The tapping had unsettled me, but when I thought about it rationally it was probably nothing more than a woodpecker, tapping away at the bottle palm at the end of the yard.
I carried my cases through to the bedroom, opened them up and laid them on the bed. I switched on my bedside radio, and it was playing some sentimental country and western song about leaving in the morning. I went back to my closet, took out all of my shirts and pants, as well as my spare fortune-telling gown and the two creased linen coats that I hardly ever wore.
As I started to fold up my shirts and my pants I thought I heard the tapping again. I listened hard, and I was sure that I could hear it, complicated and urgent and quick. I went over and turned down the volume of the radio, and listened again, but all I could hear then was a tinny voice singing: ‘—you’re the Queen of the Go-Go Girls, you’re laughin’ while you work, but I don’t ever seem to get the joke—’
I listened for over half a minute, but there was still nothing. It must have been my imagination. I went through to the bathroom, opened up the cabinet and took out all of my bottles of aftershave and shower gel and crumpled tubes of toothpaste. After I had closed the cabinet door I stared at myself in the mirror, and I thought that I was looking tired and haunted and slightly out of focus, but that may have had something to do with all of those beers and tequila chasers that I had drunk with Marcos.
‘Darlin’, you know I’m leavin’ in the mornin’,’ sang the voice on the radio. ‘And it’s true I might not be comin’ back …’
After I had pretty much finished packing I tried calling Sandy, but her cell was switched off and I guessed she must have started work already. I had drunk far too much to be sitting behind the wheel of a car, but all the same I drove into Miami Beach to see her. It was only a twenty-five minute drive, and the traffic wasn’t too heavy. It was beginning to grow dark now, and the sky was turning from dusky orange into dusky purple.
Sandy worked behind the bar at the Stars-and-Bars Lounge on 14th Street, which is where I had first met her. I had walked in there one evening after reading some retired movie star’s fortune at the Betsy Hotel. I badly needed a drink because the movie star had been suffering from terminal lung cancer and wanted to know if she was going to make a full recovery. You know me – I always try to make people feel better about their future, but it’s not easy telling somebody an outright lie. You only had to look at this woman to tell that the Grim Reaper already had his bony arm around her and was blowing her kisses that smelled of the cemetery.
Sandy wasn’t sandy but brunette, with huge brown eyes that almost made you feel like throwing her a dog-choc and a perfect squarish face that put me in my mind of Audrey Hepburn. In fact, if Audrey Hepburn had been three inches taller and worn a 38DD bra and spoken in a North Carolina twang, she and Sandy could almost have been taken for identical twins.
The Stars-and-Bars was crowded and noisy when I walked in. A DJ in a spangly shirt was playing a Wyclef Jean rap song, and the strobe lights on the ceiling were all flashing in time to the music. I saw Sandy behind the bar mixing a cocktail, and I pushed my way through the dancers and perched myself up on a stool.
‘Harry!’ squeaked Sandy. ‘I was going to come by when I finished work and surprise you! I got the day off tomorrow, hon … I thought we could maybe spend some time on the beach together. What can I get you to drink?’
‘Unh-hunh, nothing to drink, thanks. I had a few too many with Marcos. Well, maybe a Coke.’
‘We’re real busy tonight, hon. I won’t be able to talk to you much.’
‘Hey, babe!’ called out a shaven-headed young man with earrings and a red satin shirt. ‘How’s about some service here?’
‘See?’ said Sandy. ‘I gotta go.’
‘I gotta go, too. That’s what I came to tell you.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’ve gotten myself entangled in some stupid trouble with the cops. They’re running me out of town. In fact, they’re running me out of the entire state.’
‘What? I don’t believe it! Why? When?’
‘Hey, come on, babe!’ shouted the shaven-headed young man. ‘We’re dying of thirst here!’
‘If you’re coming around after work I’ll fill you in then,’ I told her. ‘I’m so sorry, Sandy, but this detective wouldn’t give me any choice. It was either go, or get busted.’
