Rough draft, excerpt 5: Chapter 11

Note on content:  this excerpt takes place in Chapter 11 (according to the outline), and falls into Part II, the portion of the narrative told from the point of view of Michael Rowe.  This is not the entire chapter, but rather a portion intended to illustrate Michael's mental state, while tying him into the wider set of historical events that will continue to unfold over all three Volumes.

August 19, 1994:  Michael Rowe

Michael looked off to the west and caught a faceful of sunset.  The air was dry and flat, somnolent and heavy with the drone of cicadas.  Some brisk afternoon breezes had blown a lot of dust off the cornfields outside of town, and now a thick orange haze hung beneath those wisps of clouds still trying vainly to gather strength from the waning heat of the day.  The western horizon was ablaze, but above him was clear blue sky.  Behind him the air was evening-tinged and heavy, but the treeline along the barn fence obscured most of it from his view. 

            The barn had been rusting away quietly for decades in privacy, attended only by the burgeoning overgrowth and several generations of owls.  No livestock had been kept here in years.  What had once been a ranch had reverted, accidentally, to wildlife preserve.  The air barely stirred, now, but less than an hour ago it had been windy enough out here to thoroughly begrit with long-dry barnyard dust the face and throat of the unwary traveler.  He could content himself with the virtual certainty that the cowshit content of the dust was probably at an all-time low this summer, so long after the land had been used for grazing, but it probably still well exceeded the minimum requirement of pulverized insect husks.  And there were still plenty of quietly smoking, dessicated puffballs underfoot; he’d never gotten over his early phobia of inhaling spores and then growing poisonous fungi in his lungs.

            The place had never been well-tended, in any ranching sort of context, at least not during his residence there.  His parents had acquired all hundred and twelve acres when he was nine years old, and had used it as a base of operations for their separate ventures, most rather ranch-unrelated.  They’d tended some goats and let a few horses run on the place, but the pasture was by and large undergrazed, and the fields went fallow, then feral, as the tractor and other, more mysterious implements rusted in shame in the shadow of the barn.  There were gardens, and stock ponds now serving the needs of their piscene populations rather than those of actual livestock; and the grownups made some trails for taking dirt bikes and four-wheelers on.  But outside of a few more such nods to civilization, they pretty much turned the place loose to fend for itself.  As far as Michael knew.  There were parts of the property he wasn’t allowed to go on.

            Having been released into such a wide world at an age when his explorer’s spirit had just begun to emerge, he found himself strongly compelled to get out under the sun and do things, see things, check it all out.  He’d always been a rather pallid child, only as energetic as he’d needed to be to meet the demands of childhood.  In every photo taken of him outdoors, he was squinting, resentful at the sun. 

            Here at the cusp of childhood and adolescence, he’d found himself unfettered by urban space considerations and unsaddled of the overcrowded playground of urban obligations.  He had a vast landscape to wander, and he didn’t have to wander it with anybody else.  Over time, as his parents accumulated dogs of various sizes and breeds, he built up a companion base, but he was beholden to no one, and responsible for nothing, when he was out beneath the sky.   The fields were a world he didn’t have to share with anybody, an expansive, even scary one that he became accustomed to, and then enamored of, as he entered his second decade of living.

            He never thought of himself as solitary.

            He never thought of himself as strange.

            The sky did something to him.  As the years passed, and his memories accumulated to the point where he had to sort them into winter, spring and summer categories, his time spent outdoors—some radiative property of the sun, perhaps—thinned out the top of his skull, weathering away the topmost surface of the nearly impenetrable shell he’d begun to grow.  The sky was able to peek through the glaze as though through a peeled-up corner of window tint, and the peeling progressed as summers came and went. 

            Michael was not yet thirteen when he started to realize that the sky was reading his mind.  Not just the sky, but everything in it.  Birds passing overhead caught glimpses of his inner world.  Clouds chuckled among themselves at his erupting erotic fantasies.  Grasshoppers twittered to katydids about the arguments he’d had with his parents, the fistfights he’d had at school.  He knew that coyotes, possums, and turtles queried his dogs about his trials and tribulations, but the dogs at least kept mum.

By the time he’d started hair on his chin, his thoughts were an open book to anybody within earshot.  He first noticed this at church.  It was the only place other than school where he would congregate among dozens of other people, and it was rather a more quiet and captive audience than he was likely to encounter there.  Long since bored of all the church talk, he would tune out the sermon and study the females.  He was learning to appreciate the curve of a thigh and the swelling of a breast.  And the girls his age, and just a little older, had been catching his eye lately in a way that no females of any age had ever managed.  He’d seen dozens of pairs of nice but much-older breasts over the course of his life, and few had made much of a dent in his consciousness; age somehow distanced them from his attraction.  And up until recently, girls his own age hadn’t had much to offer in that regard.

