Something inside of Gideon snapped.

The tectonic plates in his head loosened. The fixed continents that had stood for as long as he had lived were no more, and memories of the war that Gideon had repressed for decades were coming back to him unbidden.

Gideon Baker lived in the same house for the entirety of his life on an island situated towards the southern end of a lake. There were seven houses on the island. There had been eight, but that owner departed one winter and never returned. He’d either died or decided there were better locations where he could dwell. Whatever the reason, the place fell into disrepair until Mother Nature reclaimed it.  

The island had an Algonquin name at one point in time, but no one quite remembered what it was. Everyone called it Vatican City because it had been home to a small religious sect that declared its independence from the state in 1914. So, Vatican City it was, except for the people who lived there. They called it home.

Gideon Baker was one of those inhabitants, a seventy-plus-year-old retiree. That’s not entirely accurate, he would correct. He wasn’t technically retired because he never had a profession from which to withdraw.  Just tinkered a bit with this and that, here and there, from time to time. Gideon inherited the home from his parents after they died and owned the property outright.  Having grown up on an island in the middle of a lake, he loved to hunt and fish and caught or bagged a large portion of what he consumed. In addition, to supplement his income, he received a pension from his tour in Vietnam, that subtropical conjunction of nihilism and despair. Gideon had been a river rat, a brown-water sailor on a PBR. Vietnam is a country laced with thousands of miles of waterways all of which were used, during the conflict, as highways in a land with very few roads. Gideon had grown up on the water. He’d been boating since almost before he could walk. He volunteered that information to his C.O. and was assigned to the Riverine Assault Force. The check that arrived every month from Veterans Affairs for his service was enough to defray the cost of those provisions he couldn’t procure for himself. So, finding a more permanent type of employment was something Gideon Baker had never felt compelled to do.

Gideon recognized every inch of the lake’s shoreline; understood its many moods. It had been his lifelong confidant and companion. He was acquainted with all the local lore (even if some of it he made up to pass the time). Gideon was tall as a parade float, with shoulder-length gray hair and eyes that resolved in a perpetual squint, which some might assume was a result of the ever-present cigar in his mouth. But he never lit the thing. It was too expensive, and he too cheap. The primary reason he kept it there was to deter anyone from expecting him to smile. Still, he was a loveable old bird to most people in town.

But they didn’t know everything about Gideon Baker. If they did, they might reconsider.

*

Arwin Cushing was as much a fixture in the lakes region as Gideon Baker. He was “a head shorter but twice as smart” as the one man would joke to the other. During the sixties, he had eluded getting called up in the draft, but after high school, he volunteered two years in the Peace Corps, then another two working towards his associate degree in law enforcement. After graduating, he applied for his dream job and was offered the position of Fish and Game Warden for all areas around Pelter County. He’d grown up near the water on the ‘mainland’ as the islanders referred to it. He was intimately acquainted with the lake, the trails, the caves, and any other place a young boy might have explored, so was as well-suited to the job as just about anyone.

The best thing about being warden was that he didn’t have to spend all his hours behind a desk. After thirty-five years on the job, he was able to retire with fifty percent of his pay, and before the scourge of meth had become so ubiquitous.

It was through his job that Arwin and Gideon Baker reconnected. The two had known one another growing up. Though their paths hadn’t overlapped often, they’d intersected with enough frequency that their shared interests allied them for a time.

Arwin wasn’t around when Gideon came back home after his tour. He was off at school earning his degree. And when Arwin returned he was busy with his job and building a life with his new bride, Lettie. It wasn’t until many years later that the two men reunited.

It was summer, and the warden’s office got a call that a family of deer was swimming in the lake, trying to get to Vatican City from the mainland. A passel of drunken fraternity boys thought it would be a hoot to circle the deer with their outboards, hoping to tire the animals until they drowned. “The cruelty of the weak manifesting as superiority,” Arwin mused. Arwin hightailed it out there and gave the idiots a proposition they couldn’t refuse. They chose not to go to jail. He waited as they sped off, then stayed close to the deer until the family arrived safely on dry land. Watching from the dock was Gideon Baker. He had been the one who made the call.

