by Jimmy Fox
“What’s that?” Nick asked, pointing with his good arm to a man-made structure peeking over the tree line, about half a mile away.
“It’s an old fire tower. Nooj Chenerie lives there, believe it or not.”
“The Wildlife and Fisheries enforcement agent? Yeah, I believe it.”
“Um-hmm,” she responded, swallowing some of her cookie. “The Agriculture and Forestry Department relies on aircraft and satellites mostly now. Nooj is a loner, doesn’t like people very much, white or Indian. Perfect guy to keep vandals out of an unused tower and keep watch on the forest, too. Louisiana government’s really a big game show of brother-in-law deals.”
“He and Carl sound a lot alike,” Nick said.
“Carl I could take. Usually.” She looked at the tower as if it were going to stride over the trees and crush them. “Nooj gives me the creeps. He’s always showing up where you don’t expect him, quiet as a cat.” She shrugged and nibbled more cookie. “But who am I to criticize? He’s devoted to the tribe. Volunteers a lot of his time for tours and fairs where the Katogoula have a booth. I don’t think he’s wild about the casino idea, but he’ll have to learn to like it, I suppose.”
Nick was sitting against a pine trunk. She scooted over to him and leaned against his chest, careful not to press too hard against his injuries.
“You be Cary Grant and I’ll be Grace Kelly,” she said, “in that scene from To Catch a Thief, the picnic on the Riviera. I love that.”
“I’m driving back, then. Remember the car chase before the picnic?”
“Very funny. You’re helpless with just one arm.”
“Oh, yeah?” He kissed her.
She dropped her cookie, reached back and caressed his head.
With his good arm just under her breasts, he gathered her to him with a need that was more than sexual, one he hadn’t felt in a long time.
They didn’t notice the momentary flash of reflected sunlight from the dark eyes of the fire tower.
CHAPTER 19
“Look! I’m big chief of the mountain!” shouted eleven-year-old Matt Shawe with triumphant glee.
He’d ridden his horse to the top of a burial mound, one of six fifteen-foot-high grassy hillocks dotted with struggling dogwood, persimmon, redbud, and the odd lightning-blasted oak.
Sam, Matt’s twin brother, and his horse had lagged behind in the race through the grassy meadow, and now they arrived, both considerably winded, at the foot of the mound.
“Matt, you better come down from there.”
“Why? You afraid of ghosts!?” In a defiant challenge to any invisible beings, Matt made his horse strut around the relatively flat top of the mound. “It’s daytime, stupid. Ghosts don’t come out in the light.”
“Dad said it’s like church, remember. Sacred, sort of like. Come on down. You’re gonna get us in trouble.”
“Oh, okay, chicken. Baaawk, bawk, bawk, bawk!” Flapping his elbows in added derision of his brother, Matt urged his horse down the mound, impatient with her careful steps. “Baaawk, bawk, bawk, bawk!”
These were Mr. Tadbull’s fine horses. The old man got a kick out of letting the boys do some easy chores on the weekends and go out for a ride.
A tributary bayou of larger Bayou Fostine ran through the thick forest at the western boundary of the meadow, where hardwood trees were more prevalent than pine. The twins headed there to give the horses a drink and to enjoy the snacks their mother, Brianne, had packed for them.
As the boys entered the dense stand of trees, the muffled thud of hooves gave way to the din of leaves and other forest litter being crushed. Their mounts seemed nervous.
“What’s with these stupid horses?” Matt complained aloud, ducking for a low limb.
With the motiveless cruelty of adolescence, he kicked his horse too harshly. But the more he kicked, the more his horse balked, tossed her head, and stamped her feet.
“Maybe they’re not thirsty,” Sam said from behind. He took a piece of apple from his pocket and reached around to offer it to his horse. She refused it.
“Horses are always thirsty, buttface,” Matt sneered.
Sam’s mount saw the cougar first, as it jumped from a tree between the two horses. Before Sam could shout a warning, she reared up and threw him to the leaf-carpeted forest floor.
