Unicorns II

by Gardner Dozois

  A siren began to keen, and they all looked around to see Deputy Marshal Blake Seals come barreling into the intersection in one of Ignacio's two patrol cars.

  iv.

  Seals introduced her into the middle cell of five in the block at the rear of the marshal's office, and she was relieved to find that none of the others held prisoners. The drunk tank at the end of the damp hall looked exactly like a cave or the entrance to a mine shaft—a concrete grotto. For a time, Seals stood outside her cell, his pock-marked face like a big albino strawberry and his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his windbreaker so that it bellied out in front like a sail. He wasn't a cruel Anglo, just a pompous and partisan one.

  "Sorry there's nobody in tonight for you to talk to."

  "Couldn't you find any other Indians to arrest?"

  "You were making a public disturbance, Miss Coldpony."

  "I was the victim of a public disturbance. Those turkeys were drunk. Frank tried to run over me."

  "The kid was just trying to depart the scene before you turned his Trans Am into scrap metal."

  It was a temptation to renew their street argument, but they'd hashed out the details three dozen times already, in the middle of Ignacio, and Seals had sent the "kids"—friends of his—home to bed, promising Frank that the "perpetrator" would spend the rest of this chilly night "incarcerated."

  Well, here she was, incarcerated. She would have cursed Seals for the fact that the jail stank of disinfectant if not for the linked fact that it would've reeked of something far less bearable if he hadn't earlier bothered to "sanitize" everything. That was one of the questionable bonuses of being deputy of Ignacio—you also got to be custodian.

  "Sorry there's only that—" gesturing at the urinal—"if your bladder gets heavy. We don't have many female guests."

  "Leave me alone, Deputy."

  "I could bring you a bucket."

  "Stick your head in it."

  He grinned, mysteriously delighted by her retort. "Put my foot in that one, didn't I?" He returned to the office. Paisley sat down on her grungy mattress, which lay askew on what looked like a pig-iron frame. She wouldn't be in for long, though. Her phone call had gone to DeWayne Sky, who, although not overjoyed to be roused at four in the morning, had told her to hang on, he would vouch for her, put up her bail, or whatever.

  She was welcome to stay the rest of the night with LannaSue and him.

  In the drunk tank down the hall, somebody or something coughed, a painfully congested hacking.

  "Deputy," Paisley called, "I'm not alone back here."

  "That's only Barnes," Seals shouted from the office. "I forgot about him."

  Barnes. Herbert Barnes. Whirling Goat. Seals had shoved him into the cave and forgotten about him. The old man careened out of its bleak dampness, slumped against the bars with his arms hanging through. He was wall-eyed with cheap liquor or bread-filtered hair tonic, and his white hair tufted out from his temples in a way that made him resemble a great horned owl. Usually, reservation police took care of him, but tonight—last night—he had fallen to the efficient ministrations of Blake Seals.

  "Hello, Alma." He sounded more weary than drunk. Maybe a nap had rubbed the nap off the velvet of his nightly stupor.

  "Paisley," Paisley said. "My name is Paisley."

  "Your mother called you Alma," the drunk lessoned her. " 'Soul' in Spanish."

  "I know what it means. But my father named me Paisley, Paisley Coldpony, and that's the name on my birth certificate."

  "You lived with your mother longer than your daddy. Your name is Alma Arriola." He pulled some string out of the pocket of his dirty suede coat and, with his hands outside the bars, began making cat's cradles with it. He was remarkably dexterous for so old and alcohol-steeped a brave. Paisley found her irritation with his comments about her name softened a little by the web-weaving of his stubby fingers.

  "Jackrabbit," he said, rotating the string figure so that she could see this two-dimensional creature loping across the blackness of the drunk tank.

  "Arriola's Spanish name, too," he added pedantically, hacking her off again. Then he dismantled the airy jackrabbit and began a second latticework figure.

  "And Barnes is an Anglo name, Whirling Goat."

  Paisley knew that some of her hostility to the old guy was left over from her dream. She resented what he'd said to her in it and was sorry to find him—dare she even think the word?—polluting the cell block. (If, given the disinfectant fumes stinging her eyes, further pollution were even possible).

