The Totem 1979 (35 page)

Dunlap moaned. His breath was putrid. Too rushed to mind that, Slaughter hefted him across his shoulder and stumbled down the hallway toward the bathroom. When he set him on the toilet, he started to unbutton Dunlap’s shirt, but that was taking too much time, so he just ripped the shirt off. Dunlap tilted, almost falling, and Slaughter eased him onto the floor, then got his pants off, his shoes and socks and underwear. The underwear was soiled. Nostrils flaring, Slaughter threw it into a corner. He slid Dunlap into the bathtub and turned the shower on to cold. Dunlap woke up, screaming.

“Take it easy.”

Dunlap wouldn’t stop screaming.

Slaughter slapped his cheeks. “Hey, it’s me. It’s Slaughter.”

Dunlap blinked at him. His eyes were red. The vomit that had caked around his lips and chin was rinsing off, and he was frowning, his head to one side. He looked as if he might begin to cry, and then his body heaved.

“It’s all right. I’m with you,” Slaughter told him. “Get it out of you.”

He studied Dunlap, water spraying onto the both of them, as spasm followed spasm, and then Dunlap sighed and leaned back, coughing in the bathtub. He was crying.

“What’s the matter? Nightmares?”

Dunlap nodded.

“Well, I’ve got work for you. I need you sober. While you’re stunned like this, I need some answers. And I think right now that you won’t lie to me. I need to know if I can trust you.”

Dunlap closed his eyes and shivered as the cold water sprayed at him. “You know already what you want to hear. You don’t need me to answer.”

“Listen, buddy.” Slaughter dug his fingers into Dunlap’s shoulder. “You’re not quite so drunk as you pretend. I want to hear the answer.”

“Sure, all right, I’ll say that you can trust me.”

“If you screw up, you’ll wish you’d never met me.”

“You can trust me.

Hey. My shoulder.”

Slaughter noticed the way the skin was turning purple and eased his fingers off. He leaned back, sitting on the toilet seat. “I need a man to cover me,” he said at last. “A man from outside who has no involvement in this. I want you to watch me every second, check out everything I do and keep a record. There’ll soon be trouble, major trouble, and I want to know that I’m protected.”

Dunlap had his eyes shut as he shivered in the cold spray of water.

“Do you hear me?” Slaughter asked.

“Is it that bad?”

“It’s that bad.”

“Hell, I’d be crazy not to go along with you.”

“You’ll be crazy if you do. There’s just one stipulation. All I ask is that you wait until I say that you can publish the story.”

“Now I-“

“I don’t want to have to worry about you. I have lots to watch for without that.”

The water kept spraying. Slaughter felt his wet shirt clinging to his skin.

“All right, so long as no one else is in on this,” Dunlap said.

“It’s you and me.”

“A deal then.”

Slaughter sat back on the toilet seat. He didn’t know exactly where to start. “You said you wanted a story. Here’s the damnedest thing you ever heard.”

Chapter Three.

Altick scanned the trees and ridges as the helicopter swooped over them. He watched for some flash of movement, some odd color, anything, but there was nothing to attract him, just an endless sweep of forest rising sharply, boulders, deadfalls, streams and canyons, farther ridges, everything but what he wanted, and he rubbed his eyes to clear them, staring harder. There were three of them in the chopper, the pilot, Altick, and a state policeman wedged in back. They had rifles, binoculars, a portable two-way radio, and several knapsacks filled with food, water, and medical supplies. The helicopter was outmoded, small, ideal for two persons, suitable for three if absolutely necessary. With the added weight of their gear, it was unsteady, slow, and hard to keep above the trees. It burned fuel too rapidly. As they swung up the contour of these rising ridges, there were moments when they held their breath, and Altick wished that there had been another way to get up here as soon as he required.

On the ground the other team would have already started, five men as before but this time primed for trouble, clutching their rifles, watching all around them as they used their maps to find the best way to the lake up in the mountains. There were no dogs, no way to get any soon enough, but this search team had a specific destination, and it didn’t need any dogs for guidance. Altick thought about them somewhere down below him, thought about the hard job they would have to push up through the forest toward the rendezvous up here. But he had made several phone calls, and there hadn’t been any other helicopters he could commandeer. He was thinking that he might wish he had more than just two men with him. There was no predicting what he might find when the helicopter touched down.

