Empire of Dust (11 page)

A
t midnight, an hour after Laika, Tony, and Joseph went to bed, a sixty-three-year-old Navajo named Ralph Begay came stumbling down a road that had once been loose stone, but had now been reclaimed by dirt, like so many of the Indian roads on the reservation. Begay had had too much to drink, as he often did, and was unsure as to whether or not he was even on the right road home.

Jesus, he thought, turning the white man's god into an epithet, the only use to which he ever put it. All these damn roads looked alike, especially in the moonlight. He'd be lucky if he made it back to his place on the rez. It wouldn't be the first time. He'd spent a lot of chilly nights wrapped up in the serape he wore, sleeping out in the open before he sobered up the next morning and made his way home. That was why his arthritis was so damn bad.

But it didn't ache now. That's how he knew he had enough to drink, when his joints stopped feeling so damned painful and his elbow didn't hurt when he bent it to lift the glass to his mouth. Unfortunately, by the time he got to that point, he was stinking drunk, and they threw him out of the Longhorn or Boots & Saddles or the Dewdrop Inn, or any of the other dozen bars in and around Gallup that he frequented.

And he drank whisky. He was proud of that—of not being one of those damn wino Indians who bought a three- or four-dollar bottle and sat in an alley or on a curb, swigging away until it was empty. Hell no, Ralph Begay could afford to sit in a bar like a white man and toss back shots at a buck and a half or two bucks each until he was properly stewed and feeling no pain.
Then
they could boot him out and he'd be none the sorrier. He'd have forgotten, for a time, about the betrayal.

But you looked at it another way, and if it hadn't been for the betrayal, he wouldn't be able to afford the whisky. He'd be respected, but he still wouldn't be able to afford to get rid of the pain. Nah, thought Ralph Begay. Whatever it took to get the whisky was worth doing, and the others could just go to hell if they didn't like it. His wife would still take care of him.

Ralph nearly tripped in a rut, and stopped for a second to regain his balance. For a moment he thought he heard something shuffling along behind him, and thought—quite logically, it seemed to him—that it must be his shadow following along, catching up to him.

Then he realized how stupid that was, and thought about Coyote. Coyote, that trickster of the animal world, often delighted in tormenting men, and if there was one thing Ralph Begay didn't need, it was more torment. So he started walking again, faster than before, and his own footsteps shuffling along in the dirt covered the sound of any others nearby. When Ralph no longer heard them, they slipped from his mind.

He felt pretty sure now that he didn't know what road he was on, and he'd probably have to spend the night outside. He had just decided to start looking for a ditch or culvert in which to curl up, when he heard a strange noise ahead to the right, and saw lights in the sky.

He rubbed his eyes to try and make them more clearly define the blurring lights, but they would not, so he stepped from the road and walked closer, across the scrub and rocks and sand. In his youth, Ralph Begay's eyesight had been phenomenal, but now the cataract in the right eye and the glaucoma in the left had taken away his ability to even find the Pleiades, let alone count every one of the seven star-maidens. Maybe if he got closer he could tell what the lights were. Now he didn't even have a sense of their distance from him. They might have been a hundred yards or a hundred miles.

Whatever and wherever they were, they also gave off a sound, a heavy throbbing. Maybe they were demons, and the lights were their flashing eyes, and the sounds were their huge hearts beating. Maybe they had come for him, and he was walking right into their trap. He didn't know, and in his drunken state, he scarcely cared. If they were demons he would talk to them, ask them what they wanted. Maybe he would ask if they had any whisky.

But then it seemed as if the demons were moving away as he drew nearer. Yes, that was what was happening, all right. They must have been scared of him, Ralph thought. You never could tell with demons. Sometimes they were brave, and at other times they were cowards. He had been lucky enough to confront a pack of cowardly ones.

Or at least he thought he was lucky, until he came over the rise and saw in the moonlight below what they had left behind in the sand.

It was the outline, cut into the rocky sand, of a giant bird, its wings spread over a distance of several hundred yards, from one end of the shallow basin to the other. Ralph Begay had seen the symbol before, in petroglyphs and on pottery. It meant many different things, but to Ralph, whose guilt caused him nearly as much pain as his arthritis, what he read into it was that his soul was soon to be carried away by a great bird, and that before that occurred, he must die.

So be it. He might as well keep trying to get home, though, so that he could wait there in relative comfort for the bird to overtake him.

As he stood looking at the shape in the sand, he became aware of other lights close to the ground, farther away. It was the highway, he realized, and then he remembered this basin where the demons had done their artwork, and by combining the two landmarks he had his bearings again. He knew where he was and how to get home.

He headed back in the direction of the dirt road he had been on. Once there, he would walk northwest and turn right at the first crossroads he came to. Another three miles and he would be back at his house, and Mary, his wife, would help him undress and get him into bed and maybe hold him until he fell asleep. He had dismissed the thought of sleeping out in the desert tonight. When death came for him, he wanted to be in his own bed.

He had walked a mile, considerably sobered by the sight of the symbol in the earth, when he thought he heard the footsteps shuffling behind him again. Old Coyote, or something else? He paused, but this time the shuffling did not stop, and he turned slowly, afraid to see what might be behind him.

When he finally saw his pursuer closing upon him, the sight drove the last doubt from his mind. It was one of the ancient ones, come back to punish the man whose mouth ran with the truth to outsiders, who told the secrets to those who had no business knowing them. Ralph Begay stood rooted to the spot, a condemned man before a bullet-pocked wall. Guilt breeds resignation.

