A Host of Shadows Read online

  I nodded and poured myself another couple of fingers. The Jack went down easy, and I started to forget about my nightmare. I checked the clock to see how long it would be before the liquor store opened up again, but then remembered I had a second fifth in the cupboard. I relaxed. “Take your time, bro. I got nothing better to do.”

  Cody took another pull from the bottle. He seemed to choose his words carefully, leaning heavily on each syllable. “Listen to me carefully, Vegas,” he said. “She’s back.”

  I blinked and shook my head, honestly confused. “What the fuck do you mean, Cody? Who’s back?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut and released a long, slow breath that reminded me of a death rattle. “She is. The girl.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. I wanted to buy some time, so I got up and got the second fifth and a carton of Camels out of the cupboard. I couldn’t find an ashtray, so I grabbed a coffee mug out of the sink and set it down in the middle of the table. I lit up, offered Cody one. He joined me.

  “Cody, look, a lot of guys got ugly memories, man. Even really bad dreams. Just now, when you came through the back gate, I was hitting a hot LZ. You remember that time down near…”

  “Shut up,” Cody hissed. “I mean it. Just shut the fuck up and listen.”

  I felt a surge of irritation but held it back. This man was troubled, in deep shit. He was all drugged up, if not totally flipped out, and needed my help. I leaned back in my chair. It complained, but it held. I waited, expression pleasant, and settled in to let him talk things out.

  “You remember that little tunnel rat with the ponytail? Name of Clegg, I think? We were in the Ia Drang Valley, over near to that shit hole called Hump Hollow. It was summer, maybe ’69 or ’70 I can’t remember now. Comin’ up on nightfall, and we were heading home. The kid walking point got nicked by a sniper hiding out in some pissant ville, so we all stormed the village while the civilians beat feet. You remember?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t. “I was fucking high all the time, man.”

  “Yeah,” Cody said. “You were smoking joints with Horse in ’em or something. It’s amazing you’re still alive.” He eyed the bottle. “I heard you were sober now.”

  “Yeah. I was.”

  Cody nodded in complete understanding, then continued, “Anyway, once we got into the ville we tied up a couple of civilians. It was dark. The Loot had us fire up a hooch to give us somethin’ to see by, and we went around looking for guns. Just like usual. Coop found a tunnel underneath some sacks of rice, hollered “fire in the hole” and dropped a grenade. Then the Loot ordered Clegg to go check out the tunnel.”

  Bits and pieces were coming back to me now. I remembered something about the burning hut, and the wide-eyed fear in little Clegg’s eyes as he stuck the flashlight in his mouth, armed his .45 and dropped into that dark, dangerous hole in the ground. “Yeah,” I said. “I think I remember him going down.”

  Cody sighed. “That boy, Clegg, he was gone a long time, man. The Loot knew something was wrong. We all started looking for the other end of the tunnel, just outside the ville, to stop any VC from getting away. Dumb shit split us up, Vegas. Shoulda never done that, especially after dark. I’m the one found Clegg’s body. Somebody had knifed him, cut him up bad.

  “And it’s funny, but the second guy to vanish was the same one who had been walking point and got hit by the sniper. One minute he was standing there smoking and rubbing his neck wound, where he had a bit of blood, and then when I turned around again he was just…gone.”

  I still couldn’t place things. “Where was I all this time, Cody?”

  He shrugged. “You were ripped, man. I think you were just leaning against this pole the dinks had in the middle of that ville, half the fuck out of it, humming some Supremes tune. Loot had you guarding the one slope family that we managed to capture, some old farts and a young girl. You weren’t in any condition to help out beyond that.”

  “Sounds like me.”

  “When the third guy disappeared we all fucking freaked. Can’t recall now, but I think it might have been that black cat Quade. Dumb bastard goes off to take a leak and never comes back. The Loot, he takes his side arm and he puts it up to the male slope’s head. The old man doesn’t seem to give a shit. Loot asks where his men are. The old fuck doesn’t blink… So Loot shoots him.”

  “You’re shitting me. I don’t remember this at all.”

