Soon after that, coyote went to see the mighty She-Wolf and told her that he had stolen a sacred tobacco. The tobacco was powerful and humankind coveted it dearly, and if she could find it, She-Wolf would have power over man. Coyote had buried it in a rabbit’s hole far away from gossiping badgers who would steal it. The mighty She-Wolf dug into the rabbit burrow to find the tobacco and when she did, the little Coyote sniffed her beautiful behind, mounted her, and had his way with her. Each day after that, coyote came to see the She-Wolf, telling her the tobacco is more sacred now and each day it grows in the strength it holds over mankind, but that it’s further down the hole. The mighty She-Wolf would put her long nose down the hole as far as her nose would go and coyote would mount her, nailing her from behind again. After several seasons of doing this with the she-wolf, the Coyote went back to his mighty brother the Wolf and said, ‘Brother Wolf! I have explored your lands, and they are impressive, but now there are as many wolves as there are rabbits, so you are not so special now, and I think Coyote will go wherever he pleases.’”
The old woman laughed uproariously, heads turning among huddled groups of tourists.
Aoki laughed nervously. To Helen, it was tremendous, and she recorded it on her smart phone, posting it on social media. Avina tried to hide while Catherine fumbled in her leather clutch for more money to give, but the old crone dismissed Catherine’s excess.
It was Avina Zadeh that the crone was interested in, very interested.
Avina turned to face a crowd of tourists at an ice cream stand. The large imposing woman shook through the group and her stench washed over them. Avina, awkward in her turquoise western boots and jean shorts in the bright street and the old Indian woman pressing, retreated backward. The old Indian woman said, “I know you. You’re the little crow girl.”
“No, I’m not. You’re mistaken. I’m not who you think.” Avina desperately wanted to leave but the old witch started cawing, “You’re the lost little Crow girl!”
Avina hid herself in the crowd at the ice cream stand.
“Lost Crow girl,” The old Indian woman shrieked. Her breathe was potent but Helen wanted more. “Oh my god, are you a witch? How do you know her? Are you two besties? How do you know her?”
The old woman ignored Helen and called, “It’s me, its Bernie!”
The girls drifted away from the drunk and mumbling woman. Then Helen strode back to her.
“How do you know Avina? I need to know,” Helen demanded from the old crone.
The woman said, “That’s not for you to hear, you’re unwise.”
The girls kept walking. Helen joined them.
The old crone yelled out toward the square, “the little crow girl is here!” startling tourists on the boardwalk. Families veered away between parked cars.
“Lost little crow girl has flown back to her nest!” She called after the girls and laughed a brazen laugh to scare tourists.
Helen’s condominium had a communal pool in the back. The girls drank vodka and mineral water and floated on the still blue pool in the night, looking at the stars, quite high on Avina’s good dope. Aoki asked Avina Zadeh, “Why was that old bag lady calling you the lost Crow Girl?” The girls floated and were quiet.
“I don’t know why she calls me that. She huffs hair spray.”
Avina Zadeh finally admitted that the old Indian woman knew her. Bernie was her name, she hung around the alley behind the White Buffalo, and Avina had been feeding her out of the kitchen of the café, passing bottles of wine that went unfinished out the door to her.
This past winter, the old Crone Bernie was found dead. Hitchhiking south out of town trying to make her way to Wind River Reservation, someone killed her. The winter night was too black and cold to be on foot along the highway. A truck ran her over and fled the scene. She lay in the ditch, frozen.
Avina knew her full name, Bernice Whiteman; she was from Wind River, people called her Burned Bernie.
The story was further proof that Avina was not who she tried to be, she was playing pretend, not truly one of them. There was a place in her heart for this street woman, and she mourned her death for some time. Helen began to see what Catherine saw in Avina all along. She was a different brand of girl, strange and rare, her depth made her valuable.
After the crone story, Helen and Avina became friends.
Helen watched Avina Zadeh closely nonetheless, watched her change and become enslaved to what, in her mind, she thought Catherine Kinderdine wanted. Obsessive, cultish; a darker duplicate of Catherine, Avina fixated on everything Catherine said and did.
