Owl Dreams

by John T. Biggs

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  There seemed to be no end of red SUVs at Archie’s disposal. He had stolen this one from across the Texas border. It had four-wheel drive. Sarah and Robert would need that when they went searching for Hashilli and Marie in the Kiamichi forest.

  “No such thing as a guarantee with grand theft auto, but I don’t think this vehicle will attract police attention.” Archie sorted through a collection of stolen tags he’d taken from similar vehicles in the long term parking lot at the Tulsa Airport.

  “Wish I could go with you guys, but I can’t go near that stretch of highway 271 since I shot up those police cruisers.” He rubbed crushed insects off the tag with a paper towel drenched in the Walmart version of Windex.

  “No one memorizes tag numbers any more. Not since they put card swipes in the gas stations.”

  He wiped his hands with window cleaner, dried them on his pants, and presented Sarah with the keys. “Drive her carefully, Sarah. Should be safe enough if you keep under the speed limit.”

  Sarah took the keys. Why did men refer to cars as she? Cars, ships, the ocean, hurricanes, weapons, mothers, and girlfriends. Things they like, things they want, things that cause them trouble. She asked Archie, but he didn’t have a good answer.

  “Knew a man in Gallup who called his pistol ‘Little Charlie’.” He shivered involuntarily. “Little Charlie killed his owner in the end. Barrel in the mouth. Bullet in the brain. Nasty way to die if you ask me.”

  “Nasty?”

  “Unnatural, I mean.”

  She would have to think about that later. Much later. Were men all crazy, or was it just the ones she knew?

  Sarah started complaining from the moment she pulled out of the

  parking lot at Bob’s Lake Country Motel, but Robert didn’t mind. Her anger was a kind of passion. It filled the SUV with emotional electricity. It made his skin tingle. It gave him a feeling in his belly that was something very much like falling.

  “If it’s so damn safe, why didn’t Archie come along?”

  Robert didn’t bother with an answer. Sarah was talking to herself. Talking to God. Talking to anyone but him. He paid close attention to her pitch and inflection. Her words were as energetic and free of meaning as a thunderclap.

  Robert rode in the passenger seat with the window wide open, enjoying the feel of the wind on his face and the power of his girlfriend’s voice. Sarah still didn’t know she was his girlfriend, but she would eventually. Meanwhile, her perfect round tones reminded him of the voices he used to hear carried on the wind. Life was simpler before he heard of Hashilli or Marie, before he’d been cured of hearing voices by the curious yellow powder that sent everyone else it touched into an anesthetic coma.

  Not everyone. Hashilli could handle the powder too. That was something Robert and the shape-shifter had in common.

  Both impervious to spirit powder. Both crazy. Robert wondered what other characteristics he might share with the Choctaw witch. He checked his jacket pockets for the packets of mushroom dust Archie made him carry. Easy to reach, easy to open. The powder was a weapon Robert would be willing to use in an emergency. It wouldn’t kill his adversaries.

  Archie understood Robert’s limitations. “Not everyone is a wild Indian.”

  Archie also recognized Robert’s value in the search for Marie. Aside from having the wind as a powerful spirit ally, he was a pretty good shape-shifter in his own right.

  Sarah had to admit Archie’s assessment was accurate. She had seen Robert pretend to be lawyer, a spiritual advisor, a policeman, and a hapless slacker who looked like a fugitive. Was he able to slip into false personas so easily and effectively because he didn’t have a personality of his own? That was her original explanation, but it wasn’t the whole story. Most tribes believed crazy people were the voice of incomprehensible cosmic forces collectively known as Power. Maybe they were right. Professor Lindsay would approve. He’d say she finally had a handle on cultural relativity, accepting what a member of an alien culture told her on face value.

  Was schizophrenia an alien culture? She supposed so. Was Robert still a schizophrenic now that he didn’t hear voices? Not a schizophrenic, maybe. But still crazy.

  Sarah felt the car run over the edge of the highway onto the shoulder. She returned her full attention to the road ahead. How long had she been focused on thoughts of Robert Collins?

  Too long for safety’s sake. Letting a man into your mind is dangerous. Sarah had learned that much growing up in Marie’s shadow. Even a man with a gentle spirit can be dangerous if he crowds into a woman’s brain and pushes rational thought aside, even a man who would do anything Sarah asked.

  “Slow down,” Robert told her. “The police are ahead, just over the next hill.”

  How did he know these things? She wanted to ask if the wind was talking to him again, but was afraid of his answer.

  “Nothing mystical,” he said, as though he read her mind. The wind hadn’t resumed her dialogue, but she’d reached through the open window and cleared his mind of troubling thoughts that interfered with the ordinary senses.

  Sarah would have seen the flash of blue and white lights if she’d been paying close attention. She would have heard the burst of static on the police radio and known that trouble lay ahead. A Pushmataha County deputy stood in her lane of traffic and motioned for her to pull over.

  “So much for Archie’s promise of safety.” Sarah applied the brake and drove onto the shoulder. The police car was parked just beyond the entry to the hidden road Archie believed would lead them to Hashilli’s hiding place.

