Blind Panic (4 page)

Remo picked up his rifle and stood up. “Hey, man! What you doing there? You’re not spying on us or nothing?”

The man didn’t reply, and he didn’t move. Sometimes they could see him quite clearly, but then the smoke would billow in front of him and he would disappear.

“You going to tell us what you want?” Remo shouted. “Otherwise, vamoose, okay?”

Still the man said nothing, but now he began to walk toward them, appearing through the smoke like a stage magician. The crown of his hat was cone shaped, with a braided leather band around it, and he wore a long black coat and a
high-buttoned black vest. He had a flat, leathery face, with a mouth that was almost lipless. As he came nearer, they saw that his eyes appeared to be totally silver with no pupils, as if he had steel ball bearings in his eye sockets.

“What do you want, man?” Remo repeated. “Is there something wrong? You
blind
or something?”

“Gituwutabudeu?”
the man shouted back at him, so harshly that all four of them jumped.
“Gi besa! Poohaguma! Soongapumaka!”

“What the hell is he talking about?” said Remo. “What kind of language is that?”

“Vulcan, most like,” said Charlie. “Whatever it is, he seems to be pretty pissed about something.”

The man came closer, until he was standing less than twenty feet away from them. Remo kept his rifle pointed at him, but he wasn’t sure whether the man could see him. The firelight danced and sparkled in his silver eyes.

“Teyabe?”
he asked, turning to Mickey and Charlie. Then he spoke in English, although his tone was still aggressive. “Why is your friend so frightened? In my language we say
tsegwabbetuma
for such a man—he who aims his gun but never pulls the trigger.”

“Listen, is there something we can help you with?” said Remo. “We’re just having a cookout here, that’s all.”

“I told you,” the man replied. "I am
poohaguma
, medicine man. But I am more than that. I am
soongapumaka
—medicine man making breath. My name is Wodziwob, but you—if you prefer—you can call me Infernal John.”

“Phew! Good to know he’s not called anything remotely scary,” said Charlie, out of the side of his mouth.

Mickey said, “Sir, we’re not, like, trespassing, are we? The signs all say that this a camping zone. And we haven’t done any damage. I caught a trout but I think it was well over the regulation size and anyhow I put it back in the river.”

“What?” demanded Wodziwob. “You think you have done no damage? You have done more damage than you can possibly know.”

“Oh, come on, bro,” said Charlie. “We’re only here to drink beer and cook a few wieners and catch a couple of trout, and when we’ve gone, you won’t even know we’ve been here.”

“We will
always
know that you have been here, even when you are gone forever.”

“We’ll pick everything up—I promise you. Every last bottle.”

“You think I care about your paper and your bottles and your rubbish? All those will vanish in time. But you have polluted the land in a different way. You have stained its spirit, and a stain like that has gi
tokedu
, no end.”

“I’m sorry, man,” said Remo. “I really have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It does not matter if you know or if you do not know. You will suffer the same consequences.”

Mickey said, “Look, if we’ve upset you or anything, we apologize. But we’ve been real careful not to make a mess, and our RV has its own chemical toilet facility so we won’t be leaving any kind of stain whatsoever.”

But at that moment, two figures materialized. They seemed to rise right out of the ground, one on Wodziwob’s left and one on his right. They were both impossibly tall, nearly twice Wodziwob’s height, and wide shouldered, and they were both dressed in boxy black coats. Their faces were covered by expressionless wooden masks, painted chalky white. On top of their heads they wore antlers decorated with beads and small bones and bird skulls.

They stood beside Wodziwob, swaying slightly, while the smoke from the campfire whirled around their legs. They looked more like living totem poles than men.

“Where the hell did
they
come from?” said Charlie, with a wheeze.

“Remo,” said Cayley, clutching at his arm. “Remo, I think we’d better just get out of here, don’t you?”

Remo raised his rifle higher, swinging it from one of the figures to the other, but all the same he took two or three steps backward toward the Winnebago.

“They came out of
nowhere
, man,” said Charlie, and he was wheezing more painfully now. “They came right out of the fricking
ground
.”

Mickey said, “Maybe we’re hallucinating. Where did you get that shit we’ve been smoking, Remo?”

Remo continued to keep the figures covered, but he continued to back away, too. “That was good shit, man. I got that from Louie.”