  “Oh, yeah. Brains splatter right up on the front of the old woman’s pajamas. She starts shrieking and kicking, so the Loot, he shoots her too…

  And that leaves just the pretty young girl.”

  My stomach flipped over. One memory came flooding back: The reed-thin, beautiful Vietnamese teenager was unusually tall. She had almost movie-star looks; a beautiful nose and gorgeous, almost Western brown eyes. When the old people were dead, she didn’t weep or wail. In fact, she eyed Lieutenant Porter with something like scorn. She was strong, willful, unafraid.

  I suddenly needed another drink. I poured for the both of us, and Cody paused to light another cigarette. His cheeks reddened with shame as his eyes looked through the filthy kitchen wall and into the distant past.

  “Loot radioed for reinforcements. Captain said no. He called for a dust off for the wounded, even though he didn’t know where the fuck they were, just to get somebody else in there. Sucker said no. Told us to stay right where we were, not to go back out into the dark. Told us to wait for morning. Too much going on over at Hump Hollow, he said. Shit, we could hear the small-arms fire from where we were. We knew Baker Company was in the shit.

  “But we were all alone, and there was just a handful of us left. A bunch of scared fucking kids playing soldier. We got ourselves in a tight circle, you remember? With the girl in the middle?”

  And now I did remember. In fact, it all came flooding back: Passing around a joint that was laced with heroin and God knows what else. Trying to be tough guys. Guys making cracks about the chickenshit dinks out there hiding in the night, and the slope cunt we had there with us, getting themselves all worked up. I closed my itchy eyes and swallowed again. I took another long pull on the bottle.

  “Yeah. I remember some of it now.”

  “We heard somebody in pain out there,” Cody said. His voice had gone low and soft and had a ragged edge to it. “Couldn’t even tell for sure if was one of our own, but it sounded like he could have been speaking English. That really got on my nerves, man. You must have felt it too, right? Somebody dying right under your nose, out there alone in the dark, and you can’t do nothing about it.”

  “It was the Loot went first,” I said. “With the girl, I mean.”

  Cody shook his head. “Loot tried to stop it, at least in the beginning.” He sighed. “It was me, actually. I was half out of my mind with fear, man. I had a boner the size of Florida in my pants. I slapped her and tore her bottoms off and rolled her over on her belly. Then I spit on my fingers and fucked her doggy style. I didn’t care who was watching, didn’t care if somebody shot me.”

  Clenching buttocks by firelight, the pretty girl screaming, all the men grunting. I closed my eyes and willed the images away, but they stayed. I felt a wave of sadness wash over me. Oh, shit. What had Cody done?

  “You okay?” Cody asked. He drank, eyes never leaving my face.

  I nodded. “I’m okay,” I said. “You finish what you got to say.” Because I finally understood what was going on, now. I got it that Cody had carried this awful burden for more than thirty years, and it would kill him if he didn’t get it out, get it said, have it listened to. He’d come here for that. Confession was good for the soul. Hell, every therapist and priest in the world knew that.

  Sooner or later, so did every vet.

  Cody went on, his words stumbling over one another as if in a hurry to finish: “One by one, we had her, man. Jackson from behind, Kelly in front, two at a time. On and on. Even the Loot got into it after a while. Because we were tired and scared and pissed and horny a
nd young and stupid. Watching somebody else with her would get another guy riled up again. I remember she finally stopped whining, stopped making any sound at all. She just laid there, tied up and bleeding, mumbling that phrase. Sometimes in Vietnamese and sometimes in English. Over and over. Always the same thing.”

  I reached for a smoke. My hand was trembling. “Let me die,” I said.

  “What?”

  My voice broke. “She kept saying ‘let me die.’”

  Cody nodded, and now he was crying too. “And round about when the sun was about to come up, when we were finally getting sober and knew we were going to get out of that fucking place alive, the Loot decides he wants one last blow job. He forces the girl up on her knees and takes out his dick. He’s really pissed, because at first he can’t get it up, so he chokes the chicken and finally he’s hard enough. She’s saying ‘let me die’ over and over, and we’re all starting to feel pretty bad about what we done, you know? But the Loot, he forces his cock in her mouth. He’s moving his ass around for a minute or two when he shrieks like a kid on a roller coaster.

