Verdugo Dawn

by Blake Banner

  Not upstairs.

  It was like the word “ghost” in my mind triggered something. I sensed suddenly the living room downstairs. It was like I could see it, hear it and smell it from where I sat. It had, or seemed to have, a presence of its own. Like it was listening to me instead of the other way around. I wondered what made that room so important. Irrationally, I wondered if Mendez and Sole had been in that room, together, alone. I got up, shook my head and made my way out to the landing and down the stairs again.

  The entrance hall was large and tiled in terracotta. Like the rest of the house, it was dark, yet there was a glow on the floor, and I could see as though there were a candle burning somewhere. The living room door was a black oblong in the deep dusk. I moved across the hall and went in. A filtering of gray luminescence lingered around two tall windows in the wall opposite. I crossed the room and opened them onto the night. There were still no birds and no cicadas. A thin mist was rising off the pool. It hung over the lawn and had concealed the rusting iron gate at the end of the drive. For a moment, my Jeep felt very far away, but I ignored the feeling and turned to examine the room.

  I fished out my Camels. It was a fresh pack. I peeled off the plastic, pinched one out and poked it in my mouth. There was a black leather sofa against the wall to my left, and a couple of matching armchairs in front of me. There was a fireplace to my right, and opposite, by the door, a Castilian dresser. On the mantelpiece, I saw a heavy iron candlestick with a church candle in it. I flipped my lighter and felt a cold prickling on my scalp when I realized it was an old, battered Zippo. I leaned into the flame, wondering suddenly, and absently, if I was dreaming. Then I stepped over to light the candle. The flame caught, wavered and started making big shadows.

  He was just a hazy silhouette in the doorway. His face was a ghostly oval. He seemed too tall and a bit too thin. He remained motionless, watching me. A voice in my head told me I didn’t know how dangerous he was.

  I said, “Hello, Olaf.”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t make any noise. The candle was making the long shadows dance on the walls, so it was hard to tell if he was moving or not. But I guess he must have been, because after a second he was in the room, a few feet from me. My stomach was hot with something that might have been fear, and I could feel my heart in my chest. I still couldn’t see him clearly, but I could feel his presence, and a glint of candlelight on his eyes told me he was watching me. I took a drag and spoke through the smoke.

  “Great entrance. What do you do for an encore?”

  His shadow seemed to fold and contract into one of the armchairs, and now the candle played on his face so I could make out his features. I sat in the other chair and studied him. Everything about him was long and thin. His face was long, his pale eyes were long, and his cheekbones were high. His skin was pale and I couldn’t tell for sure, but his hair seemed to be almost silver.

  I asked, “How did you do that?”

  He didn’t answer and I knew he was waiting for me to fill in the deletion.

  “Appear like that? How did you know I would be here? Did Luke tell you…” But even as I asked it, I knew it was wrong and could not be and I added, “You brought me here.”

  I didn’t see the smile so much as become aware of it. “Did I?”

  “You know you did. That’s why we’re both here.”

  “Is it?”

  “This could get boring.”

  “Could it?”

  Then he burst out laughing. It was loud, harsh and shocking, and I had a flash in my mind of a peacock crying out, with its tail in full fan.

  When he’d finished, I said, “Yeah. It could. I don’t know how you did it. Maybe you’re David Blaine in disguise. Or maybe you’re testing an app for Apple’s next generation of iPhone, but you called me here and you got me here, and I’d like to know how—and why—but if we’re going to play twenty rhetorical questions all evening, I have better things to do.”

  He was very quiet for about seven seconds. Then, very softly, he asked, “Do you?”

  I sighed, stuck my cigarette in my mouth and went to stand.

  He said, “I don’t think you do. I think you are exactly where you want to be.”

  I relaxed back into my chair and waited.

  “I didn’t call you. I just let you know I was here, and let you do what you wanted to do. Find me.”

