Private Demons

by Robert Masello

  “There's a village not far ahead,” Pridi suggested.

  But Brendan didn't want to stop where there were people; there'd be too much explaining to do, the ambulance would be too much of a curiosity, everyone would be craning their necks to get a glimpse of the patient in back. What he wanted was just a remote, quiet spot, clear enough of the trees and roadside vegetation to cut down on the mosquitoes and pick up on any little breeze that might be stirring. Just past the village that Pridi had mentioned, he found it—a small, dusty turnoff with a hard trail that led down, through a thick curtain of trees, toward the river. He pulled the ambulance off the road, turned off the rumbling engine, and flicked off the headlight; instantly, they were plunged into an almost total darkness and silence. But Brendan could feel his body still vibrating from the hours of travel.

  “What do we do now?” Pridi asked. He sounded as if he could have gone on for another twenty miles.

  “We relax.”

  “Here?”

  “Here.”

  “Can we listen to the radio?” His hand was already reaching for the knob.

  “No . . . I don't want to strain the battery.”

  Pridi dropped his hand back into his lap, clearly not ready to relax yet. Brendan put his head back against the cracked vinyl of the seat, and closed his eyes. He still felt as if he was moving, bumping along the rutted road, peering out through the bug-spattered window, clutching the steering wheel with hot, wet hands. He longed for an ice-cold beer, an air-conditioned room, and maybe, since he was dreaming, a very rare porterhouse steak and a baked potato piled high with sour cream and chives. Followed by another couple of ice-cold beers. Followed by a big white bed, with crisp white sheets and a heavy feather pillow like his grandmother in Indiana used to have. Even with his head against the back of the seat, he could almost feel that pillow, cool and firm, and hear the air conditioner humming in the window. He was almost asleep already.

  “What about going to the river for a swim?” Pridi said. “It can't be far off.”

  Brendan opened his eyes, rubbed them with the flats of his hands. He thought he heard Molloy stir in the back.

  “I'll come right back afterwards,” Pridi said, already opening the glove compartment. “And I won't lose the flashlight, I promise.”

  Brendan had to hold him by the arm to keep him from leaping out of the seat. “It's too dark, it's too late, and it's too dangerous to go swimming now. Put the light back.”

  Pridi did, with reluctance.

  To make it up to him, Brendan said, “I'm going to check on Molloy now. I'll need your help.”

  This being even better than a swim, Pridi closed the glove compartment and scrambled out of the cab of the ambulance. By the time Brendan got there, Pridi had already thrown open the rear doors and climbed up into the back; he was squatting on his haunches there, in his madras shorts and green thongs, next to the gurney on which Molloy was lying.

  Molloy was awake now, his right eye covered with a white patch, his left one glassy and staring up at the dim interior light. He moaned softly as the back of the car jounced under Brendan's added weight.

  “How are you doing, buddy?” Brendan asked, in the casual manner he'd perfected on the battlefields of Viet Nam. His voice was always friendly, undisturbed, almost offhanded, as if to imply that none of the injuries he was looking at, no matter how grim, were anything to worry about. It was meant to be calm and reassuring . . . even when he had known it was likely to be the last thing the wounded soldier was ever going to hear. Correction. Especially when he had known it was likely to be the last thing he'd ever hear.

  Molloy licked his cracked lips and mumbled, “Got to go topside . . . got to relieve Skolnick. It's my watch. Got to go topside.”

  “It's all right,” Brendan said, drawing down the top sheet, wet with sweat. “You're not on the ship anymore. You're not at sea.” All of his bandages were soaked through, and stuck to his skin. Brendan motioned for Pridi to get the supplies kit. “You're in the back of an ambulance, heading north from Bangkok. The roads are for shit; I'm sorry about that.”

  Pridi unlatched the metal box, filled with the supplies Calais's money had bought, and put it on the floor beside the gurney. Brendan slipped a straw into the plastic water jug and held it to Molloy's lips.

  “You can start removing those bandages,” Brendan said to Pridi while Molloy sucked greedily on the straw. “But be very careful.”

