The Throat

Ransom carried our bottle to the bar.

Ransom and Jed picked up the major between them. They were strong enough to lift him easily. Bachelor's greasy head rolled forward. Jed put the .45 into his pocket, and Ransom put the bottle into his own pocket. Together they carried the major to the door.

I followed them outside. Artillery pounded hills a long way off. It was dark now, and lantern light spilled through the gaps in the windows.

All of us went down the rotting steps, the major bobbing between the other two.

Ransom opened the jeep, and they took a while to maneuver the major into the backseat. Jed squeezed in beside him and pulled him upright.

John Ransom got in behind the wheel and sighed. He had no taste for the next part of his job.

'I'll give you a ride back to camp,' he said.

I took the seat beside him. Ransom started the engine and turned on the lights. He jerked the gearshift into reverse and rolled backward. 'You know why that mortar round came in, don't you?' he asked me. He grinned at me, and we bounced onto the road back to the main part of camp. 'He was trying to chase you away from Bong To, and your fool of a lieutenant went straight for the place instead.' He was still grinning. 'It must have steamed him, seeing a bunch of roundeyes going in there.'

'He didn't send in any more fire.'

'No. He didn't want to damage the place. It's supposed to stay the way it is. I don't think they'd use the word, but that village is like a kind of monument.' He glanced at me again.

Ransom paused and then asked, 'Did you go into any of the huts? Did you see anything unusual there?'

'I went into a hut. I saw something unusual.'

'A list of names?'

'I thought that's what they were.'

'Okay,' Ransom said. 'There's a difference between private and public shame. Between what's acknowledged and what is not acknowledged. Some things are acceptable, as long as you don't talk about them.' He looked sideways at me as we began to approach the northern end of the camp proper. He wiped his face, and flakes of dried mud fell off his cheek. The exposed skin looked red, and so did his eyes. 'I've been learning things,' Ransom said.

I remembered thinking that the arrangement in the hut's basement had been a shrine to an obscene deity.

'One day in Bong To, a little boy disappeared.'

My heart gave a thud.

'Say, three. Old enough to talk and get into trouble, but too young to take care of himself. He's just gone— poof. A couple of months later, it happened again. Mom turns her back, where the hell did Junior go? This time they scour the village. The villagers scour the village, every square foot of that place, and then they do the same to the rice paddy, and then they look through the forest.'

'What happens next is the interesting part. An old woman goes out one morning to fetch water from the well, and she sees the ghost of a disreputable old man from another village, a local no-good, in fact. He's just standing near the well with his hands together. He's hungry—that's what these people know about ghosts. The skinny old bastard wants more. He wants to be fed. ' The old lady gives a squawk and passes out. When she comes to again, the ghost is gone.

'Well, the old lady tells everybody what she saw, and the whole village gets in a panic. Next thing you know, two thirteen-year-old girls are working in the paddy, they look up and see an old woman who died when they were ten—she's about six feet away from them. Her hair is stringy and gray and her fingernails are about a foot long. They start screaming and crying, but no one else can see her, and she comes closer and closer, and they try to get away but one of them falls down, and the old woman is on her like a cat. And do you know what she does? She rubs her filthy hands over the screaming girl's face and licks the tears and slobber off her fingers.'

'The next night, two men go looking around the village latrine behind the houses, and they see two ghosts down in the pit, shoving excrement into their mouths. They rush back into the village, and then they both see half a dozen ghosts around the chiefs hut. They want to eat. One of the men screeches, because not only did he see his dead wife, he saw her pass into the chief's hut without the benefit of the door.'

'The dead wife comes back out through the wall of the chief's hut. She's licking blood off her hands.'

'The former husband stands there pointing and jabbering, and the mothers and grandmothers of the missing boys come out of their huts. All these women go howling up to the chief's door. When the chief comes out, they push past him and they take the hut apart. And you know what they find.'

Ransom had parked the jeep near my battalion headquarters five minutes before, and now he smiled as if he had explained everything.

'But what happened?' I asked. 'How did you hear about it?'

He shrugged. 'I probably heard that story half a dozen times, but Bachelor knew more about it than anyone I ever met before. They probably carried out the pieces of the chief's body and threw them into the excrement pit. And over months, bit by bit, everybody in the village crossed a kind of border. By that time, they were seeing ghosts all the time. Bachelor says they turned into ghosts.'

'Do you think they turned into ghosts?'

'I think Major Bachelor turned into a ghost, if you ask me. Let me tell you something. The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people.'

I got out of the jeep and closed the door Ransom peered at me through the jeep's window. 'Take better care of yourself.'

'Good luck with your Bru.'

'The Bru are fantastic' He slammed the jeep into gear and sho away, cranking the wheel to turn the jeep around in a giant circle in front of the battalion headquarters before he jammed it into second and took off to wherever he was going.

PART THREE

JOHN RAMSOM

1

Once I had started remembering John Ransom, I couldn't stop. I tried to write, but my book had flattened out into a movie starring Kent Smith and Gloria Grahame. I called a travel agent and booked a ticket to Millhaven for Wednesday morning.

The imagination sometimes makes demands the rest of the mind resists, and Tuesday night I dreamed that the body Scoot was busily dismembering was my own.

I jerked awake into suffocating darkness.

The sheet beneath me was cold and greasy with sweat. In the morning the blurry yellow pattern of my body would be printed on the cotton. My heart thundered. I turned over the pillow and shifted to a dry place on the bed.

2

I realized at last that the thought of seeing Millhaven again filled me with dread. Millhaven and Vietnam were