Turn with me. Now we will Turn together and the step was simple enough, toe behind heel and a twist of the hips and again and again till the dizziness started, as she and her friends had dizzied themselves as children. Would she slip on an arrowhead, kick dinosaurs around the room? That worry passed and she thought of herself posed like a propeller on a beanie, then wanted to laugh but the hilarity was a deeper, richer euphoria because she was flying in fact, or falling, twirling like a maple seed as she spun down, and her feet had melted together like a ballerina’s en pointe and were drilling into the floor, soft pine, heating it till sparks flew up and spilled into a furze of tinder, and fire moved from the tinder to the wick of an oil lamp shaped from the hollow of a bone.
Now she could see the walls of the cave and the vastness of it, and coming out of shadow was her lost daughter, naked except for a pelt slung over her shoulder and the ochre and umber streaked all over her, one entranced eye ringed in midnight’s black and the other with the color of the moon. Then Marissa slipped behind her eyes and saw no more but the wall approaching; she felt the clutch of the hooded hawk’s claws on her shoulder through the bear pelt and the weight of the bear paws with her human hands inside. Drumming, chanting, in her ears and in her blood and she knew somewhere little horns of color were making the hunt of Mammut dance on the wall (or had already done so or in future would).
She knew these songs but was not singing, or was singing them with the blood in her heart. Her feet fit exactly into prints in the hardened clay on the floor, so surely she had passed this way before. There were many handprints on the wall approaching her but not hers, not yet, but when she laid her palms against the wall there was the tingling lock of magnetic connection, and her hands even seemed to sink in a little, as though the stone itself was soft like clay. When she looked to the left there was Julie, dressed in the clothing she’d abandoned in Carrie’s house, and to her right was the great she-bear of her clan and her totem, standing on her hind legs and projecting a fearsome, toothy smile, and when she looked forward—
There was—
There—
—and the shaman appeared with his foot-long cane blowpipe and began to exhale black paint over the backs of her hands pressed into the wall but he didn’t stop at that as he usually did; he kept on blowing the darkness over her forearms and her elbows, her shoulders and her back, obliterating her completely, erasing every scrap of her being into the whole world’s blackest night.
71
Marissa woke up all at once with a jolt, as to the crack of a starter’s pistol. She was stretched full length on Julie’s bunk, but her awareness roved the room. The rosary hung from the hook on the door. Julie’s dinosaurs and arrowheads were back on the shelves. Had Marissa put them away, in her sleep? Had Carrie? By the light in the window she knew it was late, and it was quite cold, with the window still open. The house was still, and Carrie was at work.
She got up and pulled on her black jeans. She’d slept, apparently, in the rest of her street clothes. Her feet were cold on the oval hooked rug, which Julie had made for herself in sixth grade, and colder on the bare wood floor around it. She dragged on a pair of socks and went to the kitchen, where Carrie had left coffee still heating for her. It wasn’t quite reduced to tar. She stirred in an alarming quantity of sugar, till the mixture reached the consistency of molasses. Nothing she saw in the room made any sense to her.
Then in her sock feet she went outdoors, carrying the sticky mug, and walked to the center of the dead-end circle, shivering in her shirt sleeves. Here she felt calmer. Except for the railroad tracks, there was nothing in the view that her eyes last night could not have seen: the desert scrub unrolling westward in the harsh clarity of the morning light. Her eyes in Julie’s head. The eye of the hawk. Marissa shook her head, like it itched inside. The eye you see with is. . . .
She went indoors, made Julie’s bed, and sat again at the kitchen table. There was a Krazy Kat clock above the sink that should have rolled its eyes and switched its tail, but didn’t. Marissa took it down and cleaned away years of built-up cooking grease; when she hung it up again, it worked properly.
She needed someone to explain to her what had happened, or to tell her, convincingly, it had all been no more than a set of mad dreams. Jamal’s mother—but her presence in the scene last night must have been hallucination, and in spite of the bright flashes of mutual intelligence that once in a while occurred between them, they didn’t have enough of a common language. Jamal himself was wise for his years, but. . . . Then again, Carrie was not to be underestimated. There was a bedrock solidity to her. But Marissa didn’t want to make Carrie think she was crazy. Crazier.
