Ghost Point

by James A. Hetley

  GHOST POINT

  James A. Hetley

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  July 1, 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-409-3

  Copyright © 2014 James A. Hetley

  Dedication

  To the entire Book View Café team that made this happen

  I

  The mortars rained out of the hot ’Nam sky, Crump! Crump! Crump! into the shit-stinking paddy mud. Den Carlsson threw himself flat, scanned the battlefield, and the third round always took the looie as he stood noble and inspirational out in the middle of harm’s way like they taught him in ROTC and damn near chopped him in half at the waist. He fell the same way every time, dreamtime-slow leaving his legs and hips standing for a moment while his chest and head toppled like a felled tree and his face showed dumb surprise. AKs chattered from the treeline, and Brownie kept the pig hammering back at them from behind a dike. At least that M60 made the bastards keep their frigging heads down.

  Now Red was on the horn, trying to call in coordinates for a fire mission or some air. Dammit, this was supposed to be a friendly ville, and they landed in a hot LZ instead. Then Charlie lobbed in another salvo of mortars and the paddy muck rained down and Eason gave that startled grunt you get when high-speed metal stops in the chest cavity but he stared at his arm instead. Blood spurted from a ragged gash, bright arterial blood with the pulse in it, and he reached out to Carlsson with his other hand.

  Den slithered up and over the dike, slugs and shrapnel whining past his ears. He felt the thump of choppers in his gut, gunships probably. Already the fire slackened, Charlie fading back into the boonies to let the friendlies cowering in the ville eat napalm and iron in his place.

  Den clamped on to the pressure point, high on Eason’s arm. With his other hand and teeth, he tore a bandage pack open and slapped its wrapper over the chest wound, trying to seal a sucking hole the size of a silver dollar.

  The treeline burst into orange flame, black smoke, streamers of white phosphorus smoke arching high and falling back. Thatch flew into the sky as the ville dissolved under the incoming.

  Eason . . . young, strong, black, damn near the first black man Den had ever known. Peppercorn hair and gang scars and jive talk and joints and bro’s dap, ten months in-country and honkies can stay the hell out of the Brother’s Hooch. He’d taken Den into the squad as a green troop, kept his white ass alive and seen him make corporal and buck sergeant by the simple process of surviving.

  And now he lay dying under Den’s hand.

  Den stuck his head up over the dike. “Medic!”

  “Frat’s down!” Sounded like Jelly, over on the left flank.

  So Fratelli had also bought a piece of it. Figured. Charlie went for rank, radio, and relief. That cross on Frat’s helmet was as good as a bull’s-eye.

  “Hey Red, you still kicking?”

  “Yo!”

  “Medevac!”

  “On the way!”

  Too damn slow. Den felt rage building inside, overpowering the helplessness. That damned butter-bar looie, he didn’t matter. Another month of his frigging rotsie regs and gung-ho head-on tactics, someone would have fragged him, anyway. He was more dangerous than Charlie. But Frat was a good man, brave as hell, conchie or not. And Den knew, dream-memory of things out of sight, Green had bit the big one, first round incoming, short-timer with two weeks left before he punched his ticket back to the World.

  And Eason. Den felt the life ebbing, through the flow of blood he couldn’t stop, through the drowning bubbling lung, through the cold seeping up from the paddy mud until he could feel it spreading across that glossy walnut skin.

  Eason stirred and looked up. “Hey . . . Bro.”

  “Be easy, man. Chopper’s on the way.”

  “Bull . . . shit, honkie. Take . . . you, patch yo’ white ass up . . . .” The deep Louisiana accent faded into bubbles.

  Den felt the fire burning deep in his calf, where some jagged chunks of iron were settling in for a visit. Yeah, they’d patch that up, shoot him full of vitamins, have him back in the boonies in a couple weeks max.

  Rage boiled in him, to the point where he’d seen men snap and stand up and play John Wayne, “Come and get me, Commie bastards!” with an M60 in one hand firing from the hip and cartridge casings spouting like an arterial wound, tracers washing the jungle with their red glare, and then the switch flipped and icy calm flooded through. He could be a hero, or he could save a life.

