Edgar Yarnell looked up from his Mexican omelet at the man who'd stopped at his small table.
"Hi, Bar Stool," the man said. "I'm Ben Shoreff. You picked up my family and me at Henrys Hat earlier this month. May I sit with you?"
"Sure. Sit."
Ben still stood. "I had in mind asking some questions. You may not feel like questions at lunch."
"Give 'er a try."
Ben put down his tray and sat. "You and Lor Lu talked as if you knew one another, forty years ago in Southeast Asia. Is that right?"
"That's right."
Ben looked bemused. "I'd have guessed your age at fifty-five or sixty, and his at thirty."
"I'm sixty-eight."
"And still working!"
"Nope. About all I do is fly, maintain the aircraft and take naps."
Bar Stool was not, Ben thought, a voluble man. "Ah," he said, "but what about Lor Lu?"
Bar Stool surprised him; an unexpected smile wreathed his face. "Lor Lu. He's something. Want to hear a story?"
Ben grinned. "I'd love to."
"You got a while?"
"Sure."
"This'd be confusing without some background. During the war I was a Forward Air Controller in northern Laos. On paper I'd been discharged from the Air Force, to fly for a company called 'Air America,' a CIA cover. There was a whole army of Hmong guerrillas, under their own general, Vang Pao. A hell of a lot better general than that chickenshit Westmoreland the Pentagon sent us. The Hmong were a stone-age tribe that'd been fighting the Pathet Lao, the communists, since about 1950. Armed first by the French. We—the U.S.A.—started supplying them in about '65.
"Anyway I got sent to Long Tieng in '69. After 20 years of fighting, the Hmong had lost so many men, a lot of their fighters were kids 13, 14 years old. And it'd get worse. Before I left, some were 11 or 12, looked more like 9 or 10. "Mostly we were flying O-1 Bird Dogs, looked kind of like Piper Cubs. Top speed supposed to be 115 knots, but loaded, more like 60. We'd fly over the jungle looking for enemy, and when we'd find some—troops, a truck park, whatever—we'd radio in the location. Maybe fire marking rockets. Let the Air Force or Hmong take it from there. We got shot at a lot, of course, and the O-1s were as innocent of armor as a young girl's heart. The gas tanks weren't even self-sealing. So they were kind of dangerous, but great for finding enemy on the ground."
Bar Stool took a bite of omelet, chewed and swallowed, then continued. "The O-1 was a fore-and-aft two-seater, and we'd take a Hmong with us, in back, to help spot the enemy. And while the Hmong weren't short on guts, getting shot at in aircraft was a lot different to them than fighting in the jungle, where they felt at home. Some of them didn't do too good up there, and when you got a really good backseater, you liked to keep him.
"That's what happened with me and Yang, Lor Lu's dad. His eyes never missed a thing. So whenever I went up, I tried to get Yang as my backseater. Sometimes he'd be out with someone else. Al Lewis used to grab him whenever he could, until Al got killed. Al seemed to attract ground fire more than most. Killed in '72, but got shot down twice before that, once near Muong Soui. Which is when he got the nickname Muong Soui Louie. Lots of times he got back with bullet holes in the aircraft."
Muong Soui Louie! Bar Stool had called Lor Lu that, driving out in the eight-pack! Ben was almost sure of it.
The flyer raised his coffee cup for a thoughtful drink, then put more hot sauce on his omelet and took another bite. "I got shot down right after Al got killed, and after I got out of the hospital, I got sent home. So I went to work for the Roth Brothers out of Lauenbruck, cowboying and mechanicking. Never heard how things were going with the Hmong. The newspapers and television never paid any attention to them, which was just as well. Over there they generally got things screwed up anyway.
"After we pulled out of Southeast Asia, the CIA busted their ass for the Hmong. They'd got to know and admire them, and hated to leave them in the lurch. But they were way short on resources and way long on restrictions. Then, somewhere around '90, I read that some Hmong refugees had been settled on the Arkansas River, working for farmers there. That's a big irrigation district in the southeast part of the state. So I took a notion to go see how they were doing.
"Not too well, it turned out. The country there's a lot different than the Laotian jungle. It's even flat, and so far east, you can't see mountains. I asked around, and they told me the people to check with about the Hmong were preachers, so I went to one and told him I'd like to find an old Hmong friend of mine. All the name I had for him was Yang. He told me thousands, probably tens of thousands of Hmong had been flown to the States to keep from getting massacred by the Communists. They were scattered all over the country. But he did know a Yang, and told me how I could find him.
"So I went, and by God it was him! One chance in thousands, like playing the lottery. It was him. He'd already known a certain amount of English, and gotten a lot better at it since, so he'd been made foreman of the Hmong working on this big produce farm. I'm not ashamed to say we cried all over each other. It was minutes before we could even talk."
