Owl Dreams

by John T. Biggs

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Hashilli parked his SUV beside the Indian Baptist Cemetery. The sun was still too high to test the child. Ten more minutes. Fifteen at the most. The motion of the SUV had rocked Andrew to sleep, but now he was waking up. He’d want his mother soon. Hashilli knew the pattern. First the little boy would pull at his child seat restraints, then he’d cry like a guest on Oprah Winfrey, only louder and longer. God, how Hashilli hated babies. Roly-poly, chubby cheeked, little shit machines. Eyes full of tears and heads full of mush.

  Andrew smiled at him like a stroke victim. A cloudy stream of drool dripped from the baby’s chin. Admittedly cute. That’s why their mothers didn’t kill them—usually.

  These days, babies were in short supply for women who’d put off getting stretch marks until too many ripe plums had fallen. Andrew would fetch a handsome price if he didn’t satisfy the Maytubby ancestors. White enough to command top dollar in the grey adoption market where lawyers peddled infants the way used car salesmen moved low-mileage one-owner luxury sedans.

  The baby gurgled a persuasive string of nonsense syllables, charming little manipulator. This child came equipped with the perfect skill set for a twenty-first century witch. Hashilli had high hopes.

  “Maybe you’ll be the next great Choctaw sorcerer.” No butchered syntax or infantile speech impediments were necessary to hold the little one’s attention. With babies it’s all about cadence and melody.

  Andrew’s head wobbled in agreement. He spewed a fine mist of saliva and seemed to be completely satisfied with his accomplishment. Hashilli liked Andrew just a little.

  Had Grandfather liked Hashilli just a little?

  “The old man brought me here,” he told Andrew. “Almost forty years ago.” Things were simpler in those days. No kidnapping necessary.

  “Bought me from a homeless Seminole woman.”

  Andrew’s face twisted into its tear-shedding configuration, but relaxed when Hashilli favored him with a conspiratorial wink.

  “Paid her twenty dollars and a two for one coupon good at any MacDonald’s.” Hashilli didn’t know if this was true, or just another one of Grandfather’s stories. The old man told so many.

  “When he sat me in the doorway of the bonehouse, the afternoon sun cast my shadow in the shape of an owl.” Witches didn’t reproduce like lawyers and dentists. The forces of creation chose them the same way a hunter picked the best hound from a litter. Witches are marked in ways invisible to the living, but obvious to the dead. This half-breed Creek baby could be the one.

  As the sun moved into the proper position for the test, Andrew squirmed in his baby seat. Hashilli took it as a sign of readiness, but the baby might be simply redistributing the bowel movement that already stained both legs of his jumper.

  “Sorry little one, witches don’t change diapers.”

  Hashilli stayed at the cemetery longer than he should have, long after Andrew failed the test. Like all of the stolen children before him, the Tigers’ baby did not cast a witch’s shadow.

  “But you will fetch a handsome price,” Hashilli told Andrew. “You will break the heart of your old family while you make your new one happy.”

  Balance is the core of power. Kidnappers generally murdered the children they stole, but Hashilli never did. He was wicked, not cruel. There was no quicker way to squander power than taking innocent lives.

  The Tiger baby would go to The Wise Owl Center, one of Hashilli’s most altruistic concerns. Good could be profitable as evil, if a clever witch used other people’s money to pay the bills.

  “Be many things to many people.” Hashilli shared Grandfather’s best advice with baby Andrew. “Friends and enemies stumble over each other, and your trail is lost.” The child squirmed when Hashilli fastened him into his baby seat.

  “Be calm, little one. You can still be a man of power, even if you’re not a Choctaw witch. Magic is all about money these days.” Hashilli had so few opportunities to talk about his work.

  He told Andrew about the secret of zeros. “The difference between a one dollar bill and a ten and a hundred is how many little circles follow the number one.” Zeros were as imaginary as Santa Claus, but a lot more convincing. Especially in the digital era, where wealth consisted of so many electrons wrangled into the proper files.

  Andrew gurgled. His crusty diaper seemed forgotten for the moment. Perhaps this baby was too pretty to be a witch, his features too regular, his personality too appealing. A witch wears his persona the way a snake wears his skin. He can shed it and grow another when the time was right. Rich man, Poor man, Beggar man, Thief. Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief. While the modern shape-shifter plies his trade, the soft money from government grants and the hard money from annual budgets collects around him like iron filings around a magnet.