Ralph fell backward onto the ground, his attacker with him. Then a feeling he had never had overcame him. It was as though the essence was being drained out of him, as though his consciousness was sliding from his body in a thousand different places. This sensation lasted until his blood dried up, leaving only its solids in his brain, which, unable to absorb the stuff that allowed its synapses to send their messages, died instantly.

It was good for him that he could not know what happened next to his body.

T
ony Luciano looked up at the motel room ceiling, and the jagged line the yellow light made as it reached in over the top of his room's curtains. No light had been added to or taken from it for hours, and he expected no change until the dawn, which was coming, he feared, far too soon.

He had slept lightly when he'd slept at all, and now was fully awake. Often he would go for weeks at a time with just two or three hours of sleep a night. If he was on a solo assignment, he used the time as effectively as possible against his enemies; if not, he devoured piles of books while most of the citizens he was charged with protecting slept. It was a combination of that "protection" and his metabolism that kept him awake.

For many years, his primary charge had been killing. Assassination, termination, prejudicial intervention—there were many different names for his specialty, but they all dealt with the taking of human lives. For a long time, he didn't mind. He was good at it, and at first he thought, with a simplicity born of faith in God and his country, that this was what he had been intended to do, that it was part of a divine plan, that those he killed deserved killing.

But as the years passed and the body count increased, his innate intelligence crushed such fables like cyanide pellets in a panicked mouth. The ambiguities multiplied, the questions increased, the doubts bred. The ghosts of his kills, not exorcised by the ritual of confession, spoke to him, neither accusing nor cursing, but only querying through their mere presence. They were shadows in his memory, predecessors sent ahead to scout the territory beyond life, bound to him more closely than family or lovers could ever be.

They teemed now, still many hours before dawn, and he saw their eyes again, saw that they retained the knowledge of why they died, but that they were unsure into what black lake they were sinking. Though most had been ready, none was prepared, and it had been the same with him in their killing.

He finally threw off the covers and swung his feet over the side of the bed, not bothering to tell them to go away, for they would not. Instead, they could walk the night with him, have a cup of coffee, sit where there was food and light, until, sated with these comforts of a world they had left, their silent voices withdrew, leaving him as alone as he could ever be.

He dressed and opened the door of his room. From the second-floor balcony, what might have been the first light of dawn hung low over the desert in the east, far surpassed by the incandescence of the bright neon of the Tumbleweed Coffee Shop across the street. Dusty pickup trucks were parked in front of it, and a figure in white moved behind its broad windows, going from counter to booths and back again. The promise of early morning bacon and a dark eye of coffee looking up from a white china cup set him moving.

Inside the aluminum frame, the Tumbleweed was structured like a classic diner, with the counter in front of him, spanning the entire width of the building, and booths to either side against the front wall. Automatically, Tony surveilled them all, and was pleasantly surprised to see Miriam Dominick occupying the far left booth. Though facing him, she was not looking at him. Her head was resting on her left hand, while a white mug was hovering, perched on two fingers of her right hand, over the Formica table-top. The string of its teabag dangled in the air.

His first response was to go to her immediately, but Laika's caution over further contact with her made him hesitate. Then Miriam raised her head from her hand and looked out the window into the night. When Tony saw her eyes, Laika and her warning were forgotten.

"Morning," he said, raising a hand as he closed the gap between them. He felt like a schoolboy finding his beautiful teacher, for the first time, outside of school.

She turned and looked at him, and for a second there was blankness. Then came recognition that lit her face like firelight. "Vincent, right?
Is
it morning?" she asked, with a smile that drove all his ghosts back to the dark wells deep in his brain.

"It must be, it's after midnight." He nodded to the empty vinyl bench across from her. "Taken?"

"Please, sit down," she said, and reached out her hand to shake his. He took it, sat, and grinned, wishing to hell he had brushed his teeth.

"Couldn't sleep?" he offered, signaling the waitress, who returned a weary smile and drew out her order pad, walking with a movie gunslinger's crawl to their booth.

"No, I. . . ." Miriam shook her head. "Bad dream," she said, and then the waitress was there, turning over Tony's coffee cup and filling it at his nod. Maybe the coffee breath would mask the lousy taste in his mouth.

With a glance at Miriam's buttered muffin, he ordered a bagel and cream cheese. But when the waitress asked if a frozen bagel was okay, he amended his order to what he had really wanted, two eggs over easy, bacon, and wheat toast. "That we can handle," the waitress said, and moseyed back to the opening behind the counter.

"Bad dream, huh?" he said, picking up the conversational thread as Miriam drew up the string of the tea bag and lowered it delicately to her saucer.

"I don't know if it was
bad
," she said, "but it was . . . haunting. All too real."

"One of your visions?" he said, with a smile that he hoped told her he doubted, but was willing to be convinced.

Her face grew serious, and she nodded, then looked out the window again toward the motel, as though seeing her dream's birthplace would help her recapture it for Tony. "I was in the desert," she said softly. "It was night. I heard something overhead, like . . . like a fluttering of wings, only much louder. I looked up, and I saw . . . it wasn't a bird, but it was the
shape
of a bird, an outline, like a petroglyph?"

She looked back at him, and he sensed pleading in her eyes, a painful desire to be understood and believed. "Those Indian drawings," he said, nodding, held by her gaze.

"Yes . . . and the shape came down—
over
me—until I was inside it. And when I looked all around, it was as though the shape had
dug
itself into the sand . . . the shape of a giant bird, its wings spread. And then I rose up, until I was high overhead, looking down at it . . . a giant bird, there in the sand. . . ."