Matt’s horse turned her head, got a glimpse of the crouching cat, wheeled, and then bolted off at full, wide-eyed gallop toward the closest curve of the meadow. “Whoa!” Matt shouted over and over again, but it didn’t do any good. He clung for his life to her neck, his feet slapping the horse’s sides. Saplings lashed his face as he desperately searched for the stirrups, looking down perilously on one side and then on the other of his panicked mount, but he kept missing the flailing foot supports.
Sam had landed with one leg underneath him. His ankle was badly twisted. He got to his feet, limped to a nearby tree, and watched, horrified, as Matt and his horse, now fifty yards away, moving much too quickly for safety, weaved through the trees and sailed over fallen trunks and overgrown stumps. Just a few more yards and they would make the clearing. And then Matt could come back and together they’d go round up Sam’s spooked horse. Sam, aware now of building pain, knew he’d have to go to a doctor, have his ankle examined.
He was thinking of big needles and hanging bags of fluids in an emergency room, when he focused on his brother again. It was, Sam thought, as if someone had a rope attached to Matt and suddenly yanked it taut. Sam knew that what had really happened was that the horse had ducked, but that a low magnolia limb had caught Matt, stopping him instantly in midair.
The collision had happened so quickly it seemed to take Sam’s mind an eternity to catch up with it.
Matt hung on the limb for a moment longer before falling limply to the ground.
Sam tried to run, but it hurt too much. He skipped from tree to tree, until finally he reached his brother. Matt was curled up and didn’t seem to be breathing. His face and neck on one side were bloody; fragments of teeth and more blood littered his split lips.
“Matt! Matt! Don’t be dead, Matt!”
On his knees beside his brother, Sam put an ear to Matt’s chest. At that moment, Matt gasped, his wind back; he started to moan.
Sam was crying with joy now, for this was a good sign. His brother was alive!
“Don’t move, Matt. Stay there. I’ll catch a horse. Just don’t move, all right. You might have something broken. I’m going for help!”
Sam stood up and wiped the tears from his downy cheeks. He spotted the horses in the meadow, grazing in tandem, muscles quivering and tails wildly thrashing, the reins hanging loose. They occasionally raised their heads to sniff for danger.
Only now did he think about the big cougar, and his fear returned. The rumors of angry spirits walking the forest were true! If it was an animal, it could be defeated or killed. But this . . . this was the Sacred Cougar! He trembled at the memory of its awesome size and speed, its ability to appear and disappear at will; and with each moment the supernatural beast grew more fearsome in his youthful imagination.
From the Sacred Cougar, there was no escape. The tribe would suffer until it was appeased. He no longer doubted the truth of the stories his grandfather and father had told him and Matt.
Sam had to get help, and he had to warn his father. The tribe was doing something wrong, the way he and Matt had desecrated the old mounds. He’d been only vaguely interested in the big controversy swirling around the casino question, but he knew now with an inexplicable certainty that this is what had awakened the angry spirits of the forest, which had killed his Uncle Carl.
In religion class at the Catholic church serving the tribe—CCD, the class was called, Confraternity of Christian Doctrine—Sam had heard the stories about children who’d seen visions of Mother Mary or Christ. He’d never paid much attention to those legends or, for that matter, to the words and actions of adults in general; it all seemed designed just to trick you, to get you to do what
the adults wanted. But from today on, he understood so much more. In an instant he’d become a man, and he’d been given a glimpse of ultimate truth.
Isaiah’s prophecy “And a little child shall lead them” rang in his ears, filling him with a strength he didn’t know he had. Was he now a divine messenger? Would they teach the story of his epiphany in CCD one day?
Sam hopped and limped into the clearing, holding out a piece of apple for his horse and softly calling her name.
CHAPTER 20
Flames clawed through the flat roof of the Katogoula Museum. History went up in smoke, billowing into the soft blue sky framed by towering pines.
“Grace! Irton!” Holly shouted through cupped hands over the crackling tumult of the fire. “Where are they?!”
“Not in there, I hope!” Nick shouted back.
Power lines had melted and fallen away; a transformer bellowed warnings through the forest that a vital circuit was forever broken, and that one wrong step would bring instant death.
