Indian Country Noir (Akashic Noir) (8 page)

Such a relief to release the flow, to feel the pressure ease!
Heather relaxed as much as anyone could relax while squatting bare-bottomed in the snow.

The revving of the motor took her by surprise. She was still
peeing when the engine roared and the Ski-doo sped away.

"Hey! Wait a minute!" she shouted, as if the snowmobile's
departure were mere carelessness-a failure to notice that the
passenger was not on board.

It took Heather ten seconds to realize that the snowmobile was not going to stop, another ten to claw her clothing
into place. She stumbled through the snow, hollering, "Don't
leave me here!" She chased after the Ski-doo, the diminishing
roar of its motor humming in her ears even when it had disappeared behind a hill.

After disbelief, shock set in. The truth swept over her,
buried her like an avalanche. She was alone in the middle of
a frozen lake. The Ski-doo's track, a long scar in the white
snow, was the only sign that it had ever been here. Everything else seemed like a bad dream. Only the track was real,
and only it could save her. She had to follow that track, and
quickly, before drifting snow erased it.

Which way should she go? Forward or back? It must be
twenty miles back to Osprey Lake.

Forward, she decided. There would be a town beyond the
next hill. She would come upon it soon. Snow swirled in every
direction. Soon it covered the snowmobile's track.

Heather walked and walked until she lost all sense of time
and place. There was a buzzing in her head. Images swam
vaguely in her mind. For a while, someone seemed to walk
beside her, a presence felt rather than seen. When she turned
her head, nothing was there but swirling snow.

Then a heavy drowsiness came upon her. She felt her knees give way and her body sink into the softness. Rest and sleep,
she thought. Rest and sleep. Memories passed like strands of
mist, like fragments of a dream. It was summer, and Don lay
beside her on the plaid blanket, down by a river, just past a
little town that was out of sight behind a hill. She made an
effort to touch his face. But she was too tired.

There were voices in the wind. They came from above her
and from every side, chanting in a language she did not know.
She heard drums too, but that might have been her blood
beating in her ears, fainter now and far away.

New York, New York

he was a different kind of incoming, bursting like a
hungry TRex through the City Hall subway platform
crowd thick from track pit to tile wall with suits and
stiffs. Her eyes zeroed in on half a dozen guys, me included,
for a split second before dismissing us all. We weren't on the
menu. I wouldn't have minded, even after she near knocked
me over chasing a train that hadn't come in yet.

Funny how little of my life sticks with me. But, of course,
things sticking to me isn't the problem at all.

She put a good lick into me with her shoulder. Played some
games, that one. Curtain of black hair had my heart racing
before I remembered her lips, thin because they were pursed,
and her small nose, nostrils flaring like a horse in full gallop. I
liked the way her hips shoved the sides of a loose cotton top
out as she bulled her way through a New York crowd that really didn't give a shit about being pushed around by her.

Almost like they forgot she'd been there as soon as she
passed. But I didn't.

Wake up, white man, and see what's coming.

That's what Grandpa said, inside my head. Normally, I'm
sleeping when I hear him. Usually, I'm dreaming when I see
the world so sharp it hurts, in a quick-cut slide, down a looping water ride that doesn't ever want to stop. Like a house-to house fire fight. Or an RPG blazing a smoke trail for a Humvee parked at a market.

Grandpa says I should take up the pipe if I want to understand where I'm going and what I'm seeing in these dreams.
Then he laughs when I think about it, and tells me I don't
have enough First in me to handle a pipe. Yeah, and you
weren't there when I needed you, ghost warrior.

I couldn't remember the last time he warned about something in real time.

I turned, a little slow because I didn't want to let go of
her, and looked. Got two looks in, really. First take was of a
big, goofy, golden-haired boy with porcelain skin and muscles
on top of muscles packed under a shiny custom suit, slipping
and sliding his way through the crowd like a king snake with
a thousand excuse-me's slithering from his mouth in a few different languages. Pretty. Officer candidate material. The type
that goes down hard and doesn't bounce. People didn't look
twice at him either.

Second take went toward the same place as Grandpa's
voice.

I never saw nothing in any dream like what was coming
on my second take. Sure, I've spent time with ravens, cougars,
coyotes, rabbits, squirrels, even talking water bugs. Trees and
leaves turning into freaky faces, speaking words I can't understand, and even when I do, I still don't get what's up-yeah,
plenty of that.

But this check-off got me a vision full of toothy, mangy,
wild-eyed wilderness surging like a market crowd running
from a bomb blast. Where the eyes were supposed to be in
the lump that might have been a head, there were holes, redrimmed fire pockets like sniper muzzles loaded with bullets
with names on them.

Two faces. Walking in the waking world.

Something inside me felt cold, but it wasn't really me.
Grandpa was upset.

The station already smelled like meat turned bad from the
mass of sweaty bodies perfumed for the day at the office, but
what I saw pushed out a shockwave stench like a body cooked
in burning wreckage. Or a fresh, dug-up grave stacked with
the dead.

