The Cause (11 page)

The map man barked at the two again, poking the paper with a finger. He waited a long ten seconds for one of them to speak. Then he ripped away the map and moved behind them, removing his pistol from a side holster.

No one doubted what was going to happen next. The surrealism struck us as if it were theatre, the audience with a certain foresight of the upcoming scene. We held our breaths, looked at one another. Seee sensed our anxiety and motioned with a stern hand for us to hold. A memory blipped in my head from the day I saved Timothy Skies—police sergeant Smith ordering me to
keep my position. Here, I didn’t have the courage of the hero from long ago.

Brock and Conroy lowered their eyes. Split had a shaking finger on his M16 trigger, the map man in the crosshairs. Seee, shook him by the helmet, and when he had his attention, clenched his jaw and shook his head no.

The map man pulled the trigger on Drew Gareth. A loud bang leapt into the forest as blood burst from Gareth’s forehead. His body went limp, boneless as a squid as the two men holding him stepped back, letting him crumble to the ground. We gritted our teeth watching as blood pooled around Gareth’s skull. The two men covered in blood spray wiped their faces on their sleeves.

Atlas had his head turned. The two men holding him up twisted his neck, bent him over, and pushed his eyes closer to the wide-eyed Gareth with part of his brain oozing out of his head. The map man pivoted back around to Atlas, kneeled down to gaze at him in the eyes, then doubled up his shouting while grabbing a clump of his hair. But Atlas simply shook his head. If any fear gripped Atlas, the map man certainly wasn’t seeing it.

I gazed over at Seee and could tell Atlas was making an impression on him. The map man went back into the wigwam and came out with Seee’s machete. He shoved the shiny blade under Atlas’s throat, sawing the dull side against his skin. We looked at Seee once more, but he motioned again for us to wait.
Too many—too many
, came the whispers down the line,
too many in the camp for us to take
.

Atlas clenched his jaws, snapped his eyes shut. The map man took his time slicing off his ear, cutting it slow and delicately, as if it were a hunk of steak he were cutting into. Then he took the ear in his fingers, and held it high in the air. Atlas couldn’t help but scream, though it wasn’t one of fear or pain, rather a growl of pure rage, a bear cry, shrill and dark from a vagrant beast, one that said,
You’ve just pissed me off and I’m coming to fuck you
. Atlas twisted his shoulders to break free, but he was wedged in good
between the men on each side of him. Finally, one of them gave him a hard knee to the ribs.

I glimpsed over at Seee. A calm, sanguine look took over his face, more apathetic than a machine. He disassociated himself from the scene, biding time until the odds were right. Calculating probabilities with a raw unemotional discipline, reworking the battle plan, thinking if they killed Atlas, grenades and mortars could be used. But he also knew the enemy would only kill him out of pure rage, that it would be unwise to kill him before he talked. I remembered turning away in disgust, but later the sentiment would turn to admiration.

Atlas wheezed on the ground, the wind knocked out of him. The onlookers at the perimeter finished packing, and finally two of the patrols dipped into different parts of the jungle. We counted twelve men remaining. Seee called us into a huddle. Each man would snipe a target. Split and Brock would then split off into the woods and flank one of the patrols entering the jungle. Mir, Conroy, and I would flank the clearing and retake the camp. Seee told us he would provide the cover fire.

The guards lifted Atlas from the ground onto his knees. The map man straddled him again. He repeated the yelling routine, but Atlas remained more tight-lipped than ever, pressing his lips together, the fleshy parts hidden in a prankish, childlike expression. The map man stood up, ordered the two men to tilt Atlas’s head back, then threatened to cut off his nose with the machete.

Atlas missed seeing the man’s body jerk since his eyes were soaked in his own blood. Perhaps he heard the six shots crush five enemy skulls. The other, Mir’s man, covered a hole shot in his neck with his thumb. Blood gushed out making a fountain over the body of the map man. Seee put down two more before I had enough time to aim again. One of the guerillas reached for a shouldered walkie-talkie, but before he could get a word out, Mir’s second shot cracked a bullet through his teeth. Seee
motioned for us to move out, dropping his M40A3 for an M16.

