Burial (54 page)

‘Bad circulation?' asked E.C. Dude, in all innocence.

But Papago Joe shook his head. ‘It's dead people,' he said. ‘It's dead people, passing through you, going so fast you can barely feel it. But that's what it is. Think about it.'

E.C. Dude looked amazed and annoyed. ‘Dead people go through me?'

Papago Joe nodded. ‘Dead people pass through most of us, two or three times a week, sometimes more. If you stay really still, you can
feel
them.'

‘Hey —' protested E.C. Dude. ‘Dead people go through me and they don't even say “pardon me”? That's trespass.'

Papago Joe wasn't even amused. ‘You don't have many privileges when you're dead. But that's one of them.'

‘Hey,' said E.C. Dude. ‘So what are you going to do — travel around with these dead people? Go through other people?'

Papago Joe said, ‘Harry here wants to find his Karen. He also wants to find Misquamacus, and I want to find Misquamacus, too. And I'll tell you for why. If we
don't
find Misquamacus, then life is liable to come to a dark and horrible and very shadowy finish, and if you knew what I know about Aktunowihio, the Shadow Buffalo, then you'd be crapping those women's panties you wear.'

‘Hey, these are Cybille's.'

‘And where's Cybille?' demanded Papago Joe.

‘I don't know. Home with her parents I guess. I hope. Unless she's been seeing that meathead Gary again.'

‘Have you taken a look outside? She may be home with her parents, but where's her parents' home?'

E.C. Dude climbed off the couch and went to the trailer's window. He opened the Venetian blind, but all we could see was billowing dust and the flickering reflections of candles. E.C. Dude turned back and said, ‘It's a storm, man. That's all. Hurricane Whoever.'

Papago Joe emphatically shook his head. ‘That isn't a storm, E.C. According to all of the Indian legends and all of the Indian predictions, this is it. This is All Shadows' Day, the day that the Ghost Dance comes true.'

The trailer swayed, much more violently this time, and I heard something collide with its outside panelling, something soft and heavy. It could have been a sack of flour; it could have been a young pig; it could have been a dead dog.

It could have been a child.

‘You're going then?' said E.C. Dude. ‘You're just going to split, and leave us?'

‘You'll be all right,' Papago Joe told him. ‘Take care of Linda, take care of Stanley. That's all you have to do.'

‘Man, I want to come with you,' said E.C. Dude.

‘What?' asked Papago Joe.

‘I want to come with you. Come on, man, you're talking about spirits and being possessed and stuff and travelling through time. It sounds totally extra, man. I want to come with you!'

Papago Joe said, ‘No. I want you to stay here and protect Linda and Stanley.'

‘And what do I do if the trailer tips over?'

‘It won't. The spells will hold it, even if it sways.'

‘Well, man,' said E.C. Dude, crossly. ‘I wish I had your confidence.'

I felt like agreeing with him. Especially since Papago Joe and I were about to set off on a journey under the soles of our own feet — a trip through the underground that made me feel almost nostalgic for the New York subway. At least
on the New York subway the dangers were palpable. And even when your fellow-travellers acted violent and threatening, and started screeching and vandalizing and mugging, at least they were
alive
.

I watched Papago Joe measure out the powder which would give us hallucinatory death. I saw the candle-flames dipping and swaying in his eyes. I heard the scratching of the razor-blade on the mirror. I knew now why Amelia hadn't wanted to go on chasing Misquamacus any further. I knew why MacArthur had made her give up spiritualism, back in the days when she had first raised up the head of Misquamacus from out of that cherrywood table.

Papago Joe divided the powder as neat and sharp as if he were laying out lines of coke, except that this stuff wasn't white. This stuff was grey — grey with cremated ashes and peyote.

‘What do you do?' I asked him. ‘Do you swallow it or inhale it?'

He rolled up a crisp new fifty dollar bill. ‘I'm sorry, you have to breathe it in.'

‘Jesus,' said E.C. Dude. ‘How can you snort a stiff? That's disgusting!'

Papago Joe ignored him, and handed me the rolled-up bill. ‘You first, Harry.'

