by John Saul
“Not at all. In fact, Paul Kendall heard everything Otto Kruger had to say about the dam, and it didn’t seem to bother him at all. He’s quite willing to let the deal go through with no changes.”
Rita stared at him. “But that doesn’t make sense. If the dam’s damaged badly, the company’s not worth as much.”
Greg shrugged. “I suppose when you have as much money as UniChem does, whatever it will take to fix the damage doesn’t mean much to them. They just seem to want the company, and they don’t seem to care what it costs.”
“But why?” Rita insisted. “Max always said that if a deal looked too good to be true, it was too good to be true. If they’re willing to pay the same price, disregarding the condition of the dam—”
Before she could complete her thought, a loud crash echoed through the house, followed by the tinkling of glass. Rita and Greg stared at each other for a moment, then Greg was on his feet, charging out to the foyer.
On the hardwood floor, amid the shattered remains of the broken judas window in the large oaken door, was a rock the size of a fist. Ignoring the rock, Greg jerked the door open and stepped out onto the broad veranda that fronted the house. But he already knew it was too late. The moon was low in the sky, and the darkness of the desert night surrounded him.
Whoever had thrown the rock had already disappeared into the vast emptiness around the house. Still, Greg left the porch and quickly searched the grounds before going back in and gingerly picking the rock from among the shards of glass.
It was a river cobble, round, flat, and worn smooth from eons of tumbling. But on one of its surfaces a word had been scrawled with a laundry marker.
Bitch.
Greg stared at it in puzzlement, then finally looked up at his aunt, who was standing in the wide arched opening of the living room.
“What does it say?” Rita demanded, her voice clear and calm.
Greg handed the rock to his aunt, who turned it over and read the single word. “Why the hell would anyone want to do something like this?” he asked. “And tonight, of all nights?”
Rita shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice sorrowful. “Apparently I don’t have the sympathy of everyone in town after all.”
Greg’s eyes hardened. “I’m calling the police,” he said. “There’s no reason why we should have to put up with vandalism.”
Rita took a deep breath, then shook her head. “No,” she said, the exhaustion of the long evening finally closing in on her. “Not tonight. I don’t want to talk to anyone else right now, Greg. I just want to go to bed and think for a while.”
But a few minutes later, when she was at last alone in the large bed she’d shared with Max for almost half a century, she found she didn’t think at all.
She fell asleep, and dreamed of Max.
Jed had no idea what time it was, except that the sun had risen and a bright patch of light lay trapped on the western edge of the kiva floor. The fire still smoldered, tendrils of smoke drifting up to dance for a moment in the rays of the sun, only to climb onward, escaping out of the hatch and riding away on the breeze.
He was still uncertain exactly what had happened last night. When he’d arrived at Kokatí and found his grandfather waiting for him, he had been unsurprised, as if there were nothing abnormal about Brown Eagle having known he was coming. He’d told his grandfather about the dream, and a bemused smile had come over Brown Eagle’s face as he listened. “Maybe,” the old man had mused when Jed was finished, “your grandpa isn’t so crazy after all, eh?”
“But what happened?” Jed had asked. “What did I see?”
Brown Eagle shrugged. “You can see anything in dreams. Some of it is real—some of it might not be. Some of it means something, some of it doesn’t.” At the look of puzzlement on Jed’s face, he continued, “The trouble with your father’s people is that they won’t open their minds. When they dream, they say everything they see comes from inside their minds. When their eyes are closed, they don’t think there’s any other way to see. But to the People, sleep is a different world. When we sleep, we see different things.”
“I don’t get it.”
Brown Eagle put an arm around Jed’s shoulders. “Why do you have to? If you don’t understand why the sky is blue, does it make it another color? Just because you don’t know where something comes from doesn’t make it less real. Come on.” He guided Jed toward the kiva, but as they approached the ladder, Jed hesitated, remembering the strange loss of time he’d experienced when he’d gone into the kiva on his last visit to Kokatí.