  “You’re good looking enough for politics,” he told Andrew. The baby responded with a distress cry that would have brought gorillas running from the jungle if they had been in Africa.

  What other African entities might that cry have summoned? Hashilli drove slowly toward the only passageway between Riverside Gardens Cemetery and the land of the living. He scanned the monuments for signs the giant black man with stumps for legs.

  Baron Saturday.

  Robert Collins called him by name from the bottom of a grave. The insane see power with crystal clarity.

  Andrew pulled off a baby shoe and threw it against the back of Hashilli’s seat. Precursor to a tantrum.

  Indian mothers strapped their babies into cradleboards and propped them in the corner of a lodge. Didn’t they? Times were different now. So were children. Babies needed interaction. They needed entertainment. Or else they raised hell.

  Hashilli was up to the task.

  “Archiving documents,” he told Andrew. “That was my breakthrough business.”

  He stretched his vowels to their elastic limit and added a simple melody. He followed up with a song devoted to backing up computer files and a poem with a payroll management theme. Economic rap music at its infant-pleasing best, without one derogatory reference to women. Eat your heart out, Kanye West.

  The baby smiled at Hashilli’s image in the rearview mirror.

  “Innocence—the perfect disguise.” Too bad the Maytubby ghosts rejected him. Important ghosts, but not Grandfather. The old man’s bones lay in the mud at the bottom of Lake Texoma, his outer shadow lost beyond all hope of redemption. Murdering him had been an act of love. Hashilli smiled at the memory.

  No one greeted Hashilli when he entered the intake section of the single open-concept room of the Wise Owl Center. The clerical staff looked up from their Sudoku and crossword puzzles long enough to evaluate the threat to their employment. None at all. In the Wise Owl Center, Hashilli was Mr. Luna, a well-respected social worker from the Department of Human Services. He brought babies to the center all the time. The infant in his arms was just one more. Mr. Luna smiled and waved.

  “Don’t mean to interrupt your work,” he said without a trace of cynicism.

  Desks were scattered around the perimeter of the large room. The nursery occupied the center, segregated by a waist high wall. A Plexiglas extension had been added to baffle sound without obstructing vision. It reminded Mr. Luna of the cough shield over the buffet line at the Golden Corral. There were four entrances to the nursery area. He took the closest one.

  A nurse practitioner frowned at the unhygienic condition of her newest client. She gave Mr. Luna a look almost as nasty as the new baby’s bottom.

  “Your babies are always soiled and cranky.” The nurse was African American, born and raised in the black township of Boley, Oklahoma. She’d lived in Oklahoma City for ten years now and still hadn’t learned to trust white people. Mr. Luna was pretty sure she didn’t trust him either.

  “Poor little guy.”

  Mr. Luna watched the nurse apply a little warm water. She swabbed the baby’s bottom with sanitary wipes while she half-hummed half-sang a generic lullaby.

 
“Get DHS to buy you wipes and diapers, Mr. Luna. This baby’s butt looks like raw hamburger.”

  Jemima Coinpenny was the nurse’s name, but she preferred to be called Ti’Mama. The Coinpenny family brought their African religion and a little of their language with them when they moved from Louisiana after the Civil War. Ti’Mama’s Creole nickname and the string of Mercury dimes she wore around her left ankle were proof she still respected the Voodoo Loa, even though she’d checked the Catholic box on her employment application. Hashilli used her as a barometer of local Voodoo activity. In just a few centuries, African sorcerers had displaced Indian mystics in Mexico, the Caribbean, and in Hispanic sections of North America. Eventually they’d move into Oklahoma, but as long as this nurse’s friends and associates were mostly Muslims and Baptists, Hashilli felt relatively safe. When that changed, it would be time for his Mr. Luna persona to take cover.

  Ti’Mama pronounced the little boy healthy and well nourished. Not the case for many of the babies who passed through the Wise Owl Center. She placed a bracelet around his ankle; it identified him as baby MT 186.

  “I have a priority family,” Mr. Luna told the nurse. “I don’t expect this one to be here very long. A few days at the most.”

  “It’ll take longer than that to treat his diaper rash.” Ti’Mama tickled the baby’s cheek, eliciting a smile.

