The Fifth Sacred Thing (7 page)

The long day passed. After a couple of hours Bird was bored enough to wonder if he was truly going to go crazy. He was struggling to catch hold of pieces of himself as he had once grabbed at finger holds on a sheer rock face. That was a memory, a physical one, real as the swishing sound of the broom brushing the concrete floor. He could smell sun-warmed granite and hear voices shouting encouragement from below, could feel in his body visceral fear and then exhilaration as he pulled himself up over a steep ledge, but he couldn’t quite place the moment in any context.

He found that he could play with the edge of mindlessness, as if his memory were a balloon on a loose string that he could let run through his fingers and suddenly grab tight again. When he let go of memory, the moment became luminous, even there in the gray concrete, and the rhythmic action of his muscles and the soft sound of the broom on the floor were enough to keep him endlessly satisfied. When he brought memory back, he wanted to run away screaming.

His grandmother had brown eyes that looked at you as if she could see you down to the bone. Maya. That was her name, Maya. He could almost hear her voice whispering to him: “You’re a Witch, boy. Use your magic.” But he couldn’t remember his magic.

Probably by now his grandmother thought he was dead, if she thought about him at all. No,
when
she thought about him, if she were still alive. He was afraid to reach too far for her, afraid to send his spirit home until he was more firmly rooted back in his body.

Another bell sounded, and he was marched back to the barracks for count. Then the men lined up and shuffled off to dinner. He could see Hijohn, moving slowly as if his body still hurt. Littlejohn fell into line behind Bird, and they received their food and found places at a table.

“Wait,” Littlejohn whispered, when Bird prepared to eat. When all the men were seated, they folded their hands and bowed their heads as a voice came over a loudspeaker, intoning a prayer some part of Bird recognized.

“We utterly repudiate the Devil and all his works.…”

It was the Millennialist Creed. Bird had memorized it once for a performance in school, when he had played Justin Hardwick, the breakaway Fundamentalist who, just after the turn of the century, had preached the doctrine of Christ’s rejection. Why did he remember that when so much else eluded him?

“In memory of Jesus Christ, who returned to earth only to repudiate the world for its sins, we abhor the earth, the Devil’s playground, and the flesh, Satan’s instrument. We abhor the false prophets and the false gods, those who lie with promises of salvation and those who tempt us to wallow in the worship of demons, whether they be called Goddesses, Saints, Lucifer, or the so-called Virgin Mary. For we know that Our Lord never lowered Himself to take on loathly flesh, but was, is, and ever shall be pure spirit. Amen.”

The words fell off his tongue as if he had been saying them for years—which he had, he realized with a slight shiver. As kids, they had all made fun of Hardwick’s name. “How hard is your wick?” He could hear the laughs quite clearly, although he couldn’t remember who had been laughing. But if he focused on what he did remember, even the fragments, then more scraps of memory returned. Faces. A dark face like his own, brown eyes always looking off into the distance, hands tapping rhythms on the edge of the table. Marley. “If you boys can’t keep still at the table, you can eat outside in the garden with
the dogs.” His mother’s voice, crisp on the surface, but underneath Bird heard the harmonics of grief. Someone was dead. His father. “It’s not fair! Marley’s making noise, not me!” That was his own voice, and his mother’s black eyes turned on him, and now her voice was sharp but there was humor in it too. “You’re making noise now. It’s a noise called ‘whining.’ ” And then a girl’s face popping in at the back door, her wild hair escaping from two black braids, her skin brown and gold and rosy in the warm evening light. “Can Bird come outside and play?”

Madrone. That was Madrone.

He wanted to go outside now, to run and run and run, to feel his numb feet pounding down on dirt, putting distance between him and captivity. When he thought he might never get outside again … but he couldn’t afford to think about that. Instead, he focused on the cold, greasy noodles on his plate, forcing himself to chew and swallow, to stay focused in the here and now. There was something he had to do. Hijohn. He had to warn him.

The moment came as they lined up after supper to carry their trays back to be stacked and washed. Hijohn was in front of Bird, and when he set his tray down on the counter Bird stumbled and dropped his own. The guard yelled at him, but Hijohn bent down and helped him pick up the fragments of dishes.

“They’re going to kill you tonight,” Bird said softly, without moving his lips.

“Yeah.”

“What can we do?”

“We?”

“We.”

“I wish I knew,” Hijohn said. “I sure wish I knew. Thanks, brother.”

Their eyes met, just for a brief flash. “I’ll try to stay with you,” Bird whispered.

Hijohn’s eyes acknowledged the whisper, as he moved away in silence.

Back in the cell block, the men kept an uneasy territorial truce. They were divided into distinct and separate groups, Bird found. Each group had its own tables, its own section of bunks. They called themselves Blacks and Latins and Asians, whom the others called Slants. The terms seemed only loosely related to color or culture. Nobody spoke any Spanish, and whenever a few unwary words escaped his own tongue Littlejohn silenced him. Some of the Blacks looked white or Asian and some of the Latins looked black. Nevertheless, they identified each other clearly enough by hand signs, Bird guessed, or body language, or subtle differences in the way they wore the common uniform. And the identification with one group or another determined everything:
where you slept, whom you ate with, whom you could count on, whom you had to watch out for.

Bird was outside it all. No one needed an ally who couldn’t remember who he was, or feared an enemy who might forget what he was doing in the middle of a battle. Littlejohn took shelter in the aura of his protection and guarded him, making sure he remembered to eat, to dress, to stand for count, shepherding him away from avoidable dangers, keeping him out of the others’ way. He was tended like some big, friendly, protective, potentially dangerous dog.

Hijohn walked over to the table where a group of men were playing cards with a homemade deck. He sat down.

