A tickle of unease ran down Sam’s back.
“The Shoshoni don’t believe these images were carved by men, but that they were made by the spirits themselves. I’ve heard elders, shamans, explain in very careful terms how they’ve heard pecking as they entered canyons. When they went to investigate, the sound would stop moments before they encountered the actual petroglyph. Usually unfinished.”
“Let me guess,” Sam said. “The pecking started again as soon as they were out of sight.”
“And the next time they returned to the spot the image was complete. You’ve got it, Sam.”
“Wow,” Amber said softly. “Is this what you wanted me to see?”
“In part,” Dr. Holly told her. “Let’s take a look, shall we?”
Sam squeezed past Frank, who remained with his flashlight illuminating the water ghost.
“Oh, my God,” Amber whispered as the cavern widened slightly. Various pictographs, images, and designs painted onto the stone versus the carved and pecked petroglyphs adorned the cave walls. Painted in red, with white-and-black accents, there were ghostly elongated beings with big eyes; almost alien linear apparitions; frog-like creatures; and stringy images that conjured notions of mutant insects.
Another of the pandzoavits toward the back was reaching up, but instead of straight, vertical lines, his wide torso was filled with a series of interlinked wavy lines and dots. He wore a radiant-lined headdress, but what was more amazing, he’d been painted. The body, though faded, was still red, the dots white. The headdress was in black.
“You ever seen one painted before?” Amber asked reverently.
“Nope. Nor has there been any evidence from the trace-analysis studies done on other Dinwoody-style petroglyphs to indicate that they were painted.”
Sam blinked, looking around, totally and truly awed. He could feel his heart beating in his chest. It sank in. What Dr. Holly had been talking about. This was a sacred place. He could feel the spiritual essence that seemed to radiate from the images, what the Shoshoni called puha.
Sam gazed from one image to another as he shifted his flashlight. The tickle in his spine intensified. Could feel them looking back at him.
Had to be the place, right? The cave, deep in the mountains, and seeing cool things that just triggered his imagination. Brains did that when they were excited and got a dopamine rush.
Just past the gallery, the cave split, the larger passage leading to the left. Sam had been so blown away he had missed anything Dr. Holly and Amber were saying...was only vaguely aware of the fact that they were headed deeper into the mountain, disappearing into the left-hand passage.
Sam was about to follow when he noticed the little guy carved down by the floor next to the right-hand passage. He’d swear the thing moved to get his attention. And when he flashed his light full on the image, it was like a soul jolt: Electric. He was staring into the little guy’s remarkably rendered eyes: three concentric circles with black pupils.
The image had his three-fingered hands up, and three-toed feet sprouted from the corners of his rotund body with its apparent breechcloth and a Dinwoody-style breastplate.
“Who are you?” Sam whispered softly, struggling to remember if the image were one of the ones he had read about.
Damn! Did it just move?
Sam couldn’t be sure, wondering if it was a trick of the light bouncing off the little puddle of water on the cave floor at the image’s feet. Every time Sam shifted, the reflection sent soft waves of light flowing across the rock.
Drawn by the image, he took the right-hand passage, surprised to find it descended over irregular rock worn smooth by age. Ahead he could hear droplets hitting water with a hollow and musical plop that almost echoed.
The passage opened, and the first thing that caught Sam’s eye was the little guy. An exact copy of the one he had left behind. The little guy was still staring at Sam through the same black pupils, his three-fingered hands held out as if in surprise.
“So, you beat me down here, huh?” he asked, figuring humor would lighten the uneasy tingle that just kept getting worse. “What was it you wanted me to see?”
As Sam shifted, the light played a trick, the little creature seeming to extend his left hand, and Sam followed...stopping short.
Even as he took in the image depicted on the cave’s back wall, another drop plopped into the pool of water at the woman’s feet. A sort of crescendo.