The battle pitched forward. I caught a glimpse of Brock and Split taking off the other way. My hands damp with sweat, a cold layer of fear crawled over me. A jolt of adrenalin flew through my body as I rushed to my feet. Through the bush I ran in a neurotic stumble. Were Conroy and Mir behind me? I didn’t know. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the muzzle flash of Seee’s M16 as he drew the fire away from us. Perhaps three or four guerillas remained, now on their stomachs, most of them shooting wildly into the jungle in Seee’s direction. Bullets and tracers sprayed the jungle in chaos.

All reaction. No control. Revved-up and running at transonic speed, the red glow of tracer rounds zinging in streams overhead. Hundreds of bamboo trees in front of me, long and lank, networked together, root systems interleaved, all part of the same underground organism in a semi-live state. Doors opening as I fly through them. Step through the wrong one and a bullet catches you in the head. The world pushes forward without you.

I sprint over dead leaves and detritus as if the earth beneath flames with fire. The hot streak of sweat on my brow stings my eyes as I gallop through the woods. Trees splinter in front of me, the ground kicking up earth from a sweep of bullets. Closer and closer I bolt toward the spitting muzzle fire. Then I hear a cry from behind. Someone trailing me, hit. No time to look. Shotgun in my arms, I burst into the clearing, a side shot open with one of the machinegunners. He must have seen me in the corner of his eye. Rolling over frantically, he tries to adjust. I pull the trigger in a full charge, the spray of the shot blowing him backwards. Another guy snaking on the ground swivels toward me, the man just realizing the nature of the ambush. I pump another slug back into the chamber. Peace, brother, but this is war.

Buried under a body, Atlas now rises with the machete in his hand, his face bloodstained and mean. A wild, hungry
expression in his eyes like a vampire after the first sniff of blood. One of the enemy flees into the woods. A single shot coming from the jungle cuts him down. Conroy now through the wall of trees. The last of the enemy surrenders, raising his weapon in the air, but Atlas slides behind him in no mood for mercy.

The area was ours. Seee stepped into the clearing, popping off rounds in enemy corpses. Conroy helped hobbling Mir. Mir was hit twice, once in the flak jacket and another in the leg. Blood streamed down his fatigues from the wound. Seee ordered Conroy to patch him up. He opened his backpack and threw Conroy a med kit. Then he looked over our dead, turning each on his back. It looked like they had been ambushed from the rear—all of them shot from behind. Seee’s face went pale when he glared at the face of one of them. It was the rugged Ahanu, his whole face pale and frozen in time looking up at us. Seee put his hand over Ahanu’s chest and said a farewell in Yoncalla. We were wide open out here, I thought. Even still, Seee fingered one of the exit wounds, and striped his cheeks with Ahanu’s blood. He ordered the bleeding Atlas to come with him, me back into the jungle to tail the patrol Brock and Split were flanking. They would certainly be coming back, he said.

We split up, him and Atlas running into one side of the jungle, me the other—both of us outnumbered but with the element of surprise. I hesitated for a moment, thinking of the prime opportunity in front of me. Track the tracker. An ambush he would never expect. I stood frozen, hearing my own breathing. A few seconds later, I walked deeper into the forest, double-backed, and then changed my mind again. It wasn’t just Atlas stopping me from fulfilling Pelletier’s wish, something else gripped me to turn away from my promise.

I flipped down the NVG over an eye, and a green tint filled my vision. The world came in focus differently, the roots of trees like veins in the earth. I ran through the jungle, losing myself in the maze of the bush. A retro reality passed before my eyes. Senses
sharpened once again, but my mind levitated out of body, stuck in a wet blanket of dissociation, lost in a deprivation chamber in the jungle of some alien planet lush and verdant. I seemed to be a stranger to myself, wondering who the man was running away from his word. The heavy breathing I heard I associated with myself only because it synched in with my own. I ran uphill as I hard as I could until my breath caught up with my boot speed. Then all of a sudden, I stopped.