“Wh-What’s going to happen?”
“Who knows?” Brown Eagle countered. “Maybe nothing Maybe we’ll just sit for a while and I’ll tell you stories, like I did when you were still five years old.” He nudged Jed forward, and Jed climbed down into the gloom of the subterranean chamber. As always, a fire crackled in the pit, but the suffocating heat that built up in the day had long since dispersed through the hatchway. Tonight, the room held only an intimate warmth, with none of the stultifying closeness that bore in on it when the sun was at its zenith.
“You can learn practically anything down here,” Brown Eagle told him as they seated themselves on the bench. “To me, this place is a doorway I can sit here for hours, looking out at things I can’t see anywhere else. If I want, sometimes I can even pass through the door and go to other places.” He grinned at Jed. “Tonight, for example I went with Rakantoh tonight, and spoke to you.”
Jed smiled nervously. “Come on, you don’t think I’m gonna believe that, do you?” But even as he spoke, he remembered the word that had risen from the bird’s throat, a word he had heard in his grandfather’s voice.
“Look at the fire,” Brown Eagle told him. “Watch the flames Let yourself drift Let the fire guide you, and don’t be afraid.”
Jed leaned back against the stone wall. For a few minutes he looked around the dimly lit chamber, peering into the shadows around its circumference, examining the stones that paved the floor. But soon the fire itself seemed to beckon to his eyes and he stared into the flames themselves.
For a while he saw nothing, but slowly the flames began to take on shapes, and he began to imagine that they had come alive. Amorphous forms began to appear—a brilliantly hued snake slithered among the coals, only to disappear a second later, transformed into a bird which rose up from the ashes, then disappeared as quickly as it had come.
The fire came alive, and a whole new world appeared within the stone ring that surrounded it. Life came and went, strange creatures lived for a moment, then died, or were transformed into something else. Jed felt his mind begin to expand and reach out toward the world within the fire, wanting to explore every corner of it.
The fire grew then, surrounding him, and suddenly he himself was walking among the coals. Yet he felt no fear, no burning of his flesh; and his nostrils, instead of filling with the acrid aroma of smoke, thrilled instead to the myriad perfumes of the desert night—sage and juniper, and the scents of earth.
A bird appeared before him, the same bird he’d seen in his dream, and when the bird spread its wings to soar into the sky, Jed let himself go with it.
He rose out of the fire, drifted like the smoke up through the hatchway and into the coolness of the night sky. The huge eagle rose beside him, and Jed felt as if he could reach out and touch the creature’s feathers. He reached out. Suddenly the bird turned on the breeze and soared higher.
As they rose upward, Jed gazed down on the pueblo spread along the edge of the mesa. From the sky it seemed a perfect reflection of the landscape around it. The plazas appeared to wander through the buildings just as the floor of the desert meandered among the mesas that lay scattered across it, and the whispers of smoke that rose from the firepits of the village gathered over it like so many clouds. Seen from the night sky, Kokatí seemed perfect.
Jed wheeled with the great bird and sailed out over the canyon. There was a coldness to the air above the lake, and fo
r a moment Jed felt as if he was going to fall out of the sky and plunge into the waters below. He could stand to look into their black depths for only a moment, for a feeling of desolate loneliness and longing came over him, wrenching at his spirit. Then he was above the ugly concrete scar of the dam, and the canyon spread out before him. Even from the great height at which he soared, he could hear the soft babbling of the stream as it made its way through the rocks, and hear the muted rustlings of small animals scavenging in the night.
The mouth of the canyon opened before him, and the vastness of the desert spread away from the banks of the wash. He breathed deeply, sucking the clean air into his lungs, feeling the rush of the wind against his face.
