by Martha Wells
I hoofed it back to the bus station and made the call before I could think too much about it and changed my mind. It rang three times before voicemail picked up. His recorded voice was familiar, if a little more worn down to gravel by years of smoke: “Your call is important to me.” That was all he said before the beep, but it was enough to know I had the right guy. I didn’t leave a message and was glad he hadn’t picked up. The business address I’d jotted on my notepad wasn’t located on the strip among the high-end psychics, but here in the old town. I decided to walk.
Would he recognize me when I stepped into his parlor? I didn’t think I looked much like I had at 13. Back then he’d said a bunch of stuff about my aura. Told me it was blue. I wondered if he’d see the same energy when I showed up 17 years later. It wasn’t likely.
I recognized the symbol painted on the plate glass before I could even read the name. A constellation in white: Ophiuchus, the snake handler, floating in the sky over a crossed feather and staff. The shop was at street level, between a podiatrist and a Mexican restaurant. It looked dark inside, but when I tried the door I found it unlocked and entered to the sound of wind chimes. Of course the first thing to hit me while my eyes adjusted to the cluttered murk was the diffused smell of burning sage.
The proprietor hadn’t overlooked the merchandising possibilities. Racks of tie-dyed tapestries printed with tribal motifs, spirit animals, and celestial designs obstructed my view of the shop. Parting a pair of them like curtains, I found my way into a larger area where dim sunlight from the street illuminated a glass countertop through which I glimpsed a variety of quartz crystals and amethyst geodes. Bookshelves flanked the counter, stocked with a sparse collection of New Age and astrological titles interspersed with painted woodcarvings and brass statues: a turquoise wolf, a masked dancing shaman, even a Buddha sitting in lotus position with an awning of hooded cobras over his head to shelter him from the rain. Behind the counter the wall was lined with charts. A medicine pipe hung from a nail by a loop of rawhide. A barstool stood vacant behind the cash register, a knobby walking stick of lustrous black wood leaning in the corner beside it.
Danny Wormbone emerged from the back room through a slit in a tapestry. My first thought was that it couldn’t be him, because it looked too much like him. Surely he would have aged more in the intervening years. But he had the same jet-black hair, the same leathery skin, the same sinewy build and that deep hollow I remembered where his throat met his breastbone. The same quick eyes set close to his nose like you see on any wild predator, and the same quiet gentle demeanor as he moved through the space and settled on the stool as if intent on stirring the air as little as necessary.
I nodded at him. He nodded back, his face as impassive as it had been from the moment it emerged through the curtain, his expression betraying no sign of recognition.
As usual, I was winging it. I still didn’t know if I was going to ask if he remembered me or play it like a stranger in search of spiritual counseling.
The moment passed and I browsed the shop in silence. When I looked at the countertop again, Wormbone had produced a small block of wood and was whittling it with a buck knife over a square of canvas littered with shavings.
I approached the counter. I figured I had enough cash to hire him as a guide, but not enough to spend more than a couple of nights in this town before heading on to SoCal where I still had friends. It wouldn’t do to have him pencil me in on his calendar like any other walk-in. I’d come a long way to be here and it was time to get to the point. Probably a lot of people stepped into a shop like that without knowing exactly what they were looking for. I imagine part of his job was getting them to articulate it. I had crossed most of the continent without admitting to myself exactly what I was after. Now I was faced with the only person who could help me. So what was I looking for? Closure? It felt more like I was opening something.
A can of worms.
A grave.
Wormbone remained focused on his carving until finally, wondering if he’d noticed me, I drummed my fingers on the glass countertop. Without looking up from the spiral of blond wood curling around his blade, he said one word. The only word I needed to hear to know he knew me. “Unukalhai. Wondered when I’d see you again.”
“I want to go back.”
“It’ll cost you,” he said, poking a pupil into the eye of the creature he was carving. I couldn’t make out what it was. A crude dragon, maybe.
“I have money.”
“And I’ll take it.” He finally looked up and locked his gaze on mine. “But I’m not talking about money.”
***
I’m at my 13th birthday party. I know this because there’s a pair of those big number candles on the cake. I don’t think my mother ever got those for me, but in the dream, there they are, unlit. The dining room is decorated with nothing but red helium balloons. I think I’m alone at the table. Have I just blown the candles out, or have they not been lit yet? I examine the wicks for ash and find virgin white string. Adam says, “They’re blood balloons.” He’s sitting next to me but somehow I don’t see him until he speaks. Each balloon trails a length of ribbon, like the tail of a sperm cell. “Aren’t you gonna blow them out?” Adam asks.
I look again and now the candles are lit. But no one is singing. My family isn’t here.
I take a breath, make a wish, and blow out the twin flames. The red balloons pop, showering the table, the cake and my hair with scrappy, coagulating splashes of blood and tufts of coarse brown fur.
I had that dream on and off for about a week while the heel of my right hand ached in my sleep from the recoil of the revolver. I’d missed the rat with every shot.
