“What happened to Rake?” Singleton said.
Hank laughed. “I knew that was coming. Deeper trust formed and you struck. You’ve been trained.”
“What happened to Rake?”
“Meg and I had to find a way to channel his desire to kill into the little bit of honor he had left — something like that. He had a little bit left, my gut told me. I had to trust my gut. We had to find a way to get him killed without either one of us doing the killing. I thought about getting him to commit suicide, something along those lines, and, again, I thought about killing him myself, risking going back to that old place, reversing the treatment. Believe me, there was nothing I wanted to do more than take him out. I was itching to do it. Meg wanted to do it, too. Then these rumors came in about duels up on Isle Royale and I made use of them in my own way.”
“How’d you do that?” Singleton said.
“I’d rather not get into the details right now. But believe me, Rake’s dead. He’s gone. Nothing to worry about. I get the sense you know that anyway.”
* * *
A perfect blue-skied end-of-August day with a faint hint of autumn. A front had come through early in the morning and pushed back the southerly smell of burning tires and trees and cleared out the sky. “One last daytime beach excursion,” Hank suggested. The night before, the Black Flaggers had approached closer than ever.
Now, on the shore, Hank was on his back with his hands crossed over his chest, his soft belly exposed. He was talking about the good groove that he and Singleton had going, the sense of shared mission that was developing. Wendy and Meg, arm in arm, were sauntering down the sand, staying close to the waterline where the gravel was smooth, stopping on occasion to look out at the water. (Later he’d look back and see that there had been intention in the secretive distance they had kept. Sitting across from Hank, he had felt something, an urge to run to them, to take Wendy by the hand and lead her into the berm — not really a dune — where he would declare his love for her in no uncertain terms. Later he’d understand that he had been locked into an operative task, focused, zeroed in on getting some kind of answer from Hank.)
“I need to know what you did with Rake’s body. I need details on how you handled the duel.”
Hank sat up and lit a cigarette.
“What difference does it make. If I could enfold that story, I’d take fucking Trip right now and do it. That’s all in the past. I just want to forget it.”
“No. I need it for my report,” Singleton said.
“You’re not going to write a report. I heard if you go back, you’ll be court-martialed.”
“Sent up for adjudication,” Singleton said. Wendy had turned and was looking back at him with her hands out as if to say: What are you doing, exactly? What are we doing?
“Same thing. You’re not going back there and you’re not going to write a report,” Hank said. He lit a cigarette, blew the smoke to the side. “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you. It’s that if I say it, if I put it in the air, if you hear it, you’re not going to want to go back, ever.”
“I’m going to write the report.”
“Well, Singleton, let me tell you, it was risky and we had to go deep into our roles. To make sure the Black Flaggers wouldn’t know he was dead, I took a big risk and drove down to the L.P. Left deep in the night and got down to the bridge at dawn, crossed over it, and then propped the body in front of Fort Michilimackinac. You probably know that the police took over the fort because it is supposedly avoided by failed enfolds, or something like that. Word goes around that failed enfolds like Rake can’t stand anything that harkens back to the wars before Nam. There’s nothing that screws with the mind like a fake old fort, with all of those logs carved into points, is what they say.”
“Why leave the body for the Corps to find?”
“In retrospect, which isn’t really fair, I’d say the idea was to get you to come up here so we’d able to leave on friendly terms with the Corps and avoid being tracked. I’ll say one thing. We had both reached a limit. If we went deep downstate with Rake’s body, we’d be dead meat before we got far. If we went ourselves, we’d never make it alive. Not if word got out — and believe me, it’s gonna get out — that Rake was dead. Rake alive was what kept us safe. There must be a catchphrase for someone in a situation that is simply not winnable, for a road that splits into two options that are just as bad. Two roads that lead back to the original option.”
“There isn’t a catchphrase for that,” Singleton said.
“But you at least get the gist,” Hank said. “Meaning if we didn’t put the body there you wouldn’t be here, and if you weren’t here, I wouldn’t have to come up with a precise explanation for our actions. It wouldn’t matter. The fact that I need to explain what we did has everything to do with the fact that it’s you who’s doing the asking, and you’d never be asking if I hadn’t put the body there, you see.”
Hank cupped his palm over a match and lit a joint. He inhaled and held and released a cloud and hit again.
“I think I’ll have a hit of that,” Singleton said, reaching for the joint. He’d have to say the body had been transported downstate to the fort for unknown reasons, if he did write a report. He looked out at Meg and Wendy, who were still arm in arm, down near the water, but turned slightly, looking back at him. The waves were slathering in with long, slow sweeps, arriving at what seemed to be an angle to the beach.
“You’re probably thinking it was a neat, clean operation. I imagine that’s what you’re thinking. But it wasn’t clean, man. Not at all. It wasn’t neat.”
“I wouldn’t think it was,” Singleton said.
“I took advantage of Meg, in that I discovered that besides being another one of Rake’s prisoners, she had another connection to his past, one I couldn’t remember because of the Tripizoid, but I sensed it. I guessed it was there. All that is lost to me. Everything before she arrived. But I’m guessing, because I can’t remember, that he went gonzo crazy when he saw her name on one of those black-market lists, just as I’m guessing I didn’t enlist with him for the Army, I mean we didn’t sign up together with the buddy program, because I do have vivid recollections of my boyhood up to the day I was in my bedroom packing up my stuff, heading off to boot camp, along with some residual memories of flying over to Nam, landing, the smell of the trees over there, and things like that. Then everything goes blank. If I’d been friends with Rake before Nam I wouldn’t remember all that shit. It would be enfolded. He was a nasty fucker as a kid, I’m sure. He went in with a chip on his shoulder and the war was his feeding ground.”
“So you immersed her. You gave her a controlled dunk in the lake?” Singleton said.
“I was careful and told her it was a onetime deal. I kept my own head above water.”
“And she came out and told you what she saw?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that. She told me bits and pieces, but eventually she mentioned a name that seemed to trigger a little bit of a spark.” He tapped his head. “Enough to hint that her connection with Rake had to do with whatever I’d enfolded in myself and that her connection with Rake in the past was also a connection with me. It made me think, maybe the Trip doesn’t get it all enfolded. Maybe we all have something that’ll spark a memory.”
“So you used the name to somehow provoke a duel?”
“Rake had been out on a long run and I enfolded myself with the black-market Tripizoid when he was gone. Then he came back, months later, with Meg. Then he went out again and brought this kid named Haze back. I’m guessing I knew he’d gone into the Grid for Meg specifically, although I didn’t figure why until Meg unfolded and had that vision. After that, we had to keep in our roles of Old Meg and Old Hank. But that was wearing thin by late June, early July.”