‘Sandy!’ said her boss, from the other end of the bar. ‘There’s customers waiting, for Chrissakes!’
Sandy’s big brown eyes filled with tears, and her glossy pink lower lip started to pout. ‘Harry, you can’t go! What am I going to do without you?’
‘Listen, sweetheart, we’ll work something out. Now, you’d better serve these customers. You don’t want to lose your job, do you?’
‘I don’t care about my job. I just care about you.’ She unpinned her sparkly name badge and said, ‘Look – I’ll quit right now!’
‘No, no, no, don’t do that! Please. I don’t know where I’ll be going, and I don’t know where I’ll be living, and I can’t take you with me. Let’s talk it over tomorrow, but right now you have thirsty and obnoxious customers to take care of.’
‘What did you call me?’ said the shaven-headed man, who was now standing right next to me.
‘“Obnoxious”. It means “deserving of kudos and immediate service”.’
The shaven-headed man gave me a long, suspicious look. He had near-together eyes like two steel nail-heads. After a moment’s consideration, he said, ‘OK. That’s OK, then.’ He probably didn’t know what ‘kudos’ meant, either. He turned to Sandy and said, ‘Two Damn-The-Weathers and one Screaming Orgasm. Thanks, doll.’
I felt even drunker when I drove back home than I had when I’d first come out, and I had to give myself a running set of instructions, out loud. ‘Look, Harry, there’s a red signal up ahead here. Make sure you stop. You have to take a right turn here, then a left on to the on-ramp. There’s a squad car right next to you. Whatever you do, don’t look at the nice policemen and give them a stupid grin.’
I managed to get home all right and park in front of the house without smashing into any plant pots. It looked like Marcos had either gone out or gone to bed early because the house was in darkness. The back yard was so dark that I had to cross it very carefully, with both hands held out in front of me. I stumbled two or three times and nearly fell over, but at last I reached my front door and managed to unlock it. I cursed myself for not having left a light on.
I groped my way along the hallway. The only illumination came from the half-open door to my bedroom, where the lights from Triangle Park were shining through the blinds. I found the light-switch next to the living-room door and I clicked it. Nothing happened. The hallway remained in darkness. Goddamn bulb must have blown.
I was just feeling my way through the living-room door when I heard it.
Tap-tap-tappety-tap-tappety-tap-tap!
I froze. This time, the tapping continued, and it was coming from my bedroom, so there was no way I could kid myself that it was a woodpecker.
Tap-tap-tappety-tappety-tap!
The last time I had heard tapping like that was when I was facing the reborn spirit of Misquamacus, the Algonquin wonder-worker – Misquamacus, who had sworn eternal vengeance on white men for wiping out so many hundreds of thousands of Native Americans and destroying so much of their culture.
But it couldn’t be. I had dismissed him forever. There was no possibility that he could ever come back, no matter what shape he took: man, woman, wolf or shadow.
So how could I hear his medicine sticks tapping?
I had a choice now. I could enter my bedroom and find out who or what was making that tapping noise … or I could get the hell out of that cottage and sleep on Marcos’ couch tonight. That is, if Marcos was actually there. I blurrily seemed to remember him saying something about a gig at the Country Club in Hialeah. That was probably why his house was in darkness and untypically silent.
&nbs
p; I thought: It’s a noise, that’s all. What are you worried about? It could be anything. One of the blind cords, tapping in the wind. Except, of course, that there was no wind that night, and all the windows were closed.
If I hadn’t been under the influence of too many beers and too many tequila chasers, I doubt I would have dared to do what I did next. I approached the bedroom door and threw it wide open. Its handle banged against the wall, and it juddered on its hinges.
I was so shocked that I lost my balance and hit my shoulder against the door frame. There were people standing in my bedroom – three of them. When I saw what they were, my mouth opened and closed, but no words came out.