Girls, the younger variety of female, had always for him an abstraction, an annoyance, something he’d have to learn to dance with and kiss one day.  But now Girls were becoming Women, and had started to smell nice and move charmingly and to sound, and be, somehow, interesting.  They were tolerable.  Better than tolerable.

            In school he would fantasize madly about every nice pair of tits that swung his way, but no one pair could occupy his mind for more than a few seconds, before the next nice pair, or some other distraction, flung it out.

            In church, he had nothing but time, and he dwelled longingly on the features of every female that caught his fancy.

            The realization was long in the dawning, the first perhaps of many slow awakenings, and the scariest:  the girls knew he was thinking about them.  When his gaze fell on one spectactular bosom, viewed in, say, reverse three-quarter profile, the bearer of that bosom—a girl, say four pews ahead of him and several to the right—would turn away, or sometimes toward, him, either denying him the view or inviting him for more. 

            There was almost always some kind of reaction.

            When his thoughts turned to what his hands might do if allowed to wander beneath a skirt seated to his right, the grandmotherly figure seated on the other side of that skirt would clear her throat gruffly.  When he spotted a fortyish woman in a swelling blouse and observed that her nipples were straining at the fabric, she coughed, turned her head, and finally lowered it in feigned prayer.

The more he let his mind wander, the more the pews around him resounded with coughs, throat-clearings, and the shuffling sounds of crossing and uncrossing legs.

It was clear that his mind was incompatible with adult society.  If sex was the only thing he could think about, but none of the grownups in his vicinity wanted him to think about it, how the hell was he going to be able to get along in the world?

It soon became obvious to him that people to either side were more likely to pick up on his thoughts than were people directly to his front.  Evidently his ear canals provided a handy conduit for brainwaves.  Having realized this, he soon started expanding on his repertoire of nervous tics, working in a number of elaborate ear-covering routines.

            Coming into high school, Michael was finding the one-sidedness of it extremely maddening.              Everyone around him seemed to know what was going on in his mind.  Of the whole world, only his parents seemed generally unconcerned about what he was thinking.  But he was sure they were in on it too.

            He was never able to catch a glimmer of anyone else’s thoughts.  He did eventually come to appreciate the sensation of being looked at, and by the summer of his freshman year, he could tell when anyone was watching him, from any direction, at any range.

By the end of that summer, he felt as though he were being watched all the time.

That sensation would never leave him.

            Now an adult, he had come to recognize that some of his earlier perceptions were unfounded, rooted in ordinary adolescent fears of embarrassment and rejection.  He didn’t acknowledge that those fears that had stuck with him throughout early adulthood, in particular the feeling of being constantly watched, qualified as paranoia.  But he did come to doubt some of the memories he had of childhood, memories that in retrospect were simply too weird to be real.  Rejecting these memories was a form of therapy, a way of proving to himself that he was at least rational enough to know what was too odd to be true.

            There was, for instance, the time, around age five, when his grandfather took him to meet Jesus. 

            Now there had always been a certain amount of weirdness hovering around his grandparents, and to even his naive and disconnected consciousness, the tension between them and his parents was fairly evident.  For the first few years of his life, his parents continually tried and shed residences, and a few such episodes during his toddlerhood resulted in stays of various durations at the grandparents’ country home in Bellville.  These were unhappy times for his father and his mother—he of a general San Fransisco hippie temperament and she an independent country hellcat—and strange times for Michael.  She was far too religious and conservative to marry an atheist anarchist, but that’s what she’d done, for reasons that would always remain unfathomable to him, to her, and to Michael.  But they remained together for the duration of his childhood, and the resulting resentment and long-standing incompatibilities made for a rather uncomfortable youth in a rather cold-hearted home.

            His grandfather was in real estate, or something, and seemed to always need to drive out to some house somewhere and walk around it holding tape measures up to things.  Michael would often ride along, providing his services as tape measure anchor.  Any day of the week, there was a decent chance he would find himself in the back of his grandfather’s big Cadillac, sleepily awaiting the end of a hot summer drive. 

