Dance for the Dead (27 page)

Stretched out below was a
squalid, sprawling settlement that seemed to have been laid out by a
madman. There were a few longhouses that looked as though Hurons or
Eries had built them with no intention of living there long,
interspersed with Algonquin wigwams made of bark and thatch, a few
hide tents like the wandering plains people had, and in the center a
clump of shanties made of boards. It was as though enemies of all of
the wars of the Nundawaono had somehow survived in debased remnants
and gathered here for the winter hunt.

As she stumbled down the steep
path to the huge collection of ramshackle dwellings, she could see
small shapes of people below, their shadows long in the bright dawn
sunlight. One of them pointed upward and yelled something, and then
men began to stream out of the shelters and gather in the center of
the village. She could see them talking and pointing, and she could
feel their excitement growing until, when she was dragged to the edge
of the village, their voices rose in a shout that was harsh and
deafening, full of hatred and glee. It grew louder as she moved
closer to it, until she could feel her stomach vibrating with it, and
the men started to fire their guns into the air, a ragged
powpow
pow powpow,
like popcorn popping.

They prodded Jane and Mary
across the dirty, mud-caked snow between the huts and pushed them
into a big pen made of upright pine logs sharpened at the tops. Jane
looked around her and saw to her surprise that there were dozens of
other people already inside – men clinging to their wives and
children, trying in vain to reach around all of them with their arms,
other men who looked as though they had run the gauntlet on the way
into the little pen, with limbs broken and faces streaked with blood
from blows above the hairline, women with eyes swelled shut and
missing teeth.

“What’s going to
happen?” asked Mary.

Jane said, “The fighting
has gone on forever. So many people get killed that the main reason
for it now is to get prisoners to adopt.”

“Adopt? We’re grown
women.”

“When people are killed
they capture someone to take their place – their name, their
work, their family.”

The gate across the pen opened
and about fifty warriors streamed in, painted and armed as though
they had just returned from battle. They were agitated and angry,
some of them in a frenzy, dancing from one foot to the other like
boxers and shouting in the incomprehensible languages of enemies. One
by one and with reluctance, they took notice of something behind them
and stepped aside to let the one Jane had been watching for pass
among them to the front.

Jane hung her head like the
captives around her to give her a chance to study him without
attracting his attention. She looked from his feet upward. He was big
and muscular, wearing a clinging, whitish leather shirt that seemed
to have been stitched together from many small pieces. Around his
neck and shoulders hung a gateasha of six rows of small white wampum
beads. When she forced her gaze to move upward, she nearly fainted.

He was wearing a Face. It was a
scalp mask, painted bright red, with round staring copper eyes and
the clenched teeth that made it resemble both the rage of battle and
the ghastly grin of a rotting corpse. It was terrifying to see a Face
here. She could tell that this was an old Face, the features that a
supernatural being had shown to some virtuous Seneca ages ago in a
dream. The Seneca had carved to free the Face from the trunk of a
living basswood tree, given it presents of tobacco, rubbed it with
sunflower oil, and fed it the same mixture of corn-meal and maple
sugar that the warriors ate on the trail to battle. It didn’t
merely represent the supernatural being; it
was
the
supernatural being. It gleamed with power strong enough to cure
disease and change the weather, but on this man that power became the
force of evil and witchcraft and death.

The Face approached and stared
at her with its round, empty eyes. Jane could see now that the
necklace was made not of little white shells but of human teeth. As
he moved on, she realized with revulsion what the leather must be:
strips of skin flayed from human beings. The Face walked around the
pen, stopping in front of each captive to turn its round-eyed,
unreadable gaze on him for a second or two, then moving on.

Finally the Face came back to
where Jane was standing. The Face stopped and pointed at Mary. At
once a warrior appeared out of the mob and poured a bucket of black,
greasy paint over Mary Perkins’s head. The paint streamed down
to her shoulders and ran along her arms to her fingertips.