  "And this is a goat," he said, holding up the second figure and whirling it for her benefit. "When I was eight, I rode a goat for three minutes that none of my friends could even catch. My name—it comes from that."

  "Which one of your friends had the stopwatch, Herbert?"

  But neither this sarcasm nor her rude familiarity would provoke him. He ceased to whirl, and handily collapsed, the goat, only to follow it with several successive string compositions, all of which he was magically weaving for his own amusement. His equanimity put her off. She wanted to puncture it.

  "I'm going to dance in the Sun Dance. I've been dream-called."

  "What do you think of this one?" he said, holding up a figure that initially made no sense to her. Standing at the bars of her cell, she peered at the crisscrossing strings with real annoyance. Her world-shaking declaration of intent had slipped past him like a coyote squeezing untouched through a hole in a henhouse.

  "What is it?" she grudgingly asked.

  He coughed, but his preoccupied hands were unable to cover his mouth. "Kar'tajan," he managed.

  "What?" The word summoned no resonances for her.

  "Kar'tajan," he repeated. "But only the head, Alma—only the head and the horn."

  Now Paisley recognized it. It was the head—the head and the horn—of a unicorn. She could not imagine how he had produced it with a single piece of looped string, but he had, and the awkward way that he held his hands to sustain the figure was justified by its fragile elegance. She'd never known that Barnes, aka Whirling Goat, had such a talent—or any talent, for that matter, beyond making a year-round nuisance of himself and sourly kibitzing every performer at every important Ute ceremony. But, so soon after the seventh repetition of her dream, the sight of the string figure—this string figure—gave her a decided pang. For it, too, seemed part and parcel of her summons.

  "Why do you call it a kar'tajan?"

  "Because that's it name. That's the name our Holy He-She gave it—before history turned the world inside-out."

  "It's a unicorn, Whirling Goat. There's no such animal."

  "It's a kar'tajan, Alma. I've seen one."

  From the office, Seals shouted, "He saw it drinking over by the Pine with this humongous herd of pink elephants!"

  The deputy's words, and then his guffaws, dismantled the mood of balanced wonder and unease that Paisley had been experiencing—in much the way that Barnes's hands collapsed the string figure of the kar'tajan or unicorn. He stuffed the looped string back into his coat pocket and slumped more heavily against the bars.

  "Can't you do a buffalo?" Paisley felt strangely tender toward him. She hoped that he wouldn't relapse into the stupor that had probably occasioned his arrest.

  "Ain't nothing I can't do with string."

  "Do me a buffalo, then."

  Barnes coughed, more or less negatively.

  Damn you, Blake Seals, Paisley thought. And then, as unbidden as lightning from a high azure sky, a memory bolt illuminating the headless corpse of her mother struck her. She was seeing again the clay-colored feet on the lounger's footrest, the dropped.12-gauge, and the Jackson Pollock brain painting on the walls behind the old chair. She'd just come home from a debate with the kids at Cortez, a debate that her team had won, and there was Mama D'lo, waiting to share the victory with her, messily at ease in the lounger, forever free of motherly obligation. Although maybe not.

  "I've been dream-called," Paisley said. Defiant
ly, she looked at Barnes. "To dance in the Sun Dance."

  "Good. Good for you." He hacked into his forearm.

  Paisley stared at him. "Didn't you hear me? I've been granted a vision. I'm to dance with the men."

  "It's what your mama wants." Barnes shifted against the bars. "She told me. That being so, you should do it."

  "Told you? Why would she tell you, old man? When?"

  "Tonight. A little time past." He indicated the impenetrable blackness behind him. "Pretty funny talk we had."

  Seals lumbered into the upper end of the cell block. "Every talk you have while you're swackered is funny, Barnes. Chats with old Chief Ignacio. Arguments with John Wayne. Even a midnight powwow with Jesus."

  "Get your butt out of here, Deputy," Paisley said. "Who asked you to horn in?"

  Smirking, Seals raised his big hands as if to ward off physical blows. "Simmer down. I'm going. Just forgot for a minute we was running a hotel here." He backed out, closing the cell-block door behind him.

