The Price of Blood

75

The year 2000 was five years away and Broker was building the pyramids in reverse, in the dark. Cyrus’s pyramid.

Grunt and heave. His leg muscles coiled and nearly cracked. He was growing into his injured thumb. His thumb screamed as he dragged a box up the long sand ramp that Trin had stamped and shoveled into the side of the pit.

He had lost track of time since the leather eye of the whip started watching him in the night. He was bleeding from the right shoulder now, where the whip saw something it didn’t like. Just him and the whip and the ramp and the Imperial weight of Ming Mang’s gold.

Long fucking way up that ramp. Rope handles on the ammo boxes. Like a wire brush, stiff with tar. Ripped his hands. He’d torn the pockets from his pants and tried to use the blood-stained tatters as makeshift gloves. Trin was barechested, his sweaty torso muscled like a bantamweight. Lost his tiger tooth? He’d torn his shirt up and shared it with Nina to use on the cutting ropes.

Broker stared at the ammo crate. Weighed anywhere from a hundred to two hundred pounds apiece. The rough wooden box had waited twenty years in its chrysalis of sand for him. This must be what slavery was like. Suffering doled out one drop of sweat at a time. Gimme water, gimme rest, gimme food, gimme another hour…

History was turning backward in the pit.

It’s a wheel. No wheels on the sand ramp though. Just muscle. And all his muscles were braced-not just with the obstinate weight of the box. With anticipation.

For the whip.

He cleared the top of the pit and the benediction of the sea breeze made his sweat sing. Up here in the fresh air there was organization. Purpose. A future.

Men who owned the future stood with guns. And a whip. Making plans. They had a system. Broker, Nina, and Trin dragged the boxes up the ramp and another twenty yards down the beach. LaPorte had decided this was the danger close zone. If there was an explosive device in the pit they should be protected by the walls of the hole and the distance. In teams of three, the crippled vets were hitched to the boxes and dragged them to the surf. Trung Si and the other three struggled with the boxes and loaded them into the dinghy.

Hire the handicapped.

Broker dropped the rope handle and plodded back toward the pit. Nina’s head inched up, then her corded shoulders and arms appeared, straining at the terrible weight. Couldn’t look her in the eye. Hadn’t been able to for hours. Supposed to protect her.

“Don’t be eyeballing that woman,” shouted Bevode. The whip winked with a leather hiss. A light, flesh- clipping butterfly kiss on the shoulder blade.

“Bevode,” chided Cyrus LaPorte. He sat in a chair, at the folding camp table, near the waterline. He was reading a copy of USA Today by the light of a battery bar. He was drinking fresh-brewed coffee. A dinghy brought it on a return trip from the boat. Broker could smell it. For the next hour all he could think about was the smell of coffee.

In the morning.

Because morning was coming. The texture of the dark had changed. From drenched canvas to velvet to gauze.

The pit had started to look familiar, like an apartment they lived in and were remodeling. Broker lurched back down the ramp. Every time they dragged a box their bleeding hands left a little trail. He winced when he heard the whip crack. Bevode’s voice gloated in an epiphany of power and contempt. “C’mon, you split-tail nigger; tote that bale, bitch.”

Trin met him halfway up the ramp, struggling with another box. No one had spoken for hours. What was the use? Trin continued to struggle on. Steady. Determined. With what? Nothing left.

After hours on the ramp it had become familiar. A routine. Broker dropped to his knees and blinked. But now the remaining boxes were countable. A finite number. Six of them. He saw the rotting wood of the pallet base protrude from the sand. What was it Jimmy said. How many words…

Well, Jimmy, how many boxes you think I got left?

Nina stumbled back down the ramp. Face set. Hammered copper. Mycenaean death mask face. Won’t talk. Setting an example. Don’t show emotion in uniform. Whatever. He could tell by the way she stared at the broken pallet. She’s going all the way, to the bottom. Like a kid playing a rough game of tag. Going to touch home.

But first there were six boxes. Broker wrapped his bloody hands around the rope and yanked, tried to straighten up. Trin stood above him on the lip of the hole, surrounded by cottony gray light. He studied the sky. “That’s it, you’re done,” he called down.

Done. Him up above. With Bevode and the whip. Them in the pit.

Nina was on her knees, wrestling boxes aside. She began to claw at the bottom of the hole. Her hands left bloody smears on the powdery wood. Losing it. Broker reached for something inside to brace on. Found nothing but pain. It’d do.

“I said, that’s it,” Trin repeated. A crazy man, forming iron words of command in his mouth. Dumb fuck. In a few minutes his mouth would be full of sand.

Broker had to try. He flung his shovel ahead, out of the hole. And went up the damn ramp with a box. Bevode watched him come across the sand, scuttling like a cockroach dragging its broken legs. Broker dropped the rope, grabbed at the shovel, set his feet to charge. The whip caught him across the chest and took his wind, and he had become so acute in his understanding of pain that he heard the skin split open when the lash snapped. Heard his own blood leak like a spigot.

“Come on, you sorry piece of Yankee shit,” taunted Bevode. He cracked the whip in a popping circle, like a lion tamer. “C’mon.”

Broker struggled up, vaguely menacing with the shovel. His will had turned to ash. A soft breeze blew it away. I can’t die this way, he thought. Not with that bastard winning. He lurched to his feet. Gotta. Try.

Trin was there, with considerable reserves of strength in his short compact body. He dragged Broker back toward the pit. Pushed him down into the hole.

“What’s going on?” muttered Nina, on her knees among the five remaining boxes.

“Give me your shirt,” Trin shouted down to Broker.

“What the fuck?” blurted Broker.

“Give it!”

Maybe it was the whip. The myopia of sweat and pain. Broker had learned in one night to respond to authority. He peeled off the torn rag and tossed it up. Trin held it and smiled as he read the ironic caption printed over the sand-and sweat-stained Commie flag. “Good morning, Vietnam,” he said quietly.

“Hey, who told you to take a break,” yelled Bevode.

“Meeow,” growled Trin. Then he waved the rag three times over his head. A crisp circular platoon leader’s hand signal: Gather on me. Impossibly, he sprinted down the ramp.

He went immediately to Nina and put his arm around her. “Hold it in. Just a little longer,” he said gently. Then Broker heard Save the Whales yell, down by the beach. “Bevode, we got us a sit-down strike here.”

Trin smiled and fished a Gauloise from the crumpled pack stuck in the sand. He put it to his lips and offered the pack to Broker. Something in that smile, thought Broker. Maybe hope does grow on gallows trees.

Broker took a cigarette. Trin found the book of matches and struck one. “What?” Nina yelled. “What?” They lit their cigarettes as a blinding band of sunlight cut a hot bar across the wall of the pit. Just above their heads.

Bevode was yelling and cracking his whip down by the water line. “Get up, get up.”

Then LaPorte’s voice. “Bevode, check the pit.” There was just a hint of apprehension in that voice. Broker started to rise, to take a look. Trin pulled him back and smiled broadly.

Broker blinked, fought off a blackout, and brushed at shadows that were suddenly flitting around his face. The air was full of dragonflies. They had materialized out of the sunlight. Must be hallucinating. He heard dragonflies swarming. The ghosts of a thousand helicopters.

“What’s going on?” Broker rasped.