Wings to the Kingdom

“Oh, nobody would do anything to us. The cops would just tell us to leave, and what could the Marshalls do except call the cops?” Benny stretched out, crossing his knees and adjusting his glasses.



“Got any bail money on you? Because I don’t think I’ve got enough to go around.” I said it with what I hoped sounded like grim confidence, but in truth I was worried.



It was one thing to wander around abandoned structures on private property; but the battlefield is a national park, and I couldn’t help but think that the penalties for trespassing might be stiffer than a night in the clink. I’d heard that you could be thrown out of the park or arrested if they caught you with a shovel. And God help you if they caught you with a metal detector.



“You don’t have any spray paint or weaponry in that bag, do you Benny?” I asked, making a mental note to remove my climber’s knife from my own bag. In case we did get caught, I wanted to keep the number of potential charges down to a minimum.



“No. Just what you saw, unless you count the flashlight. It’s pretty heavy.”



“Unless you wield it like a nightstick, I think you’ll be okay. Jamie? What about you?”



“I’m absolutely unarmed, save for my trusty flask, which is filled to the top with a highly flammable liquid,” he announced from the backseat.



“Oh, whatever. Keep your cigarette lighter in your pocket and we’ll be fine.”



The battlefield proper is only ten or twelve miles away from downtown Chattanooga, but the most direct route is through downtown Rossville, so it took twenty or thirty minutes to get there. Ted’s mobile home was behind the park in a suburb that backed up against the protected grounds, and Jamie knew the way as well as he’d said he did. I parked in a makeshift lot that looked like it might have been a construction site by day.



Ted’s party was a hit.



Behind the trailer a great orange glow rose up into the darkness, and voices laughed back and forth over some music.



We didn’t bother to go inside.



Out back, someone had found an extension cord long enough to run a boom box out to the yard. A local “slightly too heavy to be top-forty” station was coming on strong, and the fire was blazing even stronger. I had to wonder what the hell they’d been feeding it. As I looked for someone to ask, a burly, dark-haired fellow came stomping out of the night.



If I remembered correctly, his name was Brian. If I observed correctly, he was carrying the corner of a small wooden shed on his shoulder. It looked like he’d simply chosen a section, kicked it free, and walked away with it.



With a heave and a grunt, he tossed the angular segment of wood into the bonfire. The pit exploded into bright sparks and set to work peeling the paint free from the boards.



“Wow.”



“Yeah,” Benny agreed.



“Good,” Jamie said. “We’re right on time.”



About fifteen people were gathered around the fire—some sitting on blankets, some standing and toasting marshmallows and hot dogs. I recognized most of them; all but a few had been at the Pickle Barrel a few nights before. Those who were sober enough to realize that the party had newcomers yelped, cheered, and waved. Those who were not happily ignored us.



Ted came out within a few moments of our arrival. He emerged from the mobile home looking exactly like the last person you’d ever expect to see step out of a trailer. In a gray suit with a red striped tie, he smiled down upon the proceedings as though it were a cocktail party at the Four Seasons instead of a weekend barn-burning with s’mores.



“Eden!” He opened his arms and swept me in for a highly stylized hug, then nodded to my companions. “And gentlemen. Welcome to the soiree. Could I interest you in a hot dog, or a coat hanger upon which to cook it?”



Benny said no, but Jamie was game. “Sure. Could I trouble you for mustard—if you have anything that isn’t primary yellow?”



“Dijon okay?”



“Perfect. Thank you.”



He took a wire hanger and began to untwist it while Ted went back inside for a tray of cookables.



“Don’t fill up on wieners,” I warned him. “I want to get moving before it gets too late.”



“Don’t worry. But let me have one or two. I skipped supper.”



“Hurry up.”



While I watched the fire and waited on Jamie to finish eating, Benny grabbed a beer and sat down on one of the square-beam railroad ties that had been laid out around the fire. The light glinted off his glasses, so I couldn’t see his eyes.



“How do you want to do this?” he asked me.



I wasn’t sure, so I wandered over to the other side of the fire and sat down next to him. “I don’t have any great plan. I thought I’d go over to the battlefield and look for ghosts. They obviously want to communicate. Maybe they’ll have an easier time talking to me than the people they’ve addressed so far.”



“Maybe.” He nodded. “What all do you want to bring?”



