She wasn’t quite sure how to handle their age gap. Kent State was ancient history, though Duncan didn’t seem old enough for it by a decade. She had tried to imagine him thirty years ago. He would have had a little more meat on him, and fewer creases around the eyes. But he would have had the same sweet calm. A keeper. Thirty years ago.
She’d never tried a winter-summer relationship, never even thought about it. On the other hand, he wasn’t exactly winter and she wasn’t exactly summer. She told herself it shouldn’t matter. If things didn’t work out, the typhoon was all the excuse she’d need to flee.
The glass trembled again.
8.
The restaurant grew quiet.
Kleat looked at his watch. “Six sharp,” he said. “Send in the clowns.”
Molly turned as the entrance lit with the color of tangerines. Three old monks filed in, led by a child. Bits of the sunset seemed caught in their saffron robes.
She had heard of them. They were blind. The owner let them in each evening.
All around, tourists hushed reverently, even the Germans at the bar. Chairs creaked as people twisted to see. A woman started to applaud, and stopped herself. This was not like on the sidewalks where the amputees and widows leaped out at you. The monks were well washed and stately, a taste of Cambodia to go with your umbrella drinks. The waiters backed against the wall and bowed, theatrical with their white gloves pressed together at their foreheads.
“What?” said Molly.
“It’s an old saying. ‘The devil loved his children so much that he poked out their eyes.’ ”
“Only it was the KR, not the devil,” said Kleat. “And they used spoons.”
She was reminded of Brueghel’s painting, the blind leading the blind, stumbling among the rabble. No rabble here, though. Nor stumbling. The young boy’s head was shaved to the skin, a novitiate. They wove among the tables with serpent grace, gathering their alms, American dollars mostly. Molly saw one couple sign over a traveler’s check. The man and woman pressed their palms together in an awkward
“The waiters will be taking a cut,” Kleat observed.
As the monks approached, Molly saw old scars glistening at the center of their wrinkled foreheads. Their third eyes had been ritually mutilated. They held their heads high, each connected by a few fingertips to the shoulder ahead of him.
“What, no sins to pay for?” Duncan asked Kleat. He was opening his steel briefcase to get his wallet.
“At these prices, I’d say it’s already built into the menu,” Kleat said.
Molly stood to get a dollar bill from her pocket.
That was when she noticed the gypsy from their dig. He was standing in the doorway staring straight at them. She jerked with surprise.
“What’s he doing here?” she said. The two men looked up at her. “There,” she pointed.
Just then the line of monks passed in front of the doorway, blocking her view. When they had moved on to the next table, the opening stood empty.
“Never mind,” she said.
He’d never come within two hundred yards of them, so why would he be here? His place was in the mirages, along the horizon, in the ball of the rising or setting sun.
She started to sit down, but he had moved, and was watching them.
“There,” she said, startled all over again.
He had maneuvered across the room and was standing by a table with a French couple. He had gray peasant pants and a green and black camouflage T-shirt with ragged holes. He was barefoot. The French pair was not pleased by his presence.
They all saw him now. It was as if he’d stepped out of her camera.
“Incredible,” said Kleat.
The baggy gray pants had once been black. The cuffs stood at his knees, shredded by dogs. His shins were crisscrossed with bite wounds.
Some of the soldiers back at the dig had thought he might be a freelance journalist down on his luck, way down. Or, as Kleat had suggested, a heroin addict lost in inner space. Duncan wondered if he might be the son of an MIA, shipwrecked by a lifetime of hope. There was even the possibility that he could be an actual, living MIA, though no one on the dig really believed that. It was a powerful piece of MIA mythology, the POW who was still out there, or the defector who’d decided to stay into infinity. One such man, a marine named Garwood, had in fact surfaced in Vietnam years after the war. Ever since, Molly learned, the Garwood factor had become red meat for the MIA movement. They fed on it endlessly. The official military forensics teams viewed themselves as an antidote to such wishful thinking. Their only prey was the bones, though they tipped their hat to the MIA movement.
The stranger didn’t nod at them. He was gaunt. A hundred twenty pounds, Molly guessed, no more. Duncan had said he must eat weeds and insects, like John the Baptist. “He must have followed us from the dig,” she said.
“Impossible,” said Kleat. “It took us five hours by car to get down here. We would have seen him behind us.”
“One way or another, here he is.”
“He’s stalking us,” Kleat said.
It did feel like that. But which of them was he after?
The man began walking toward them. The boy. He was much younger than she’d thought. His blond hair was almost white from the undiluted sun. He had a cowlick and reminded her of Dennis the Menace, on smack. All he lacked was a slingshot in his back pocket.
Kleat placed one hand on the table. Molly looked twice. His hand was covering his dinner knife.
“Relax,” said Duncan. “He probably just wants some of our peanuts and beer.”
The fans loosened the countryside from creases in his clothing and his hair. The sunset lit the fine dust into a fiery nimbus. The French couple covered their food.
Molly expected bad smells, the reek of old urine and feces and sweat, but he only smelled like dust. He came to a halt behind the fourth chair at their table, with the window—and the sunset—behind him. It was hard to see his eyes. A thin corona of red dust wafted from his shoulders.
“What are you doing here?” Kleat demanded.
“I see you out there,” the man said. “Going through the motions. Wasting away.”
“Is that so?”
“Like starved hogs. All that dust for nothing, Jesus.”
For all his raw bearing, he had a voice like the breeze. Molly had to strain for it. He was American, no faking the West Texas accent. Twenty years old probably, going on a thousand, one of those kids. He’d seen it all.
“It don’t work,” he said. “You can’t hide.”
“It worked. It took a while. But we found our man,” Duncan said. “Molly did.”
“Who?”
“The young lady,” said Duncan.
The stranger didn’t waste a glance at her. “What man?” he said.
Kleat lifted his chin. It showed his scar like a second smile. “A pilot. He’s found. It’s done.”
The stranger stretched his fist to the middle of the table and opened his fingers. Molly looked for track marks on his forearm, but there were none. Then she remembered that the poppy was so cheap here, people just toked it. A clot of hard black dirt, as hard as cement, fell from his hand onto the tablecloth.
“Quit pretending,” the man said.
The thing looked worthless, an animal turd, nothing. A chain protruded from one end.
