Just then, I woke up and sat bolt upright in bed. Jason, who’d crawled into the bed and somehow wedged himself flat beneath me and the warm pillow, was lying on his side, his eyes shut tight. But his feet were paddling back and forth as if he were running fast to escape something fearful. I started laughing.
“Wake up, Jason,” I said, shaking him until he opened his eyes. How dizzy could you get, I thought, tuning in to the dreams of your cat?
But I had awakened with at least today’s first decision resolved in my mind. I’d pick up the package from the post office. I had no other choice. I’d never recover if I put it off and the damned thing vanished. Where to hide it was another question. My office wasn’t safe: too many people in and out all day. And until I actually saw the parcel I wouldn’t be sure I could even put all the documents in one place—a drawer or briefcase, for example—since it hadn’t fit into my mailbox.
When I went out, I was relieved to find that Olivier’s huge borrowed truck was no longer blocking the drive, so I could back my car out without going off the side. He must have had to pick up Larry the programmer extra early.
I pulled up before the post office about ten minutes after they opened for the morning. There were no cars yet parked in front as I pulled into the lot. I got out and nodded greetings to the postal worker who was scattering rock salt on the steps. The pounding of my heart and my head sounded from inside like a tympani section hooked on Latin American rhythms. Why was I so uptight? Absolutely no one here could have any idea of the contents of what I was about to collect.
I went up to the desk and handed George the postal clerk my yellow slip. He went in the back room and came out carrying a large parcel—bigger than a ream of paper, wrapped in brown paper with twine tied around it.
“Sorry you had to come all the way down here to pick this up, Miz Behn,” said George between wide-gapped teeth as he handed it to me. He scratched his head. “I’d a been happy to give it to that fella you sent for it just now, but he said you lost the claim slip. I told him then you’d have to come in person or send a signed note that it was okay to give it to him. But I guess you found your claim slip anyway.”
I was standing there deaf and dumb, as if all sound had been shut off, as if I were in a glass jar. I held the package in my hands, not speaking. George was watching me as if maybe he should give me a drink of water or fan me or something.
“I see,” I managed to choke out. I cleared my throat. “That’s okay, George, I had to come this way anyway. It’s no inconvenience.” I started for the door casually, trying to think of a way to ask the question I desperately needed the answer to. Just at the door, I found it.
“By the way,” I said to George, “I mentioned to a couple of folks to pick it up if they came this way. Who finally came by, so I can tell the others not to bother?”
I expected him to say “new fellow in town” or some such. But what he said made my blood run cold.
“Why—it was that Mr. Maxfield, your landlord. His postal address is just down from yours. S’why I felt bad not to be able to give him the parcel. But rules is rules.”
Olivier! The bottom fell out of my stomach. In my mind flashed the image of those truck high beams last night—and the drive empty of anything but tire tracks when I left this morning. I tried to smile, and thanked George. Then I went out and got into my car, and I sat there with the parcel on my lap.
“It’s all your fault,” I told it.
I knew I shouldn’t, but I had to do it. I reached into the glove compartment and pulled out the bone-handled deer knife I kept there, that had never touched a deer. I cut the twine and pulled the paper open. I was desperate to know the brand of my hemlock before I had to drink it. When I saw the first page, I started laughing.
It was written in a language I couldn’t read, with letters that weren’t even letters of the alphabet, though they did seem oddly familiar. I riffled through the rest like a deck of cards: about two reams of paper, and all alike, each page printed in black ink by the same hand. The pages were filled with feathery stick figures with little circles and bumps protruding here and there like forms dancing across the pages, like the symbols painted on an Indian teepee. What did they remind me of?
And then I knew what they were. I’d seen them in a cemetery once in Ireland, where Jersey had taken me to visit her ancestors. They were runes: the language of the ancient Teutons who’d once lived all over northern Europe. This bloody manuscript was written entirely in a language that had been dead for thousands of years.
Just as that knowledge dawned, from the corner of my eye I saw the flash of something dark moving in the parking lot. I glanced up from the manuscript and saw Olivier walking across the pebbly, salted ice, headed for my car! I tossed the manuscript on the passenger seat, where it slid partly out of its wrapper and a few pages fluttered to the floorboard, which I ignored. I was trying to jam the key into the ignition, but in my hysteria I missed twice. By the time the engine turned over, he was almost at the passenger door. Frantically I shoved down the door lock with my elbow, which caused all the car doors to lock in tandem, as I threw it in reverse.
Olivier grabbed the handle of the passenger door and tried to yell something through the window, but I ignored him and threw the stick forward. I tore out of the lot, dragging Olivier along until he finally let go. I glanced at his face for one instant before I took off down the street. He was staring through the glass at the manuscript!
Now that I was out on the street driving, and I knew Olivier was really after the manuscript, and I knew he knew I had it, I was becoming even more hysterical. The chances of hiding it anywhere in town, at this point, were absolutely nil. I knew I had only one choice, and that was to get it somewhere out of town to hide it. But where?
