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Authors: Matthew Scott Hansen

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BOOK: The Shadowkiller
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With calamitous shock buffering his awareness that he couldn't breathe, Mitch made what puny attempt he could at struggling, his arms being the only limbs that still worked. His immense attacker responded with animal fury and ripped Mitch's left arm from its socket, the limb separating from his body in a jet of blood and torn skin, muscle, white tendons, and red and bluish striated ligaments. Mitch looked up at his arm, now flailing above him, as a spray of crimson wet his face. Then he swung his head and looked into the inhuman face of his killer.

8

T
he young man glided over the forest path like a strong breeze, his feet making just enough contact to create locomotion, his movements the essence of economy. A Native American at the man end of his teens, he wore overalls, a denim shirt, and bulky old boots. Tall and lean, he wore his long black hair tied in a ponytail. The dusky forest through which he passed was sullen, a heavy mist dulling any detail past four or five yards. Although his face was a mask of concentration, the panic in his eyes betrayed the fact that he was running for his life.

A few dozen yards behind him, something menacing, something evil moved through the fog, pacing him. Like the oversized shadow of a normal person projected on a wall, only this shadow had substance.

The young Indian knew its thoughts and it knew his. The huge shadow toyed with him, knowing it could overtake him whenever it chose to. The teenager's only hope was to let it think he was far from safety and let it continue to enjoy the hunt, right up until the moment they came out in the small clearing by the home of his family. He prayed his grandfather would have felt or heard the cries of his spirit or the murderous thoughts of the shadow and would be waiting in the field, his shotgun leveled.

The shadow sensed this deceit and began to close in, slapping the trees in its path. The slapping sent a message to the boy that he would soon feel an open blow from that massive hand, breaking his neck and ending the chase.

Slap, slap, slap…

It got closer and closer.

Bam, bam, bam…

The sound was louder, the shadow behind him, its breath on his shoulder, his hair…his neck. Closer, closer…

BAM…BAM…BAM…

Oh-Mah…

BAM! BAM! BAM!

“Hey, Chief, you okay? You in there?” asked a muffled voice.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

The Indian awoke, confused, the pursuit over, his life saved by a knock at the door.

“Hey, Chief, you okay?” the young voice repeated through the door as the knocking came again.

The young Indian, suddenly an old man, looked around the dim trailer, getting his bearings, the drapes drawn against Southern California's sharp November sun. He sat up and moved slowly to the door and opened it. A blaze of strong morning light blinded him.

“Wow, I was worried,” said the young voice. “You all right?”

The old one, a lanky six three in a chambray shirt and jeans, his long hair now silver but still pulled back as in the dream, slowly focused on the twenty-year-old production assistant two steps below. Behind the PA was a flurry of activity—normal operations for a major motion picture studio. He remembered he was in a Star Waggon outside Sound Stage 27 at Paramount Pictures on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles.

“Chief? You okay?” said the youth, unsure owing to the chief's lack of response.

“Yeah, no problem,” answered the old Indian. “What's up?”

“They need you in makeup, sir. Five minutes.”

The man nodded and turned back into his trailer. He went to the sink, poured water into his cupped hands, and splashed his ancient, lined face. He was having the dream from sixty-some winters past more often now. He couldn't even take a nap and there it was. He hadn't been sleeping at all the past week, partly because of that noisy hotel on Santa Monica Boulevard in Century City, and partly because of that infernal dream that wouldn't leave him alone.

The dream had become increasingly vivid and for some reason the dreams were closer calls.
It
was closer.
It
was now almost upon him just as he'd wake up. His greatest fear now was that if it caught him, in the dream, as it almost really had in early 1945, he would never wake up. He was afraid that as old as he was, and since his strength was diminished because he was still smoking two and a half packs a day,
it
would grab him in his sleep and he would go to his death in its clutches. He couldn't let that happen. What was about to happen had been coming for a while and he knew, or rather
felt,
it was finally time.
This is it.

He shivered at the thought and looked up at himself in the mirror.
Seventy-nine and looking every day of it.
He dried his hands, found his fringed, beaded, buckskin jacket and fished out the pack of Kools. He lit one. The jacket was part of the look he'd cultivated for years. He wore it whenever he traveled because Chief Ben Eagleclaw, as he was known in most of the credits of the many films he had done, would wear a jacket like that. Back home in Eureka, plain old Ben Campbell simply wore windbreakers and sweatshirts.

Ben took a deep, unsatisfying drag off his cigarette and thought of his agent and how he might break the news to him, because Ben Campbell was just about to get Chief Ben Eagleclaw in a lot of trouble—and there wasn't a darn thing the chief could do about it. There was something out there—he wasn't really sure what—but he could feel its pull. He knew some of what drew him were the unanswered questions from sixty years past. But there was something else now, something new, something strong, something
living.
Ben wasn't sure yet if it was simply his awareness of this thing, like a tickling feeling on the edge of his consciousness, or if there was some entity out there, actually
in contact
with him, somehow. Ben couldn't yet fathom the details but he did understand one thing: the decisions he would make in the next few minutes would change everything.

Despite it being ten thirty on a Saturday morning when Ty entered the office of the
Snohomish Daily News,
the place was a bustle of activity. In his best Forest Service uniform, he'd tidied up as much as he could despite feeling pretty much like Morning of the Living Dead.

John Baxter approached and sized up Ty.
Great. Some alcoholic Forest Service guy on a wild goose chase.
It took one to know one: John had been sober fourteen years, two months, and five days.

“John Baxter,” he said, extending his hand, then passing Ty an olive green Pendaflex folder. “You can sit here and take notes if you want. Just can't let you walk out with it.”

Ty took the folder. “Sure, not a problem. Thanks.”

