Vermilion Drift (37 page)

“Will you be there, Henry?”

“I have always been there.”

It is night. He is at his grandmother’s house with the others: Meloux, Winter Moon, LeDuc, Becky Stonedeer, Grandma Dilsey, Aunt Ellie, Hattie Stillday, his mother. The men have rifles. His mother is armed as well. She has brought his father’s revolver, the .38 Police Special, which she took from the lockbox in their bedroom closet and has filled with cartridges. The firearm looks awkward in her hand. When Grandma Dilsey saw it, she’d questioned, “Do you need that?”

“I don’t know what I need to kill a monster, but this is what I have.”

She holds the gun at her side, so weighty that it seems to throw her body off balance.

He is in the back bedroom, where they made him go before they began their discussion. They closed the door. He’s opened it a crack so that he can see and hear.

“I’ve checked,” Winter Moon says. “This thing she’s at in Duluth is supposed to finish up around ten. A couple of hours to get back here, and she should hit Broom’s cabin around midnight.”

“The remains of Broom’s cabin, you mean,” LeDuc says.

“We should be there early,” Winter Moon advises.

“She comes,” Hattie says bitterly, “and then what?”

“And then justice,” LeDuc says.

“We just kill her?” Grandma Dilsey asks.

“She didn’t just kill our children,” Hattie says with acid bitterness. “She tortured them first.”

“You’re saying we should torture her, Hattie?”

“If you can’t, I’ll be more than happy to do it for you, Dilsey,” Hattie replies.

Meloux says, “To end her life isn’t a cruelty. Her life is an unnatural thing. But to drag out that end would be cruel.”

“I’m just fine with that, Henry.”

“Now, maybe. But your life will be long, Hattie, and someday you will regret your cruelty to this creature.”

“I’m willing to live with it.”

“Me, too,” LeDuc throws in.

Meloux considers them, and his voice, when he replies, is a placid pool. “We must think with one mind, speak with one voice, act with one heart. If we are not together, we will crumble.”

“I want her dead,” Aunt Ellie says quietly, “as much as anyone here. But I don’t want her to suffer. I don’t want to become a Windigo, like her.”

“To kill a Windigo, you must become a Windigo,” LeDuc throws at her.

“And feed on her heart, George?” Grandma Dilsey replies. “There will be no satisfaction. That’s the thing about a Windigo. It’s always hungry.”

“One heart, one voice, one mind,” Meloux reminds them.

They stand in a loose circle. From where he watches through the crack in the door, he can see them eye one another, and although they don’t speak, it’s as if they’re talking.

LeDuc finally says, “All right. We end it quickly. And do what with her body?”

“We put it with the bodies of those she’s killed,” Meloux says.

“No!” Hattie cries. “I don’t want her anywhere near my Abbie.”

“It will not be her. It will be only her flesh and her bone,” Meloux replies. “Her deformed spirit will be on the Path of Souls.”

Aunt Ellie offers, “Hattie, our girls will be like guardians. They won’t let that monster harm anyone else.”

“And she won’t be found there,” LeDuc adds.

Hattie lowers her head, considers, and says at last, “All right.”

“We should go,” Meloux tells them. “Prepare.”

“Someone needs to stay with Cork,” his mother says.

“I’ll stay,” Grandma Dilsey tells her. “But I won’t let you leave with that gun, Colleen.” She reaches out her hand. “There are guns enough already to do what must be done.”

Into Grandma Dilsey’s hand, his mother delivers the firearm. Grandma Dilsey walks to an old rolltop desk, slides open a drawer, and puts the gun inside.

G
randma Dilsey is outside watching night push across the sky. She has been quiet and tense. He sits beside her on the porch steps, looking where she looks, but probably not thinking what she’s thinking. He’s thinking something else, he’s pretty sure. When night has settled fully on both earth and sky, he says, “I’m tired. I’m going to lie down in the bedroom.”

She puts her arm around him. Her face, dark from the blood of The People that runs through her body and darker still from the night, comes near his own. Her eyes are soft and full of pain. “I’m sorry, Mishiikens.” She uses the Ojibwe word for “little turtle,” an affectionate name by which she sometimes calls him. “These things, you should have been spared.”

“I’m all right, Nokomis,” he replies, using the Ojibwe word for “grandmother.” “Just tired. I think I should rest for a while.”

