by Jimmy Fox
The sunset had faded to a lavender glow in the west. Nick climbed the first flight within the steel frame of the tower, pausing on the pine-plank stairs to give his eyes time to adjust. It took concentration to sort real from floating false images, but he was beginning to get the hang of it. The dark square of the living quarters loomed above. He resumed his ascent.
With each flight the stairs changed directions. The forest slumbered around and below him. He glanced down and a sense of his altitude sucked his breath away for a moment. When his mind shook off its bout of acrophobia, he thought he detected a star pattern in the shadowy stair angles below.
Patterns reveal themselves, in human lives as in the physical world, only from the right perspective.
Nick emerged on a metal-mesh deck that surrounded what had once been the tower’s fire-observation room. The wind was stronger up here at the level of the treetops. The door to Nooj’s quarters was locked. Nick recalled that one of the Shawe twins had broken a window, but Nooj apparently had repaired it.
Genealogy wasn’t all paperwork; Nick sometimes needed to resort to the unorthodox, and, well, the slightly illegal. He’d acquired a lock pick that resembled the innocuous Mini Maglite he also carried on such questionable missions. The screwdriver-like, wavy-tipped blade extended, the lock pick became a different animal. He inserted the pick blade and the companion tension wrench into the doorknob keyhole. Working the pick with inexpert jiggles, in-and-out, up-and-down, he simultaneously turned the tension wrench . . . the knob yielded and the metal door opened.
Nick was careful to point his flashlight down as he assessed the roughly twenty-by-twenty room. A monkish place, a bit warmer than outside but not welcoming to visitors. He thought of Henry David Thoreau, building his cabin by Walden Pond “to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles,” making use of only the “necessaries of life.” If Nick was right, Nooj parted with Thoreau over the idea of nonviolent civil disobedience; his style was a more active form of protest: murder.
A couple of tables; three chairs; a squat cast-iron wood-burning stove; a kitchenette; a bed on the upper level of a prison-issue iron bunk set, the lower level converted into an open closet for Nooj’s uniforms and a few other belongings. Three shotguns and two rifles filled a gun rack on one wall. He saw no evidence of running water but noticed a clear plastic water jug, three-quarters full, upended in a dispenser. Except for the electricity that powered the small but obviously adequate space heater cooling now in a corner, the wildlife agent could have been living in the nineteenth century.
The storage area below the bed seemed the logical place to start. Nick pushed aside Nooj’s uniforms. Shoes, boots, fishing rods, stacks of Louisiana Conservationist, National Geographic, and Penthouse . . . could have been a Boy Scout’s closet.
Nick moved to the middle of the room. Something wasn’t right. A million ice ants charged up his back and neck and into his scalp. The wood-burning stove!
Why did he need a wood-burning stove? The kitchenette, the lights, the space heater . . . all electric. Could it be a heat backup, for outages, which probably happened here often as a result of falling limbs? Nooj was much tougher than that. Maybe it was a relic from a time when the place wasn’t wired. Why was there no visible chimney pipe exiting through the wall or ceiling?
In the capacious, ash-less belly of the stove Nick found three bundles carefully wrapped in what appeared to be deerskin suede.
In the first thin bundle he found an atlatl. Was it Tommy Shawe’s childhood toy, stolen from his garage the evening of the day Nooj and the rest of the tribe learned of federal recognition? Yes: a child’s hands had carved the word “Tommy” in the wood. Just a simple, forearm-sized stick, really—with an un-toy-like rock strapped by leather cords at the base below the spear socket. Nick envisioned an ancient hunter, in the company of other similarly armed men, snapping his atlatl forward and hurling a spear with deadly accuracy at that evening’s tribal entrée.
He was careful not to touch the atlatl. There could possibly be Nooj’s incriminating fingerprints on it. He knew full well that he was tampering with evidence; but he wasn’t a cop and didn’t have to follow the official, complex code. Not that cops always did, either. A lot could happen with evidence between crime scene and courtroom.
The second deerskin bundle contained an assortment of unmatched notebooks. Nick used the supple deerskin like a glove to flip pages. Four books were of relatively modern vintage, from the last fifty years or so. The fifth and others were much older, of worn canvas and peeling leather. Many different hands had written in them; the earliest entries were in poor French.
