Two Songs This Archangel Sings m-5

by George C. Chesbro

  "Jan," Garth said with more gentleness in his tone than I'd heard from him in a long time, "we're not sure just what it is we're looking for. The only thing we know for sure is that you're the last link to him we know of. We'd like you to tell us everything you know, or have heard, about Veil Kendry, and let Mongo and me filter and weigh the information. It's obvious that you cared deeply about this man at one time, and still care. I give you my word that nothing you say to us will be used to hurt him."

  "I believe you," the woman said with a catch in her voice that was close to a sob. "But it hurts me so much to remember." When she turned back to look at us, tears suddenly sprang to her eyes, and she bolted for the door. "Excuse me," she called back over her shoulder. "I'm sorry, but I have to get some coffee. I'll be right back."

  "What the hell are we still doing here?" Garth asked almost an hour later as we stood by the classroom windows staring out at the gathering dusk. A storm was on its way, making the sky even darker. There were snow flurries in the air, harbingers of the much heavier flakes that would begin falling soon.

  "Just wait," I replied, listening to the rising wind whistling outside the window.

  "You keep saying that. She's stiffed us, and for all we know we're locked in here now. She's not coming back."

  "We caught her by surprise, and we upset her. I think she'll be back."

  "Why is it so damn hard for you to take a hint?"

  "Five more minutes, okay?"

  Garth glanced at his watch. "Okay. It looks like she loved Kendry, doesn't it?"

  "Still does."

  "That's one beautiful woman."

  "Yep."

  "If we didn't already know that Kendry was out of his mind, this would confirm it. Can you imagine having a woman like that still loving you after twenty years and not doing anything about it?"

  "Maybe he didn't do anything about it precisely because he loves her. Whatever burden he's been carrying, he didn't want her to have to share it with him. Don't forget the bullet hole in his window. How could he ask someone to share his life if that could also mean sharing his death?"

  "Okay," Garth said simply as he continued to stare out the window, where thick flakes had now begun to fall straight down from the sky. "What a schmuck," he added distantly.

  "Give the man a break, Garth," I said irritably. "Veil chooses to live the life of a monk so that people he cares about won't be hurt, and you call him a schmuck."

  "I wasn't talking about Kendry."

  "Then who's a schmuck?"

  "Anybody who'd camp out on the side of a mountain in weather like this."

  "What are you talking about?"

  Garth crouched down to my eye level, pointed toward a mountain in the distance. "About eleven o'clock, near the top of the second mountain. There's a fire up there. See it?"

  I looked along the direction of his pointing finger, squinted into the gloom, but could see nothing but snow falling and the barely discernible outline of the mountains. "No. You must be on drugs."

  "I don't see it now, but I'm telling you that I did see a fire up there."

  "Bullshit."

  Our argument about nothing was interrupted by the sound of a door opening and closing behind us, and we spun around. Jan Garvey, looking pale and with melting snow glistening on her face and clothes, stood just inside the doorway. A brown paper bag stuck out of her open purse. "Forgive me," the woman said softly. "I still have so much feeling inside, and there's so much hurt associated with… the things you want me to talk about. I got scared. Thank you for understanding, and thank you for waiting. I do want to help in any way I can." She set her purse down on a desk top, took out the bag. Inside was a bottle of bourbon and three plastic glasses. "I can't fool around with the ghost of Veil Kendry without a little booze," she continued with a wry smile. "I hope you two like bourbon."

  "I love bourbon," Garth said, "and Mongo will drink anything that has alcohol in it."

  "Sorry there's no ice."

  "Ice will only ruin good booze," Garth replied, bringing me my drink. We sat down in two of the student desks, watched as the woman downed her drink, immediately poured herself another.

  "I feel him in this room," she said with a shudder. "We sat in this classroom together, in those desks back by the window."

  "How long did you know him?" Garth asked quietly.

  "We grew up in this town together. He was my first lover, and he made me pregnant for the first time. I had to have an abortion. I went to some butcher who damn near killed me."

  "Jan," I interrupted, "those aren't the things we need to hear, and you certainly don't have to talk about them."

