by Jimmy Fox
He didn’t see a way out of this. His breath condensed before him and rose into the cold night sky. He envied its freedom from the doomed prison of his body.
Was he going to end up like Carl Shawe and Travis Corbett, nailed to a tree, a martyr to a murderer’s genealogical obsession? Or like the Dusongs, but smothering in another elemental force, water in place of fire? He’d rather take his chances swimming. His pursuer, though probably injured, had the advantage in these woods. Yeah . . . it seemed worth a shot. He was a good swimmer, or used to be. Maybe he could make it to the closest duck blind—fifty, seventy-five yards?—without being detected. Did he have the strength? How cold was the water? What if his attacker followed him?
He’d always heard that drowning was peaceful, as ways of death go.
He waded in, and the frigid shallows crawled up his calves.
A hand covered his mouth. He felt himself being spun around.
“Quiet! I don’t know how close he is,” Wooty said, his voice scarcely a murmur above the lake sounds. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I . . . I think so, aside from the fact that I’m running on empty. Nooj, or whoever, is chasing me. He’s wounded. I shot him and stabbed him.”
“What the hell you need me for then?” Wooty asked sarcastically. “Miss Luevie—my mother—told me about how you uncovered her secret. I’m beginning to think you’re the spirit walking these woods. . . . We were together when we heard you were in trouble. Let’s get to some cover. I’m hoping the sheriff ’ll be here soon.”
“No spirit,” Nick said through chattering teeth. “I’m very human tonight, and I want to keep it that way. What about hiding in one of those duck blinds?”
“I got a better idea.”
Wooty told him that Carl Shawe usually kept several pirogues hidden around the lakeshore, to accommodate his illegal activities. Wooty confessed that he had sometimes hunted, fished, and trapped with Carl, outside of the law. Their best bet was to find one of the dugout canoes and head for the landing on the far side of the lake, about a mile’s journey. They could then make a run for the highway and the nearest residence.
Wooty pointed to some brush nearby. “Come on. It’s shallow enough to walk. Hasn’t been enough rain this year. There! There it is!”
Nick saw the vague shape of the crude wooden boat, wedged into the grass and clay of the shoreline. If walking across the water Sacred Cougar–style was out of the question, he’d settle for a less spectacular miracle that kept him alive.
A gunshot shattered the darkness. Wooty crumpled.
Nick crouched down, searching the shore. He saw the shadowy shape of the cougar and the gleam of a handgun in its extended arm. It began splashing unsteadily toward him.
“My gun,” Wooty gasped from the water. “In the . . . holster. Gun.” He was silent.
Nick yanked off his Russell chukkas and arranged them under Wooty’s head. High-tops: a bit stodgy in the fashion department and bearing scorches from the museum fire, but right now they seemed positively brilliant! The extra inches would keep the injured man’s mouth and nose above the water—if he was still alive.
Then Nick found the holster and Wooty’s pistol. It was wet, slippery, unfamiliar. He tried to pull back the slide, but this was too much for him. The cold, his exertion, and his aggravated old injuries had turned him into a veritable infant, lacking adult strength. He cursed the frailty of the human body as he fought to make his hands and arms obey.
He looked up. The cougar was standing fifteen feet away, staggering from side to side on rubber legs. Like a drunk tightrope walker struggling for balance, the cougar waved its gun arm in a wild meaningless pattern, which tightened and tightened until the oscillations ceased.
Nick stared into the deadly void within the silver ring of the barrel.
Using both thumbs against the hammer of Wooty’s pistol, he finally was able to cock it. Was there a bullet in the chamber? Was the safety on or off ?
He raised the gun and drew a wobbly bead on the advancing cougar.
CHAPTER 39
Luevenia Silsby dropped to her knees in the muddy clay of the lake-shore. She had never seen a god before, and here was one thirty feet in front of her.
She stared through tears at the Sacred Cougar walking on the surface of Lake Katogoula, standing over the carcass of the deer it was offering to the wandering, weary tribe. She’d heard the story hundreds of times, but it had never moved her as the real thing did now.