  “Teenage mother,” Mr. Luna told the nurse. “Tried her best to keep him, but couldn’t manage.” That would satisfy Ti’Mama’s curiosity. Babies at the center always had sketchy histories. If the nurse learned too much about them, the truth might break her heart.

  The Wise Owl Center was already decades old when Hashilli first infiltrated it. The state of Oklahoma started funding the center when the declining birthrate among the middle class made orphanages obsolete. Taking over the operation required only three identities, and two of them were invisible. Easy work for a competent shape-shifter.

  No one at the center had ever seen the director or the lawyer who handled the lucrative private adoptions. Mr. Luna was the go between, and no one suspected he was all three people.

  Selective blindness was the key to the operation’s success.

  Mr. Luna left day-to-day management in the hands of the slightly dishonest staff. He permitted them to convert a small percentage of the center’s resources to their personal use. Not much—padded expense accounts, state subsidized automobiles, occasional cash bonuses for meetings never attended.

  As long as things ran smoothly, as long as the absentee director didn’t take an active interest, the minor thievery could continue.

  Do not bind the mouths of the oxen that tread the grain. Mr. Luna thought that was biblical wisdom, but he wasn’t sure. It was a management style that worked. The clandestine self-directed monetary redistribution program made the staff feel guilty, and guilty people were easy to manipulate.

  That’s how modern witches do it. No spectacle of smoke and mirrors is necessary to bend people to your will, just careful planning and a willingness to accept the fact that people are no damn good.

  The Mr. Luna persona gradually evaporated as Hashilli exited the front door of the Wise Owl Child Development Center. Being Mr. Luna always left him with a good feeling. When Hashilli assumed the social worker identity, he almost forgot he was a murderer, a kidnapper, and an extortionist—almost, but not quite.

  A shape-shifter kept a locked compartment in his soul where his original identity remained intact. At the same moment he was a respected social worker, he was also a wanted man whose fingerprints were on file with the police. Youthful indiscretions.

  Hashilli borrowed fingerprints for each of his personas. There were plenty of swirls and deltas to go around, thanks to his record archiving business. He had access to forensic identifiers that would be an insurmountable obstacle for any police investigation. Too bad he couldn’t change the patterns on his fingertips.

  His reckless youth had led to many brushes with law enforcement. If he should be arrested, he would be quickly identified.

  If only he could turn into an owl or a coyote, like Grandfather. He mulled over the lost simplicity of the early twentieth century. When his mind settled back in the present, he saw Baron Saturday lurching down the sidewalk on his leg stumps.

  “What are you doing here?” Hashilli hadn’t meant to speak, but the words were out now, and he couldn’t take them back.

  The black man held two paper bags. He looked at one and then the other.

  “Been to Homeland. Man has to eat.” No trace of Creole accent colored his language. No black urban or rural influence either. The absence of history in a human voice marked the speaker as a creature of power. Hashilli hadn’t thought the Voodoo spirit could follow him out of the cemetery, but here he was.

  “Baron Saturday!” The words popped out like an unanticipated gas bubble. Calling a malevolent spirit by name could give him a handhold to pull himself inside your soul.

  Deep horizontal wrinkles formed across the black man’s brow, as evenly spaced and parallel as the lines on a stenographer’s note pad.

  “Big Shorty.” The black man said the words slowly and clearly, like a speech therapist instructing a backward child. “Not Baron anything. People call me Big Shorty.”

  Hashilli’s eyes froze on the leather pads covering the walking surfaces of Big Shorty’s stumps. “I’ve seen you at the cemetery. I didn’t know you could leave.”

  Big Shorty lumbered forward. He stood as tall as Hashilli’s shoulders. His head was approximately the diameter of Hashilli’s waist. The black man pulled his lips back over his teeth in what might have been a smile if it looked less predatory. The gold in his bicuspids glinted in the sun.

  “I’ve seen you too,” Big Shorty said, “I’m the caretaker at Riverside Gardens, not a prisoner. I can leave anytime I want.”

  The black man walked past Hashilli. His stride was rough but with a trained athletic quality, like a hurdle jumper on a practice lap.

  “Maybe I’ll stop by and say hello,” Big Shorty said without looking back. “Next time you go to that old Indian boneyard.”

  Hashilli followed Baron Saturday with his eyes until the African blended with the horizon—a long walk for a man without legs. Did the Loa of the Dead really shop at Homeland?