Owl Dreams

by John T. Biggs

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Hashilli woke to the screech of a mockingbird asserting its territorial imperative. He reflected on Harper Lee’s astounding misjudgment of the character of those winged bullies.

  He held his wristwatch at a close approximation of the optimal focal distance for his morning vision. Cracked crystal. God only knew how that had happened, but the timepiece still worked. Already six a.m. Witches made a point of rising earlier than their enemies, but it had been a rough night.

  Memories of his dreams haunted him, pubescent girls dressed in patriotic bathing suits doing erotic floor exercises while Marie applied a vice to his groin and Robert Collins squeezed his head to the point of exploding. Hashilli would never feel the same way about female gymnastic competitions or Wheaties again. All things considered, peyote is a better pathway to a vision than Viagra.

  But a vision is a vision, no matter what the source. Wisdom filled the vacuum left in Hashilli as soon as lust receded. The scales were lifted from his eyes. He saw the truth about Marie Ferraro and Robert Collins—as clear as the crack in the crystal of his Rolex watch.

  Collins had been unaffected by the mushroom powder, just like Grandfather and Hashilli. The boy impersonated a police officer at the White Owl Center, at Stringtown, and at casinos all over southern pretended to be. Robert Collins was a shape-shifter. His skills were rudimentary, but there was no sense denying their existence.

  Hashilli had made a dreadful mistake when he locked Collins in the Maytubby bonehouse. The ancestors weighed the hapless schizophrenic, they measured him, and they did not find him wanting. The Maytubby ghosts chose Robert Collins as Hashilli’s successor.

  Grandfather was involved in this. The old man’s bones still had power, like a saint’s relics. They made things happen, even from their resting place at the bottom of Lake Texoma.

 

  A witch could take precautions against magic, but Hashilli had done nothing. He hadn’t even looked to see whether the boy’s shadow took the shape of an owl. He had always assumed the ancestors would select a child to replace him. He thought he would have twenty, perhaps thirty years to ease through the transition.

  But spirits are impatient.

  The ghosts recruited an outside agent, a woman to seduce him. They tricked him into bringing her to the cabin. He’d shown her the wall where the magic bullet was buried. Now she owned a piece of Hashilli’s spirit, the tiny seed from which all his power grew. She would give it to Robert Collins, and he would find a way to use it.

  Grandfather would help him. The old ghost still resented his murder, and for the first time in his life, Hashilli sympathized with his predecessor’s attitude.

  But things didn’t have to go as the ancestors planned. The shadows weren’t infallible. Hashilli would track Marie down. He had a pretty good idea where to start looking.

  On his Viagra-fueled trip back to the cabin, Hashilli had sensed Marie Ferraro’s presence along the river’s southern edge among a collection of cattails and reeds. If he had taken the time to investigate, he might have ended the woman’s treachery then and there, but his thought processes were dimmed by pharmacologically-induced lust. That was finished now. He knew exactly what to do.

  After he killed Marie, Hashilli would grind her bones to dust and scatter them in the river so her outer shadow would not find a resting place. Perhaps he’d keep part of her as a souvenir, not enough to give her ghost a purchase point, but enough to bind her to him. Perhaps a finger-bone necklace, or a breastbone whittled into a crucifix pendant.

  Yes, a crucifix. A marriage of pagan and Christian symbols, like the Voodoo gods who masquerade as Catholic saints.

  Now that the ancestors had abandoned him, perhaps Hashilli could learn a thing or two from the Africans. He’d not worked out Baron Saturday’s part in Robert Collins’s game, but there would be time for that once his other enemies were vanquished.

  Reeds lay bent and broken in a path exactly the same width as the stolen jon boat. Hashilli jacked a bullet into the chamber of his semi-automatic pistol and checked that the safety was in the off position before he steered his boat along the all-too-clear trail the seductress left for him. It didn’t take long to find the drag marks on the shore where Marie pulled her boat away from the water’s edge.

  Stronger than she looks. He still admired the woman who betrayed him. Thoughts of Marie fanned the coals of lust into a smoldering fire, but the emotions were manageable. Nothing more than a Viagra hangover.

  In spite of his best efforts to steer his thoughts away from weaknesses of the flesh, Hashilli found himself wondering what Marie would look like dressed in a U.S. Olympic uniform, competing in a balance beam routine before an audience of millions. How long would it take to wash his mind clear of the woman’s influence?

  The wooden jon boat wasn’t well concealed. She knew he’d follow her. She knew he’d find the boat. What measures had she taken?

  Hashilli saw seven sticks driven into the ground in a rough circle, like funeral stakes in a traditional Choctaw burial. No one did that anymore. All of the old rituals had been abandoned. Most of them forgotten.

  He removed the stakes one at a time, saving the shortest one for last. It wasn’t placed on the western side, as it should have been. Was this some kind of magic he did not recognize, Voodoo perhaps? Could this be something she had learned from Baron Saturday?

  No trip wires attached to the boat. Hashilli didn’t think it would be booby-trapped, but he couldn’t be sure. Marie Ferraro was a white woman; her kind was far more comfortable with explosives than magic.

  He slipped his fingers under one side of the jon boat, flipped it over and dove for cover in one easy, uncoordinated motion. After a slow count to thirty, he raised his head—no Claymore mine, no poison gas, no nest of rattlesnakes. There was an empty plastic water bottle, and an empty individual-serving bag that once contained Doritos. The blue plastic lid was screwed onto the bottle and the bag was crawling with ants. What did it all mean?

  While Hashilli pondered the mysteries of symbolic magic, his cell phone rang. Bob’s Lakeside Motel, according to caller ID. Hashilli owned a majority interest in the resort. He was so broadly diversified it took him five rings to remember which persona to assume.

  “Mr. Neumond speaking.” Hashilli tweaked the words with a hint of German precision. He’d circulated rumors of Nazis in the Neumond line. No one in Choctaw country would ask Mr. Neumond any embarrassing questions. Everyone in this part of Oklahoma was far too polite for open curiosity.

  “This is Bob, sir.”

  Bob had lots of German visitors at his motel over the years, but none of them looked like Mr. Neumond. Hashilli knew Bob would wonder about his bronze skin and dark hair, so he’d let some family secrets slip. His grandfather’s service in the SS. His villa in Argentina. Wasn’t that where all the runaway Nazis went after their misadventures in the Great War? Maybe all descendants of Nazi war criminals had bronze skin and black hair—Fascist evolution. Bob would understand. The motel manager never once considered the possibility that Mr. Neumond was a distant cousin.

  “That colored man you told us to watch out for is staying at the motel,” Bob said. “The one without no legs.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “He’s staying with another man,” Bob said. “Looks to be an Indian, but he ain’t from no local tribe.”

  “Thank you, Robert. Your report is most useful.” Mr. Neumond told Bob to keep the information between the two of them. “There won’t be any trouble, Robert, if you can be discrete.” Hashilli ended the call without saying goodbye. His distant cousin would be grateful for Mr. Neumond’s economy of words.

  Archie Chatto and Baron Saturday had gone to ground at Bob’s Lakeside Motel. Undoubtedly, Marie would go there too. With just a bit of luck, Hashilli could clear the entire nest of vipers in one fell swoop.

  Mr. Neumond could take the blame. These interlopers had already cost him four personas. Dr. Moon, Mr. Luna, Dr. Selene, and Mr.
Allunare, all carefully developed and documented—years of work erased by acts of treachery.

  He headed back to the reeds where his boat was tied. There were places around the motel where a man could hide, places with some elevation where an assassin with a high-powered rifle could do a lot of damage.