  The light from the candle was steady, but occasionally a hulk of shadow would move across the wall and the flame would dance for a few seconds. I said, “If that’s true, you wanted me to find you.”

  “That’s true.”

  “What for?”

  “Luke mentioned you. I was curious.”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  I didn’t hear anything, but I caught the faint shake of his head in the candlelight.

  “How did you know I was coming here?”

  “Where else would you look for Sole?”

  “If you don’t know who I am, why do you want to see me?”

  “Are you sure I do?”

  My cigarette had burned down to my fingers. I flicked it into the dead fireplace. A snake of mist had crept in through the window. He was waiting. More than that, he was watching. Observing.

  I said, “You’re talking in riddles. What are you curious about?”

  There was a deep sigh that reached me through the dark air. It sounded too loud. He shifted his position. “I am talking in riddles? You are stuck in a riddle, talking. You wanted to see me. You came here to see me, and now you tell me I wanted to see you. You need to break the mirrors before your eyes…”

  And then he said my name, but I didn’t hear it.

  I groped to hold on to it, but was too late and it was gone.

  “How do you know I wanted to see you? I don’t know myself! How do you know?”

  “Everything is connected.”

  “That’s bullshit! What is that supposed to mean? Quantum entanglement? Jungian synchronicity? The holographic universe? Bullshit!”

  “It means that you can only see a tiny part of what this is all about. Practically nothing. If you could see more clearly, you’d see that it is all connected.”

  I sighed loudly and stood. “This has been interesting. I’ve enjoyed your parlor tricks. I came looking for Mendez, not for you, and I haven’t found what I was looking for, so I think I’ll be moving along.”

  He curled his feet under himself, and as I reached for the door, he said, “You are the executioner, but Mendez plans to execute you.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Am I?”

  “More damned riddles?”

  “Instead of asking how and why I am doing this, why don’t you ask how and why you are doing this?”

  “I’m running out of patience.”

  “The complaint of bad doctors everywhere.”

  “Where is Mendez?”

  “You think finding Mendez will help you find yourself?”

  A deep frustration, close to rage, welled up inside me. “But Sole! I have to find Sole! Stop playing riddles and help me!”

  He watched me for a while. “I am the riddle you riddled…” And he said my name again. “Nothing is the way you see it.”

  “Stop! Do you know where I can find Mendez and Sole or not? Stop playing games with my head!”

  “Who are you looking for? You are looking for so many people, it is no wonder you lost yourself along the way. But I have to ask, are you sure you know who lost you? Who did lose you?”

  My head was getting foggy. My eyes were heavy and I was feeling sleepy. A force that felt almost magnetic drew me back across the room to the chair where I had been sitting. I sank into it and put my head in my hands.

  “What do you want from me?”

  He leaned forward, looking down at his palms. He looked oddly human. He said, “They kill children. They hunt them in schoolyards and prey on them. They pick the vulnerable ones, they poison their souls and eat their hearts.”
r />   I found I was weeping. I tried to speak, but my throat was constricted.

  His long, pale eyes looked into mine and then looked through me. He said, “They make slaves of women and children. They steal their souls and then they sell their bodies. And they kill them. They draw their red blood and spill it.”

  “Who?” I said at last. “Who does this?”

  “The Goat Suckers, the Blood Suckers, the Soul Suckers…”

  “Make sense, please! Have they got Sole?”

  “Yes. If you like. But names mean less than nothing…”

  “How do Mendez and Ivanovich tie in to all this? Who has my memory?”

  “Don’t ask foolish questions. Truly, names are not important.”

  My head was reeling, screaming, but at its center I could hear Olaf’s voice, soft as mist, saying that meaning was all to do with perspective. And as he said it, he seemed to be awfully far away, across the room, really small, a small snake of shadow curled into a small spiral in a small chair in the shadows.

  “The eye can never see itself. We are lost from the start.”