  Something twisted, under his heart, and a deep hollow silence settled around him in the roar and chatter of death and said, “The ravens can feast on other flesh.” Or that was what he heard, again dreamtime-slow, out of words that weren’t in English. He clamped down with his fingers. Eason’s pulse steadied. He felt one chunk of iron decide that it had really slid along a rib instead of punching straight through into the lung, while the other settled into muscle a scant quarter-inch from that throbbing artery. The black man twitched and his eyes grew wide until the whites stood out like blackface makeup.

  “Gris-gris. Man, what be you?”

  Then the medevac swooped down, spraying mud and smoke and shredded rice stalks and noise all over and breaking thoughts about whatever miracle had just occurred. A big man himself, Den shook himself and picked up his two-hundred-fifty pound platoon sergeant like a doll and hauled him to the chopper, shoving him into waiting hands. Then they loaded Frat, and Green, and what was left of the looie, and four troops from third platoon, and five more from first, stacking them up like cordwood. No room for Den, this load. He could still fight.

  The chopper thundered up and clawed into a sharp turn and didi-mau’d with its load of misery and blood. Two hundred yards out, it vanished into a ball of orange and dense black smoke, bits and lumps fluttering down like crippled pigeons. VC tracers laced the sawgrass and rice as Charlie sprang the second ambush.

  o0o

  Sweat drenched the sheets. Dennis Carlsson untangled himself and sat up. Yellow kerosene light washed the walls and ceiling, the Aladdin mantel lamp he left turned low all night so he’d know where he was when the nightmares took him and he woke like this. The old schoolhouse clock ticked away, slicing time with its pendulum.

  4:15, mid-December—hours until the first faint hints of dawn.

  He took slow deep breaths and listened to night noises, setting himself in the here and now—the boom of surf and whine of wind, the creak of the weathered boathouse shifting its way into a Maine winter. Shutters rattled on the west side, the landward side. The nor’easter seemed to have blown itself out to sea.

  His heartbeat slowed. Eight years now, 1979, and the dreams still wouldn’t quit. At least this time the flashbacks broke off early. He didn’t have them often—not like some of his buddies from the vet group up in Naskeag Falls.

  Usually the dream went on, through the rest of the blood and fire of his last day as Uncle Sam’s superhero. And his memory, helpful as always, filled in the rest of the scene. He’d stand up in some kind of bulletproof berserker rage and gather the troops and charge the ambush, working the men like fighting machines across the paddies and the dikes and through the ruined ville crackling with flame and heavy with the bitter smoke of burning thatch, calling in coordinates that came to him out of the blue and walking the roar and flame and iron of the support a perfect fifty yards in front of them.

  Being awake, being rational, even that didn’t explain how he’d known just where those Charlies had set their mortar pits, what trees hid the snipers, how he could fire a three-shot burst, head shots that killed the three NVA cadre manning an HMG. Then he’d taken over that gun, a model he’d never touched before, and swept the field with it until he ran out of targets just as he ran out of ammo. Other things, things
reported by other soldiers that he didn’t remember doing, until they kicked Charlie’s ass and he faded away into green shadows.

  The things he didn’t remember . . . those scared him more than the memories.

  The movie closed with him limping back to the LZ using a Chinese AK-47 as a cane. Then he rode the Huey-bird off to white sheets and screaming ward-mates and a raging infection that led to necrosis and amputation. Surgeons cut commie metal and dead flesh out of his body and some chicken colonel pinned good honest U. S. of A. metal on the bedding and he got the real reward for conspicuous valor, which was a one-way ticket back to the World with a GI replacement foot.

  He heaved himself up from the mattress lying flat on the floor and strapped on his plastic foot and limped across to the woodstove. Long practice raked the coals forward and stacked seasoned rock-maple splits on them and adjusted the stovepipe damper. That should keep the ancestral frost giants away from this bear’s den for a few more hours.

  Dennis compared people to animals he knew, to judge their characters. He always thought of himself as a big shaggy blond bear—slow, heavy, shy, quiet, avoiding people and trouble whenever possible. Although ’Nam had proven he could think and move damned fast when he had to.