At the memory, the flyer's eyes had welled up. He paused to take another bite of omelet and another swig of coffee while he recovered himself. When he spoke again, it was with a grin. "Yang had kids by then, one of 'em being Lor Lu. Maybe six or eight years old, about the size of a healthy flea, born in a refugee camp in Thailand. And he came up to me and called me Bar Stool! Not even Mister Bar Stool. And I asked Yang how he knew that name, because Yang'd been calling me Lieutenant Yarnell.
"Yang was kind of apologetic. Said that here, the kids didn't always use proper manners. They'd got American habits from the kids they went to school and played with." Bar Stool paused to eat the last bite of omelet. "The Hmong, some of 'em anyway, believe in past lives. From Buddhism, I suppose. And Yang explained that Lor Lu had been American his last life. That he'd been Lieutenant Lewis."
Bar Stool peered thoughtfully at Ben. "I guess that answers your question." He gestured with his fork. "Your lunch is getting cold."
Ben ate. He had a whole new appreciation of the man across the table from him.
"And that," Ben said to Lee, "is how he explained Lor Lu's being Muong Soui Louie."
Lee Shoreff looked dismayed. "And he believes this?"
Ben smiled. "There doesn't seem to be any other explanation available."
"But—it makes no sense! None at all!"
He shrugged, still smiling.
"And you believe it," she said accusingly.
"Seems fine to me. I've always felt comfortable with the idea of past lives. I believed in them the first time I heard of them."
She looked at the girls, who'd been listening with great interest, ignoring the television. Then she turned again to her husband. "I wonder if it's true that Abilities Release gets into past lives. . . what purport to be past lives."
"Among other things."
"I suppose you'd like to try it out."
"My dear," he said, "I took Life Healing shortly before I met you. At the first east coast Millennium center, on Long Island."
Lee's jaw dropped. "You didn't!"
"Sure did. You weren't there to tell me I couldn't, so . . ."
"Ben, that's not funny!"
"It's not dreadful, either."
She frowned thoughtfully. This man she loved, this good and gentle man . . . "What ever happened to your life that needed healing?" she asked.
"This life? Nothing much. But some earlier lives . . ." He cocked and waggled an eyebrow comically. The girls giggled.
"Ben, please! You're not making this any easier for me. Why didn't you tell me before?"
"It never came up till we met Lor Lu. And after that I knew it would upset you. Probably more than it does now."
"Mom," Becca piped up, "I'm old enough to take Life Healing. And Raquel will be when she's ten. Can we? Please?"
Lee took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "No, you may not."
Their response to that worried her. They didn't plead, they didn't fuss. They didn't even say, "But dad did, and it didn't do anything bad to him." They simply turned their eyes to the television, though she had no illusions about their ears.
In bed, two hours later, she asked Ben what Life Healing was like. "You sit in front of an aural field enhancer," he answered. "It looks a bit like a desk computer with a small antenna. Your guide reads from a list of short questions till he gets a meaningful aural response. Then he asks other questions until you see the event that caused the response. See it for yourself. That's when it gets hairy. You revisit things that were done to you, or things you did to others, or saw done to others—traumatic incidents that left scars on your psyche. Once you get grooved in, most of them are of past lives, or deaths, because there've been so many of them."
Lee said nothing for half a minute. "On your psyche," she said at last, her voice brittle. "What does that mean? What good does it do?"
Ben's answer was soft. "It makes life easier. Among other things, it makes you less vulnerable to things that happen in this life."
"It's a cult thing!"
"Not really. It's a psychotherapy suitable for ordinary people, developed by a licensed psychiatrist, Dr. Peter Verbeek. Synthesized from elements of earlier practices, actually."
A licensed psychiatrist, she thought. As if that's reassuring.
"You might try reading some of Dove's columns and talks," Ben added.
She tightened inwardly. Not likely. She'd felt Ngunda's magnetism, probably more effective for being casual. It was easy for some people to be hooked by him. "You'd like the girls to have Life Healing, wouldn't you?" she said.
"It would be good for them, but it's nothing I'd lobby for. They're doing great as they are."
He peered at his wife in the darkness, knowing she'd lie awake stewing. "Tell you what," he said. "Why don't you and I get up and watch TV awhile. The African Queen is playing on seventy-four about now. I'll mix you a Hungarian screwdriver."
Lee sighed. "We might as well. Or I might as well. There's no need for you to lose sleep."
He chuckled. "You'll need someone to help you through the more exciting parts."
She snorted. "What parts are those?"
He laughed. "Parts is parts. Whatever parts excite you."
She hit him with her pillow, then rolled out of bed before he could grab her. "All right," she said. "But make the drink weak. I'll want more than one."