Shadows Bend

by David Barbour

  “Oh, God,” she said. “I feel like shit. I must look like shit.”

  “I’d have to disagree with ya there,” Howard said with a smile.“I doubt you could ever look like shit.”

  Glory rubbed her face, quickly felt her hair, and checked her breath against her palm. “I had the most terrible nightmares,” she said. “I dreamt those gentlemen back there were murdering my baby.”

  “You have a baby?”

  Glory was silent for a moment, as if she were considering what to say. “No. I lost my baby a while back.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Howard said.

  It was a reply Glory had heard too many times; it surprised her now to hear the sincerity in his voice. She followed Howard to the diner and excused herself to go to the ladies’ room to freshen up. She still felt disoriented; though she could remember everything that had happened since she had gotten out at Vernon, she still had an odd dislocated feeling as if she were waking in an unfamiliar room.

  His fingers curled around the trigger handle of the gas pump, the attendant watched the red horse woman disappear into the ladies’ room, her mane so red it seemed to bum the air. Under his breath he repeated the names of the figures to himself: hatted bear man, pale fish man, red horse woman. They had come from the east and they were pursuing. the sun across the land, into the house. of night. He would report this to the old shaman, he thought, repeating the story to himself until it became a soft chant. Unconsciously, with his free hand, he fingered the beaded medicine pouch he wore around his neck. Evil times were coming. The time of the gourd of ashes was nearly upon the earth.

  * * *

  “I’M TELLIN’ YA I didn’t like the way he was lookin’ at you,”

  Howard said, glancing in the rearview mirror at the lights of the diner receding in the darkness. “Put a little firewater into a half-breed like him and he can’t control his animal lust for white women.”

  “The man is likely the product of such an unfortunate coupling,”

  Lovecraft added.

  “What are you two saying?” Glory said incredulously from the back. “His father raped his mother? Where do you boys get ideas like that?”

  “I assure you it is not due to our overabundance of imagination,” said Lovecraft. “The inferior races and classes have a proclivity for hypergamy, and when that is not a legitimate possibility, they may resort to force.”

  “When they can get away with it,” Howard added. “It’s the duty of the Aryan frontiersman to protect his womenfolk from that sort.”

  The two men looked approvingly at each other. Rather smugly,

  Glory thought from their silhouettes. “I can’t believe you boys,” she said. “What makes an Indian any different from you except the color of his skin?”

  Lovecraft gave a sort of snort. “Shall I endeavor to enlighten the lady?” he said to Howard, as if Glory were not even there.

  “Yeah, HP. What’s that book you told me about-the one about the evolution of races? Tell her some of that.”

  “At your service.”

  Glory settled back against the door and stretched out in the seat.

  “Look, Lovey,” she said, “I’m glad to hear you’ve done a lot of reading on the subject, but I’m not in the mood to hear about all this Aryan race rubbish at the moment.”

  “The Aryan race is irrefutably the one destined to be dominant on this planet, during this very epoch,” said Lovecraft, lapsing into his pedantic tone.

  “The Aryans aren’t even a race.”

  “And upon what authority do you base that assertion?”

  “I said I didn’t want to discuss this rubbish.”

  “But I am curious,” Lovecraft insisted. “How would a woman of your background have the intellectual resources to ponder coherently the complex subject of the races of man and their evolutionary hierarchy?”

  “I—”

  “What are you sayin’ about her background?” Howard interjected. “Don’t insult the lady, HP. She’s dog tired, on account of your odd men, and she’s been havin’ bad dreams. Let’s put a cork in the lecture till later.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Lovecraft.

  A long silence ensued, and Glory noticed Howard adjusting the rearview mirror so that he could look at her occasionally when he thought she wouldn’t notice. She felt awkward and yet girlishly comfortable to have this man of simple passions wanting to be her protector.

