Zanesville: A Novel

by Kris Saknussemm

  “Hand me those binos,” Clearfather asked the Marshal. Hadn’t Edwina Corn said her Zane Grey community was on the Utah–Colorado border? By God, he thought, there she is—on the Lassiter—practicing marlin fishing!

  Clearfather smiled and picked up the cockpit’s microphone and flipped on the speakers. “Ahoy the Lassiter!” he proclaimed in a screech of feedback. “In everything there is something undiscovered. Find it!”

  “Geez. That’ll sure get ’em wondering,” said the Marshal.

  “Probbbubbly make ’em poo thair pants,” Maggie suggested, noting the consternation that had resulted on the boats.

  “Maybe that’s what we should do! Just float across America in this craft making cryptic pronouncements,” the Marshal mused. “People everywhere would hope to see us—wondering what we were going to say next.”

  “Not mee,” Maggie insisted. “Wanna git back on the ground an’ shower. Iss only ’cause yoo two stink that yoo doan notice.”

  “I resent that,” said the Marshal. “I bathed just last night.”

  “’Sides,” Maggie mumbled, “wee ain’t got enuff fyool.”

  “Shit,” said Clearfather, remembering the fuel gauge. The tank had been less than half full when they’d started and there was no manual or help function to indicate what the craft’s cruising distance was. The flight computer calculated 872 air miles between their point of departure and the Rapid City Regional Airport. He had no idea of where they were going in the area—and there were no coordinates for Hermetic Canyon—if that in fact was where they were headed. He eased back on the speed.

  Below flowed the Vermillion and Little Snake rivers, while to the east the peaks of the Rockies thrust up into the red of late afternoon. The Marshal rummaged around in the pilot’s locker, found a bottle of Laphroiag, chipped ice out of the freezer, and passed around drinks at sunset. Maggie grew more sociable and even a little bit flirtatious, which made Clearfather think longingly of Kokomo. It was hard for him to imagine he’d only been with her a couple of days. His whole life had been a series of moments.

  “What I want to know,” the imaginary lawman began, “is what we’re looking for supposing we do get to South Dakota?”

  Clearfather figured he owed the Marshal as much of the truth as he knew.

  “I don’t know what we’ll find in South Dakota or where exactly we’re going—but I’m hoping to find out the secret of my life. Who I am. Why I’m here.”

  “Christ!” laughed Maggie. “If I had a dollar fer evertime I herd that!”

  “You don’t have any idea who we’re trying to hook up with?”

  “I have one idea,” Clearfather admitted. “But I think whoever it is knows I’m coming. I think we’ll get a Sign.”

  “I want more whiskey if I gotta bee ridin’ with loonies,” Maggie called.

  The Marshal whipped up a Middle Eastern Lamb ’n’ A Can® meal as the shreds of pink clouds turned to purple, then mauve, then white and as wispy as his hair. Between mouthfuls he recited for them (complete with camera angles) the script for the pilot episode of Star City. Maggie became absorbed, identifying with the character of Katie, the cathouse madam. An hour or so later the moon rose full and round over the Medicine Bow Mountains as the Haggis edged into Wyoming. The props stuttered for the first time. Despite the Marshal’s assurances, Clearfather was worried. Without power they were at the mercy of the wind. The old man passed around the bottle again and regaled them with tales of Jim Badge’s Abilene, which reminded Clearfather of Edwina Corn’s obsession with Zane Grey. Over Douglas, Wyoming, the motors died.

  Down below, the highway to Cheyenne spilled like gunpowder in the moonlight. Maggie nodded out, and the Marshal laid a McTavish’s tartan blanket over her. The air was cool and the stars were the brightest that Clearfather had ever seen.

  “I have to say, I find this invigorating,” the Marshal announced. “Chased by cannibals and now adrift over the Rockies. Whatever happens, I want you to know I’m grateful, son. I’m sorry, that sounds condescending.”

  “Not from you it doesn’t,” Clearfather replied.

  “Good. Anyway, I thought I was rescuing you, but I think it’s the other way around.”

  “I hope you can say that in the morning.” Clearfather smiled, pulling up his blanket, his eyes fluttering with fatigue and whiskey.

