by John Saul
They were at the truck now, and Gina pulled the passenger door open, half shoving Jed inside. “Let’s go,” she pleaded. “Please?”
Randy was still shouting, but now Jeff Hankins was next to him, trying to calm him down. Jed started the engine of the pickup and backed away, then shifted gears. But as he pulled out onto the road, Randy bent down and picked up a rock, hurling it toward the oncoming truck.
Instinctively both Jed and Gina ducked as the rock came at them, and neither of them saw it strike the windshield. But a moment later they both saw the cracks, a spiderweb spreading out from the pit the rock had left in the glass.
“Shit!” Jed yelled, slamming on the brakes and starting to jump out of the cab. But even before the door was fully open, Gina grabbed at his arm, pulling him back.
“Don’t, Jed!” she said. “Don’t make it any worse! We’ll figure out something to tell your father—maybe we can even get a new windshield before he gets out of the hospital.”
Jed hesitated, torn. He wanted to jump out of the truck, grab Randy, and throw him down in the dirt. He wanted to make Randy eat his words, and a lot more. And he knew he could do it. He was bigger and stronger than Randy—always had been. And Randy was so drunk he’d barely be able to even throw a punch.
Maybe.
And what would happen tomorrow, when he had to explain to his father where he’d gotten a black eye, or a split lip, or any of the other injuries he’d brought home from fights over the last few years?
Taking a deep breath, he slammed the door once again, venting his anger by jamming the accelerator to the floor. All four wheels spun gratifyingly for a moment before the truck shot forward into the night.
“Slow down, will you?” Gina begged a couple of minutes later as they approached the hairpin turns of the switchbacks that led down to the desert floor.
Still breathing hard, Jed eased up on the gas pedal, then pressed the brakes as he steered into the first of the curves. As he approached the second curve, he slammed on the brakes, at the same time reaching down to switch off the headlights.
“What’s wrong?” Gina asked. “Why are we stopping?”
Jed pointed out into the desert. “Look.”
Far in the distance a pair of dim lights glowed. It was a car, moving slowly, its headlights extinguished and only its parking lights on. It was heading along the same road Jed and the rest of the kids had traveled two hours earlier.
“You think it’s the cops?” Gina asked.
Jed shrugged. “I don’t know. But why would anyone else be coming up here at this time of night? And with their headlights off?”
Gina’s lips tightened. “I told you we shouldn’t have come. If we get caught, Mom’s gonna—”
“Just take it easy,” Jed told her Leaving the headlights off, he began carefully steering the truck down the twisting road. A few moments later they were close to the bottom, and Jed brought the pickup to a stop behind a large boulder. “Come here,” he said, holding out his arms. “If it’s the cops, it’ll look like we just came out here to neck. They probably won’t even stop.”
Gina hesitated, then decided the ruse was at least worth a try She slid across the seat and snuggled herself into Jed’s arms.
The faint beams of the oncoming car’s parking lights were brightening now, casting a dim glow onto the mesa’s wall Jed held his breath, knowing the car was approaching the fork in the road If the twin shafts of light didn’t swing away in a moment, it would mean the car was coming up the mesa road.
And then the beams suddenly moved toward them, only to disappear as the car took the turnoff just past the boulder that concealed the truck. Instantly, Jed opened the door and scrambled out of the truck, scuttling around the boulder until he could see the car as it started up the canyon. A moment later he was back, his brows furrowed.
“It’s Dr. Moreland’s car,” he said. “What’s he doing going up in the canyon in the middle of the night?”
Gina shrugged. “Maybe something happened up at The Cottonwoods,” she suggested.
Jed shook his head. “If it’s some kind of an emergency, how come he didn’t have his headlights on? The way he was driving, it’s like he didn’t want anyone to see him.”
Gina giggled softly. “Maybe he didn’t,” she said “Maybe he’s got a girlfriend up there and doesn’t want anyone to know about her.”
But Jed was barely listening, for he was once more feeling the strange vibrations he’d felt earlier that afternoon, when he and Gina had come across the new antenna UniChem had installed.