Was this the real thing? Had she traveled back centuries, millennia, to the era of her ancestors? Was this a sign that she’d been chosen for some special role, like her priestly forebears of the Vulture Cult? Devout Catholic though she was, no saint’s tale or church service or claim of a weeping garden statue had ever made her feel this way, thrilled by the immediate presence of the divine.
And if the ancient gods were not dead, then maybe Nick Herald was wrong about Nooj, wrong about many things. What if . . . what if he was indeed the evil that had turned everything upside down, as she’d once suspected?
No. This is all illusion.
She shook her head and closed her eyes, blotting out the false vision on the sparkling lake. As much as she wanted to believe in this epiphany, she knew it was a lie. Love cleared her mind, steeled her certainty. Love for Wooty. She had come to the lake to protect her son. He was her religion now. And he was out there, too. Which was he, the crouching, moving one or the stretched out, motionless figure?
She stood up and aimed the shotgun two inches above the cougar, high enough, she calculated, to avoid scattering shot on the two shapes in the shallow water below. The first shell held pellets intended for small game. But it could kill.
She squeezed the trigger. The gun barked and she leaned into the mild kick of recoil.
The cougar jolted forward, but righted itself and turned toward her.
This time she aimed only fractionally above the cougar’s head. Her second shell was loaded with a slug, a lump of lead that could fell a deer at fifty yards. At this short distance, gravity would pull the quarter-ounce projectile down only slightly.
She fired.
The cougar fell backward into the water.
Timeless peace, like omnipotent death, settled again upon the lake, as bloody ripples murmured ancient funeral rites on the shoreline.
CHAPTER 40
“The new Katogoula Tribal Center,” Tommy Shawe said, spreading his arms out as if to embrace the future. The circles under his eyes were as dark as ever, but a pure childlike joy radiated from the eyes themselves.
Nick thought about the contrast of sadness and elation Tommy’s face presented, and decided it was a perfect metaphor for the Katogoula’s month of terror, which had ended with the death of Nugent Chenerie, two weeks before this cool, bright mid-November day.
Katogoula men and women hammered and wielded power tools and poured concrete and slathered mortar between bricks.
“By summer, we’ll be in,” Tommy shouted over the shriek of a circular saw. “In time to celebrate the Green Corn Ceremony here.”
The ceremony had its roots in prehistory and once marked the beginning of the Katogoula year. It was a renewal on a personal and communal level. In the distant days when the ancient traditions still reigned, tribe members prayed to their gods for a good harvest, sought reconciliation with the living and the dead, and expelled the past year’s demons.
Nick particularly liked the expulsion-of-demons part.
Tommy turned away from Nick and Sheriff Higbee and gazed at the burial mounds, not far away across the grassy meadow. The tribal center would face the ancestral graves. Tommy rubbed his eyes now and then, and Nick and Big John noticed his stubby pony tail shaking as he tried to regain control of his emotions. He had let his fair hair and beard grow; as with the rest of the tribe, his outward appearance was evolving, mirroring the growth of Katogoula identity inside. He looked like a sane version of his brother, Carl, people said teasingly around Three Sisters Pantry.
“That Atlantic City company wanted to put the casino here. Right here!” Tommy said, his tone a mixture of exasperation and wonder at how close they’d come to selling their souls for a few casino chips. “I called them right after I got re-elected tribal president. Those Vegas and Tahoe folks, too. Told them all to shove it up their ass. It took the deaths of my brother and the Dusongs and all the other bad things that happened to show us our blood is way more than just a jackpot.”
Nick didn’t want to spoil the moment by mentioning the dark debt owed to Nooj Chenerie. Through his rampage of retribution, Nooj, descendant of proud warriors as well as humiliated slaves, had taught his enemies to fight for their heritage, but not to live in self-destructive bondage to the past. Nooj, as, in a way, the most recent incarnation of the Sacred Cougar, proved to the Katogoula that they could provide for themselves in the modern, alien land of twenty-first century America. His deadly masquerade had been as true and instructive as any myth.
