Shadows Bend

by David Barbour

  The animals had begun to disperse. The loud din of fluttering bats had faded, and in the quiet moonlight the desert creatures had come to their senses once again. In a few moments only the few shadowed’ lumps of dead carcasses were visible, and the landscape was once again cold and clear.

  STILL, IT TOOK a while for them to gather the courage to get out and examine the car. Howard pulled the dripping remains of the cougar off the hood and flung it as hard as he could; it broke into two pieces and landed several yards away. He opened the hood with hands trembling with fatigue; the first hose he touched hissed and fell to the ground, where it quickly slithered away, but otherwise, there was nothing seriously amiss, just some easily remedied dust clogs and patches of fur.

  Lovecraft, on the other side of the car, dragged a dead coyote off the roof. Under the dimming beam of his flashlight, he cataloged the dents and scratches on the chassis, some unexpectedly deep but none detrimental to the car’s mobility. Even the tires had escaped any significant harm.

  And later, while Howard and Lovecraft compared notes and argued about how best to wash the car in the middle of the desert, Glory stood against a back fender, slowly puffing on a cigarette to relax herself. Her legs would not stop shaking, and her head was still abuzz with images of the feral animals. The first cigarette did not last long; she finished it and ground it out under her heel before she realized she wanted another. With jittery fingers she fished one more out of the pack and snapped a match against the box. The small, sulfurous flame exploded with momentary light and pungency before it settled into a steady glow in the windless night. Glory put the tip of her cigarette to it, puffed until the tobacco glowed, then blew the flame out of the corner of her mouth, extinguishing it. Odd. She could still see something past the glow of her cigarette. She thought it must be the afterimage of the match flame, but when she turned and blinked her eyes, there was no afterimage. She cupped the cigarette in her palms and looked once again out into the darkness and saw a single steady light, like a lantern, approaching from the distance. In front of it bobbed two other lights, glowing orbs she was now more than familiar with-the glowing eyes of a nocturnal animal.

  Glory cried out in alarm.

  9

  HOWARD WAS ALREADY in position to fire, his .45 in one hand, his flashlight in the other, illuminating the figure that had come out of the desert. It was no glowing-eyed monster, just a gray-haired old Indian man in a headband, carrying a lantern, a very wolf like German shepherd at his side.

  “Hold it right there!” called Howard. “What do ya want?”

  “I am here to help you,” said the old man.

  “Help us?” Howard replied. “What the hell can you do that we can’t?”

  “Bob,” Glory whispered in a chastising tone. “Be civil, at least.”

  The old man seemed entirely unfazed by the gun, as if he knew it was empty. He smiled, and said, almost in a chant, “The hatted bear has a temper. The pale fish is sensitive. The red horse is full of passion and nurturing.” He swept his arm, indicating the desert. “Tonight the animals were walking in their sleep, and I came out to wake them up.”

  “To which animals are you referring?” asked Lovecraft. “The three you’ve just mentioned or those that kept us hostage?”

  “Tonight all the animals were sleepwalking. I have been waiting for you. Come to my home, and we shall talk about why you are here.”

  “I say you just go back the way you came,” said Howard, jerking his pistol. “We had enough trouble as it is. How do we know it wasn’t you, huh? With that Injun mumbo jumbo. Keep that wolf of yours away from us.”

  “The pale fish man,” said the old man, his voice very patient. “He carries a thing that brings evil. He carries a thing that was hidden in the mind of a holy Kachina, and now it has no protection. He comes from the seashore to the desert to ask the bear for help, and the two friends have found the red horse woman at the home of the lion man. I have known this for many years. And I have known that you will come with me. So come to my home and we shall talk.” He said some thing under his breath, and the dog pounded off into the darkness.

  “Who are you?” said Lovecraft.

  “I am Imanito Shakes-the-Gourd.”

  “You a witch doctor?” asked Howard. “A medicine man?”

  “Yes. I am a healer of those who are sick.”

  “We ain’t sick.”

  “You are injured. You are having evil dreams. You are sick.”

  “You gonna heal us?”

  “No,” said Imanito. “I can only tell you a story that will help you heal yourselves.”

