Owl Dreams

by John T. Biggs

CHAPTER FIVE

  When the wind blew, she talked to Robert Collins, and in Oklahoma, the wind blew all the time. She brought him words of wisdom, told him jokes, whispered secrets he didn’t want to know. The wind was a tireless talker, and Robert listened carefully to everything she had to say. No wonder he was crazy.

  “She has no voice of her own.” He’d told this story now to fifty-six Medicaid psychiatrists. Their faces and professional degrees were interchangeable—no point in learning names. They all answered to Doctor.

  “She gathers cast-off words and phrases. Puts them into brand new sentences.”

  The doctor mouthed the word, “She?” He raised his eyebrows, making it into an unasked question, but he didn’t ask it out loud. This doctor wanted Robert to do most of the talking.

  “She.” Robert shrugged. Didn’t everybody agree on the gender of the wind? Nothing Freudian about it.

  “Please go on,” the doctor said.

  Robert couldn’t blame him for the low-energy style. Psychiatrists earned less than plumbers, and their profession was uniquely unpleasant.

  “What does she tell you?” The doctor lifted his Mont Blanc pen and made a series of brief, arcane entries in Robert’s chart. Elaboration was not an option. Too many schizophrenics in Oklahoma City. Inconvenient citizens, as unfathomable as stray cats, but not as dangerous—usually.

  The group home Robert lived in was infinitely superior to Flanders Mental Hospital. He could stay there as long as he was sane enough.

  “She tells me I’m no danger to myself or others.” Robert pointed to the note pad, but the doctor didn’t write that down. This time the old Jedi mind trick didn’t work.

  The psychiatrists checked him out in these weekly sessions, made

  sure he hadn’t crossed that institutionalizable threshold once again. Talking to the wind took him right up to the welcome mat.

  “Really, Robert. What does the wind tell you?”

  He could give the doctor an example. Perhaps a snippet from a political speech the wind had brought him earlier this morning. A few phrases that blew in from the southeastern corner of the state complete with a Little Dixie accent. He could imitate the tone and cadence perfectly, but he really wasn’t sure about the content. It was politics after all, not much different than schizophrenia. So he shrugged instead. There would be plenty to say when he got back on the streets. The wind was a good listener, better than the nameless parade of shrinks who questioned his version of reality.

  The doctor pretended to scratch his shoulder with his left hand so he could check his watch. Digital. Precise. Made in China.

  Robert told him, “We can cut the session short. I don’t mind.” The voices hadn’t told him to do anything dangerous or illegal, but the psychiatrist needed another thirteen minutes to satisfy his Medicaid requirement. Big Brother might be watching.

  “Please go on.” The doctor’s eyes moved to a travel poster on the wall of the cramped little room—somewhere in the Caribbean.

  Robert started to ask if that’s where the doctor went to medical school, but thought better of it.

  “Well, doctor.” Shrinks always recognized stalling tactics. As long as the fifty minute hour was filled to the brim, they didn’t usually care, but this doctor tapped his hundred-dollar ballpoint pen on his front teeth and looked at his watch again.

  Ten minutes left, enough time for the Cliff Notes version of Robert’s life story—suitable for a quarterly assessment. He could make a show of clarity in this stuffy little room; the voices couldn’t penetrate. An open window would have blown the illusion of sanity away.

  “The wind tells me my parents were archeologists.” Lovers, sifting through the remains of a lost civilization, but Robert didn’t say anything about that.

  “I was conceived on site.” He didn’t explain how an ancient shaman’s spirit took advantage of the situation. Delusions with too much texture looked like serious psychopathology.

  The doctor checked his watch again. He flipped through Robert’s record checking today’s responses against previous sessions.

  Damn.

  “You believe an Indian’s spirit lives inside your body?”

  When all else fails, try the truth. “Sometimes, I do.”

  There were weeks, even months when the whole idea seemed preposterous, especially when he took his medications. During periods of clarity, Robert knew he was an orphan who had been in foster care from the age of three. His archeologist parents were no more than a mental program malfunction, but they were at least as real as the science of psychiatry.