“It took their suffering,” Tommy was saying, “for us to learn who we want to be. And a big part of that is knowing who we were, the good and the bad of it. For that, we thank you, Nick.”
“Hey, you can bet I’ll take advantage of my honorary tribal membership, too. Count on me shaking a leg at every pow-wow.”
The three men laughed.
“Well, Tommy, you sure didn’t make many friends in the Louisiana Legislature and the U.S. Congress,” Big John said. “I understand they’re especially pissed off at your tribe ’cause you upset a cozy little relationship they had with the gambling interests.”
“They’ll just have to find another cow to milk. We don’t need to beg and bargain anymore. The FBI can worry about those guys, from now on. I’m sure not.”
“From what my sources tell me,” Big John said with the steely innuendo of a prosecutor ready to press charges, “that’s not at all unlikely.”
Then the sheriff, giving Nick due credit for his brilliant hunches and damning, if sometimes improperly gathered, evidence, sketched out the still-evolving picture of Nooj’s deadly crusade from the moment the BIA envelope arrived.
That afternoon, the wildlife agent heard the devastating news while visiting Three Sisters Pantry, that his ancestral enemy, the Katogoula, would be rescued from oblivion through federal recognition. He also learned that Tommy had driven to meet with Chief Claude. He began to set his first devastating murder in motion, a crime that would implicate Tommy. Circumstances aided Nooj, and his night of terror developed better than he could have hoped.
Nooj must have remembered Tommy’s atlatl from their childhood together; he stole it and the genealogical records—the records perhaps a lucky find—from the Shawes’ garage, after dark. On his way to ambush Tommy, Nooj inadvertently caught the attention of Wooty Tadbull and his two partners; and even though he was a supremely skilled woodsman, he almost didn’t escape the raging Travis Corbett. Nooj led poor Travis into a pit trap he knew was there.
Having shot Tommy with the blowgun dart, Nooj led the drugged man into the woods, securing him out of sight while he put on a spooky cougar show for Wooty, who was engaged in his gruesome task on the burial mounds—a show that got the unexpected cooperation of the trophy deer Carl Shawe had been hunting for several nights. Carl probably would have bagged that buck, had Nooj not shown up first and impaled him with an atlatl spear.
Nooj, from his fire tower aerie, spotted more and more opportunities to sow fear. He swooped down on the Shawe twins, set fire to the museum, and scared Stu, the cougar impostor, with the corpse at the mounds, all with maximum dramatic effect that served to heighten superstitious panic among the tribe. He attacked Holly and Nick at the forest cemeteries when they got too close to the truth of his Quinahoa lineage and the undying Chenerie grudge.
Big John, like Tommy Shawe, had made up his mind about casinos, too: he didn’t want one in his jurisdiction. No transparency, no accountability, too slippery, he confided to the two other men. He hadn’t even been able to catch up with the little fish named Val. According to her company, she’d stolen some money and was now missing without a trace; so was her boyfriend, Butch, who worked at the company’s riverboat property in New Orleans. Nick had nothing definite to offer on their fate, but in his imagination he saw a Luck o’ the Draw helicopter hovering low over the Gulf, dropping chunks of something into the water.
“Tommy, there’s a new space on your pedigree chart I need to fill in,” Nick said. “What did you and Brianne name the baby?”
“It was twins again! Girls, this time. We named one Carlotta Shawe, after my brother. And the other one Talinda, sort of after the Tadbulls.”
Nick turned to the burial mounds in front of the planted seed of the new tribal center. This was the meadow he and Holly had run across to escape Nooj Chenerie, the day he’d attacked them in the Katogoula cemetery. Then it had been Tadbull land; now it belonged to the Katogoula again.
Big John and Tommy walked ahead to the latter’s new truck.
Nick lingered behind, breathing in the fresh breeze blowing from Lake Katogoula and Tchekalaya Forest and across the meadow and the burial mounds. He thought he heard an ancient song up there where the pine needles danced in the golden sunlight, the voices of Katogoula spirits assuring him that the good twin of the forest was at last ascendant.
For now.