  Pridi knew this part of the routine pretty well; he doused his hands with rubbing alcohol, dried them on a paper towel, then took the scissors and began cutting through the bandages that were wrapped around Molloy's arms, his legs, patches of his torso. Brendan put the water jug away.

  “Lookin’ good, my man,” Brendan said, “lookin’ good.” Funny, how easily he could fall back into those familiar cadences, expressions. “We're gonna rest right here for the night, and go on again in the morning. Where we're going isn't much farther.”

  Molloy's left eye shifted, to focus now on Brendan. He seemed to be coming around a little. “Where we're going . . .” he said, before trailing off.

  “Where we're going is a convent up-country, where there's someone I think can help you.” Bad psychology, he thought; display total confidence. “Someone I know can help you,” he amended. “Your body's healing; all you have to do is hang in there and in another few months you're going to be right as rain.” If only that were true. “But I know that your spirit is still troubled, that you're trying to get some answers to questions that keep coming at you, over and over again, no matter what you do.” Questions about salvation, about the Devil, about what Skolnick knew before he'd died. “The person I'm taking you to can give you all the answers,” Brendan said. “She can give you peace.”

  Molloy's gaze was unwavering.

  “She's a saint,” Brendan said, “a living saint.”

  Pridi had finished removing the bandages—they lay in a sticky pile on the floor—and with Brendan's help he cleaned the wounds and raw patches, then unwound a fresh roll of bandages and recovered the worst areas; others were left to breathe overnight. Brendan checked Molloy's temperature, pulse, blood pressure, then opened a can of soft rations and spoon-fed him as much as he would take.

  “Water,” Molloy croaked, and Brendan gave him more. When he'd finished drinking, Brendan prepared a syringe with enough Demerol to get him safely through the night. He was just about to give him the shot, when Molloy said, “No, no, don't give me any more of that,” in a voice tinged with alarm. He shook his head on the pillow, and tried to sit up.

  Brendan put a hand on his chest, and gently pressed him down; the straps would have kept him on the cot, regardless. “It's just enough to get you through the night, Kevin. You've got to be well rested for tomorrow.”

  “I've got to be awake tonight,” he said, with some urgency. “They're coming for me tonight.”

  Brendan lowered the syringe. “Who's coming for you tonight?”

  “The dead guys . . . from the boat. If you sail with ‘em once, you've got to sail with ‘em forever. That's what the Devil told me, back at the clinic. The night he ate Krit. You can't dope me up tonight. I've gotta be able to run.”

  If Molloy tried to run, Brendan thought, he'd get about ten feet before his legs gave out. Brendan swabbed a circle on his shoulder with a cotton ball dipped in alcohol. “Nobody's coming for you, tonight or any night. You're safe now. Nothing's going to happen to you. Trust me—you're in the middle of nowhere. They wouldn't even know where to find you.” He held the syringe up to the dome light in the compartment.

  “No, you're wrong,” Molloy insisted, “they can find you anywhere. And you can't get away from them twice.” He saw the syringe and started to thrash on the cot.

  Pridi said, “You want me to hold him still?”

  Brendan hated to do it, but said, “Yes, just for a second.”

  Molloy said, “No, I'm telling you, I can't fight ‘em if I'm all doped up. Don't do it.”

&nb
sp; But Brendan saw no way not to; with Molloy this agitated, there was all the more reason to give him something to ease the pain and calm him down. Getting him into the Temple of Kaliya, where Sister Celeste could see him herself, was going to be rough enough; Molloy had to be as rested and strong and stabilized as possible if he was going to survive the whole ordeal. Pridi pinned his shoulder to the cot and Brendan gave him the injection. Molloy stared at Brendan, with his one pale blue eye, and said, “Goddamn you for that—goddamn you to Hell.”

  Brendan, who'd heard worse over the years, was shaken nonetheless. It was the coldness, the implacability, of Molloy's voice that chilled him to the bone.