  My head jolted. The moon was slipping up from behind the hills and the horizon was a deep, translucent blue-green. One star burned on the dark side of the sky and the frogs were pretending to be cicadas, but their songs had gotten wet in the streams that ran down through the dark from the Sacramento Mountains.

  There was stillness, and I did not know who I was. I was looking through a windscreen darkly, at the black silhouette of the peeling iron gates. I knew something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

  A dream. I had dreamed. It was the only perspective that gave it meaning. The only way it made sense.

  I climbed out of the car. My legs were like Jell-O. I forced myself to walk to the big, iron gate and lean on it, looking through. The house was dark and dead. The garden was silent. I hadn’t been in there. I had a virus. A fever. I’d blacked out again. I had dreamed. I turned and leaned my back against the gate. I pulled out my fresh pack of Camels, pinched one out and stuck it in my mouth. With the disposable lighter in my right hand, halfway to the cigarette, I stopped. I looked back at the pack in my left hand. I counted how many cigarettes were left in the pack. There were three missing. One was in my mouth. The other two I had smoked inside, talking to somebody called Olaf. Somebody I didn’t know.

  I felt suddenly nauseous. My head began to spin. Inch by inch, blackness closed in and I felt the world rise up to slam me in the face. As I lay sinking into unconsciousness, I realized that the frogs were not imitating the cicadas. They were laughing. They were laughing at me.

  Fourteen

  Five miles high with the icy air in my feathers and cold, hard eyes piercing the night, I am the eagle of darkness riding the wind above the desert sands. Five miles below, a naked, tortured twist of man, curled like a snail, clenched against the pain, loses his soul and his mind to the sand.

  The whiptail and the rattler watch and wait for death to come. The moon-shadow of the coyote cries to the night and under a billion shards of ice in the sky, the tall saguaro stands vigil, his own shadow, like the shadow of the Reaper, marking the hours till dawn.

  * * *

  I awoke. I was on a bed. I had a blunt hatchet wedged in my skull, and the blades of light that were cutting through the ill-fitting window shutters were jarring on it and making my brain scream. I tried to lever myself onto one elbow and saw a hazy silhouette hovering in the corner of the room, by the window.

  Slowly, it came into focus. It was an old man, tall, thin and stooped. He had on a white shirt, long white-blond hair hanging below his shoulders and long, pale blue eyes that pierced the gloom and, for a moment, seemed to hold me in a vise. He held up a bowl and when he spoke, his voice was cultured, East Coast.

  “I have brought you a drink which will revive you.”

  I pushed myself to a sitting position, rubbed my eyes and stared at him. “Who the hell are you? And where the hell am I?”

  A wave of nausea washed over me and I felt my stomach lurch toward my mouth. It passed, but my head throbbed with pain. I rubbed my face. “I need a drink.”

  He held out the bowl. “This is a drink.”

  I had another look at him. His shirt was linen and so were his white pants. He was barefoot. I looked around. The walls were adobe, there were Mexican rugs hanging on the walls and what little furniture there was—a chest of drawers, a rocking chair and a couple of bedside tables—looked handmade. He was a hippie.

  I sighed, rubbed my face again and looked at the bowl.

  “What is it? Is it some Pueblo Indian remedy that’s going to make me throw up?”

  He smiled, looked down at the bowl and then back at me. “No,” he said simply. “It’s coffee. I also have some whiskey, if that will help.”

  “That would help, thanks. Make it a double.”

  He left the coffee on my bedside table and left the room. The coffee smelled good and I drained half the bowl before he came back with a bottle of Bushmills and put a generous shot into the hot, black liquid.

  He sat in the rocking chair and watched me while I drank the coffee. When I’d finished, I swung my legs off the bed and sat a moment, trying to put together the fragments of my memory of the night before. I was still dressed, and reached in my pocket for a crumpled pack of Camels. I pinched one out and stuck it in my mouth, then looked over at the old man. He nodded and I threw him the pack. I was about to search for my lighter, but he pulled one from his pocket, flipped the lid and thumbed the flint, then snapped it closed as he sucked on the cigarette, and tossed it over to me.