  "You saw her tonight, Mr. Barnes? Tonight?"

  "Yes. In here. I was on that pissy mattress—" pointing his chin toward it, a shadow in the dark— "and D'lo showed up, maybe from the San Juan Mountains. She stood over me, signing."

  "Signing?"

  "You know, hand-talk."

  "But why? To keep Seals from hearing?"

  "That didn't matter. He was patrolling." Barnes hunched his shoulders. "Alma, that was her only way to talk. You see?"

  Paisley understood. She had seen her mother's ini'putc in the Cuthairs' station wagon on the day of her funeral, and the revenant, like the corpse, had had no head. But then the ghost had vanished, leaving Paisley to doubt what she had witnessed.

  "What did she say? What did her hand talk mean?"

  "Just what you say, Alma. That you must dance this year. That she desires it. That no one should hinder you, girl or no girl."

  "It's 'no girl,' Mr. Barnes. It's 'woman.' " She told him as a matter of information, not to scold—for she was ready to forgive the old fart for his bad behavior in her dream.

  A moment later, Paisley said, "But why did she visit you? Why did she come here to give you that message?"

  "I have a reputation," Whirling Goat said proudly.

  As a sot, Paisley silently chastised him, but she knew that he meant as an expert on certain ceremonial matters and so refrained from disillusioning him. Let Barnes claim for himself the dubious glory of an ini'putc' visitation.

  "Also," he said, "Dolores must have foreknown."

  "Foreknown what?"

  "That you'd be arrested tonight. That it would be good for me to give you my blessing."

  "I have your blessing?"

  "Of course. I gave it to you already. How many children do I show my string creatures?" He hacked again, magpie croaks.

  "Not many," Paisley hazarded.

  "Damned straight. Now, though, you're among them."

  Talk lapsed. Paisley wondered if her run-in with Frank Winston and Howell Payne had been providential. Yes, it probably had. But she had no time to mull the matter further, for Blake Seals entered the cell block again, this time leading a haggard-appearing De Wayne Sky and announcing loudly that she was "free to go." Her esteemed tribal councilman was vouching for her character.

  "What about Mr. Barnes?" Paisley said.

  "What about him?" Seals echoed her.

  "He's slept it off. He isn't drunk any longer. You should let him out, too."

  "It's an hour or two till dawn," Seals protested. "He can get a snootful in five minutes, a sloshing bellyfull in ten."

  "Let Mr. Barnes out, too," DeWayne Sky said. He was wearing khaki trousers with a turquoise belt buckle so large that it made Paisley think of a chunk of the Colorado firmament for which the councilman's family seemed to've been named.

  Not liking it much, Seals released the old drunk along with the unrepentant Trans Am basher. In the jail's front office, he called them over to a metal desk to reclaim their belongings. All Paisley had was her school books, but Barnes had a small clutch of items—his wallet, his house key, a few salted peanuts, and some sort of foil-wrapped coin that Sky picked up and turned in the glare of the light bulb as if it were an extraordinary find.

  "What the hell are you doing with this, Barnes?"

  "He's a Boy Scout," Seals said. "His motto is 'Be Prepared.' "

  Sky threw the coin back down on the desk. "Hell, man, you're eighty-something. And nine tenths of the time you're so stinking drunk, your carrot'd have to have chronic droop, anyway."

  A rubber? Paisley speculated. Is Barnes, our oldest bachelor, actually carrying a rubber around with him?

  "There's the other one tenth," the old man said, neither shamed nor amused by Sky's attack. He stuffed the battered coin into his pocket along with his other pocket fillers and moved to the door as vigorously as he paraded around the camp grounds at the Bear Dance in May and the Sun Dance in July. Those were two weeks out of the year—maybe the only two—that he scrupulously laid off wine, whiskey, beer, hair tonic, everything but the old bucks charged with organizing and running the dances. Paisley was proud of him for getting through the door upright, his dignity intact and that silly antique rubber in his pocket.

  "What do you want to do?" DeWayne Sky asked her. "Stand here till Marshal Breault comes on duty?"

