Probably not.
He sat there, hoping for enlightenment as the sky darkened outside. At some point, Jabbo jumped up on the couch and curled up close, adding his purr as percussion to his chanting.
Jimmy fell into a light doze, a place between sleep and waking where dreadful things seemed to wander in corridors just out of sight.
Chapter 3
LAKE NISQUALLY, WASHINGTON
Jimmy hovered between sleep and waking, and he continued to murmur unhappily until headlights washed the room in brightness, and he opened his eyes.
He heard the Buick pull into the driveway, a new sound.
Jimmy rose, bones creaking. He grimaced as he turned on lights in the living room and kitchen.
George walked in, a big smile on his face.
“You been sitting here in the dark, Tonto?”
“Guess I dozed off,” Jimmy lied.
“Well, you missed a fine ride. There is nothing so sweet as being in a smooth ride while college girls parade around in shorts and halters and such.”
“You, George Watters, are a dirty old man.”
“I’m just healthy,” George countered.
Jimmy shook his head.
“Look,” George said, “there’s a dance coming up at the senior center. You and I should go.”
“Who’ll lead?” Jimmy asked.
George sputtered. “You are impossible. I’m trying to get you out of the house.”
“I was just out of the house earlier.”
“With me. Aren’t you tired of my company?”
Jimmy gave him a look.
“Look,” George pleaded. “I’m not asking you to find the love of your life. I know you had that with Rose. But I say again I think Rose would want you to go out and have some fun once in a while.”
“George, you are my friend, and I appreciate what you are trying to do, but I’m beat.”
George looked defeated. Jimmy felt sorry for him even though he thought it might be a con.
“When is this dance?”
“A week from Saturday, 8 P.M.”
“Tell you what, I will go with you, as long as you let me sit on the sidelines and drink punch or beer if that is what I decide to do.”
“One dance,” George countered.
“I’m not going to promise that,” Jimmy said. “Besides, you couldn’t handle the competition.”
George laughed at that.
“Okay, Minnehaha, okay.”
“Right back atcha, Bojangles.”
George tipped his hat forward and did a little soft shoe. “See that? Taught Sammy D everything he knew.”
“Uh-huh, taught ‘Old Blue Eyes’ to sing, no doubt.”
“Yep, and Deano, too.”
“All kidding aside, George, you have a good voice, yet I rarely hear you sing.”
George’s face clouded for just a moment. “I don’t know, Tonto, maybe I just don’t want to outshine you with yet another of my many talents.”
Jimmy was about to joke with him when he could see George was agitated. “You all right, George?”
“Fine, fine. Just tired. Think I’ll turn in early.”
Jimmy wasn’t satisfied with that response but knew better than to press. If George wanted to talk about something, he wasn’t shy about bringing it up.
“Good night then, Fred. Please tell Cyd Charisse I loved her in The Band Wagon.”
That made George smile and he did a little dance as he went upstairs.
Jimmy stood in the little kitchen and worried at his earlier vision, tugging at its possible meaning like a terrier with a rag.
His stomach rumbled and he realized he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He peeked into the refrigerator but nothing appealed to him.
He scrawled a little note to George that read, “Went for a walk, back soon.”
Jimmy slipped out of the house quietly. It was balmy outside, warmer than he usually liked it but easier on his aching joints. The night was quiet except for crickets and faint rockabilly music coming from the Red Dog Saloon down in Old Town.
Jimmy headed first to Smokey Joe’s, a place that sold gourmet cheeses, smoked meats, and wine. He paid far too much for a quarter pound of smoked salmon in a vacuum-sealed package and a cold bottle of spring water.
He followed the road down to the lake, the music from the Red Dog growing louder, then fainter, as he headed into and out of Old Town. There were people out walking, some with children or their dogs, some with ice-cream cones in hand or with cellphones to their ears.
His joints protested, but he tried to put the discomfort out of his mind and concentrate on the wilderness around him. It was so good to be out among the pines and the cool night air!
He walked a good two miles, past the marina and a campground, past businesses catering to fishermen and boating enthusiasts.
Eventually, it was just him and the pines and the silent water, the moon a bright disc. He missed the smell of the ocean, but the tang of the pines was a familiar scent, and an old friend. He would have walked farther, but his knees and hip joints were aching to the point where he could no longer ignore the pain.
He sat on a large rock and cut open the salmon with a pearl-handled pocketknife, a gift from his son, Thomas.
Jimmy held up the fish and said a short chant, thanking the Chief of the Salmon for the bounty his people provided. Then he broke off a chunk of the salmon and threw it in a long arc out into the water. It made a small splash and ripples that glimmered silver for a second, then were gone.
He took a bite of the fish and chewed it slowly. It wasn’t bad, as store-bought smoked fish went, but it was nothing like the salmon of his boyhood in Yanut.
He missed his village, his people.
Oh, there was a Haida couple in Nisqually who had invited him over for dinner. Jimmy kept making excuses. Not because he was antisocial but because he didn’t like the couple very much. They were loud and abrasive, and constantly talking about their property or recent acquisitions. Jimmy didn’t begrudge them their material excess, but he felt they were trying hard to convince everyone—including him—that they were every bit as good as whites.