Frank Arnold lay in his bed, sleeping peacefully. Then, as midnight came, his eyes opened and he sat up.
Something was wrong.
There was a strange smell in the room, almost as if something was burning. And then the scent grew stronger, and changed slightly.
Garbage.
The air seemed redolent now with the putrid stink of a dump on a hot summer afternoon.
He could even taste the stuff. It was as if his mouth was filled with rotting eggs, and he felt himself begin to gag, then tried to reach for the glass of water on his nightstand.
He missed it, his hand brushing against it, knocking it to the floor.
Suddenly, streaks of light slashed through the darkness of the room, and he saw flickering images of strange creatures lurking in the corners. But when he tried to look straight at them, they seemed to disappear, only to reappear a moment later, coming at him from another direction.
A guttural sound rose from his throat as a wave of pure terror washed over him.
Something was coming at him out of the darkness, and he tried to strike out at it. His arms flailed wildly, and then, as a flash of pain lashed through his head, he tumbled from the bed.
He began screaming then, bellowing out in fear and rage, and a moment later the room filled with blinding light. On the floor, his body writhing, Frank tried to scrabble away from this newest assailant. He cowered against the wall, his arms wrapped around his body.
His mouth filled with the sickening flavor of bile, and then he was retching, vomit spewing from his lips in glutinous streams.
From the doorway Susan Paynter, the night nurse, stared in frozen horror at the spectacle on the floor. Then her years of training took over and she came to life. Pressing the buzzer that would summon an orderly to the room, she dropped onto the floor next to Frank and reached out to touch him. “It’s all right, Mr. Arnold,” she said soothingly, though she wasn’t sure if he could hear her or not. “Just take it easy. I’m here to help you.”
As her fingers touched his left arm, Frank screamed out again. His arm jerked convulsively, as if she’d burned him, and he tried to roll away from her.
His head struck the wall, hard. A second later he smashed it against the wall again, and yet again.
Susan heard a sound at the door and looked up. “Get Dr. Banning,” she said. “Then call Dr. Moreland and tell him to get over here.”
The orderly disappeared, and a moment later she heard his voice on the paging speaker, summoning Bob Banning to the room. Though the sound was barely audible in the room, it seemed to stimulate something in Frank Arnold, and now his whole body went into convulsions.
His broken leg swung around and the cast smashed painfully against Susan Paynter’s knee. And then, as if someone had turned a switch inside him, he went limp.
For a split second Susan thought he had died. She seized his wrist, pressed her fingers into his flesh and counted quickly as she found his pulse.
At the same time, her eyes watched his chest begin to move in the slow and steady rhythm of strong breathing.
At last she heard Bob Banning’s voice behind her.
“Jesus, Susan. What’s happening in here?”
Susan glanced up. “I don’t know. I found him like this.” She slipped an arm under Frank’s shoulders, and the doctor immediately squatted down to help her. The orderly appeared, and together they managed to get Frank back into bed.
&
nbsp; Banning quickly began examining Frank, double-checking his pulse and breathing, wrapping the rubber sleeve of a sphygmomanometer around his arm. But as he began inflating the sleeve, Frank’s eyes opened and he stirred in the bed.
He looked up at the three faces above him, and his mouth opened. “Wh-What’s happening? Is something wrong?”
Susan Paynter stared at him. “Wrong?” she repeated. “Don’t you remember what just happened, Mr. Arnold?”
Frank’s eyes clouded slightly. “Nightmare,” he said at last. “I think I had a nightmare.”
Susan glanced quickly at Dr. Banning, who nodded. “It was a lot more than a nightmare, Mr. Arnold,” she told him. “You started screaming, and when I came in, you were on the floor. You smashed your head against the wall, and then you started throwing up.”
Frank’s eyes widened and his gaze shifted to the doctor.
“You don’t remember any of this, Frank?”
Frank shook his head and made a slight movement toward the glass of water that was no longer there. Susan brought him another from the bathroom, then held it while he drank.