Up ahead, there was a shake in a cluster of bush. Three enemy emerged contoured against a full moon, coming down the ravine in a swift trot, their faces distorted and green. I ducked behind a large felled tree with upended roots.

There they were. In threes—birth, life, and death traipsing obliviously through the jungle toward a point of ambush. They carried AKs in their hands, their faces blurs without feature or depth. Sewn-up eyelids blind to past, present, and future; their time now multifaceted stepping through a set of trees. A failure to see they had walked through the wrong door. They looked between twenty-six to thirty years old. Their pasts still belonged to them, but their presents were stuck in a mind frame hoping the rough day was through, their faces weary with it. I tightened the stock of the shotgun firmly against my tensed shoulder, my left arm ready to pump. I was the predator, sniffing their scent riding the wind. Their futures hid behind a hooked index finger squeezing a metal tooth, my right eye in the sight ready to ground the trinity—father, son, and Holy Ghost.

The blind men marched closer, their boots loud climbing the stairway between earth and sky. My eyes stung, moistened by sweat seeping into them. I wiped my brow on my arm and waited for one of them to look up and see me. To give me an excuse. Seee’s voice came to me,
There is no fair in a fight
. But where do you draw the line? Had it been cut to ribbons?

I clamped my thumb and two fingers together and touched my forehead. I swept them over my stomach and shoulders,
completing the sign of the cross.

Prisoners. I could take them as prisoners.

But here I was, Cerberus, the three-headed hound from Hell, coming to take them.

Prisoners, I repeated. Take them as prisoners.

But I couldn’t.

And in the end, I wouldn’t.

The day after the Battle for Atlas (as it became to be known) wherein a gang of Burmese invaded the camp, the men of The Abattoir buried the dead. Even with the loss of Glen Aims, Adam Avery, Drew Gareth, and Ahanu, the number killed on the enemy side far outnumbered Abattoir losses, and in the end the remainder of enemy guerillas retreated back into the forest. Pride glowed throughout the camp, and even though temperament remained solemn during the burial ceremony, each of us basked in the victory, so much so we seemed to miss questioning what it was really all about. Some thought Seee himself had instigated the attack as a test. Then a rumor spread around that he had stolen from the Burmese mob, inviting an attack. But all of this seemed far-fetched. Seee’s anger steamed outwardly. He cursed what he called a lack of forewarning in the system. When I asked him what he meant, he remained tight-lipped. Further prodding earned only reproach. Merrill, Des, and Kumo sidestepped around him.

Before the battle began, the camp had fallen under the watch of Kumo and Ahanu. After the first set of mines exploded, Kumo led a group of fighters into the jungle. Everyone played his part in the fight, and everyone had their own story to tell about it.

Kumo, Merrill, and Des built a wooden ziggurat eight feet tall in which they placed the wrapped Ahanu’s body on top. The bodies of the other three rested on the levels below. At twilight, Seee lit the torch that would send them away in flames. Black smoke billowed high up into the horizon. In his speech, he said not all of us would have such a sendoff, but we would do the best
while we still had the luxury to do so. He warned the enemy could be back, so all of us had to be alert during night watches. A few hours later, he called us together and told us the problem would be fixed another way, by relocation, and it would start tomorrow.

So on the day after the ceremony, a day in November of 2022, the students of The Abattoir faced a new challenge, unaware they were about to sail off the end of the flat world into an unknown universe, one always duplicitously present, but whose true form we had only imagined.