  He didn’t remember dropping off—but he must’ve because he saw the three Chinese men again, floating alongside the Billy Connolly. It was in the cold blue moments before dawn. They were telling him something about his past but he couldn’t hear because the air was filled with music. I want to take you higher . . . boom lacka lacka boom lacka lacka . . .

  At first he thought a maxicopter had overtaken them. But there was nothing visible. He rose to check the sound system. The Marshal and Maggie were curled up together like dogs. The whole console was shut off and still the music played. Boom lacka lacka boom lacka lacka. Then it stopped. The Chinese men were gone, too.

  “Immaculate Reception,” he heard a voice say. “This is Stinky Wiggler, coming to you live from KRMA in Hermetic Canyon, Self Dakota . . .”

  The Marshal stirred at his feet and the music faded away. Their speed had dropped to twelve miles an hour and the compass bearing had shifted east—but he wasn’t worried now. They were headed in the right direction. They had to be. He slumped in the cockpit, dreaming of his dog Lucky . . . wondering what had happened to him and how long ago it was they’d snuggled together on the porch . . .

  When he opened his eyes, the machinery of the sky was on fire and in the distance he could see the Black Hills studded with dark ponderosa pines and to the east the suggestion of the spires and buttes of the Badlands. The Marshal was up and fumbling with instant coffee. Maggie was still asleep. The lines on her face had relaxed, and she looked like a child again.

  “You look like you got a Message,” the Marshal observed, and Clearfather nodded.

  “Me, too,” the old man said and pointed off the port side. A large bald eagle soared alongside them. Clearfather thought back to the Dangling Rangler.

  Maggie stirred when she smelled the coffee but got sick and spent a long time in the little cubicle of the bathroom.

  Down below they saw miles of motels and bright plastic restaurants, trout farms, petting zoos, campgrounds, buffalo burger bars, and venison steak houses.

  “I suspect Crazy Horse would be mighty unhappy about all these go-kart tracks,” the Marshal remarked. “But it makes me nostalgic. Mom brought me here on vacation ages ago. Let me eat corn dogs and ice cream. Trying to make us a family.”

  “Did it work?” asked Clearfather, thinking of his own flashes of memory.

  “Naw. But that wasn’t her fault. A lot of other people had the same idea. Looks like they still do. If I didn’t know better, I’d say we’ve flown back in time.”

  Maggie emerged from the bathroom in time to see the herds of bison on the rolling hills of Custer State Park. The Black Hills swelled up out of a sea of prairie, Harney Peak spiking highest, in its shadow the Crazy Horse Memorial . . . and to the east the famous sixty-foot-high visages carved by Gutzon Borglum and his son.

  “Hm,” the Marshal said, staring through the binoculars. “I might’ve spoken too soon about things not changing. Mount Rushmore seems to be behaving oddly. Look at the four presidents—they’ve turned into the Marx Brothers. No wait—it’s the Beatles! Say—the Beatles weren’t American!”

  “I think you’re overlooking the fact that Mount Rushmore isn’t supposed to change at all,” Clearfather replied, taking the field glasses.

  But when he peered at the great granite heads he saw Sitting Bull and Martin Luther King, Dooley Duck and Ubba Dubba. That’s not possible, he thought—but he didn’t have a chance to take another look.

  “Holy shit!” gasped the Marshal. “What in the Sam Hill is that?”

  The eagle had been joined by a giant bird with orange metallic feathers and a peacockish tail. Its head was that of a dog�
��like Warhol—and its claws reminded Clearfather of Gog and Magog.

  “I’ve got no idea . . . but I’d say it’s a definite Sign.”

  “Yeah! To keep the hell away!” Maggie wailed.

  “One thing’s certain,” the Marshal observed. “That bird’s not native to South Dakota.”

  The Billy Connolly drifted over the fluorescent carpeted acres of Big Sky Mini Golf and the Homer Simpson Inflatable Family Fun Park—when the giant bird veered closer and tore at the skin of the Haggis, releasing a whistling jet of helium.

  “Weer goin’ dowwn!” Maggie bawled.

  “Hold her steady!” the Marshal cried.