Olivier knew I was meeting my uncle at Sun Valley this weekend, so that was too obvious. I had to get on a road in some direction—and fast, before he got back to his car to follow me. The absolutely worst thing that could happen was for me to get trapped with this manuscript in my car.
With no time to think, and with no thoughts leaking into my brain anyway, I headed full speed down the road to Swan Valley, to run over the Teton Pass into Jackson Hole.
THE SNAKE
THE SERPENT:
The serpent never dies.
Some day you shall see me come out of this beautiful skin,
a new snake with a new and lovelier skin. That is birth.
EVE:
I have seen that. It is wonderful.
THE SERPENT:
If I can do that, what can I not do? I tell you I am very subtle.
When you and Adam talk, I hear you say ‘Why?’ Always ‘Why?’
You see things, and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things
that never were, and I say ‘Why not?’
—George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah
It would be a good two-hour haul, with winter road conditions what they were, across the Idaho border and into Wyoming. But it would be my first chance to think things through since my return from San Francisco—was it only yesterday morning?
I had a job I’d already been absent from for more than a week, and a boss who wasn’t too happy just now because I had cold feet about leaving for Russia. If I went AWOL at work on my second day back, I might not have a job. Then too, there was my critical arrangement to wait by the phone at the No-Name cowboy bar this afternoon. But now, with this unexpected loop, I had no idea how I’d ever contact Sam again. The final disaster struck my beleaguered mind just before I reached the end of the valley: I couldn’t leave my cat in the same house with a villain—especially a villain I still owed for this month’s rent!
At the end of the valley, the road spiraled down like a corkscrew to meet and follow the curving sweep of a river that seemed to appear from nowhere out of the dense undergrowth. I knew every twist and turn by heart. I took the dips like a slalom course. Dropping beneath the crashing two-tiered waterfall, I descended to the chain-linked
valleys carved out by the rushing waters of the Snake.
The Snake is one of the most beautiful rivers in North America. Unlike the broad, complacent rivers that water the Midwest, the Snake behaves more like its namesake: a dark, mysterious reptile that only feels at home in wild and inaccessible crevasses of the mountains. It winds in a narrow zigzag for most of the thousand-mile meander from Yellowstone in Wyoming through Idaho, Oregon, and Washington State, where it joins the massive Columbia in its headlong sweep to the ocean. But the glassy sheen of most of the river’s surface hides the underlying serpentine treachery, which strikes swiftly and often lethally. These waters are so rapid, the current so strong, the hidden pools so deep, that few of the bodies swept away are ever found. Indeed, even whole automobiles have been swallowed and never recovered. This may explain the rumors of the enormous water beast lurking there, who devours everything he drags to his underwater lair.
As usual at this time of year, the valley below was buried in thick marshlike fog formed as the warmer water of the river impacted the ice-cold air. Just before the last descent, while the road could still be seen, natives usually checked fore and aft for other cars they might collide with when they got down there in the soup. It was then that I saw it, slipping out of sight around the curve behind me—a plain grey government car with standard white plates identical to a hundred others in our fleet at the nuclear site, which any of ten thousand employees might borrow for site visits or other official business. What was it doing out here, en route to no place? There was a hefty penalty, even job probation, for using government vehicles in personal or recreational activities.
But maybe this was official business, I thought. Sam had said I was being watched all the time, hadn’t he? If even Olivier had his hands in the cookie jar, who knew how many others might be in it too? Though I couldn’t see the driver through the windshield, when I saw the car reappear around the last corner I was certain he was tailing me. There was nobody but me out here.
But I knew every bend and wrinkle along this road, and I knew that the best place to ditch him would be in the soup. So as soon as I reached the last steep decline, I accelerated and dove in. Behind me, I saw him pick up his pace and do likewise. Then the blanket of dense white fog closed around us, and we were isolated within its embrace. I heard only the sound of silence as my car slalomed on the sharply curving road, moving like the serpent itself through the mist.
It seemed hours that I swung through the whipcrack curves of the road, through that smothering whiteness like the inside of a pillowcase, but my car clock told me it was really only twenty minutes. I knew the road would soon come out of the fog again as it approached the pass. Up there the road would fork, giving a choice of several routes heading into Jackson. So at the first turnout sign that appeared, almost invisible in the swirling mist, I cut my wheels and pulled off the road. Then I turned off my engine and cracked open my window a bit to listen.
Less than a minute later the government car swept by. I could hear the engine and see its outline, dark silver through the mist, but that was all. I waited a full five minutes before starting again on my way.
The road was clear over the pass, so I had a brief respite enabling me to think. I wondered what this manuscript was that had fallen into my hands, why everybody wanted it, and how it was that it had come to be written in runes. It surely wasn’t any correspondence belonging to Granny Pandora or my nefarious aunt Zoe. Nor did these pages resemble mementos of any of those great and famous legends with whom they’d reportedly trafficked throughout their long lives. And though the Celtic language itself might be thousands of years old, the document on the seat beside me wasn’t even beginning to yellow: it seemed to be written in pretty fresh ink. It was quite possible, I knew, that Sam had written in a rune code himself, trying to transcribe key elements of the original, and possibly more dangerous, documents—and maybe also to give a clue where the real ones were located, in case something happened to him.
