The Reckoning

rummaged through the med kit, picking up vials and packets and reading their contents. “I haven’t heard of half this stuff.”

“Let me look,” she said. She found a bottle of Cipro. It wasn’t penicillin, but she figured something was better than nothing. She downed a capsule with some coffee and pocketed the bottle.

“We’ll get you to a doctor,” he declared. He covered her with the canvas again and built the fire higher. The flames licked close enough to curl the edges of the green thatch. But she couldn’t seem to get warm.

“Eat,” he urged. “We have a long night ahead of us.”

“Tomorrow morning,” she bargained. “I’ll be better then.”

“You’ll only stiffen up,” he said. “Besides, we need the storm. It will give us wings.”

He went back into the clearing to haul gear and further their illusion of staying. He positioned jerry cans of gas and diesel along the walls inside the hut, which worried her. With the fire so close, they seemed like bombs waiting to go off. But she trusted his judgment.

When everything that could be pulled from the vehicles had been collected, he started making rounds of the clearing, pulling up rotten stumps and hauling more firewood. His ruse even fooled her. Coming in from one of his forays, he dumped an armful of wood on the pile, and slipped the gun to her.

“You are so clever,” he said. That cheered her.

The hurricane roar rotated in Dolby surround sound from one side to the other. Logs fell into the fire, setting off explosions of sparks. The rain hissed and vaporized in bursts of haze.

“How can I help?” she asked.

“We’re going to need your camera bag, but without the camera. It’s got to stay. I’m sorry. My stuff stays, too. We can’t afford the weight, and we have no backpacks. I’ll need your bag to carry food and meds. We have a long trek ahead of us.”

She wanted to argue. But they were running for their lives.

“Don’t make a big show of it,” he said. “Just take the camera and lenses out. Line them up. Polish the glass. Remember, he could be watching.”

37.

Duncan left again, carrying on with his charade of inhabiting this island. It was getting dark beyond the flames. Molly wondered when he meant for them to make their move.

She emptied the camera bag, polishing the lenses, drying the camera, and setting the lenses in a neat row. Ten grand in glass and mirrors. Let the forest and the monkeys have them. The real treasures were her images. Those she could still keep.

It took a few minutes to transfer the last of her images to her digital wallet. Little bigger than a hand calculator, it held close to a thousand of her best shots. Wrapped in a plastic bag, it would fit into her pants pocket. Duncan would never know. If she couldn’t manage to carry the extra few ounces, she wasn’t going to make it anyway.

While she was at it, she decided to surprise Duncan with some of his own treasures. Just because he was sacrificing his briefcase didn’t mean losing everything in it. Once they reached Phnom Penh and their escape was just a memory, she would present him with a few of his most precious mementos.

She reached for the briefcase. From the first day she’d met him, Molly had wondered what it held. The stainless steel was dented and raked with scratch marks. The hinges on the bottom and the lock combination were rusted. She’d never once seen him clean the mud or dust from it. In a way, his neglect made the contents that much more mysterious, because the case was nothing to him, only a shell.

She raised the lid and the smell of mildew poured out. Inside lay a clutter of papers, photos, news clippings, postcards, and letters mixed with rotted rubber bands and rusty paper clips. At first she only registered the strata of his accumulating. There were decades of stuff in here. The bottom layers were mottled with fungus and yellowed with time. On top, his most recent acquisitions were still unspoiled by the tropics.

Only then did she see what his newest artifacts actually were, the memorabilia he’d stolen from RE-1.

Duncan was their camp thief.

Here was the stolen Hustler the two marines had fought over. Here were the snapshots and mail that men had reported missing.

She was dumbfounded.

Here was a page of the Wall Street Journal dated six years earlier, and on it the bygone dot.coms and their stock earnings that he’d talked about with such freshness and authority.

Here was a monograph on Cambodian flora and fauna written in French in 1903.

Here was his sketchbook, and it was filled from end to end with mindless squiggles and scrawl.

Here was a chapter torn from a British text on pre-Angkor archaeology, word for word the lectures he’d given them.

Here was an article from the New York Times, “Giant Trees Hold Ancient Temples in a Deadly Embrace,’ complete with spong and its scientific name, Tetrameles nudiflora.

Here was the kitchen he had built by hand, the zebrawood cabinets, the butcher-block table, and the panel of green and brown and blue bottle bottoms leaded together like a stained-glass window. Only it wasn’t his kitchen, it was a magazine ad.

Here was the red setter with the bandit’s neckerchief that he’d grown up with, except the setter and the neckerchief belonged to three children in a snapshot with a digitized date, two months ago.

Here was Kent State in all its bloody details—in a paperback history of the war.

Here was Duncan, the scraps of him gathered like stolen homework.

He had dissected each thing. He had underlined sections, circled faces in snapshots, written marginalia, and then dropped it in here to be layered over with more of the same. He had memorized a life.

Who was he?

She looked out into the night. Logs detonated, splitting open with loud snaps and bangs, offering their white meat to be burned, renewing the fuel. The rain evaporated in a cloud above the fire. Eventually one would win out, the rain or the inferno. For now they were in perfect balance.

Duncan came in from the darkness. “Feeling better?” He began weaving shut the hut like a giant cocoon, braiding strips of bark into a front wall. “Once we close the front door,” he said, “we’ll escape through the back door.”

“There is no back door, Duncan.” Samnang had woven solid walls to the rear and sides.

“That’s what Luke will be thinking, too.” He went on knitting the raw strips into a screen.

She mopped the sweat from her face. Chills shook her. The hut seemed to be spinning. If only her body would make up its mind, hot or cold.

He was either her murderer or her savior. Maybe he was both, like a Jekyll and Hyde. Was he the one who had mined the road that he was so desperately trying to lead them away from? Could this explain his reluctance to follow Luke here, the knowledge that his other self, his forest self, was waiting to stalk him? But then, who was Luke? The son of a soldier who had lost his mind in the Cambodian wilderness? Had Duncan told her everything already?

Molly struggled to piece it together. Sweat poisoned her vision. The smoke was hard to breathe. While she was still able to aim the gun, she had to judge this man. Should she confront his fiction or let herself raft along on it and hope for the best? Would he confess his mimicry or stick to his innocence? Or was he so insane that he was incapable of guilt anymore? And what about her? If it came down to it, could she pull the trigger?

He didn’t look like a monster sitting there, weaving strips of green bark. But he was Oklahoma all over again, sharing some food and talk while they waited for the night to pass and the highway to carry them on. This very morning she had lain in his arms and spun a romance in her head. She had trusted him.

She gripped the gun. This had to be done. “Who are you?” she asked.

He looked up with his farm-boy smile. “Me?”

She kept the gun along her leg, out of sight.