  He pulled on a wool shirt and pawed through a tangle of pants, hunting for a pair that looked reasonably clean. No point in trying to go back to sleep—he’d tried that before, and it never worked. And the dark hours could be beautiful. He didn’t have to fit his life into anyone’s idea of a schedule.

  Pants and socks and slippers, the usual dance, Dennis leaned against a section of wall to keep his balance while tottering on plastic toes. The rehab folks had always called that thing “the prosthesis” or “the artificial limb.” As if adding more syllables made it more elegant. It was his foot, one syllable, as plain and simple as a pirate’s wooden leg. Sometimes it even felt like a foot. He’d dropped a cast-iron fry pan on it the other day and yelped in pain as if he’d bruised flesh instead of polyethylene.

  Or whatever. One of the endless stream of faceless docs or techs had told him what the material really was. It wasn’t skin and bone, anyway, and that was the only thing that mattered. He’d traded blood and skin and bone for a handful of medals and a pension check.

  He donated that each month to the Vet’s Center. A Carlsson didn’t need the nation’s grudging pittance for blood they’d rather forget. Anything he needed, he could buy. Grandpa’s money saw to that. Anything except a real foot, and an explanation of how he’d done the things that happened both before and after that chopper had vanished into smoke.

  “Hysterical strength,” they’d called it. The way a mother lifts a car off her screaming child. Dad gave it a different name, pulled out of deep in their Jutlander heritage. Berserker. What it boiled down to was, he’d turned into some kind of perfect Hollywood killing machine, Government-Issue Gung-ho Sarge.

  That was what gave him the nightmares. Worse than the memories of what they’d done to him—remembering that thing that had come out of nowhere and grabbed him and possessed him. That Thing forced him to live alone on this ancestral finger of rock thrust out into the Gulf of Maine, three miles from the nearest human and ten miles from the wide place in the road that passed for the nearest village. If he went crazy again, the only one he could hurt would be himself.

  Sleeping alone. Living alone. Sometimes that hurt like a knife in the gut, but it sure as shit hurt less than a little bit of oral lore in the vets’ group—waking up to find you were strangling your wife in a combat flashback. The guy had stopped in time, she’d survived, but she’d moved out that same morning. With the kids. And he’d lived the next three years in various bars, before committing suicide. Not a chance Dennis cared to take.

  He still tasted the reek of napalm and blazing thatch, the charred meat, the sweet tang of explosives and gunpowder. Kerosene lamps had a downside—they touched off memories with their smell. Kerosene and woodsmoke in the air and the night’s used chamber pot, and his brain supplied the rest. But the power grid never had found Ghost Point on the map, and Old Jake up on his tower didn’t pull enough electricity out of the wind to waste on lights or furnace burners or deep-well water pumps.

  Instant coffee—hot water always waited on the back of the cookstove out in the kitchen. Instant served fine when he felt this groggy, quick and bitter and hot and packing that vital caffeine rush. Save the good stuff for when his tongue could taste the difference. He stoked up the black iron stove, pumped some more icy water into the kettle, and pulled another kerosene lantern from its shelf. Following its yellow light, he limped around this lair of rooms converted out of storage and workrooms and a boatman’s apartment from the forgotten world of ’Twenties money, sipping pseudo-coffee, checking the fine wash of snow blown past double windows onto the kitchen counter and melting now that the cookstove muttered to itself and shoved heat back out to the walls.

  More snow waited out in the dark hollow barn of the boatroom, a snowdrift two feet deep driven in around the loose sliding doors across the roller ramp down to the inlet. Snow had even blown up onto the pigeon-spotted tarp over the old Alden sloop, its mast pulled and laid along the deck for the winter, one September twenty-thirty years ago and the boat hadn’t tasted water since. She’d probably sink like a rock if he tried, hull planks bone dry, caulking loose, stays and lines and even the tarp rotten and rat-chewed with the years.

  That described Ghost Point in a nutshell—an abandoned estate left to the storms and mice and coyotes, burned-out main house, boathouse serving as a hermit’s lair, carriage house with two dust-coated cars that hadn’t run since Eisenhower called the White House home. Another garage sat out at the Point Road gate and the plowed gravel, with a four-wheel-drive GMC pickup that did run if you asked it nicely.

