Ghost Point

by James A. Hetley

  He took another swallow. “Yeah. Now you’ve met Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s resident Charlie Cong. Look on the bright side. You don’t have to work with her. I do.”

  “You could always frag her.”

  Rick seemed to think about that. “Nah, waste of a good grenade. She’s a true cast-iron bitch—shrapnel would bounce right off.” Then he turned serious.

  “Try to cut the lady some slack, soldier. Her dad and older brother are in reeducation camps somewhere in the Central Highlands. Mom and sister are Boat People, rotting in a camp in Thailand because some bastard blocked their visas. Couple of other close family killed in the war or MIA. She’s got reason to have a serious case of the ass with the world in general and good ol’ Uncle Samuel in particular.”

  Dennis remembered that face. Her face, give or take a few years, and the grenades, and the spray of blood and flesh and paddy muck as he emptied an entire twenty-round magazine on rock-and-roll. And then the grenade fell from her hand and popped, US Army issue baseball grenade probably straight from a sleeper in an ARVN unit, blowing her right leg off at the hip but she was already a corpse by then, her and her suicide squad. ’Cause that’s what they had to be, out in the open like that.

  It couldn’t be the same woman. Not likely to be a sister, either, that stretched coincidence too far. But if Doctor Tranh had relatives with the Cong, that could explain the blocked visas.

  Hell, the way some Viet families had straddled the fence, that brother or father could be running the reeducation camp. Fucking shadow war, he remembered the top sergeant warning him to set Claymores on his platoon’s flanks in case they drew fire from their ARVN “allies” dug in right next door.

  And that “diplomat” crap—the Diem government had to be a contender for “most corrupt regime” on the modern hit parade. She stank of blood money. Those Bauer parkas, high-grade goose down, cost three, four hundred bucks, more’n a month’s earnings for a Sunrise County clamdigger or logger . . . .

  He remembered plenty of brave Viets, fine men and women, fighting and bleeding and dying for their land, their families, their freedom. And then we bugged out and left them trapped in Hell, and bitches like her got a free pass out . . . .

  He shook himself, shedding memories like a dog coming in out of the rain. He had other questions for Rick, nothing to do with jungles and brown-skinned guerillas and voices from the past. That blood on the ice . . . .

  “Hey, what’s up with the swabbies? They’ve got choppers and frigging Air Guard fighters buzzing around those towers like someone whacked a hornet’s nest. I’d planned on sleeping late this morning.”

  Rick just sat there, sipping coffee, eyes narrowed. Dennis had put his foot in it, asking questions about either of the Navy bases, but Rick still had clearance up the wazoo and drew pay from some Reserve or Guard unit off in Massachusetts. He sometimes played weekend-warrior tag with the perimeter security. “Consulting,” they called it. Euphemism for hide-and-seek, macho style, Green Berets and SEALS and Marines against that civilian contractor, score tied late in the fourth quarter. Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you.

  Speaking of bears . . . .

  “Forget I asked. Hey, another question: What do you know about silver bears that appear out of nowhere and then vanish after dancing around in the moonlight for a while? No tracks coming, no tracks going away?”

  Rick sputtered and coughed and then they spent a minute or two mopping up coffee from the table and Rick’s uniform pants and Den’s jacket. The game warden fetched another cup, sat down, and took a deep breath.

  “Spirit Point. It figures. It just fucking figures. Okay. When was this?”

  “Last night. Or early this morning, more precisely.”

  “Spirit Point—‘Spirit’ would be a better translation than ‘Ghost.’ You know my people always avoided your place?”

  Dennis nodded.

  “Well, it doesn’t have anything to do with ghosts. Not a sacred Indian burial ground or anything. Our stories name it as a place to find visions, to meet the spirits.” He cocked his head. “Skip the jaw-breaker Naskeag title. Algonquin word, Manitou, you ever hear of it?”

  “God?”

  “Not really, not the big boss Judeo-Christian-Muslim guy with the white beard. More a force of nature, one of many.”

  Dennis nodded.

  “Well, Bear is a very powerful Manitou for my people. Powerful enough that I wouldn’t want to go against his will. You need to find out what Bear wants, and do it.”

