by C. E. Murphy
I could hear people behind me, voices rising and falling with as much enthusiasm as could be generated in the heat. Someone was keeping an eye on me, not worried, but because I was a kid, and so someone had to watch out for me. I felt a hand on my shoulder as an adult stopped to watch the car with me, then a double-pat as he left me on my own.
Time folded, the car pulling up in a cloud of dust. It was an enormous old boat of an Oldsmobile, built in the seventies, four-doored and powered by a massive V8 engine. A fleeting thought, this is not your father’s Oldsmobile, scampered through my mind, but as the driver’s-side door pushed open and a young man got out, an unsettling jolt made my stomach cold.
It was my father’s Oldsmobile. The car I’d grown up in was out there in the desert, my dad climbing out to hail one of the adults behind me. I shook myself, realizing that for the second time, I was having a dream in which I was somebody else. I hadn’t known it this time, though, until I saw Dad. I knew him, but whomever I was dreaming as didn’t.
He was tall, taller than I thought of him as being. That was the kid’s perspective; I remembered Dad from my adult height, only an inch or two shorter than his. He gave me an impersonal nod before he passed me, offering to shake someone’s hand. I turned to watch him a few seconds, unused to strangers.
His height was compounded by a ranginess that I shared, both of us lacking my mother’s elegance. He wore his hair long and smooth beneath a bandanna, just as he had all through my childhood. I’d loved it when I was little, though not enough to try to grow my own out. Long hair on men was in at that time, and it suited my father’s angular Cherokee features. The rest of his clothing was conventional, nothing native about it, but his hair and cheekbones set him apart. He couldn’t have been older than I was now, if that.
I turned away from him when another car door slammed. A little girl, maybe five years old, came around the vehicle’s enormous hood from the passenger side, her palm flat against the hot gold-painted surface. Blunt-cut black bangs were nearly in green eyes, the sides of her bobbed hair hitting a baby-round face just at chin length. She stopped in front of the Oldsmobile’s left headlight and stared at me, defiant to the point of excluding curiosity. My stomach did another lurch and flip, though the reaction seemed in both cases to be my own; the dreamer wasn’t surprised or confused at all. How I could separate myself from the dreamer, I didn’t know, and for a moment teetered on the precipice of a mental death spiral about the philosophy of dreamers and dreams.
The kid saved me from it by thrusting her chin out and saying, “Hello. I’m Joanne.”
A thunderclap sounded, ripping the sky asunder. Starlight fell down from the blue, making a blazing path that ran from me and under the little girl’s feet, then farther and farther into a blazing future I couldn’t see. A coyote appeared before me, standing between little Joanne and myself, his every strand of fur so sharp and vivid it might have been etched in pure copper. He brought with him air too hot to breathe, the weight of it pressing down and making the sky turn white with expectation. I swallowed against the dryness in my throat, wondering how I kept my feet as he paced forward to stalk around the dreamer me. I watched him as best I could without moving more than my head, and when he’d made a full circle, he stopped and let out a single bark that broke the world in half.
A second path shot up out of the darkness that made up the earth’s insides. It ran at right angles from the first one, burning through the sand into a different future. I could see farther down that path: the little Joanne wasn’t in the way, and I got sparks of information: family, community respect, long life, satisfaction. I felt joy down that road, and a lot of years of laughter. Looking back at the other, all I could see was the little girl, so vivid and clear that nothing beyond her was visible.
Coyote sat down between the two paths, arranged his paws mathematically, and waited.
A warning of imminent danger splashed over me, darkness suddenly cutting through the brilliant sky and the brighter paths that lay before me. I flung a hand up, knowing which road I intended to travel, but before a step could be taken, a raven made of thin glowing white lines and avian grace fell down out of the sky and dug its claws into little Joanne’s shoulders.