  “You'll be glad I gave you that,” Brendan said, reaching down to pull up the fresh sheet that Pridi had tucked in. “First thing in the morning we're going to be out of here again.” He reached up to the roll of mosquito netting that was affixed to the roof above Molloy's head, and draped it down to cover the bed. “Great things are going to happen for you tomorrow,” he said, in the most convincing tone he could muster.

  Molloy, still staring at him from behind the veil of netting, said, “Tomorrow I'll be one of those dead guys, rowing that fat son of a bitch around until the Day of Judgment.”

  Brendan, crouching down in the compartment, felt an actual shiver descend his spine—not so much from what Molloy had said, none of it very different from his ravings at the clinic, but once again from the way he'd said it. The more alert and rational Molloy seemed, the crazier his fears and predictions became. His delusions were delivered with a precision and urgency that made them seem, if it weren't for their content, almost sensible.

  “Get some sleep,” Brendan said, flicking off the feeble dome light. “Pridi and I will be right here, all night, and nothing's going to happen to you.”

  He climbed down out of the ambulance, leaving the doors open. Taking several cans of rations and the canteen, he sat down on a fallen log by the side of the road and served up dinner. Pridi ate his with his customary speed and absorption. It reminded Brendan of the way the grunts had eaten theirs in the field, wolfing it down to sate their hunger and, even more to the point, to keep from having to stop and really taste the stuff. Sometimes it seemed to Brendan that he'd been eating canned rations all his life.

  In point of fact, he almost had been. He'd shipped out to Nam, as a medical corpsman, in the fall of ‘68. He'd considered becoming a “conscientious objector,” but that didn't feel right either. He'd been raised in a pretty observant Catholic household, on the west side of Chicago, but he'd also been raised to be a proud, and even pugnacious, Irish American boy. Serving as a medic seemed like a pretty good compromise between conscience and patriotism. So he'd taken it.

  And then Nam had done its own number on his head. Nothing like a little death and destruction, Brendan discovered, to show you what you really believed in . . . and after zipping up his tenth, or twentieth, body bag, he'd known that this wasn't it. Not all this killing, not all this blood, not all this hatred and anger and misery. He knew then that, if he came out alive, he was going to spend the rest of his allotted time patching things up, making life better, easing pain wherever he found it. And Southeast Asia left him plenty to work with.

  The Dominicans showed him how.

  Pridi gathered up the empty tins—a full sack of scrap metal would get him a few baht back in Bangkok—and asked Brendan where he should sleep.

  “Take the back of the ambulance,” Brendan said. “I'll sleep in front.”

  “But you're bigger than I am. Maybe you should—”

  “Take the back,” Brendan interrupted, wearily. “And wake me if there's any problem with Molloy.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “Any kind.”

  Pridi stood up and brushed off his madras shorts—he was very proud of those shorts, they'd come in a relief package all the way from an American city called Chicago—and said good night. Brendan took hold of one of his hands, gave it a friendly squeeze, and said, “Good night, Pridi. And thank you for coming along. You've been a big help.”

  Pridi smiled, but stayed right where he was. He looked a little troubled.

  “What is it?” Brendan said.

  “I was just thinking . . . about those things he was saying.” He glanced over at the open doors at the back of the ambulance. “They aren't true, are they? About dead men, and the Devil, and eating Dr. Krit?”

  “No, of course not,” Brendan said. He'd hoped Pridi wasn't paying attention. “They're what's called hallucinations—crazy dreams that he has because he's so sick and in so much pain. Remember when you had the fever at the clinic, and you didn't know what you were doing or saying?”

  “Dr. Krit told me I got into the chapel one night and thought they were going to show a movie.”

  “That's right,” Brendan said, “it's just like that. Only the movies he's seeing in his head are really bad ones, and he can't stop watching. We're taking him to a person who can help him to stop. Who can heal him. In his body . . . and in his mind.” Or so at least his theory went. Brendan thought of it as killing two birds with one stone—in one fell swoop, he'd save Molloy and get concrete proof of Sister Celeste's powers. Powers he could then attest to, and provide direct confirmation of, to Rome.

  Or so at least the theory went.

