by J.R. Bowles
CHAPTER 31
The room was dark, except for the glow from Mindy’s cigarette. Mindy sat watching Jamal sleep, and smiled. Poor Jamal; he had been with her all day, tagging along like a love-struck puppy. One sick puppy, she thought. He looked so peaceful she almost regretted using him the way she had; but she really had no choice, she told herself. She would not be stopped, and anyone who got in her way would regret it.
Jamal had wanted to bed her all day, and had pestered her to the point she was ready to kill him, but she couldn’t. He was one of the paths, and his path had not been shown yet; she also needed him to access the other paths. She had kept putting the sex off, knowing that she must wait until the time the path could be seen. Only then would the joining of bodies be, and she would have access to the opening. That was the only way she could experience them, at least for now. His power was growing, and he didn’t know it.
She understood Jamal so much better than he understood himself. His motivation for hating the whites. She hated them too. They were always taking, as if everything material belonged to them. They would steal it or buy it–-anything to have whatever they wanted–-and they used her people. They used the black man, the yellow man, they used everyone; they even used each other. They had no sense of fairness. It was their desire which made them so evil.
Her people had learned the ways of the white man, to survive in his world.
The great Cherokee nation had learned to survive, by selling their heritage to the white man. Oh, how she had hated it, her parents dressing her in beads and braids, in her moccasins, so the whites would pay to have their pictures taken with a real live Indian. Spit formed in her mouth.
She remembered the day John Fleuric's parents had visited them at the tourist trap in the Smoky Mountains. It had been her Grandfather who had later explained who he was. She still kept the picture her Grandfather had taken that day.
She had to pose with little Johnny, so his parents could take his picture, so the sweet little thing could show all his friends he had been with Indians. She hadn't smiled for the picture; she never did, she hated it. Then her Grandfather had pulled out his camera and taken additional pictures, and had got the names and address of the people, in the pretense he would send them additional pictures at no extra cost. She wondered if he had ever sent the pictures.
She sighed, reflecting on her Grandfather. Her ashes hit the carpet. She absentmindedly stomped on them with her bare foot. She looked at the smear on the rug as if it were meant to tell her something.
Her Grandfather had been their spiritual leader, and he had no grandsons to pass the knowledge to, so he had taught her the ways of the spirits and the paths. He had the sight and had seen the power hidden in the little white boy.
How excited she was, the day she went with her Grandfather to Roanoke, Virginia. He could see the powers of the sweet mother earth, and had followed the veins of the mother's power to the focal point where they had built a hospital.
This place, Roanoke, had been called by a different tribe, “Big Lick', because of the natural salts nature gave to the deer in the form of a salt lick.
He had spent many years, tracing several of the mother's energies to that spot where the white man had built the hospital. The Shenandoah Hospital, yes; even the blind white man was able to sense the healing powers of that energy crossing.
She had sat in the old station wagon while her Grandfather and his brother broke into the hospital and stole records of children born the same day as Fleuric. She knew them all; all of the children born that day. Her Grandfather had recalled the day when the stars had shone together, which enabled him to find records. The flames of the hospital as it burned where beautiful in her eyes. Even at that age, she had wanted the white man dead.
John Fleuric, your power will be my power, and then I will kill you.
Jamal stirred in his sleep, reaching out to feel her body next to him, grasping at empty air. With her mind she lulled him back into a deeper more tranquil sleep.
He was to have been the next path opening. She knew the order in which it should have occurred. That had been why she had chosen him: he was the destroyer. She needed the power of destruction. For some reason, she fretted, the throat had opened, but why? Was someone on to her?
Would the constructive power of the throat cause her problems, when the destructive force took over?
She smashed her cigarette into the tray and crawled back into bed. They wouldn't stop her.