“I—I thought it was a dream,” he said. “I woke up, and everything smelled funny. Then I got this horrible taste in my mouth, and I started seeing things …” His voice trailed off and he dropped back against the pillows.
“Okay,” Bob Banning said, squeezing Frank’s shoulder reassuringly. “Let’s just check a few things and see where we are. And how does that leg feel?”
Frank’s lips tightened. “Hurts like hell,” he admitted. “Feels like I kicked something.”
“You did,” Susan Paynter told him. “Me.” Then she smiled. “Don’t worry about it. I have a feeling that in this case, it really did hurt you a lot more than it hurt me.”
“Great,” Banning commented dryly. “Well, when we’re done here, we’ll take him in and X ray the leg again.” He peeled Frank’s left eyelid back, examined the pupil carefully, then repeated the procedure on his right eye. A few moments later he was at the foot of the bed, running the tip of a pencil up the bare soles of Frank’s feet.
Instantly Frank jerked his feet away, then groaned as the flash of pain shot through his broken leg.
“Serves you right,” Banning commented wryly. “Kicking nurses, indeed! Well, your reflexes seem to be in good shape. Other than your leg, how do you feel?”
Frank shrugged uncertainly, then leaned forward so Susan could strip off his filthy hospital gown. “Given what Susan says happened, not too bad, I suppose. But what did happen?”
Banning shook his head. “I wish I could tell you,” he said, starting to make notations on Frank’s medical chart. He glanced at his watch, frowned slightly, and turned to Susan Paynter. “How long ago did the seizure begin?”
Susan’s eyes darted toward Frank, then returned to the doctor. “It was strange,” she said, her voice muted. “I have my watch set to beep on the hour. And it had just beeped when I heard Frank scream. It was midnight. Exactly midnight.”
Chapter 18
It had been more than a year since Brown Eagle had last been in Borrego, and as he left the pueblo at the first light of dawn the next morning, he felt as if he were embarking on a journey into an alien territory. He fell into the steady pace that could carry him across the desert all day if need be, but instead of turning his mind inward to close out the tedium of a long walk, he watched and listened eagerly as the landscape around him changed.
The last rustlings of the night creatures fell silent as they crept back into their burrows, shielding themselves from the heat of the day and the predators that stalked them from the sky as well as on the desert’s floor. As the sun rose, Brown Eagle turned to face it, silently welcoming it back to the mesas. His eyes swept the sky, searching for the familiar shape of the bird whose name he bore, but this morning the sky was empty.
Brown Eagle took it as an omen. Today his personal totem had abandoned him. As he continued on his way toward the town, he felt lonely and unprotected.
He paused on the fringes of Borrego, feeling the familiar hostility that seemed to emanate from the town like an invisible sandstorm. During the months he’d stayed in Kokatí, avoiding the town completely, he’d almost forgotten the hostility toward his people that hung over it. But he’d never learned to ignore the way people looked at him, or, more exactly, failed to look at him, acting for the most part as if he didn’t exist at all. He’d never grown used to their silent contempt for the Kokatí, and over the years, as his senses had sharpened with age instead of growing dull, he felt the malice clearly whenever he was forced to come down off the mesa. It seemed to reach out to him, as if it were trying to crush him.
He moved on, his head down, the pavement under his feet feeling too hard, the acrid smell of the refinery and the ugly cinder-block houses offending his senses. Finally he came to the house where his daughter had once lived. He walked around to the back door and let himself into the kitchen, sensing immediately that his grandson had not wakened yet.
He sat down at the kitchen table and waited.
Almost an hour later Jed, a bathrobe hanging loosely from his shoulders, came into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. He stopped short, shocked by the sight of someone sitting at the table, then realized who it was.
“Grandpa? What are you doing here? How long have you been here?”
Brown Eagle grinned at Jed’s surprise. “About an hour. I came to find out about your father. Is he going to be all right?”
Jed nodded, but then he eyed his grandfather suspiciously. “How did you know?” he asked.
