Speak Rain

by P. Edward Auman

December 9

  Building Defense

  Though they both awoke rather late, about 11:00AM, Rachel and Daniel felt refreshed, having received better sleep than either had had in weeks. Ray went about making some eggs for breakfast while Daniel pulled his laptop out of his backpack in his bedroom closet and prepared it for use at the kitchen table. He found Rachel was a bit of a sloppy guest, having left her clothes from the night before draped around the footboard and floor around the bed. But he decided that whether or not that was a normal pattern for her, he found it a little appealing anyway. It was nice to know a beautiful, young woman such as Ray also had some personable, if not bad, habits.

  Together they were strangely quiet towards one another, but not uncomfortably so. Daniel thought perhaps Rachel was waiting for an opportune moment to mentioned what she’d experienced in the night. After all, that was Daniel’s plan.

  “So…Rachel?” Daniel started the conversation after Ray sat down with two plates of scrambled eggs and some toast. “What are your plans for the next few days?”

  Rachel’s initial response was a hum with a mouth full of egg and a pleasant smile. Once she’d smiled she replied, “Oh…I don’t know. I thought I’d hang around and bum off your hospitality. Maybe steal a beer out of the fridge. Watch some football”

  She smacked his shoulder from around the corner of the table as she laughed and took another bite.

  Daniel smiled too, but wanted to stay on track. “Well…no, I mean. I wondered if you had any plans to maybe travel around a bit. See the area?”

  “None that I’m aware of,” she hinted.

  “Well, I was thinking maybe you could hop on my desktop computer in the basement and see if you could do some research, while I work on this one.”

  “Ya…I guess I could do that. What are we researching?”

  “I want to understand a little more about Native American traditions.”

  “Oh really?” Rachel’s smiled enveloped Daniel and wished he could think of something fun for them to go do together, but the closest movie theater and real restaurants were a good twenty miles away.

  The morning had at last been one without rain or sprinkles tinkling the metal of the gutters and downspouts outside. But it was still foggy. In many ways, though it was a slight improvement, the fog made it very unappealing to go driving around looking for something with which Dan could entertain his guest.

  “Ya. I want to see if we can come up with a way to get rid of this water shaman.”

  Rachel put her fork down and sipped her coffee. “Boy, you sort of took to that name, didn’t you?”

  “What? ‘Water Shaman’?”

  “Ya. … You know…those were just stories. I don’t know that you should put a lot of faith in them.”

  The somewhat less gloomy day seemed to be helping Rachel put aside their fears or even thoughts about the shadow they’d been dealing with. Daniel thought perhaps, if he’d been a psychologist, that she might be in a state of denial. So, rather un-clinical-like, he pushed to get her back on track.

  “Yes, I know. But…” Dan took a sip of his coffee too and paused.

  “But, what?” Rachel asked, a little impatiently.

  “Well…I think I know why you don’t want to talk about this very much.”

  Rachel snorted. “Oh yeah? Why is that?”

  Clearing his throat, Daniel tried pushing just hard enough to get her talking openly again. “I said a little prayer last night…”

  Rachel put down her cup and closed her hands around it, warming them with the coffee. She stared below Dan’s chin line so that he could not read her reaction well.

  “…and I got some answers. I need to do some research about Native Americans and their ceremonies.”

  “Told you that, did he?” Rachel asked in a raspy voice.

  “Who?”

  “G.G.?”

  “Your great grandfather?” Daniel asked.

  “Ya,” she replied. Some melancholy returned, but Dan wasn’t sure why this would be upsetting in itself. “I said a prayer last night too.”

  “Really? I kind of got the impression you didn’t pray.”