“Then maybe it’s the campfire. Maybe there was jimson weed in some of that brush.”

“So what do
you
see?” Remo asked him. “Do you see a guy in a pointy black hat and two tall guys who look like they’re wearing coffins?”

Mickey glanced at him quickly. They all knew that everybody has different hallucinations when they’re high.

“I think Cayley’s right,” said Charlie. “Like, let’s say that the better part of valor is getting the hell out of here,
prontissimo
.”

They began to stumble back to the Winnebago, but the man who called himself Infernal John came after them, stalking across the boulders with a terrible surefootedness. The two totemlike figures followed close behind him, with long articulated legs like stilts. As they walked, they made a clicking noise and a loud, rattling
whirr.

“Shit, man!” said Remo, and there was panic in his voice.

“Why are you running away from
me?”
Wodziwob demanded. “Are you afraid of
ggwo tseka’a
—that I will scalp you?”

“Just get away from us, man!” Remo shouted. “We haven’t done nothing, but if you want us to leave, we’ll leave!”

He lifted his rifle and fired one deafening shot into the air. It echoed and re-echoed from the rimrock and all the surrounding mountains. The last echo was followed almost immediately by the roar of a mountain lion.

“You have disturbed
kaggwe toohoo’oo
,” said Wodziwob. “Just as you have crushed every blade of grass that you have trodden on, and poisoned every insect, and shot down every
bird that flies through the air. You have despoiled everything, and now you must pay the price for it.”

Remo pointed the rifle directly at Wodziwob’s chest. “You take one step nearer, Mr. Infernal What’s-your-name, and the next one’s for you. I mean it. Me and my friends, we’re going to leave now, and you’re going to stay right there and let us go.
Capisce?
”

But it was then that Wodziwob lifted both of his hands, palms outward, and started to sing in a high, strangulated warble.

“Jesus,” said Charlie. “Sounds like my mom’s tomcat when it’s in heat.”

“I sing to each of you as
gi tuwutabuedu!
” Wodziwob called out, and his voice was no longer mocking, but hard with anger. “This means blind person. I bring to your eyes
toohoo-ggweddaddu nabo’o
, which means black paint.
Pooga’hoo
—I blow out your candle.”

The totemlike figures stalked closer, until they were towering over them. Behind the expressionless slits in their marks, the Emperors of IT could see faint blue-white lights flickering.

“Come on, man,” said Charlie. “We really need to go.”

“Look at them,” Remo protested. “They’re not even human. They’re just, like,
robots
or something.”

He leaned forward and peered at them more intently. The two totemlike figures made a creaking noise and swayed slightly. Then, without warning, the blue-white lights suddenly flared up, crackling and spitting as fiercely as welding torches. They were so bright that the Emperors of IT had to raise their hands in front of their faces to stop themselves from being dazzled.

“Holy crap,” said Mickey—yet almost as quickly as the lights had flared up, they died down again, and he found himself in total darkness. He lowered his hand, but he was still in total darkness. He blinked furiously and rubbed his eyes, but it made no difference. He couldn’t see anything except seamless black.

It was Cayley who screamed out first. “I’m
blind!
Remo, I can’t see! Remo, I’m blind!
Help me!
”

But Remo was blundering around in circles, with his arms flailing, and he was shouting out, “
Ahh! Ahh!
Shit! What have you done to me, you bastard? What have you done?”

Charlie had sank to his knees on the ground, rotating his head around and around and tilting it from side to side as if his eyes had simply come loose and he could somehow shake them back into place and bring his sight back.

“What have you done to me?” Remo screamed. “Where the fuck are you, and what have you done to me?” He fired off another shot, and Cayley screamed and stumbled against Mickey’s side. Mickey took hold of her arm and steadied her and said, “I’m here; it’s Mickey. I can’t see anything either. Don’t move. Charlie, where are you?”

“I can’t see nothing,” moaned Charlie. “What’s happened to me, Mickey? I can’t see nothing!”

Mickey reached out with his other hand and found Charlie’s shoulder. “Don’t move, Charlie. He’s blinded us. Those lights that came out of their eyes.”

“Are you still here?” Remo yelled out. “Are you still here, Mr. Infernal Fricking John?”

