by Swigart, Rob
He came back, trying hard to walk normally. He almost made it, but something caught his foot and he fell against the hood. He leaned against it with both palms, breathing hard. Sweat had broken out on his forehead. “Mama, Mama, Mama,” he mumbled. The man could see ripples of heated air over the hood, but Danny didn’t seem to notice. He sagged between his stiffened arms, breathing hard and mumbling.
The man opened his door and stepped out. The heat was oppressive, trapped in this small clearing. There was no sign of a breeze. The silence, too, oppressed. The man called Henri said nothing.
Danny suddenly leaned back and waved his hands in the air, as if cooling them, though he did not look at them or speak. He walked in a circle with short abrupt steps. He stopped beside the car and looked at it for a moment. Suddenly his face twisted into rage, and he swung his fist at the rear window. It shattered, and blood from his hand flew to his face. He walked away, mumbling, waving his bleeding hand in the air. He headed for the trees. Beyond them was the heiau and beyond that the water.
The man followed him at a distance, carrying his bag.
Danny reached the ancient temple and stopped, puzzled. His eyes rolled in his head when he turned to look back at the man. Then he sat down with a jolt and put his head in his hands. The man came over and sat beside him.
He put his arm around Danny’s shoulders and looked down the trail. Heat shimmered beyond the trees over the parking area. The hood of the car sent waves of distortion into the air. There was no sound but very distant surf.
“Come on,” the man said, lifting Danny to his feet. They shuffled around the heiau, avoiding the hot stones. On the other side, the man lay Danny down on the hard dirt. Danny’s mouth was slack and wet, his eyes closed.
The man rolled up Danny’s shirtsleeve and looked at his forearm. It was bare and brown. The man grunted softly and opened his bag. He removed a flat leather case and opened it. There were small vials and a set of steel needles inside. He smiled as he removed them and set them up on the stone wall of the heiau. It was time for the worship of art. He set to work. As he worked he sang softly, under his breath, Et le bec, sous le robinet…
When he was done, he looked at it briefly. It would do, certainly. He put his equipment away, got out a pair of scissors and began to cut Danny’s hair. By the time he finished, Danny was moaning, low in his throat, a strangled sound over a swollen dry tongue. Suddenly, he sat up. He saw nothing. The man sat back in satisfaction and watched.
Danny lurched to his feet, rubbing his arms. “Where…?”
There was no answer to that.
Danny walked away. Then he broke into a trot that became a headlong rush toward the wall of the mountain beyond the trees, where he suddenly stopped and pulled off his shirt. He flapped it in the air, shouting, “Fire. Oh sweet Jesus Christ, I’m on fire.” His voice was dry, small. He started running again, banging into the twisted dry trees, spinning, tearing his flesh. The man walked slowly behind him, watching. The water was to his left, a flat brown sheet in shadow.
Danny saw the water. He ran into it with a scream. It was stagnant, choked with brown vegetation that gave off a thick odor of decay when he plunged his face under. He threw himself forward with a splash. The water was only a few inches deep. He thrashed, choking. Mud streaked in his head hair when he threw it up, out of the water.
He walked slowly around the pond. When he got back to his starting place, he climbed onto the black lava stone platform. They had built these ugly temples all over the Pacific. Everywhere it was the same. Superstition and dread. Such things were very useful.
The man stood on the platform and watched Danny drown.
In a moment of silence, someone shouted from the path to the parking lot, “What’s going on?” Without hesitation the man plunged over the low wall and into the water. He dragged Danny’s thrashing body out, pinned the jerking arms behind him and slogged out of the mud toward the trees, pushing Danny before him. The man standing there was wearing an orange utility company uniform.
“Help. He just went crazy,” Henri said. His English was American and very good. The utility man took Danny’s arm. The two of them managed to get him back through the trees to the shed. A utility truck was parked next to Danny’s car.
“Jesus, it’s a good thing I came along. He coulda’ drowned himself. What happened?”
