Two Songs This Archangel Sings

by George C. Chesbro

  “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 you 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.”

  Garth shook his head. “Hasn’t anyone from around here ever gone up to look for him?”

  Jan Garvey nodded. “Yes; once. And one of the men in the search party almost had to have a leg amputated after he walked into some kind of mantrap Gary had set. After that, everyone has just left Gary alone. There may be a lot of traps like that up there; Gary’s still fighting the war in his mind.”

  “I’d think he’d be a danger to hunters and hikers,” Garth said, still visibly upset.

  “Oh, h
e most certainly is. The county has posted the entire area, and everyone around here stays well away from any of the sites where fires have been spotted. Also, we try as best we can to warn away strangers; a few years ago, one man came back with a story about how a wild man had almost killed him. So far, obviously, we’ve been lucky. Don’t expect help from anyone, state troopers included, if you do decide to go up there looking for him.” The woman paused, smiled thinly. “Colletville and the surrounding towns really don’t want it known that we’re running a kind of huge, open-air insane asylum for one maniac on public lands.”

  Garth grunted, walked across the room, and stopped directly in front of the woman. “Whatever happens, we won’t make trouble for Gary, or this town.” Garth paused, reached out and gently gripped Jan Garvey’s shoulder. “I don’t mean to frighten you, but there are a few things you have to know. I very much wish that Mongo and I could walk out of here with you now and take you to dinner, but we can’t. We can’t even be seen together. Mongo and I have been very careful. As far as we know, we weren’t followed up the Thruway; nobody who shouldn’t know is aware that we’re in Colletville, or that we’ve talked to you. But we can’t be absolutely certain. Now, just in case we’re wrong and men come to talk to you, you simply tell them about this conversation—all of it except for the part about Gary Worde. That’s very important. Nothing that you know is a threat to these people, but Gary Worde may very well be a threat. If you can follow these directions, everyone—including your friend in the mountains—should be safe.”

  “I understand,” the woman said evenly. “I know you’re going to look for him. Please be very careful. Remember that he’s crazy.”

  Garth smiled, jerked a thumb in my direction. “So’s Mongo. The two of them will get along just fine.”

  After leaving the school by a back entrance, we went through our usual ritual of driving slowly and watching in our rearview mirrors for lights. There were none.

  Despite the storm, we found a place where we were able to pick up a pizza and a six-pack of beer for our dinner. Back at our motel, before sitting down to eat, Garth called his precinct station house.

  There was news.

  The NYPD had kept in touch with the Seattle Police Department regarding the deaths of Loan Ka and his family, and Kathy. The Seattle police, at Garth’s urging, were treating the deaths as murders, but still had no leads in the case. However, something curious had happened within hours of the explosion, and the police there were wondering if Garth thought there might be a connection. Three local Hmong, men with criminal records for extortion and illegal use of explosives, had been found murdered, their corpses dumped in an alley near a station house. The men’s bodies had been mutilated, skinned from the necks almost down to the waists; the coroner’s report indicated that they had been alive when the skinning had been done, and it was the torture that had killed them. Furthermore, the right thumb of each man had been severed, and the missing digits had not been found.

  Garth suggested that Seattle be advised not to waste any more time or manpower on the case.

  15.

  The next day we outfitted ourselves with camping and survival gear, and supplies. We bought small-bore rifles and ammunition, then used another chunk of Veil’s ten thousand dollars to rent a large, heavy Jeep with four-wheel drive. With our gear and a half dozen ten-gallon cans of gasoline strapped down in the back of the Jeep, we headed up into the mountains.

  We knew we were going to have to get lucky; we could drive for weeks through the Catskills without seeing any sign of our quarry, and the problem was further complicated by the fact that our hidden veteran certainly wasn’t going to be hanging out near any main road. After all his years in the mountains, Gary Worde would almost certainly have built at least one semipermanent shelter, but it would be far away from roads, people, and towns. Besides the extra gasoline, Garth and I had purchased sturdy hiking boots.

  The starting point for our search would be the mountain where Garth thought he had spotted a campfire the night before, and that was the general direction—south by southwest—in which we headed, constantly keeping our eyes on the Jeep’s dashboard compass. Occasionally we veered off the main road to explore ice- and snow-covered side roads. While Garth drove, I scanned the surrounding countryside with high-powered binoculars, looking for signs of—anything. What I saw was a lot of deer, a few hearty winter hikers exploring the foothills, and a group of brightly clad cross-country skiers. That was it.