Arwin reached out to Gideon a few days later, and they met up at one of the local haunts they had frequented as wide-eyed teens. Once they got to talking, neither could shut up. As warden, Arwin had plenty of stories to relate, and Gideon was an eager recipient. Not to mention the embellished reminiscences of their youth.

“Do you remember the time we almost bagged Willy Steiner…”

“No, it was a trout, not a bass. Thirty-two pounds, at least…”

“Can you believe that Arnie married Lorraine Carney…?”

“Keep it comin’ I said. Never saw him again after that night. And he…”

“…was buck naked in the back of a pick-up, wearing a moose head and heading out of town.”

The duo howled at the reverie, clinked bottles, and toasted.

After that night, it was almost as if the two men were brothers. “Thick as thieves,” Lettie would say, grateful for their alliance.

Once Arwin retired, they got together every few days. He’d venture out to Vatican City to fish, or Gideon would meet Arwin on the mainland to hunt, play cards or – more often than not – head to the Pub for a beer or two. Over their years of friendship, Gideon and Arwin spoke of most things the way two buddies do. And as time progressed, if it were just the two of them, they’d begun to share personal anecdotes and confidences, recollections to which no one else was privy. Arwin told Gideon about a short-lived dalliance he had when he was in his mid-forties, wondering if he’d made the right choices in life. The woman had been an artist who lived a distance out of town in a tumbledown house with a barn she used as her studio. He’d travel to her place where no one would see them together. It was good for a time. But Arwin would feel so guilty after that “it didn’t make the ‘during’ worthwhile.” He broke it off before any permanent damage might have been done.

Some nights, Gideon would reciprocate, revealing secrets from his own past. The only thing Gideon never spoke of was the war.

Other local vets were happy to extol stories for the price of a beer; about the deluxe class joy-girls in Saigon, or supposed battles where they displayed uncommon bravery, proving their metal, though they didn’t have the medals to back up the claim. Some would just recollect about the rain or the heat, the tedium, or the comradery. But not Gideon. And Gideon was not a taciturn individual. Gideon had an opinion on everything and everyone and no compunction sharing the same with whoever might be within earshot. But bring up ‘Nam, and he would clamp down like a leg-hold bear trap.

Whenever Arwin mentioned it – if something happened on the news that brought the old conflict to the forefront – Gideon wouldn’t offer anything beyond a “Huh.” Or “Imagine.” Or “Nope, I didn’t see that.” And even though brief, he said those statements with such finality that Arwin knew he’d better change the subject and quick. If he wanted to maintain his friendship, he would lock the subject in a box with a very tight lid, throw away the key, and forget where it had been tossed.

*

The SEALORDS’ mission was to patrol the riverways and supply routes, scan the banks for guerilla activity, destroy any enemy they found, or clear the area of civilians in a preemptive attempt to stop them from potentially providing aid to the guerillas. Though none of the guys had ever seen the VC or knew who or what they might be. Like everything else in country, you just did what was ordered without trying to make sense of it ‘cuz none of it made a lick.

In the beginning, there’d been a system in place, an order and sequence of procedures the boys were intended to obey. The drill was always the same. Two boats would run patrol, one in the lead and another bringing up the rear. If a patrol boat encountered a sampan or another vessel, the boat behind would hold back while the first requested the intruder to identify itself. If it refused, a warning shot would be fired across its bow. If there was still no response, the river rats had orders to shoot to kill without discussion. Rules at night were different. There was a curfew from sunset till sunrise. G.I.s were to consider any vessels encountered during curfew as hostile and respond accordingly.

Out on the endless rivers and canals, they threw away the rulebook. They just did their best; did whatever was needed to get through the day and make it home alive.

They’d patrol for twelve hours at a stretch, ten days straight, followed by a few days off for some r & r, then back on the assembly line. Gideon had been on river watch for going on ten months. Three hundred-plus days of suffocating and unrelenting misery; endless boredom in which twenty-four hours was forever, and a week, an eternity. One hundred degrees during the day and humidity you’d wear like a long winter coat.

That’s when it was dry. When the monsoons arrived like a tsunami to the shore, there was a solid wall of rain over which one could not scale. Everyone would be soaked through, and no attempt to combat the elements could render them dry, so finally, they stopped trying. Soldiers would walk knee-deep in mud, feet cracked, swollen and sore. They were instructed to dry their feet and put on clean socks. But feet were always wet, and socks hadn’t seen clean in weeks. Months.

