The Siren's Tale (4 page)

Speaking of HEAs, I predict the young woman I spoke of earlier will be inspired
to record our entire story for posterity on her magical tablet. Now, won't that be a feather in our fedoras? In my dream, she winks at me and then writes:

“
The twenty-first century is perfect for sirens. Vampires are so over. Why should they get all the fan mail? LOL.”

As for Harry, of course he is no vampire, but the man has a cardboard soul. Why else would his wife Lila, a siren who knows a good man when she sees one, spend so much time away from her rich and powerful husband?

I
f I were inclined to take on a new human form, I would choose Lila's. Lila Coffin Drake is a siren of the black-haired, sea-going lineage, and ooh la la!—a hotter, shrewder, wittier siren never graced Goddess Earth. Lila snared Harry Drake only to get her blue-blooded family off her back. Unlike Marlena, Lila does not love Harry. Indeed I believe she quite hates him.

If I were still among the living, I might get it on with Lila. In the olden days, sirens made love to each other routinely, as part of their sexual education, while preening on the rocks. Then the Victorian Age came along, and all sex, particularly sex between homogeneous creatures, became suspect. What nonsensical prudery!

There is no telling what Lila might be up to next if she divorces Harry, but I will bet ten to one that Marlena's face is in Lila's crystal ball. I would not put it past the two of them to hook up—whether professionally or sexually is an open question. Or, Lila might snare Bryce Scattergood, that historic preservationist fellow who is sniffing around Marlena. Now there is a hunk. Wake up and smell the testosterone, sirens!

P
erhaps Lila is the one who should have my zither. Chloe told me all about Drake's Roost, the Gothic monstrosity Harry Drake built on Alta Mountain in the ‘60s to compete with the Biltmore family and which now houses his glamorous wife. Not that Lila stays at Drake's Roost for more than a month at a time. She calls Drake's mansion, the darling of
Town & Country,
a “mausoleum.” Perfect acoustics for a zither, though, and Lila plays her white Steinway beautifully, almost as well as she plays her sexual organs.

Men have it right. Sexual passion is the single best thing about human life, way beyond spiritual ecstasy, which is pathetic and symptomatic of serious mental illness. Certainly a voracious sex drive has shaped the destiny of our red-haired hope for the future. But given
Marlena's rare intellect, one would think she would have figured out by now that her persistent obsession with Harry Drake—the chink in her armor—was triggered by forces outside her control. Her adulterous initiation into sexual passion, which her marriage was devoid of, set off an ancient behavioral pattern in her siren DNA. Theirs is not a grand passion, nor is it the greatest example of romantic egoism since Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, as she thinks. Not even close!

From my perspective,
Marlena Bellum and Harry Drake are as explosive together as a stick of dynamite and a blowtorch. Their affair repeats an accursed relationship I had with Harry's grandfather, back in that town I never should have set foot in.

This secret has been kept from
Marlena, as well as the story of how I unintentionally set off the curse that haunts our family. When she was a child, I asked Chloe not to reveal our siren history to Marlena, partly in deference to Faith, but mostly for fear the invisible forces loitering in Alta might be listening in.

But, I said that if my story was ever needed to save
us from future catastrophe, then Chloe might tell it—with my guidance, of course. Faith has tried to keep clear of us, having refused to accept that either she or her daughter is a siren.

“
There are no sirens in the Bible, and I've never met one in Ohio,” Faith said when she visited me on my deathbed, but the blaze in her eyes was siren, not human. Anyway, Marlena's beauty, predilections, and special gifts would indicate Faith, as usual, is dead wrong. I trust in Chloe's judgment, and when Chloe says the moment has arrived to educate Marlena, I will be the first one at the reunion, body or no body.

If I could spare our young cousin
the pain that goes with a siren's education, I would. Alas, my dreams indicate otherwise. We may already be too late in the game to prevent unintended consequences and mitigate disaster for Marlena and the citizens of Alta, both the living and the dead.