He kept staring. Then he saw some movement, but as he pointed at it, he realized that what he’d seen were elk below him among the trees. He saw one bound across an open space, and normally he would have taken pleasure, but he had to keep his mind on his objective. More than that, he now was bothered that he hadn’t seen more elk before this, deer, other signs of life down there. He should have, this high in the mountains, but the forest seemed deserted, and he wished the helicopter could go faster.

It was roaring, straining. Even with the plexiglass, the noise came rushing at him, and he kept peering down, and the whole scene was like everything he’d been through back in Nam in 1969. While the radicals had looted campus buildings, while the marchers had converged on Washington, he had been going on patrols, his team in a chopper, staring at the wilderness below them, and the trees of course were different now, the weather, and whatever waited for him down there, but he felt the tightness in his stomach, felt the cramps around his heart as he fought to restrain his nervousness. He remembered all the shit that he had gone through, all the friends that he’d seen killed, the blood, the disease, the suffocating jungle, believing that he served his country while the demonstrators back home had weakened the country’s resolve. He had come back from his tour of duty and had signed on with the state police. The valley at least had responded to him with some pride, and with his military bearing, he’d done well. Indeed he sometimes acted as if he were still in the service, and he talked about the people in the valley as civilians, building pride and character among his men, reminding them that they were different. And they all were loyal to him, as he was to them, afraid now for the officers he’d sent up and were missing. He was staring at the forest, reaching absently to touch his mustache and the scar across his lip that it disguised. He grabbed the microphone and spoke abruptly, “Chopper to patrol. Report.”

The hiss of static.

“Chopper to patrol.”

“Yeah, Captain, everything’s fine. We’re moving fast. We should be up there before noon.”

“They might have headed back already. Let’s hope we didn’t have to do this.”

“We’ll just call it exercise.”

“Some exercise,” Altick answered, smiling. “Ten-four. Out.”

His smile dissolved, though, as he stared down from the helicopter. He was more and more reminded of those choppers back in Nam, the tension solid in him as the helicopter rose up past another ridge, and suddenly he saw it.

“There’s the lake,” the pilot said.

Altick nodded, studying the landscape. It was formed a basin, ridges sloping all around, then forest spreading inward, then the clearing that went all around the lake. There were few trees beside the lake itself, but Altick knew his men would have gone toward them. He pointed toward one tree by the lake, and they swept closer.

“This was where they camped,” the pilot told him. “When I couldn’t find them, I went back to get some help.”

The knapsacks were in sight now and the black pit where their campfire had been. Nothing else, and Altick tapped the pilot’s shoulder. “Swing around the lake. I want to check those trees beside it on the other shore. I want to check the edge of the forest as well.”

“I did that when I first was up here.”

“Yeah, well, just for me, let’s do it once again.”

Altick continued staring downward. They moved around the lake, the wind whipped by the rotors causing patterns on the water. But the other trees had nothing there of interest, and the clearing all around the lake was quiet, and he saw no sign of anything around the forest’s edge.

“Okay, then, take her back and set her down.”

“I told you we wouldn’t see anything.”

Altick only looked at him. He spoke into the microphone. “Chopper to patrol one. Charlie, do you hear me?”

Static. He waited. “Chopper to patrol one.”

“I already did that, too,” the pilot told him. “But I never got an answer.”

They set down, the long grass bending from the wind created by the helicopter’s rotors, and back in Nam, Altick would have been in motion by now, jumping out before the chopper hit the ground or more often hovered and then swooped away, and he’d be scrambling with his men to find some cover. Abandoned. At least this way the helicopter would stay with him, and he waited for the rotors to stop before he unhitched his harness, shoved at the hatch, and stepped out, holding his rifle.