Nights were spent in utter darkness, so crews didn’t present an easy target for mortars, rocket fire, or worse. They were all afraid of getting captured. They heard the stories. Everyone had. Solitary, strappado, beatings, tiger cages.

In the winter, Gideon would lie down at night and wake up with a rat nestled into his stomach for warmth. During the day, he would miss his companion.

Most of these memories were random but benign. They’d flow past Gideon like the winter thaws that replenished the lake. Nothing that anyone burdened with typical battle fatigue couldn’t handle.

But not all.

*

For the past year, Gideon would sometimes find himself in a new location and wonder, “now, how did I get here?” Of course, he would chalk it up to daydreaming. He had a penchant for it. “Head in the clouds” his mother had been fond of saying. He probably was just having a ponder about something and forgot how he had gone from watching television to standing on the dock near his house. Or one minute, he’d be cooking up something on the stove, and the next, he’d be sitting on his bed, taking off his second shoe. But he assured himself it was the onset of old age, not something to which he should pay any heed.

Arwin was the first to notice. The two men were out fishing, and he looked over at Gideon and recognized his friend was miles away. Not just lost in thought but lost entirely. Or they’d be playing cards, and Gideon would stop and stare at one in his hand as if he hadn’t the slightest idea what the object was or what he should do with it. At the outset, Arwin didn’t think much of it. They were both getting older. Hell, Arwin was known to put his phone in the freezer and his beer in the microwave. But then he would catch himself (or more likely, Lettie would), they’d both have a laugh, and that would be that. Gideon just didn’t have a Lettie to set him right on those occasions he went off track.

But Gideon’s lapses were happening with increased frequency. Even Lettie noticed and broached the subject with her husband. “Had Gideon mentioned anything about not feeling himself lately?” and Arwin shared with her some (though not all) of his concerns.

Perhaps if he had done so, things would have turned out differently.

*

It had been a brutal February. The shortest month made longer by its disdain for spring. Where all the world was either dormant or dead and covered with a coating of indiscriminate white. But it was a perfect season for catching lake trout or cusk. Or so Gideon hoped as he drove onto the frozen lake, the moment before dawn when the world remains neither enveloped by the night nor illuminated by the day. He collected his cleats, grabbed his chub and waxworms, his jigging rod and reel, and hoisted himself into the emerging light.

Ice fishing was one of the few activities in which Arwin did not join his friend. Arwin was much more a warm-weather sportsman. Plus, every year, he and Lettie drove south to visit her sister for a few weeks after the holidays, then dropped in on other friends or relatives as they took their time heading back up the coast towards home. So, ice fishing was a solitary enterprise for Gideon.

He hadn’t bothered to haul out his shanty, something he would have done any other year. Every fisherman for miles knew which one was his, and he didn’t want anyone to discover that he had been working this ridiculous hole.

A fishing hole should be no more than eight or maybe twelve inches wide at the most. Anything larger is unsafe, and only the most incompetent of novices would make such a mistake. A week earlier, Gideon had trekked out to his usual spot to discover an opening drilled at least twenty inches wide by some knucklehead who was probably a guest at one of those gated mansions that had been springing up around the lake and didn’t know an auger from their asshole. Cut the thing, posed for a picture with a fish they had bought and brought out for the occasion for instamadoodle. Then they called it a “wrap” and went to one of those fancy restaurants at the inn for brunch and a few Bloody Marys. When Gideon saw the size of the hole, he let out a stream of expletives that would have made his C.O. blush, and he had a mouth that could strip the bark off a tree.

But Gideon decided he wouldn’t turn his back on a gift horse and commandeered the hole as his own. Gideon hadn’t been feeling quite himself. He was getting older. Gideon’s hands didn’t work the way they used to. Or his knees. Or his back. His prick, once as reliable as Old Faithful, was now as undependable as a one-armed clock. Hell, nothing functioned the way it was supposed to or how God intended, and the cold’s cruelty made his ailments that much more acute.