  “Figures,” said Howard.

  “Please, I have been waiting many years to help you. I have prepared my role. I can even help you repair your automobile.”

  “It ain’t broke, so it don’t need fixin’,” said Howard. “The car’s fine. Just needs a good washin’ to get all the blood and guts off. You got water out there?”

  “I will gladly help you wash your car.”

  That seemed to please Howard, and now, although Lovecraft and. Glory expressed their misgivings, he was agreeable to following the old man. “How can you just accept his story?” Glory whispered. “Especially after what you’ve been through today?”

  While the old man waited with his lantern, Howard made his way to the front of the Chevy to close the hood. “Everything bad’s given me a bad feelin’,” Howard replied. “This old Injun gives me a good feelin’.”

  “That’s hardly enough to base an important decision on.”

  “God damn!” Howard exclaimed, leaning into the engine compartment, one hand still holding up the hood.

  “Bob?” Lovecraft appeared with his flashlight.

  “Shine it down here, HP.”

  When Lovecraft turned the beam of his flashlight down to the earth, Glory saw that the ground was dark with water. Drops were still falling from somewhere under the hood.

  Howard twisted off the. radiator cap and cursed again. “Must have been the snake,” he said. “We got a punctured hose, and I ain’t carryin’ enough spare water to make up for this.”

  “Mr. Imanito said he had water,” Glory offered.

  “You would almost conclude he had sent the animals himself,” said Lovecraft. “But you’re right, Bob. He gives me a good feeling also.”

  “More likely it was that bucktoothed bastard back at the gas pump in Thalia that did it,” said Howard. “But it don’t matter. We need water now.” He turned to the old man. “We ain’t walkin’ in the dark and gettin’ bushwhacked, so climb in. There’s enough water to get to your teepee.”

  “I think the proper term is ‘hogan,’ ” said Glory. “Mr. Imanito is a Navajo. Mr. Imanito?”

  “Yes, I happen to live in a hogan. But my people are closer to the Hopi.” He climbed into the backseat with Glory, balancing his lantern carefully between them.

  Howard started up the Chevy and eased it forward. “I thought all the Hopis lived in Arizona,” he said. “Ain’t never heard of any in New Mexico. This is Navajo country.”

  “That is true,” said Imanito. “I do not live among my people at the moment because I have been awaiting you.”

  “Stop the bullshit, old man.”

  Imanito smiled. “Come to my home, and the bull will give you many more droppings.”

  Howard looked momentarily puzzled at this unexpected response, but then he broke into a grin. “Well,” he said, “what are we waitin’ for then? Which way?”

  Imanito gave directions from the back. There were no real turns to make after he looked once out the window and established their bearing by the stars. From the front seat, Lovecraft confirmed the old man’s sense of direction based on his own long experience as an amateur astronomer, something he pointed out to Imanito. Once Howard got accustomed to steering around the few shrubs and cacti in their way, it was slow but steady going.

  “So who are your people?” Lovecraft asked. “I am especially intrigued by the existence of an anc
ient elder race of Indians in this region.”

  “I dwell among the people whose name comes from ‘Hopitu,’ which means ‘the peaceful people,’” said Imanito. “They have remained peaceful, and they have kept the old ways because they are keepers of the old stories.”

  “The Hopi are the only tribe that kept to the pueblos,” said Glory. “They hold to the purest form of pre-Columbian life in North America.”

  “You’re sounding rather like a professor,” said Lovecraft. “Is primitive societies a topic you studied in college?”

  “No. I met an anthropologist once while I was working one of the oil towns. He talked a lot. Studying for his Ph.D. exams.”

  Imanito’s eyes glinted with amusement. “Most of my people live on three mesas north of what you call Winslow in Arizona. We have only a dozen villages left, and the old ways are dying.”

  “My impression was that sagacious old men of the Indian tribes were rather taciturn,” said Lovecraft. “And they usually refer to their own people as ‘we.’ ”

  “There is little time and there is much I must tell you,” Imanito said, avoiding the implied question.

  “Why didn’t you write it down for us if you’ve been waiting all these years?”