  She sighed and nestled into the folds of the jacket she had taken from her suitcase to ward off the desert chill. There hadn’t been any other traffic for nearly half an hour, and the night outside seemed to be darker than it should be. Out of the rear window, she could see the stars in the distant east slowly blotted out by an approaching cloud. Odd, she thought. The wind had been blowing from the west all day, or was she confused by the wind rushing by the car? Or perhaps it was another layer of air, higher up in the atmosphere, that carried the dust. She recalled that in the early 1880s an island called Krakatoa had exploded, and the ash from the volcanic eruption, lingering in the upper atmosphere, had darkened the whole earth for months. Her grandmother had been in Java at the time and witnessed the aftermath of the giant tidal wave that had crashed into the neighboring islands, crushing and drowning nearly fifty thousand people. “We heard an explosion like the end of the world,” she’d said. “Then we felt it in our flesh and our bones, and out on the coast it was as if the ocean had spat its guts out onto the earth. It reeked for months of rotting fish and’ death, but I must say the sunsets were spectacular for years after.”

  Why am I remembering Grandmother? Glory thought, Why am I thinking of volcanoes and tidal waves when I’m out in the middle of the desert at night with two eccentric strangers who might as well be kidnapping me? Kidnapping, she thought again, and the word, with the memory of her grandmother, took her suddenly back into the nightmare she had had earlier.

  It was Christmas, and she was sitting under the tree, which was a Douglas fir, a giant tree that seemed to go up and up and up forever, though it stood in the living room across from the fireplace. Her father was in his comfortable chair smoking his pipe, his legs crossed, his feet in his favorite slippers; and her mother was there, sitting on the floor with her, ready to admire the presents. Her grandmother stood by the fireplace, looking somewhat disapprovingly at the sheer number of presents in their fancy red-and-green wrappings. “Go ahead and open it,” said Father. Usually they didn’t open their presents until Christmas morning, but Father was in a good mood tonight, and it was past midnight. They had stayed up drinking eggnog and eating chocolate cake, and she had been eager to open just one present, the one wrapped in the blue cord and not the ribbon. “Go on,” said Father, “you can open that one. Just that one.” So she looked anxiously at Mother, who nodded with a smile, and she tore the package open with a cry of delight. The inside of the paper was wet, for some strange reason-water leaked out when she took the layer off-but Glory knew it was supposed to be that way. She pulled the wrapping away, and Mother gave her a paring knife to cut the cord so she could get the present out of the red box. She was so excited she was all out of breath, and by the time she had the box open she was covered in sweat, so excited it was painful, and when she reached inside, she felt something soft and round, and she shrieked in delight. It was a doll! A beautiful, perfect little doll. And she pulled it out and hugged it and wrapped it in the swaddling cloth that Mother gave her, and she looked into its perfect blue infant eyes and cuddled it so tight she thought she might crush the life out of it. Then she looked down at it and saw that the eyes were closed. They were the sort of eyes that closed when you laid the doll down and opened again when you picked it up. Sometimes they stuck a little and you had to jostle the baby a bit, but they always worked eventually, so she wasn’t worried. But when she picked the doll up the eyes stayed shut. She laid it back down again and then picked it up again and then laid it down and picked it up and then she jostled it and thumped its little back and s
hook it and shook it, but the eyes never opened again and the baby never woke up. And then she looked at Mother for help, but Mother was gone. She was just a ghost, and Father was a dark-eyed hollow man, and the only person who could do anything was her grandmother, and Grandmother hated her because she was going to miss school because she had been spoiled by the doll. She started to cry, and then she heard an odd voice that couldn’t really speak English. “It. Belongs. To Us,” said the voice. “We. Will. Take. It. Now,” and Glory looked through her tears to see the two lawyers in black suits standing over her, both reaching toward the doll in her arms, which had suddenly become limp and heavy like the infant it was supposed to be. Her tears suddenly became hysterical, nearly choking her, and she had woken up in the backseat of the Chevy.

  “Are ya okay, Miss?” It was Howard’s voice.

  “Yes,” Glory replied, wiping her eyes. “I was just thinking.”

  “You never told me about that nightmare,” he said, as if he had just read her mind.

  “Oh, it’s nothing you’d want to hear about. Just a silly dream with an obvious meaning. I must have had it because I’m going to visit my sister so I can see her little boy.”

