Lizardskin

WINNER OF THE ARTHUR ELLIS AWARD
for
Best Novel of 1992
from the Crime Writers of Canada

The night wind had a strange scent of pine and eucalyptus trees and something sharp. The moon was still back in the east somewhere, shining for other people. The Milky Way showed through the thin cloud cover like sparks through silk. Beau felt the chill of the high plains night on his cheeks and the backs of his hands. The shotgun was a heavy bar of cold iron.…

As he leaned into the driver’s side door to shut off the lights, the muscles of his back and shoulder blades coiled up and grew cold. He was listening so hard, he could hear his own blood in his ears, listening for that snap and the thrum of a shaft coming in from the dark. It struck him then that this was a very old experience in this territory—a man alone in the dark, waiting for an arrow to come whistling in from somewhere beyond the light.…

from
Lizardskin

———————————

I’ve walked a narrow track through this book, trying to balance the requirements of fiction with my affection for hard facts. Those Montana residents lucky enough to live around Billings and Hardin and the Crow lands will know that Pompeys Pillar is rather less than I’ve described, Hardin rather more, and the valley of Arrow Creek considerably changed. I hope they’ll understand I made these changes with care and out of a writer’s necessity. To my cousin Michael Spence, whose love for the West sparked this story two years ago, I offer my affectionate gratitude.

And for those Lakota, Crow, and Cheyenne people who may read this book, and see the names of great men and women from their histories, and see those names carried into this age by some of my fictional characters, I want them to know it was done as a kind of remembrance, with the hope that their names might be spoken again by those who loved them, among their own peoples, and, with respect, among those people who are not of the First Nations but who, when the day is slipping away and a soft amber light is on the land, sometimes go to their windows and look out across the hills and the coulees and think about how much that was fine and true has passed away under the sweetgrass.

Beyond these caveats, and always remembering how much I owe to my editor, Beverly Lewis, the book is mine and I stand or fall on what I have written.

When the light outside her window turned the color of milk and blood, Mary Littlebasket closed her eyes and pulled at the intravenous line. It came away from her vein like a snake letting go, a skin-pop sound, and then a small blossom of her blood rose out of the brown skin on the back of her hand. From the glittering tip of the needle, drops of clear liquid swelled and fell onto the wrinkled pink hospital linen. She closed her eyes again and for a long moment thought about putting her head back on the hard pillow and trying once again to drive her soul from her body by singing the leaving song. But there was no belief inside her to give the song power. She let out a long trembling breath through her taut lips, paused at the edge of this moment to summon her intentions, then rolled to her left, feeling the stitches in her belly as they tugged at her like hooks.

Now she was on her feet. The room reeled, and a soft white cloud seemed to fill her head, dimming the pooled yellow light from the lamp over her bed. She steadied herself on the bedside table, seeing her hand and her bruised arm as if from a distance, oddly distorted and elongated.

She found her clothes in a brown paper bag; her flower-print dress and the sandals and the blue ribbon that Charlie Tallbull had tied in her hair when the ambulance came to take her to town.

Mary Littlebasket dressed herself, trying not to be frightened at the incision that violated her belly and the bandages that girdled her body.

She stepped into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Pausing at the mirror, she stared at her reflection, at the ochre tint in her cheeks and the coal-fire light in her brown eyes, at the wild aurora of blue-black hair and her blunt strong face. Taking a tube of lipstick—Tahiti Dawn—she inscribed a sign on the chilly glass, doing it slowly and carefully, out of respect for the gesture, perhaps for her parents and her relatives if they should ever hear of it, but it still seemed a slight thing, as futile as a rabbit’s shriek.

Finishing, she came out again and closed the bathroom door. Perhaps they would be pleased that the stupid Crow girl had finally decided to take a shower.

Out in the hall she heard the nurses talking at their station, bright brittle chatter and one voice carrying above it. They were changing the shift, each one describing her patient load and how they had passed the night. It would take them a half-hour, and then they’d spread out through the ward, full of cold comfort and metallic efficiency, like the sisters at the Mission St. Labre. Mary shook the memory out and stood awhile at the door, trying to transcend the white fog and the pain in her belly. She stepped out into the hall, turned to the right, and pushed her way through the doorway into the nursery, the heavy door closing behind her with a hissing reptilian slither.

The hallway was empty. Through the plate-glass window she could see the plastic shells where they kept the babies. There was no one in the room. The attendant must be at the shift meeting. She came into the room and went over to the one where her baby slept. She stood over the alien machine, watching him draw in his breath and let it out, a small brown monkey-creature bound up in a web of tubes and needles and monitors.

The monitors.

If she pulled at the wires, surely a bell—an alarm—would ring at the nurses’ station. She studied the machine for a while, then she reached out and flipped a red switch on the panel. The tiny green screen went dark, but there was no change in the baby’s breathing. With her breath held and her heart
pounding in her ribcage, she forced herself to look at the baby’s face, at the—wrongness—of the features, the flat misshapen skull and the eyes that seemed to be sewn shut. Yet there was breath and a heartbeat. He was alive. Surely this was a kind of life.

She took the covering off him and carefully disconnected the monitors. She lifted him—so light! so delicate—yet warm, and breathing; he radiated a perfect sweet stillness, calm as a pool under a gliding moon. His body was hot and dry, and she covered him with a blue blanket, wrapping it around him, pulling him to her aching breasts; turning now, leaving, she glided, wraithlike, a sweep of cotton flowers and the whisper of sandaled feet on the polished floors. She passed away down the long hall, her blue-black hair shining with yellow lights as she moved into and out of the glow of the overhead lamps toward the glowing green sign that said
EXIT
.

Holding the child in her right arm, she leaned into the door and popped it open. A warm wind coiled inside around the door, smelling of dry stone and dust and baking asphalt.

In the security office on the second floor, a red light began to blink on a control panel showing a floor plan of the clinic. The guard put down his copy of
USA Today
and leaned forward in his chair, his leather creaking, the Ruger digging into his waist, hesitating, his right hand poised over a phone set.

Mary Littlebasket went through the door and closed it with her back, feeling the lock set again. She was in a parking lot, newly painted white lines intense against the sticky surface. The air was warm and harsh against her cheek as she ran across it toward the street. Past the tiny brick homes and the stunted cottonwoods at the edge of the schoolyard, she could see the low weathered hills of the Arapooish, the grasses still soft and blue-green in the dying June days.

The Changing Grass Moon, she thought, going out across the schoolyard, looking for the pickup truck, listening for a motor.

The guard stared at the blinking red light for another thirty seconds. Sighing, he tapped the panel twice, hard. When the
light did not go off, he picked up the telephone, spoke into it for a few seconds, then he pushed himself up out of his oak swivel chair and adjusted his belt. He sighed again, theatrically, for his own pleasure, put on his cap, setting it just right in the reflection of the office window, and stepped out into the stairway. He was halfway down the stairs when he met a nurse coming up around the flight, her face hard and white.