It didn’t make sense why Sam “had to get rid of” the manuscript. If his death was faked, if everyone on the planet knew I was about to inherit the goods, if journalists knew enough to demand a press conference and ask for exclusive rights, and if even my own landlord was set to spy on me, then this whole situation had been designed to flush someone out of the woodwork: someone who wanted the real manuscript for whatever reason. And I was the bait.
I also now understood exactly what it was I must do: I had to hide this document in such a difficult place that no one but me—including Sam—could find it. And I knew precisely where that was going to be.
It was lucky I’d brought my skis.
At Jackson Hole I pulled into the parking lot facing the Grand Tetons—or “big tits,” as French trappers had dubbed these showgirl-breasted mountain peaks pointing at the sky. I stuffed the manuscript into one of my dog-eared canvas knapsacks from the back, grabbed my silvery moonsuit and parka and the thermal socks and gloves I always kept there, and went inside the lodge to the powder room to transform myself into the Snow Queen. Then I bought a cup of coffee, got some change at the cafeteria, and made the de rigueur long distance call to the Pod to explain my absence on this, my first full day back at work. I wanted to be sure he hadn’t gone ballistic when, after our slight unpleasantness yesterday, I’d failed to show up this morning at the office.
“Behn, where are you?” he said as soon as his secretary put me through.
“Last night I suddenly realized that I needed to collect some data out here at the western site, where I’m phoning from,” I lied.
The nuclear site at Arco out in the high desert, where the government’s fifty-two experimental reactors were located, was a three-hour drive in the opposite direction, past town and the post office I’d so hastily quitted. But the Pod’s next words made my lie seem absurdly unnecessary.
“I’ve had Maxfield beating the bushes for you since he first came in this morning. Wolf Hauser unexpectedly came back to town and dropped in here quite early. He was overjoyed to hear you’d be joining his project and wanted to meet you at once, since he was about to depart again on out-of-town business. We phoned you at home, but you’d already left. So I had Maxfield dash over to try to catch you at the post office—”
“The—post office?” I interjected, in what I hoped was a casual tone, though my ears were ringing and my head had started pounding again. Why on earth the post office? I pulled my psychological cards close to the chest to take a peek: Was the Pod in on this, too? I was beginning to trust no one, a prescription that hardly seemed the antidote to paranoia. But he was still speaking.
“After you left work yesterday I got a call from someone representing the Washington Post,” he explained. “She said she’d been trying to reach you for several days about some valuable papers she learned at a press conference were en route to you; that the Post urgently wanted to speak with you about acquiring them. I said I’d be sure to have you phone her today.
“Then when Hauser came through in such a rush this morning, it occurred to me that you might be over picking up mail—especially if you were expecting important documents. So I sent Maxfield at once. But when he found you—well, he’s told me the most astounding tale of your behavior.”
I knew what was coming next: how I drove off with some of Olivier’s body parts still attached to my car, and nearly glued the rest of him to the pavement. I looked like a fool, and worse. Yet though this seemed straightforward enough, there were a few things dangling here. For instance, whether it was the Pod’s idea or Olivier’s to try to pick up that package. But I could think of no way to ask, without letting the Pod know that the parcel was now actually in my possession.
“All this trouble just because I missed Dr. Hauser again,” I told him apologetically. “Well, it couldn’t be helped. I was in a big hurry too, so I didn’t realize Olivier was standing so close to my car. Tell him I’m sorry I almost drove over his foot.” Then I added, more cautiously, “Dr. Hauser and I seem to keep pass
ing like two ships in the night. Things have gotten pretty confused, but I’m sure we’ll meet up soon enough. I did think over this project last night. I agree with what you said, that it might be the shot in the arm my career could use right now.”
I wasn’t just cranking up the Pod’s ego. Maybe my brain was getting scrambled and soggy after all this stress and hysteria, pushing me into believing everyone I’d ever known was out to get me. Maybe I did need a short retreat in the USSR to introduce me to a different reality than my own, which was starting to look pretty “virtual.” It was time for a schuss downhill to flush out my microprocesses.
I told the Pod I’d be back from the site before quitting time, and rang off. I felt relieved that Olivier was an unlikely candidate for the spy, hit man, and potential cat assassin I’d been visualizing. But I was still going to take the appropriate precautions and hide this manuscript where no one could ever find it—maybe not even me.
I had to wait half an hour for the tram to get hooked up. By the time it finally did, there were so many passengers queued up that they had to jam us in like sardines and weigh the fully laden tram before letting it take off over the deep gorges on that spindly-looking high wire. Packed in with all those restless midwesterners and Japanese tourists, my face was squashed against the windowpane by the mass of bodies, affording me a lovely view of the two-thousand-foot drop we’d experience if the load did prove too heavy for this orange crate. It would have been faster and simpler just to catch a chair lift instead. But I wasn’t sure I could locate the spot I was looking for without starting from Scylla and Charybdis.
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