CHAPTER 16
Agony knotted my shoulder muscles, just as if the raven’s talons had buried themselves in my flesh and not in young Joanne’s. I felt like I was being dragged skyward, the raven’s wings whispering against desert air that thinned and turned bluer as we rose into it. The world hollowed around me until it had cylindrical walls, just like the vision I’d had in the dance club. There was nowhere to go but up or down, and the raven kept climbing higher. I set my teeth together and tried not to either squirm or scream, afraid the former would get me dropped and figuring the latter to be pretty much pointless.
I didn’t know if a bird could actually wheeze from breathlessness, but by the time we broke out of the cylinder into a blue world, I had the impression that was exactly what the raven was doing. Well, I hadn’t asked it to haul my hundred-and-sixty-pound self through the sky.
As if in response, it dropped me and I tumbled down to the earth, bumping and whacking myself on mountains along the way. Clouds wafted above me when I finally came to a rest, lying on my back and staring up.
I’d called it a blue world, when we broke into it. Normally that would mean I’d been looking skyward, except I hadn’t been. I had no need to watch a raven’s butt as it hauled me around. I’d been looking down, and the mountains and the dirt and the plant life had all been different shades of cerulean.
The sky, it turned out, was also blue, though not a typical Middle World blue. It was a hard flat blue, dark enough in hue to be pushing dusk, except the sun burned down, blazing so white the edges of its corona were—I regretted the descriptor, but it was true: sky blue. I turned my head, looking for a horizon, expecting it to be like the Lower World’s horizon, like my last vision’s horizon: too close.
I found no horizon. There was instead a lithe, long cat staring at me. For a few critical seconds I forgot how to breathe, my heart clogging my throat and cutting off air. Another cat padded up, standing above me with the blueeyed curiosity of a wild animal. Another and another appeared, all of them watching me as if to see if I was about to become dinner. Their stomachs were pale, almost white, and their faces and the tips of twitching tails were dark.
Dark blue, actually. So was the rest of the fur on their bodies, paler blue instead of tawny like I expected it to be. Mountain lions didn’t come in blue, as far as I knew. Not cobalt and powder-blue, anyway, as if somebody’d carved them out of this strange sky and made them into cats with clouds for underbellies.
The first one, delicately, put a large paw onto my chest and pressed. I hadn’t been breathing, anyway, but the weight brought that home, and I gasped. He shifted forward, liquid movement that took his bulk from long hind legs and leaned it into me. This was not a spirit animal. I didn’t know what it was, but I felt pretty confident of that. It was something entirely Other, belonging to a world that wasn’t my own. Spots danced in my vision, blocking out his wide eyes.
Thin voices cried out from the mountains around me. I turned my head the other way with effort, to find other humans pinned to the ground in the same manner I was. Innumerable Prussian-colored cats leaned into uncountable people, squashing the life from them, and like me, they all seemed too frightened to fight back. I twisted my head forward again and wrapped my hands around the cougar’s paw, pushing back enough to drag in a lungful of air.
As if my inhalation called them down, sparrows flocked from the sky by the thousands, sparks of darting sapphire against the stillness of the dusky sky and blue-smoke mountains. For a moment I thought they would attack the cats, but instead they swept down to the captive humans, pecking and plucking at tender flesh and tasty eyes. The sky blotted into darkness from their numbers and from mortal screams.
Then the sky broke apart, fragile as an eggshell, and black poured in.
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I flung my hands up, half warding off sparrows and half as if I’d catch the sky. Power came without bidding, spilling from my hands as I pushed toward the pieces of sky as they fell. I tried to shore up the world, and it almost worked. For a few seconds destruction came to a halt, and the people around me cried out in gladness.
Then a huge whacking straw burst up through the heart of the world and shattered the remaining sky into a billion pieces. Sparrows and cats alike chittered and yowled with fear, springing away from the men they held captive and feasted upon. All around me, people scrambled to their feet and ran for the tube that pierced the sky, while I lay there heaving with a useless attempt to save the world.
Blue mountain broke apart beneath me and I fell a hundred miles, all the way back into my apartment. I was just about to hit my body at terminal velocity when I felt myself jerk, as if wings had spread, and popped back into myself just a little more gently than I’d expected. My shoulders ached. I pressed on one, trying to work the pain away, and encountered slight resistance and the fluttered offense of a man-handled bird. I even thought I heard an undignified squack of dismay, and looked up to find Gary gaping at me without the slightest apology.