  They had little sense of distance in the dark without landmarks, and they reached their destination before they knew it. Imanito’s home loomed ahead of them so suddenly it seemed to have sprouted out of the earth. What the headlights illuminated in the middle of nowhere was a hogan, but a decidedly odd one, constructed of adobe brick, mud, twigs, wood scraps, and what appeared, against all logic, to be driftwood. They climbed out of the car. Howard left the engine running and went with Imanito immediately to fetch water.

  “Now that is decidedly odd,” Lovecraft said to Glory. “Shouldn’t they shut the motor off if it is in imminent danger of overheating?”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

  ;When Imanito and Howard returned with water, Lovecraft posed the question once again, and Howard answered rather arrogantly, happy, it seemed, to play professor to his friend for once. “You gotta keep the water circulatin’, HP. If you shut the engine off and pour cold water into the radiator, it all hits the engine in one jolt and it could make the cylinders crack from the sudden temperature change. You pour a little at a time and it cools down slower and safer.”

  “Remarkable,” said Lovecraft. “One would never expect that a backwoods pulp writer could so concisely explain the thermodynamics of an internal combustion engine.”

  “When the radiator stopped steaming and the chugging of the Chevy sounded oddly contentented, Howard shut the engine off. “Now we gotta fix this hose,” he declared. ““Where are we gonna get a hose out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  “I have such a hose for you,” said Imanito. “But I know you are all hungry from your ordeal, so please eat first.”

  “And you wouldn’t happen to have a tool box handy, would ya?”

  “I have also kept the tools you will need to fix the hose.”

  “You don’t say. I’m likin’ you more every minute, old man.”

  As they entered Imanito’s home, Glory paused to give the old man something small in a packet, and he said a gracious thanks. They retired into the hogan, where they sat on low stools around the fire. The interior of Imanito’s home was dim in the unsteady light of the fire, and not much was fully visible, but there were tantalizing glimpses of a vast array of traditional artifacts and modern junk. Howard was especially struck by the poster of the shapely young diving woman in the red swimsuit advertising Jantzen swimwear. In the flickering firelight, she seemed to be swimming through warm ripples of water.

  Lovecraft found his stomach immediately rumbling, and he fixated his gleaming eyes on the pot of stew on the flame, the source of the delicious, hearty aroma that filled the hogan.

  “It would be improper to perform a ritual on a full stomach, but you are not of my people, and therefore you need not be bound to our ways.” Imanito ladled out bowls of the thick stew and served it in stoneware bowls with hunks of puffy fry bread.

  The travelers hadn’t realized how hungry they were; they ate ravenously, stopping only to let Imanito refill their empty bowls.

  “This is delicious,” said Howard. “What is it?”

  “It is made from corn and lamb,” said Imanito.

  “What do ya call it in Hopi?”

  “Nokquivi,” said Imanito.

  “Knock-quee-vee,” Howard repeated. “Mighty satisfyin’.”

  “Now,” said Imanito, “I will tell you why you are here.”

  “Well, give it your best shot,” Howard replied, slouching forward on his stool with his elbows propped on his knees.

  “Many years ago when I was still a boy, I was told a story by my father, who was a medicine man. At that time it was just a story to me, because it did not fit with the sacred stories he told. I thought that it might be something he had made up just for me to entertain me because I was just a boy and found the ways of the healer difficult.” Imanito passed around a pack of cigarettes as he spoke, and Howard and Glory each took one. The old man produced a small pipe, which he filled from a pouch of tobacco. “This is the story he told me,” he said. “A long time from now, in the future, when you are an old man older than me, you are visited by three travelers who are of the white people. They are riding in the belly of a black horse made of iron. It is” a horse without legs, and it rolls like a cart which is drawn by horses. On its head sits a hummingbird woman, who protects it from afar. It is in the desert, and many animals have come to eat it, but they cannot eat it because its flesh is iron and they themselves are asleep in a sleep made for them by an evil sorcerer.