The man shrugged. “I hitched a ride. He drove out here and seemed to just go crazy. I followed him to the water. He kept screaming he was thirsty.”
“Drugs,” the utility worker said with a shake of his head. “A problem everywhere. Christ! Young people!” He wasn’t over thirty himself, younger than Danny or the man. “He should get to the hospital.”
The man nodded.
Danny swung violently, trying to hit. “Don’t take me,” he shouted. “No. Mama!”
“We’ve got to restrain him,” the man said. The utility worker pulled some thick insulated wire from the back of his truck, and they bound Danny’s arms to his sides. Together they pushed him inside the truck. Immediately, a pool of foul-smelling water formed under him.
“I’ll go with you,” the man said. “Out to the highway.”
They left. A trail of dust hung in the air behind them and slowly drifted away.
“He say what his name was, anything like that?”
The man shrugged. “Herbert. Something like that.”
The utility worker shook his head. “Herbert. Don’t know anyone goes by that name.”
At the highway, Henri said, “You can let me out here. I’m just going over there.” He pointed at the Mana post office, a tiny one-room store across the street.
“Shouldn’t you come with us to the hospital? Tell them what happened?”
The man shrugged. “I don’t know what happened, except what I said. And my wife…” He shook his head in despair. “She’s sick. If I lose my job…”
“Okay, Okay, sorry. But where can we reach you? You know, in case the hospital wants to talk to you.”
“Sanderson. In Waimea,” he said without hesitation.
“All right. I’ll get him to Wilcox. You get back to work.”
“Thanks.” The man calling himself Henri climbed out of the truck. He watched it roar away toward town. Then he turned and walked the three miles back to Danny’s car.
The heat was even more oppressive, the silence deeper. The keys were gone. Danny must have taken them out and dropped them somewhere. The man didn’t bother looking for them. He leaned over the hood and took out the wallet he had lifted from Danny while rescuing him from the water. He removed the driver’s license and union card and looked at them closely for a few moments. Daniel Cavanaugh, 34 years old, of Waimea, Kauai. The picture on the license would do.
He walked slowly to the heiau, where he gathered up the hair he had clipped from Danny and disposed of it in the water.
He opened the hood of Danny’s Chevrolet and gazed at the engine, wondering at the profligacy of Americans that they could build such enormous and inefficient cars, but the works were fairly simple, and he started it without difficulty. He smudged the license photo with a dab of grease. Then he returned the papers to their plastic holders and shoved the wallet into his pocket.
He got in and drove back toward town. The man taking Danny to the hospital would report a Mr. Sanderson, who did not exist. Danny would be lucky to remember his own name, even after a long recovery.
There was nothing to connect him with the murdered women. The man they had met no longer existed. Now he was Danny Cavanaugh from Waimea; he was the Phoenix, risen again from his own ashes.
Soon he would have to do something about that woman, though, the one who found the second body. He’d been watching her for some time. He saw how she looked at him. She was thinking too much, she and the Jap woman, the policeman’s wife. They could be trouble.
Now that fool Sangier wanted him to meet with the fat man from Vancouver, Meissner. Fine. Meissner would meet Danny Cavanaugh. He would tell
people Danny Cavanaugh helped him out. He liked that. Later on the fat man would find out all about the power of the Phoenix. He liked that even more.
Time was limited. It was a shame he would have to leave this lovely island, but in the end he always had to leave. Behind him was a long string of islands, most as lovely as this one. Perhaps some day he could come back, though. It was his kind of place.
TWENTY
THE TRAIL HOME
She was hidden by the man’s naked back. He could see only ridges of muscle, highlighted by glints of moisture. The man was sweating, and she was screaming without sound, calling his name. She had run, and now she was caught.
There was pain and behind it there was more pain. The walls were weeping, sharp red streaks flowing down. They were stone, carved by water and blood, and the ceiling was low. Small popping sounds startled him, and then the sound of wood dragged across the slats of a fence that faded away.