Death dates. Only death dates. Spanning a period of perhaps two hundred years. In each book the old core families had separate sections, the Bellarmines, Nooj’s mother’s family, included. There was also a section for the Cheneries. It was clear to Nick that the Cheneries should be considered the seventh core family; though elusive in official records, they had in fact maintained a constant local presence. Other pages handled more numerous non-core families who moved in and out of the Cutpine area, including many names Nick hadn’t encountered in his research. When the last member of a family died, the chronicler used the same transliterated phrase, in the Roman letters of the white conquerors: BAH-UA CU-BISH-NAW-A. Nick presumed that these words were Quinahoa, some expression of triumph from the lost ancestral language of the defeated and enslaved tribe, though he had no inkling of the exact meaning.
The pen strokes of each of the writers infused the phrase with exultation. That needed no translation. He understood the human emotions that crossed ethnic boundaries and millennia, that seemed to make the notebooks glow with oppressed pride and hot vengeance in the murky fire tower. The Cheneries were ghoulish reverse family historians, not celebrating the triumph of life through the generations, but watching with silent, bitter satisfaction as the Katogoula tribe staggered toward extinction.
Nooj was apparently the last archivist of the Quinahoa blood grudge, the lonely guardian of his lost tribe’s honor, the keeper of the flame of hate. And in a stove, at that. Nick scanned one of the oldest notebooks and saw the handwriting of one chronicler give way to that of the next, the passing of the torch confirmed by death dates in the Chenerie section. Nooj was continuing the tradition, with a new twist: no longer watching with passive detachment, but helping along the slow process of gradual death of an entire tribe. And the question formed in his mind: had past Cheneries merely watched, and nothing more?
Tommy and Brianne and their three children were recorded, with a dash after their names; so too were all the other living Katogoula in the Cutpine area. Nooj had duly noted the death dates of Carl Shawe and the Dusongs; he’d judged them for a past they had no hand in creating, using collective guilt to sentence them all to death.
No one should have such power, Nick thought, a hot surge of anger causing him to rip a page as he turned it.
Nick let his imagination touch and probe the discovery he had made. He surmised that some Cheneries apparently wished even for the disappearance of their own name, as they secretly reveled in the larger tribal decay. In the minds of the true believers of the family—Nooj’s father’s line, the keepers of these notebooks—they had been polluted by the Katogoula, even though against their will, and no longer felt deserving of life. Other Cheneries, ignorant or scornful of the sick vigilance of their kin, had insisted on reproducing, continuing the line. Thus Nooj was born. He’d written his own name and a dash in the most recent Chenerie section—confirming his own contract with oblivion.
Where had it started? With a Chenerie Katogoula warrior who fell in love with a Quinahoa concubine, ten or more generations ago? Was it she who injected the venom of vengeance? From then on, had this Chenerie branch devoted itself to uniting with other families having Quinahoa blood? Nick felt the truth of his theory: in Nooj, the bloodline had been bred back to pure hatred.
Nooj surely knew his ancestors by heart, probably to a time even be
fore these written records. Nick remembered their conversation at Three Sisters Pantry; he’d had the feeling then that the wildlife agent was selling him a bill of goods in claiming that his grandfather was “kind of an orphan.” Was he observing the ancient Quinahoa naming taboo? Hoping to put the snooping genealogist off his trail? Probably both.
Stacking the notebooks in order and rewrapping them, Nick wondered how the Chenerie sentinels had felt about Katogoula who left the Cutpine band and entered other cultures. He supposed they had their own qualifications for tribal disaffiliation, just as all tribes have rules for joining. Once a Katogoula married outside the tribe, left Cutpine and surrendered his Katogoula heritage by jumping into the mainstream, he was lost—and the ancient debt was paid—as surely as if he’d died childless. Nick had noticed many names with lines drawn through them, sprinkled throughout the notebooks; these must have been the Katogoula who turned their backs on their ancestral way of life.