  He watched as Pridi crossed over to the ambulance and climbed inside without so much as a sound. His feet, with the green thongs still on them, poked out through the rear doors. He should have told him to rub on some more insect repellent.

  Brendan got up himself now, and putting his hands on the small of his back, tried to straighten out. He rolled his head, and let out a sigh. He was almost tempted to take that swim he'd forbidden Pridi. But he was too damn tired to do anything but go on over to the ambulance and lie down across the front seat, with his legs angled into the well on the passenger side. One of his shoulders butted up against the base of the steering wheel, but he figured that that would keep him from trying to roll over in his sleep. He was so low down in the seat, the only things he could see, out the lowered window on the opposite side, were the swaying fronds of a coconut palm. They moved, very gently, back and forth, in an almost hypnotic fashion, and the next thing he knew he'd closed his eyes and fallen into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  It was still dark when he found himself abruptly awake again and not knowing why. His body was still numb with exhaustion, and stiff from staying in one position. But his eyes were open and he was awake. The fronds of the palm tree were swaying in the moonlight. He had no idea what time it was; he struggled to get his left arm out from under the steering wheel so he could see his watch. The luminescent dial showed two-thirty. And then, he remembered—or thought he did—what had awakened him. It was a cry, a human cry. Had he been dreaming, after all? Had he been having a nightmare? He didn't think so; he thought he'd heard a cry—no, more of a scream, really—from off in the jungle. If he concentrated, he could almost hear it again right now—a single, prolonged scream.

  He sat up quickly, and looked through the little window that opened into the rear of the ambulance. He could make out the white of the linens on the gurney, but not much else. It was too dark in there. He popped the button on the car door he'd been leaning against, and jumped out. For a second, his legs buckled. He straightened up, and limped to the back of the ambulance.

  The sheet from the gurney trailed down over the rear bumper. But Molloy and Pridi were both gone.

  Pridi he could almost understand. He might have decided to sneak off for a swim.

  But Molloy? How could Molloy have loosened his restraints and overcome the drugs enough to get away?

  And who had screamed? And from what direction?

  He looked all around, across the paddy fields and low brush on the far side of the road, then into the denser brush and trees that grew between the road and the river.

  They must have gone toward the river. And they'd probably taken that narrow hard trail that led throug
h the trees. Something—the scream?—told him that they hadn't gone far.

  He went to the glove compartment, grabbed the flashlight, then studied the dirt at the start of the trail. Even to his unpracticed eye, it looked like people had just been through here; he could almost make out footprints. But had they gone together? Brendan couldn't imagine Pridi disobeying him to that extent. And he also couldn't imagine Molloy managing something like this on his own. None of it made any sense whatsoever.

  But using the flashlight to stay on the path, he plunged into the dense jungle growth. It was like walking into a steam bath; the air was hot and close, and the leaves overhead shed droplets of moisture. His shirt clung to his body like a wet bandage; thank God, he thought, he wasn't wearing the cassock. His sandals slapped loosely against the soles of his feet, and occasionally a bird, whose slumber he had disturbed, screeched unseen from a nearby branch. The path took a long and meandering course, and Brendan saw no further sign of anyone's passing. Nor did he hear anything except the expected noises of jungle life, of furtive burrowings, calling birds, once or twice the chattering of a monkey in the canopy overhead. But he could smell the river.

  And he could smell something else—something he needed a second to identify—as he got even closer to the water. The smell was faint, but familiar, and took him back to the firefights in Nam, when even under the smoke and the cordite and the gunpowder and the burning brush, you could smell it . . . the unmistakable scent of freshly spilled blood, in the open air.

  “Jesus Christ,” he murmured under his breath, scrambling up a low rise, “please don't let it be. Please don't let it be.” He wished suddenly for a weapon—any sort of weapon.

  He topped the rise, his eyes and flashlight trained on the ground to keep from tripping over the loose vines and tendrils, and suddenly collided with something, something right in the middle of the trail.

  He looked up in surprise. The thing had fallen back. But it was still standing in front of him. Brendan raised the beam of the flashlight.