            It was after one such trip, on the return leg, that Grandpa had gotten onto the highway headed south out of town instead of looping back around to the west side where they lived.  Michael half-wondered whether they were going to Sealy, maybe to the Dairy Queen there in town.  When he finally got around to voicing this concern, Grandpa answered, “Oh, no, we’re going to see Jesus.” 

            Michael still held out hope that there might be ice cream after the meeting.

            Grandpa often spoke of Jesus as someone he knew personally, and so although Michael had the vague idea that Jesus must be pretty old by now, and possibly kind of dead, based on all the imagery floating around, he didn’t really doubt that they were going to see him, in some sense.  Grandpa had a way of making magic things happen, and he was probably at least as good at going to see dead people as he was at pulling quarters out of Michael’s ears.  Michael didn’t really like meeting new people, though, and if Jesus was another of Grandpa’s stuffy religious friends, this wasn’t gonna be much fun. 

Michael wondered whether he lived close to Dairy Queen.

            Michael spent a lot of time staring out of the windows of moving cars, usually preferring the rear view but unable to attain it most times, being securely belted in.  There were parts of the county where he knew all of the trees along the road, could tell when one of them had recently lost a limb to rain or wind.  He could usually determine, without even looking out the window, whether he was being driven toward Cat Spring, or Eagle Lake, or Lake Somerville.  He was familiar with all of the little crossings over the Brazos River.  There wasn’t a major body of water, or stretch of highway, that he couldn’t identify blindfolded from just the smells or the sounds or the rhythm of the roughness of the road.  He dozed off, lulled by the flat amplitude-modulated Paul Harvey voice droning from the radio up front.  The radio was always on either Paul Harvey or Pat Robertson, and they were always putting Michael to sleep.

            When he woke up, they were at the edge of an unfamiliar body of water.  It looked like a lake, but not one that Michael had ever seen, unless they’d come in on an unusual route and were looking at it from the opposite side or something.  The banks were grassy, and it looked like this place had a tended lawn, but there weren’t any picnic tables or trash cans around.  The car was slowly edging into the water; the road went straight down into it.  A more cosmopolitan child might have recognized this as a boat landing.  Michael took it on faith that Grandpa was simply driving the Cadillac into the lake the same way he always did when going to see Jesus.

            He could feel a bit of a sliding, twisting motion, and he was aware of the tires losing traction beneath him, and then the car was treading water.  The tires spun gently as Grandpa applied the accelerator, and by means of a current either thusly generated or already present in the lake, they slowly floated around the curve of a grassy bank and lost sight of the road.

            After a few minutes, the tires found traction again, and the car began to slowly drive up out of the water.  This landing was well-concealed behind dense overgrowth, seeming to lead into an almost cavernlike pocket in the thick woods here.  The day was bright and clear, and the impossibly green leaves of the trees, and of the broad scythe blades of the bank grasses, seemed to actually sparkle in the sun.  To his front, everything was as crystalline as it could ever possibly hope to be, but this field of view was fairly narrow.  As he usually did on sunny days, Michael was squinting, and maybe it was the sleep that had gathered on the trip out here, but something made the edges of his vision really pale and smudgy, like someone had poured milk into his eyes. 

            Out of the cave and into the sunlight walked Jesus.  He was a bearded man, with long brownish, kinda curly hair.  He was tan, and his exceedingly white robe contrasted sharply.  There was no other real adornment, just a belt and some sandals.

            Michael didn’t leave the backseat.  He never really spoke to Jesus, or shook his hand, although the man did look into the back window and wave and smile when Grandpa introduced him.

            Grandpa and Jesus chatted idly through the window; Grandpa never opened the car door.  Michael never heard or never understood anything they said, and the conversation was therefore just as boring as he’d feared.  It at least didn’t last all that long.  Grandpa appeared to have arrived merely to deliver some message, and then after exchanging some pleasantries, he turned the car around—pulling off a three-point turn in the dark hollow in the woods, which permitted Michael the brief opportunity to spot what looked like a rudimentary camp site—and drove back into the lake.  Ten minutes later, they were driving back out on the opposite landing.

            In later years Michael would try to figure out just where this had taken place.  He’d had no real idea where they were going, other than a general southern or southwesterly sense.  It might have been Butler Lake, but they’d have had to drive through Cat Spring to get there, and Michael would have remembered that.  He was also fairly certain that no Cadillac would float on the surface of any lake.

            He knew only one thing for certain:  it was no dream.  In dreams, he wasn’t cognizant of the passage of time.  In this memory, he grew bored and fatigued from the drive and fell asleep, to awaken later at the objective.