  Clearfather fiddled with the fins and ballonets as best he could, trying to retard the rate of fall. The wind pushed them harder toward the Badlands. The fading dark pine peaks and crags of the Black Hills seemed cushy and inviting compared with the jagged towers and foreboding canyons they were approaching. On and on the wind drove them as they slowly lost altitude. At last the eagle tracked down into the shadows of weather-eaten rock—and the monstrous bird flew up, grasping the netting around one of the battens just as the hole in the skin blew clear and the craft started to seriously dive. Down into a canyon the Haggis was lowered, the bird’s enormous wings almost brushing the sandstone crust of the walls.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Eagle Has Landed

  The canyon was deeper than it appeared from the air, the steep walls riddled with caves and crevices that formed ancient faces in the rocks. The shadow of the great bird’s wings and the depth of the fissure took them out of the morning sunlight—and yet it wasn’t dark. They passed through a belt of spray, but as they descended, Clearfather saw that it was actually a mist of shimmering transparent leaves. Each of the leaves was a face. The mist illuminated the canyon walls like a dense cloud, so that it was impossible to tell what time of day it was. Maggie stood frozen. The Marshal gripped the rifle. Out of the color-banded mudstone below, a group of derelict buildings emerged, resembling an old western ghost town. The Billy Connolly collapsed softly down on the roof of the livery stable, and the balloon finished deflating. The mutant bird let go and flapped up a flurry of gypsum dust as it rose to the mouth of one of the caves and disappeared.

  “I knew I shudda stayed trickin’,” Maggie said.

  The Marshal retained the damaged Winchester but handed the 12-gauge to her. To Clearfather he offered the H&K.

  “I don’t think we’ll need those,” Clearfather said.

  The Marshal shook his head. “I see a bird the size of a house with the head of a dog and lion claws, I bring the guns. May not do any good—but I feel better.”

  The old man sprang over the deck and across the roof to the fire escape of the broken-windowed Red Cloud Hotel. Clearfather followed, noticing a flag atop the courthouse that showed a striped skunk with the words LOCO FOCO—MAKE A STINK. Refusing to be left alone, Maggie straggled after them. Through the luminous mist above they could just make out the lip of the gorge.

  “Must be an old mining town,” the Marshal said, pointing to the ruins of an ore-crushing mill. Still visible were the remains of the crusher, the furnace stamps, and the steam engines. “Reminds me of Star City.”

  It reminded Clearfather of Cubby’s model train town. Around the perimeter ran a miniature railroad line.

  “Whot was that?” Maggie shushed. “Yoo hear that?”

  Clearfather stared back down the main street. He’d heard something, too—but he was distracted by the peeling red schoolhouse. He could’ve sworn it was one room—but now it was clearly two, and hanging across the dirt street between the saloon and the funeral parlor was a banner that read WELCOME HOME.

  “That’s promising,” the Marshal remarked, but Clearfather wondered how it had come to be there so suddenly. And what did that word mean . . . HOME? This place? Was this what he’d been seeing in his visions?

  “Look!” The Marshal gestured. The eagle was perched on the roof of the train station, which was adorned with a weather vane featuring a wheelbarrow with flames rising. As they neared, a steam whistle tooted, and from around the other side of the town there clicked a scaled-down locomotive with a big smokestack. On the platform was a faded wooden sign of a cartoon owl dressed as a train conductor with a message that said . . . MUST BE 42 INCHES TALL TO RIDE. KEEP YOUR ARMS INSIDE THE CARS AT ALL TIMES. AND PLEASE—DON’T LITTER!

  The engine stopped. Behind were three open cars.

  “All aboard?” asked the Marshal.

  “Wee have a choice?” Maggie grunted—and Clearfather felt a twinge of fear. He swung into the last seat. His companions took the other two, and the whistle hooted. He thought he saw a shadow in the newspaper office, The Clamon, but he couldn’t be sure because the locomotive chugged off. The schoolhouse now had a library.

  The train clacked through a moonscape of cones and culverts, occasionally passing more battered signs—a weathered raccoon dressed as a cavalry scout or a splintery old hound dog panning for gold. Clearfather had the disconcerting feeling that they were being watched but he couldn’t say from where or with what attitude.

  The tracks skirted a quarry filled with iridescent green water and rusted cranes—huge fossils embedded in the cliff walls. Thirty feet ahead the rails had been broken apart and the train slowed to a halt.

  “Looks like the end of the line,” the Marshal surmised as they clambered out. A moment later the engine began backing up the way it came.