  The mountain where Garth thought he had seen the fire turned out to be ten miles away—which probably meant that he hadn’t seen anything more than some random reflection of light in the window glass. It made no difference; we had to start somewhere, and that mountain seemed as good a place as any. Without some glimpse of fire or smoke, our chances of finding Gary Worde were a good deal less than minuscule.

  For lunch we ate sandwiches from our large, well-stocked ice locker, then turned on gas-powered space heaters and waited in the Jeep until nightfall. We took turns sleeping and searching the tapestry of night for the tiniest speck of fire on the mountain, but sighted nothing. At dawn we crossed that mountain off one of the five topological maps we had brought with us, started up the Jeep, and headed for the next mountain.

  We spent three days and nights driving through the mountains in a twenty-five-mile radius around the town of Colletville and were about to give up when, near midnight of the third night, I glanced to my right through the binoculars and clearly saw wisps of smoke rising in the distance into a sky brightly illuminated by a full moon. I quickly checked the map, saw that we were ten miles away from the nearest town. We parked the Jeep off the road, slept for a few hours, and at dawn loaded and hitched on our backpacks. We checked our pocket compasses, then headed off in the direction where I had seen the smoke.

  After a day of hiking west, we both began to suspect that my sighting of smoke might have been as phantasmagorical as Garth’s sighting of fire in the schoolhouse window back in Colletville. By nightfall, two city boys were thoroughly exhausted from tramping over hill and dale. We pitched camp, built a huge fire to cheer ourselves up, but didn’t have the energy to cook. We ate cold cuts washed down with beer, then talked strategy—or lack of it. Just before sundown we had spotted, far in the distance, the top of what appeared to be a fire-lookout tower, close to the top of yet another mountain. Before going to sleep, we decided that we would try to make it as far as that tower the next day, and then turn back if there was no sign of Gary Worde; there seemed no sense in throwing away good time after that we would have already wasted in a futile search.

  Over the river and through the woods …

  We were again up at dawn at the beginning of what looked to be a fine, bright day. Refreshed, we cooked ourselves a big breakfast of eggs and Canadian bacon, cleaned up the campsite, and started off again in the direction of the lookout tower. After a half hour of walking we reached the top of a rise and were relieved to see below us a dry streambed which looked like easy walking and which appeared to meander off in the general direction of the tower. I led the way down the hill, entering a thick outcropping of fir trees. I was the first to see the streambed again when we emerged from the trees, and it was almost enough to give me a heart attack; thoroughly startled, I yelped in astonishment and jumped backward, bumping into Garth.

  In the few minutes that it had taken us to walk down the forested hillside, something had appeared in the streambed that definitely hadn’t been there when we’d started down; sitting on a huge boulder not ten yards away from us was a fairly large man. He was wearing a blue, fur-lined parka, faded jeans tucked into high-top laced hiking boots. His thinning brown hair looked clean but was very long, pulled back from his face and tied in a pony tail, and he had a full beard which reached the center of his broad chest. His eyes were large and brown, perhaps a bit too bright. Large hands were wrapped around a sturdy walking stick which he had laid across his knees. Powerful field binoculars hung on a leather strap arou
nd his neck.

  “You’ve got to be Mongo Frederickson,” the man said, pointing a stubby index finger in my direction. He looked more than a bit bemused.

  Garth and I glanced at each other, then back at the man. Our rifles were stuck in sleeves in our backpacks, not easily accessible. “Who the hell are you?!” I snapped.

  “My name’s Gary Worde,” the man said easily in a deep, rather pleasing baritone. “If you are Mongo, then the sour-looking big guy with you is your brother, the cop. Are you two looking for me?”

  “How the hell do you know who we are, and what makes you think we’re looking for you?” I asked, feeling rather foolish.

  The bearded man shrugged his broad shoulders, touched the binoculars slung around his neck. “I’ve been tracking you for the past two hours from the top of the lookout tower back there. From the way the two of you trip over your own feet, you’re sure as hell not hikers—and there are no hiking trails in this area, anyway. So I asked myself, what would an odd pair like you two be doing around here? A mutual friend, Veil Kendry, talks about you a lot. Let’s just say I put one big guy and one little guy together and came up with your names. Did Veil send you with a message for me? Is he all right?”

  Garth unhurriedly unzipped his parka, reached inside, and withdrew his service revolver. He cocked the hammer, walked out into the streambed, and put the gun to the man’s head. It wasn’t a very friendly thing to do, but I definitely agreed with his next point. “For some reason I don’t believe you, pal,” Garth said in a quiet voice that carried clearly in the sharp, cold air. “I try to put you together, and I don’t come up with any answer at all. Now, what’s your real name, and what are you doing here?”