            Weirdness didn’t stop there.  He wasn’t just feeling things and seeing eerie reactions in people around him.  He was witnessing, and experiencing, unusual events.  Freaks of nature, he thought, or perhaps pranks thereof.  There were places on the ranch where to stand was to invite intermittent feelings of pure terror, and places that simply felt strange.  Odd tangled growths of roots seeming to project faerie-auras; flat circles of hard dirt, inexplicably free of green grass and of animal tracks; deeply shadowed pockets in the wooded areas lining the fences, eldritch semisubterranean depressions along the banks of the creek, eerily quiet culverts under the road which felt of drowning and death.

            Once, at the age of fourteen, while patrolling the fenceline with his dogs, looking for critters to annoy, he entered the shade of an old elm at the corner of the south and east fence.  Here he felt more strongly the sensation of being watched; and unlike the ordinary sensation, which he felt most of the time when awake, this time it was directional.  Something in the woodline was eyeing him keenly. Unable to resist finding out once and for all what was behind those eyes, he climbed the fence, crossing over into neighbor territory, and scouted around.

            He found nothing but the severed head of a black bird, left there perhaps by a predator, propped up neatly on the flat stump of its neck.  Watching him through dead, open eyes.

            This memory he never questioned.  There was no surreal feeling about it, no milk-blurriness to his vision.  It happened, just as he remembered it, although he never noted the date, the time of day or the season of the year.  It was just another odd memory in a life full of them.  But although he was aware of the spookiness of this and other events, he had no external frame of reference against which to compare them.  It wasn’t until he graduated high school and entered the workforce, and the relative familial chaos of his earlier years had settled into the dry routine of adult life, that he even began to appreciate some of those events as unusual.  He had rarely shared any of his experiences with his parents; after their initial disinterest in the first couple he did relate, he never again bothered.  The few friends he had at school were never privy, either, as he preferred talking to them about hunting and fishing, about guns and spaceships and tanks, things he knew they also had a keen interest in.  

And there were of course some memories that went beyond spooky, which were recognizeable as weird even at the time, because they involved what could only be described as ghosts.  These events he kept to himself, not because he believed them prosaic and beneath his parents’ notice, but because he knew they were entirely outside the bounds of what most people—most grownups, anyway—regarded as “normal” and “real,” and if he told anybody about them, he would be regarded as a liar, or crazy, or both.

            The memories, then, suffered nothing from retelling:  no embellishment, no doubt imposed by the scorn of an unbelieving audience.  At the same time, they got little reinforcement, never being put into words, and simply slipped further into the past with each new year.  At least the memories of newer events got better—clearer, more in context, less doubtful—as he got older.  Still, certain things about them, such as frequency and association with previous events, could only be appreciated in rewind.  And this was a time for rewinding, the first such since he’d initially left home.  More than a year after his parents’ death, he was finally taking something like ownership of the land, finally reestablishing ties with it.  At the same time, he was in search of something to clarify the distinction between real and unreal.  Michael’s migraines had come back this past month, and while the actual headaches weren’t nearly so bad as they had been a few years ago, their sensory interference, their “auras,” were eroding his faith in reality.  For a couple of weeks now, he’d been replaying odd memories, dreams and migraine fugues, searching for patterns, trying to make sense of things.                      

            This was why he was back here now, wandering over the old property for the first time in years, checking out some of the old haunts.  He was trying to reexperience some of that weirdness, to prove to himself that it had happened.

            At age nine, when trying to catch crawdads in the swampy terrain along the west fence one evening, he had seen a cluster of people standing by the fence, their silhouette partially broken up by a clump of mesquite growing on the spot.  He was able to hear whispers, which the wind blew away and the cicadas overrode when he tried to listen.  There was nothing to do but to approach and try to hear better. 

            It was darkening rapidly when he got to the clump, and he was startled to see that they were all black men.  Five of them.  More startling than that, though, was their appearance of having been wounded.  They all looked bloody, and they all had torn clothes.  Military uniforms, actually, in various stages of being faded and shredded by heavy use and weaponry.  One had a helmet on, one of the steel round ones they showed soldiers wearing in the news clips that had been on television so much a few years ago, back when Michael was little and nobody knew he was watching.  He was the tallest, and stood in the middle of the group, with two shorter men to either side in a neat arrangement that matched the spray of mesquite fronds growing from a recently-cut stump in front of them.  They were just on the other side of the fence, close enough to spit on.  The whites of their eyes stood out in the dusk, and they were all watching him, some smiling slightly.  The one furthest to the left was also grinning broadly, cartoonishly wide.  Michael suddenly realized it wasn’t a grin he was looking at, not a mouth at all.  The man’s throat had been cut, and it was hanging down, gaping, showing a cross-section of skin and meat facing him with a yawning shadowy chasm of opened trachea and esophagus behind.