  “Let me handle this.” Sarah put the SUV in park. She turned the engine off and rolled her window down.

  The policeman walked to Robert’s open window, not the driver’s. The deputy was in his mid thirties. His long dark hair would have hung to his shoulders if it hadn’t been captured in a crisp ponytail. Archie had warned Sarah to watch out for Indian cops. This one was a rugged young man with a barrel chest and a bad complexion. He had his hand on the butt of his pistol.

  He did not respond to Sarah when she asked, “Was I speeding, officer?” Instead, he demanded Robert’s ID.

  “Take it out slowly. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  Sarah tried to think of a sarcastic, clever comment about male chauvinism and female stereotypes but the policeman’s fingers closed around his pistol grip, and his eyes went flat and deadly.

  Robert reached into the pocket of his jacket and withdrew Detective Jerry Daugherty’s badge and police identification.

  That took the Indian cop by surprise. He looked at the picture and back at Robert. He made the comparison several times but couldn’t decide if the face on the ID matched the man who was riding in a car with a stolen tag.

  Sarah had watched enough episodes of Cops to know what was coming next:

  “License and registration.”

  “The car belongs to my mother’s boyfriend, officer.”

  “Where is your mother’s boyfriend now?”

  “He couldn’t come with us because he’s a wanted man. Have you heard of Archie Chatto?”

  Apparently the Indian cop didn’t watch much television. He didn’t separate his suspects and question them separately. He didn’t call for back-up. He didn’t even ask Robert for Jerald Daugherty’s birth date. He rubbed his thumb over the color photograph on the ID as though his confusion were no more than a smudge and gave Robert a look hard enough to leave a mark.

  “Want me to show you the secret handshake?” Robert asked.

  The Indian cop looked puzzled as Robert extended his closed hand through the open window. The cop stepped back as the hand opened and revealed a mound of yellow powder. He drew his weapon and shouted, “Hold it right there!” as Robert blew the powder into his face.

  The policeman looked at the pistol in his hand as if he couldn’t remember how it got there. He staggered onto the grass beside the highway shoulder and struggled to keep his balance, like an ice skat
er who’s had one beer too many.

  Sarah rushed to his side. She steadied him while reality slipped out from under his feet. Robert grabbed the deputy around the chest, lowered him to the ground and dragged him to a safe location in the shadow of his police car.

  The deputy’s eyes fixed on Sarah. He tried to speak but the mushroom powder had already locked his voice inside another world. The cop managed two last words before his identity crumbled. Something important, judging from the expression on his face, but garbled.

  “What did he say?” Sarah asked as soon as Robert tipped the deputy’s head so his airway was clear.

  “Owl dreams,” Robert told her. “Don’t ask me what it means.”

  The wailing siren of a police car approaching from behind them left no time for speculation. Sarah started to move toward the SUV, but Robert held her back.

  “That car won’t take us any farther,” he said. “Every cop in the county will be looking for it.”

  The second police car skidded to a stop twenty yards back, and two policemen jumped out with their pistols drawn. Robert took Sarah’s hand and pulled her into the trees just as the deputies opened fire.

  Sarah resolved to write a letter to the Pushmataha County Sheriff, complaining that these deputies had not ordered her to stop and their warning shots were way too close for comfort.

  “Keep as many trees between us and them as possible,” Robert said. “One deputy will have to stay with the unconscious officer.”

  The shots continued to ring out, even when Robert and Sarah were deep in the cross timbers.

  “They can’t see us anymore,” Sarah said. “Why don’t they stop shooting?”

  “When they run out of bullets,” Robert said. “Then they’ll stop.”

  Archie had told Sarah that Pushmataha County had just equipped the county cops with 9 mm Glocks—a bit of trivia gleaned from a front-page article in the Clayton Today.

  “Austrian semiautomatics,” he said. “They hold sixteen bullets each. To a fleeing felon, it always seems like more.”

  Good to know.

  By the time the cops emptied their weapons, reloaded, and chose which one of them would pursue the suspects on foot, Robert and Sarah were well out of range and completely turned around.

  “Nothing to do but keep on walking,” Sarah said after they waded a shallow stream and crashed through a thicket of thorn bushes. “Lost is lost. There’s no such thing as more lost or most lost, is there?”

  Robert wasn’t sure about comparatives and superlatives, but they were very lost indeed. His socks were full of burrs; his hair was full of brambles, and there was something in his right shoe that didn’t hurt enough to stop and take it out until they were sure the police had given up the chase. He stopped and listened for sounds of pursuit, but there were always noises in the forest.

  “If Archie was here, he’d know what to do,” he said.

  “So what do you think he would say?”

  “I think he would tell us to walk in the direction of the setting sun until we find Marie.”

  “And what if we don’t find her?” Sarah asked.

  “We keep looking,” Robert said. “Simple plans are always the best.”

  “Where does that leave us when the sun sets?”

  “In the dark.” Robert smiled. He’d been waiting to use that line ever since he first saw it in an Abbott and Costello movie many years ago. Even if they didn’t find Marie, the day wasn’t a total waste.