I am here to deliver you your dreams, the shaman had said. Or was it I am here to deliver you from your dreams? But she had no idea how to find her way back to the one place she’d met the shaman in flesh and bone. If that episode had not been a hallucination, too.
In Julie’s room she found her cell phone, the battery dead. She plugged in the charger and thought of calling Peggy Keenan. But Peggy already thought she was unhinged for walking away from her job for no reason. . . .
She pulled her truck into the row of empty slots in front of the Wild West town. The only other car parked there must have belonged to the manager, who sat in the weatherboard ticket booth, listening to football on a transistor, but apparently half asleep. He roused when she skirted the buildings, came out of the booth and called after her.
“Hey Missy! It’s over here!”
In spite of herself she turned back for a minute. The man wore a loose flannel shirt over an oil-stained orange tank top. He had a diamond stud in one ear and was missing the two front teeth that meth heads frequently lacked.
“Hey, Baby,” he said, climbing toward her. “You don’t need to go back there.” His tone was conciliatory, as if they were intimate enough to have quarreled. “Baby, it can’t be that bad.”
Marissa shook herself, turned on her sneaker heel and kept walking, following the wide-set ruts. Beyond the crest of the ridge she was climbing, a couple of vultures were circling high, their ragged wingtips clawing like fingers at the empty sky.
“Hey Missy!” The man’s tone had grown more hostile, but he was also farther away. “You can’t just walk off and leave your truck like that. That parking’s for Wild West.”
The dog pack came ravening at the fence as soon as Marissa topped the ridge. She hesitated, studying the mesh and the gates, till she was satisfied there was no way the dogs could break out of it. Then, tentatively, she began to walk down, watching the front door of the trailer. No sign. Ten yards from the gate she stopped. The Humvee was parked inside the wire, which should have made her think the owner must be there too, and yet that didn’t really mean anything. He could have gone off on a horse or on foot or simply vanished into thin air.
The dogs kept hurling themselves at the wire, teeth bared, sometimes catching in the mesh diamonds. The wire began to glisten with their slobber. The biggest one, a sort of olive color with a blunt head and tigerish stripes, was the most determined and relentless, climbing the trailer’s steps to hurl himself and hit the gate chest-high, bashing his muzzle till it bled, over and over, relentlessly. But the buzzards were not circling this compound after all; they were half a mile out, above the desert.
“Hush up, you.” The voice came from the trailer door, which had opened, dislodging a dog from the top step. “Now just you simmer down.”
Ultimo stepped out, scattering dogs with a cane in his left hand, and shaking a square tin box in his right. He seemed to be able to swat the dogs without looking at them. His eyes were steadily on Marissa the whole time. The rhythm of the rattling can seemed to take her back toward where she’d been the night before. Not dream. That other reality.
The dogs had stopped barking and charging the gate. Ultimo tucked his cane under one elbow and pried the tin open, scattering dog biscuits right and left. The dogs claimed their biscuits and went to the shadow of the Hu
mvee or the opposite corner of the fence, where they sat down, chewing, eyes still watchful.
Ultimo unfastened the heavy padlock. Steel links rang against the posts as he pulled the chain free.
“This way,” he said, still looking into Marissa’s eyes. “I wondered when you’d come.”
72
Marko had never yet killed a person or a buffalo. It looked like the buffalo would go down first. He got a buck every year in the season, plus a couple more deer jack-lit on the sly, and he’d been out a time or two after bighorn, with no luck. All that was with a 30.06 borrowed from one of Sonny’s uncles. Today what he had was a forty-five automatic, old army issue, which he’d bought bootleg from Ultimo.
If an Indian could bring down a buffalo bull with a bow and arrow he figured the forty-five should be plenty. It would knock down a man the size of Ultimo, or anyway that’s what Ultimo said. And it put a good-size hole in you, too. Marko felt a rich thrill of satisfied relief whenever he thought of solving his personal problems that way. Bang! through Julie, Bang! through Jamal. Bang! through that meddlesome bitch Marissa, who’d shown up for no reason from who knows where.