The tiniest slight from Catherine would throw Avina into turmoil. Everything Catherine wanted for herself Avina glommed onto and cheapened.
“Avina is sweet.” Helen had said to Brouwer over the phone. “She is cool and she’s like my little sister now, but she is weak, she has no hardcore. Without Catherine, who is she? She’s nobody. She could be precious if she would get to know herself, if she had any strength.”
Avina Zadeh was a mystery. The lost crow girl to Bernice Whiteman was Sky Rocket to Catherine Kinderdine and an empty, if beautiful, imposter to Helen Hearne. Helen had agreed to tell Brouwer about Avina Zadeh, but that was as far as she’d gotten before Helen left town.
Brouwer was no further ahead. There was little of substance about the dark haired girl from Denver, as though she were a girl of air. She had a valid Colorado driver license and leased a luxury truck. The rest of her was guesswork.
30.
Avina Zadeh paced the heavy stone floor of her benefactor’s guesthouse.
Tala Vahedi invited her to stay in her Jackson Hole property. It needed to be lived in, as no one was ever there. Vahedi hated the mountain wilderness, and could not stay in the mansion at night; she was terrified of the cloaking animal darkness.
Tala Vahedi’s children had left for New York City years ago and as Avina had jumped on the offer, she was happy to tell the young woman to use the house and enjoy the wilderness, “but you should keep waitressing there. Learn how restaurants work so you can open one yourself someday. One day, you may need to be independent.” The older Persian woman was regal in her crisp white shirt and bangles along her slender wrists.
Avina paced the landing of the guesthouse at the intersection of a twenty-foot breezeway that connected the guesthouse to the main home and its three-car garage, shelter to a Porsche coup that sat idle for years.
Heavy rock hauled from a fossil quarry in Utah gave the handcrafted home its bold stance. Reclaimed wood from abandoned horse and cattle barns accented the rock and paid a pricey homage to the valley’s roughhewn past. A footpath to the rear of the breezeway ambled through a stone grotto and over a bridged trout pond, crossed a rear driveway, and then trailed into the wild.
Zadeh shivered in her short shorts and tank top. Alone, suspended in inaction, she stroked her long liquid black hair in front of her. Never having crossed from her guesthouse into the Vadehi’s main home, until tonight, she thought she never would.
She had told detective Brouwer everything she could. She had been with Catherine that night, but Catherine wandered off from the camp and never returned. She did not go and find her because she did not know she was missing. That fact attacked every conscious idea she tried to conjure. Whatever her flaws, she would not have counted stupid among them, and yet it was her carelessness that allowed Catherine’s death.
Catherine had been in severe danger, but her primal fears must have felt ignored. She may have screamed for help and no one heard her, the rest of the world indifferent, unconcerned, and hidden from view by forest. That Catherine died believing no one cared for her was a nightmare that Avina could not tolerate, and could not live with.
Her breath quickened at her grave options. Catherine died alone and Avina wavered, incoherent, and useless.
Catherine, in nature, while in the trees, became aware of the patterns of the natural world, while in harmony, she became a wraithlike earth goddess. She had wandered
the forest and something vile had followed her.
Avina stood in the darkness of the guesthouse, heavy with dullness, muddled questions like falling letters rolled behind her eyes, offering nothing. She could think of no man that Catherine would walk through a black mountain forest for. Catherine had left the fire to sit in peace with the forest at night. Someone had hunted her, found her alone, and had taken her light.
Picking wild flowers one day, Catherine had given Avina a bundle of scarlet gilia and nicknamed her skyrocket, a folk name for the flower. Avina had thumbed through the guidebook of Wyoming wildflowers and jokingly nicknamed Catherine the names she had come across, Hooker’s onion, Devil’s Paintbrush, Naked broomrape. The two had laughed over these names for wildflowers and then Avina had shared with Catherine a story about herself that she had sworn to tell no one. It was her history.