  “Well…I don’t really. But I got to thinking about things my grandfather and G.G. told me when I was young. I…remember them saying a tribal healer would burn a Bahos…a ‘prayer stick’ is what you might call it. …So, since I didn’t think you wanted me burning a wrap of tobacco in your house last night,” she had been gesturing with her left hand a little bit as if apologetic about this explanation, but in describing the stick Rachel finally looked at Daniel’s eyes again and smiled again. “…and of course I don’t have any tobacco. So, anyway, I just sat on the bed and imagined I was burning a Bahos and said a little prayer.”

  Daniel leaned back in his chair and folded his arms in front of him. Once again he found himself at the altar of Rachel’s ancestral knowledge, wondering why he even booted up the laptop.

  He asked, “What is the point of the Bahos then?”

  “Well, I don’t know. It’s supposed to be a way to…I guess appeal to the ‘Creator’. It’s supposed to invoke healing and good feelings.”

  “I see,” Dan replied. Synapsis fired throughout his brain further developing his plan to eliminate the water shaman’s influence.

  Rachel perked up a bit, shifting in her seat and trying to hold Dan’s gaze more frequently as she spoke. “In fact, I didn’t really realize it until just now while I was trying to explain it, but the idea is to use the prayer sticks to invoke the elements and nature to help you.”

  “Really!” Dan leaned forward intently and engaged their conspiratorial whisper they had shared as they spoke the night before. “How do you do that?”

  “Well…I think generally we burn the tobacco and that’s for setting the prayer wishes free…but…if you needed help with say, growing your crops, you could bury them in your field.”

  “Or!...you could…”

  “…release them in a river…or a lake!”

  Dan concluded the simultaneous thought for them, “…to help with rain.”

  “Yes!” Ray exclaimed. “Dan! I think we should do that! Where would we put them?”

  “Well…okay…so I have a question about that then…” he confided.

  “Shoot!”

  “You’re saying you can put a Bahos in the ground to heal a field for crops, right?”

  “Yes!”

  “So, if this thing has followed us from here all the way down to the four corners area and maybe further…”

  Rachel’s face turned to a frown and deep furrows in her brow developed as she considered the situation.

  “…where do we put it?”

  They were silent for a moment.

  “There’s another little problem…” said Rachel. “Or maybe it’s the answer, I don’t know.”

  “Okay. What is it?”

  “It’s not just one Bahos. The idea, as G.G. told me through my grandfather, is that the number of prayer sticks you offer determines how sincere you are about what you want.”

  Daniel shrugged slightly, “So we have to make a bunch then. …We’ll make a ton, just to make sure we do the job right.”

  “Ya…” Rachel said. She tapped her front teeth with a finger nail on her right hand index finger as she pondered. “The thing is, I’m pretty sure G.G. said they would make thousands of them for some things…like that forest shaman that went insane…I’m pretty sure if they’d tried to calm him down they’d have been a whole hell of a lot of prayer sticks…”

  “So…we could do that if we had to…” Daniel was hesitating a bit. “Maybe we need to…you know, to go on a little drive and drop them off in every river or pond we can find.”

  “Yeah…that’s kind of what I was thinking. But…we may also just need to find the source of his element for him…you know…like his den.”

  Daniel thought, stymied yet again. “I would think that would be
down at the Mesa in the dwellings, wouldn’t you? I mean, this flood of rain has been going across multiple states here in the Rockies for going on three months now. We can’t possibly try to cover every waterway. Maybe we need to try this plan of attack first.”

  “No…” Rachel said. She looked into Dan’s eyes with a much more serious look this time. “I don’t think he’d be at the dwellings necessarily.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, I don’t know if we need to look at rainfall measurements or something, but consider…It’s been terribly heavy rainfall right here! Like right around your home! I’m thinking his home is here too.”

  The idea was intriguing. It was true, at least in Daniel’s perception, that the news and his limited travels in the last week seemed to indicate the heaviest rains since it all began were in the particular valley and mountains where he lived. It seemed likely that there was no coincidence in that.

  “Do you think he’s taken up residence here because of me?”