  “Mostly, I don’t.” The adverb was a lie.

  The doctor didn’t speak, but his body language shouted accolades. With a flourish of his Mont Blanc, he made a note in Robert’s chart. His lips moved as he wrote, “Touching base with reality.”

  The doctor drew a five-pointed star beside the entry.

  The pentagram. An appropriate sign to designate the loss of a man’s soul. It didn’t matter to the doctor that Robert Collins’s life was interesting when the spirit of an ancient shaman lived inside him.

  The psychiatrist wanted to know what the wind told Robert about his future.

  “Partly cloudy skies tomorrow with only a small chance for rain. That’s a good thing because the house I live in has a leaky roof.”

  And something big and dangerous is coming soon. No need to tell the doctor that. Robert might be crazy, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew from past experience how terribly wrong things could go in the final minutes of a session.

  “You should keep your umbrella close at hand just the same,” Robert said. “Even the spirits can’t predict the weather in Oklahoma.”

  The psychiatrist tapped the crystal of his wristwatch as if that would hurry the session along. The allotted fifty minutes of talk therapy would be over in fifty-nine seconds. The doctor held his watch so that Robert could participate in the countdown. 58, 57, 56 . . . . All conditions were go.

 

  No one protested when DHS bought rundown houses on the northeast side of town and converted them to group homes for the mentally challenged. The neighborhood where Robert lived didn’t quite rise to the status of a ghetto, but the streets were ruled by teenage thugs with an unlimited capacity for violence.

  The youthful offenders committed armed robberies, sold drugs, and shot each other with impunity, but they treated the residential clients of the group homes with reverence.

  Robert walked the streets of the most dangerous quadrant of Oklahoma City in complete safety because he was crazy. Like the Cheyenne and Sioux of the Great Plains, the Crips and Bloods around N.E. 36th Street cherished and protected the insane.

  The wind danced around Robert as he walked the streets of his neighborhood. She was in a playful mood, nudging him this way and that, pelting him gently with dandelion seed and bits of cast-off paper. She chased herself into a whirlwind and embraced him in the center. The wind’s happiness was contagious, and Robert soon found himself singing a song he heard many years ago but only just remembered.

  He knew the tune was wrong. The words fit poorly into stanzas. The rhyme and meter missed the mark, but in Robert Collins’s mind, the effect was serious perfection.

  A young black couple crossed the street to avoid contact with the crazy white man who sang to an invisible audience. They evaluated the area for potential cover. They could duck into the Wise Owl Child Development Center if necessary and pretend to be new parents interested in day care. But the crazy man did not fix his gaze on them. He was busy with his tuneless song.

  Robert sang louder as he drifted away from the young couple, away from the child development center, like a flying insect moving at the wind’s discretion. No one would interfere with him in this part of town, and no one would complain to the authorities.

  When the song lyrics finally ran their course, he found the wind had stopped him within the boundaries of Riverside Gardens Cemetery. A glossy black hearse turned into the entranc
e and led a string of cars between two square stone pillars with weeping angels on their tops.

  Riverside Gardens Cemetery was one of the oldest graveyards in the region, established well before statehood. Robert visited often. The burial park was one of the few peaceful well-kept expanses of green within walking distance of his group home.

  The rich and the poor were buried together here. Blacks, whites, and Indians lay in peaceful coexistence under lawns maintained by illegal Hispanic immigrants. The status of the dead was differentiated only by their headstones. Dust-bowl-paupers slept under degraded blocks of limestone with barely legible names and dates. Granite monuments and marble statuary adorned the graves of oil millionaires and industrialists.

  The only segregated part of the necropolis was the oldest eighth acre in its exact center. The dead in this section of the graveyard were fenced in by a sandstone wall built when Oklahoma City was still an unnamed section of the Cherokee Strip. A bronze plaque beside the only entrance identified the place as the Indian Baptist Cemetery.