Baxter went back to his office and Ty sat on the vinyl sofa in the open reception area. The low buzz of workers and keyboards clicking faded to nothing as Ty took out a pen and opened the folder. The notes reflected the conversations between the article's author and Joe Wylie's boss, as well as a Snohomish County Sheriff's deputy named Bill Alexander. Though the exact location of the incident was unclear, Ty noted down the approximate area, then wrote down the pertinent names, as well as Wylie's phone number. He decided to call Wylie's wife as soon as he got home.

As he left, he caught Baxter's eye and waved his thanks. Baxter nodded.

John Baxter sat back in his tired-out Clark Kent office chair. His newsman's gut told him there was something familiar about this guy, but he just couldn't place it. He glanced down at the name on the scratch pad he had borrowed from the reception desk earlier that morning.

“Ty Greenwood,” he said softly to himself.

He had a suspicion there was more to Mr. Greenwood than Mr. Greenwood was letting on. He tore off the page of the pad and put it in his desk. He thought briefly about calling the Forest Service but decided to wait.
Next time Greenwood appears—and he will—this newsman will do some checking.

Five minutes after his wake-up call, instead of settling into a makeup chair, Ben was now aboard a Cushman, riding with a PA across the immense Paramount Pictures facility. To get that lift he had lied to one of the assistant directors that a family emergency was forcing him home. The AD summoned the director and Ben repeated his tale of a family crisis. The more he elaborated, the more he believed his own story.

Only when he'd been formally excused by one of the executive producers and given transport to the parking lot did he realize he was setting things in motion that were beyond his ability to analyze. This was real Indian instinct stuff, he thought, blowing off a major picture on a gut feeling and a dream of something that had happened sixty-some years ago.

Crazy Indian stuff.

As their cart made its way down the narrow alleys between sound stages, Ben's mind flew back in time, briefly revisiting the events that had brought him to Hollywood. On returning from the South Pacific in '46, Ben and his unit came ashore in San Francisco. Instead of going home to his tribal lands in Northern California's Humboldt County, he went south with some buddies to see Hollywood.

One night, while he was standing in a crowd ogling Betty Grable and June Haver as they alighted from limos at the premier of
The Dolly Sisters,
a small, sharp-featured man approached Ben and handed him a card. “Wanna work?” he asked. “I need Indians, especially tall ones. I'm in
the business.

Ben had heard the Lana Turner myth and had seen enough movies to know which business the guy meant. So, despite the ribbing of his buddies, he made the call the next day and it led to a job as an extra on a Republic serial playing a member of an angry Apache horde. Soon he was in demand, one month as a Shoshone for RKO, the next at Warner Brothers playing a Creek. Neither the directors nor the audiences knew the difference and he was more than happy to take the then kingly sum of thirty-five bucks a day to eat dust, whoop a lot, and get shot by guys like Duke Wayne and Ward Bond.

By the time Ben got his first picture with a screen credit, the man who had handed him the card, an independent ten-percenter named Al Levine—who was now his agent—decided Ben Campbell needed an “Indian” name, so he became Ben Eagleclaw. With Al's promise it would get him more money, Ben went along with it. That years later another Indian, Benjamin “Nighthorse” Campbell, would be elected U.S. senator in Colorado didn't matter much because by then Ben's last name was known to nearly everyone as Eagleclaw.

Flashing forward to the late sixties, and after nearly thirty years at three packs a day, Ben had weathered his face into a finely tuned symbol of Indian wisdom. Al, then eighty-one and still his agent, decided to give Ben a promotion. Having ascended the casting ladder from muscled brave to seasoned warrior to medicine man, Ben was ready, Al felt, to become a chief. He told Ben it could mean his price would go up. It was Al's last earthly strategy, for an hour after their ill-fated lunch at Chasen's, when Al made Ben a chief, Al died.

Ben always wondered if it had been the chili.

Though Al's cavalier disregard for Indian cultural protocol made Ben a little uneasy, he decided, partly out of respect for the dead, to go with the handle of chief. Over the years he had witnessed menacing redskins evolve into noble Native Americans, and though the roles for Indians had dwindled, Ben was established enough to command parts that just needed a sage old guy. Of course, the fact he was a sage old
Indian
guy certainly wasn't lost on Hollywood. Ben thought of the late Al Levine as they entered the Paramount parking lot. He wondered how he was doing in heaven or the Great Spirit Village or wherever old Jewish guys went. Al's partner Sid had retired around ten years back and had given the business to his son, Jay, who had assumed Ben as a client. Ben wondered how he was going to tell Jay he'd just walked off a picture, something he'd never done before. He shook his head.

Crazy Indian stuff. Honest to God, I've got no damn idea what I'm doing.

He muttered softly, “Damn crazy Indian stuff,” and the PA driving him, barely more than an embryo, noticed.

“Huh? Did you say something, sir?”

“Oh, just an old Indian chant,” he fibbed. “'Bout the past…and the future.”

The fresh-faced kid gazed at Ben in reverence. “Awesome.”

Ben figured the lad had never been anywhere but the womb, his home, school, prom, and this movie studio. Ben smiled inwardly that the kid had bought his bull because he was old, had done lots of movies, and was an Indian.

Then it occurred to him that maybe it wasn't a complete load of crap.

He felt the conflict between the movie Indian, Chief Ben Eagleclaw, and the real Indian, Benjamin Campbell, the Tsnungwe of Humboldt County. The real Indian was running the show. The movie Indian was just along for the ride. This was instinct territory, because the movie Indian was the only one still operating on a conscious level. It was a little scary because he felt too out of practice for this spiritual Indian stuff. As they arrived next to his rented Chrysler 300, Ben looked at the kid and smiled slightly. All of twenty and this baby had just helped show him something he didn't know.

Old dogs…

BOOK: The Shadowkiller
3.52Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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