            Michael startled again, and thought about running, but the man put up a hand and casually waved, and he felt that if the guy was a ghost, he was probably a friendly one.  He didn’t approach any closer, but he kept watching, to see if they would talk to him.  He did feel hair standing up on the back of his neck and arms, but it wasn’t the first time, and he had learned to deal with that.

            He tried to find wounds on the others, and was able to see some gunshot wounds and some cuts—shrapnel wounds—here and there.  But the bodies were more or less intact other than that.  No missing limbs, no severe burns.  No big holes in faces or exposed organs.  Nothing truly scary, other than that slit throat, which that guy seemed to be pretty embarrassed about.  He hung his head in an apparent effort to conceal the damage.

            “Hey,” said the tall man in the middle.  To Michael, it sounded kind of like a cicada’s call shaped into words, wispy and dry, but still exhibiting some of the deep, throaty character of a big man’s voice, as if sounding from within the chest of a human being.

            “Hey,” he said.  “What are y’all doing here?”

            The tall man exchanged glances with the guy to his right, the one between him and the cut-throat guy.  “Waiting on you, I guess.”

            Michael shuffled his feet.  “What for?” 

            “Cuz you one of us,” said the tall man.  Michael noticed that none of the others were talking.  When he looked more closely at the one to the tall man’s right, he saw bullet holes in the throat.  He couldn’t spot anything on the ones to the left, but he guessed they also had some kind of injury that prevented them from speaking.  He found himself taking another step forward, in spite of himself, and he made himself stop.

            “Shoulda been here earlier, though,” said the tall man.  “Too dark to talk now.  You need to find us when the sky is orange.  You’ll be able to see us better.”  His face was fading with the waning sunlight, and his voice was fading too, falling into the rasping of the crickets and katydids.

            “I don’t get it,” Michael said, inadvertently stepping forward again, and then the dusk was complete.  The men became shadows, their facial features and their injuries lost to the darkness.  Then the Dead Soldiers were gone entirely, leaving only a spray of mesquite saplings occupying the same profile.

            In the years since then, Michael had made a few half-hearted attempts to find them at that same spot.  He’d show up at the mesquite clump in broad daylight, or linger in the fields until after dark and wander past.  But never showed up just at sunset.  Something in him resisted the idea of being there when the sky turned orange, just as strongly as it drew him there in the first place.  The saplings, all scions from a single cut stump, grew up throughout the ensuing years, gradually distorting the shape that had so resembled a group of men, and were eventually cut down again.  After that, he no longer felt the need to wander by that spot. 

            And yet, here he was now, daring himself to do just that, to stand near where the mesquite tree had once struggled to regrow, and wait for the dusk.

            His woolgathering had allowed the sun to sink a good way, and the breeze to settle a bit, and the noise of the evening insects to rise considerably, before he realized how late it had become.  There was nothing unusual directly to his front.  He cast his gaze over the fence, scouting up and down for human silhouettes.  Further down the property, as the terrain depressed toward the creek that ran along the back fence, the shadows under the trees were dark and heavy, and his eyes were drawn toward them.  As he shifted that gaze back leftward, toward his position, it froze over a clump of mesquite fronds growing from a long-ago-cut stump some twenty yards from his current position.

            There was something humanlike about their outline, and he found himself walking slowly in that direction.

            “Bout damn time,” the tall Dead Soldier said as he approached.  His voice sounded like a mouthful of cicadas, pulsating steadily, their chatter given shape by moving lips.  He had not aged in the fifteen years that had passed since their first meeting.

            Michael kept his voice steady.  He was seeing ghosts, yes.  And his hair was standing on end, just as before, and adrenaline was hammering his insides hard.  But he was an adult, and he was sane, and he knew ghosts cannot hurt the living.  “Who are you?”

            The tall Soldier smiled.  “We the Weapons Squad,” he said.  A couple of the others nodded.  The guy on the left of the line, furthest to the tall one’s right, had a cravat tied around his neck, mercifully concealing the horrible wound to his throat.  The others still exhibited their various injuries, though, and in this somewhat better light, Michael was able to make out shrapnel wounds to the throats of those who were free of bullet holes.  All had taken damage to the face and neck from close-range attack; only the tall one, evidently, retained the ability to speak.