I accepted the bill with shaking hands. In fact I was shaking so much I was worried I was going to shake all the powder off the table.

As I leaned forward, Papago Joe rested his hand on my shoulder, to comfort me. I looked up into the darkness of his deeply buried eyes and I saw something in that darkness that made me feel as if I was beginning, just a little, to understand the secrets of the universe. ‘We all have to die sometime,' he said; although I wasn't at all sure that he had said it aloud.

Amelia awoke just before dawn, with the strong sense that something was badly wrong. She had a feeling that — during the night — the world had somehow unbalanced itself, and was wobbling on its axis like a child's spinning-top that's just about to run out of momentum.

She lay in her rumpled bed for five or ten minutes, listening, frowning, trying to decide what was different. Then she sat up, and switched on her light. Her bedroom was yellow, with vases of dried sunflowers, and gold-framed prints by Currier & Ives, yellow-dominated scenes such as
Reading The Scriptures
and
The Dream of Youth
.

She could hear a low, vibrant, rumbling noise, but it didn't sound at all like traffic. It sounded more like a thunderstorm, approaching from Jersey, or a subway train approaching round the bend, or the city being shaken by its very roots. She picked up her spectacles from the bedside table, and climbed out of bed in her XXL Indianapolis Colts football shirt. Jerry — her ex — had been a Colts enthusiast. Her mother (one cold and cloudy day, as she had died of cancer), had taken her hand and told her that she should never have married a Hoosier. ‘Hoosiers are always dire, darling. It's in their genes.'

She went to the window and opened the yellow Venetian blinds. It was still dark outside, although she could make out a dim crimson streak in the eastern sky, like blood soaking through a black dress. She listened again, really listened, and the rumbling went on. The window-frame began to judder and buzz, and she could feel a deep shaking sensation through the floor.

It wasn't traffic, although she could see headlights in the streets below, and horns parping and protesting. It was much more fundamental than traffic. It was the kind of rumbling that disturbed dogs and canaries and neighbourhood cats, and made milk curdle in the carton. And it was growing, too. It was growing stronger and deeper and louder. She could hear the cups and saucers in her kitchen jingling.

She went to the bathroom, and as she sat on the toilet-seat she could feel the whole apartment-building
thrumming
. She was worried now. Late last night on the television news, she had seen the jumbled-up panicky reports from Phoenix and Las Vegas, where hundreds of people had been killed — even thousands — and the buildings had fallen as completely as if they had been dynamited.

There had been no warnings that the same thing was likely to happen here in New York, but she was very aware that it might. After all, Manhattan had seen as many Indian massacres as anywhere else in America — massacres by fire, massacres by shot and shell, massacres by disease.

The site of every one of those killings could be opened up by Misquamacus as a gateway to the Great Outside; through which buildings and people and everything else that the whites had ever created could be dragged into darkness, and sealed over, and buried, for ever.

Amelia went through to the kitchen and punched out the number of the Thunderbird Motel in Phoenix. She was greeted yet again by a busy signal. She had tried to call Harry repeatedly, all through the night, but she guessed that all the phone lines to Arizona were down. She just prayed that Harry's usual instinct for self-preservation hadn't deserted him. She still felt guilty that she had refused to help him search for Misquamacus, but not so guilty that she wished she were there, in the Sunbelt, where cities were collapsing and people were being dragged right into the ground.

She filled the percolator with decaf and then she took a cigarette out of her pocketbook and made a fuss of lighting it I'm not smoking this because I need to smoke: I'm smoking this because Harry Erskine always makes me smoke. Damn Harry Erskine. He's a walking disaster. Everywhere he goes, he causes more trouble than he ever manages to sort out. He thinks he's some kind of Renaissance man, able to do everything and anything, and do it more brilliantly than anybody else. He had built her some shelves for her apartment, and six days later they had all dropped off the wall, breaking her tropical fish aquarium and four out of five rare Mexican figurines.

He had tried to cook her
steak Diane
once, and set fire to the kitchen. Now he had gone charging off like some latter-day knight errant, like some story-book hero, looking for Karen Tandy in a world of shadows that probably didn't even exist. Not in the way that thought it existed, anyway. She blew smoke, paced around the pale limed-oak kitchen, and listened to the thunder rumbling.