“Go,” she says. “Lie down.”

Inside the house he walks to the desk where Grandma Dilsey has put his father’s handgun. Soundlessly, he slides the drawer open and removes the weapon. He goes into the bedroom and closes the door behind him. At the window, he takes off the screen. He’s just about to ease himself through the opening when the door opens at his back and his father enters the room. Grandma Dilsey is with him. Her face is defiant and at the same time afraid.

“Where are you going, Cork?”

His father’s voice is colder than he has ever heard.

“Nowhere,” he replies.

“Give me the gun.”

He walks to his father and holds the heavy firearm out to him. His father takes the weight from the small hand and fills the empty holster on his own belt.

“Where have they gone?” his father asks, his voice still like something frozen in winter.

He looks at his Grandma Dilsey and understands that she hasn’t told. He wants to be like her, to hold his tongue even against the frigid power of his father. He says nothing.

His father reaches out and grabs his arm. His fingers are like the iron of the manacles in Mr. Windigo’s shed. “You’ll tell me what’s happening. You’ll tell me where they’ve gone. And you’ll tell me now.”

“Liam,” Grandma Dilsey cries. “Don’t hurt him.”

“Then you tell me,” he says, turning on the old woman.

“All right, all right. Just let him go.”

The grip is released. And Liam O’Connor listens stone-faced as Grandma Dilsey tells him everything.

He stands there ashamed, knowing that, but for him, his grandmother would never have told. He hates himself and he hates his father and even when his father turns and something different is in his face now, something afraid, he goes on hating him.

“Stay here,” his father says to him. His voice is stern but softer.

Grandma Dilsey stands barring the door. “Liam, it has to be done.”

“Not this way, Dilsey. Not if I have anything to say about it.” He shoves her aside, and his boots shake the floorboards as he leaves.

Grandma Dilsey follows, and he can hear her calling from the porch, “Liam, please understand.”

He is alone and takes the opportunity to slip through the screenless window and drop to the ground, and as he sees the headlights of his father’s car barrel into the dark, he lopes to a stand of paper birch thirty yards away and makes his way silently among the trees. He reaches the highway well out of sight of the house and heads south following where his father has gone, following toward Waagikomaan, toward the road the Cavanaugh woman must take that night to get to the place where Indigo Broom’s cabin stands in smoldering ruin.

It’s several miles, and he alternates between a brisk walk and a
run. The night is quiet. The road is practically empty. Whenever he hears the approach of a vehicle and sees headlights, he slips among the trees and underbrush that edge the old potholed asphalt.

He is thinking:
They’ll be at the place where the logging road to Mr. Windigo’s cuts off from Waagikomaan. They’ll be waiting for her, hiding in the trees there
.

He’s not thinking what he will do when he gets there. He’s simply thinking that it is because of him that his mother’s people are in jeopardy now and he has a responsibility to them. And because of what happened to him in Mr. Windigo’s shed, he has a right to be a part of whatever may occur.

He comes to the juncture, the place where the dirt and gravel of Waagikomaan branch off from the highway. The moon has risen by then. It’s like a great hole in the dark sky that lets the light of some brighter place shine through.

He turns toward the full moon and has walked a hundred yards, heading in the direction he believes the others will be hiding and waiting, when a car whose engine is huge and quiet glides from the highway onto Waagikomaan and headlights brighter and harsher than the moon illuminate him.

He spins. The car stops in a little spray of dust. The headlights remain on. For a long moment, he’s facing a beast with two glaring eyes and a low growl of a voice. Then the headlights blink out and the engine dies. The dark and the quiet of the night return. The door opens. She steps out.

She walks toward him in a way that makes him think of a sleek animal—a panther maybe—or maybe it’s because she’s wearing a sleek black dress. In the moonlight, her face is silver, and her hair, yellow in daylight, is now like a spill of angry white water. She stops two feet from where he stands. And she smiles.

“What are you doing here?” she asks in a friendly tone that suggests everything he believes about her is wrong. “Did you get away from Indigo? You naughty boy.”

She reaches out a silver hand and ruffs his hair. Then her fingers become talons and her grip becomes a torture. She pulls as if to rip away his scalp.

“You goddamned little snot,” she says through clenched teeth, bone white. “You could have spoiled everything.”

“Let him go!”