Jamal was the one he’d most like to take out. But going after Jamal was like fighting a bug. Plus he could tie you up with his cunning, which often involved only telling true things, like you can’t just walk into a hospital room and start blazing, or not if you want to walk away afterward. Julie might be put away by pulling a plug, only Marko didn’t know which one to pull and somebody would notice if he pulled them all—same problem with smothering her with a pillow; there always seemed to be somebody around.
Rubbing out Jamal with Marissa’s truck had seemed a stroke of genius until it went wrong. She could have said whatever she wanted afterward—nobody in town had known her long, and a lot of people already thought it was queer how the two of them went around together. But now—Ultimo wouldn’t even talk to him about the problem, plus Jamal’s brothers had got involved, or knew enough that they might get involved. Marko had only been three years old when his family started trying to get as far away from Serbia as the shape of the planet permitted, but he still remembered plenty about the persistence of family vendettas and he knew when it was time to back off.
This buffalo had a Circle-D brand, but it had been a long way from home when he separated it from the herd with the bike. Now that was a kick—gunning the Harley in amongst all that galloping, bristling weight . . . like the wild Cheyenne on their painted horses. He’d cut out his quarry without too much trouble, zigzagging the bike and roaring the throttle, and he felt proud of that since he’d never done it before. He’d been driving it for about forty minutes, keeping it moving at a brisk trot. Of course he could have cranked up and overtaken it at any point but he was enjoying the chase too much; also the buffalo was headed back in the general direction Marko would need to come with a truck later on, to collect the hide and meat and the head for a trophy.
The animal was already beginning to tire, but for some reason it started scrambling up the low side of one of the painted clay hills. It was slowing, stumbling on the ascent, but the bike’s tires got no traction to climb, so Marko wheeled it down to the dry gulch and went up on foot, racking a round into the forty-five’s chamber as he climbed. It would be mano a mano now, or no—he smiled to himself at the gag—mano a buffalo.
When he came out on top of the mesa, the buffalo had come to a stand, at the edge farthest away from Marko, humped shoulders high and his head low. Marko, pistol swinging in his hand, looked past the animal to the landscape beyond; he felt like he’d come near this place before, only not from the same direction. Behind him, when he glanced over his shoulder, a ribbon of highway stitched through hills. That would be farther away than it looked. A speckled hawk flew overhead, cried sharply and stooped away beyond the cliff edge where the buffalo was standing, head raised now to watch Marko’s approach.
Marko had read in a magazine about guys down South hunting wild hogs with handguns, which was plenty dangerous, but those guys had dogs. He meant to shoot this buffalo somewhere behind the shoulder—he’d seen pictures of Indians doing that on horseback, and when they were down on the flat pack he could have done the same thing from the bike. He was beginning to wish he had done that when the buffalo dropped his head and charged him.
He couldn’t stop himself from letting off a couple of shots right away, and maybe they had just gone wild but there didn’t seem to be anything very penetrable in the space between the horns, the heavy head and shoulders bearing down on him. He wanted to sidestep and get that bullet in behind the shoulder as the animal overshot him, but now he remembered how nimbly the bull had been able to turn while he was chasing it on the Harley—Marko was still looking at the frame of the horns, much closer now, and he squeezed off a couple more straight into the forehead, thinking that might at least spook it, but no—
Another sidestep, but the bull was still on track. Marko yanked on the trigger till he heard the forty-five click empty, and he was about to try to dive out of the way—he’d land rolling, he thought, for whatever it was worth. The buffalo disappeared.
Or rather, it was sucked under the earth. And Marko was too, tumbling down a shifting slope, roots and rocks popping him in the elbows and ribs, trying to keep his head curled in until he flopped out on the bottom.
It was the biggest sinkhole Marko had ever seen or heard of—maybe four stories high on three sides of it, and as he scrambled up to his feet he was, for an instant, stone terrified—he saw no way out, and there wouldn’t be anybody looking for him either. But there was sunlight on his back, and when he turned around he saw a much more manageable slope. At the top, he could even see his Harley in the dry gulch, still securely balanced on the kickstand.