He also couldn’t find his auger. Much of his stuff had gone missing of late, and he thought to hell with it, this year he’d use the goddamned hole. Besides, this was his spot. He’d always had a great deal of luck here, and why should he move to another location (and have to cut another hole) when there was one ready to go? Once he’d gotten a good catch, he’d cover it and inform the new warden of its whereabouts.

He was hoping for some yellow trout today. He had a freezer that needed filling, and the quicker he could stock it, the better. Gone were the days when he could sit out all night, drinking whiskey and looking at the stars while waiting for something to snag on his line.

He attached his crampons and flat-footed over to the opening in the ice, intending to check the cusk line he’d submerged the previous evening. He tugged on it, but it barely moved. Odd. Sure, Earl Tremont had caught a fifteen-pounder the year before, and Gideon may be slipping. But he could still lift more than fifteen pounds. This wasn’t any cusk, Gideon thought. Maybe the lure was snagged around a rock or a piece of stump that someone had tossed.   He braced his cleats, stamping them into the ice, wrapped the filament several times around his gloved hands, and pulled. But the line was as immovable as an evangelical.

He couldn’t enlist another to assist. He didn’t want anyone seeing the hole and thinking it his; he’d never be able to set foot in the Drunken Duck again. He let out some more filament from between the pegs embedded on his cusk trap, enough so that the line could reach his truck. He wrapped the thread around the hitch, engaged the ignition, and with caution, coaxed the obstruction from the frigid water. A morning that had begun with optimistic promise was deteriorating into impotence.  

That was confirmed when he saw the body.

It was battered and blue, all indigo and rigid immobility. A teenage girl, it looked like.  He hefted her up by her shoulders and halfway out of the water.  She was dead, that was for certain. No one could have survived for more than twenty minutes in that frigid chill; severe hypothermia would have set in, when a body’s cells freeze, crystallize and then rupture. He’d seen it once before. An old dog he’d found on the side of a road after the blizzard of ’82.

Something inside of him snapped at the sight. Her wet, bedraggled body with eyes wide and immobile in a vacant stare caused a memory to shift, one intense and unsettling.

Then Gideon Baker did something he never would have believed himself capable of doing. He disentangled the dead from his line and released her back into the icy depths. He packed the gear, got into his truck, and drove, never telling a soul about what he had found.

*

He’d discovered the girl in February. Things took a turn for the worse in March.

Memories of the war that Gideon had repressed for decades were coming back to him unbidden, as if he’d pulled them from the water along with the body. The worst goddamned place in the world, and Gideon had no desire to be back. They were adrift, sailing upriver and carrying him back to a place Gideon had longed to forget. Images would infiltrate his consciousness like a VC guerilla. One secret unearthing others long since buried.

It was the last twenty-four hours of another ten day-stretch in ‘Nam, and everyone was on edge. Entire deltas were aflame. The Viet Cong had sprung a nighttime ambush on another patrol unit only two nights before, and the Boatswain’s Mate, Eddie Ruiz, was killed. Eddie had been a good guy. The Cong used civilians as human shields. Sampans surprised the GIs with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. The men had heard another report of VC swimmers with scuba gear who placed mines under patrol boats and blew a squad right out of the brown, bubbling brew. Another crew watched two young women emerge from the jungle. When ordered to do so, they raised their arms in surrender and sent everything around them back to kingdom come. Beneath their shirts, they had grenades strapped to their breasts, the pins connected to wires attached to their wrists.

That tenth day was brutally hot. If he closed his eyes, Gideon could still feel the sensation on his skin. It had also been slow going. Rain had deposited any loose debris into the river, transforming it into an ever-narrowing canal. The mine sweepers that led the way in front of the boats had to be careful of every floating object – wicker baskets, inner tubes, Styrofoam. Any one of those could be a deadly decoy. They had to pick their way through the flotsam and jetsam with the precision of surgeons while Gideon and his crew crawled behind, endlessly exposed to the broiling sun.

They had been promised air cover, but like so much else in this fucked up fiasco of a war, no one had appeared from above to assist. They were alone. Apart from whatever might be lurking in those dense and endless canopies of green.

The combination wound everyone as tight as springs, but none more so than Gideon Baker. Trigger fingers were itchy for anything.

They’d rounded a bend and saw a collection of huts on the bank to their left. Skipper cut the engines. Gideon grabbed his binoculars to scan the shore for any signs of activity.