This image Sam knew: Water Ghost Woman. Pa waip. The mystical and dangerous siren of the Shoshoni underworld. Beautiful, seductive, with her long hair and the tears she shed. Her left arm was extended, arrowheads dangling from her sleeve like fringe and a strung bow was gripped in her hand. Broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted as she was, the artist had left no doubt about her sexuality. The breasts were well rendered with round dark nipples. The presence of her spirit helper and errand boy, Turtle, where he was carved on the wall beside her, left no doubt she was pa waip. Her right hand was reaching out, the fingers ready to grasp.
Sam swallowed hard, gut cold.
“You’re the seductress. The stories the Shoshoni tell have you hanging out by rivers and springs. Men are drawn by the sound of your weeping. And sure enough, once they find you beside the water, they just can’t resist. You flip up that little skirt you’re wearing and open your legs. Then, as soon as they’re inside, Whap! You roll them into the water just as the action really heats up.”
He paused, a quivering of anxiety running through his nerves. “So, which story is true? Do you just drown them? Or do you eat them like the scary stories insist?”
She seemed to waver indecisively as his flashlight beam reflected in bars from the water.
“Making up your mind, huh?”
The attempt at witty banter didn’t seem to be alleviating the unease down in his core. Something about her...
He couldn’t help but think about what she would have looked like in the flesh, how her long hair would glisten in the moonlight. Imagine what animated those dark and gleaming eyes. The fantasy was good enough that he reached up with his left hand, ready to step forward and caress her full breast, feel her nipple harden against his palm. An erection began to swell in his pants.
What am I doing?
“Stop it!” he growled to himself, shaking his head and stepping back. He forced himself to remember Shyla’s turquoise eyes, the delicious lines of her body, and the way the sunlight glimmered in her ash-blonde hair.
In the refracted light, Water Ghost Woman seemed to smile, as if this were just the first ploys in a most complicated game. Some faint whisper in Sam’s mind said, “You’ll be back.”
He flashed the light onto the little guy who’d brought him down there. “Am I that horny?”
Sam almost jumped out of his skin when a voice behind him said, “I wouldn’t know, but she’s remarkably alluring when you stare at her for a while.”
Self-Sorting
With the collapse of American manufacturing and the movement of jobs overseas to China, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Vietnam, not to mention Mexico, America began to transition into what they called the “service” economy.
A couple of generations ago, it was accepted, for the most part, that a person had one career, generally working for the same company until retirement. A couple married, bought a house, and raised their kids in a familiar neighborhood. The Ozzie and Harriet life.
For a myriad of reasons, including advances in telecommunications, the internet, cheap transportation, and evolving technology, companies rose and fell. Work became mobile. Cars were no longer being built just in Michigan, but Alabama, North Carolina, and Mississippi. It wasn’t all about money. Often people began to find themselves in different communities with different politics. If they liked it, they stayed, having found kindred spirits. If they didn’t they moved on to places where folks thought the same way they did. Like clustered with like.
Sociologists call it self-sorting.
In the 1850s, historians called
it “sectionalism” and it gave birth to the Civil War.
— Excerpt from Breeze Tappan’s Journal.
Chapter Fourteen
Sam whirled around, light probing a dark side chamber in the cavern. He uttered a strangled sort of shriek as his light fell on a seated figure. A man. Black cowboy hat, red shirt, blue Levi’s, beaded buckle decorated with a red rose. Old-style pointed cowboy boots and spurs on the feet. Two long gray braids draped down on either side of a beaded, star-patterned bolo at the base of his throat.
The old man lowered the brim of his hat to protect his eyes from the blinding light, and raised a weathered brown hand, as if to shield himself. “You want to lower that?”
“Who the...? Who the...?” Sam tried to stop the pounding of his heart, managed to finally both lower the light and squeak: “Who the hell are you?”
In the diffused light Sam saw the man smile and could pick out the deeply incised lines in his aged, round face. The eyes were like shining black stones as they studied him from either side of a mashed and misshapen nose.
