montana some trouble.’ He closed the rear of the trailer.
‘I’ll be along directly,’ he said to the horse. He turned. ‘You never know how much they understand,’ he said. ‘I always tell them how long it’ll be.’
I could see his hair more clearly now, a thick braided crown. Feathers were interwoven in the braid; black feathers, crow, raven. The two watches looked oversize on the narrow wrists. He ran a hand across the braid, shedding water. The white hand was not all white. The tattooing traced along the skeletal structure. Some unknown tattoo artist was a genius. The bones seemed to lie above the surface of the hand, the flesh under the bones. The watch built for combat was a thick, low-glowing lump above the bones. His left hand was not as dark as the rest of him. Later on I would see that it was tattooed as tan as Azeem’s face.
‘I’d rather be seeing you in San Francisco,’ the Blackbird said, ‘but since it’s here I’m glad anyway.’ The Blackbird does not lie, and so he was glad.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘San Francisco. But since we’re here…’
‘Come back to the truck. We won’t be going in there for a while.’ He motioned toward North’s house, then walked toward the truck.
It was no bad thing to sit in the cab of that truck. Smells of oil and harness and horse dung had tanned the worn seat covers. One windshield was cracked. ‘Why not?’ I asked, and pointed toward North’s house. I looked through the rain-running windshields at the shadow of the rain-covered mesa. The truck cab was dry.
‘The doctor figures North is going to die,’ Blackbird said, and he said it flatly. ‘The preacher figures North is going to hell. North is sort of resisting.’
‘Drinking?’
‘I doubt I’d want to do it sober, myself.’ Blackbird leaned forward to peek out into the darkness. ‘Or maybe I would. If a man gets too crocked he’d lose all interest. You can see how that would go.’
‘Drinking now?’
The same flat response. ‘He’s sitting in there with a fifth, and that old .45. He’s all set to shoot something. Best if it isn’t us.’
‘Himself. Shoot himself?’
‘Nope.’ Blackbird said. ‘North never did amount to much, but he sure don’t amount to that much.’ The white hand rested on the steering wheel. I’ve heard of a lot of folks having ghosts,’ he said, ‘but I never knew a man to have a whole army of them.’
‘I told him to stay sober,’ I said. Then I felt like a man confessed to prudishness.
‘He was sober when I got here. Soon as I did, he felt real safe.’ An exhalation, a crack in the flat, lifeless speech. ‘Safe.’ he breathed, and I realized he was chuckling.
‘Fool’ he said, looking up at North’s house. ‘Our boy figures that cleric he shot is coming for him. Figures the mullah is bringing all his relations.
I sat staring into the darkness and rain. Maybe death was coming to North, but not in the form of an Islamic priest. A priest would be indifferent to all that.
‘Those people have a lot of relatives,’ I said; and I tried to say it soberly but still had to swallow a chuckle. ‘North needn’t worry about the priest, just the next of kin.’
Blackbird stared toward North’s house. ‘He’ll pass out directly.’
‘You know,’ I said. ‘This is the first time we’ve been together when there was no combat.’ It was a little surprising to think that.
The Blackbird straightened, poked a finger at the rain. ‘You been living too soft,’ he muttered, ‘don’t let down.’
---
North was a big man. It took a lot of whiskey to put him away. When night came on and the mesa turned black, as impenetrable as slate, the Blackbird drove me, truck and horse into town. We parked between semi trucks and ate dinner in a weather worn hotel. We spoke together like brothers. People around us glanced at the Blackbird’s hand and continued chewing; eggs, steak, potatoes. Truckers burped, yawned, scratched their armpits. Waitresses made silent crossing patterns around the tables. Along the bar some awfully young drunks, and a few awfully old drunks, muttered to each other or gambled on punchboards. The people were indifferent to the Blackbird’s hand, and to the feathers in his braided hair. I thought better of the people, if not the place. This is still the frontier, I told myself, or something very much like it.
‘I’ve been nosing around,’ the Blackbird said. ‘After North commenced nursing that bottle, I exercised the horse. There’s a trail back of North’s house. Leads up into the mesa.’
The Blackbird chewed steak and looked like a man sitting on an enormous secret. ‘The fool,’ he said, ‘his guilts have brought him back to the one place he shouldn’t ever be. There’s two graveyards up there, Mexican and Indian. I don’t care for either one, but that Indian one is special.’