  They were beside two hangars. The first had once been a mixture of clean room and laboratory, with a series of operating theaters and stainless-steel refrigeration units. On the floor lay prosthetic devices—actionatronic limbs and articulation joints. The interior of the next hangar contained thousands of religious images . . . crucifixes, oil paintings of Annunciations and Last Suppers . . . the Three Magi and the raising of Lazarus . . . Madonnas, Nativity scenes, Stars of David . . . murals showing Marduk creating the world out of Tiamat’s body . . . Buddhas, Hindu gods, Islamic mosaics . . . Kwakiutl totem poles, Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs, bark paintings, Mayan and Egyptian hieroglyphs . . . fragments of machine language code.

  Bewildered, the three kept exploring, weapons at the ready. Gradually they became aware of a rough, haunting music.

  “Over there.” The Marshal pointed.

  The song was “Love in Vain” by Robert Johnson. The mournful blues reverberated off the rocks, drawing them through a maze of smashed slot machines. They came to a shack with the letters KRMA and a spear of transmission tower rising from the roof.

  “I’ve seen this in my dreams!” Clearfather cried.

  “Ain’t that a reeleef,” Maggie commented.

  Inside there was a rocking chair. No equipment, no music, and no person. Just shed rattlesnake skins and an old ladderback rocker. Clearfather’s heart fluttered—he’d been braced for a meeting. Still the blues drifted on . . . a black voice . . . the guitar talking back . . . like spit on a griddle . . . then sliding off into morphine sadness. “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day.”

  They rounded a crusted spire and saw a man in the company of two Harijans kneeling beside an extremely large set of paw prints.

  “Ah!” the man whirled. “Terribly sorry to have missed you at the station. Bit of a prickly situation here—hah. So glad you made it! Welcome to the Canyon! Yes!”

  The Harijans made the same gesture of greeting and respect that Clearfather had seen before—then set out fast in the other direction, both armed with stun rifles.

  The man not only was bald, but gave the impression that he’d never had any hair. He wasn’t young but his skin was clear and unlined, the color of maple syrup. He was of average height and weight but there was something about his movements that gave the impression his body was cartilaginous like a shark’s. He wore a white sarong, a T-shirt advertising the BIG THUNDER GOLDMINE, deerskin moccasins, and little round shades of methylene blue. But when he turned, Clearfather caught a sparkle of emerald green behind the l
enses.

  “Questions, questions—I can see you have so many questions!” he bubbled. “You, my dear, are wondering about the bird—oh, and I see about your mother, too. A glimmer of hope—that you’ll one day meet her—yes, very sad—who knows? Of course. My, well . . . anyway the bird is called a Simurgh—a mythological Persian bird that has lived so long, it’s seen the world destroyed three times. I’m sorry if you thought it a bit extreme. Sometimes my enthusiasm runs away with me! And you, Marshal, are curious about the mist. Well, it’s complicated to explain. Think of it as a hazing system—a reflective energy field that counters perception. I’m something of a stickler for privacy—and your father—yes, well that’s very sad, too—and you,” he said, wheeling back to Clearfather. “We’ll get to your questions, too, of course. Perhaps sooner rather than later, eh? Oh, my!”

  “Are you . . . who . . . I think you are?” Clearfather gasped.

  “Moi? I, sir, am the Pleasure Principal—Lord of Misrule, Abbot of Unreason—King of the Weird Frontier. But as to whether or not I am who you think I am . . . that would all depend on who you thought I was,” the man smiled.

  “‘There’s nothing so quaint . . . as a f-future . . . beyond your wildest imagination,’” Clearfather stammered.

  “Emerson said ‘I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.’”

  “S-stinky . . . Wiggler?”

  “Here am I!” the man bowed.

  “Whot?” said Maggie. “Stinky Wiggler?”

  “I’ve worn many faces and names over the years,” the man answered with a flicker of annoyance.

  “But—but what are you doing here?” the Marshal inquired.

  “Well, actually I am here.”

  “Duh!” Maggie said.

  “No, I mean—yes. Well . . . we may need to warm up to that notion. Let’s just say for now that I like being nestled among seventy-five million years of geology. Plus it never pays to live too far away from the National Museum of Woodcarving.”