  “The girl bit down on his dick. Hard.

  “The Loot tries to pull away, but now she’s chewing and grinding those teeth and he’s slapping at her head and screaming. Me, I’m just frozen there, I can’t even move. I look at you, Vegas, and you’re kind of nodding, but you’re awake, and you got this look. Like you stepped in dog shit or something.

  “Huddleston, he tries to pull her off the Loot, but she seems out to bite his cock off. So quick as lightning, he takes his trench knife and he cuts her throat from fucking ear to ear.”

  I remembered more, then. How I’d helped them move her ruined body. How we had stuffed all three corpses into some other hooch and set that one afire: Black smoke rising. The very air reeked from the stench of blood and burning straw.

  Something broke open deep inside. I don’t know what strange compartment of my mind had held this sickening incident; how I had managed to keep it from myself for so long, but now that it was back I was heartbroken and disgusted with myself. I felt the catharsis too, a cleansing of guilt and shame and remorse that seemed to go along with genuine tears. And so the two of us sobbed and drank and sobbed and talked until the sun came up. It was a good thing.

  Cody admitted he’d been thinking of shooting himself. He promised he wouldn’t do anything without calling me first.

  He gave me his address and phone number and sketched a map, and I gave him the information on where I was working part-time and who my shrink was over at the VA. I felt proud to have helped him out.

  “I got to sleep, Cody,” I finally slurred. “I just got to. You be okay now?”

  Cody was hammered, too. He nodded. “Daylight is okay,” he said. “She can’t haunt my ass in the daytime.”

  I walked him to the door, struggling for something profound to say. “We were kids,” I finally whispered. “Shit-terrified little boys with guns. It wasn’t us, it was the war.”

  “Wherever she is, you think she knows that?”

  I lied. “I’m sure she does.”

  Cody stumbled down onto the grass, hit his knees. He got to his feet, weaving, and called back over his shoulder. “Then how come she keeps calling me, man? How come?”

  I cleared my throat and coughed up smoker’s phlegm. “Say what?”

  Cody was leaning on his car at this point, fumbling for his keys. He looked up, bewildered. “I told you, man. She’s back.”

  “What the fuck you mean she’s back?”

  He opened the car door, emitted a long belch. “She keeps on calling me, Vegas. Late at night, usually. First, I always smell that rank coppery smell, you know? And then something that stinks, kind of like a hooch on fire. The phone rings. But when I pick up the receiver, I just hear this whispering moan, like it comes from a lot further away than the ‘Nam. She always says ‘let me die’ and then hangs up.”

  I shook my head. “Cody, it’s just your guilt. I’m no shrink, but believe me there is a rational explanation. Those are all just auditory and visual hallucinations, man. You’re feeling guilty and ashamed about what you did, and you needed to talk to somebody about it, that’s all. It’ll go away eventually.”

  Sunrise was a red, brown and yellow smear on the horizon. “The Loot is dead, Vegas,” Cody said. “He got robbed outside a bar in Atlanta. Somebody cut his guts up and he died.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “Even though I didn’t much like the man.”

  Cody shrugged. “Who did? Thing of it is, so is Huddleston. He said goodbye to his wife and went for a walk one night and then just up and vanished. They never found the body.”

  A chill tickled my spine. “You’re not saying…”

  Cody tried to light a smoke, but he was cross-eyed from the alcohol. It took him a moment to put flame to cigarette. Somehow I already knew what he was about to say. I waited for it anyway, hoping I was wrong.

  “They’re all gone, Vegas,” Cody said. “Jackson, Kelly, everyone but us. Everyone from the squad except you and me is fucking history.”

  I stared at him, my jaw loose and eyes all wide and stupid. “And you think it was the girl?”

  “I know it was,” Cody said. “I’ve been seeing her for quite a while now, Vegas.”

  “Aw, Cody, look…”

  “Sometimes she’s walking down the street like any other American girl. Some nights she’s standing in my backyard just as naked as the day she was born. She’s all peeking in my windows, smiling with those little buck teeth.” Cody laughed bitterly. “But then, lately? She’s been calling me up at night, man. Just to whisper ‘let me die,’ first in slope and then in English. That’s how I know I’m next.”