A twenty-first century expression comes to mind, one the young woman of the future will write on her magic tablet
: “No pain, no gain. LOL.”

“No smoking here, boy,” says the visiting nurse, pausing at the door, her scanty eyebrows a-twitch. “What with the oxygen tank and all the trash in this room, we might go up in flames.” 

The half-blooded Native American
continues to smoke a cheroot while contemplating the old man on the bed. The young man is strikingly tall, with sculpted cheekbones, topaz eyes, and sultry hair that is long, curly, and black, except for a few burnt-red ends.

The corpse surprises him by speaking
. “Ain't much of a nurse,” Caesar Lawless declares with a ghastly smile.

“
Not much to look at neither,” Dakota Lawless rejoins. “White-Eye bitch that ugly should put out for free. You oughta know.”

The dying man chortles, obviously pleased with his son's reference to past conquests.
“Them was the days…ha, ha, ha.”

The nurse turns red, spins on her heel, and slams the door, which breaks from its
rotten casing and falls, landing with a loud thud and raising a thick cloud of dust.

Dakota is motionless, staring at the shell of his seventy-four-year-old father with mingled pity and contempt. Caesar always believed he was irresistible to women. He had
settled down only once in his life, briefly and at age fifty, after impregnating the fifteen-year-old daughter of a Lakota Sioux shaman. They moved into a shabby, single-room walkup in Rapid City, where the teenager died, essentially of starvation, a month after giving birth to Dakota. She is buried in a pauper's grave outside of town.

Caesar licks his chapped lips, then gasps,
“Last night…I heard
her
tapping at the window.”

“
My dead mother?”

“
Yes. Your mother wanted me to tell you…about Nevada Carson. It was her I was speaking of…before that nurse butted in. Your mother said you should know as much as I do…about my rich and famous birth mother. Your grandmother is…still alive.”

D
akota frowns. Just like Pa, waiting for death to have him by the cojones before he coughs up a secret about a loaded White-Eye grandmother.

“
When you track down…your grandmother…in San Francisco, you tell her…I stuck to my part of the bargain. Don't be afeared to ask her…for more dough.”

“
I will handle her all right,” mutters Dakota. He adds darkly: “Ten to one, more cash is hid under Granny's mattress than you made in your whole life.”

Any money coming Pa's way,
including a mysterious check that appeared annually, was squandered on gambling and booze. Father and son lived poorer than the poorest Oglala Lakota on the Pine Ridge reservation, though it needn't have been that way.

Caesar was born in 1902, the bastard of an unmarried, unnamed woman, but his adoptive parents were childless, doting, and well-off. The Lawless couple gave their son every advantage, but he
was forever running away from their San Antonio ranch.

As a teenager, Caesar overheard his parents discussing his birth mother. He gathered she was an actress living in San Francisco who had made a name for herself in the film industry. When Caesar cut out
one final time, he headed for California in the beckoning light of her distant star. But the only job he could hold down for more than a month at a time was raising tents and shoveling shit-stained hay for a carnival traveling the length of the state.

By 1947, Caesar was flat broke and out of options. Not even the bearded
lady in the circus would take him in. One cloudy day, he hitched a ride on a turnip truck and rode from Sacramento to San Francisco. He traveled on the strength of a strong intuition, which in turn hinged on a feature story in the movie industry papers he followed.

A famous
actress/film writer, Nevada Carson, was retiring from her stage career in San Francisco. A sidebar article featured her daughter, a renowned psychologist who had chosen to live in Alta, Wyoming, a tiny hamlet in the nation's least populous state.  Having perfect recall, Caesar made a serendipitous connection with the town's name. On his birth certificate, which was hidden in a wood box at the back of Mrs. Lawless's bedroom closet, the place of birth and death for his natural father (name, “Deceased”) was recorded as Alta, Wyoming.