It was a sad and frustrating way to live, and one he had seen in his own village.
When he had related this to Anna Marie and Fred Deutschendorf, they had gently accused him of being a snob. Only George had understood—being of the same race didn’t make you automatically compatible, or even tolerable.
Jimmy finished his fish and took a long draft of the cold water. It was good but not as good as the water of his childhood.
He laughed at himself. He had somehow taken a leap from child to curmudgeon, and he couldn’t remember when he had reached that regrettable destination. If he was going to spend the rest of his days comparing the present to the past, he would be playing a losing game, one that would hasten his end.
He had thought a lot about dying in the past year, ever since he had awakened in that L.A. hospital room, surprised to be alive.
He had nearly concluded that death might be preferable to the emptiness that filled his days, a great and aching absence that even George’s friendship could not assuage.
He longed to be reunited with Rose, to rush into her arms on the Bridge of Lights, and rejoin their families and friends, and live a new life—a life without sorrow or pain.
Jimmy rubbed his knees and sighed.
A song came to him, “Dream On, Little Dreamer.” Perry Como sang it, back in…1965? Rose had loved that song, so he bought her the 45 in a music store in Yakutat. She had practically worn it out. He had teased her about it, called it “square,” but he loved the way she smiled and swayed to that song.
She was just twenty-two, then. He had been twenty-four. They had been married for three years and hadn’t gotten pregnant. But they kept trying and Jimmy brought all the magic he knew to bless them with a child. He chanted and danced, used the sacred rattle and transformation mask his uncle had left him.
Finally, Ro
se had gotten pregnant in the winter of 1967.
The child was stillborn in the summer of 1968.
He wondered now if that was what really turned him away from being a shaman. He had always told himself that the people of the village had lost their affinity for the old ways, had dismissed it all as superstition, turning their worship to technology and material things.
But had he played a part in that shift? Had his own grief and disappointment translated to a loss of faith? Had his village sensed that and joined him in a great turning away?
It was the sort of thing his uncle Will would have dismissed as “Monday-morning quarterbacking.”
And it was the sort of thing Rosie would have swept away with the simple gesture of placing her hands on his face and kissing him, all the while looking into his eyes with her wise and solemn gaze, so full of kindness and love for him.
Tears spilled down Jimmy Kalmaku’s cheeks and onto his denim shirt. His throat clogged with the anguish of a life without her, and his heartache was so great his other pains were forgotten.
He rocked back and forth, holding himself, not caring if anyone happened to stumble upon him on the shore of that dark and silent lake.
If he could have willed himself dead at that moment, he would have done so, no matter whom he left behind.
There was a light touch on his back, and the slightest hint of Heaven Sent.
Her perfume.
Jimmy dared not move lest he disrupt this moment. He fervently wished he might see her, if only for a moment.
Then the touch and the perfume were gone, and there was only the scent of pine and grass, and the sound of the water gently lapping at a log lying partially in the lake.
He turned, but there was no one there.
He wondered if his uncle Will might pay him a visit, but Uncle Will had not appeared since he moved to Lake Nisqually. Jimmy wondered if he would ever see him again, at least while he was alive.
A sound reached him from far out in the lake, a sort of gurgling.
There, near the center of Lake Nisqually, a rapid set of large bubbles noisily broke the surface, as if some underwater chamber had been opened.
A smell reached his nostrils, then, the unpleasant stink of something dead and rotting.
Out in the lake, something was rising to the surface, something bone-white.
Jimmy felt a pang of fear and wondered if it was a Whe-atchee, a female monster the Nisqually nation said lived at the bottom of Lake Steilacoom.
Part of him became a child again, burying his face in his mother’s lap as Uncle Will told the people about the kushtaka, water demons who drowned those foolish enough to wander from home, and Kolatch-ka, the Stick Man, who devoured children and greased his creaking joints with human fat.
He wanted to run but he stayed fast. If this was a demon, then he would fight it, kill it with his pocketknife, and rid the world of one more monster.
If it was merely a felled tree bleached white by the sun, then he would chide himself for being such an old fool.
The thing rose to the surface, and indeed it looked like a large, sun-bleached log.
Then it began to swim, directly toward him.
Jimmy waited, heart hammering against his ribs.
He would very likely die tonight on the shore of this lake.
The apparition was now only thirty feet away. He still had time to run, but it seemed his running days were over. Hell, he’d probably trip and go down, allowing the kushtaka to make easy work of him.
The stink of the thing was growing stronger, the smell of a gas-bloated corpse just washed ashore.
Jimmy tried not to breathe and held his knife steady.
Headlights washed over him, and the sound of two trucks playing loud music.
Teens drove a short way past his location and parked on the shoreline, spilling out of the cabs and cargo beds in a loud and happy jumble of beer and hormones.
The thing in the lake was gone.
Jimmy sighed and put his knife away. He left, the partying teens ignorant both of his exit and the battle they had interrupted.
—
Some twenty-five hundred miles to the southeast, Donny Watters woke suddenly and heard the faint notes of music, then silence.