A small figure was running out of the jungle. A blur.

Something inside of Gideon snapped. He had heard that expression, of course. But he had never experienced the sensation until that afternoon, when part of himself, the portion tethered to reality, to sanity, to empathy, to anything bearing what was right or good or just, tore loose from him. A wire inside that had been pulled taut, finally rent itself asunder. What remained was base; it was primal, malevolent, and foul.

The first one he killed was maybe an eight-year-old boy. The child who had come running out of the jungle carrying a grenade. Gideon yelled for him to stop. “Dung lai!” he cried, “Dung lai!” When he thought about it later, when he’d replayed the incident frame-by-frame, he was sure he had shouted that, hadn’t he? Maybe he just thought that he had. It didn’t matter, the boy kept coming with that Chi Com in his hand, and Gideon shot. Maybe it wasn’t a grenade. Maybe it was a mangosteen or guava. Gideon did not wait to discover the truth.

He started shooting napalm from the zippo on his monitor, like a fire-breathing dragon in a fairy tale. Rivers of flame streaked from the muzzle, setting the village in front of him alight. Others joined along in a hive-mind hysteria, not knowing what had triggered the conflict and not waiting to determine the circumstances. They burned the hooches to the ground. Villagers fled from their homes. Women, children, and elderly men helping even older women in a futile attempt to escape the inevitable. Gideon saw a young girl aflame. She ran to the water’s edge to douse her burning flesh. He shot her in the head. She fell into the water. Anyone within his field of vision he took out, or others did. It was ecstasy. It was Armageddon. It was over in an instant.

They ceased in synchronicity, stopped, and let the silence descend. No one spoke. They moved closer to the shore, anticipating another attack. That’s what it had been, hadn’t it? The VCs were using the villagers as cover. It was kill or be killed, wasn’t it?

Images. Snapshots. Footprints imprinted in the sand and mud. The smell of burning flesh and sulfur perfuming the air. Getting out of the vessel, Gideon approached the corpse of the young woman whose skin had been aflame. Her blood and any hope for a future were carried downstream with the current. River-damp hair clung in wet tentacles to her face; eyes were wide open.

He shot her again. Twice as nice at any price.

They got back on board and proceeded upriver. Not a word was ever mentioned. Gideon packed the horror away in his footlocker with his cigars and shaving cream, his machete, and letters from home. He locked it tight and slid it deep, keeping those memories at bay forever.

Or so he had hoped.

Now, when the young woman’s face loomed in his dreams or his waking reveries, it replaced the corpse he’d pulled from the lake. One had become the same as if the girl had swum through the canals and rivers, swamps and seas, had crossed oceans and navigated decades to find her way back to him. She had been a cunning little corpse, and now that they were reunited, she would cling to him forever.

*

Arwin and Lettie were celebrating their forty-sixth wedding anniversary. They had been married on April 1 by a justice of the peace with a few friends and some family present. Arwin liked to kid that they chose the date because he was just a fool in love, and Lettie would quip back that she was marrying a damned fool. It was a joke that, to them, never grew old.

Over the past few years, it had become their routine to boat across to the other side of the lake to an Italian place they both loved. A pricey but romantic, candlelit charmer with a view of the sunset and food that Arwin’s doctor insisted he avoid, but he indulged on this one annual occasion. If the weather was accommodating, they’d have a cocktail outside near the fire pit, ablaze with the first flames of the Spring, then retire inside to their favorite table and a bottle of Brunello that would have cost a month’s salary back when Arwin was still working. But they had no one to whom they could leave their money, and it was just the once a year when they let practicality be damned. Afterward, satiated and swathed in the velvety embrace of the rich repast, they would reboard their boat and head for home, each happy in the company of the other.

*

Gideon found himself on night patrol, a duty he despised. How did that happen? The last he remembered he was at Vatican City doing some chores. But now he was in the water on night patrol. Night patrol. You had no idea who or what might be out there when the water and sky merged, and both were the color of ink. And he was alone. Where was everyone else? You never went on night patrol on your own. Gideon strained to think – people had been sick, wasn’t that it? Sure, a fever had spread through the company. Gideon had volunteered for the night patrol, hadn’t he? He didn’t remember how he got there, only that he was in this boat. He last remembered seeing the young woman. When had he killed her? That had been yesterday, hadn’t it? It was as fresh in his mind as if it had been. He could see her eyes and the flecks of copper etched into irises of brown. The eruption of bullet holes. He could still smell her flesh, her death, her stagnation.