She told Catherine her secret path, the risk of the telling like a deposit held in security. The secret sharing bestowed the two women to one another.
She feared that when Catherine learned the truth about her she would recoil in horror and hatred from her. That she would learn Avina’s secret and be disgusted. Instead, she told her story and it fastened their bond. The risk had paid off. Catherine accepted her for who and what she was. That night she held her face in her pillow and cried with joy. She could not fully believe what she had achieved. She had become friends with Catherine Kinderdine. She smiled with pure bliss for the first time since she was very young.
Avina Zadeh walked out of the guesthouse in the warm night air over the patio stones, touched the security code into the panel with her fingertips, and entered the main house. Black vastness, dark stone and timber walls, like a castle, the dark house grew around her. The house was dark and offered a clear view into the forest and the scarred granite faces of mountains. In the kitchen, the height of the thick stone and timber beams isolated her, and shrunk her.
She slid a long heavy chef’s knife off a butcher block. Holding the knife in front of her, the starry night sky reflected on its brushed steel blade. Chaotic courses of action jumbled in her vision. Each came to worse and worse endings, where a cell door slide closed in front of her, grown women yelling at her from prison cells or a grown man’s powerful hands closed on her throat, crushing her windpipe while he stabbed himself blindly between her legs. Her mind raced with actions too paralyzing to take. Panic weaved through her empty stomach into her lungs, and her coarse throat vied for air.
Through the Vahedi living room, a massive stone fireplace stood as a column between more windows, the black mountains, the endless forest. She faltered up a spiral staircase into Tala Vahedi’s master bedroom. A photo of the smiling family, a man and his wife and two children, years ago, the children young, the hoard of wealth was only just beginning. Tala, young but frumpy, awkward in the photo, standing off kilter from the Iranian executive she married, her black hair short and curled closely to her head. She had become beautiful with age, and stylish only with money. Avina set the picture face down. The king sized bed was quilted in American Indian patterns, southwestern. Beautiful and expensive, but Hopi tribes are from the desert, not the mountains, she thought. Neither nightstand drawer held a pistol nor did the drawer of the heavy wooden desk.
There were few effects in the master bath. The enormous dark house was unlived in and moment by moment, absence expanded the home into a silent void. She rifled through moisturizers and hygiene products, a box of Q-tips, turning an old prescription bottle of anti-depressants. She opened a drawer to black barbershop clippers; she picked up the clippers, got into the bathtub, and took off her tank top and shorts. Her nakedness stark in a floor to ceiling mirror across the bathroom, her small breasts, her dark eyes encircled by darker rings, and the butcher’s knife massive in her petite hand.
Sawing off her long black hair, its tangled wisps floated down to her bare feet. She sliced roughly at the sides, and ran the clippers along her skull. Holding her long hair from the top bending at the waist, she buzzed off the back of her head. An Iroquois slash was all that remained of the shining black hair Tala Vahedi had so celebrated.
The wet heat of the shower struck her body. Tell the truth and come clean, reveal the lies, all the lies, and peel away the false until only your hideous core remains. Dark fruit with a pink center turned bad, rotten liquid inside. Steam from the hot shower grew around her as she scrubbed herself.
The face appeared in the steam and its toothless mouth gaped. Gums diseased from decay, it breathed out at her, inhaling the steam from the shower, polluting it with chemical it had huffed into its spotted lungs, and released the exhaust back into the steam that clung on Avina’s hot, slick body. The two of them together, the knowledge they shared, washed them in wet poison. Burned out Bernie smiled wide at her through the steam and she shuddered.
The woman mimicked laughter as though aping the laughter of her lifetime of persecutors, but made no sound. Her black eyes, the eyes of simple survival, of a life of running, of fighting in the frozen streets, of walking backroads hard with packed snow, shone at the younger woman. Avina began to cry and huddled before the monstrous specter. Some vile asshole killed you Bernie as you walked home. Some fool incapable of basic respect ran over you and did not stop to help you; your blood pooled and froze into the ice and snow. All you had was simple curses for them.