***
My parents must have discussed the vision quest before my dad presented the idea to me, but it became clear in the first weeks of June as more detail trickled in, that my mother had serious reservations about what my father (having no doubt read too much Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell) thought would make a good substitution for a confirmation or a bar mitzvah. To be honest, so did I. Maybe the same concerns were shared by Adam’s mother, Renée. If so, Adam didn’t mention it.
“I just hope they don’t think they’re gonna babysit us the whole time,” he said. “It would defeat the whole purpose. I mean, this is supposed to be hardcore, man. Rite of passage, not the fucking Boy Scouts.”
I agreed fervently, although I knew the only reason my mother hadn’t intervened and called the whole thing off was exactly because my dad had been promising her he would shadow me like a scout leader. In my presence he downplayed his role, of course, not wanting to undermine the mystique going in or any sense of accomplishment I might have coming out. But I heard more of their conversations than they realized.
“You can’t starve and dehydrate our kid,” she said. “And sleep deprivation? If Child Services ever heard about it… Christ, how can this guy operate legally with minors involved?”
“You make it sound so extreme. We’ll have water. Absolutely. It’s the desert. Do you think I’m crazy? I mean, where did you even get that? I’m not going to neglect him. A little light fasting never killed anyone. It’s healthy. Healthier than how he eats most of the time. You know, I’m a little insulted that you don’t think I’ll intervene if necessary.”
She sighed. “It’s not you, it’s Lee. Or how you two are together. Knowing him, he’ll toss your emergency provisions off a cliff just to impress the boys.”
“No, he won’t.”
“And you’ll let him, just to prove you’re not a wimp.”
“Hey, that’s not fair. You know I’ll take care of Nathan. No harm will come to him.”
***
Everything is vibrating. The striated sandstone formations pulse in bands of blood red, lavender, and bone yellow. The sky stretches and retracts like the skin of a funeral drum with each beat of my heart and under everything, no, inside everything, buzzing like the collision of fire-wreathed atoms is the all-pervasive sound of rattles—ker
atin rings dancing in the tip of a serpent’s tail and the world is in thrall to that hypnotic rhythm. A sound as rich as a symphony of cicadas, but I’ve seen no insects among the sagebrush and mesquite. I’m slicked with sweat and my knees and elbows are skinned from stumbling over rock and I feel like I’m tripping, but I’ve never tripped, not yet, not until college, I haven’t even tried weed yet but Adam has—that was the last thing he tried before me and it’s the last thing he’ll ever try before me but I don’t know that yet and I’m trying to make sense of all this sensory distortion. Can it really be the lack of food and sleep? Is it possible that disturbing the rhythms of the body’s needs just a little can screw with your perception this bad, this fast and send you so far out? I’m scared. We got lost. My throat is sore from calling for the men but I’m trying to conserve the last of the water in my canteen and this is not a dream. Not a dream, but still it haunts me. It haunts me for fucking years.
Adam’s posture changes when he crests the slope and steps through the arch, leaving a gray handprint in sweat on the limestone. He goes rigid and I swear I can hear his breath stopping in his chest. He steps backward slowly and slips out of the straps of his backpack. He feels for the telescoping shovel that hangs from the pack without ever taking his eyes off what lies beyond the arch, now gliding over the threshold and coiling to strike.
A Mohave green rattlesnake, probably four feet long with black and white rings near the tail. We learned about them in school, so I know it’s deaf despite its warning rattle, has heat-sensors between its nostrils and eyes, is notoriously aggressive and possessed of a far more powerful venom than its cousin, the western diamondback—a frequently lethal neurotoxin. Lee has a snakebite kit in his pack but that does us no good unless the men find us, or we find them and we got ourselves lost on purpose and I’m praying that they know where we are and are just keeping out of sight, laying low, ignoring our calls to give our trial meaning, to scare us, but my cries have been so desperate that they would have come. They would have come.
The snake winds over itself in a figure eight, its head rising, the rattle erect and vibrating like everything else in this heightened world, a translucent gray blur.
Adam is gripping the shovel, sliding backward, sending pebbles and dust tumbling down the slope toward me and raising the shaft in both hands like a spear, but it’s not a shovel, it’s a hand spade—too small, too pointed, too close range. He must be crazy. A square flat blade might take the snake’s head off, but this? The blade is triangular like the rattler’s head. He would have to move faster than the snake. He would have to have dead aim.
I open my mouth to yell no, but he stabs the spade down into the dirt, heaving his weight behind it and I have time to think he’s breaking ground on his own grave but then the snake’s head rolls between his hiking shoes, down the slope with the scree. The jaws are still twitching and crying venom and I jump out of the way of it with an animal vocalization that comes out somewhere between a moan and a yelp, surprising even me with its alien timbre.
But that other sound, the sound under and in the heart of everything, the rattle and hum of cannibal Creation, goes on.
Adam turns to face me, his skin pale against the ruddy sandstone. “Don’t touch it,” he says. “You know what they say about a severed snake head? It doesn’t die until sundown.”
***
The bad shit that happened when I was 13 caught up with me at 31. Or I caught up with it. 1331: tally all the digits and you get 8. Roll it on its side and you get infinity, or a snake winding over on itself. Maybe I never outran any of it, never believed the lies the adults told me back then. The lies they told the police, the school, and each other.