  "Please," she whispered. "You asked me to tell you anything and everything I remember. There's so much that I just didn't know where to start… so I started there."

  "Go ahead," Garth said. "You tell us anything you want, any way you want to."

  The woman nodded, sighed. "It's all right. I can talk about it now-after a lot of craziness on my part and two broken marriages. There was always a lot of madness in this town. Maybe that's why I decided to come back here to teach; I'd finally defeated it, the madness, and I was proud of that." She paused, passed a hand across her eyes. "He may have come back for the opposite reason-the madness had finally defeated him."

  Suddenly I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. I straightened up in my desk, but it was Garth who asked the question.

  "Who are you talking about, Jan? Veil Kendry?"

  The teacher shook her head, gazed down into her drink. "No, not Veil. Veil never came back."

  We waited for her to tell us whom she'd been referring to, but she resumed where she had left off, and neither Garth nor I wanted to interrupt her.

  "I probably wound up with Veil because we were both wild," Jan Garvey continued after a period of silence. "But there was a big difference between the two of us. I was just a bad-ass kid out of control, with no self-discipline. A lot of Veil's craziness wasn't really his fault. He was born brain-damaged, you know."

  Garth and I looked at each other. "We didn't know that, Jan," I said. "We'd like to hear about it."

  We watched as the woman slowly walked across the room to stand by the window. It had grown too dark in the room to see her features, but I figured she knew where the lights were if she wanted to turn them on.

  "He almost died at birth of a very high fever," she said in a low voice. "He wasn't supposed to live more than a few hours. It's how he got his name; his parents gave it to him as a kind of prayer that he would pass safely through the veil separating death and life. Obviously, he did, but the fever damaged a part of his brain and he ended up with a curious affliction. He was-is-what physicians and psychiatrists call a 'vivid dreamer.' To Veil, his dreams have always been as real as everyday life. It was years before anybody realized it. As a child, when Veil would have a nightmare, he wouldn't wake up like a normal child when he had monsters of all sorts chasing him. His first hospitalization in a mental institution came when he was ten years old; he'd drunk gasoline in an attempt to kill himself."

  I shuddered, trying to imagine the unspeakable terror of a child when the ogres that chase all of us through dreams always caught him, perhaps did things to him; I wondered if phantom teeth sinking into dream flesh could cause real pain, suspected that they could.

  "They kept him there six months during his first stay," the woman continued, "and it was there that they discovered his vivid dreaming. They treated it with medication, stabilized him, and sent him home. But this is a small town, and everyone knew where he'd been. By the age of eleven he'd been permanently branded as crazy, and the other kids constantly teased him.

  "The medication helped, but one of its side effects was that it made him sleepy all the time. He had a choice-exist in a drug-fog most of the time and not have terrible nightmares, or do without the drug and suffer the consequences when he went to sleep at night. Veil was always incredibly gutsy, even as a kid. He kept challenging himself, trying to wean himse
lf off the drugs. Then, finally, he found something to replace the medication."

  "Violence," I said softly.

  The silhouette of the woman's head against the window nodded. "Yes. Without the medication, Veil was in a constant state of tension. He began to fight all the time. He almost always fought older and bigger boys, and-in the beginning-usually got beaten up. But he kept fighting, because he'd discovered that the fighting drained off the psychic poison in him, and he could sleep at night without suffering from the nightmares. Then he got sent back to the mental hospital, after he'd been kicked out of his house and gone to live with his aunt, when he almost killed the captain of the football team, who'd made the mistake of challenging a much smaller and younger Veil Kendry to fight. This time he was referred to the hospital by the courts.

  "He spent almost all of his junior year in the hospital. We wrote each other constantly, I went to visit him, and he was sometimes allowed to come back for home visits. He changed a great deal during that year. He was still like a time bomb waiting to go off, but he was far more controlled and self-contained than he had been. He had new medication, which was far better than the stuff he'd been given before. Also, he had something else; someone at the hospital had begun teaching him the martial arts as an outlet for his aggression and a means of obtaining self-control. Veil practiced his martial arts and read about them every free moment. That second stay at the hospital saved him. He had tremendous respect for the teachers and therapists there, and maybe it was the way he talked about them that made me finally get my act together years later, go to college and get a degree in order to become a teacher myself. But that was a long time coming. I still had a lot of wildness to get out of my own system.