But a moment later his nostrils recoiled as they were choked with a noxious odor, and Jed realized he was above the refinery now. Like a hideous pit of vipers, the tangle of blackened pipes writhed among themselves, twisting around the furnaces that glowed with the light of Hell and belched fumes into the sky. Sickened, he turned away, only to be faced with the oil fields themselves, the drilling rigs poised like giant insects sucking the blood from the planet’s body. Once again that bleakness of spirit overcame him; once more he turned away.
He was above the village now, and in the distance he could see the angry glare of artificial light, far too bright against the darkness of the night, and he flew toward it.
Below him now was the ungainly Victorian shape of the Morelands’ house, all its windows glowing brightly, as if its occupants were trying to fend off the night itself.
There was a movement then, and Jed’s eyes shifted. A figure was moving through the night, darting across the desert, crouched low to the ground. Jed let himself drop downward, following closely as the shadow dodged among the boulders and trees. Then at last he lost interest, drifting once more on the wind, feeling at one with the sky.
He let his eyes close, let his mind soar free …
And now it was morning, and the kiva was already beginning to take on the heat of the sun as well as the fire. Jed blinked and stretched, prepared for the pain he expected to wash over him as he flexed his muscles after the many hours of sitting on the hard stone bench.
But his body felt relaxed, as if he’d been sleeping all night.
Yet in his mind all the images he’d seen as he stared at the fire, and then imagined himself soaring free with the great bird, were still clear.
Nor were they the vague, fleeting fragments of dreams that sometimes caught in his memory for a few seconds upon awakening, only to disappear forever a moment later. No, these were clear memories, as bright and vivid as his memories of riding up to the mesa with Jude; as vivid, indeed, as his ride up the mesa last night in his father’s truck.
The memories were not the memories of dreams at all. They were memories of something that truly happened. As the realization hit him, he felt a hollowness in his belly and his heart began to pound. When he turned to his grandfather, his face frightened, Brown Eagle only chuckled softly.
“What happened?” the old man asked. “What did you see?”
Jed did his best to explain the strange thing that had happened to him during the night, but even as he listened to his own words he realized they sounded crazy.
It was impossible, all of it.
But when he was finished, Brown Eagle nodded. “The bird is Rakantoh,” he said, his eyes fixing once more on the fire. “He is the totem of our clan. What you felt when you were over the lake was what he feels. His home is there somewhere, under the water, and he tries to go back. But he can’t.” He laid a gentle hand on Jed’s knee. “Maybe he feels the way you do,” he went on. “Maybe he feels he has no home and doesn’t belong anywhere. But it’s not true, of course.” Brown Eagle sighed heavily. “His home is still there. Someday he will reclaim it.”
Jed made a hollow snorting sound. “Yeah?” he asked. “How?”
Brown Eagle shook his head. “Some things none of us can know.” He stood up and moved toward the ladder. “Time for you to go,” he said. “Up here time might not mean much, but down in Borrego your father will be worried about you.”
Jed steered the truck down the winding road that led off the mesa, then stopped at one of the turns to look out over the desert. In the distance he could see the refinery and the oil fields, something he’d seen all his life. But this morning, after what happened to him during the night, they looked different.
They looked wrong.
Wrong, and somehow evil. He drove more slowly now, looking at all the things the people of Borrego had brought to the area.
The refinery and the dam, and paved roads and electric cables.
Great pipes, shooting straight across the desert like scars made by a surgeon’s scalpel.
All the things that were supposed to make life better for the people who had built them. But as he thought about it now, he realized that wasn’t quite what had happened.
For the people of Borrego, unlike the Kokatí, had become slaves to what they had built, spending most of their time tending to the machinery that was supposed to take care of them.
The only good thing, he supposed, was that at least most of them didn’t know they were slaves.
Idly, he wondered what would happen if they ever found out …
“Well,” Judith Sheffield said, glancing at the clock and dropping her chalk on the ledge below the blackboard, “shall we all line up and play kindergarten?”
The sound of laughter rippled through the class, and Gina Alvarez grinned. “Maybe we should all pin our permission slips to our shirts,” she suggested.