  “Why don’t ya tell me about it? I’m getting set to nod off here behind the wheel. And my partner ain’t doin’ much of a job keepin’ awake, neither.” He jerked his head a couple of times to indicate Lovecraft, and Glory noticed suddenly that the man must have been snoring for a while by now.

  “I’d rather not talk about it,” said Glory.

  “Fair enough,” said Howard, glancing at her in the mirror. “You said you lost a baby. What was his name?”

  “Huh? Oh, it’s Gabriel.”

  “The angel?”

  “Yes, he was an angel. And now he’s with them, I suppose.”

  “Beggin’ your pardon, but yadon’t sound convinced about that. You sound like a woman without much faith.”

  “I only have faith in what I can touch. And that nightmare really touched a wound in me.” She sat up and leaned against the back of the front seat again, her mouth only inches from Howard’s ear. “Tell me what’s really going on, Bob. I’m tired of hearing you and your friend be short with each other. I need to know what I’m in for, though I do appreciate the ride.”

  “You’ll have to ask HP when he wakes up, Miss.”

  “Please call me Glory.”

  “Glory. There’s some things about what we’re doin’ that I don’t rightly believe myself. I’d hardly expect you to believe them now, would I?”

  “I guess I’ll just have to hear it from the horse lover’s mouth?”

  “Horse lover?”

  “That’s what ‘Phillip’ means.”

  “And where did you learn that?”

  “I know what you take me for,” said Glory, “but things aren’t always the way the appear, are they?”

  “I s’pose you could say the same about me and HP here. Sorry for misreadin’ your character, but there ain’t much more than appearances to go on now, is there?”

  “I suppose I could say the same thing.”

  Howard nodded and was quiet for a long time. Outside, the night grew progressively darker as the cloud that followed them overtook the car and slowly blotted out the stars in the distance. The twin beams of the headlights, slightly askew, became sharply visible as a dark mist enveloped them. There was no sound other than the car, whose noises grew muffled in the descending dust. Howard found it lulling, like driving in a soft snowfall on an empty road. “Dust storm,” he whispered. “But I ain’t never seen one like this. Don’t really seem to be blowin’ from nowhere.”

  “It fits my mood,” said Glory.

  * * *

  HOWARD COULD NO LONGER SEE where he was going, and he knew the car was in danger of overheating from the dust clogging the air filter. For the past several miles the signs themselves had been obscured by the dust, and he realized he had no idea where they were on their route. Lovecraft startled awake when he hit a pothole; he offered to check the map and even managed to unfold it to approximately the right place, but Howard found the rustling and the darting beam of the flashlight so annoying he told his friend to stop.

  “Look, HP, we’re comin’ up on a road sign. I’ll just get out and see if I can read it.”

  “Why don’t we stop for a while?” Glory said from the back. “I could really use a smoke and a little stretch.”

  Howard let off on the gas, stepped on the clutch, and coasted slowly to a stop just far enough from the sign to illuminate its gray-black face with the headlights. With the engine idling, he stepped out onto the deserted stretch of road and wiped his palm across the sign in a wide arc. He had to do it several more times before he revealed enough fragments of lettering through the fine dust to guess at what it said.

  “Welcome to The Exham Priory,” Howard read. He wiped his brow with the back of his dirty hand and walked back up to the car, frowning. “This don’t help us a whole hell of a lot,” he said to Lovecraft. “I was hopin’ we were near some town.”

  “I think it wise that you get some rest now,” Lovecraft replied. “Even a few minutes, Bob. You’ve been drowsing at the wheel. I’d gladly relieve you of the tedium, but this is hardly the time for you to instruct me in the intricacies of operating your automobile.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Howard. “Where’s Glory?”

  “She stepped out to ‘stretch,’ as it were.”

  “Why’s her suitcase gone?”

  Lovecraft turned the beam of the flashlight into the back and saw that it was, indeed, gone. “I was not aware of that fact,” he said.

  “Glory!” Howard called into the darkness. “Glory! Where are you?”

  There was no reply. Not even a cricket interrupted the black silence, which was punctuated only by the throbbing of the Chevy’s exhaust and the slightly irregular rumble of the engine. Howard took the flashlight from his friend and shined it into the blackness. “Glory!” he called again. “Glory!” The darkness seemed to stifle the sound, killing its resonance the instant it left Howard’s lips.

