The Fear Artist

Back in the day, back in ’Nam, he’d never been able to kill the beautiful ones. Despite the business-as-usual betrayals: the working girls with big smiles counting the troops and memorizing the positions of the barracks when they were sneaked into the base for a short-time tussle, then pointing out officers in civvies in the street, targeting them for the knife from behind or the rolled grenade. The pretty village teenager filing reports with Charlie’s artillery battalions. He could round up the women, he could bring them in, he could scare them till they pissed themselves, but he couldn’t kill them if they were beautiful.

Well, he thinks, straightening up with a sigh, there was probably no one anywhere who didn’t draw the line at something. He’s faced down fifteen-year-old Muslim kids who fired automatic weapons into women and children in village markets without any apparent hesitation but who fought for their lives when a soldier was shoving pork into their mouths.

His shoulders sag. Maybe it’s just the flight, the waits at both ends. He feels weary, and he has an impulse to crawl in beside Neeni. But she’d turn away from him, draw her legs up, make herself small.

And there’s still the train room.

He looks away from her without any sense of loss; he had to learn to disconnect from her years ago, although the feeling manages to sneak back. At the door to her room, he pauses, looking down the hall toward the open door to the train room. He hears a faint clicking sound, regular and slightly syncopated, and he recognizes it. He relaxes, just a little. But he shouldn’t hear it.

How tough should he be? More to the point, given what he’s seeing in her the past two years, would it make any difference?

He moves on the balls of his feet, breathing silently, until he’s standing a foot or two from the door, looking into the room. The clicking noise has stopped.

It’s a big room, created by knocking together a maid’s quarters and a breakfast area and moving the external wall out about eight feet. Evenly lit by pin spots recessed in the ceiling, it has a thickly carpeted floor in West Point gray and walls covered with shelving of blond wood, mostly empty but crowded in a few places by what look like mass collisions of cast-metal toys: trucks, cars, farm machinery, military vehicles, and trains-mostly trains.

Without looking right or left, he slips the Buck knife into a belt loop, snagging the top of the guard inside the loop so the knife won’t fall out, and walks into the room as though he thinks he’s completely alone. About two- thirds of the room is taken up by an enormous table, plywood on sawhorses, clamped together into a dependable flatness and covered with a two-inch layer of Styrofoam painted green. Carved and punched into the Styrofoam is a scale-model tropical world: four-inch hills, roads with little houses clinging to them like limpets, tiny villages, two- inch palm trees, rubber plantations with their military platoons of trees in straight lines, shallow, mirrored ponds, a narrow-gauge railroad. This is a precise scale model of a few square miles in Yala, the southernmost province of Thailand, just above the border with Malaysia.

The railroad is the key to it all.

A finger touched to the top of the transformer at one side of the miniature confirms that it’s hot. He cranks the lever, and a small train, a golden yellow diesel that’s a perfect model of several actually in use in the area, clickety-clicks its way along the track, nearing a small station. With the total concentration he devotes to everything he does, he brings the train to the exact point where it would stop to take on and discharge passengers, then breaks the current. In the absence of the train’s noise, the room almost pulses with silence.

To the left and right of the big windows hang heavy, dark green, floor-to-ceiling curtains that he draws against the morning light when he’s worked through the night in here. One of them bells out slightly from the wall.

Murphy sweeps several pieces out of the miniature world-buildings and trees, mostly-and they clatter against each other as they hit the carpet. While the sound is still ringing in his ears, he says in a low, animal growl, “I … smell … something … ALIVE.”

The last word is a roar. In the silence that follows it, he can hear an almost-inaudible sound, bone dry and fast and irregular: teeth chattering. The chattering gives way to something airy, high, and faint that could be a sob, a whimper, or even a nervous giggle. Or, since it’s her, all three at once.

He crosses the room in a leap and yanks aside the curtain.

A figure in white, a single loose garment modeled on Wendy’s nightgown in the animated Peter Pan, stands there, her back pressed to the wall. She’s small, even for twelve, and almost emaciated, even though she eats like a wolf. Her arms are black with burned cork, as is her face, except for a straight horizontal stripe of brownish pink skin over the bridge of her nose, broken by two eyes, tiny circles of a wolfish amber completely surrounded by white, trained up at his face with an energy he can almost sense on his skin. Her hair, black with a reddish tint, is an uncombed tangle, shoulder length, and damp. She won’t let anyone get near it.

“What are you doing?”

“Ghosting.” Her voice is unexpectedly low-pitched, a boy’s voice, and there’s a tremor in it that could be fear or excitement or both.

“Where’s the rotten meat? It works better if you stink.”

For a tenth of a second, a pink tongue flicks across the blackened lower lip. “I’m on a, a, a sneak. If I smell bad, they’ll know I’m there.”

He puts a curled index finger under her chin and pulls it up, not particularly gently. “That’s not what I asked you. I asked you where the meat was.”

Her teeth chatter for a moment, and he feels her chin tremble. “Hwa threw it out. She thought it was just spoiled.”

“That’s Hwa’s job,” he says. “Protect us from spoiled meat. Protect us from you.” He takes hold of a knot of hair and gives it a yank, and for a moment her eyes narrow, although she doesn’t make a sound. “I ought to slap you,” he says. “Some fucking ghost. ‘My maid threw out the spoiled meat.’ Oh, well, let’s just stop the war until the little rich girl can age another porterhouse.”

The child says, “You’re right.”

“You want to play this, play it real. If you don’t want to play it, go be a little girl. I’m not saying you should stink right now, but if you want rotten meat, you keep it away from the maid.” She’s looking at nothing in the middle of the room. “Treasure? Listening or not?”

“In a, in a real war,” Treasure says to the middle of the room, “if my, my maid figured out what I was doing, I’d kill her.” She speaks her own version of English, flavored with Lao and Vietnamese.

“Then you’d have to get another one. And then she’d find the meat because you’re so sloppy, and you’d have to kill her and hire another one, and a few months later you’d have so many dead maids you’d have to move out of the house. Dead maids stacked everywhere.”

“I’d hide the meat better,” Treasure says, still looking at nothing.

“Don’t have maids,” Murphy says. “Unless you can trust them with your life, don’t have maids.”

“Can you trust Hwa and Phung with your life?”

“They won’t be with us much longer.”

She ignores his response. “If you find out you can’t trust them, are you going to-”

“We’re not in a real war,” Murphy says.

Treasure says, “Hwa couldn’t protect you from, from me. Phung couldn’t. Nobody could.” She pulls the curtain over her lower half and edges sideways as though she expects a blow.

“In five years, maybe. I won’t worry until then.” He picks up the fallen model pieces, his back to her. He can hear her coming, and when he turns to look, she’s a few feet from him, still holding the bottom of the curtain, dragging it away from the wall as though it’s her connection to safety. “Have you figured it out?” he asks, looking down at the railroad.

“It’s, it’s, it’s not the station.”

“Let go of that thing. And don’t tell me where it’s not going to be. Tell me where it will be.”

The curtain flops back against the wall, and she’s standing beside the table, carefully out of arm’s reach. He can smell the feral odor of her; she bathes only when she wants to, and she wears a nightgown until the seams are parting and it’s stiff with dirt, when she replaces it with an identical one, maybe a quarter size larger, sewn by Hwa or Phung. She’s refused to wear anything else since she saw the cartoon Wendy in flight, when she was seven. Neeni had sewn them at first, but these days it’s dangerous to let Neeni near a sewing machine.