  He looked troubled. He took another sip of coffee, running it over his tongue like a vintage wine before grimacing. Then he shook his head.

  “You say last night. It can’t be coincidence. Maybe you just got added to the Need-To-Know list. Two nights ago, first night of the storm, two contract guards bought it over at the base. One corpse, one MIA but plenty of blood left behind. That’s what poked the hornet’s nest. Best guess was Russians, Spetsnaz commandos playing tag. Both sides do it—hell, I spent a month on the ground on Kamchatka once. Summer, bugs worse than the Harlan Bog. Ol’ Brother Ivan never knew I was there, but those bugs nearly ate me alive.

  “Anyway. Naval Security called me in this morning, trying to make sense of the tracks. Like hell, after a two day blizzard, no way to get anything more than a rough guess of size and direction. All I can say, man-sized, it or they came from the sea. We thought scuba, like I said, Spetsnaz from a submarine. Now you tell me Bear wants you to do something. Can’t be coincidence. That’s not Russkies. That’s spirit-land business.”

  He sat and thought for a while, quiet, sipping toxic mud disguised as coffee, and Dennis let the silence hang. Then Rick twitched his head to the side, a Naskeag shrug with a grimace that might have been a smile.

  “There’s more. I don’t know this, damn sure you never heard it. Hell, the way those spooks run things, I’m not sure the friggin’ President knows it. But that base was already wound up tighter than a cat in a fiddle-string factory. And I still have good ears.

  “This Navy rating was escorting me down a corridor, making sure I didn’t see anything I shouldn’t with my Army-issue eyes. We passed a door, I suspect it wasn’t supposed to be open, and I heard somebody say ‘like thresher and scorpion.’ Ran that back through my head, capitalized ‘Thresher’ and ‘Scorpion’ and put them in italics, and damn near shit a brick. Submarines, nukes, lost at sea.”

  He took another sip of coffee. “I think someone has lost a sub out on the Georges Bank or the Gulf of Maine. Probably not ours, maybe Russian, could be the friggin’ French for all I know. And both sides want to get their hands on it. That’s what has the brass thinking spies and Spetsnaz.”

  He glared at his coffee cup and shoved it away. “Okay. I’m going to ask Aunt Jean to come down to the point and talk to you. Tell her what you saw and heard. Show her the tracks. Take her seriously. She’s the best Spirit Warrior I’ve ever seen. If her snot-nosed niece tags along, ignore the obnoxious brat or heave her young ass into a snowbank. Your choice.”

  Take her seriously . . . .

  Oh, shit! Aunt Jean. The worst of those Naskeag “Aunts.” You’re in deep kimchee now, Den-boy.

  IV

  Screw Carlsson. Screw him and the lily-white dragon-ship he rode in on.

  Susan glared through the windshield of her ’69 Dodge Dart, hoping against hope that her seething rage could melt the snow and ice streaking the glass where the anemic defroster wouldn’t. The engine still worked fine but she needed a new heater to make it through another Maine winter without freezing to death, and the frame was rusting through. The state didn’t pay wildlife biologists squat. She was not having a good day.

  Fucking racist. I’m an American. Natural-born US citizen, eligible to run for president. In a few more years. Got the birth certificate to prove it.

  But he’d seen her face, seen her skin and eyes and cheekbones and pitiful excuse for a nose, and just about shouted “Gook!” out loud. And dropped his coffe
e mug with the shock that one of them had snuck into the whites-only country club of Sunrise County.

  Naskeags like Rick Bouchard were honorary whites around here, by virtue of owning half the township. She didn’t care too much for him, either, but that was professional friction. They’d been at it more than once, tooth and nail, over the eagle-feather thing—endangered species and exemptions for “indigenous peoples.” Plus, he earned more as a game warden than she did with her PhD and title as a “Biologist.” Veteran’s preference and “Native American” status gave him three pay grades worth of leg up.

  But at least he didn’t swagger into a coffee shop like it was his personal mead-hall. Blond and bearded and bulging-muscled and well over six feet tall, Nordic-handsome like a Barbie sex dream, that bastard Carlsson looked like he should be carrying a pole ax over one shoulder and a screaming Irish girl over the other.