  I sat staring at it for a long while. It was an old Zippo, battered, made of brass. I lit up and stared at the lighter some more.

  “I had one like this.”

  “Keep it. I shouldn’t smoke. My doctor told me that.” He sucked hard on the cigarette and inhaled deeply. As he spoke, small clouds of smoke drifted from his mouth, like an idling dragon. “‘Don’t smoke,’ he would say, ‘it will surely kill you!’ He died of lung cancer, having never smoked a single cigarette in all his life. That is what I call a tragedy.”

  I took a drag. “Where am I?”

  “In my house.”

  I stared at him, trying to choose the most relevant of all the questions I had in my head. In the end, the best I could do was, “Who are you?”

  He gave a vaguely amused frown, like I was being stupid and he was being patient.

  “Olaf. How much do you remember?”

  “I had a weird dream. I was going somewhere, looking for a man…” Suddenly, Mendez rose large in my memory, and with him Sole. I went to stand. “I need to go.”

  I set down my cup and got to my feet. It was a mistake. Everything ached. I ached, inside and out. My brain ached. There were flashes, pictures, voices. Feelings.

  I said, “I remember—”

  “What?”

  “I went to a house. A ranch. Mendez, I was looking for Mendez.” I frowned at him. “How did I get here?”

  He studied me for a long moment. “I found you, in the desert.”

  “My car…”

  “A nice ’93 Cherokee, with twin electric motors and twin lithium ion batteries. Fast, powerful.”

  “You found me? How did you find me?”

  He smiled, and there was something mocking in his long eyes. “Men like me travel a lot in the desert. There isn’t much else to do out here.”

  “Where did you find me?”

  “You were at the gate of a ranch, an iron gate. You were beside your Jeep, lying in the dust. It was good that I found you. You would have become dehydrated, and died very quickly.”

  “That was in Dell City.”

  “It was a big, old ranch. Nobody has been there for a long time.”

  I stared at him. His gaze didn’t waver. It was like he was waiting for something to happen.

  Finally, I said, “You were there.”

  “In your dream?”

  “No!” An ache throbbed th
rough my brain. “Yes… I don’t know. But…” I put my head in my hands and after a while looked at him again, at his long, pale eyes in the gloom. “Do you know me?”

  He smiled. Then he giggled. “Nobody knows anybody, Verdugo.”

  Alarm kicked in my chest. I sat upright.

  He waved a hand at me. “Relax! I know what you do. But knowing what you do is not the same as knowing who you are. Only you know who you are.”

  “More damned riddles.”

  “Riddles?”

  “Riddles about…” I strained. There was a fog in my mind. “Riddles about mirrors.”

  “Reflections.”

  “You were there.”

  “I already told you I found you there.”

  “In the house.”

  “In your dream?”

  I walked to the window and pulled open the shutters. Hot, dusty light poured in, laying bent, twisted rectangles of brilliance on the white adobe walls. I squinted. Beyond the glass, hot, red desert stretched out, peppered with gnarled shrubs, away toward the Sacramento Mountains. In the middle distance, a saguaro stood stenciled against the light in silent vigil. In the foreground, a broad dirt road was familiar. I had been here before.

  “You’re Luke’s shrink.”

  “Am I?”

  I took another drag on the cigarette. It had almost burned down. I spoke to the glass in the window as I released the smoke. “Wise people are supposed to do that, right? Answer everything with a question.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I always thought it was a copout.”

  I turned to look at him. He was smiling. “Oh.” And after a moment, “You think I’m going to be offended if you don’t think I’m wise?”

  “Luke said you use peyote buds for your therapy.”

  He snorted. His face was derisive. “Therapy! Therapy is for blind people who want to lead other blind people down blind alleys! I don’t provide therapy!”

  “Did you give me peyote?”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday. Last night.”