Nick strolled alone along the Golden Trace toward Tadbull Hall. He thought of early morning in the French Quarter, when a similar sparkling calm sometimes allowed the willing listener to hear the local gods who’d temporarily vanquished the cackling demons of the treacherous Quarter night.
The Golden Trace was a necklace strung with totems of the Katogoula past. One of these totems was Tadbull Hall. The trace ran right into the elliptical cart path in front of the house and picked up again on the other side. Nick stopped to read a newly erected marker explaining that the original Tadbull patriarch had deliberately interrupted the sacred trail with his front yard to demonstrate his power to the Katogoula.
Nick stepped onto the bright shell driveway and headed for the house. The tribe had finally broken free from this purgatorial loop the white world had imposed, to find its traditional path once again. The Tadbulls had received a painful lesson in the limits of earthly posturing.
As he reached the porch, he noticed two people on the driveway, making their way toward the bayou. Holly’s hair glowed in bronze glory, even from a couple of hundred yards away. A thin man walked slowly beside her; he used a cane to do most of the work healthy legs should be doing. Nick could see that the man turned his head frequently toward Holly, as if she were the source of the only heat keeping his limbs from frozen immobility.
Holly waved animatedly at Nick, made the motions of shouting something at him, and then the two resumed their walking. “We’ll be there in a few minutes!” the words said, reaching him finally.
Nick waited for them.
Wooty seemed to have aged twenty years. He was gaunt and ashen. In his eyes, their size exaggerated by his body’s frailness, the vibrant cockiness had been replaced by the dazed, distant wariness of the man who’s awakened more than once to find death, like a beautiful succubus, jumping impatiently up and down on his chest. Wooty’s encounters with a surgeon’s scalpel had left scars the color of raw veal, beginning just below his now prominent Adam’s apple.
“This is our first day all the way around,” Holly said, her face and voice proud of their joint accomplishment. She guided Wooty up the steps, onto the porch, and into one of the big rockers.
Holly patiently helped the sick man when necessary, but didn’t pamper him. Wooty clearly appreciated not being treated like a child.
They would do well together for the rest of their lives, facing their problems with mutual dignity, and love, Nick was thinking.
Holly hugged Nick, pressing close with her body, her head turned outward against his shoulder. Today her hair smelled of nectarine. The deep, quavering breath she took and released told him better than words what hell she and Wooty had been through.
“They broke me open like a boiled crab,” Wooty said, attempting a little laugh that obviously hurt. “I wonder which parts of me they took out, white or Katogoula? Nothing I can’t live without, anyway. Besides, I got a few good parts left.” He winked at Holly.
She sat on the arm of his rocker and held his hand. “At least they removed that defective get-rich-quick gland. We’re going to do honest work for our living, from now on, right? And no more of that illegal stuff. No more Senator Augustus Bayles, either.”
Wooty nodded capitulation in a war he no longer cared to fight, leaned his head back, and closed his eyes. Holly tucked a Katogoula quilted throw around him, from chest to knees, and he fell into instant open-mouthed slumber below the geometric tree-of-life pattern.
“As soon as he gets well,” Holly said softly, “we’re opening the mill again. And the tribe’s hired me as cultural director; they made me an honorary member, like you. Me, a Scottish lassie through and through, a Katogoula Indian! Best of all, I get to run the new museum. Bascove Tadbull’s paintings and drawings and photos will be the first things up on the walls.”
“How’s Mr. Tadbull?” Nick asked. “He had something of a breakdown?”
“Doctor says it’s depression that’ll probably pass eventually. Or maybe not. Doctors! Come on, I’ll show you,” she said, pulling him by his slightly sore right arm inside the house. “Smell that cooking? Miss Luevie’s in charge of the grub around here; it’s a regular Three Sisters Pantry. She tells Verla what to fix—much to her annoyance. They’re planning a major bash for Thanksgiving, out on the front lawn; the Katogoula don’t make a big negative thing out of it, like some tribes. I’ll make sure you get an invitation. Miss Luevie made me promise not to let you leave until you’ve had lunch. Don’t make a liar out of me.”