Judith smiled at her. When she’d briefed the class earlier about what was to occur at exactly 8:45 that morning, she’d made no attempt to disguise her disdain of Stuart Beckwith’s precise logistical plans. Indeed, she’d hardly listened at the staff meeting yesterday afternoon, when he’d made his laborious explanation of how the distribution of flu shots was to be carried out. It had sounded to her more like a military campaign than a simple inoculation, and as soon as he’d begun repeating himself—which had happened in about the second minute of his presentation—Judith found herself thinking not about the logistics of administering the shots, but of the shots themselves.
After all, it was only last spring that she’d heard that flu shots were no longer going to be administered on a mass basis. If people wanted them, they were going to have to get them privately. Nor, for that matter, had she heard anything about an epidemic sweeping the country, which was the kind of thing that invariably got some mention on the evening news. Finally, out of pique at what she considered Beckwith’s wasting of the staff’s time, she’d decided to call her doctor in Los Angeles, who was also a close friend. “Actually,” Sally Rosen had told her, “there is an epidemic going on, a small one, though, and pretty well localized in New England. But there’s no inoculation against it. It’s some new strain.” Judith hadn’t made a big deal about it; indeed she’d soon been more interested in hearing about Sally’s latest boyfriend. Then, when Greg had arrived at the Morelands’ the night before, with the news of Max’s death, it had vanished from her mind completely.
This morning, as Frank scribbled his name on the inoculation permission slip Jed had left for him on the refrigerator door—and which was now in Judith’s purse—she’d remembered her conversation with Sally, and gone to talk to Beckwith as soon as she’d arrived at the school.
He’d pasted a smile on as she stepped into his office, but it had immediately disappeared when she’d told him she had some questions about the shots the students were to receive that day.
“Really,” he’d said, his eyes fixing on her as if he’d just detected a cockroach creeping across the floor of his office. “I hadn’t been aware of your medical background, Judy.”
“It’s not my background,” Judith replied. “It’s a friend of mine. I happened to be talking to her yesterday. She told me there’s no epidemic around here, and even if there were, there’s no immunization shot available.
”
Beckwith’s scowl deepened. “I’m afraid you’re talking to the wrong person,” he said. “It was Greg Moreland who arranged for these shots to be given. If you have a problem, you should take it up with him.”
Judith felt her face burning. “It just seems to me that if there’s any question—” she began, but this time Beckwith didn’t let her finish.
“What you’re saying is that you expect me to jeopardize the students’ health simply because some friend of yours hasn’t kept up with this epidemic.”
“If that’s the way you want to put it, fine!” Judith replied, then wished she’d been able to keep the anger out of her voice But it was too late.
“That is the way I want to put it, Judy,” Beckwith had told her. “And until you’re the principal here, I think you’d be well advised to leave administrative decisions up to me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a great deal of work this morning.” He’d nodded toward the door in a gesture of dismissal that Judith had found infuriating. Still, he was right in one way—the shots were his business, and Greg Moreland’s business, not hers.
“Okay,” she said now, “let’s go.” She watched in amusement as the class trooped out of the room, their permission slips neatly pinned to their chests just as Gina had suggested.
Lining themselves up in alphabetical order, they all joined hands like a kindergarten class trooping through a museum. “Do we get cookies and milk if we’re good?” someone asked.
Despite herself, Judith laughed out loud. “I’m just hoping none of you embarrasses me by passing out,” she replied. Then, deciding that if the class were going to make a joke out of it, she might as well too, she stepped to the head of the line.
Stuart Beckwith was waiting outside the nurse’s office, a clipboard in his hand, and Judith had to suppress an urge to snap him a sharp salute. His eyes swept her class, and a flicker of anger crossed his face as he saw the slips pinned to their chests. “Well, at least you’re prompt,” he observed tightly. “Line them up against the wall. Laura will be ready for them in a moment.”
