The Reckoning

She passed two more ledges, expecting the white Land Cruiser or the truck and the fire to appear, but the mist concealed them. Reaching the ground, she worked across her memory of the clearing. The floor had a slight tilt to it, to drain off the rain no doubt.

Trees bulged up, sudden immense pillars that evaporated overhead. Molly looked up and stopped, not trusting her eyes. Twenty feet above the ground, the remains of a name seemed to hover in the mist. She went closer and it disappeared. She backed away and it reappeared, letters carved into the skin of the tree. Years of growth had lifted them high, and their once neat incisions were stretched apart and rutted and ribbed. The scars were only slightly lighter than the smooth bark, and the wood had absorbed whole sections.

She circled around the base of the tree. “Helen,” the letters said. She went a little farther, and found a final a. Helena.

The Blackhorse soldiers had been here.

She turned to another tree, and the name Barbara hung in the mist. There was an Ada and an Emma and a Rosita, each upon its own tree. She was in a forest of lovers. The men had taken their knives to the trees and left this much of themselves. It was magical. How much more was hidden in here?

She would have gone on wandering, but after another few minutes, she saw the fire’s orange glow. Its heat had melted an opening in the mist.

Vin and his two brothers were squatting on a ledge above the bright orange flames, their eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep or from the wood smoke. They did not look like happy campers. Propped within easy reach against a fallen tree, their rifles gave them the air of bounty hunters.

“Ah-roon soo-ah-s’dai,” she tried. But none flashed his golden teeth for her this good morning, not even Vin. She blamed her awful accent. She was a total linguistic cripple. Some days, faced with her blank screen and a couple of thousand words to crank out, she could barely manage the King’s English.

A little distance off, Kleat and Duncan were leaning over a squared foundation stone strewn with rolled maps, and that was strange. She’d heard them calling her from above. Samnang was here, too, hunkered inside the pall of smoke like a gnome, his plastic leg stowed away from the fire. She shrugged. So the forest had wiggy acoustics.

Kleat was stabbing at the forest and the sky and the map. By this point, she would have been surprised if they weren’t arguing. Whatever the concern, Duncan appeared to find it pressing, too. He glanced at Molly, then returned his attention to Kleat.

That left Samnang as her official greeter. “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” he said, welcoming her. “I have for you a coffee.”

“Is that how you keep all your wives so happy?” she said.

Samnang smiled. He had no wife or family. He had no one. The wars had eaten them all, and she knew it. But they could—and did—pretend. She played his saucy American daughter. The light would come on in his brown face.

He reached through the fire for the covered pot and poured the coffee into a white teacup on a white saucer. Probably he’d brought it from his own kitchen, probably just for her. He knew she liked it black, but went through his daily ritual of offering her sugar.

For all its noisy crackling and the billowing white smoke, the fire was a small thing. The wood was green. It was a miracle the stuff had lit at all. Then she saw the jerry can of fuel, their miracle, parked behind a stump.

“Ar kun,” she said, thanking him, and sat underneath the plume of smoke by his side. The fire was warm. “I didn’t mean to sleep so late.”

“No matter,” Samnang said. “You see this mist. Duncan said to let you sleep.”

Then why, she wondered, call her name? “Will the mist lift soon?”

“The forest decides these things.” He looked more closely at her. “Be still a moment, please.” He reached over.

She knew without asking what it was. The leech clung to the skin of her throat before coming away. She touched the spot, and her finger came away bloody. She looped the kroma around her neck to hide the tiny wound.

Samnang held the leech for her to see. It must have fallen on her as she was exiting the tent. The wisp of a worm had bloated to a slug the length of her little finger. What surprised her more than its size and stealth was the speed of its gorging. In ten minutes, such hunger.

She watched to see what came next. Would Samnang throw it against a rock or squeeze it in his fingers? He was contemplative. “She humbles me,” he said.

“That?”

“If only I could obey God with such faith.” He juggled it on his palm to keep the suckers from getting hold.

“What faith is that?”

“Oh,” he said, embarrassed to be preaching.

“No, go on, tell me.”

“To exist in the forest with no questions, no doubt. Imagine.” He smiled. “Someday, this lowly worm, a Buddha.” He gently tossed it to a bed of leaves.

One of Vin’s brothers went over and picked it up. He was the one named So, the middle one. He laid the leech on a twig and held it over the fire. The leech began writhing. The man grinned at Molly with yellow hepatitis eyes. She frowned, not so much distressed by the leech’s fate—the thing had sucked her blood—as by the man’s vandalism. It was pointed, his ruining Samnang’s little act of compassion. Something was going on between them.

The oldest brother, Doc, with wisps of mustache hair and geometric suns tattooed on each shoulder, made a joke. It had to do with throwing Samnang’s artificial leg into the fire. Vin glanced at Molly and did not join in the laughter. She had no idea what the problem was, but disliked seeing the old man mocked.

Samnang went back to tending the fire. He rested the pot on three neat stones above a nest of embers. The flames were trim, the heat no more or less than the morning called for.

Molly went on sitting by Samnang for another minute, mostly to show her solidarity. Then she stood casually. “Let me see what the lords of the jungle are up to,” she said.

“Of course,” said Samnang.

She walked to Duncan and Kleat and placed her white saucer and cup at the farthest corner of their makeshift bench, away from the maps. Like a skin drying, one map was pegged open with chunks of rock and food packets. Small pebbles on a U.S. military topo marked last night’s passage. From Snuol, the logging road ran east and north, and the pebbles became bits of twigs—hypotheticals—leading off to nowhere. You could conjure up a hundred phantom rivers and streams from the wrinkles and curves, all of them descending to the Mekong.

“Got us figured out?” she said.

“Not a clue,” Duncan said. He seemed frayed. He gestured at a big, boxy GPS receiver that looked almost as obsolete as his colonial-scientist compass in its brown wooden case with oiled hinges. What antiques stores had these come from? The lighted panel read “SEARCHING.”

“It’s like all the satellites fell from the sky,” said Duncan. “We’re not getting a single reading.”

“Our location can wait,” Kleat said. “No more fussing around.”

“You don’t understand. These hills may not seem like much. You can’t properly call them mountains. But they can eat you alive, especially—”

“I know,” said Kleat. “I know.”

“We’re lost,” said Duncan. “It matters. We don’t even know if they came in here.”

“We know they crossed the river. We saw their tracks. Where else could they have gone?”

“They were here,” said Molly. The two men stopped. “You didn’t see the names?”

“What’s this?” Kleat said.

She led them into the mist. After the fire, it seemed colder and darker out here.

Head craned back, she searched for the names. “They were carved on the trees,” she said. “The names of their women. Up high.”

The names had disappeared, though. There were so many trees, and she must have come in differently from the stairs. “They were here somewhere,” she insisted.