They were nuns, all in black, all with their heads covered, all completely motionless. At the same time, though, the tapping noise not only continued, but began to grow faster and faster and even more complicated, as if it was racing up to a climax.
THIRTEEN
I raised both hands protectively and started to back away. As I edged back down the hallway, I collided with the crescent-shaped side table and nearly knocked the lamp off it, but I managed to catch it before it fell to the floor.
The three nuns stayed where they were, still not moving, but the tapping was becoming more and more frantic. I reached the front door and took hold of the handle to open it, but I shouted out, ‘Shit!’ because it was almost red hot. I snatched my hand away, flapping my blistered fingers and blowing on them. It looked as if the nuns weren’t going to allow me to get away.
‘You will come back here!’ said a harsh, accented voice. I wasn’t at all sure that it was coming from any of the nuns, and I couldn’t tell what accent it was, but it was loud and it sounded like it really meant business.
I tugged down my shirt cuff to cover my hand and tried again to open the front door, but the handle was not only too hot to touch, it was jammed solid.
‘Come back here!’ the voice repeated. ‘We want you to know who we are!’
‘I know who you are!’ I retorted. ‘You’re nuns!’
‘We are warnings,’ said the voice.
‘Warnings? Warnings of what, for Christ’s sake? I don’t need warnings – I just want you to get the hell out of my house!’
‘Why do you think we are here, in your dwelling? Why do you think we have chosen to appear to you, of all your people?’
I licked my fingertip and gingerly dabbed at the door-handle again, but it was still too hot to touch. I was doing my best to be defiant, but my heart was beating faster and I could feel the beginnings of panic rising up inside me, as well as alcoholic bile. I thought about dodging into the living room and climbing out of the window, but the second I thought that, bang, the living-room door slammed shut all by itself.
These nuns were not only inside my bedroom, but they were inside my mind too. I glanced toward the bathroom door, and that, too, slammed shut.
‘OK, why?’ I demanded, although my throat was so tight that I was finding it difficult to speak. ‘What made you pick on me? I’m not even religious. Or is it because I’m not religious? Was it you who made Father Zapata hurt himself like that?’
‘It was a warning to the holy father not to interfere.’
‘Some warning. He could have died.’
‘It was to remind you that your people have always destroyed life and never honored it.’
‘What do you mean, “your people”?’
‘Your people always pick fruit before it ripens, and they always fell the trees before they can scatter their seeds across the earth. But the time has come at last, and we will allow nothing to stand in our way.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about!’
‘You will understand when you know who we are.’
When the voice said that, the tapping became so frenzied that I could hardly hear what it was saying. At the same time, the black veils that covered the heads of two of the nuns began to ripple and swell, almost as if they were made of boiling tar. In between the two of them, the third nun remained as she was, small and dark and motionless, and for some reason that made her all the more frightening.
The two nuns on either side of her began to grow taller and bulkier, until their heads were almost touching the bedroom ceiling. Their head-coverings took on the shape of horns, and their black habits knotted and twisted themselves into muscular bodies covered with strips of dark-brown animal furs. At the same time, I could smell incense and a strong, sour odor of charred wood. It reminded me of the time that I went up to visit my cousin in New Hampshire after a forest fire. The reek of burned pine-trees had clung to my clothes and lingered in the air for weeks, so that I could actually taste it.
‘This is who we are,’ announced the voice. ‘We have returned to take back what is ours. We have learned your ways, and this time you will not defeat us.’
‘I still don’t get it. What are you going to take back?’
‘Our land. Our lives.’
I stayed where I was, in the hallway. Those two figures were enormous now, and although it was too dark to see them clearly, I could just make out the glitter of their eyes, and I thought that I could see something moving on their shoulders, as if torrents of beetles were constantly running all over them.
‘We want our sky back,’ the voice continued. ‘We want our clouds, and our rain, and our tornadoes. We want our sunrises, and our snow. Every river, every mountain, every lake. Every animal. Every tree, every single blade of grass. Every breath of air that we ever took, that was ours. We want it all back.’