“Oh, I know who I am,” he said thoughtfully. “Ruined my life a few times, not to mention other people’s, finding out. There was more than a little hell in the process, too.” He paused. “What I really want to know is...who are you?”
“I...I’m Sam Delgado. I’m a...a graduate student.”
“Not many taipo graduate students have a nynymbi. Why do you?” His voice sounded dry and raspy, somehow ancient.
“I have a...a what?”
The old man gestured with a flick of brown and gnarled fingers. “The little one. The one you were talking to before you began that fascinating interchange with Pa Waip.”
The way he said her name, you’d think he knew her personally.
Sam flashed the light back to the little petroglyph by the entrance. “That’s a nynymbi?”
One of the little folk—a prankster who pulled tricks on people in the back country, made them trip over their own feet, or shot invisible arrows that sent a stitch of pain through the chest or hip.
Sam finished his thoughts aloud, saying, “...And who can act as a guide to those who seek the Water World.”
That was what the Shoshoni called the underworld. Sam shook his head, swiveling the flashlight back in the old man’s direction. “I mean, he’s not mine. I just saw one like him in the upper cavern.”
“You mean you saw him.” Again, the brush of the fingers toward the image.
“No. I mean I saw the petroglyph that looked like this one up in the—”
“But you said, he ‘Beat you down here’.”
“I was just...I was...um, joking.” Sam felt a red fluster warming his ears.
The old man inhaled, as if savoring the air. “Of course. Joking. Most unusual for a taipo. Most unusual all the way around. A nynymbi don’t just offer his services without being asked, begged actually. It is a favor not lightly given. Yet you just walk in here, and one of the little people puts himself at your disposal.”
“What makes you think he did that?”
“He wasn’t here until an instant before you climbed down. He appeared just before you did.”
“Wait a minute. He’s carved into the rock. He couldn’t have just appeared.” What had the old dude been smoking?
“You sure?” A beat. “Be careful when you answer that, Sam Delgado, graduate student. You are in a place of passages, at the doorway to a different world. This is a place that only quantum physicists and mystics can fully comprehend. An interface between universes. The domain of the multiverse, assuming you have enough background in theoretical physics to grasp the mathematical probabilities.”
The old man’s head tilted skeptically. “Which, I suspect, you don’t. Anthropologists generally get arrested for indecent exposure when they have to count up to twenty-one. At least the male ones do.”
A voice echoed in the passage behind Sam, saying, “Down here.”
The scraping of shoes and clothing preceded Dr. Holly’s arrival. Sam scrunched to the side to make room as Amber crowded in.
“What the...?” She flashed her light onto Water Ghost Woman. “Holy shit,” she whispered. “She’s magnificent. Look at the detail. Like she was rendered yesterday.”
“Who were you talking to, Sam?” Dr. Holly asked, his gaze on Water Ghost Woman.
“He was talking to Pa waip, Evan,” the old man said from where he’d been relegated to the shadows again. “At least he was when he wasn’t talking to the nynymbi.”
Lights flashed the old man’s way again, blinding him. He took refuge under the down-tilted brim of his hat.
“Thomas? What are you doing here?” Dr. Holly stepped forward, reaching out to push Amber’s flashlight beam out of the old man’s face.
Thomas? Thomas Star?
“Crap,” Amber whispered. “He just scared the ever-loving shit out of me.”
“Yeah. Join the club,” Sam muttered.
So this was the renowned Shoshoni puhagan? Talking theoretical physics, for God’s sake?
The old man had climbed to his feet, first shaking Dr. Holly’s hand, and then clasping him in a bear hug.
Pushing back, Star said, “I wanted to see this place first. Wanted to learn what the puha wanted done now that it’s been discovered. It’s puha kahni. A definite sacred site. The spirits and I, we’ve been talking about how it should be protected. What the best use of the knowledge is.”
“What did they say?” Evan’s voice dropped.
“They say it’s their time, Evan. That they’ve been waiting. That they have things people are going to need. They tested this notion with Frank. They found his navushieip worthy, so they didn’t kill him that night. Instead they watched. He and his family have always treated this place with respect and honor.”