  Warm fur butted his leg, his meat ankle, and he reached his free hand down and rubbed tattered ears. Sandy purred back, an old yellow tomcat with one blind eye and as many battle-scars as Den, fellow resident of the Ghost Point Veterans’ Home. The two of them made a handsome pair. Dennis took the cat’s hint and limped back to his kitchen, stopping in the frozen storeroom for a couple of mackerel from an ice chest. One for the cat, one for the human. One into a tin pie-plate on the floor, Sandy would gnaw it at his leisure, one into a dish in the stove’s warming oven to thaw for human breakfast.

  First thing, though, he had other obligations in the breakfast department. Dennis shrugged into his heavy Filson jacket, all wool and damn near as durable as a tin roof, and dug out a wool Balaclava and thick warm gloves. Boots, meat foot and plastic foot, tottering balance game again, automatic. He lifted snowshoes off their wall peg—bear-paws with leather bindings and rawhide lacing that he made sure to hang up every time so the mice couldn’t add a little protein to their diet. He’d found that his GI foot worked fine with snowshoes. Couldn’t do a decent job on cross-country skis, the “kick” just wasn’t there, but snowshoes didn’t need a living ankle and toes.

  Nor’easter—he thought about wind angles and chose the side door to the boatroom, the most likely to have blown clear through the storm. Black shadows and ghostly silver-white greeted him, Christmas-card spruces and pines with their load of new snow, smooth fresh rounded drifts under a waning half moon, diamond stars. Brutal or not, Maine winter held a pure stark beauty that always grabbed him by his throat. The air crackled and hummed around him, dry even with the surf close enough to glaze salt ice on the boathouse in a high sea and tide.

  The drifts made a packed ramp down from the door and landing, four steps, more than two feet deep of wind-slab that barely noticed his snowshoes and weight. Under the trees by the animal pens, though, the drifts lay loose and fluffy—even with the snowshoes he’d sink out of sight if he wandered from his trail. That led to Bimbo first, the blind whitetail doe, getting cedar tips and feed pellets. She heard him coming and stirred from her drifted bed beside the windbreak. His route fed the herbivores before his clothing picked up any of the carnivore re
ek, to cut down on the panic factor.

  Den worked his way through the convalescent ward, talking nonsense in a quiet stream that calmed the animals. State-licensed wildlife rehab, most of his patients ended up back in the hungry cold taking their chances, only the permanent cripples staying on through winter. That final day in the boonies had cut him away from the human race, but it had given him a gift in payment. Animals trusted him, and he’d found he could sometimes twist reality for healing them just as he’d done with Eason.

  Fucking lot of good that had done.

  He finished up with Peg-leg Pete and Hop-along Cassidy, the coyote missing one paw from a trap and the bobcat on three legs from the same back-country nemesis. It was Pete’s turn for a day out, so Dennis left that pen door latched back open and the coyote bounded loose through the snow, biting at imagined mice, burrowing, throwing white plumes right and left. He could run away, but he wouldn’t. Evening would find him back in the pen and waiting for another free meal.

  Dennis paused and savored the night after feeding Cassidy, the bobcat muttering over a frozen moose rib from roadkill out on the Federal Road. Night still hung black and silver around him, the moon and stars crystal clear, glinting from the black waves out in the bay. Red lights blinked like a colossal Christmas tree out there, a whole forest of Christmas trees, the navy base with its pincushion of radio masts on the next point over.

  Some Navy base. The biggest ship based there was a harbor launch they used to patrol the shoreline every week or so. NavComGruAc Cold Harbor, Naval Communications Group Activity, submarine fleet communications. The base used so much power they had their own generator station. When they cranked up their megawatt VLF transmitters, Den’s radios went haywire. He couldn’t even play records on the stereo due to cross-talk and intermod.

  In some of the closest houses, you could transcribe Morse code from fluorescent lamps glowing in the dark—long slow dots and dashes that could take an hour to send a message. Something about the VLF system took forever to get messages through salt water. Not that you’d learn any secrets writing the stuff down—crypto transmissions—but you sure as hell knew when the navy felt talkative.