  Robert never went inside the sandstone wall. The place was spooky, too spooky even for a white man whose body is inhabited by the spirit of a dead shaman.

  The rest of Riverside Gardens was well maintained, but Indian Baptist Cemetery was overgrown with thistles and moonflowers. Cottonwood trees grew as haphazardly as Robert’s thoughts. Fallen limbs provided nourishment for yellow puffballs as big as Christmas ornaments.

  Tipped slate tombstones barely held their own against the deadwood and the weeds. They sported epitaphs written in the graceful looping Cherokee alphabet.

  Failed wooden crosses without lettering or numbers marked the final resting places of Creek and Seminole freedmen.

  Three redbrick Choctaw bonehouses dominated the little graveyard. The names—Tingle, Byars, and Maytubby—were spelled out in green colored tiles over their doorways.

  Only the Maytubby building was in good repair. Its roof was straight; its entryway swept clean. A life-size figure of a white owl decorated the rusty metal door. Simple shapes of plane geometry arranged by a clever anonymous artist to resemble a bird of prey.

  “Post-modern abstract representation,” the wind told Robert. He had no idea what she meant.

  He turned away from the Indian Baptist Cemetery and watched a newly arrived funeral procession follow a winding gravel road toward a yellow canopy at River Gardens’ northern border.

  “A graveside service,” the wind told him. She would sweep through the open walls of the pavilion and collect solemn words. She would mix them into phrases from playgrounds, political rallies, battlefields, and prison yards. She would use the borrowed words to fill Robert’s ears with things no one else could know. The wind spoke in a thousand voices, each one fully charged with its own emotion. She was impossible to ignore.

  A black SUV turned away from the procession and headed toward the Indian Baptist Cemetery.

  “Watch what he does!” The wind borrowed the voice of a scorned wife who had used that phrase to instruct a private detective. The words were as sharp and angry as a switchblade.

  “Don’t get too close!” A mother’s words this time, warning her child away from a space heater.

  A man rolled out of the passenger door of the SUV as it stopped at the entrance to the Indian Baptist Cemetery.

  An Indian man. He struggled to his feet. The man’s head bobbed in a perfect imitation of a chicken evaluating the final hundred yards leading to a rendering plant. Methamphetamine users moved their heads like that, but this man was no addict. He was clean-shaven and well-dressed with glossy black shoes, well-tailored pants, and a blue blazer. A name tag pinned to the pocket of the blazer identified the Indian man as J. Mankiller, Casino Manager.

  The driver stepped out of the SUV. His skin was bronze, like his passenger’s, but his features gave no clue of his race or nationality. He made a wide circle around the vehicle and closed in on the disoriented passenger with the slow deliberate motion of a wolf cornering a rabbit.

  The wolf waited for an opening. He had done this kind of thing many times before. He knew rabbits could be dangerous if they weren’t managed properly.

  “You killed my wife.” The passenger barely spoke above a whisper, but the wind picked up his words and carried them to Robert.

  “You took my daughter.”

  The wolf did not answer; he had his quarry trapped between himself and the SUV.

  The passenger reached into the inside pocket of his blue blazer. The wolf stepped back in case his rabbit might have a weapon, but it was only a piece of paper.

  “I know where she is.”

  The wolf snatched at the paper, but he only tore away a corner.

  “I know where she is.”

  The wolf extended a closed fist in the passenger’s direction. He turned his hand over and opened it so the rabbit could see the mound of yellow powder resting on his palm.

  Robert watched the driver blow the yellow powder into the passenger’s face. The man fell backward against the SUV, slid down the door and sat on the ground. The driver reached for the paper in the passenger’s hand, but the wind snatched it away before his fingers closed around it.

  The paper blew left and right, as unpredictable as a dragonfly. It followed a jagged meandering route, until it dropped like a heavy stone at Robert’s feet.

  He picked it up.

  “Run!” The wind shouted the order to Robert in a voice borrowed from a football coach. He waited long enough to see the wolf stuff his victim back into the SUV.