The Native American graveyard was filled with elaborately carved cedar rails fashioned to imitate enormous beds. The beds surrounded the Native graves. The dead were buried in symbolic beds.
‘In pretty good shape,’ the Blackbird said. ‘Considering the rain. Looks like a sort of weird furniture store. Got slugs and moss and spiders. The beds are all decorated with them. Got these great big snails, and white worms.’ He chewed, slurped at coffee, and the feathers in his braided hair gleamed in the fluorescent light of the restaurant. ‘It all seems pretty honest when you see it that way,’ he said. ‘All those slugs and things. I get this calm feeling – like death is okay. I don’t like that feeling. We all know that ain’t right.’
‘It might not be a bad feeling,’ I told him. ‘Sooner or later it all comes to that. Might feel all right if you could think about dying as a calm feeling.’
The Blackbird looked at me in a way that said he worried about my sanity. ‘You’ve been living way too easy, ‘ he said. ‘And you haven’t seen that other graveyard.’ The Blackbird mopped gravy with a piece of bread. He looked around the room, looked at the waitress, then looked through the windows into the night. He checked the time on the combat watch. ‘Let’s go see if there’s anything left of our boy.’
North was passed out and snoring in a chair when we entered the house. A wood fire lay dying in a fireplace. When we switched off some of the lights the fire became the focus of the room, a comment of darkened coals and ash. Outside the dripping mesa was painted with darkness, a wall of darkness.
I had not seen North is a long time. Beneath the remaining lights his face was red, his blond hair white, and breath gargled from his throat in sobbing snores. He was dressed in work clothes, booted, wearing a hunter’s jacket. In his hand, which lay in his lap, the .45 automatic was dark and oiled. Except for the sleep and the stink of booze, North was a man dressed and armed for action. A man ready to rush into the night. What was he intending to do? Shoot a ghost?
Blackbird fed up the fire. ‘There’s a couple of rooms upstairs,’ he said. ‘Take one. I’m going to sleep with the horse.’ He began searching the house, looking in closets. I stood watching North. The Blackbird was gone for several minutes, rummaging the kitchen and the upstairs rooms. He returned carrying an old 30-30 carbine and three kitchen knives. ‘I’ll keep these beside me,’ he said. ‘That way if North berserks the worst he can do is smack you with a broom.’
‘He’s that far gone?” I was ready to go back to the hotel and take a room.
Blackbird picked up the nearly empty fifth. ‘I figure you got time for a night’s sleep,’ he said. ‘I make him to wake up come noon tomorrow.’ He walked to North. ‘Or maybe never.’
The Blackbird reached toward North, took the .45 from his hand. He stood above North, a small black figure befeathered but contemplative. He seemed to be musing over the effects of history and combat and booze. Blackbird ejected the magazine from the .45, but he did not work the slide. Maybe there was a bullet in the pistol’s chamber, maybe not. It all depended on how good North was at soldiering. You do not arm your weapon before you need it.
The Blackbird cocked the piece. He placed the barrel beneath North’s chin, pointed at the throat. Smiled. Lowered the gun and turned to me.
‘See this here?’ He indicated North. ‘We came all this way to help this man.’
‘What are you doing?’ I said. ‘Cut the clowning.’
‘I’m a gambler,’ the Blackbird said. He watched North’s flushed face, listened to the breath snorting from North’s mouth. ‘I owe this man a debt, and he owes me. Let’s leave North’s ghosts to settle us up.’ The Blackbird stood easily, mildly amused, resigned to some imagined fate that I could not divine.
‘It sorts out like this,’ the Blackbird said. ‘If there’s a shell in this chamber, then North is gone. He’s got no more problems. I’ll have taken care of him and paid my debt.’ He looked at me. ‘You understand that?’
‘North doesn’t want to die.’ I said.
‘Who does? He doesn’t want to live in hell, either, but death or hell are all the choice’s he’s got.’
Flames were beginning to lick the new wood in the fireplace. The flames were tentative, searching for the easiest area of combustion. In my mind lay an old darkness, cut with flames. ‘What do you mean,’ I said desperately, ‘What do you mean, let the ghosts decide?’ I was stalling for time.
The Blackbird’s face gradually woke into a slow smile. Maybe a smile cannot be called historic, but this was a smile filled with memories. ‘I’m gonna talk here for a minute about Azeem.’ the Blackbird said. ‘Azeem was a man.’