  “Which way did she go, HP?”

  “I’m afraid my back was to her. I was perusing the map to determine our position.”

  “You lost her!” Something cracked in Howard’s voice. “I oughta—”

  “Can’t a lady have a moment of privacy?” came Glory’s voice, out of the darkness.

  Howard turned toward the sound, almost suspiciously. “Why didn’t ya answer?”

  “I was preoccupied.”

  “Why couldn’t you just say where you were?”

  “Because,” Glory replied, losing her patience, “I was taking a piss. Can’t a girl have a little piss in peace around here?”

  “Just a word woulda been enough.”

  “Well, I was smoking, too,” said Glory.

  “Why did you take your suitcase? Where is it?” Howard illuminated her with the flashlight, moving the beam up and down to examine her. Lovecraft, though he was perturbed about what Howard might have said to him without the interruption, looked carefully on.

  “It’s back there,” said Glory.

  “Why did ya leave it?”

  “Because! It sounded like you were about to pop your cork. Now get the light out of my face!” She shielded her eyes with her forearm, grimacing.

  “Do not allow her to approach any closer,” Lovecraft said suddenly. “Hold it right there, Glory.”

  “What the hell’s gotten into you two?”

  “Just stay right there,” said Howard. “Why did ya take the suitcase in the first place?”

  “My cigarettes were in there.“_

  “Why couldn’t ya just take them out? HP, take the other flashlight and find the suitcase. Make sure you only see one set of footprints, and check for unusual tracks. Glory, you stay right there where I can see ya.” While Lovecraft fumbled for the other flashlight, Howard eased back to the car and, almost incredulous at himself, pulled his .45 from under the driver’
s seat and cocked the hammer back.

  “Bob, will you stop this nonsense and let me back in the car? It’s cold out here, and I’m a little scared, to tell the truth.” Glory lowered her arm and squinted at him, confused, the light glinting in her eyes. Howard was sure there was an odd quality to her voice.

  “Glory, I’m tellin’ ya to stand right there. I’ve got my gun aimed at you.”

  There was no mistaking the tone of his voice, and Glory stood in place, her arms hanging limp at her sides though she had claimed to be cold. Howard saw the other pool of light jitter and jump as Lovecraft walked around her into the desert.

  “I think you boys need to stop reading your fantasy stories,” Glory said rather flatly.

  After a few long moments, Lovecraft’s voice called out of the darkness: “Bob, I’ve located the suitcase. Everything appears normal. Wait…” Silence. “There appears to be…” Silence. The sound of sagebrush crunching. “Bob, it’s blood!”

  Howard nearly pulled the trigger at that instant, but stopped when he saw the expression on Glory’s face. It was a complex expression, one he couldn’t exactly read, though it seemed to reflect frustration, disgust, humiliation, and anger all in combination. It was certainly not the workings of a woman hypnotized, or a zombie, or some inhuman impostor. It flashed rapidly across her face, and then she said in a low but clearly audible voice, “I’m having my period, Bob. I carry my pads in my suitcase if you must know.”

  “Blood!” came Lovecraft’s shrill cry once again, and this time Howard broke into loud guffaws that shook his frame so hard he dropped his flashlight. In the darkness, Glory’s musical laughter joined in.

  When Lovecraft, still trembling with terror, had made his way back to the car, they decided to drive a few miles farther before making camp—in case the bloody menstrual rags attracted animals. They found a flat, empty patch of desert and pulled over again after making sure they were not in a dry streambed. The tension had certainly broken. Even. the air had cleared to some degree, but they were all still on edge at the thought of what might so easily have happened.

  Howard made quick work of setting up camp. He scoured the area nearby for sagebrush to bum, checked for suspicious rocks and animal burrows, made sure they were far enough from the road not to be seen. He set up around the car as if it were a covered wagon during the days of the pioneer trails-Glory was to sleep in the backseat, where she would have the comfort of the cushion and could protect herself from the elements by simply closing the door. Lovecraft and he would stretch out on their bedrolls on either side of a small fire.