As soon as Nick and Holly had seen the thick smoke from Lookout Point, they hopped back into the clothes they had already taken off, halfway through the process of seducing each other. Minutes later, they were running down the Golden Trace, back to the burning museum, Holly in front, and behind her a suffering Nick, holding his bad right arm close to his chest.
“The office!” Holly sprinted past the front entrance. Panes of window glass exploded in her path. She hit the ground on her knees, her hands over her face.
Instantly, Nick crouched down with her. “How bad?”
Pinpricks and then streams of blood appeared on her cheeks where the glass had sprayed her.
“I’m okay. I think.” She touched her face to check out the damage. Her hand came away covered in blood. “Yeah, I’m okay. Had my eyes closed in time. From the look you’re giving me, though, I must be bleeding like a stuck pig. Come on!” Now she was up, running again toward the office, blood from her knees beginning to stain the rips in her jeans.
They reached the side room that served as Grace and Irton’s office. The windows were still intact, closed and securely locked.
Holly put her face against the window and then shielded her brows with her hands to lessen the outside glare.
“I see them, on the floor!” Her cheeks left bloody smears on the smoke-blackened glass, which now was more mirror than window.
“If we break it, the fire could spread,” Nick warned.
“We don’t have a choice. Find a rock, anything!”
Nick found a baseball-size rock and with his left arm hurled it hard through the window. He winced and groaned involuntarily. His rapid movements had set off waves of deep, gnawing anguish in his right shoulder and elbow.
Brown smoke the consistency of liquid chalk poured from the broken window and rose, in seeming defiance of gravity, to join the dense cloud above the building. Heat had denuded the branches of surrounding pines to a level of seventy feet.
Holly, in a black tank T-shirt, used her sweater wrapped around a hand to knock out the remaining shards of glass. “I’m going in. No!—don’t argue! No time. You can’t lift them with that shoulder. Can you pull them out if I get them in the window?”
Nick gave a brisk nod, not sure if he could, and began unbuttoning his shirt. “Use this.”
She quickly helped him out of it, and Nick tied the sleeves around her mouth and nose. Then he squatted down, offering the shelf of his thigh as her foothold. He was careful to keep his distance from a group of sharp yucca behind him.
“Watch the spears,” he said.
“I hate those things.” Holly confidently stepped up on Nick’s leg and then catapulted herself into the smoke-dense room.
He hadn’t known he loved her, had thought the fresh bud of infatuation was reserved for the young; the sudden realization now came as a shock, obliterating even his fear for her safety, his anxiety over the condition of Grace and Irton, and his sorrow for the loss of irreplaceable objects that would never again provide a dim pathway to the past.
“Holly?!” he cried out. “Holly!”
No reply from inside. It had been only seconds, but to Nick it seemed like eons.
He heard muffled coughing, and then Holly shouting, “I have them!”
A limp, gnarled hand, and then two, appeared at the window. The rest of Grace Dusong followed. Nick got under her heavy, inert body, propping her on his good shoulder. Bayonets of yucca gored him in the buttocks and bare back. He jumped away in startled pain and his knees buckled. Grace fell on top of him.
Nick rolled her over. The smoke had blackened her. He scarcely recognized the pleasant woman; most of her brindled tresses had been singed away, and her bright hair band was now merely a shriveled black rubber band. He searched for a pulse, but didn’t find one. He tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and chest compression. After a dizzying minute he stopped; he didn’t really know what he was doing. He spat out the foul taste of smoke and burned flesh and hair he’d picked up from Grace’s hot, lifeless lips.
“Nick! Help!” was all Holly could say, before a racking, uncontrollable cough gripped her. She stood at the window, gasping for fresh air, but her lungs demanded to expel what they had breathed of the conflagration. Still coughing violently, she pushed Irton through the window, and he fell the four feet to the ground. One of his sneakers caught on the yucca; he appeared to be walking up an invisible wall.
Nick helped Holly from the burning building. As she bent over, hands on bloody knees, continuing to retch and cough, he clumsily dragged Irton over to his wife.
Maybe they would walk together in another world, but not in this one, Nick thought, looking down at the Dusongs.