At six-thirty it was still dark. Amelia stood on her small cramped balcony, amongst her pots of geraniums and alyssum, and stared at up at the sky. She had tried to call her friends more than thirty or forty times: first Renee, who lived quite close, on West 99th, then Peter and Davina, who lived on the other side of the Park; then Bill Dollis, who had always wanted to marry her. Everybody's phone had been busy, and when she had heard sirens whooping and fire-trucks blaring, she had known that her instincts were right. The world had gone badly wrong in the night; and she began to realize that the sun wasn't going to rise, not today. Maybe not ever again.

She had tried to switch on the TV, but the TV was dead too, only a high-pitched whining noise. She could still pick up two or three radio-stations, but one was country-and-western and one was local news from Hackensack, New
Jersey, and one was an interview with Robbie Robertson, the rock musician.

The clouds were crimson, heavy crimson, and they looked as if they were boiling. There was a strong burning smell in the air, a smell of grass and aromatic roots and mesquite. Looking downtown from her balcony, Amelia could see that in most of the major buildings, the lights were still blazing: the Citicorp Center, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State. There were hundreds of automobiles on the streets, but they seemed to be crushed together in impossible gridlocks, at every intersection, and when she leaned over her balcony and looked westward down the length of West 98th Street, Amelia could see six or seven automobiles wedged together on the sidewalk, their lights glaring, and she could hear men shouting at each other.

Robbie Robertson was saying, ‘I'm half-Mohawk, yes. And I do have some inside information, a couple of connections with the spirit land.'

Amelia tipped out the coffee from her percolator, rinsed it, and refilled it, but then she decided she didn't want any more. What she needed now was communication, somebody to talk to, somebody to share her rising sense of panic. For the first time, she heard people screaming in the streets, and then the heart-wrenching sound of two vehicles colliding, and she thought to herself: this is it, this is where it ends. This is where Misquamacus finally gets his revenge on us. She lit another cigarette and then immediately crushed it out. She wanted to get out of the building. It may not stand on the site of an Indian massacre, but she didn't want to take the risk. Better off escaping. Better off leaving the city altogether. This was disaster time.

She dressed quickly, in jeans and a loose white cotton sweater with a low neck. She ransacked her desk in the living room, and took out all the important papers she could find. Insurance certificates, marriage certificate, divorce decree.
She took her precious photograph album, too. Pictures of MacArthur, in those early days, outside her knick-knackery store in the Village. Pictures of Harry on the Staten Island ferry, squinting against the sunshine. Pictures of her mother, so frail and ill that she was practically transparent.

The rumbling started up again, and a picture dropped off the wall, its glass shattering across the carpet. No time for nostalgia, thought Amelia, and hurriedly stuffed sweaters, socks, panties and dresses into her black canvas weekend bag.

Robbie Robertson said, ‘I do have in my background people whose gifts I could recognize from their connection to the earth, to father sky, mother earth. Everything's alive, we're all part of this thing, you take care of father sky, mother earth, and they do likewise for you. Mistreat these things, they mistreat you.'

She left the apartment, locked it, and stood for a while in the hallway feeling foolish. Nobody else seemed to be leaving the building, in spite of the deep and persistent vibrations; nobody else seemed to be panicking. But after a while she picked up her bags and walked as rapidly as she could to the stairs. Although she was eight storeys up, she didn't want to take the elevator in case it jammed. Not only that, she had always been haunted by that story about the day in 1945 when a bomber had crashed into the Empire State Building, and a young elevator operator had fallen seventy-nine storeys inside her damaged elevator. Amelia's mother had been a nurse at Bellevue, and had seen the girl when she was brought in. ‘She died, but then she found she wasn't dead, and the realization that she wasn't dead, that almost drove her out of her mind. I've seen it hundreds of times. Sometimes dead is better.'

Amelia clattered down the staircase, carrying her bags. She had to rest on the third floor; her head back against the
wall. She didn't think; she tried not to panic. She breathed the way that her aerobics teacher had taught her to breathe. Then she carried on down.