The buffalo hadn’t broken a leg; it was standing up and didn’t seem damaged in any way, and it also didn’t seem interested in Marko anymore. The buffalo was facing the far wall of the sinkhole. It lowered its head and began to paw and snort, but instead of charging, it was backing away.
Hair rose up on Marko’s neck, like the hackles of a dog. Peering into the shadow he began to see that the wall of the sinkhole wasn’t a vertical wall at all, but a rim hanging over a cavern that the collapsing earth had opened. The thing coming out of the cavern was a bear, something like a grizzly but on a different scale, dwarfing even the buffalo. That’s what the buffalo was afraid of, but the bear was coming toward Marko instead, as if it knew him, had been looking for him for a long time, and now had found him. The forty-five was still in his hand and there was even a spare clip in his pants pocket, but his mind was too slow and his limbs were too numb. When the bear was near enough it rose on its hind legs and spread its great arms for a crushing embrace.
White teeth.
It can’t be that that big, Marko was thinking. Wherever he turned the bear was before him, blocking out the light of the whole world.
73
The bison came into the dry gulch and stood for a long moment staring at Marissa’s truck, which she had pulled to a quick stop the moment she saw it. The animal’s head lowered; it blew dust from the ground. It was big, and the horns looked bluish in the midday light. A buffalo was not a wholly uncommon sight hereabouts but this one struck Marissa as ancient, as if it had sprung from a well of deep time. Maybe she had never looked at one closely before.
“Blow your horn?” Jamal said softly. But before she could decide whether to do that or not, the buffalo lifted its head with a snort, turned and went trotting away down the gulch.
“Now, where did that come from?” Ultimo smacked the roof of the cab with his broad palm. He had been riding in the truck bed, in the spot that Jamal had said would be good to mount a machinegun, since the three of them left his place. He tapped the roof a second time, then swung himself over the rail and landed heavily in the alkaline dust. At his gesture Marissa cut the motor. Jamal got out the passenger door and shaded his eyes with one hand. In the spot where the buffalo had been, a bi
g silver-trimmed Harley stood on its kickstand.
“Mmm,” said Ultimo. “Let’s go take a look.”
Marissa stepped out and stood with her elbows braced on the top of the door frame, looking across. The Harley seemed to be balanced on the edge of some sort of pit, or rather a pool full of liquid darkness. Vertigo. It sucked at her mind. The kaleidoscope inside her head revolved and everything turned upside down so that the motorcycle stuck mysteriously to a ceiling of earth and the peaks of the painted hills dangled like stalactites. I wondered when you’d come, Ultimo said, his voice pleasant enough until he kicked the door shut behind the two of them, trapping her in some sort of black-dark corridor whose shape made no sense in terms of the outside of the trailer.
The inside and the outside didn’t fit. But she had no time to consider that peculiarity because his hands were already choking her and pushing her up the wall. She fought, tried to, but he was hideously strong, thick, impenetrable as stone. Outside the dogs were barking and snarling and hurling themselves against the door. He had lifted her feet off the floor so that she had no purchase to push back, even when she tried to push off the wall, and the wall was wrong too—a trashy trailer partition should have collapsed under such a battering. As her consciousness faded she seemed to hear a sort of voice-over you set yourself up for this a sort of shrewish woman’s voice anyone would have seen it coming like the bitch reporter Janice Something. . . . He wasn’t going to strangle her quite to death, she realized. There was a different plan than that. As her head dissolved in a dark swirl of golden motes he released her throat and let her slump down for a moment, her heels skidding over dry nuggets of spilled dog biscuit. A considered plan. She had just caught some part of her breath but was still too weak to move when he ripped open her clothing with a couple of easy swipes like the paws of a bear, then tossed her up against the wall again, stabbing into her, retracting and stabbing again. No need to choke her now because any movement only involved her more in what was happening to her. The sensation was overpowering though couldn’t otherwise be classified, though the screams she heard had to be her own.
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