            “Do I know you?”

            This caused more exchanging of glances among the Soldiers.  “Hell yeah, you know us.  You’re the Coyote.  You’re the point man.  We never go anywhere without you.”

            For the first time, Michael noticed that the Soldiers were carrying weapons; their profile on their first visit would not have accommodated them.  The cut-throat guy had an M60 slung across his chest; the guy next to him had a slung rifle, and was balancing a machine gun tripod across his shoulders.  With the eyes of an Army veteran, Michael picked out the details of a Vietnam-era weapons squad:  one man with an M79 grenade launcher in one hand, balanced on his shoulder, and wearing a grenade vest; the tall one toting a slung M-16; the remaining guy with no rifle, just a .45 pistol in a holster on his belt and two or three heavy belts of M-60 ammo draped over his shoulders.  There were other new details, too.  The tall one in the middle was presumably the squad leader, and his uniform shirt was unbuttoned, exposing the worn, stained t-shirt beneath.  The grenadier, all the way to the leader’s left, was wearing a bush hat; other than the leader, none of the others had any headgear on.  Their uniforms were unkempt, field-modified, torn, halfassed.

            He was not aware that the men standing here could have, at best, constituted one-half of a complete weapons squad; that in the late Vietnam era, a full-strength weapons squad would have two complete machine gun teams and two grenadiers in addition to the squad leader.  But he nonetheless sensed that the group was incomplete.  Cuz you one of us, the tall one had said, so many years before.

            “Are you from Vietnam?”

            More laughter.  “Hells no.  We ain’t from Vietnam.  We in Cambodia, though.  Or—actually—we’re in you, in your head right now.  We’re wherever you are.  You just can’t see us most of the time.”

            “You’re dead, though.  Right?”

            “Yeah, we dead.”  The leader spat.

            “When?  What year?”

            “Nineteen seventy.  May 12.”

            The year Michael was born.  Several months before.

            “What about me?” he said.  “Where do I fit in?”

            The leader leaned back as he laughed, and blood leaked from bullet holes in his abdomen.  “You the Coyote,” he said simply.  “You the man.”

            “The point man?”
            “Yeah.  You always out front.  First squad.  We attached to first squad; we go where you go.  You got the shotgun; you got the eyes.  You see what we don’t see comin.”  The leader was still laughing, chuckling a half-friendly, half-ironic cicada sound as he spoke.

            Michael sensed that this, finally, was the crux of the matter.  This was the message the ghosts had come to deliver:  what he was being haunted by.  “What happened?” 

            The leader shrugged.  “You didn’t see it comin.  You got us killed.”

            This stunned Michael; the sounds around him went quiet for a moment as the blood rushed through his ears.  He could almost remember…almost--

            “I stepped on a mine,” he said, finally.

            The leader nodded.  “You stepped on a mine, or crossed a tripwire.  Somethin.  Set off an ambush.  We all got hit by an RPG while settin up.  Somethin like that.”  The men to either side nodded in vague agreement.  They all had met such a sudden death, he presumed, that they were not quite clear on what happened.

            Michael shook his head.  He tried to say I’m sorry, but he could barely mouth the words.  The red-orange light of sunset was rapidly giving way to dusk, and he felt pressed for time.  He cleared his throat and pressed on.

            “Why are you here now?”

            “Somethin about your brain, my man.  We’re not really here, anyway.  We like, trapped.  Trapped between two worlds, as they say.  You can help us, and then maybe we can help you.  Alls I know for sure is we have to get your attention, and then you can figure out the rest.”

            His head was still spinning, but this fit; it made sense; it seemed true.  It put the earlier visit, and much of the weirdness of his childhood, into perspective.  Beings from beyond the grave had been reaching out to him, signalling him using everyday objects and situations, the apparatus available to them in this, his world.  If he sat down to map it all out, he might be able to figure out the grand scheme, the message—

            The darkness was obscuring their features; only the whites of their eyes, and the grinning teeth of the squad leader, remained.  “One more thing,” he said, desperately trying to hold them here.  “Was I—was I black, like you?”

            “Was you—“ the leader broke off to laugh heartily, and the others laughed with him, whispery insectile sounds wafting from the fading shapes of their heads.  The machine gunner, unable to laugh, instead hissed rhythmically.  The leader leaned sharply forward, straining to see Michael.  “Why, what color are you now?”

            Then the Dead Soldiers were gone, and there was only a clump of mesquite saplings where they had stood. 
            Darkness had fallen.