by C. E. Murphy
“Ooh,” Ashley said happily. “Carrot cake.”
Brer Rabbit sat up, paws tucked to his chest, nose a-quiver, just like the most rabbity rabbit there ever was. He looked avariciously at Ashley, who had managed to smear cream cheese frosting all the way from her eyebrows to her chin. I checked the cake, but there was no face-sized imprint in it. I had to admire the kid’s tenacity, in that case.
“Tell you what,” I said dryly. “You can have a piece of carrot cake if you let Ashley go. In fact, you can have the whole carrot cake. A nice full round tummy and a nice warm sun to sleep under. What could be better than that?”
Brer Rabbit’s nose twitched again and for about a millisecond, I thought it was actually going to work. Then he sank back into his seat, whiskers drooping. “I’m afraid keeping the girl is more important.”
“Why?” Nerves suddenly cramped my hands and I was glad I’d remembered to shield my thoughts. None of the stories I’d heard talked about Brer Rabbit stealing children. That was more of an Irish fairy tale.
A thunderous cloud rolled over the sky, cutting out all the light. The Lower World stretched flatter and thinner, like it was trying to hide from something, or, it came to me, as if it was trying to hide something. Me, maybe. Me, or Ashley. My own voice came from far away, pulled into discordant tones by the distorted world: “Who sent you, Bro’ Rabbit?”
He wouldn’t tell me, but I knew the answer already; knew it as though it had been burned into my bones. There was a creature out there, something the banshee had called Master, and he had haunted me since the day my shamanic powers awakened. I didn’t know what he was or what he wanted besides a piece of me, but all of a sudden Ashley Hampton looked like a very tempting piece of bait. I’d followed her into the rabbit hole without a second thought. I’d go anywhere to keep the kid safe. Little girls didn’t deserve to get mixed up in my weird-ass world.
Ashley, miserably, said, “I want to go home.”
“Oh, but not yet.” Brer Rabbit threw off the gloom—literally: the sky lightened again, darkness fleeing before his smooth Southern voice—and I put an arm around Ashley’s shoulders protective. “We haven’t had our cake yet,” he said.
Ashley sniffled. “Okay. But it was more fun before, when we were playing.”
“We can play as long as you like,” Brer Rabbit promised.
Kids were amazing. Mercurial little monsters, in the depths of despair one moment and happy as larks the next. Ashley brightened right up. “Will you dance with me?”
For a rabbit, he did a surprisingly good job of looking non-plussed. Then he stood, came around the table, and swept Ashley up in his rabbity arms.
The child I had my arm around stayed right where she was.
Carrot cake and honey and a pink table cloth stuck to Brer Rabbit’s face and chest and paws.
Ashley grabbed my hand and whispered, “Run!”
We raced back out of the rabbit hole so fast I clobbered my head on the underside of Morrison’s desk. Ashley flung herself to the side, eyes wide and dramatic as she gasped at the ceiling. I rubbed my head and spluttered, then finally began to applaud. “How’d you do that, kid?”
“He said Tar Baby wouldn’t work, but he didn’t say anything about a Honey Baby!” Ashley pushed up on her elbows, eyes still very wide. “I just had to build it real fast while you and him were talking. I pretended real hard that I wasn’t doing anything and hoped he wouldn’t see!”
“I didn’t even see.” And I was supposed to be a grown-up who noticed things. “That was brilliant, Ashley. That was fantastic. You’re amazing.”
She beamed at me, though the expression went away again almost instantly, turning instead to conspiracy. “I think we shouldn’t tell my mommy, okay?”
I laughed, a sort of frantic noise in the back of my throat, and fumbled around for her case file. “I think that might be a good idea. How about we go find this instead, so she can be impressed when she gets back?”
Ashley scrambled to her feet and took my hand a second time. “I’m going to be just like you when I grow up, Detective Walker.”
I followed her out of Morrison’s office, wondering if she just might be.
Forgotten But By A Few
“Forgotten But By A Few” takes place at the same time as SPIRIT DANCES (Book Six of the Walker Papers), while Gary is in San Diego.