We spent the morning setting booby traps in the forest. Afterward, I walked by Seee’s bivouac, and through the crack in the canvass door saw him spreading out the map, the paper now blood-tattered and worn, onto a metallic table. Des was packing up supplies outside—tents, ammo, M16s, ready-to-eat-meals—throwing it on the backs of idling horses nibbling on grass. The smell of urine from one of them was thick in the air. I crept to the back of the shelter and listened to the low whispers coming from inside.

From Kumo: “You’re making a mistake. You should kill him now before this gets any more out of hand.”

Then Seee, switching to Yoncalla, which I was now beginning to understand, said something to the effect of: “Nothing is certain. We must be patient. We need him. He’s the only one that can do this.”

Kumo spoke again in Yoncalla: “It’s not in your nature to take risks. So why now?”

Silence followed. I heard the map crinkle and flip, then Seee’s fists slammed down on the table. A moment of silence passed and then Seee said in English, “With a failure from The Anthill what I need now is your trust. This cannot stand! We lost a good man last night, and I know you are all upset, but it hasn’t clouded my judgment. With some men, you must roll the dice and see where they land.”

No more words came, so I crept away. After they reemerged, Seee asked us to gather in the clearing. Then we moved into the forest receiving few other directions.

The horses stayed behind, spare one with empty baskets dangling over its side. We hiked northwest where the woods thickened. We plodded through an initial cluster of thanaka trees mashed compactly together. Here the green plant matter and shadowed undergrowth were the most dense. The bush became as solid as a holly hedge. We swam through vines and thicket. We hacked through walls of vegetation with glittering machetes, their blades sticky with gummy residue of roots and branches. Each of us took a rotation, two at a time up front clearing a path with machetes large enough for the trailing horse. We inched forward until we heard the gushing sounds of distant rivers.

On the way up a peak, I caught up to Briana. “I heard you did pretty well out there.”

She looked at me cautiously, as if I were playing an angle. “Thanks,” she said. “I guess.”

“Seriously. I’m not messing with you. I heard you were tough.”

“You’re not trying to be a smart ass are you, Corvus?”

“Not at all. I can switch back if you like.”

She smiled at me and gave me a wink. “Please do. I don’t think I recognize you.”

“I heard you got your cherry popped. Or rather, you popped a cherry in one of the enemy.”

“That’s the Corvus I know. But it’s true, and nothing really to be bragging about.”

We climbed over the last of the hill and hit a flat stretch of land. “I’ll be damned,” I said with a quick laugh. “Should I put you on the couch so you can tell me your feelings?”

“There’s only one thing you want to put me on the couch for, Corvus.”

I laughed. “Well played.”

Ascending another stony hill, we reached scarred cliffs ripping the landscape into veiny ravines where river water flowed into the heart of yet another wall of endless jungle. We climbed down a gentle decline toward a part of the river smothered in woods. There, Seee ordered us to drop the machetes and gear and gather around while Kumo laid out a map on the rocks of the riverbank. Seee spoke, lifting the map high so all could see. Written on the map were names, each shaded within a geography, dark lines enclosing each person’s name. “Everyone will have a zone you will call home. You are not to wander into another person’s zone. Each zone has been marked with paint on tree trunks to mark each boundary.”

All of us looked confused, as if Seee spoke unlearnt words in Yoncalla.

“Here you will live and survive,” Seee continued.

Kumo watched our reactions while Merrill picked up our belongings and put them into the horse’s baskets.

Each of us squinted toward the map glancing at whom would be close. Across the river from me would be Uriah. On his right and left—Mir and Grus. Split was north of them, almost landlocked. Upriver from Grus was Shankar, Conroy, Brock. On my side, Burns and Eaton were upriver. Downriver were Drake, and Orland. I couldn’t even see where Briana was. No one I really knew was on my side of the river.