  “The three travelers are tired and hungry and scared. Their horse has eyes that light up the darkness, but it cannot find its way because it is thirsty. Its intestines are leaking, for they have been bitten by a snake, and its water has fallen to the thirsty earth. The horse growls like a mountain lion. It breathes hot steam like the bowels of the earth. Inside it, the three travelers grow hot and afraid. ”

  “These are the three travelers: the black-hatted bear man, the pale fish man, the red horse woman. The two men are tellers of tales and keepers of secrets they themselves do not know. The woman is a mother, who is not a mother, who wishes to visit a mother. Her hair is the color of fire and her death is cold and clear as the air. The death of the black-hatted bear man is the color of caked clay; it is hot and full of thunder and the smell of sulfur that fills the belly of his black horse. The death of the pale fish man is quiet and white, and it is like the pain that a boy feels in his side when he has run too fast and too hard and he pants like a fish that has been taken from the river.” Imanito paused. “These were all riddles, as you can see. It was a good story whose meaning I did not know truly until tonight.”

  “I don’t like the sound of all that death,” said Howard. “You tellin’ us you brought us here to fortune-tell how we’re gonna die?”

  “No. That is only part of the story. My father’s instructions were different.”

  “You wanna hear more of this mumbo jumbo, HP?”

  “I find it rich and fascinating,” said Lovecraft. “Please continue, Mr. Imanito. But we haven’t all night, so perhaps you should summarize the gist of things.”

  “My father told me that I must go out into the desert on a certain night to help the three of you. He said I had to wake up the sleeping animals, and he gave me the song that would do it. He said I should bring you back to my home and feed you and give you a new piece of intestine for your horse. And I was to tell you how to go to the place where shadows bend, for that was the place of his first battle, and the pale fish man carried a thing that must be buried there to keep the world safe until the time of the gourd of ashes.” Imanito stopped again. “Now I must tell you what you must do, but the woman cannot see the things I must show you.”

  “Why not?” said Howard.

  Glory was mom
entarily flattered and pleased that he would want to include her, but then Imanito stated that the knowledge was for men only, that women’s eyes would pollute it, and that seemed more than satisfactory as an answer.

  “What’ll we do about her then?” Howard asked. “Can’t exactly put her out in the car now, can we?”

  “Not to worry,” said Imanito. “I have prepared a place for her.” He indicated a corner, or rather, an area in the round interior that he had set off behind a partition of hanging blankets. “Red horse woman may rest in there where I have prepared blankets.”

  “I’m dead tired anyway,” said Glory, unable to mask the disappointment in her voice. “What are you going to show them, anyway? A sand painting? I’ve seen those before.”

  “Yes,” said Imanito. “There are instructions I must show them. It would not do to have them seenby your eyes.”

  “All right. Good night, fellas.” She parted the hanging blankets and entered a dark enclave surrounded by stacks of junk. When she let the blankets fall back into place, a little light from the fire still managed to shine in underneath, between the blankets and the floor.

  Imanito had laid out a couple of clean horse blankets and a thinner one, an army blanket, for her. While the others muttered on the other side of the partition, Glory lay back in the soft bedding and relaxed. She looked around as her eyes adjusted to the dark and was amazed by the junk the old shaman had collected over the years. There were stacks and stacks of popular magazines piled from the dirt floor to the roof; she recognized some of the stray volumes of Life and even an issue of Weird Tales, with its usual cover depicting a scantily clad woman in dire terror. At one side of the small enclave were open wooden boxes stacked with mason jars whose contents were either mysterious or absurd-unidentifiable colored pastes or tiny toy cars; there was a Frigidaire with its door permanently open, filled with books and crinkled contour maps of the U.S. Geological Survey; a scattering of postcards-used ones-from odd parts of the world; dried herbs and flowers hung from the rafters; several dozen identical black men’s shoes-all for the right foot-were stacked in a corner; and there was an open box just next to her filled with fabric and rug scraps, old wooden Christmas ornaments, part of a Confederate flag, and a teddy bear with one eye. It was as if Imanito had worked at a post office and kept random parcels for himself; his hogan was like a personal dead-letter office accumulating a mass of things that were truly odds and ends. Glory pulled her blanket more snugly over her shoulder and, with the dim images still in her mind, she was asleep before she realized it.