Mary gasped and sputtered. “Why
did he do that? What is it, some kind of joke?”

“No,” said Jane. She
could feel waves of nausea that started in her chest and moved down
to grip her belly.

Mary shivered with cold. “It
must be an initiation, right?” Her voice was tense and scared
now, and a little sob was audible in it. “Why me?” she
wailed. “What do they want me to do?”

Jane tried to speak, but what
she would have to say was impossible to put into words. The black
paint was the sign that a captive had been selected to be burned.

Jane
awoke in the darkness with her heart pounding. She walked to the
window. The snow had stopped sometime during the night, and now the
sidewalks and streets were white and still, but in the east the sky
had changed enough to tell her there was no point in going back to
the couch. She raised her hand to touch her forehead and rubbed away
the beads of sweat that had formed there. She had been denying what
she knew about Barraclough, and the knowledge was fighting its way to
the surface in dreams.

She moved quietly into the
kitchen and put the coffee on. Then she sat and listened to Mary
waking up and remembering and making her way toward the smell of the
brewing coffee. The door opened and Mary walked out into the kitchen,
poured a cup of coffee, and stood at the sink to drink it. “I’ve
been thinking,” she said. “I’ve been on my own most
of my life and I think I can stay out of Barraclough’s way if I
don’t do anything stupid.” It was a question.

“It can be done.”
Jane sat still. It was time already. She would have to work up to it
gradually, tell Mary what she knew and let her draw her own
conclusion. “You just have to avoid doing anything stupid.”

“Like getting my picture
in the papers,” Mary offered.

“Right,” said Jane.
“You might want to keep it off things like credit cards and
driver’s licenses too. Barraclough is the regional head of a
very big detective agency, so he can probably find a way to have your
picture circulated. You know, a reward for a missing person.”

“I guess I can,”
Mary said. “And keep from getting arrested.”

“Or fingerprinted.”

“That’s what I
said.”

“You’ve got to keep
from being a victim too. If your house is burglarized or your car is
stolen, they fingerprint the owner so they can identify prints that
aren’t supposed to be there. Some states take your prints for a
driver’s license. And a lot of employers require it; if you
need to be bonded or licensed or need a security clearance, it’s
hard to avoid. Most companies hire a security service to handle the
details and report the results – a service like
Intercontinental.”

Mary Perkins glared at her.
“You’re trying to scare me.”

“Yes,” said Jane.
“It’s better. I don’t want to hear you sometime
saying, ‘Why me?’”

“All right,” said
Mary. “What else?”

Jane stared at the wall. “Well,
they’re not just passively waiting for you to turn up. They’re
searching. I know that because I talked to somebody who was hired to
help. But the easiest way is to get you to come to them. You know –
an announcement in the paper says some rich aunt of yours died and
the following eighty people are named in the will. Or the help-wanted
section says there’s a job for a blue-eyed woman age
thirty-four and a half and five feet four and seven eighths who’s
good at arithmetic. Or a personal ad says a wealthy widow with a
large secluded mansion wants a roommate: a quiet female nonsmoker
from the South who plays cribbage, or whatever else you do but not
everyone does. Barraclough is perfectly capable of renting houses in
the ten most likely places and having ten women sit there for a month
waiting for you to show up.”

“He’d do that?”

“Sure,” said Jane.
“It’s quick, it’s easy, and it’s cheaper than
the alternatives.”

“What are those?”

“Well, you have a history.
There are people you were close to. They’ll go see them. Maybe
watch to see if you come for a visit, or maybe bully them into
telling what they know. If you ever left clothes anywhere when you
started running, they’ll have translated the labels into places
where you might buy the next batch. The more expensive they were, the
fewer places to buy them, and they know you’ll need spring
clothes or risk standing out. They’ll also use them to
construct a projection of how you’re likely to look now. so
they don’t miss you in a public place: exact height, weight,
style, and color preference. Then there’s chemical analysis.”

“What do they have to
analyze?”