The third bundle, a very fat one, contained the cache of Katogoula records that Tommy’s father had assembled, also stolen from the Shawes’ garage closet. There couldn’t be much doubt about that, now. Nick recalled Tommy saying that Brianne had forgotten to look for the papers that wild afternoon, as he had asked her to do just before rushing off to meet with Chief Rafe Claude at the Chitiko-Tiloasha casino. Nick was wowed: this was a crucial collection of family-history documentation the BIA either had never received or had lost, for he had had no luck obtaining copies of this material from the agency, though he had gotten other valuable information.
Nooj must have seen the certainty of the tribe’s humiliating destruction snatched away from him the day word came of recognition. This blew his small private flame into a raging forest fire. And it was then that he began his last-ditch campaign to break the spirit of the tribe and halt its progress toward growth and prosperity.
He robbed the Katogoula of priceless genealogical material, terrorized them with impersonations of an angry spirit, framed the tribal leader with the death of his own brother, burned the museum and in the process killed the Dusongs, extinguishing two more Katogoula lines. It almost worked, too. The tribe members by now were terrified and interpreted their recent luck as the reason for the plague of misfortune. Who would join a tribe so cursed? Luevenia Silsby, motivated by her own secrets, unintentionally aided Nooj’s plan.
Nick wondered if Nooj, undetected, never satisfied with his psychological warfare, would have murdered the whole tribe in time, as Sheriff Higbee had suggested.
The sound of a truck engine echoed distantly through the dark forest.
Nick quickly rewrapped and replaced the last bundle in the stove, killed his flashlight, and groped his way toward the open door, straining to listen over his incredibly noisy breathing.
He’d never noticed how much racket the human machine makes.
What were his options? Stay in the tower, try to find a phone or radio in the darkness? No. He’d be trapped, on Nooj’s home turf. Help would take too long to arrive at this desolate place. He’d take his chances down there on the ground—chances he made a bit more even by grabbing a pump shotgun from the wall rack and a handful of shells from a box on the table below. A shell dropped on the pine-plank floor; the noise boomed through the forest.
Great. You’re going to get yourself killed, klutz!
He fumbled with three shells until the gun swallowed them. The hunting regulations booklet had mentioned something about a magazine “plug” that limited the number of shells. Nooj, law-abiding homicidal maniac.
Outside on the catwalk, he heard nothing alarming, a fact which failed to put him at ease. He started down the stairs. Nick hadn’t fired a gun in thirty years. His father, who’d fought into Germany with General McAuliffe—of Bastogne and “Nuts!” fame—had always tried to familiarize him with guns, “In case we get another Hitler,” he often said. Nick hated hunting and thew up the first and only time he killed anything with a gun—a turtle.
He prodded sleeping pathways of memory, hoping to awaken some boyhood shooting lesson that might save him.
Starlight and a silver sliver of moon rising in the pines guided his steps. Halfway down, now. The light at the bottom of the tower! It was not casting its feeble illumination. It had been switched off. Through his racing heartbeat, he heard nothing but calming insect cadences.
He took the final steps down and crept watchfully into the pine-straw covered clearing where Nooj probably parked his department pickup. No truck. That was good.
He glanced up at the dark tower behind him and let out a breath of relief. Nothing to worry about, he decided, chuckling at his earlier skittishness. He was alone, except for the spirits of departed Katogoula, Yaknelousa, and Quinahoa warriors, fighting their bloody battle until the end of time.
Now his main problem was getting back to his car, which he’d hidden in the woods on a rutted logging trail that split off from the well-maintained gravel road that ran from the parish highway to the fire tower.
He wouldn’t need the shotgun, after all. Lucky thing; he’d probably just end up shooting himself. Maybe he should go back up, search a few minutes longer, and return the gun, the absence of which would surely alert Nooj that—
Something thwacked into the gunstock, very close to his hand. Nick instinctively crouched low. He looked down: a feathered blowgun dart the size of a pencil had burrowed itself into the wood of the stock. He heard another dart whiz past his head.
Then the pine curtains of darkness parted and a large animal raced toward him. It was cloaked in strange blue phosphorescence from the sky, moving rapidly but in jerks, as if in a video missing every tenth frame. In an awful moment of recognition, Nick knew this was the Sacred Cougar!