I woke up on the plane with the feeling somebody’d been sittin’ on my chest. Ain’t a nice feeling, ‘specially when a heart attack snuck up on you a year or so back. Well, it hadn’t snuck up on me, I’d been witched into it, but when you’re lying in a hospital bed with a nurse who don’t never say more than two words together at once scowling down at you, whether it snuck up or got sent don’t really matter. So waking up with that feeling made me a lot more nervous than it used to woulda, and that was a lousy way to start a holiday weekend.
‘course, it coulda just been the warm humid air in San Diego feelin’ thick in my chest. Not that Seattle ain’t humid, but it just ain’t the same. San Diego’s got no winter, plenty of sunshine, beautiful women hanging out at the beaches, and one of the best zoos in the world. In the long couple years between my wife dying and me meeting Joanne, I’d wondered why I still lived in Seattle. Now I knew, a’course, but that didn’t mean I was gonna miss my St. Patrick’s Day weekend with the boys.
And it was getting important to show up every year. The number of us who could make it was shrinking, and not because we couldn’t afford to come. Whether we liked to admit it or not, none of us were spring chickens anymore. I was one of the youngsters, and my seventy-fourth birthday had been a couple months ago. Korea had been a long time ago, and nothin’ but M*A*S*H re-runs kept it fresh in folks’s minds.
Two of my buddies were waitin’ for me at the luggage carousel. One of ‘em held a sign that said my name in big ugly Army-style stencils: GARRISON MATTHEW MULDOON, with a military rank that hadn’t meant anything to me in fifty years. The other guy, Dave Ackerly, had a sign reading ANDERSON COLVER LEE, MASTER SGT. tucked under his arm. Andy was the guy holding my sign, and I had one in my bag that said CORPORAL DANIEL BAE KIM. Sun would have the next one, and the last guy in would have a sign for Ackerly, the first fella in. That sign would say WHERE THE HELL’S THE LIMO, ACK?
We’d been doing this a while. There were rituals. Sometimes it meant we spent about six or eight hours at the airport, waitin’ for everybody to come in. Truth was, we could spend our whole weekend in the airport and none of us would care much, except for it was hard to get beer at baggage claim. Mostly it was about seein’ each other again, always maybe for the last time. Don’t much matter where that happens, as long as you get to say goodbye.
Andy pounded my back while the sign with my name on it jabbed me in the ribs. “Muldoon! You look good, you look great, you look—” He let me go and took a step back. Andy was a little black guy from Alabama whose skinny bones had gotten him out of more tight spots in Korea than any of us could count. He was strong as hell, made up of baling wire and sprung steel, and every time I saw him his eyes had sunk farther into his head. He looked terrible, though I wouldn’t tell him that to his face.
“You look great,” he said again, except this time he meant it. “What’s going on, Muldoon, you got a new girl?”
“Yeah, Andy, a hot young thing who can’t get by without me.” Funny thing was, it was true, not that he’d believe me. “You’re looking good too, old man.”
“Bullshit, I look like hell, but that’s okay, I been through hell.”
Anything else he said was lost as The Ack-Man elbowed him out of the way to shake my hand, then, who were we kidding, offer up a bear hug as big as Andy’s. I felt his ribs when I hugged him. Dave was closer to my size, couple inches over six feet, but his muscle had withered away over the years until he was tall and skinny and old. We were all old. It just looked better on some of us than others. We grunted each other’s names into each other’s shoulders, no sentimentality here, no sir, then stood b
ack and all three of us looked each other up and down, seeing what the past year had done to us.
We were so busy doing that, that Daniel snuck up on us before I got his sign out. He said, “I see how it is,” out of nowhere. “You make a fuss for all you white guys, but you don’t give a damn about the Korean.”
“Man, I am not white!” Andy and Danny had gone around on that one for fifty years and would keep doing it til they were both dead. I scrambled for Dan’s sign, held it up, checked it, and flipped it right-side up, putting as big an innocent grin on my face as I could manage.
“You’re still a goddamned sneak, Danny.” Danny had been our secret weapon, the American-born Korean who walked in and out of enemy territory without ever raising an eyebrow. He was the only one of us without any body scars from Korea. Fifty years later I still didn’t know just how deep the other ones cut, the ones on his heart. “Thought your plane didn’t get in for another twenty minutes.”