He could see her face, distorted, first by fear, then by death. Her eyes went wide, still, open and staring. Her dark short hair congealed somehow, like old grease. The muscles in that back writhed, an animal. An octopus. It had a name, but he could not remember it, it was too dark, and grew darker still. He was gone again.
He heard small mewling sounds, and it was a long long time before he knew they came from him, because for all that time there was no distinction between what was him and what was not. No such distinction existed. And then it did.
She fell back, limp and dead. The popping sounds returned.
The muscular figure turned. He had no face. Holes for eyes, no mouth. The blank, uncomprehending face of a manikin. His muscles flowed, waxen, melting. His arms writhed, and he was the animal: bulbous head a blank with eyes.
His hand groped against something, and it was rough, and that meant it was not him, but something else, something other. It was stone.
He tried to open his eyes; they would not open. That accounted for the darkness. He lay still and breathed. He could hear the breathing. He didn’t like the sound.
He passed out again.
When he woke up again, one of his eyes would open, though what it saw was very faint, small splotches of light against a velvet nothing. He blinked; a sharp pain ran down the side of his face. That meant he had a face.
The splotches grew sharper and smaller and he knew they were stars.
If they were stars, that meant she was not dead, that it was his own fear rising in him. Fear for her. She was back there, in Kauai, and he was… here. Tahiti. Raíatéa. Somewhere.
He remembered the animal, writhing, and it did have a name. Its name was Plato, and it was the young octopus he had found at the bottom of the sea beside the advancing lava, exploding and popping the water to steam as it came on. The bubbles that flowed and shifted swiftly over the rolling surface were splotches too, brilliant blue, almost white, like the stars.
But the popping sounds were not the explosions into steam in the sea; they were the strange sounds of birds, popping and then ratcheting, like dragging a stick along a wooden fence.
He sat up, and the mewling sound came again. It was his own voice.
Four men, coming at him out of the mist. He tried to shake his head, and could not, so he settled for moving it slowly from one side to the other.
He found himself curiously without anger. They had been a force of nature. He should have handled it, but did not. That was curious.
Even more curious was what they had wanted. They were from the disco, he had stopped them there, and they wanted revenge.
Chazz did not believe it. His left eye was swollen closed. His back and sides and legs ached. His hands were scraped raw in places. It had rained earlier, when he was unconscious, and his beard was damp. Perhaps the rain had revived him.
He did not think they intended to kill him. They could have done so, and did not.
So they wanted something else.
He put it away. He could not think clearly, and he had other things to do.
The stone behind him and under his hand was very rough. The darkness rose all around him to meet black water in which the stars swam. He could see no lights, could hear nothing that sounded like humankind. The birds gradually settled into silence, out of sight somewhere.
He listened carefully. He could not hear surf. But the surf would be far away even if he were near the shore, since it fell against the reef and did not flow in the lagoon. He could not smell the sea. What he could smell was damp earth and hot stone and rotting vegetation.
Was he near the place where he had been attacked? He couldn’t tell. It had been misty then, and he hadn’t seen much. He had been thinking. Thinking about the man who killed the crew. The man who in his delirium had threatened Patria.
He had been here for hours. Cobb would be looking for him, but he had told no one where he was going. Just walking, thinking, working out the small pain in his calf.
He almost smiled at that. The pain was much larger now.
After a time, he could move a little. He assessed himself. Possible broken ribs. Left eye closed, swollen. He could feel his toes, his feet moved, and although everything was painful, he thought damage was contained. He would heal. But he could not stand.
He was still sitting there when the lights danced crazily through the trees, and the muffled voices called, and footsteps came over the flat volcanic stones and found him squinting through his one good eye up into the hidden faces of three men.
“Chazz,” one of them said, and it was Cobb Takamura and not the French soldiers come back to kill him again.
He grinned. It was a painful expression, lopsided and grotesque.