Nick led Holly past the two bodies. Leaning heavily on him, she stared at them but didn’t seem to understand. Her face was covered with soot, except for the relatively clear band where his shirt had been. The blood on her cheeks had coagulated a bit. Black trails below her nostrils gave evidence of the noxious fumes she’d inhaled, in spite of the shirt. She looked like a raccoon; at another time he would have laughed.
Her singed hair bristled out in every direction. She grabbed a hank and smelled it. “Yeccchh! Gross. I’ll have to cut all this off.” Her voice betrayed the dissociation of the traumatized. Then she threw up.
Nick maneuvered her to a park bench. “Lie down. I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?” But she didn’t press him for an answer; she had lapsed into exhausted semi-consciousness.
The office ignited with a great inrush of air. Flames shot out of the window like rocket exhaust. Sirens wailed in the distance.
Nick touched Holly’s blackened, bloodied cheeks. She had imperiled herself for these two lives; he would take a risk, too, for the life of a people. He knew she would do it, if she could.
He ran around the other side of the crumbling stucco building. He made a quick determination of where the Twins-Raccoon Bowl would be, moved to the right, and then started kicking the wall with his remaining strength. After a few tries that cracked away the stucco, he sat down, put his hip behind a kick, and drove the crepe sole of one of his already beat-up leather chukkas through. He heard a display case crash inside and hoped it wasn’t the one he wanted.
Working stucco, boards, and old insulation loose, he managed to widen the hole he’d made. The fire inside seemed to have started in the back of the building, and that area was completely engulfed in red-and-yellow chaos. This side of the interior was still relatively intact, though Nick could feel intense heat. The big pirogue a few feet closer to the back of the building was an elongated bowl of flame. How long before an explosive outbreak, triggered by the oxygen he’d just let in?
Shaking off his fear, he crawled inside. His whole right side from waist to shoulder was killing him. He scarcely noticed the rusty nails scraping his bare torso. But he’d guessed correctly: the bowl was waiting, almost within reach. The heat was beginning to barbecue his skin. He picked up a piece of smoldering lum
ber, and broke the glass on the display case. The bowl was his. He stowed it in his sling, where his arm should have been, and wriggled again through the hole in the wall.
Only his feet and calves were inside when that section of the interior exploded.
He crawled quickly in tripod fashion away from the building. The hair on his legs from his knees to his socks was mere foul-smelling stubble. He scraped up handfuls of dirt and smothered the spreading sparks eating away at the fabric of his khakis and shoelaces.
He was lucky—he’d saved the bowl. Without it, what myth of contrarieties would the tribe lean on in this tragic hour?
The enigmatic Katogoula twins of good and evil danced with moody raccoons in a timeless circle, offering no easy answers to mortals’ questions.
Nick lolled back on a gentle upward slope of cool grass and stared at the expanding cloud of smoke. He was only vaguely aware of the diesel growl of emergency vehicles swarming into the parking lot.
CHAPTER 21
The crew from the parish coroner’s office loaded body bags containing the remains of Grace and Irton Dusong into a white van dwarfed by fire trucks. Deflated hoses snaked from the small parking lot to the dripping, reeking, charred shell of the Katogoula Museum. As usual with suspicious deaths occurring in this rural part of Louisiana, the autopsies would be performed in Bossier City, adjacent to Shreveport, two hours north.
Watching the van drive slowly away, Nick was sorry the Vulture Cult no longer existed, to give the innocent couple a dignified, if by modern standards grotesque, ritual burial, instead of the further violation of a cold steel table and the prying hands of strangers.
It was late afternoon, three hours after the firemen had extinguished the last flames. Sheriff Higbee and his detectives were certain that the fire had been deliberately set.
“Spalling,” Big John had said to Nick earlier, as he pointed out the pockmarking on the concrete in the utility area behind the museum. “And up here on the wood, we got what they call alligatoring—see these rolling blisters. This kind of char pattern pretty well shouts out somebody used an accelerant. It got mighty hot, mighty fast, before the fire took its normal course. Now who would want to do that, I wonder? It was just poor old Grace and Irton. They never hurt anybody in their lives.” He let out a gargantuan sigh. “Tell me again what color the smoke was you saw.”