  "Veil liked to roam at night on his motorcycle-and I roamed with him. By this time he'd gained a very big rep around the area as a fighter, and there was always somebody who wanted to take him on. Veil always obliged all comers, whether it was in the parking lots of bars or in some field where a fight had been prearranged. It wasn't long before a lot of money started changing hands at these matches, with Veil making a lot by betting on himself and giving large odds. Sometimes he'd fight three or four men in one night. I didn't understand something-not then. I thought Veil was fighting for the money, but he wasn't. The others were fighting for money, or a reputation as the man who beat Veil Kendry. Veil was literally fighting for his life, his sanity; fighting was the only way he could keep his demons at bay."

  There was a prolonged silence, and once I thought I heard Jan Garvey try to stifle a sob. However, when she spoke again, her voice was clear and strong.

  "Then he got in trouble with some local sheriff's deputies. He was only seventeen, but he really was an incredible fighter, what with the karate he'd learned and the moves he was always making up. A lot of macho men around here didn't like the fact that a seventeen-year-old kid should have such a big rep. When one of the deputies got his jaw broken in a challenge match with Veil, he got four of his buddies to go after Veil and try to arrest him. Veil beat up all four of them. Then he was arrested by the State Police. Everyone in three counties, including the State Police, knew about the challenge matches, and the judge had a pretty good idea of what had really happened. He sympathized with Veil, but also-justifiably-considered Veil to be an increasingly dangerous man. The charges were dropped in exchange for Veil's agreeing to enlist in the army. Veil did, and two weeks later he left. I drove him to the bus station. It was the last time I ever saw him."

  "Did he ever write to you, Jan?" Garth asked.

  "Once, early on while he was still in basic training. It was to say he loved me, but also to say good-bye. He wrote that, for better or worse, the army was the only chance he had for a new life, and he was putting everything in the past behind him. He was setting me free."

  Now Jan Garvey abruptly crossed the room and turned on the lights. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, but dry. "I don't know whether all my talking has helped you," she continued in a firm voice as she poured more bourbon into our plastic cups, "but it's certainly helped me. All these years; I guess I never realized how much these memories of Veil have haunted me. There was, and is, nobody like Veil, and I guess it was those memories that broke up my marriages. I had such mixed emotions when I started reading about his growing success as an artist. I hated him for leaving me behind, for forgetting about me, and I realized at the same time that I still loved him. Then I knew I was happy for him. He'd finally found another way to fight his demons; his painting was a new kind of salvation." She paused, sighed, sipped at her bourbon. "Now, you say somebody is trying to kill him."

  "Yes," I said. "Jan, Veil was very successful in the army. He was most certainly an outstanding combat soldier, because somewhere along the line he was made an officer-probably a field commission. And he was promoted steadily, to the rank of full colonel. What you've told us helps us to understand better a lot of things about him, but there are still too many important gaps missing. Something happened to him toward the end of his career in the army, and somehow we have to find out what it was. Please think very carefully. You told us he only wrote you that one letter. Can you think of anyone, anyone at all, he might have written to regularly over the years?"

  "I doubt he wrote to anyone," the woman said distantly, in a voice so low I could hardly hear her, "but Gary probably knows what happened to him."

  "Gary?"

  Once again there was a prolonged silence, and Jan Garvey seemed cut adrift on a sea of thought and memory. "Forget I mentioned that name," she said at last. "Gary can't help you; he can't even help himself. All Gary will do is kill you."

  Suddenly I thought I had a pretty good idea what had upset Matthew Holmes when we'd first mentioned that we were looking for someone in connection with arson and murder. There also seemed a good possibility that Garth really had seen a fire in the storm. "Jan," I said, "earlier you talked about the madness in Colletville. You were talking about Veil, of course, and yourself. Then you said that you'd come back here because you'd defeated the madness, but that somebody else may have come back because he was defeated by it. Did you mean Gary?"