He flicked the fingers toward Sam this time. “Then, this one arrives, guided by Nynymbi.” He tilted his head toward Amber, who had walked to the edge of the pool and was staring transfixed at Water Ghost Woman, their gazes locked together. “And that one hears. Down inside, in the mugwa and suap. You can’t hear, but she does.”
“I don’t understand,” Dr. Holly said warily. His shoulders had hunched, as though he expected some sort of a lethal blow.
“Worlds die, Evan,” the old man told him. “It’s the end of one world and the beginning of another. All things, all peoples have their time. Yours is over.”
Sam’s first reaction was to chuckle, but at the pale shock reflected in Dr. Holly’s face, he scuttled it. To Sam’s eyes, Evan Holly looked as if a death sentence had just been passed on him.
The Infernal Invention
In Nazi-occupied Europe, having an unlicensed printing press was grounds for immediate arrest and execution. In Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1968, possession of a mimeograph machine was a one-way ticket to the “re-education camp”. The state feared any uncontrolled communications among the people.
The evolution of the internet was supposed to be the death knell of despots and dictators. It promised the free movement of information, discourse, and diversity of thought. The ultimate in freedom of speech for the masses.
Who would have thought it would become a tool of self-reinforcement? Instead of broadening understanding, ideologues used it as a means of isolating themselves from those who did not share their beliefs and causes. And as a means of reinforcing their notions of “Truth”. The very lack of regulation meant any vitriol could be posted without censure.
— Excerpt from Breeze Tappan’s Journal.
Chapter Fifteen
The old Shoshoni led the way out of Puha Canyon. Thomas took them to a much better trail—a place where soil had filled in a crevice to the point that deer used it. Talk about bow-legged, watching Mr. Star walk was like seeing parentheses hobbling along.
At the top of the trail two horses were tied off in the aspens, no doubt the ones Frank had heard when they had first descended into the canyon.
Seated at the base of a nearby aspen,
whittling on a willow stick, a young Native man in a battered hat and Levi jacket looked up. He climbed slowly to his feet, worn boots shifting on trampled grass. His legs were long and skinny, clad in blue jeans, and he wore an old red-and-white-checked flannel shirt with snaps for buttons. A long black braid hung down his back. Wide cheekbones framed obsidian eyes and a long thin nose, and his chin dropped to a point with a dimple.
“Hey, Grampa,” he called. “I see they found you.”
“Huh, yeah. That’s the thing about these anthropologists, Willy. Once they finally figure out you’re an Indian, you can’t get rid of ‘em. Sort of like lice and fleas, they just cling to you. Real pests.”
Willy Star grinned, exposing large white teeth, and stepped forward, offering his hand to Dr. Holly. “Hey, Evan. Good to see you again.”
“You, too, Willy. It’s a relief after being stuck with this old codger. Keeps hitting me up for a hundred bucks. Says it’s an informant’s fee for telling lies about the old times. Says he’ll sell me a genuine war chief’s headdress for a thousand bucks. Worn only once by some guy named Washakie when he killed some Crow Chief up on top of Crowheart Butte.”
Thomas Star stroked his chin. “And if you don’t want that one, for two thousand bucks, I got the war bonnet Geronimo wore at the battle of the Little Bighorn. Comes with a little card, says ‘Hand made by a genuine American Indian’.”
“Geronimo was never within a thousand miles of the Little Big Horn.”
“That’s what makes that war bonnet so valuable.”
Dr. Holly leaned close to Frank, saying, “What do you want to bet it’s the same headdress?”
Thomas nodded in a most sagacious Indian way. “Same headdress, but for the extra thousand you get a different card. Instead of Washakie’s picture, you get Geronimo’s.”
Sam stared, dumbfounded, but Amber was grinning as she asked Willy, “Are they always like this?”
Dissolution: The Wyoming Chronicles: Book One Page 11