Avina could hear Bernie’s true laugh, ironic, too much pain to be wholesome. Not the laugh of the panhandler, shocking dupes for money. Bernie was once again the thinking woman of Avina’s youth, beaten but cunning. The burned face full of pain and regret and longing and hope. Hope for what? Bernie stood wet and silent in death by the mirror. The hate she had absorbed over her years rolled on the thin surface of her face, a mask the younger woman would wear in due time. Avina saw rot, the rotten town and its rows of stores, pristine for tourists on the outside. Painful rot ate away from inside her, and it hurt dreadfully.
Avina held the butcher’s knife by her side and tried to focus on her own image, shaking in the standing mirror. With the hilt of the knife pointing out, the heavy blade point touched her slick chest. She forced herself to face the figure and it came closer, and shook its head, grinning. Avina threw the heavy knife at her reflection in the standing mirror and it struck glass, marking it with a tiny star, the heavy blade slid along the white tiles and glinted on the lion’s paw of the tub. The long Iroquois hair hanging off her head, cut hair clinging to her wet body, black and blue tattoos reddened clean by hot water, the diamond in her nose sparkling in mirrors. Her nakedness exposed the blatancy that she was not who she could have been, not whom she should have been. She was a lie carved in relief. The towering burned face woman, her rags clinging to her in the shower steam, came over her. But Bernie simply smiled and left Avina wet and naked in the tub.
Onto the master bedroom balcony, the breeze was cool on her wet, nude body. The Italian paving stone was bright and white below. There was an artificially bright blue pool, then the woods beyond. It was a good forty-foot fall to the stone patio below. A satellite winked at her from the sky. She held the railing and swung her feet over it, one after the other. Her bare bottom touched the polished wood, she held herself against the rail, keeping her feet together on the ledge. The patio stone lay white and hard below her. Her black hair whirled in the breeze. She was unsure if the fall to the patio stone was high enough to kill her outright. She did not want to lie and bleed out the way Bernie had.
A slender pine that flanked the stream began to move. The thin tree drooped to the ground and then stood gracefully. The pine had become a pale feminine body with bare white shoulders. Perfect brunette hair and pure face, the figure waded into the still pool in the quiet moonlit stream. The pool rippled slightly then stilled as she passed into it. This was the sign for which she had prayed. Catherine was reaching out to her from the spirit world.
Avina left the balcony, dressed herself, and unwound down the spiral staircase. The man who had hunted and attacked Catheri
ne finally began to emerge as a living image. If he were waiting for her behind a timber beam at the bottom of the stairs, she would know whom to expect.
Desire in his face; desire to breathe closely over her and steal the air from her mouth, desire to crush her throat with his hands, desire to penetrate her with his foreignness, his hate. Could she face it? Could she look him in the eye? Bernie’s heart beat alongside her own rotten core. It beat with the truth of what she was. Bernie was in her. She held on to simple curses.
She came to a heavy rounded timber door secured with iron stemming at its hinges, a castle keep door from a fairy tale. It required a code on a security panel. She tried the guesthouse code. It failed. The main house door code failed. She tried the garage door code, and the panel blinked green. With great force, she pulled down the long silver lever and pushed the heavy wooden door in, anticipating it to be a safe, a vault, a cool steel room stacked with gold bricks, drawers of diamonds, old paintings leaning in plastic, and most critically, a husband’s guns.
The secured room was not a vault or a castle keep. It was a wine cellar. A temperature gauge blinked on the wall before rows of bottles. Above that, a light had automatically come on. There was also a security key pad inside the room, she pulled the door handle but it did not move. If the door closed behind you, and you did not know the code, you’d be locked in. It was a dungeon, and she knew how a dungeon worked. If you can get him into it, he’ll never get out.
With her back on the heavy steel door, she covered her face with her hands. Finally, she saw a course of action that would wed her to Catherine for eternity. An act of recompense only she could perform, an eternal offering; she would give the gift of justice to Catherine’s spirit. She knew what to do. It would be the first truly meaningful act of her life.
Dream of the Wolf Page 16