“Deal me in,” he said.

The men didn’t bother to look at him.

“Go hang with your own kind,” one of them muttered.

“I am with my own kind.”

“You ain’t black.”

Hijohn stood up. Suddenly the room was silent, everybody watching him. “All of us in here are the same kind,” he said.

It seemed to Bird that the temperature of the air dropped about ten degrees. Nobody breathed.

“I come from the hills,” Hijohn went on. He was breathing hard, and his wizened face seemed pressed into one wrinkled point with some inner effort he was making. “We’ve learned that the hard way. They set us against each other so they can rule. We’ve got to unite.”

He reminded Bird of an apple doll, and it seemed wrong somehow. He should look grander or more heroic.

“You talk like that, they kill you, man,” somebody muttered from across the room.

“We’re all going to die,” Hijohn said.

“Some of us quicker than others.”

“When have you ever had a chance to live? Are you alive in here? For how long? Until they throw your ass out onto some work levee and you fry in toxins?”

“What do you want, man?”

But he never got a chance to answer, because the door opened and the guards took him away.

Bird lay on his bunk, staring blankly up at the wires that held the mattress above him. He could feel Hijohn, somewhere, in pain. Bird wanted to help him, but all he could manage to do was drift into his mind, feeling the blows as they came, a helpless witness. It was night, and around him men slept. His
outer ears could hear muffled cries and moans through the walls, or maybe he only imagined he could hear them. Hijohn’s pain weighed on him like a stone, while some memory of his own burgeoned up beneath him. Between the two of them, he was crushed, could hardly breathe, yet he kept feeling that if he could only remember something, something he knew, he would be able to help this man, even if only to help him die.

Then he was falling into a dark place, a memory, where he still floated unbounded, out of context. He was alone in a dark cell, but he didn’t remember how he’d gotten there. He had no idea whether it was day or night. There was a thin blanket over him, but he felt cold. His right hand was shackled to something—he couldn’t move it more than a foot or two—and his left leg felt heavy, encased in something that weighed him down. His whole body hurt more than he could believe. He wished for Madrone, wished she were there bending over him, her face grave but confident, her healing hands pouring warmth on his wounds. But she was far away, and he was alone. He had never felt so alone.

He had to piss, and he groped with his free hand in hopes of finding a bedpan, but there was nothing. If he got the bed wet, that would only make him colder. With a great deal of effort and some pain, he finally managed to shift his position to roll on his side and pee over the edge of the bed. Relieved, he began to feel thirsty and hollow inside. He couldn’t remember eating or drinking or much of anything for a good long while, but he must be healing because his mind felt clear enough for him to begin to worry. What the fuck was going to happen to him now?

After a long, long time, a door opened. He smelled soup. “Stinking slime,” a voice said, but hands placed a tray down near his free hand, and he heard a metallic sound, like something being dragged to the side of the bed. “Use the goddamn bucket,” the voice said, and then the door slammed shut.

If he ate, he was going to have to shit someday, but he would worry about that later. There was some sort of thin soup, and bread, and a hot, bitter liquid to drink, and the fact that it seemed as good as it did told him how hungry he was. Then he slept.

In memory, he spent a long time in that cage. Alone in the dark, he’d begun to fly. He had always been good at spirit travel; now he had infinite time to explore and few outside distractions. He went to his power place in the mountains; it was winter there, and in his astral body the crystalline structure of the snow became a labyrinth of rainbow chambers where he could wander for hours or days. Every crystal was a world. He could move through them, into dark spaces that were also, somehow, the great reaches of emptiness between the stars.

His captors had made time into an instrument of punishment, but he was
free of it on the star roads and they couldn’t touch him. He was in the underworld, like a seed, gestating in the dark. The scraps of old myths he half remembered became actual places, where he dropped with Inanna down into the realm of the Queen of the Dead. The past was a place, too, where he rode with warriors of Queen Nzinga to defend their walled town, where he attacked cities and burned children in their houses, where he lay in a dungeon like this one and was dragged out to burn, where he stood behind an Inquisitor’s mask and asked the question and ordered the torment, where if he lay in his hole long enough he could experience every single thing that had ever happened to a human being.

And there were beautiful places, orchards of fruit trees that shone with their own light, misty islands where he followed the tantalizing back of a woman who was always just beyond his reach. He moved in realms of color so pure that even sunlight could only diminish them; he heard music, chords so perfectly tuned he could dissolve in their perfection and lose all fear. If he could only hold the melody to himself and remember, he knew it would knit his bones. And when he was far enough gone, so that even the edge of his mind disappeared, she came: the Crone, the Reaper, the one whose breath you feel in your hair when the gate slides shut and there’s no going back anymore, the terrible beauty, the hag who holds out withered arms and demands your embrace. In the fairy tales it was always the older brothers who rejected her. But he was the younger brother, the one who laid out his cloak for her and lay down with her to let her take him into herself, and take her in. And so he came to know in his body the power of the Reaper and the song of the stars.

Enough, Bird thought, struggling to shake free of his memories, to open his eyes. He didn’t want to relive any more. But the images rolled on relentlessly.

He remembered the shock when the guards came for him. Suddenly the cast was broken from his hips; he was shoved to his feet and forced to walk on legs that didn’t remember how. He was in a bare room facing a bright light that stabbed his eyes, and there were men facing him whose malevolence was palpable as his own rotting flesh.

“You ready to talk, boy?” they asked.

He wasn’t ready to talk to them.

“What’s your name?”

It occurred to him that being Bird of Lavender and Black Dragon, good Witch of the North, was maybe not the safest identity around here. “Paco,” he said. It was an old nickname, short for
pájaro
, bird in Spanish. “Paco Negro.”