“My own bad self—but beyond that I don’t know. You came way better prepared than I did. Should I assume that you’ve done this before?”



“Oh, yeah. But not in a while. And not with anyone like you. No psychics or anything, I mean.”



“You ever catch any ghosts?”



He adjusted the edge of his glasses and gazed into the fire. “We got some good orb photographs, and we captured some good ghost activity on audiotape.”



“But did you, personally, ever get anything out of it?”



“Once,” he said. Benny pulled the glasses off and wiped them with the end of his shirt, polishing the lenses though they didn’t seem to need it. “Something talked to me. Addressed me by name. It scared the crap out of me, if you want to know the truth.”



“Is that why you quit hunting?”



“No. The people I used to go with moved away, and I didn’t want to go by myself. But you understand that. Otherwise you wouldn’t be out here now. You’d be out there.” Benny flipped his wrist in the direction of the battlefield.



“You’re right,” I admitted. “And thanks for coming with me, by the way. I appreciate the company.”



“Anytime. I’m happy to give this another go.”



“Let’s bring, well—what have we got?” He pulled his backpack up onto his knees, and I pulled my own battered leather bag off my shoulder and sat it in front of me. We opened our bags.



“There’s plenty of light out here tonight. Let’s just bring one flashlight, and only use it if we really need to. We’re more likely to be spotted than we are to spot anything if we go bouncing around the battlefield with half a dozen—what’s that?”



Benny held up a camouflage-green light with a right-angle crook at the top. “I got it from an army surplus store. Check it.” He unscrewed a cap on the light’s bottom, and three circular plastic discs fell out. One was clear but textured, one was blue, and one was red.



“What are those for?”



He unscrewed a ring around the bulb and slipped the red disc over the light source. “The clear one is for floodlight instead of spotlight, the blue one is for…something else, maybe signaling or something, and the red one is for covert operations, such as the one we’ll be undertaking this evening.”



I took the light when he handed it to me, and I pushed the switch with my thumb.



“From a distance, red light is harder to see than ordinary white light,” he explained. “We won’t be such an obvious target, but we’ll still be able to see the ground in front of us.”



“Right on.” I smiled, fiddling with a nubby button beneath the main switch. “What does this do?”



“It’s a pulse button. You use it when you’re signaling. It’s faster than flipping the switch over and over again.”



“Ah. And you said you had a tape recorder?”



“Yes ma’am. I’m afraid it’s digital, though.”



“Why do you say that like it’s a bad thing?”



Benny popped open the back of the recorder and checked the batteries. “It’s not necessarily bad, but it isn’t ideal. It’s better if you’ve got a regular tape device, because that way if you get anything good, you have something for the authorities to examine.”



“But we’re not looking to prove anything to the authorities. I’m not, anyway. I just want to find out what’s going on. I want to know why Green Eyes left, and I don’t care if that message comes across on a microchip or a minicassette.”



“Fair enough.” He set the recorder down beside his bag, next to the modified flashlight.



I rifled through my own bag and turned up nothing more practical than a tube of lip gloss and a keychain-sized vial of pepper spray. I added the spray to our pile, put my car keys in my pocket, and closed the bag up again.



“Let’s leave it at this, shall we? And we can put the rest of this stuff in my car—unless you want to leave it at the mercy of the bonfire party.”



“Okay, but I want to bring my knife, too.”



“No weapons. No way. Seriously. Bad idea. How did you sneak that past me, anyway?”



“We are not going to get caught,” he argued.



“You don’t know that. Look at this party, Benny. There’s a bonfire. In a pseudo-suburban neighborhood. Someone could call the cops at any moment, and if we’re as close to the battlefield as you guys say—”



“It’s right around the corner, over the railroad tracks.”



“Okay, then if it’s that close, there’s no reason to push our luck. No weaponry. It’s not going to be any good against ghosts, anyway. By definition, they are already dead. They are unimpressed by the stabby.”



“I’m not worried about the ghosts,” he sulked.



“I already told you Green Eyes isn’t there anymore, so you don’t have to worry about him, either.”



Jamie came up behind us then, one cheek still bulging from his most recent bite of hot dog. “Oh, but Green Eyes and the ghosts are the least of your worries out there.” He swallowed the last of it, and the rest of his half-joked warning came out less garbled. “And I’m not talking about catching an accidental ride in a paddy wagon.”