The Reckoning

“It’s got to be one of these drainages,” Duncan muttered at his map. She could hear him back there, twisting the paper to try to fit it to the terrain. Couldn’t he see the handle of the Big Dipper, the stars skipping up to the North Star? They weren’t lost, only in motion.

She closed her eyes and, midstream, they seemed adrift on a raft. Her feet were wet, and she saw an inch of water on the floor. She laughed.

“You’re happy,” said Duncan.

She didn’t turn. “Yes,” she said.

It pleased him. That pleased her.

She didn’t try to explain her joy. After all these weeks, she felt released. The tension of searching for the pilot, the pushing and pulling of tool against earth, of man against man, civilian against soldier, of Kleat against Duncan, all of it seemed left behind. Her trespass upon the pilot, with her camera, was a thing of the past. The highway and its dark menace were forgotten.

The sun would find them somewhere. That was the heart of it. The farther they got from the main road, the more it felt like she was finally reaching a center. When the time came, one way or another they could always retrace their journey, and eventually she could return to writing her words, publishing her photos, and promoting her name, the maiden name—the only name she knew—of a woman who had forsaken her. For now, she just wanted to keep going.

The river—or her happiness—changed Duncan, too. His anxieties fell away. He put aside his map, and she thought that now they could cast themselves into the journey. They had made their crossing. Their hell-bent midnight ride could slow. She could start to know Duncan without the background noise and her urgency to catch the recovery team’s story. They were on their own now, threading up a path across a river that was just a stream upon a mountain that was just a hill, wandering off the maps. Two searchers, that’s who they were.

The bones were an excuse. That divorced her and him from Kleat, who was so bound to his dead and his duty. She hadn’t come to resurrect soldiers any more than Duncan had. The missing pilot had drawn them as a novelty, an opportunity, nothing more. Now they could enter a territory of the heart.

They had never talked about what preceded Cambodia for him. For a month, they had worked and lived within inches of each other, but she still didn’t have a real handle on him. For all his tales of high school football and a dog named Bandit and his summer-long Harley solo to Anchorage and special barbecue recipes and favorite old movies, she had no idea why he’d landed here, or even when. The one time she’d asked, he’d dodged. Sometimes it feels like I was born here, he’d said. Like I’m like some dusty thing out of a Kipling novel, just one more relic of the empire.

Not Kipling, she thought. Conrad. And not Kurtz, not Heart of Darkness, but Lord Jim. Duncan had secrets, maybe dark secrets or sad secrets or old guilt. One does not go to the jungle out of innocence. He never talked about a wife or children or another woman, never crouched over snapshots of a lost family or a lover who had chosen a different man or died a tragic death. He never mentioned where that part of his life had gone. Survivor guilt, she guessed. Maybe that was what attracted her to him. He seemed to carry her same sense of a past best unrepeated, of a voyage without anchors. Like an orphan, he acted never quite worthy of love. They were perfect fodder for a grail quest, the two of them.

They passed worn blocks of stone in the river wall, evidence of ancient channels. That perked him up.

“Incredible,” he said. “We’re looking at water control that predates the Angkor kingdom by centuries, and on the opposite side of the country. A massive hydraulics system in the mountains, for Pete’s sake. You need to understand, water is everything here. There’s not another country like this on earth. For the Khmers, the world is water. When the monsoon comes, almost half the country vanishes under water. The Tonle Sap River reverses course. Great battles were fought on inland boats. Their civilization was founded on wet rice cultivation. The Angkor empire rose and fell based on their ability to control water. The Angkor kings captured the rain in huge pools and would dole it out in drought years or choke their enemies with thirst. But where did the Angkor genius come from? What sparked their greatness? Who passed to them the divine mandate? Who came before them?”

Luke would have muttered “history” had he been conscious. But he had gone to sleep or was traveling in his head. His eyes were shut. Perhaps his delirium had cycles, or the loss of his secret had emptied him. Hibernation suited him, Molly decided. He looked younger without the junkie eyes. Asleep, he looked resigned to himself.

Trailed by the hulking Mercedes, they wound higher along the contour lines. The moon spun left to right across the windshield, a moving target. Molly let go of the urge to orient herself. There was no longer any question of where they were headed.

The prow of the forest seemed to descend to them. White mist leaked from the throat of the trees. Early morning fog was part of the Cambodian clockwork. But tonight it looked to Molly like a word exhaled, like a syllable spilling downhill to greet her.

To the right and left, creeper vines stitched shut the forest wall. The only possible entry was directly through a break in the screen of trees. She wanted to ask Vin to stop for a picture. But that would have meant setting up a tripod for a time-lapse shot, and it would have been more an emotion than a picture anyway.

“It will be a whole other world in there,” Duncan said. “An ecosystem writing its own rules. You’ll see. There are species in these mountains that no one knows exist. The khiting vor, practically a unicorn, like a myth, part gazelle with curlicue horns. They say it stands on its rear legs to feed, that it eats deadly snakes. There are herds of white elephants, like ghosts. Peacocks. Langur monkeys with two stomachs. Hundreds of species of moths. And the flowers.”

Teak and gum trees soared. He knew them by shape, and by their Khmer names, too. They reached the outskirts of the fog, and it turned to brilliant milky smoke in their beams. Vin slowed, feeling his way forward. But they had their bearings now, that gaping hole in the forest.

Something tapped against the rooftop. A leaf. A twig.

“What about tigers?”

“These days you see more pelts than paw marks,” Duncan said. “The hill tribes and ex-soldiers are trapping them out. It’s obscenely easy. They take an old land mine, hide it under a dead monkey for bait, and boom, jackpot. Skin, meat, claws, and penis…you can make enough money for a Honda Dream. That’s the bike of choice here. The tiger parts go to China for folk medicine.”

Another story, another time, she idly thought.

“I wouldn’t worry about the big cats. Not this deep. They’ve never bothered me. This far from people, they don’t have a taste for us.”

There was another soft pat on the roof, a light rap, an ounce of pebble, less. Then another. Molly glanced at the ceiling. Another. Tiptoes on the metal.

She frowned, wishing the noises away, guessing what they were.

“It can’t be,” she stated firmly. “Tell me it’s not starting.”

But it was. Duncan had his fingers against the roof, feeling the minute landings. “The luck,” he said.

The season had beat them.

“I don’t believe it,” she groaned. “We’re so close.”

They had a deal, though. First rain, turn home. It was all the more imperative now with the river between them and the world.

More soft pats on the roof, little metallic kisses.

“I’m sorry,” said Duncan.

A raindrop slapped the windshield. Molly leaned closer to see it. “That’s not rain.” She put her fingertip on the inside of the glass.

It was blood. Gore. With little webbed feet. Molly lifted her finger away.

“Is that a frog?” said Duncan.

He was right. It was a storm of frogs, little tree frogs. They were falling from the sky. She cranked her window shut.

You read of tadpoles being sucked into the heights and growing into young frogs among the clouds. Was this that, she wondered? Did the monsoon have that power?

Then she saw that they weren’t falling. They were leaping out from the forest’s high branches. Another struck the windshield. Another, and this one didn’t splash to bits like the others.

Dead or stunned, the frog stuck in place. Its red and black bands glistened, backlit by the white mist.

Another hit, this one alive. It took position on the glass, head high. The tiny thing looked majestic, like a