  “Possibly,” Rachel hemmed and hawed a bit. “I would think a vengeful elemental or shaman or whatever this is would probably single out a person or maybe a group of people…even if they made it miserable for everyone.”

  For a while they sat and picked at the eggs and toast. While they did, at one point, Daniel keyed in the words ‘Bahos’ and ‘Prayer Stick’ on a search site while Rachel watched, but he didn’t immediately click on any of the higher ranking results. It was more distraction while he contemplated than anything else.

  “If I were to try to pin you down, say, just based on your gut feelings, do you think this thing is from around here?” Daniel asked.

  “Yes.” Rachel nodded her agreement. “I’m pretty sure he is. I wouldn’t be too surprised if we could find him just above the ridges here behind your house in these mountains somewhere.”

  “That’s what I was thinking too,” Dan acknowledged.

  Just then the Dan’s cell phone rang, sitting on the kitchen counter near the sink. It startled both of them, and Rachel actually stood up before Daniel did. Neither would admit it later but they had been taken off guard by the idea of normal worldly activities intruding on their supernatural game plan they were developing. It was as if they’d sequestered themselves into a world of ghostly shamans and prayers separate from their daily lives. Indeed the phone call was a little confusing for Daniel to take in for the first few moments as well.

  “Hello? Daniel Tremon?” the voice on the other end said. The speaker in the phone was loud enough that even held closely to Dan’s ear Rachel could hear both ends of the conversation in the quite kitchen.

  “Yes?” Dan replied.

  “I understand from Mr. …” clarity wasn’t perfect. Rachel couldn’t quite make out the name nor all of the sentence that followed it. But the most important part came through freely once Daniel stopped pacing. “So I’d like to schedule an interview with you, perhaps next week on the twelfth?”

  “Sure! Ya, ya!” Dan replied, “of course. So you’re Ted and Janine Smith’s friends that I met a couple nights ago in Mesa Verde?”

  “That’s right!” Ray could hear the gentleman say. It was friendly, elderly sounding voice, but deep as well. “I have an opening for…”

  The rest was drowned out by Daniel’s movements and shuffling to find a paper and pencil. He quickly jotted down a phone number and an address. Ray wanted to impose and ask repeatedly, “What is it? What is it?” like an impatient child, but she held her tongue. She thought, maybe things are looking up already.

  After hanging up, Daniel smiled at Rachel. “It sounds like I have a new job, thanks to meeting the Smiths down there in Cortez!”

  Ray grinned, “Don’t get your hopes up yet. I heard him say ‘interview’, not ‘job’.”

  “Yes, well,” Dan continued grinning. He wasn’t sure if Rachel was really trying to put a little damper on his excitement or just teasing him. “I think it’s pretty definite. He basically told me when the start date would be if I was available and how much money and everything.”

  “Wow! That does sound good!”

  “Yeah…” Daniel put the slip on the fridge under a magnetic picture frame that held a photo of both he and his late wife. Ray noted she’d come back to that at some point, but didn’t want to bring down Dan’s mood right then. “I have a meeting with him on the twelfth next week.”

  “Well…I guess I probably could just hang out. Bum off of you and watch football all day if you’re going to be wealthy again.”

  “Sure,” Dan replied. He grabbed his coat off the couch in the living room and his keys from the kitchen counter. “C’mon!”

  “Where are we going,” Ray laughed. But she rose and headed towards the bedroom to get her coat as well.

  “I think this is cause for a celebration!” Dan hadn’t felt so much positive excitement since the rains had started. Or maybe since I met Rachel, actually, he thought. He paused at the door considering that.

  “So we’re headed down to the grill to get a milkshake, Potsy?” Rachel engaged his humor. “Where are we going to go to celebrate?”

  “Let’s head in to town! The big town tonight! You know…maybe a fancy Italian Restaurant or sum’n,” he said in his best Little Paesano impression. “Besides, I’ve got to get a new suit and clothes for my interview.”