“You got—it’s gone now—you had a—you had wings, Jo.”
“What, like an angel?” I slid my hand down my shoulder, half expecting to encounter angel wings.
He pushed his mouth out in exasperation. “Around your head, you crazy dame.”
Right where the raven had snagged me. I could feel its presence on my shoulder, claws dug in for purchase. It had no weight, just a peculiar thereness I couldn’t otherwise identify. “Gary, can you feel that tortoise?”
Gary drew himself up, mock dignity almost hiding the amused twinkle in his gray eyes. “Lady, I ain’t sure that’s the kinda question a nice girl asks an old man.”
“Gary!” I couldn’t get enough exasperation into my voice. It came out sounding like laughter. Gary let the twinkle overtake dignity and gave me a wicked smirk.
“I guess I kinda can,” he allowed, “if I think about it. I got kind of a sense of havin’ somebody watchin’ my back, like maybe I got that big ol’ shell keepin’ me safe. Why?”
I rolled my shoulder, seeing if I could dislodge the faint sense of having a bird clinging to it. I couldn’t. In fact, it hung on harder, so I stopped that nonsense. Well, I tried, anyway. I found myself still shifting around a bit, getting used to the idea of having somebody—or something—watching over me. “I think it worked.”
“That’s good, ain’t it?”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t like your spirit quest. Or the one I dreamed about. I had another…” I hesitated, frowning. “Dream, I guess. I didn’t think I was asleep.”
“You didn’t fall over,” Gary supplied helpfully. “What’d you dream?”
I shook my head and got to my feet, stretching out some of the stiffness of sitting still. “I dreamed about meeting my dad and me out in a desert someplace. I don’t know where. And I saw Big Coyote in the dream. He was giving me a choice of some kind, but then the raven grabbed me—the little me—and then—”
“Raven?” Gary turned my drum toward me so I could see the raven sheltering the rattlesnake and the wolf under its wings. I stared at the rich dye job and pressed my lips together, nodding. “Think somebody knew somethin’ you didn’t?”
“I don’t know, Gary.” I couldn’t even decide if I hoped the answer was yes or no. I’d had that drum since I was fifteen. The idea that somebody’d seen the potential for what I might become that long ago, without me ever knowing anything about it, made me both sad and nervous. “I don’t know,” I said again. “That didn’t exactly go like I thought it was going to.”
“Nothin’ ever does,” Gary said, far too cheerfully. “That’s how life is, Jo. You gotta run with the punches.”
I smiled. “You’re mixing your metaphors, old man.” Gary sniffed. “Mix a few words up and she starts callin’ me old. How you like that?” he asked of no one in particular, before shaking off his snit and adding, “So you got yourself a little spiritual protection goin’ on. That gonna be any use?”
“Honestly?” I dropped into the couch. “I have no idea.”
“Oh, good.” Gary put my drum aside, folding his hands behind his head. “I always like it when you got a nice solid game plan.”
I grinned despite myself and leaned against his rib cage, feeling like a big cat demanding attention. Reminded, I straightened before I got comfortable. “The world ended again. I forgot. The raven distracted me.”
“That s’posed to make sense?”
I gritted my teeth impatiently and tried once more, explaining the second part of the dream I’d had. “It was kind of like the vision at the dance club. The world—some world—came to an end and I couldn’t stop it.”
“Some world?”
“It wasn’t this one. It was like the Lower World, except not. I mean…” I screwed up my face. “Everything was blue. Everything. The first one was all kind of primary colors. So it was like the second one was more real, more like this, than the first, kind of. If that makes sense.” I was pretty sure it didn’t.
Gary harrumphed. “If they’re gettin’ realer, I guess that kinda gives us an idea of what we’re up against, don’t it?”
I leaned against his side again. “You always sound so cheerful about things like that. ’Hey, Gary, I saw the world ending.’ ’Great!’ I don’t know why you stick around in the face of that, but I’m glad you do.”