North snored. The new fire crackled. Night seemed to be pressing against the windows.
‘You know why Azeem contacted the enemy,’ Blackbird said. ‘You ever think about why Azeem called down fire?’
‘I’ve thought about it. They weren’t good thoughts. So I stopped thinking about it.’
The Blackbird gestured to the dark windows, to the black night. ‘That’s our hearts,’ he said, in a general way. ‘Our hearts were flat as those windows.’
‘We were little more than kids. We were in combat against the enemy.’
‘We were the enemy,’ the Blackbird said. ‘We enemized everything – the dead, the kids, and all the others.’ He looked down at North. ‘And with never a lick of respect.’
The firelight was growing as fire stood brilliantly in the new logs. Shadows flickered on the wall like spirits. In my mind, deep from the darkness of my mind, figures began to walk. Then the figures began to fall, clutching guts, or grabbing at faces which were alight with flames. ‘Don’t,’ I whispered. ‘Don’t do this.’ and I meant, don’t make me recall. Just shoot North and get this over. But don’t make me remember.
‘We were looking at the face of something powerful,’ the Blackbird said, ‘something mighty old. We didn’t even know it.’
‘Shoot him.’ I whispered. ‘Don’t talk.’ I stood shocked, desperate, a willing conspirator in murder, a man betraying a friend. Echoes of rockets seemed to fill the room.
‘These ghosts,’ the Blackbird said easily, ‘are hungry. They are the spirits of hunger. Azeem knew. Azeem was medji, do you know what that means? He watched over those spirits, negotiated with them, kept them at peace. That was his way, before we came with our war and our weapons and our canned peaches. Azeem knew. They’ll never feel peace. Ever. This here,‘ -and he laid the pistol beside North’s head – ‘ this here is a blessing for this man. The worst it does is send him to his preacher’s hell, maybe.’
The words caused me to gain some self-control. After all, the Blackbird was insane. I was being persuaded by insanity. ‘We’ve already been there,’ I said. ‘Only one hell to a customer.’
‘Those ghosts are always lonesome. Always hungry. They are hungry for food and booze and sex. They are hungry for some kind of God somewhere. Hungry for sleep, and pretty things, and hungry for stars, and being warm.’ The Blackbird’s voice was an incantation. ‘Hungry for starlight, and kinfolk, and laughing with friends. They are starving for all those things, and blowing across the world forever, howling and hungry.’ He turned to me. ‘They scream a lot. They just wail and wail. Azeem said so.’ He looked at North. ‘And they are hungry for this man. They will make him one of them, and they will still be hungry.’
‘Shoot.’ I said. The fire crackled. When rockets fall into the streets, flame spreads. Mostly though, it goes straight up. It is a steeple of fire pointing diabolic praise at heaven. ‘Shoot.’ I whispered.
The Blackbird looked at me curiously. The black weapon glowed dull in the spectral white hand. Blackbird looked around the room, held the pistol to North’s temple, paused. ‘It’ll make a mess,’ he said, ‘and this would make a nice little house for somebody. Best if we just mess up the chair.’ He moved the pistol to North’s chest, felt for the exact spot, and the hammer went click against an empty chamber.
The Blackbird stood looking at North. ‘Pretty good soldiering,’ he said to North, ‘and the ghosts have decided. They want all of you.’ He threw the .45 on North’s lap. ‘I’ve got the magazine,’ he said to me. ‘Things will be safe around here.’
He walked to the door, turned back, looked at North. The Blackbird checked the time on one watch, then checked the time on the other. He looked more serious than he had when he pulled the trigger. ‘You got to understand about time,’ he said; and he sounded like a teacher leveling with a favorite student. ‘There’s all the time there is, all the time.’
I looked confused. I was confused.
‘There’s the time when North is a ghost,’ he said, ‘and there’s a time when he isn’t. Only mystery about the whole thing was – was he actually gonna be a ghost?’ The Blackbird indicated the watches. ‘There’s the time when you weren’t a lawyer and the time when you are. There’s the time when you weren’t born, and the time when you’re dead. All of those times are scampering. Right now. Like the mouse on this watch.’
He opened the door, turned back, looked at North. ‘You shouldn’t have laughed.’ He said to North’s sleeping figure. ‘Everybody did bad things, but you were the man who laughed.’
END PART ONE