“He told me what had happened as we moved out—I don’t know if it was ‘cause I was the Officer In Charge, or ‘cause I was his friend. Maybe both. The shooter had been a kid, no more than nine, he said. Next to the shooter was a girl of about six, probably his sister. Larry took them both out. He asked me what I would have done, what I thought he should have done with the little girl.”
“What did you tell him?” Susan asked, but he either didn’t hear her or didn’t want to answer, because he carried on.
“That afternoon we came across a young American soldier who told us he’d been separated from his lash-up when they’d been attacked. He came along with us, heading back to base. We racked out for the night a couple of hours after that. He shared a tent with Larry. Larry had barely spoken two words since he’d told me about the kids, but as I lay in my bag, I could hear them talking in quiet whispers.
“Next morning, they were both gone.”
Copyright © 2001 Simon Bewick
*
Simon Bewick lives in Oxfordshire, England. He has had stories published in Strange Horizons, Blue Murder, Quantum Muse, and Digital Catapult, among others. He’s an e-mail fiend and welcomes any comments you might have.
Somewhere Down the River
By Simon Bewick
9/17/01
Part 2 of 2
Read Part 1 here
He paused for a moment and looked at her. “You know what I mean when I say that?” He studied her for a moment and continued, “I see you do. Larry was still there, or at least the shell of Larry, but he was as close to dead as any man with a pulse could get. We didn’t have a Corpsman, I mean a medic, not after Bill Morrison got hisself shot three days before. We didn’t know whether the kid was going to die in a minute, an hour, or a month. He was alive, but we had no idea how alive. Does this ring any bells with you, miss, or should I stop now?”
She shook her head slowly. Tears stung at her eyes. “Johnny, my man, he was in the county jail. There was no way he was going to make bail, and no way we could afford to pay it even if he did. We both knew he was headed for Angola prison as soon as that trial date came round. Only it never did. They put some guy in the cell with him one night—Johnny’d only been there a day. The sheriff said he heard them talking. The guy asking questions, Johnny telling him what he’d done. He’s never denied it, so it weren’t like he was giving anything away, but it struck me as strange. Johnny’s never been much of a talker….” She paused, dragged hard on the cigarette, and Freddie waited for her to continue. “…I got a call Monday last week, saying he was sick and I should get down to Memorial Hospital as soon as I could. When I got there, he was in a coma. I went on over to the jail, and those boys were in a hell of a way. They remembered this other guy … kind of. But no one knew who’d booked him in. No one could find any records….”
“What was your man in for?”
“I worked in a bar down in Baton Rouge. One night after work, waiting for Johnny to pick me up, a couple guys got rough with me. I can take care of myself, but one of these guys hit me with a bottle…. That was when Johnny arrived. He saved my life, I think. Those kids would have ….”
“Kids?”
“Well, that’s the way the paper tried to paint it afterwards … but they were old enough to know better. Johnny was only trying to protect me, but once he started, he … well, he didn’t stop, and one of the kids ended up dead….”
“And they locked him up until they decided what to do with him,” Frankie said.
“Uh-huh. They locked him up. They let this new guy in. Or this new guy lets himself in, but lets them think they did it. And then they go round in the morning to wake them ….”
“And Johnny was gone,” Freddie said softly.
Susan nodded. “Johnny was gone like your buddy. The other guy was just plain not there … and no-one in that whole jail seemed to know a damn thing about him.”
Freddie sighed. “You can’t hold someone like him with mortar, stones, and chains.”
“They took Johnny down to the hospital, and he’s been there ever since. Sleeping the sleep of the dead….”
“Not yet, Susan, not yet.”
She thought about this for a moment, and then asked, “What happened after he disappeared?”
Freddie took a sip of the drink in front of him. “It was my decision. I thought about what Larry’d said to me the day before, and I thought I knew how he felt when he’d had a split second to make a decision about that little girl.
“We put together a makeshift stretcher and mounted out. We didn’t make a whole lot of progress that day. We were still getting used to walking through jungle, never mind carrying a dead weight on a half-assed stretcher with us. We camped down that night in a clearing, and we were all asleep half an hour after dinner. Normally, guys would shoot the shit for a couple hours, but that night no one wanted to talk. We kept wonderin’ whether that lonely soldier was gonna pop back up, maybe with an M16 he wanted to introduce us all to.
“Guess you know what happened. He did show up that night. I dreamt I saw him, and he was the same but different. He’d turned into Mr. Velvet Nose.”
“Why do you keep calling him that?” Susan asked, too curious to stop herself.
He took a breath and another drink. “You look at a skull just right and it don’t look like a hole in the middle of the face. If the light is wrong and the heat has got to you a little bit. You know how it is. When you’re so tired and it’s so hot the heat feels like it’s walking right along with you? Maybe you don’t. But it gets to be like a weight on your back.
“I don’t even remember who started the expression, probably Billy Kovac; he was only eighteen and stoned out of his head most of the time. We came across a burned-out village; our own people had done it, and there was a pile of bodies. Someone, Billy I think, picked up one of the skulls and in this fucked-up voice, excuse my language, starts squealing, ‘Oh, Mr. Velvet Nose been here, all right.’
“I’d forgot all about it till that night I woke in the jungle. I saw an orange glow outside the tent, and he’s sitting there. He’s got a little fire going, and he’s sitting next to it. He’s got a little lantern, a little flame, flickering away in a little box, hung from a pole. The pole, see, looks a lot like a bone to me. I guess a thigh bone or somethin’. The lantern … the only way I can describe it is like some crazy jack-o’-lantern. Except normally you’d have a pumpkin face with a light shining inside of it—here you got the light, and somewhere deep deep inside of it there’s a face in there. Then I figure it all out and realize this is a dream. So I go on out and sit by the fire even though nights are as hot as hell out there, and I’m surprised that when I stick my hand near the flame, it’s cold. But what the hell, it’s a dream. He turns to me, and there’s a face swimming on his skull, and the face is almost like the one in the lantern he’s carrying. Almost, but it’s not clear enough to make out properly, you know what I mean?”
Susan nodded. “Like fixing a focus on camera. It’s there, it’s gone, it’s there … but it never quite stays clear.”
Freddie nodded too. “Yeah, that’s Mr. Velvet Nose all right.”
He looked at her, inviting her to say what she’d seen. She felt the need to do it, to tell someone, anyone. “The night after it happened I saw him. He came into my room, the sonofabitch.
“He stood at the end of my bed and looked at me, and he was cold. The cold came off him like stinky lines in a comic book.
“He told me he had Johnny’s soul in the lantern. I think I said something like ‘Good for you, asshole,’ because it was a dream. It had to be a dream because his coat was moving—that’s what I remember most. A thick, black coat, twitching, fluttering, and then I thought, just for a second, that it was…”