  "Yes," the woman replied softly. "I shouldn't have said that; I had no right. I have a big mouth."

  "Why don't you have the right? Why is it wrong to talk about Gary?"

  "I told you he can't help you."

  "I don't understand. You said that he may know what happened to Veil. Why wouldn't he want to help?"

  "It's not that he won't; he can't. I mean that literally. Gary Worde is quite insane, and very, very dangerous."

  "Jan," Garth said, rising to his feet and setting down his cup, "where can we find this Gary Worde?"

  "You can't," the teacher answered softly. "Nobody knows where to find him, and you mustn't try. It can only bring harm to you, and perhaps to Gary. Leave him alone."

  "We have to try, Jan," Garth said, a slight edge to his voice. "Remember that there are lives at stake here."

  I rose, went to a window and stared out into the darkness. A cold draft blew in my face. "Jan," I said, "all over America there are so-called 'hidden veterans'-men who came home from the war with very deep emotional wounds they found they just couldn't handle. They can't, or won't, function any longer in our society, and so they go off to live by themselves wherever they can find solitude. They go into wilderness areas where they can live off the land, with as little contact with other people as possible. Is Gary Worde this county's hidden veteran? Is he up in those mountains?"

  Turning away from the window, I saw Jan Garvey nod. "Gary has no contact with anyone at all," she said quietly. "At least none that anyone around here has heard of, and we would hear."

  "How does he get food and clothing?" Garth asked.

  "Nobody knows. I suppose he could get food by trapping, but clothing and other things …?" She finished with a shrug.

  "How long has he been up there?"

  "Almost nine years. Sometimes you'll see a campfire up there at night, and then y
ou won't see another one for a long time. You think maybe he's dead, but then one night you'll see another fire, in a different place. I think he must move around a lot; there's a great deal of wilderness around here."

  "How do you know the campfires aren't set by hikers or hunters?"

  "In summer, maybe. But not in winter-not in those mountains."

  I asked, "Why would this man know what happened to Veil in the war? Southeast Asia's a big place."

  "He might know. Gary was Veil's closest friend, besides me. They enlisted together. Gary had his problems, too, and so he decided to go off with Veil. I know they went through basic training together, in the same unit. Gary used to write home fairly regularly, and his family shared the news with everyone."

  "When Gary came home, did he talk about the war?"

  Jan Garvey shook her head. "Never. Everyone knew right away that Gary was in a lot of trouble. Later, we found out that he'd spent six months in a V.A. mental hospital before he'd been discharged to come home. He'd gone away an overweight kid, and he came back looking like an old man who'd been in a concentration camp. Everyone tried to help as much as they could, and for a while he lived in a little converted room over his parents' garage. He suffered from night terrors; sometimes, you could hear him clear across town screaming in the middle of the night. Then, after a time, I guess he started suffering from the same terrors during the day. He couldn't work, because he'd just drift off in the middle of doing something, squat down, and cover his head. Then he'd start screaming."

  "It sounds like classic postcombat stress syndrome," Garth said to me, raising his eyebrows slightly. "Severe."

  I nodded in agreement, looked at the woman. "Jan, why didn't his family, or the authorities, have him committed to a V.A. hospital?"

  "His parents were going to. Gary had begun to fantasize that the Viet Cong were waiting just outside town and were going to come in after him. Everyone knew he was psychotic, and people were afraid he was going to explode and kill himself, or somebody else. The problem was that Gary was as terrified of going back to the mental hospital as he was of his phantom Viet Cong; apparently, his experiences there were as much a nightmare for him as whatever happened to him in the war. We all felt a responsibility toward him. This is a close-knit community. The feeling was that we'd sent him off to war as a kid of seventeen, and he'd come back … worse than dead. Nobody wanted to cause him any more suffering. We wanted to take care of him, but we just didn't know how. Finally, Gary solved the problem for all of us. One day in August just before sundown, nine years ago, he came out of the room over his parents' garage, walked down the middle of the street to the edge of town, and just kept going up into the mountains. That's where he's been ever since."