The three men helped him to his feet and walked him around, and their lantern light danced on the dark rough wall, on the paving stones. No one spoke for a long time as they paced slowly, one foot before the other. A grating in his ribs fired off a sharp inhalation with each step.
They moved away, down the trail. “Same marae,” Tepe said behind the swinging shaft of light. “Same rock. Killing stone.”
The journey lasted forever. A moon appeared out of somewhere in the brief patches of sky overhead. The journey was down from the mountain, back to the sea. “I thought it was,” Tepe said. “Saw you going up, saw the men. Bad men, I think. Gone now.”
Chazz could only croak assent. His throat was dry and empty. Finally, they got to a car, and riding in it was almost worse than walking, and then they were in the town. And then they were at the hospital, and the lights were very bright, and Chazz could smell alcohol but could not feel the sting.
He fell into more dreams of Patria— running in dark night or locked in a tower or buried in a narrow place— and when he woke up, Cobb Takamura was standing beside his bed in brilliant sunshine, and he hurt all over.
“Welcome back,” Takamura said.
“Easy for you to say,” Chazz answered.
“You’ll live.”
“I’m sure I’m glad. What happened?”
“You went for a walk.”
“I remember that part. What happened after?”
Another man entered the room. “Chazz, this is Charlie Song. He helped find you. What happened is that Duvalois has gone to Hawaii. That suggests he wants to find our man before we do. He wanted to delay us. He has friends in the army. I think he dogged those thugs onto you.”
“I guess he must’ve. They were very good— some kind of foot-fighting I’ve never seen before.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Cobb said. “We found you. I don’t think they expected that, not so soon. You were sitting against the same rock where Tepe found Queneau. Our good luck.”
“What time is it?”
“A little after nine.”
“Help me up.”
Chazz sat for a time with his feet dangling over the edge of the hospital bed. “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” he said.
“No. You were supposed to be up there for a few days. A grim reminder. The birds were supposed to eat you.”
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“Thanks. Lovely thought. I can travel.”
“Not yet.” Dr. Rathé stood in the doorway. “A few days rest.”
“No. I figured some things out. It’s why they got the jump on me. I was distracted. No excuses, but I was worried about Patria. That guy is there, on Kauai. And I think he’s the one killing women. I don’t know why, but he is. And he’s good at covering his tracks.”
“Yes. I’ve learned a few things too. We’ll talk later.”
“Can you give me a shot or something?” Chazz asked the doctor, who frowned and sucked on his lips. He looked suddenly very disagreeable. “Something to get me moving,” Chazz urged.
“It’s not necessary, Chazz,” Cobb said.
“Yes, it is.” Chazz let himself slide forward until his feet touched the floor. He stood carefully, then sat down suddenly. “Dizzy.”
“A wheelchair, perhaps,” Dr. Rathé suggested. The expression of distaste had not left his face. He appeared anxious to get rid of these troublesome foreigners.
“Yes.”
Chazz sat in the sunshine at the entrance to the hospital, waiting for Cobb to summon a taxi. It was warm and drowsy and his body ached. He dozed.
A sputtering and screech woke him: Freddie Barrone leaping from his hideous yellow Renault. He slammed the door and ran up the steps. He was already halfway through the door when he spun around. “S you!” he shouted. “I heard the terrible news. My God, what happened?”
“Accident,” Chazz murmured.
“Four of ‘em, I heard. Hell, those guys were army. Trained in savate, foot-fighting. Those guys can kick the pecker off a fly so’s he don’t even notice till it’s all over and they’re home on leave.”
“How’d you know who it was?”
Freddie grinned. “All over the island. Gone now, took the morning flight out, not a care in the world. Only one of them had a big bandage on his head, took twenty-three stitches is the way I heard it— my wife has her ear to the grapevine, see— and another one was limping, so I guess it wasn’t all one sided. Limping bad, too. Won’t be kicking off any peckers for a while, I guess.”