“I saw them bring him down from the dam yesterday. In fact, I told him not to go into it at all.”
Jed scowled darkly. “Great,” he said. “I told him to be careful, Jude told him to quit his job, and you warned him not to go in the dam. He really listens to all of us, doesn’t he?”
Brown Eagle eyed his grandson dispassionately. When Jed came up to the pueblo to visit him, there was so much of the Kokatí about him that he sometimes forgot the other half of the boy’s heritage. But here, in his home in Borrego, Brown Eagle could see the other side of Jed, the side that would forever be alien to the Kokatí, the side he’d inherited from his father.
“Maybe he’s as stubborn as you,” he said. “It wasn’t so very long ago you thought I was a crazy old Indian. Frank probably still thinks so.”
There was a knock at the back door, and a moment later Jed let Judith Sheffield in. She put a box of fresh doughnuts on the counter, then noticed Brown Eagle. “I—I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I thought Jed was by himself. If I’m interrupting something—”
“It’s okay,” Brown Eagle told her. “Jed didn’t know I was here either.” He eyed the box on the counter, and Judith groaned, handed it to him. He bit into one of the doughnuts, then, spoke again. “Tell me about Frank. Is he really going to be all right?”
Judith’s eyes darted toward Jed. “I—I’m not sure,” she said. “I called the hospital this morning, and they wouldn’t tell me much, but I got the feeling something happened during the night. I came over to get Jed so we could both go see him.”
Brown Eagle stood up. “We’ll all go,” he said. “He’s still my grandson’s father. He might not listen to me, but I care what happens to him.”
As they drove to the hospital, Judith glanced at Brown Eagle in the rearview mirror. His face looked odd: his eyes, open and unmoving, seemed fixed on some object a few feet in front of him.
She turned her concentration to the road ahead, but a minute or so later, when she glanced in the mirror again, nothing had changed.
Brown Eagle seemed unaware of his very surroundings, as if he’d disappeared somewhere within himself, some place neither she nor anyone else could follow. Finally she turned to Jed. “Is he all right?” she whispered, nodding toward the backseat of the Honda where Brown Eagle sat, staring sightlessly out the window.
Jed glanced back, then nodded. “He’s fine,” he said. “He do
esn’t like the town, you know. So in his mind, he’s gone somewhere else. The mesa, probably.”
Jed’s words echoed in Judith’s mind as she continued driving. He’d said them so matter-of-factly, as if there were nothing strange about them at all.
She wondered if he even realized that until a few days ago, when he’d gone up there himself and spent the night in the kiva, he’d never have said such a thing, much less understood it.
Margie Sparks, her ample figure clad in a fading pink housedress, tapped at Randy’s door, then let herself in. Randy was sprawled on his back, his eyes closed, and for a moment Margie thought he was still asleep. But when she spoke softly to her son, Randy’s eyes opened and he sat up.
Margie eyed him carefully. His eyes were rimmed with red, and his complexion had the same sallow look her husband’s always had the night after he’d been out on a toot. “You’ve got a hangover, haven’t you?” Margie challenged, going to the window and pulling the drapes back, deliberately letting the morning sun glare into Randy’s eyes. When the groan of protest she’d expected didn’t come, she glanced back at Randy, then opened the window itself to air out the stuffy room. When she turned to face Randy again, fully expecting him to have buried his head under the pillow, she was surprised to find him still sitting up in bed, the sun in his eyes, exactly as she’d left him a moment before.
“What’s wrong with you?” she demanded. “Don’t feel so good?”
Randy shook his head. “I feel fine,” he replied.
Margie frowned. Well, at least that was normal: no matter how bad he looked on a Saturday morning, he always insisted he felt fine. And he always lied about drinking, just as if she was blind and couldn’t see how he looked. “What were you doin’ last night?” she demanded.
“Me and some of the kids went up on the mesa,” Randy mumbled.
Margie rolled her eyes knowingly. “And I ’spose you’re going to tell me you was just lookin’ at the stars, and nobody brought no keg of beer, right?”