He was confused for a moment, because he was neither in his bed nor his home. Then he remembered, he was in a tent trailer, and his family was on vacation.
They were in the Moss Landing Campground in the Atchafalaya Basin. It was kinda cool, but not whole-vacation cool.
He and his brother Cal had wanted to go to Disney World, but their moms were on a “discover your heritage” thing. So their vacations were going to be about this uncle and that cousin, and their boring lives in the past and the torn-down wreck they used to live in, and he and Cal would have hardly any time for swimming in the motel pool or doing real vacation things.
Shoot, this time they didn’t even get a motel, just this stupid old tent trailer that kinda smelled like cigarettes and fried fish.
Donny sighed. It was probably going to be vacations like this for the next zillion years.
Bor-ring.
Cal snored lightly next to him, his face very white in the bit of moonlight spilling through the trailer door.
At the other end of the trailer, Mel-Mom and Tru-Mom slept peacefully, their shapes just a shadowy mound in the bed. When Cal was very little, they had tried to get him to say Mama Melissa and Mama Trudy, but he had started saying “Mel-Mom” and “Tru-Mom,” and it stuck. Cal had taught Donny to say it, and now the nicknames were set.
Donny peeked out the mosquito netting that served as a window on his side of the bed. At first he saw nothing, then caught a glimmer of light, a beautiful, dancing glow that went from green to gold and back again.
In the light, he saw children running and hiding behind trees while another was counting out loud as they hid their face against a tree.
Hide-and-seek was a baby’s game, and one that he hadn’t played since he was five or six. But these children seemed so happy that he found himself yearning to join them.
The music came again, sweet notes on some kind of flute, bright notes like colorful butterflies in the night-gray world of the swamp.
Donny knew he wasn’t supposed to go near the swamp alone, but there were other kids out there. Surely there was an adult or two supervising. If he got in trouble for being out, he’d just tell the truth: The noise woke him up and he wanted to see what was going on.
He climbed carefully over Cal and down onto one of the benches that flanked the little dining table. He stopped when Tru-Mom murmured, and he was sure his pounding heart was loud enough to wake her.
When she sighed and quieted, he tiptoed to the door and unlocked it. The lock made a loud click when you moved it, so he was extra careful. He was already dressed in swim trunks and a Justice League of America tee shirt. The night was balmy, so he wouldn’t get cold. He grabbed his hiking boots by the door and stepped out, wincing when the trailer creaked a little under his shifting weight.
Outside, the children raced back and forth, some coming close to the water’s edge and squealing with delight. He should have wondered why the noise didn’t wake his mothers or his brother, but he was too excited at the prospect of having some actual fun.
Several of the children saw him, and they smiled. They waved to him and slipped into the bushes, laughing and giggling.
Donny followed them, wondering where their parents were. Maybe there was another campground just a little ways up the trail.
The night was pleasant, and fireflies winked and danced as he wandered farther and farther from his family.
A cute girl, African American and dressed in funny clothes, peeked out from behind a tree and put her finger to her lips.
Had he been older, Donny might have seen that there was a great sadness in her eyes and a hunger, too. And he might have noticed that she was actually quite gaunt, but he was too young and too enthralled.
He rounded the t
ree and the girl was gone. He moved forward, trying to hear the children, or the strange music. He heard nothing.
He went a little farther, thinking they might be playing some version of hide-and-seek without bothering to tell him he was “it.”
The trail meandered deeper into the swamp, its farthest point lost in a low fog. The fireflies had also disappeared, and he hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight.
He wasn’t so much afraid as he was angry. Those assholes had ditched him!
“Asshole” was currently his favorite curse word. He couldn’t even say “a-hole” in front of either of his moms, as it always earned him a time-out. If he said it in front of Cal, his big brother sometimes used it as a blackmail chip, so he used it in private whenever possible.
He didn’t need this crap—another favorite private word—it certainly wasn’t worth getting in trouble for. He turned around and headed back to the tent trailer.
The trail, which seemed darker now, went as he expected at first, then terminated at a ruined skiff half-in the stagnant water, a length of stout and rotting rope draped over the side like a skeletal arm and hand.
Donny retraced his steps back to the point where he had turned back. There should have been a path that disappeared into the fog, with several trees on both sides and a huge log partially submerged on his right.
Instead, he saw a vast expanse of water, its surface covered near the shore in plants and algae, becoming clear farther out to a dull silver that sparkled but gave no sense of serenity or welcome.
He didn’t like this place! He liked camping with his family okay, but back home in the Georgia pines, knowing that their house was close by, waiting for them. This place was too…strange.
Amid the peeping of frogs and the chirping of crickets, he heard something bellow out in the water. It wasn’t a particularly loud sound, but it frightened him like nothing else he could remember.
It’s a dinosaur, a big old T-rex, and it’s going to eat you up!
Shut up! he told that mean voice that was sometimes in his head.
He felt tears welling up and wiped at his eyes savagely.
Don’t you cry, you big baby! Cal will never let you hear the end of it if you stumble into the campground, eyes all red and you blubbering!
Deadlight Jack Page 4