Keeping Watch (14 page)

But there was someone out there, two someones, and they did come. An instant before they appeared, openly casting the beams from their flashlights across the rough riverbank, Allen's jungle instincts flared through his brain, and he could smell them coming, could feel Todd's location in the dark recesses, hear the rustle of the jungle green. Excited voices echoed from the concrete—not children's voices, but those of young men, with muscle in their depth. Allen eased himself back behind the stanchion, stripped off his warm but rustling raincoat, and prayed that Todd hadn't fallen asleep.

The beams zeroed in on the cart and pile of blankets beside it, and the voices went silent. They passed the stanchion, with Allen circling silently around its far side, and halted at the foot of the blankets. One of them handed his light to the other and fished something out of his jacket pocket, fumbling with it for a moment before his arms thrust out into the light beams, revealing a small square can. The stream came from crotch level, up and down across the lumpy sleeping roll. Allen crept forward, catching a strong whiff of lighter fluid, and reached the oblivious pair just as the boy with the fluid was putting the empty canister into one pocket and pulling a book of matches from another. Allen swung.

The lights dropped to the ground at the feet of the boy who had been holding them. The boy with the matches gave a startled curse, before the length of pipe slammed into him. A sharp cry told Allen he'd hit something, but not knocked him out, so he swung again in the confusing light, connecting mid-body with a crack of bone and another scream.

Then Todd was there, throwing himself across the kid, and Allen could pick up one of the fallen flashlights and shine it on the first boy he'd hit, who was trying groggily to stand. Allen kicked his feet out from under him, then took out the ball of heavy twine he'd bought specially for the purpose and bound the kid hand and foot. He did the same for Todd's boy, then the two-man patrol dragged their captives over to the stanchion to prop them up.

They were more than kids. Two well-clothed, middle-class boys, one about nineteen, the other two or three years younger, and if Allen hadn't taken them by surprise, they'd have been all over him. They had blood on their faces and beer on their breath, and they winced away from the light beams, shocked stupid but trying not to show how shit-scared they were at their pain, their helplessness, and the abrupt turn of events. Asking themselves what the hell had gone sour so fast.

Allen screwed the directional cap off one of the flashlights to expose its bulb, wedging it upright between some chunks of concrete like an electric candle. The boys could see them now, two worthless homeless men who had somehow taken over. Allen and Todd stood looking down at their prisoners, both of them wondering how many times they'd done the same with small men dressed in black pajamas.

“You think we'd let you get away with it?” Allen finally said, breaking the silence. “Two worthless little pieces of shit like you?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” the taller boy blustered. “We were just down here checking things out, you've got no right to attack us like this. Man, you're gonna be in deep shit now.”

Allen squatted onto his heels so he could look into the kid's face, letting the boy see just how much he wanted to take him apart, how easy it would be, how deeply pleasurable. The already pale face went stone white. Allen murmured, “You think that's the way it works? You think when you come into the jungle, you bring the rules and regulations of society with you? Oh, no. You're on our ground now. Nobody can see you from the river. And sure as hell nobody can hear you when you scream.”

The prisoners did not like that last word one bit. The match boy with the cracked rib, the smaller of the two, was already sweating with pain and sheer terror. He wasn't far from tears, thought Allen. Not that tears would do him any good.

Without another word, Allen slowly put his hand to the capacious pocket of his overcoat, turning that side of his body to the light so both boys could see his movements. He pulled out two objects: a roll of wide duct tape, and a lighter fluid tin.

Todd took the tape from Allen and slapped pieces of it across the two mouths, then used the rest of the roll to bind them together where they sat, shoulder to shoulder. Allen waited until he had finished, and then deliberately stuck his gloved thumbnail under the plastic spout at the top of the small tin to pry it open.

The boys convulsed so violently when he came at them with the can, he was afraid they were going to knock themselves out, if not on the concrete stanchion then on each other's skull. He signaled to Todd to hold them down, then sprinkled them with the can's contents.

When he had shaken the last drops from the can, he put it away and pulled out a box of matches.