Chances were good that the
psychologist had family roots in Alta. If his hunch proved correct, the two famous women, Nevada Carson and Dr. Chloe Vye, were, respectively, his birth mother and half-sister, and hallelujah! his long dry spell was over. In San Francisco, a ticket seller Caesar picked up when the Rialto Theatre went dark told him Miss Carson lived in a Victorian townhouse on Nob Hill, a block down from the Fairmont Hotel.

His knock at an imposing front door was answered by a mannish-looking Asian woman, who
rudely looked Caesar up and down. Her attitude changed when he said he was Miss Carson's son. He waited in the foyer, and then Miss Carson herself appeared.

She was
beyond gorgeous and almost inhumanly luminous. She looked thirty years younger than her age. An old stringed instrument dangling from the crook of one arm struck him as peculiar.

He tried flashing his dazzling smile, but his mouth was too dry.

“
Come in, Caesar,” she said in a sultry voice. “I've been expecting you.”

He was shown into a formal
parlor decorated with Italian marble statuary, crystal chandeliers, Victorian engravings, and Native American tapestries. There was a curious, primitive aura of magic in the air. Miss Carson lounged in a one-armed divan and listened to his rambling life story without once taking her topaz eyes from his face.

“
In my dreams, I saw you as a redheaded, good-looking man, and so you are.”

“
I heard you give me my name. I figured it was high time we seen each other in person, maybe git better acquainted.”

He
was stunned when, in a tone admitting no argument, his mother said they were never to meet again, and he was never to divulge their family connection to anyone.

“
You must do as I say. It is a matter of life or death. Only send me word of where you are living, dear.”

Caesar's wanderings eventually landed him in
Rapid City. After Dakota was born, he sent Miss Carson a short letter. One day, mail arrived for him via general delivery, with a large check drawn on a San Francisco bank. Her signature was not on it, but he knew the benefactor was his birth mother.

Telepathy being one of his many under-used talents, Caesar
can read Dakota's mind, where a suspicion is forming in regard to the revealed family history. Perhaps Miss Carson paid off her bastard son all these years solely to avoid certain inconvenient questions, such as the identity of Caesar's deceased father and what inheritance Caesar (or his son) might have a rightful claim to.

As a potential for violence lurks beneath Dakota's impassive aura, Caesar hastens to add an explanation.
“Your grandmother said…if it was known…we was related, trouble would soon follow. Something evil…judging by the look in them cat's eyes of hers. They was exactly your color. She said…she was marked by a curse. If the curse ever found me…I would be haunted…to my dying day…even beyond it.”

He wheezes through the end of his story, which is his favorite bit.
“I never…saw her again. But as I kissed her goodbye, she told me…about my name. Back East…she played Cleopatra…Queen of the Nile. She named me after…the queen's lover…Julius Caesar.”

The dying man's energy is depleted.
A half hour goes by. A loud snore rattles the cobwebs in the rafters. There is another long silence. Caesar's head drops to one side; his eyes roll and slowly close.

“
Goodbye, my dear,” the old man whispers. He is gone. The only sign of his passing is a slight lift of the curtain in the dirty window of the airless room. 

One night, Dakota hears a
tap-tap-tapping
at the window before falling asleep, and then he dreams about the reclusive grandmother his dying father told him about and her untold wealth. Later in the dream, he sees himself returning to his native people on a white horse, laden with bags of gold and precious jewels, riding past Mount Rushmore and flipping off the four White-Eye images there that deface his tribe's sacred mountain. Dakota's mother was a direct descendant of Crazy Horse, and in Dakota's dream, he makes a dazzling contribution to the 563-foot-tall mountain sculpture under construction in honor of Crazy Horse. He sees himself in a pow-wow with Seth Big Crow, transferring the treasure into his hands. They smoke peyote, and Big Crow says, no matter how he got the money, Dakota has made a proud, defiant answer to the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, and that because of Dakota, the largest monument in the world will be completed.