Danny Wormbone hadn’t aged much. Maybe that was the Indian blood in him, maybe it was something else. The weather was good for the end of November and he agreed to take me out to the Moapa Paiute lands north of Vegas, the reservation where he had been living when my father called him in 1994. It was early afternoon when we left town in a Jeep he kept in a rented garage down the street. He tossed his walking stick in the backseat after my backpack and sleeping bag. I only brought my gear because I had nowhere else to leave it. I wasn’t planning on sleeping in the desert.
The Jeep smelled of cigarettes. Rock and roll on the radio and a dusty little dream catcher hanging from the rearview. I had paid the old medicine man two hundred dollars for the ride and trail guide, but he wasn’t much for talk. He smoked and drove and I watched the city thin out and the silver clouds move in over the Mojave.
Seventeen years ago we had met Wormbone at a picnic area inside Valley of Fire National Park. We came, the four of us, in Adam’s dad’s SUV and after a final lunch, followed our “spirit guide” to a second site outside the park. He rode a motorcycle with leather fringe saddlebags, but nothing about him besides his braided hair looked particularly Native American. He was dressed in denim, cowboy boots, and sunglasses and asked us if we’d been expecting feathers.
We hiked in silence and I think my dad was wondering if he and Lee were going to get their money’s worth. At sunset we arrived at a red rock wall covered with petroglyphs, the rock an almost blackened rust color, the glyphs contrasting in pale salmon: concentric circles, silhouettes of big horn sheep, spoked wheels, and pairs of zigzagging lines.
Wormbone ran his finger over one of the zigzags. “This is the snake,” he said. “Symbol of rebirth. Humans have connected with the energy of rebirth, regeneration, and transformation on this land since prehistoric times. Since long before your tribe or mine ever came here.” He took a bottle of red wine from the saddlebag of his motorcycle and a corkscrew from the pocket of his denim jacket. He opened the bottle, lined up five waxed paper cups, and poured.
Without asking our fathers if we could partake, he held his own cup up to the sun in a toast and said, “Join me in the sacrament. This wine, the blood red of the iron earth and the all-sustaining sun, taste it as you absorb the power and glory of this place.”
We raised our cups to the sun and drank. The wine tasted bitter.
From another pocket Wormbone produced a silver cigarette lighter adorned with a turquoise stone and held the flame to the end of the cork. He let it burn for a few seconds, then shook it out in the cool evening air. He brushed the hair away from my forehead with his callused fingers and drew something there with the charcoal. I didn’t know what it was until he had done the same to Adam: a pair of zigzagging lines like the symbol for Aquarius written vertically.
“Take the serpent as your symbol. The undulating pulse of life, the winding path, the one who sheds his form to be reborn.”
He poured the remainder of the wine into the dirt, mounted his bike, and kicked it to life with a roar.
We followed in the car to the next stop where he told us to gather our gear for the hike. He pointed out the ridge and the towering formation that was to be the site of our first camp. In the clear desert air it looked closer than it was. Adam and I set out at a brisk pace and were soon far ahead of the men, but before long we tired and the gap narrowed until Wormbone’s staff was scratching the dirt at my heels.
Now here was that sound again, this time ahead of me, as I followed the old shaman up the trail. We had passed by the petroglyphs without so much as a pause to look this time, never mind a pep talk and a toast. The trail was deserted. Most hikers kept to the official park trails, and this one was outside the boundary. I wasn’t sure if it was on reservation land or not. We had passed the Moapa Paiute Travel Plaza off of I-15. Fireworks, alcohol, tobacco, and gas. We hadn’t stopped. Now, hiking up the ridge, I regretted not asking him to pull in so I could use the bathroom and buy some bottled water. It could have been enlightening to watch him interact with whoever worked there. I wondered what kind of reaction his presence provoked. Respect? Scorn? Fear? Or was he just another New Age snake oil salesman claiming Indian heritage? Would they even recognize him?
“This is the place,” he said, punching the earth with his staff and sweepin
g his hand over the vast expanse of prismatic sandstone, frozen waves of geologic record lapping at an endless shore. “This is where we made our main camp for the vision quest.” His manner and tone implied fulfillment of the job I’d hired him for. But no, we were far from done here.
“Do you still take kids on quests, with the fasting and staying up all night?”
He didn’t answer. He traced a spiral in the dust with his staff, scrutinized me, and asked, “You think I’m responsible for what happened to your friend?”
“I don’t know.”
“His parents took on the risks. They signed a waiver. Yours did, too. Do you think the desert isn’t dangerous? Do you think confronting it would mean anything if it wasn’t?”
“I don’t know what happened to Adam,” I said. “But you do, I know you do. I didn’t come all the way here to blame you. I just want to know what happened.”
“Then you should have gone to his father.”
“His father ate a gun a long time ago. And I don’t know if his mother ever really knew what happened.”
“You boys shouldn’t have wandered off on your own.”
I scanned the paths that branched off from the ridge. Some wound around sculpted rock formations that resembled faces in profile or the silhouettes of great spiny beasts. Others were lost among the sage and cacti. “This is where you showed us the stars,” I said.