  I’m an American. Couple of generations back, you were the fucking Gook, people turning their backs on you and refusing to serve you in a bar and telling Swede jokes about big dumb shits that talked slow and couldn’t pronounce “W” or “J.” But changing your language is a hell of a lot easier than changing your skin color or the shape of your eyes and nose. How many generations before I get to be an American, you asshole?

  She had that birth certificate. She had those degrees, one from Brandeis and two from Michigan, genuine article. Maybe some of the rest of her tales came out of thin air and wishful thinking, but those were solid facts she could roll up and use to whap the world across its nose. She might be a rootless street-rat with a missing father and dead mother, but she had those.

  Maybe I should do a Bà Trieu number on him. She kicked some serious Chinese ass, back in the long-ago. Of course, then she lost and killed herself. Maybe not a great example.

  Not that Mom ever told me about Vietnamese warrior princesses. Had to learn that on my own, in translation. She wanted a complete break with Vietnam. “All trash. Do not fill mind with trash. You American girl. You learn American history, find American heroes.” And we didn’t have any Vietnamese friends. Knew of two families from over there, long before the Boat People, they wouldn’t even talk to us. Probably because of Dad. Had some Chinese in the neighborhood, a few Japanese. Mom didn’t trust the Chinese, even though she worked for them. Because she worked for them.

  Hated the Japanese. History lesson.

  History lessons kept smacking her in the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. Like today.

  I’m going to whap him with that PhD, if he takes one step out of line. “Mammal Rehab” my little brown ass. I know about those backwoods “rehab” operations. I’ve seen ones that look like Auschwitz on a bad day. Bastard dodged me on his qualifications. He’s got a bucket-load of shit headed toward the fan.

  And if he refused to let her check out his site, that was grounds for pulling his license on the spot.

  The Dodge wiggled its rear end, thinking about a ditch, and she snapped her attention back to the driving. Turn into the skid, back off on the gas, throw out the clutch, don’t you dare touch that brake. The Dart wiggled again on the greasy pavement, then straightened and drifted to a stop crosswise in the road. She muttered cusswords, American cusswords, under her breath, and sat for a minute until her hands stopped twitching.

  She pulled out her cigarettes, shook out the next-to-last coffin nail—needed to get more—and pushed the cigarette-lighter button into the dashboard before she remembered that it didn’t work anymore. Then she fumbled for the Michigan League Zippo in her pocket, lit up, and dragged smoke into her lungs. She sat and stared through the added fog of the smoke at the white swirls of snow whipping across the road.

  Weather service had said it was supposed to be clear today. Clear and sunny, high temps near thirty, bit of a wind. Sure as hell didn’t look like clear and sunny on her road. Maybe this was the Gook road, separate but un-equal facilities. Me against the world. As always.

  Maybe there was a gene for driving on snow and ice, and ol’ Darwin had bred it out of the Southeast Asian gene pool. No evolutionary advantage in the jungles.

  And almost-bald summer tires didn’t help a bit. She’d seen that three-quarter-ton GMC that Carlsson drove, sitting high on new studded snows at all four corners and Warn hubs on the front to lock in four-wheel-drive. Viking truck, Detroit’s version of a long-ship.

  She eased the clutch and got traction, tires spinning but pushing the car around to the line of the road. Or what she thought was the line of the road, under fresh white untracked snow. Damn good thing all the other cars had vanished, as well as the pavement. Fall, winter, spring, you could sit down in the middle of Harborside Road and read a newspaper without getting interrupted by a car. Or truck.

  Tourists wouldn’t show up until Memorial Day, headed south again around Labor Day. The other nine months of the year, moose and bears outnumbered people.

  That was just the way she liked it. Moose and bears weren’t racists. Moose would stomp a white man just as fast as they’d stomp a Gook. Equal opportunity stompers.

  Screw him.