When he awakens, he looks up the history of the warrior Crazy Horse, who
most famously killed George Armstrong Custer and 264 cavalrymen at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. In the 1868 treaty, the White-Eye handed over the Black Hills to the Lakota, but deliberately failed to address the gold rights. Crazy Horse led his tribe numerous times against miners and settlers in the Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming before his mysterious death almost one hundred years ago.

In January, bored
with his plains life, Dakota heads to San Francisco on a Greyhound bus. He is increasingly resentful toward his grandmother, who should be punished for giving Pa away when he was a helpless infant, then later kicking him from the door like a begging dog. The old broad might reward him handsomely, to keep him from telling the newspapers what he knows about her personal history.

Perhaps no words will be necessary. When Dakota
puts his mind to it, he can silently will a person of any age, appearance, or disposition to do just about anything. Even hoity-toity dames give him a tumble and a month's stay, which is as long as he can stand their White-Eye stink. There is a ritual he follows. He presses a ridged birthmark on his chest with the tip of a finger and aims his topaz eyes straight into theirs. The trouble is, he quickly tires of White-Eye so easily bent to his will.

On the mo
rning of January 21, Dakota is sitting on a bench on Market Street and reading the
Examiner
. His free paper is courtesy of a Japanese woman who was buying a copy from a service box when he willed her to hold the lid open. Afterward she remained transfixed, thinking the air was oddly sulphurous.

Dakota's focus is on a
front-page photo of a stunning woman who waves at the camera from a vintage red
1908 Fritchle Victoria
Phaeton. The caption says: “Our retrospective on a departed star from the olden days—see our editorial page.” Meanwhile his eidetic memory is flipping through a stack of photos in the cardboard drawer that once held his father's scant personal belongings.

“
I'll be damned if that dead woman ain't Nevada Carson.”

He throws the paper down in disgust. The woman pictured is identical to the redheaded star in an aging color photo owned by Pa. The newspaper photos show Nevada Carson
on stage playing an antique zither. Her platinum hair is fashioned in a 1920's bob. In Pa's photo, her hair rippled down her back in a red-gold mane, with the exception of a short white streak at one temple. That white streak had caught Dakota's attention. Its form was in the shape of a lightning bolt, identical to his own jagged white birthmark. 

Of all the karma in the universe, his appears to be the worst. His grandmother passed on the same day as Pa, and he has
missed his opportunity! However, a new plan is forming as he swiftly commits to memory his grandmother's epitaph on the editorial page:

“On December 21, we reported with great sadness the passing of Cassandra Vye, 96, better known as the legendary Nevada Carson. Miss Carson, a prolific screenwriter and an actress of both stage and screen, died at her home on Nob Hill, where she lived for almost 70 years.

“
A pioneer in the film industry, Miss Carson starred in early films during the silent movie era and wrote dozens of successful screenplays, including 'The Bounder.' Later in life, she gave back to the community generously. Her many altruistic works were funded in the name of the Wyoming human rights activist Nicholas Brighton.

“
The family requests memorial donations be made directly to the Brighton Foundation. Miss Carson is survived by one daughter, psychologist Dr. Chloe Vye, a resident of Alta, Wyoming.”

So grandmother's
real name was Cassandra Vye, like a fucking fortune-teller. Dakota mutters, “I see myself making Alta my hunting ground. That doctor ain't Cassandra's sole survivor. No one ever fed me with a silver spoon.”

Dakota strides down the Embarcadero
past tourists watching the ferries come in. He slams his fist on a parking meter and grinds his teeth. His topaz eyes flash dangerously. His fierce expression and great height attract the notice of passers-by.

He has always regarded with mixed feelings the abnormal strengths he was born with.
“Big Boy,” Pa called him at birth, because of his beautiful son's unusually large, perfectly round head; he had dawdled in the womb an extra month. At two months, Dakota was walking and talking; at two years, smoking peyote and playing the banjo. Instead of the six hundred or so muscles normal people have, he has over eight hundred. He has survived a bullet through the chest and three brutal assaults by White-Eye gangs.