“We are currently in Grus’s zone,” Seee said. “Kumo and Merrill will escort you to your zones momentarily. Anyone caught in another man’s zone will be punished with the whip.” Seee fished through his backpack and threw a black bullwhip out onto the river rocks. Bundled up in a coil, it was made of black leather. It had a silver handle, gold coupling, and an ivory pummel with two holes cut into it where red leather bands slithered out like baby snakes. The cracker had small jagged pieces of metal woven into it. Seee marked the reactions of the men as we stared down at it. “You are free to defend your own
zone from others who might try to steal your resources.”

For a moment no one said a word. Finally, Shankar asked, “What about the guerillas?”

“They won’t find you here,” Seee said.

“Surely you will leave us with something,” Shankar said.

Seee gave us a polished smile. “They didn’t teach you how to survive without tools at The Farm, did they? As you’ll soon find out, it’s a different game when you’ve got nothing.” He drew a box of matches from his backpack and threw them in the air. They landed closest to Orland’s feet. A melee started in the dirt, hands from everywhere trying to grab them. I dove into the pile and quickly found Orland’s arm with the matches. With my feet, I kicked away others and screamed out, “We will share! Everyone shall have one.” Yet the struggle ensued. Finally, I saw Split and Brock clawing men off the dog pile until it was just me and Orland. Orland struggled, kneeing me in my newly healed ribs. I let out a groan. Shankar tried to pile in again, but I booted him in the face. Blood streamed from his nose as he stepped back and cupped his hands around his face. I twisted around and wedged Orland’s arm into an arm bar. Orland punched me in the ribs again with his free hand, sensing the weak spot. I lifted my hips abruptly. As the matches dropped from his clenched fist, I continued the relentless pressure until I heard a snap. Orland screamed in agony.

“See how quickly they turn?” Seee scoffed to Kumo. “Earlier they were acting as if one battle makes the war.”

Kumo nodded. “Nature is quick to change the minds of men. Where is honor amongst the animals?” He pointed at me. “It seems Angry Dog is the fastest learner.”

“Indeed,” Seee said, gazing down at Orland’s broken arm. “Merrill, bring a med kit.”

I raised myself from the ground with the matches.

“Sometimes order must be paid for with a price,” I said angrily.

Merrill came over with his rucksack, and overhearing what I said, smiled and guffawed, “Angry Dog says he who makes the order makes the rules.”

Kumo snorted, and Seee said, “The Buck in him is beginning to wake. But here, Nature is the club.”

Were my actions simply a maneuver for positioning, letting the men know the pecking order? Everyone stared at me, waiting for a response. Briana glared down at the ground, avoiding my eyes. Was it respect or fear I saw? I didn’t care which. I stood there, silent. My position on the river had improved and I had the matches. Mashed and crumpled, I tore open the box and began doling them out one-by-one to each man in the circle. The men took them greedily, but lowered their eyes when they took one.

“We will at least start this game from on equal ground,” I said, directing my remark to Seee.

“You will see that nothing is equal out here,” Merrill said, pulling a first-aid kit from his rucksack. A pack of cigarettes bulged in the arm of his white T-shirt. The shirt was streaked with sap and mud, and his arms were red with scratches. Leaning down to tend to Orland, he added, “You could be handing away your life right there.”

“Yes,” Kumo said, “but it was a deed with honor all the same.” This unexpected ray of sunshine from Kumo caused me to turn my gaze at him. He caught my eye and looked over to Merrill. Merrill was busy making a sling and splint. A small smile brushed over Seee’s lips, yet he remained silent. More begging hands held themselves up for a match, wiggling fingers frantically outstretched, as if Merrill’s words would make me reconsider.

Seee concluded by saying, “Welcome to Nature. Your humble beginnings.”

From there, each of us split up and was shown our marked boundary, claiming two square miles of land, all with access to the river. No man’s land separated regional boundaries where
one had to shout to be heard by someone else adjacent. Fear of being whipped would keep communication minimal, as blood loss and festering wounds from a lashing would surely be a death sentence. Orland would spend ten days in the infirmary set up in the Tree House before he would have to rejoin the rest of us.