“If you wore perfume or
cosmetics when you wore the clothes, they’ll identify them and
add them to your profile. If you love Thai food or going to the zoo,
they’ll know that too.”

“That’s crazy.”

Jane shrugged. “No crazier
than having people meet us in airports all over the western half of
the country. Intercontinental is an enormous detective agency, much
bigger than most police departments. There isn’t a city in the
country that doesn’t have a crime lab with a trace-analysis
section. There’s a machine called a gas chromatograph that
vaporizes whatever substance they find and identifies it. There’s
no question Intercontinental has one, and probably an emission
spectrometer and an electron microscope. If you’re in the
business of tracking people for money, that stuff pays for itself
quickly.”

“You’re making it
sound hopeless.”

“Not hopeless. It just
takes some thought.”

Mary protested. “But there
are thousands of people in this country nobody can find.”

“Millions,” said
Jane.

“Well, who are they? You
can’t tell me they all get caught.”

“It depends on who’s
looking for them and how hard. A lot of them are divorce fugitives:
the man who doesn’t want to pay alimony or the parent who loses
custody and takes the child out of state. Somebody else runs up a
debt or embezzles a few bucks. Unless the person is foaming at the
mouth and shooting people at freeway rest stops, the only ones who
are very interested are the local police back home. Then there are a
few million illegal aliens. There’s not much reason to look for
them because nobody gets any benefit from finding them. There are
also personal cases: some woman breaks up with her boyfriend and he
threatens her. There’s practically no place where the police
will do anything to help her, so she moves away and changes her name.
There are millions of people hiding under assumed identities, and the
reason most of them don’t get found is that nobody’s
looking.”

“What you’re saying
is that if anybody tried, they would.”

“No,” said Jane.
“What I said is that it depends on who’s looking and how
hard.”

“You think I’m going
to get caught, don’t you?”

Jane hesitated. “You can
take that chance, or you can choose to take other chances.”

“What does that mean?”

“He’s not going to
give up. He has lots of trained people at his disposal in offices all
over the country, and he can probably dream up a charge to get the
police looking for you too, if he wants to. If you learn fast and
never make a mistake, he might not find you.” Jane looked at
her closely. “Or you could make a mistake –
intentionally.”

Mary’s eyes widened and
the color seemed to drain from her face. “You want to use me
for – ”

“Bait. Yes. What he’s
doing isn’t just evil; it’s also illegal.”

“I can’t. I don’t
have the money. You’re wrong. He’s wrong.”

“It doesn’t matter.
He thinks you do, and he wants it. That makes him predictable, and
that can be turned into a weakness. Your chance of trapping him and
getting him convicted might be better than your chance of hiding from
him.”

“No. I won’t do it.”
Mary looked at Jane defiantly.

“Suit yourself.”

“Are you leaving this
morning?”

“I said I’d help you
get settled.”

“But I told you I wouldn’t
do it. You can’t use me as bait.”

“I heard you.”

For the next six days, Jane
Whitefield waited. When Mary woke up she would find the quilt folded
neatly and stowed beside the couch. Jane would be in the middle of
the only open space in the small living room going through the slow,
floating movements of Tai Chi.

On the sixth day, Mary Perkins
said, “Why do you do that?”

“It keeps my waist thin
and my ass from getting flabby.”

Mary repeated, “Why do you
do that?”

“It helps me feel good. It
keeps me flexible. It helps me think clearly and concentrate.”

“Don’t worry,”
said Mary. “I’ll shut up.”

“You don’t have to,”
said Jane. “Part of the idea is that after a while the body
makes the movements flow into each other without consulting the
conscious mind much.”

“What’s that one?”

“What do you mean?”

“They all have names,
right?”

“Oh. ‘Cloud Hands.’”
Then her body was in a radically different position without much
apparent movement. “ ‘Golden Cock Stands on Leg.’”
Her body continued to drift into a changing pattern of positions.

Mary watched for a long time.
“Where did you learn to fight?”