Two-face didn't single me out. It was stalking the woman.

I moved. Didn't think twice. Not scared. Hell, Grandpa'd
been talking to me since I was a kid, saying he's in my blood
and telling me I should do this or that crazy thing. Scared
always bounced off of me, even in that shit-and-rock country
they sent me to after I enlisted. This was just one more dream
I was walking through.

I left a wake of curses. Guess I was the only one running
who wasn't invisible. Put out a hand, caught a flap of cloth
that felt slippery. Kept the other tight for a punch to what I
hoped were ribs.

Two-face raised an elbow and I barely cleared a broken
jaw. The thing shrugged and I heard the buzzing of a nest full
of hornets barreling into my ear drums.

I went down, sparks flying. No concussion or ringing eardrums, no smoke curling from singed cloth. No flashbacks either. Got up quick. People muttering didn't bother me. I'm
used to folks thinking I'm crazy. Best four years of my life were
in the service. I was normal there. Bugfuck as I wanted to
be. Grandpa didn't visit me. Not even in dreams. No signs
or warnings. Reality was the dream. I'd been sent all alone to
the mountaintop in a shit storm to find my way, my tribe, my
vision.

You had to make it on your own, is what Grandpa told me when I came back and he started speaking to me again.

Where's my way, my tribe, my guide?

You on the path for it now.

Thanks for nothing.

I followed in the big man's wake, catching up, thinking
about what I was going to do-jump up and grab the choke or
go low and take out the knees. He stayed mostly man, which
made it easier to think. Of course, when you have to think
about these things before you do them, they don't turn out
well.

I wasn't fast enough. Good thing, or else I wouldn't be
talking about it now. And the woman, she'd be dead.

He caught up to her and shoved. She screamed as she
went flying into naked air, and when she stopped flying she
vanished into the track pit.

A gust of warm, humid air blew in, then surged out of the
tunnel.

The man kept moving on through the crowd as I came to
the platform edge. A few suits shouted, stirred from their iPod
cocoons by a sense of having just missed something. I knew
the feeling. A young girl in a school uniform pointed down
at the tracks. A knot of teenage boys whooped and laughed.
Maybe there was something down there, maybe there wasn't.
A fat rat plodded away to the other side of the station. Fast
food wrappings and newspaper pages danced in the air. A roar
was building.

The big man wasn't so big anymore, like he was making
his way down a different horizon line than everyone else. He
looked back at something way behind me, maybe the distant
crowd of its and his victim, and then he dipped below the
range of shoulders and was gone. There was no two-faced
man. No woman either.

Grandpa settled down inside me. I never knew he could
get upset like that.

On the uptown side of the station, a twenty-something
who looked like he'd stayed up from a night of clubbing broke
into a free-form flow like he was the headliner and we'd all
come to hear him and the sound of that train coming was our
love and adulation taking him higher and higher. I have no
idea what he was rapping about.

So I jumped.

The lights of the lead subway car were the eyes of that
thing I'd seen on the second take of Mr. Muscle, only they
were flashing with the fire from full clips being dumped on
me.

My hand settled on something warm, soft. Moaning.
There she was. I grabbed an arm, pulled. Got hold of her hip,
slid my hand up under the other shoulder. There was space
below the platform. I dragged her to cover.

Happened to me once. Small, smelly guy, spilling blood
himself, pulled me from a burning wreckage over stone and
dust and sheet metal, through a tangle of poles and beach umbrellas and plastic sheeting, to a quiet little spot underneath
sides of meat quietly flaming. We listened to gunfire crackling
and kids crying for a while. Don't know what happened to him
after the evac.

I held the woman tight against my chest, legs around her
hips to keep her from rolling. Her hair flew and crawled all
around my face and head as the train blasted past its inches
away. For a second I didn't know where I was anymore. Too
many dreams, too much reality.

She was a warm, trembling bundle against my beating
heart. I closed my eyes, and turned my head so her hair could
get all of me, neck, ears, eyes, and lips-like she cared-and her fingers were memorizing the shape of me and I was something special to her.

But the train screeched to a stop and we choked and
coughed on a burnt, electric stink and dust and she broke free
but knocked her head against a car's undercarriage and stared
at me like I was the one who'd thrown her down there.

Her face was rounder than I thought, now that I could see
it with her hair flowing away, reaching for the light and the air
and freedom.

"Sorry," I said, pulling my legs away from her because I was
afraid that even with everything going on I'd get a hard-on
and that would make the situation a complete cluster fuck.

People were shouting above me and I thought I was okay,
though my knees and hips were singing like an out-of-tune
choir. I thought we could crawl to one end of the station and
get out, so I pointed and started moving. If there's one thing
hearing voices, much less combat, taught me, it was recovery.
If you just lay there, you're screwed. Keep moving.