  “Run, Run, Run, as fast as you can!” It was the voice of an enthusiastic grandmother telling the story of the gingerbread man to a three year old who was hearing it for the first time.

  Robert knew he couldn’t outrun the wolf’s SUV, but the man couldn’t drive among the gravestones and he couldn’t chase him down in front of witnesses.

  Robert sprinted toward the graveside service. He had taken only a dozen steps when he heard footfalls on the gravel road behind him—fast, efficient footfalls that would close the distance between them in minutes. But in seconds Robert reached the safety of the funereal canopy.

  Bad news. It was an African-American funeral. He couldn’t blend seamlessly with the mourners, and they would not interrupt their service to defend a crazy white man in a fight that did not concern them.

  Robert continued running, but looked over his shoulder to check the progress of his pursuer. A strategic mistake. The wolf had dropped back, and Robert might have been able to escape over the cemetery fence, but he tripped on a wrinkle in the artificial turf under the canopy and went sprawling over a group of mourners. The wind collected a wide assortment of expletives as a result of his blunder, but he lost the opportunity for a clean getaway.

  He scrambled to his feet, ran to the open coffin.

  “Jesus, take this man to your bosom,” he sang out in his loudest most sincere gospel music voice. The wind provided Robert with the kind of religious vocabulary spoken at tent revivals and river baptisms.

  “This sinner has been washed in the blood of the lamb.” Robert did crazy things all the time. He usually didn’t realize it, so he usually didn’t feel embarrassed. This time he did. He bent over the corpse and kissed both of the dead man’s cold, heavily rouged cheeks while he stuffed the paper he was carrying into the pocket of the dearly departed’s burying shirt. Then he turned around to take stock of his circumstances.

  The wolf was nowhere to be seen. He’d been discouraged by Robert’s antics; now the crowd of mourners posed a more immediate threat.

  He ran around the coffin and away from the angry crowd, worrying too much about the impression he left behind and not enough about the obstacles in front of him. He traveled only a few yards when he stumbled over a headstone and rolled into an open grave.

  Robert’s head made a sound like an underinflated basketball as it thumped against the edge of the concrete vault. He rolled onto his back and looked at the perfectly rectangular p
atch of sky at the top of the grave.

  “You all right?” The speaker was a large black man dressed in well-worn working clothes. He wore a broad-brimmed green gardener’s hat that kept his face hidden in a shadow. He walked around the edge of the grave in a stride that was simultaneously rough and graceful.

  Robert tried to answer, but the words stuck in his throat. The surface of the world was very far away, so much farther than the six feet mandated by tradition.

  “You all right?” The margins of the grave framed the man like a surrealistic portrait. Reflected sunlight found its way under the brim of his hat and revealed a face distorted by concern. A hummingbird hovered over the man’s right shoulder, and there was something else. His proportions were wrong, squat and thick, like an image in a fun house mirror.

  As other people gathered beside the man, Robert could see that he was large, but also relatively short, not even as tall as some of the female mourners.

  That seemed impossible, but after a few seconds of careful observation, Robert solved the problem. The big man had no legs below his knees.

  “Who are you?” Robert asked the man. No one at the top of the grave had any doubt who was being asked to identify himself.

  “They call me Big Shorty,” the man said.

  But the wind told Robert his real name, “Baron Saturday,” accented with delicate Acadian French vowels she’d carried from the bayous of Louisiana.

  “Baron Saturday,” Robert repeated the name with the same precise Creole intonations. “The Voodoo Loa of the dead.” A resident client in the halfway house had told Robert about him.

  The wind filled in details. Baron Saturday was supposed to wear a white top hat and a black tuxedo. Robert meant to ask the big short man about that, but before he could, the rectangle of light at the top of the grave receded to a small bright point and then disappeared altogether. The last thing he heard before his world slipped away was discordant music—Bartok or tinnitus or maybe just the wind.

  He knew he wasn’t dying. His head hurt far too much.