Animal, man, or spirit? . . . Nick didn’t have the luxury of time to find out. He fired once and tried to pump the next shell into the chamber. But the thing already had him by the throat. They both went down on the pine straw. The shotgun went flying.
Using his good left arm, Nick punched, clawed, and poked his attacker with every ounce of strength he could muster.
Liquid, metallic and hot! He felt and smelled blood on his hands and face. Whose, he didn’t know.
Nick and the thing rolled over several times. The heavy beast crunched down on him, compressing his injured collarbone, shoulder, elbow, and ribs into a throbbing nucleus of agony. He yelped reflexively and lashed out savagely with his left fist, hitting a whiskered, toothy snout. The animal seemed stunned—but only for a moment.
A moment was all it took for Nick to realize he had a weapon within reach. The lock pick! And then he had the tool in his hand, driving the sharp shaft over and over again into the furry back of his attacker.
More hot, slippery blood leaked onto his hands.
The cougar shook him off, stood up abruptly, and then fell backward. Panting and groaning, it got to all fours. Nick was certain he’d hurt it.
“Nugent Chenerie!” he shouted, frantically searching the straw for the shotgun. “I know it’s you. Nooj, listen, it’s over! We know what you’re trying to do, and we’re not afraid anymore. Stop the killing! Don’t add to the tragedy of the Quinahoa with the death of more innocents. The battle ended long ago. You can’t change it!”
Nick saw the glint of Nooj’s badge below the cougar skin . . . or was it his pistol? Was it Nooj? Such questions were academic now. He kicked at the threatening metal and felt thudding contact.
On his feet now, he ran blindly into the unimaginable evil of the dark forest.
CHAPTER 35
Deep in Tadbull woods, Wooty nervously waited in the night’s inscrutable blackness on the porch of his family’s disused, rustic hunting cabin. He heard something.
A backfire? A shot?
He couldn’t be sure. “Damnit!” he muttered. He’d chosen the instant before the distant noise to lay his pistol and flashlight beside him on the dusty boards, and that closer commotion had masked what he thought he’d heard. Now he sat on the porch ledge, his back
to a thick old cypress post, tapping his shoes in the pine straw, listening, his jumpy right hand ready to grab for the gun. Though he’d given up smoking, he now drew deeply from the fourth cigarette of his vigil. When that one burned down to the filter, he used it to light the next one.
It was thirty-three minutes past nine o’clock. He’d pressed the night-light on his watch so many times the battery was weakening. Except for that noise a few minutes ago, Tchekalaya Forest slept restlessly.
His contacts were already an hour late. Three guys—he knew only the first name of one who’d made the trip before—were supposed to pick up the marijuana he’d stored in the old cistern here at the cabin, and then drive it on to a secret airfield, God knows where. He didn’t want to know that, either.
The cylindrical cistern hulked on stilt legs in the shadows to his right. Wooty imagined it as a fat, fifteen-foot-tall forest jester chuckling quietly at all the things that could go wrong.
He’d made some stupid decisions in his life, but this took the cake. He hated this drug-running idiocy, and it had taken external events to open his eyes. That bothered him, that he still lacked the maturity and savvy to figure things out for himself. He would have to get smart fast, if he wanted to run with the big dogs, Bayles and his crowd.
Anyway, this would be the last time, thanks to Nick and Holly.
Holly . . . he’d almost lost her today, on the Golden Trace. Earlier tonight, holding her naked body against him, he vowed to himself never to let her go again. They would leave this place of stagnation and death, he promised her; and she said she wanted only to be with him, wherever he went, whatever he did. Together they would chase the dream held out by state senator Augustus Bayles.
And then she’d raised holy hell when he wouldn’t let her join him on this final job. Luckily, she was exhausted and didn’t have all of the usual fight in her. She’d played gin rummy with his father, who was delighted to have a beautiful woman in the house, even though she beat the pants off him in every game; and now she slept in Wooty’s bed at Tadbull Hall, the television her babysitter. He ached to return to her strong embrace.