The smaller boy moaned, his eyes flickering before he fainted dead away. Todd slapped him sharply to bring him around. When his eyes focused again, Allen lit a match, meditatively let it burn out in his fingers, then dropped the twisted stick. He lit another. As it flared and settled down to a steady burn, Allen negligently flicked it in the direction of the boys. A flurry of bound legs spasmed to push away, and the match died out. Allen lit another, tossed it, and it too died. By the next one, the teenagers were beginning to realize something was wrong. They held nearly still for the last one, their bugged eyes watching it flare, fall, and die against the damp cloth of their blue-jeaned legs.

Allen smiled, and squatted down again. “Smart little prick heads, aren't you? You notice that stuff in my can wasn't quite as flammable as the stuff you used. Of course, if my friend and I'd had more to drink today, it might've gone up, but we've both been pretty abstemious.” He waited a while to see if the meaning of his words would register through their confusion, but eventually he saw their eyes go wide, with revulsion this time instead of shock. He smiled. “Yep. We've just pissed all over your pretty clothes. ‘Course, you seem to've pissed yourselves pretty thoroughly as well, so it might not bother you.

“Well, boys, it's past our bedtime, old losers like us. What's that?” he asked, as the younger one struggled and tried to speak through the duct tape. “Oh, right. Your names.”

He made a show of finding the taller boy's wallet, taking out a driver's license, which informed him that the boy was indeed well past his eighteenth birthday. He dropped it into his own pocket before returning the wallet to its place. He didn't bother with the younger kid, just rose to his feet and brushed off his hands.

“I'll make a phone call before I go to bed, let someone know you're out here. If I remember, that is,” he added. “Men as old and brain-dead as we are, you can't expect us to be too with-it. I expect we'll remember to call someone sooner or later. See you boys around.”

He and Todd abandoned the shopping cart and sleeping roll they'd been pushing around for days, since they'd taken care to ensure that there would be nothing there to lead anyone to them, including fingerprints. They also left untouched the sleeping roll that the boys had soaked with lighter fluid, evidence for the police.

Out from under the noisome roadway, Allen sucked in a deep breath of moist river air flavored with exhaust. The city lights sparkled and danced over the surface of the water, pulsing with secret messages, and the light rain drifted down as God's blessing. He felt strong, tall, invincible: righteousness personified.

“Jesus, that was just far out,” he said to Todd.

“I still think we should've just torched the little bastards.”

“And had the police after us for murder? No thanks. And this'll sure bring those two a load of grief. Christ, I haven't felt this good since 'Nam.”

“Yeah, well, don't get too attached to the feeling,” Todd grumbled. “You sure you don't want to come to San Diego with me?”

“No, thanks, man. You take care, now, okay?”

They embraced, the parting of squad-mates, then went their separate ways. Allen walked on toward his part of town, filled with the glory of the night, going a mile out of his way to use a public telephone he'd spotted earlier. He told the police dispatcher that two suspects in the murders of the homeless men were under a certain bridge, then hung up to stroll through the rain-splattered shadows to his hotel, where he fell asleep, high as a kite but stone-cold sober, with a smile on his face and a mind nearly free of the sound of a man's distant scream.

And when he woke in the gray, wet Portland morning, the smile was still there. It dawned on him that he could not remember the last time he'd slept a night free of horror. Last night, he had actually dreamed of his mother, young and sitting among the driftwood on the beach in front of the house, playing with a baby. Jerry.

No deRosa's hands. No heap of dead infants.

No Brenda, with those ice-colored eyes.

Allen got up from his musty bed, unaccountably hungry. He showered, shaved for the first time in weeks, and walked half a mile to a place he'd never been in before although the morning fragrance had often caught at him as he passed. He ate to satiation, but when he walked out an hour later, he discovered that, far from feeling logy, his skin was as jumpy as a junkie needing his fix. He had looked in vain through the café's strewn newspapers for word of the adventure under the bridge, even though he knew it was too early. As the day wore on, he had a hard time waiting until the evening television news, and at five o'clock he was sitting in a bar where the television was always on, waiting for the early local reports.