It is his mother’s voice, coming from the dark at the side of the road. She steps into the glare of the headlights and confronts the woman. Winter Moon is with her. Only those two. The others, he realizes, must be at the place where the road to Broom’s branches off. Winter Moon is holding a rifle, which is pointed at the woman’s breast.

The woman releases her hold.

Winter Moon lifts his rifle and fires a single shot into the air.

“Cork.” His mother waves him to her side, and he obeys. His head hurts from the viciousness of the woman’s grip.

The woman doesn’t seem to be afraid. Instead what he sees in her face is anger. “What now?” she asks.

“We wait for the others.”

The sound of vehicles comes from the direction of Broom’s cabin, and she looks past them down the moonlit road at their backs.

“Indigo?”

“He won’t be coming to your rescue,” Winter Moon replies.

“Ah,” she says. “Dead?” No one replies, and she gives a nod. “A little native justice? Is that what’s in store for me?” She changes in an instant. Her body changes, becomes smaller somehow, fragile and vulnerable. Her face changes, becomes suffused with terror. And her voice changes, becomes such a desperate cry for pity that it’s hard not to be moved. “Please, I haven’t done anything, I swear. Please, don’t hurt me.”

She moves toward his mother, her hands out in supplication. “Oh, God, please. I’m a mother like you. I have children that I love and who need me.” Tears run down her cheeks. “Please, just let me go back to my children.”

The vehicles are close now, pulling to a stop not far behind him, their own headlights adding to the surreal brilliance in which he stands with Winter Moon and his mother and the woman who is suddenly too near. Her arm is like a whip, fast and deadly, and wraps itself around his mother and pulls her from his side. In the same instant, he sees the silver flash of a knife blade that has materialized in
the woman’s hand and is poised at his mother’s throat. She draws back, pulling his mother with her and using her as a shield against Winter Moon’s rifle.

“I’ll kill her,” she says calmly.

Doors slam behind him, and he hears the thud of boots on the packed dirt of Waagikomaan. The woman’s eyes move there.

“I’ll kill her,” she repeats.

His father is suddenly, magically at his side. He steps toward the woman with the knife.

“If you kill her, you will yourself die,” he says, matching her incredible calm. “What is it you want?”

“To go home.”

“I’ll come for you there.”

“I think not,” she replies slyly. “What I think is that you’ve all murdered Indigo and if I go to the gas chamber, you’ll go with me. I think that if I make it home, I’m safe.”

“As far as I’m concerned, Monique, you’re safe now. I won’t let anyone harm you, I promise.”

His mother’s eyes are wide and he can feel her fear and it hurts him as if the slash across her throat is already a real thing. He’s paralyzed. He absolutely cannot move.

The woman edges her way toward her car, forcing his mother with her, foot by foot.

“This is the deal, Monique,” his father says, matching her retreat with his own advance, foot by foot. “You release her unharmed, and I’ll let you go. No one will touch you. You have my word.” His hands are in front of him, held away from his gun belt in a way that makes it clear they’re empty of both firearm and intention. “Not another step, Monique, until we have a deal.”

“I have all the cards,” she points out.

“You cut her throat and I kill you. I kill you here or kill you in your house or I kill you on the street, I still kill you. You let her go and I swear you go free. As you say, we have every reason to keep all this quiet.”

“I’ll keep her with me until I’m away, then I’ll let her go.”

“That’s not the deal because I don’t believe you.”

“How can I believe you?”

“Because I’ve never broken a promise.”

His father has said it, and the truth of it would be clear even to the worst lying snake that ever lived. He believes his father absolutely, and he prays the woman will, too.

Her eyes move past his father to the men at his back.

“I won’t let them touch you, I promise. Let her go, return to your house, then leave this town forever. That’s the deal.”

“I can leave?”

“If you ever come back to Aurora, it will be your death, and that’s a promise, too.”

She considers, considers a long time. And in that time, which seems now to stretch into forever, something in him snaps. He is released from the moment. He can feel himself floating, drifting away, numbed, mercifully removed from the reality of what is occurring. The incredible brightness of all the headlights. The knife blade glinting fire against the skin of his mother’s throat. His mother’s face not her face but a mask unreal because he can’t comprehend anymore what he sees there. It’s all a dream. But even in that dream he is aware, vaguely, that he’s wetting his pants.