  I took an involuntary step backwards, turned and bent over. I vomited into the bushes by my porch. By the time I got hold of myself again, Cody had driven away. I leaned on the doorway and went back into the house. I locked my front door, tripped on the coffee table and passed out on the couch.

  I slept most of the day. When I came out of it, I felt like a coroner was using his bone saw to take off the top of my skull. I downed some aspirins and coffee, took a long, cold shower and then called a shrink I know at the VA Hospital, Dr. Bellefontaine. I told him about Cody. Bellefontaine said about what I expected him to say, that Cody had bad PTSD and might need an anti-psychotic medication like Haldol if he’d been doing speed and staying up for days at a time. Bellefontaine asked if I’d try to get Cody to come in for an intake session. I said sure, but the truth is now I was feeling like I’d need to come along, for my own reasons.

  By then it was early evening. I had another shot of Jack, just a hair of the dog that bit me, and went out into the night. I drove over to the San Fernando Valley and got off the freeway at Sepulveda Boulevard. I went north. The neighborhood was pretty bad and it steadily got worse. I pulled over from time to time to try to make sense of the scrawled map and printed address. Took me a couple of hours, overall, but I found the little duplex.

  There was a crowd around the back unit. My skin twitched and I suddenly became aware of the low, thumping twirl of rotor blades overhead; another police chopper. In fact, the cops were everywhere. Their yellow crime-scene tape surrounded the rental unit.

  And something bloody was being loaded into the back of an ambulance.

  Shit

  , Cody, why the hell didn’t you call me first, like you promised?

  My friend’s guilt had taken him out anyway, despite my best efforts to help out. I got out of my car and stood there, in the dark, just outside the ring of lights and people. I didn’t want to go any closer. A cold, cutting wind roared up the street and moved some leaves with a sound like bacon frying in a pan. I didn’t feel much, just kind of empty inside. I guess I was all cried out.

  “Poor bastard,” somebody said.

  I jumped and spun around. It was a balding old man with missing teeth. He was in a robe and using a battered walker. I forced a laugh. “You scared the shit out o
f me, you old fart. What did you say?”

  The old man chuckled. “I said the poor bastard.”

  I edged closer, trying to act casual. “Do you know what happened?”

  “Guy snapped,” he said. “I used to be on the job, see? I did twenty-five in LAPD Homicide. So when I saw some rookie leaning on a lamp post about to puke, I asked him what happened. Seems my crazy neighbor actually cut off his own Johnson and balls and then stuck a gun in his mouth to finish the job. Kid said it was a bloody scene in there, real bloody.”

  I swallowed. “So it was suicide.”

  The old cop smiled, revealing rotting gums. “Had to be. Everything locked up tight, the kid said. They found the guy with a razor and a gun and his sack of family jewels, right there in the armchair, pretty as you please. Fuck, that must have hurt.”

  Jesus

  , I thought. Poor Cody. What a horrible way to go. I decided to wait and page Dr. Bellefontaine in the morning to fill him in. I turned to leave.

  “Probably over her,” the old man muttered.

  My skin hopped and crawled and ice cubes formed in my sour stomach. “Over who?”

  The old cop shrugged. “That gorgeous piece of Oriental pussy he had hanging around lately,” he said. “I saw her standing outside his window last night, naked as a baby bird. Great little ass. They must have been playing some kind of sex game or something, cause a second later she was gone. Hey! Where you going in such a hurry, son? What’s the matter?”

  I don’t remember anything about the drive, or how I found my way back home. I don’t remember drinking the rest of the whiskey. Oh, but I do finally remember ‘Nam. Every fucking little piece of what I did back there. Now I clearly remember lying on top of that girl, trying to get off, looking down into her dark, cold eyes while she tried to bite my face.

  Let me die…

  So now I sit here with the shades drawn, spinning my .9mm Glock around in circles on the kitchen table. I’m waiting for the courage to do something besides shake. Do I shoot myself now, or try to last until morning? Should I page the shrink? Tell him about this waking nightmare, and what I can sense is just around the corner?