There was a long pause. Apart from Cayley’s persistent whimpering, the only sounds they could hear were the wind fluffing against their ears, the river gurgling, and the lurching of the logs on their campfire. But then they heard the cicada-
whirr
ing noise of the totemlike figures, and wooden footsteps clattering around behind them.

“Don’t come any closer!” Remo shouted. “I’m warning you! Maybe I can’t see you, but I’m going to go on shooting till I blow your fricking head off!”

Wodziwob said, “You are helpless, like nursing babies. You can do nothing to save yourselves. You are the same now as we once were. When you first appeared in our land, we, too, were blind. We were blind to your greed and blind to your cruelty and we were deaf, too—deaf to your lies,
which buzzed like a thousand blowflies on the corpse of our happiness.”

Mickey said, “We really don’t know what you’re talking about, sir. We’re sorry if we’ve done anything to upset you, but if we did we sure didn’t do it on purpose, and if there’s anything we can do to put it right…And this blindness. It’s only temporary, right? Like looking at the sun, right?”

Wodziwob must have come right up close to him, because Mickey could actually
smell
him, some herbal smell like cilantro, and a dry spice, a little like nutmeg. He could smell buttery grease, too, and an underlying reek of tobacco.

“What you did to our people—
that
was not temporary, was it?”

“
We don’t understand you!
” Mickey screamed at him—and this was Mickey, who hardly ever lost his temper. “
We don’t know what you mean! I can’t stay blind forever! I can’t be a blind person!
”

“You should not be fearful,” said Wodziwob. “You will not be blind for very long.”

“What?” said Mickey, and now he was shaking. “What do you mean?”

Wodziwob didn’t answer, but Mickey heard him step away and call out, “Tudatzewunu! Tubbohwa’e! Let us show our friends the way to join their forefathers!”

Remo said, wildly, “You’re going to
kill
us? You think you can fucking
kill
us, and nobody’s going to come after you? Everybody knows where we are, Mr. Infernal John. Our parents know we’re here. Our friends know we’re here. The park rangers know we’re here. We have GPS, too.”

He heard one of the totemlike figures creaking up behind him, and he wheeled around and lost his balance and fell heavily onto the rocks, dropping his rifle with a loud clatter. Mickey took two groping steps forward and tripped over one of the logs on which they had been sitting to roast their wieners. He pitched forward into the fire, hands first, in a huge shower of hot sparks. He shouted and rolled over, his
hands scorched and his hair alight. He sat up and banged at his head with both hands, and then furiously rubbed his scalp to make sure that his hair wasn’t still burning.

Charlie said, “Okay, okay. We won’t tell anybody what you did to us. We promise. But please don’t hurt us, okay?”

“I don’t want to be blind!” Cayley suddenly screamed. “I’d rather be dead than blind!”

Wodziwob said, “We will do to you, child, only what your ancestors did to us.” With that, he knelt down next to Remo and beckoned to the totem figure he had called Tubbohwa’e. The totem figure bent down with a complicated series of jerks and clicks, and seized hold of Remo with jointed fingers that were so realistically carved out of oak that they almost looked human.

“Let go of me, you bastard!” Remo swore at it. “Let go of me—you’re breaking my fucking wrists!” He struggled and kicked and twisted, but the totem figure was far too strong for him, and he remained pinned to the ground, grunting with pain and frustration.

Wodziwob unbuttoned his coat. Wound around his waist was a long, thin rope that he loosened and dragged free, yard after yard of it, and wrapped around his right elbow. There was more than ten yards of it in all, with a loop in one end, like a lariat. While the totem figure held Remo’s wrists tightly together, Wodziwob tied a double knot around them and yanked it tight.

“Shit, man!” Remo protested. “You’re cutting off my goddamned circulation!”

Wodziwob said nothing, but stood up and walked over to Charlie, his open coat flapping in the smoky wind. He beckoned to the totem figure he had called Tudatzewunu, and the figure came looming up behind Charlie and gripped both of his forearms. In the meantime, Tubbohwa’e heaved Remo up from the ground and dragged him closer, so that he and Charlie were standing less than three feet apart.

“They’re going to come looking for us, man,” said Remo, although now he was beginning to sound seriously frightened.
“The park rangers, the cops. The FBI. If we don’t come back they’re going to come looking for us, and you guys are going to be toast.”