Gary put his arm over my shoulders and wrapped it over my collarbone to squeeze me, dropping a kiss on the top of my head. “How many times I gotta tell you, you’re the most interesting thing—”
“That’s happened to you since Annie died, I know.” I smiled. “I just think you must be crazy, the way you run with all this and just kind of let it come without freaking out.”
“Darlin’, you get to be my age, and you start figurin’ there’s two ways to take the world. One’s like it ain’t never gonna change and you’re not gonna, either. The other’s ta keep right on believing in six impossible things before breakfast. Guess I’d just rather do that.”
“Is that what Annie would’ve done, too?” I closed my eyes, inhaling the old man’s mellow scent. “I wish I’d met her.”
“Me, too. She woulda liked you, Jo. You woulda liked her.”
“I’d like anybody who could stay married to you for forty-eight years.”
“Harrumph.” Gary gave me another squeeze to let me know he didn’t mean it. “Always thought she was the practical one,” he said after a moment. I turned my cheek toward his chest, eyes still closed as I listened. “She was a nurse, didja know?”
“I think you told me,” I said with a nod. I felt Gary nod, too, pride coming into his voice.
“She said it was in case I never came back from the war, so she’d have somethin’ to do. I always thought it was so she could work with the little ones without bringin’ ’em home to remind me of what she couldn’t give me. Damn fool woman never did understand.” Sorrow mixed with pride by the end of his words and I squirmed around to put my arm over his chest and hug him.
“How come you didn’t adopt? I think you would’ve made a fantastic dad.” Gary had mentioned once, in passing, that Annie couldn’t have children. He didn’t know I’d seen more than that in a moment of revelation, seen the illness that had nearly claimed his wife’s life and had taken her ability to bear children instead. It was one of those things there was no less-than-awkward way to confess: sorry, Gary, but I accidentally spied on your history a couple days after we met.
Gary chuckled. “Annie was the breadwinner then. Me, I was wanderin’ around playin’ the trumpet at jazz clubs and drinkin’ too much. Guess we never thought we fit the right mold to adopt.”
I sat up, an incredulous smile blooming over my face. “Trumpet? You? Were you any good?”
“I was all right,” Gary said with such deprecation I suspected he’d be
en a lot better than all right. “Brought in enough spare cash to take Annie on some nice vacations.”
“You still play?”
Gary made a noise that sounded suspiciously like pshaw. I poked him in the ribs, grinning. “You do, don’t you? How come I don’t know this? What other secrets are you keeping?”
Gary gave me a white-toothed grin and shrugged his big shoulders, looking thirty years younger than the Hemingway wrinkles and white hair told me he was. “A fella’s gotta keep some secrets, Jo, or you’ll stop comin’ around.”
“I’m not the one who goes breaking into your house,” I pointed out. “You’re doing the coming around.” Gary looked not at all repentant, and I climbed off the couch, smiling as I looked for my cell phone. “Come on down to the car with me. I left the topaz and my phone there.” There was absolutely no good reason I couldn’t use the phone in the house, but Gary ambled down to Petite with me, anyway, and I dug a particularly nice piece of topaz out of the bag and handed it to him. He held it up to the light, and I dialed Morrison’s number into my phone. I hadn’t figured out how to program numbers into the phone’s auto-dial—or, more accurately, I hadn’t figured out how to make the stupid keypad give me the right letters so I could spell people’s names when it offered to store numbers for me—and so I still had to actually dial phone numbers. For someone who owned a Linux box at home instead of a Microsoft or Mac PC, that was an embarrassing failure in the technical department. I liked to imagine that memorizing numbers was a good mental exercise that would stand me well while all of my contemporaries’ brains turned to mush from lack of use.
“Walker.” Morrison spoke through gritted teeth before I even heard the connection go through. How I could tell his teeth were gritted, I wasn’t sure, unless I was just making the relatively safe assumption that if he was talking to me, his teeth were gritted. “Tell me you’ve got a better solution to my police force calling in sick than leaving pieces of rocks on people’s desks.”