It was, he was pleased to see, the lead story. When the police spokesman admitted to the cameras that the arrest of two local teenagers under a bridge was due to an anonymous tip, it was all Allen could do not to whoop aloud.

That was when it dawned on him: He'd thought he'd come out of Vietnam scarred but intact, but in truth, he had a monkey on his back as bad as a strong taste for grass or an addiction to pain pills. His personal monkey was a craving for adrenaline, a bone-deep need for the thrill of patrol.

He thought it might have been just after the patrol with Todd that he'd shaved off his beard, bought himself some clean clothes from Goodwill, and gone to the islands for a few days. He told himself he just needed to show his family that he was still alive, so his father wouldn't cut off the monthly allowance that kept Allen under roofs instead of on the street, but really, he wanted to see them. To see, most of all, Jerry.

But after four or five days, he looked out the window one morning and saw deRosa in his coat of flies climbing down from the tree with the swing in it, stepping onto a pulsating heap of dead infants and coming toward the house with his raw hands held beseechingly in front of him. That afternoon, with the thin wail in his ears, Allen headed back out into the jungle.

Then a very strange chunk of memory, so bizarre he could never be sure it had actually taken place. If it did, it was between the patrol with Todd and the incident with the wife-beater, but he had no idea when, or even where.

As if in a dream, he was inside a convenience store holding a gun—a real gun, although it felt like a joke, since it was just a handgun, a thirty-eight. But it was no joke to the wide-eyed man behind the counter, who babbled in two or three languages his willingness to part with his cash register contents. Allen would have dismissed the brief image as fantasy, but for its clarity: the man's patchy moustache and frayed collar, the accumulation of candies and whatnots piled near the register, the feel of the bills spilling into his hand, and the physical memory of the jolt on his shoulder blades as his good buddy partner in crime (whose name he did not think he'd ever known) slapped him in congratulation.

That, and the sensuous memory of how sweet the air was that night, how alive a person felt with adrenaline kicking through his veins.

But for many nights after the robbery, he dreamed of the Snakeman, hunting the American jungles for prey.

What, after all, could a man like him do after Vietnam?

Memory splintered then, a kaleidoscope of bone-chilling weather and vicious fights and at least a couple of arrests. One instant of supreme clarity involved a knife, slicing into his arm with the shock of a paper cut, but what the fight was about, and what had happened to the other man, he hadn't a clue. The pieces became smaller and smaller, a shower of gleaming fragments: flowers in a park; reading a paperback book by the light spilling through a window; belt buckles lying on the path; the taste of coffee on his tongue.

Then: It was May (a magical word, full of blossom and unfolding) and he was in some dry place, where the rains were over for the year. He was walking along a quiet street, very late at night, carrying nothing but the clothes he wore, boiling with the feelings of clamped-down rage that had ridden him all through college. Only this time, it wasn't very well clamped down, not at all.

The noise that came from the house he was passing seemed inevitable, as if he'd laid the perfect ambush and the enemy had walked right into it. The sound was brief but unmistakable, a yelp merged with a grunt. Allen paused, and was rewarded by the crash of a chair going over, the meaty sound of flesh hitting flesh, and another cry: He was listening to the sound of a man beating the crap out of someone. He turned up the short walkway and simply kicked in the flimsy door. The woman took one look, stumbled to her feet, and fled out the back door; her attacker swung his head around like a confused bull, and charged.

The moment Allen stepped onto the scene, faced with a man in a sweat-stained T-shirt and a woman with a bleeding face, he was no longer in a sad, trampled room with a drunken middle-aged white man. For all intents and purposes, Allen was back in the jungle, facing the vermin who had flayed deRosa, who had set the booby traps, who had laid the pungi-stakes along the trail. The rage swept out of nowhere and took control, as surely and completely as it had at Truc Tho, a savage release of the furies within. He wanted to tear the bastard to pieces.