“And you’re still goddamned blind.” Another round of hugs and hand-shakes went around, Dan saying, “Tailwind, we got in early,” between greetings. If I looked good, he looked like an anti-aging commercial. He had that luck of the draw a lot of Asians seemed to get, the tight smooth skin over bone structure most women would kill for, and his hair was still black as pitch. He coulda been anywhere from his late fifties to a couple weeks older than God, and I knew for a fact he was the oldest of us, turnin’ eighty-three in another week. He stepped free of Ack’s hug, then, with a sigh, took his sign from his duffel.
It said WHERE THE HELL’S THE LIMO, ACK?
We all stared at it, hardly understanding. Then the breath wheezed out of me, my chest feelin’ as heavy as it had on the plane. “Wait, what the hell, where’s Mick?”
“His wife called me this morning. You guys had all left already.” Dan was up in San Francisco, the shortest flight any of us had to get to San Diego. My shoulders fell. There wasn’t much else Dan had to say, though he went ahead and said it: “He’d been having a hard time breathing the past few days, she said. He went to the doctor, they said he was fine, so he was planning to come up just like always. He went to bed early last night, and when she came to bed…”
“Dammit. Dammit.” Seventeen of us had come back together from Korea. Time and trouble had taken most of us away, but these five—me, Andy, Dan, Mick and Dave—we’d stuck through. The last three years it had been us five, and just last night it had looked like it would be all five of us again.
Andy had his hand pressed against his chest, same way as I’d had gettin’ off the plane. We all looked like we couldn’t breathe, and I sure felt like the breath had been knocked outta me. The older we got the less like a crime it felt when one of us died, ‘cause there was nothing so bad as a kid losin’ out on all those years ahead of him, but that didn’t make it easier. One of us muttered, “Son of a bitch,” and we all nodded.
“The limo’s waiting,” The Ack-Man finally said. “Let’s go have a drink. It’s after five in Korea.”
“She’s a kid,” I said into my beer. Green beer, an Alaskan Amber with food coloring. I’d had enough to drink that I’d stopped tellin’ the bozos behind the bar not to color my booze, and we’d all had enough to drink that we’d stopped talking about Mick and were on to our own lives. “She’s a mess. Nah. She was a mess. She’s growing out of it.”
“Lemme get this straight.” Dan leaned forward over a cup of tea. Not even in the worst of it in Korea had I ever seen him drink anything stronger than tea. “You’ve got a twenty-seven year old girlfriend and you think she’s a mess?”
I couldn’t help laughin’. Alla Joanne’s friends thought she had somethin’ going on with me, but I hadn’t figured on my friends thinking I had somethin’ going on with her. “Ain’t like that, Danny-boy.”
“Oh God,” said The Ack. “Don’t let him start singing. I’m not drunk enough for that. Hell, Mick’s not drunk enough for that, and you can bet he’s out-drinking the Devil right now.”
“The girl’s magic,” I said to the beer, and my buddies, the guys I’d known a lifetime, all burst out laughing.
“Last time he said that was about Annie.” Andy went from grinning to solemn and raised his glass of dark ale. “Miss that lady.”
I tapped my glass against his. “Every day. But this girl, Jo, she’s real magic. I had a heart attack last year.”
That shut them up, three old guys sitting around a boozy table in what woulda been a smoky bar, back in the day. Little bastion of quiet, that was us, all silence and worry on a Friday evening in a pub full of kids. Lotta them were in the military, Navy kids who reminded us of ourselves, ‘cept about a million years younger. The Ack still wore his hair in a crew cut, and Andy didn’t have any. Maybe we looked ex-military to the kids, or maybe we just looked old and boring. Either way, they left us alone, but when we got quiet it spread out around the bar for a minute. Then The Ack got himself together enough to say, “You never said. What’s the cardiologist say?”
“That I got the heart of a twenty-five year old.”
Andy, deadpan, said, “Thought you said she was twenty-seven,” and all of us laughed again. The kids in the bar relaxed and the noise level went back up. Nothin’ like a bunch of old farts to bring down the mood, I guess.
Ack waved Andy’s joke off, though. “How’s that possible? Don’t get me wrong, Muldoon, but you were a smoker. That leaves marks.”