  She didn't and so they left.

  v.

  The Skys lived in a wood-frame house that, several years ago, they had remodeled in an unusual way. Around it, entirely around it, Sky had had built a conical frame whose summit rose better than forty feet above the original roof. Sky's workmen had stuccoed the frame, windowing it at various places with huge rectangular sheets of Plexiglas to let in the sun. At night, spotlights lit the cone so that you could see it from several blocks away, a garish white tepee rising among the scattered tract houses like an advertisement for a Wild West amusement park.

  The cone's huge stucco flap opened to the east, as prescribed for tepees by sacred tradition, but the door to the house inside the frame faced south. Thus, Paisley and her rescuer—once he'd parked his Ford Bronco in the driveway—had to walk an enclosed track between the house and the inside tepee wall to reach the real entrance to his living quarters.

  Paisley felt decidedly weird following DeWayne Sky around this bizarre corridor, but she remembered that he had erected the fake tepee not just to pretend that he was still living in one, as most whites mockingly accused, but to avail himself of the power to call spirits that round houses—and only round houses—could impart to those living in them. A house with corners, a house with none of the circularity of earth and sky about it, preached De Wayne Sky, cut one off from the spirits and thus robbed one of power.

  Although Paisley feared that merely masking a boxy house with a big stucco tepee was not the best way of persuading the gods that you were back in touch with both the earth and the Old Ones, she knew that in the years since erecting his cone, De Wayne Sky's power and influence among the Southern Utes had grown enormously. He'd spent a lot of money on his "folly," but he'd got all of that back, and a great deal more, representing his people at Indian caucuses around the country, presiding as the grand marshal in Frontier Day parades in various towns, and taking part in all five Shoshone-Ute Dances, just like a true shaman. Now, he was chairman of the tribal council and chief of the Sun Dance committee, and who'd have the sand to tell him that his big stucco tepee hadn't gotten him in good with the Great Manitou?

  Not me, Paisley thought. Not on a dare.

  LannaSue Sky handed her a cup of hot tea, sweetened with honey, and pointed her to a couch covered with a scratchy Navajo blanket. On the knee of her jeans, the tea cup warmed a circle that Paisley couldn't help regarding as a tiny replica of the base of the tepee surrounding them.

  When LannaSue returned to bed, Sky paced in front of Paisley in his boots, a stocky man with two tight braids hanging to his waist and a paunch decorated by that sky-blue belt buckle.

  "W
hat's the word, Alma? What's going on?"

  "The word's Paisley," she corrected him.

  He waved off the correction with angry impatience. "Tell me stuff I don't know. Tell me important stuff."

  "Names are important. Names let us—"

  "Okay. If I call you Paisley, you call me Papa Tuqú-payá, got it?" Tuqú-payá was the Ute word for sky, one of only a few dozen in her people's tongue that Paisley knew. "Understand?"

  "Sure, Papa Tuqú-payá."

  "Talk to me, Paisley. But only important stuff."

  So she related her Sun Dance dream. Parts, however, she kept to herself, the parts that still frightened or unnerved her.

  A lamp in the living room relieved a little of the predawn gloom, but when she looked out its picture window, she saw only the interior wall of the fake tepee. A melancholy claustrophobia rose in her. Nevertheless, she kept talking, and when she was finished, she repeated that tonight's dream had been her seventh in the past five weeks. Therefore her visit to town.

  "Women don't dance," Sky declared.

  "Women have danced, Papa Tuqú-payá. At Fort Hall, they do it all the time. They've done it here, too."

  "Twelve years ago, child. Two months later, one of them who'd danced, Theresa Eagle, took sick. The white doctors had no idea with what, but she saw the sacred water bird in the tube connected to her IV bottle and soon thereafter died."

  "Mama told me that four other women danced. Nothing like that happened to them."

  "No. It happened to other people. Our last Sun Dance chief, the one who let the woman dance—his wife died of a heart attack that year. The aunt of the tribal council's last chairman—she died, too. I could make a list."

  "None of that matters, Papa Sky. I'm being dream-called. If I'm not, why am I having this dream again and again?"