  She drove on, slow and cautious, the wipers streaking white across her windshield and stacking snow and ice at each end of their travel until she stared out through an arch-shaped porthole and the useless mirror showed a bank of drifted snow on her rear window. Lights passed her going the other way, dim glows of headlights under their coating of snow and ice, and she remembered to switch on her own headlights even though it was supposed to be afternoon, so that the other idiots could at least see what they were hitting.

  Lights glowed in the gray snow on her right, not moving, and resolved into the signs at Tracy’s Truck Stop, last gas before forty miles of bad road and the bridge to Canada. She guessed at the driveway and pulled in without finding the culvert or the ditch under the snow instead. Relax for a few minutes, buy those smokes and maybe a six-pack.

  She stowed her cigarette on the ashtray and left her car running, hoping the heater would take the hint and besides nobody would be out stealing cars in this weather and nobody but an idiot would steal a ten-year-old Dodge Dart in the first place. Gook insurance.

  The wind bit her when she climbed out of the Dart, snow driving needles into her cheeks, and she ducked her chin into the top of the parka and pulled the hood tight. Damned expensive parka, a month’s salary, but sure as hell it earned its keep. She dodged into the blaze of light and warmth of the truck stop, smell of coffee and fried clams and cigarettes but the place looked empty. The clerk at the counter glared at her, didn’t want to be bothered with a customer. Probably thinking to close down early and head home herself.

  Susan grabbed a carton of Camels, a six-pack of Bud, added a couple of cans of baked beans and a box of Cajun jerky, and headed for the checkout. American dinner. Or “suppah,” the natives would say.

  The clerk was still glaring. Susan stacked her purchases on the counter, but the woman made no move to ring them up.

  “I.D?”

  Huh? Susan knew she didn’t look that young. Hadn’t been carded since undergrad days at Brandeis. She fumbled her license out of her wallet and laid it on the counter. The woman glanced at it without contaminating her fingers by picking it up. Gave a curt nod and started ringing up the merchandise.

  And rang up the jerky twice.

  “Excuse me, there’s only one package there.”

  The woman glared at her and cleared the register, then punched each key with deliberation and obvious anger. Susan collected her license, handed over the exact total so she wouldn’t have to argue over the change, and glared back.

  “You got some kind of problem with me, lady?”

  “Yeah. You people killed my brother. Go the hell back where you belong.” The woman slammed the register drawer closed and started switching off the lights in the truck stop, turning her back on Susan.

  What the fuck? Shock froze Susan so that she didn’t vault right over the counter to punch the woman’s own lights out. She stood there for a few s
econds, blazing with rage and then freezing with terror, clenching her fists until the nails bit into her palms and then relaxing them, breathing deep and letting the shakes die down before she tried to pick up her stuff because if she didn’t, she’d try to brain the bitch with a can of beans.

  But the woman probably had a gun hidden under the counter. People like that were fucking dangerous. And everyone in Maine had guns. Not like Waltham or D.C. or even Ann Arbor. Everyone in Maine had guns, and knew how to use them.

  Everyone except me.

  Well, fuck you very much. And she didn’t even say it out loud. Susan gathered up the stuff in shaking hands, no offer of a bag, and used her butt to knock the door open and head back into the biting wind and snow. Hope you freeze to death in a ditch, bitch.

  She swiped snow and ice off her headlights and turn signals, cleared a patch of the rear window, all exercises in futility, and climbed into the old Dart. The heater was starting to work. Barely. She followed her own tire tracks back out onto the highway. Pulling out of the truck stop lot, she saw the lights coming back on inside the store. Subtle. It’s so nice to feel welcome in your town.

  She should have sat for a minute, two minutes, calming down. She still felt the shakes, mixed fight-or-flight instinct pumping chemicals through her muscles and brain.

  Hatred. That woman hated me, just from my face and my name on the license. I’ve stopped in there dozens of times and I’ve never seen her before. Must work a different shift. If I never see her again it’ll be too soon. Just like Carlsson. Bet that blond bastard has guns out the ass. Gun rack in the rear window of his truck, empty now, but damn sure he has something to fill it when he wants to play lynch mob in his KKK sheet.

  Got to get a shotgun. Damned sure Bitch won’t protect me. That stupid hound would just mug a burglar for a tummy-rub. Lick him to death.