“It’s the girl. Joanne. The kid’s got magic.” I looked between my old buddies, then pushed the beer aside and sighed. “Don’t give me those faces. You remember the war.”
I didn’t look at Danny when I said it, but the other two did. His eyebrows beetled at me and I shrugged. “Your culture. Your demons.”
“My goddamned demons are the same one every other American kid has,” Dan muttered. “Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and not meeting Marilyn Monroe.”
“You knew what they were called.” From anybody outside of this circle, Andy’s tone woulda been accusatory. It almost was anyway.
“I didn’t know how the hell to get rid of ‘em, did I.” Danny drained his tea with an emphasis that woulda gone better with a shot of Jack Daniels, but a guy worked with what he had. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
We all grunted. None of us wanted to talk about it. None of us ever had, except obliquely. But there’d been something fucked up in the Korean nights, something different from the war. Not worse, but harder to understand. We understood the war. We hated it, we were scared of it, we didn’t want it, but we got it. Stop ‘em at the 38th parallel, blast them yellow Reds to hell. Billy Joel was a kid while me and these guys were fighting that war, but he got it too. War was easy to understand.
The thing that came pressin’ down on your buddies, stealin’ their breath like cats were supposed to steal babies’, the thing that screamed all night like a Korean banshee, the things you didn’t quite see from the corner of your eye and died tryin’ to chase down, those were harder to understand. Danny’d had names for them, names his Korean-born parents had told him. Stay away from ‘em, he’d said, they’ll steal your soul and eat your bones.
We’d listened. Our whole damned platoon had listened, even when it meant us sittin’ on each other to keep ourselves from goin’ out after the sound of a shriekin’ baby that just wasn’t quite right. We’d listened, ‘cause Danny was our secret weapon and there ain’t no point in havin’ one if you don’t use it for all it’s worth. But other troops hadn’t had him, and a lot of their guys were the kind who went missing in action, no body or explanation to send home to his family, just a flag and an apology.
We lost two guys that way. Reckless Rick, he was always gonna get himself killed one way or another, but we found his body the next day, lookin’ drowned when we all knew there wasn’t any water for miles. And the other Andy, Dandy Andy, who the prettiest guy in our unit. Couldn’t keep his hands off the girls, or their hands off him. He’d gone off with the most beautiful local girl any of us had seen, an
d he’d come back in the morning white-faced and shaking. Never said a word, just died by noon, and when the doctors stripped his body to put him in dress greens, he looked like a hundred vampire leeches had gotten to him.
After that everybody listened to Danny, and listened good. He never knew how to stop ‘em, just to stay the hell away, so that’s what we did. And now, fifty years later, we all sat there starin’ into our beers, still tryin’ ta stay the hell away.
‘cept I’d spent the past fifteen months hangin’ out with a girl who wouldn’ta done that, even if it’d been the smart thing to do. Especially if it’d been the smart thing. It didn’t matter that they wouldn’t believe me. What mattered was trying to make them believe there were people out there who could fight the monsters.
And maybe, just a little, it mattered to me that they learned I was one of ‘em. “I do wanna talk about it,” I said abruptly. “Because didja know every one of us who came back from the war, every single one of us has died of a heart attack?”
They didn’t. I could see it in their eyes. Andy rubbed his chest again, makin’ me pull a deep breath too, just to make sure I could. “Every one of us, even when we were young. Died of a heart attack in our sleep. That’s thirteen heart attacks.”
“Lots of people die of heart attacks. You just said you almost did too.”
“Yeah, but—” All of a sudden I felt sorry for Jo. You couldn’t just say, “Yeah, but I was witched into it,” even if it was true. The poor girl had spent the last year trying to offer up sensible explanations where none existed, and now that I was trying to, it was harder than it looked. “But I had Joanne,” I finished.
They laughed at me again. I couldn’t blame ‘em. “Arright, arright, yeah, I got myself a sweet young thing and she healed my heart. Gotta use that big fat military retirement check for somethin’, right?”
Ack-Man snorted. “You can use it to buy me another drink. Mick would’ve had us all under the table by now. Let’s show him he’s not forgotten.”