He hurried toward the trees beside the lake, then straightened as he stared at what he’d been afraid of. Never mind the scattered remnants of the fire. Kicking at it would be one way to put it out, sloppy granted, but there was no dismissing what he found beside the charred wood. Blood. A lot of it. Huge patches of it, dry now on the mountain grass and earth. He glanced around and saw the leashes on the tree, more blood where once the dogs must have huddled. He noticed the glint of an empty rifle cartridge. In the grass, he found a flashlight, and the knapsacks had been torn, their contents missing, and a rifle butt was smashed beside a tree-the little signs he couldn’t see from the air, but now he knew that there had been a fight all right, and no dog, no wolf, no bear ever smashed a rifle. At once, he saw the barrel in the shallows of the lake.

“My God, what happened here?” his deputy blurted.

Altick swung toward the pilot. “Can you use that rifle we brought for you?”

“Sure, but-” The pilot looked pale.

“Five men and five dogs, and this is all that’s left of them. I don’t think we can wait for help. We’ve got to spread out, searching,” Altick said.

“Not me. I’m not going anywhere alone,” the pilot told him.

From the right, a wind rushed toward them, tugging at their clothing, bending grass, and scraping branches in the tree. The deputy looked up at the scraping branches and pointed. Altick looked.

“Another rifle.”

It was wedged up in the branches where it must have been thrown.

“We’ll do this together,” Altick said. “These tracks in the grass. I thought they might be from our men. Now I’m not so sure. Let’s follow them.”

They soon found a state policeman’s shirtsleeve in the grass, the edges bloody. No one said a word or even touched it.

They kept walking. Farther on, they found the other sleeve and then the shirt itself. The forest loomed. They studied the grass, then the forest. The wind kept tugging at them, scraping branches. All the trees were moving.

“I’m not going in there. We have no idea what we’re up against,” the pilot said “It could be anything.”

But Altick continued walking.

“Hey, I said I won’t go with you. “

“I heard you. Stay back then.”

“But you can’t just leave me.”

“If there’s trouble, you can use the chopper.”

“I don’t like this.”

Altick kept walking. When he looked back, he saw the pilot running toward the helicopter.

“Just as well,” the deputy said. “I don’t like nervous civilians near me with a rifle.”

Altick nodded. “He was sure excited at the start. But once there’s danger, he’s a weekend cowboy. He was right, though. We don’t know what we’ll find in there.”

They followed the tracks in the grass, noticing more dried blood, and when Altick parted some branches, he saw four piles of guts among the fir trees. Altick swallowed something bitter, the taste of fear, and scanned the forest. He thought of corpses he had seen in Nam, their ears and balls cut off, and he knew he had only one choice now. “We’re going back.”

The deputy beside him was ashen. He shook and made a retching sound.

“Don’t be ashamed if you get sick,” Altick said.

The man clutched his stomach. “I’ll be fine. It’s just that-“

“Take deep breaths. I saw a lot of things like this in Nam. I never did get used to them.

“My God, they disemboweled them.”

“Who or what? For sure, no wolf or dog did this. Come on. We’d better head back toward the chopper. I don’t know what’s out here, but it’s more than we can handle.” Altick kept thinking, four. There were five men, so why only four fly-speckled mounds of viscera, and then he reached the helicopter, fighting for his breath, and he found out. The pilot wasn’t looking at them. Instead he faced the lake, his mouth open, his finger pointing, and when Altick got there, he saw the headless body floating in the water. His deputy moaned. The wind kept blowing fiercely. On the ripples of the lake, the head bobbed to the surface.

“Jesus, won’t those reinforcements ever get here?”

Chapter Four.

It was twenty-three years since Lucas had left. Now he was coming home. He peered out from the window of the car he’d thumbed a ride from, seeing new homes on the outskirts, then a shopping center, and the street here hadn’t been paved back then, but he recognized more buildings than he didn’t, and he thought that he might recognize some of the people, but he couldn’t. Over there, a house that had been blue was now painted white, and up ahead, trees that had been saplings now were tall. He saw front yards he once had played in, but their spaces now seemed smaller, as indeed the houses did, and everywhere he looked he had the sense of things diminished. Well, what else had he expected? Did he think that twenty-three years would leave the town and him unchanged? Or had the town been really this small all along and he too young to put it in perspective? Well, he’d seen how big the world could be. Now Potter’s Field was welcome.