‘Who are you?’ I asked. All the same, I was increasingly sure that I knew what they were, because they had come looking for me. Purely by accident, I had become their nemesis in the past – not that I had ever wanted to, or felt that it was my duty. I had simply been protecting the people I cared about.
‘I am Matchitehew,’ said the voice. ‘My brother is Megedagik. We are the sons of Misquamacus, whose spirit you condemned to the outer darkness for all time.’
‘You’re his sons? Misquamacus died hundreds of years ago! How can you be his sons?’
‘You might have condemned his spirit to the outer darkness, but he still had the power to summon our spirits, and like him we are wonder-workers. He taught us magic in life, and we never forgot it, even after death. Now he has charged us with taking our just revenge on you and claiming back all that is rightfully ours. You might have thwarted him, but you will not thwart us.’
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I know you have a genuine grievance, and I can understand it. If somebody had appeared out of nowhere and massacred my people and taken all of my land, I think I’d be pissed too, and on the whole I think you Native Americans have taken it pretty well.’
‘Are you mocking us?’ asked Matchitehew, with a rasp in his voice.
‘Of course I’m not mocking you. But too much time has gone by. You can’t go back to the way things were before the white man showed up. It’s just not possible.’
‘We can still take our revenge on you. No matter how much time has passed, why should you be allowed to go unpunished?’
‘For Pete’s sake, the people around today aren’t the same people who massacred your ancestors! You can’t blame them for what their fathers did. Or even their fathers’ fathers.’
‘They still have no title to this land. They still have no right to live here, and to eat its fruit and its fish and its animals and to profit from its riches. Our father Misquamacus was not an evil man, and he was not a vengeful man. But how could he stand by and accept the killing of thousands of his own people and the theft of the land that the Great Spirit had given us? You would have done the same, if it had happened to your people, and yet you condemned him to a fate that is worse than death itself.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘And I’m sorry I had to do it. Well, I’m not sorry, really. It was either him or me.’ I was trying my best to be nonchalant, but my heart was beating so hard against my ribcage that it hurt.
I thought: These two enormou
s spirits are probably going to kill me now, in one agonizing way or another. If they hadn’t forgiven white men in general for taking this country away from them, they certainly weren’t going to show any mercy to the one white man who had dispatched their father to wherever it was that Native American spirits can never come back from.
But – ‘You defeated our father,’ said Matchitehew. ‘You showed yourself to be stronger than him. Therefore we are bound by the code of our people not to harm you.’
‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘That’s a relief.’ All this time, though, the tapping was continuing, although I couldn’t see which of the three of them was doing it. The nun remained silent and motionless, and the atmosphere in the cottage was still deeply threatening, like those few tense seconds before a thunderstorm breaks.
‘We have come to tell you that you must give a warning to your people. This time you cannot defeat us, as you defeated our father Misquamacus, because this time we have your own spirits in league with us, as our allies.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ I told him.
‘You defeated our father in the same way that your forebears defeated us. Your forebears brought diseases to our people so that they fell like mayflies. Those diseases were unknown to us, and we were unable to protect ourselves. You defeated our father by using magic of which he knew nothing and so had no way to defend himself.’
‘Well, it wasn’t really magic,’ I said. ‘It was what we call technology.’ I still didn’t really understand what he was trying to tell me.
‘Now we have your spirits on our side,’ said Matchitehew. ‘Your spirits know your ways. They know your magic. They know what diseases can make you sick. They know how to take over your bodies and your minds. Now that we are together, you cannot defeat us. We will drive you out of this land as you once drove us. That is the warning that you must give to your people. They will leave – or they will die.’
The tapping stopped. The bedroom was silent, all except for an endless clicking which must have been the sound of the black beetles swarming all over Matchitehew and Megedagik, because nothing else in the room was moving.
Plague of the Manitou Page 14