And the cold. His breath appeared before him as mist. Hadn’t it been frigid? A frozen wasteland amid the jungle?

And the boy. He’d been there beside her, still clutching the mango in his lifeless hand beside that ridiculous hole in the ice.

Gideon couldn’t think about that now. He had to stay focused. It was after curfew.

*

Arwin and Lettie loved the lake at night. Lights aglow from the inside of houses gave a viewer a glimpse into the lives of their neighbors underneath a celestial canopy. The beacon of their spotlight illuminated the path ahead. No moon tonight, but the stars congregated on the water’s surface, contented to see themselves reflected there. Music from the café halfway down the shore drifted towards them.  

It was a warm night for the season, and the wine they had drunk, perhaps a bit too much, found Arwin as mellow as he could remember. He studied Lettie, whose closed eyes and upturned face was a ship’s mast making headway into the genial breeze. She appeared like the young girl he had first met all those years ago.

*

Gideon first noticed the headlamp before he heard the motor. A boat was approaching across the river, now as wide as a lake. Not fast, but in his direction. It was after sundown. Curfew was in effect. The incoming had to be considered hostile. Gideon turned off his light to evade detection and reached for his M16, but it wasn’t there. Where was his M16? It had to have been Miller. Gideon determined to get that little fucker back. He was always doing shit like this and thinking he was funny. He won’t consider himself so when Gideon gets back to camp. What was protocol? He couldn’t remember, but it didn’t matter. An enemy vessel was advancing, and it was Gideon’s responsibility to stop it. He searched the hull, but there was nothing. No grenades, no zippo. Had he taken the wrong boat? He’ll never hear the end of this one from the others. Especially Miller.

He couldn’t worry about that now. First things first. He had to stop the oncoming vessel. If they made it past him, who knows what havoc they would wreak?  Gideon didn’t need to contemplate what they may or may not unleash. He knew exactly what tactics they’d employ. They’d detonate all the other boats in the patrol. Gideon had never considered himself a hero. He wouldn’t shy away from a fight or conflict, but he never advanced toward one. But tonight was going to be different. He had to do this.

She wanted him to. The girl he had set aflame. The girl whose body became the reliquary for his bullets. He could tell by the expression in her eyes, for she was in the boat with him, standing at the prow. She was his figurehead. His muse. His medusa, with her river-drenched hair, a rippling billow in the wind. The corpse was also present, standing beside the girl, looking as she had when Gideon pulled her from the water. The girl’s twin, not in life but in death. Both abandoned by Gideon. Both thrust into worlds in which they did not belong. Both determined to set things right, remedy his misdeeds, and assist in his absolution.  All the villagers from that day were there. The old women. The ancient men. The little boy with the mango in his hand sat before Gideon and smiled as if to say, I know a game we can play. That was all the motivation Gideon needed to put a plan into action.

He pointed his craft towards the advancing enemy, gunned the throttle, and thrust his boat headlong across the deep, dark water.

“Do I love you, my oh my…”

The others moved to surround him. One by one, they rested their hands upon him in communion.

Gideon followed their lead, directing his boat towards the oncoming vessel and a past that was destined to determine his future.

About the Author:

Brian John Feehan’s fiction has appeared in New Millennium Writing (Muse Award), The Foundling Review, Gingerbread House and Plots with Guns as well as the anthologies Beyond Words (2021), Lockdown Number One (2020) and Musepaper 1.0 (2019).  He was a 2022 finalist for both the London Independent Story Prize, the Hemingway Story Prize and a 2022 semi-finalist for the Tennessee Williams ‘Saints and Sinners’ Festival. “RIVER DEEP” is a selection from his new novel THE LAKE. Brian has trekked the Himalayas, never tasted coffee, and currently lives in Connecticut in a 250-year-old house with his husband, two ghosts, and a mortgage.  www.brianjohnfeehan.com

*Feature image by Andre Benz on Unsplash