by Susan Slater
“Could be. I know Sal is holding something back. I thought he was going to tell me the other night at the jail, but he didn’t.”
“You know, whoever scalped the guy had to know Indian customs and know how Sal would react. The person who washed that scalp knew he’d have an audience—knew what Sal would do on the fourth day, where he’d go.”
“I’ve thought of that,” Ben said. “Indian ritual is fairly predictable.”
“Does Sal have any enemies in the village?”
“I’m hoping the case worker at the clinic can answer that.”
“You know this could be nothing more than a family dispute gone wrong.” Julie sighed. “But I’ve been doing my homework on the tribe. Hallucinations are the disease of supernatural origin.”
The killing seemed out of place, Julie thought, a knifing, to be exact, something almost unheard of in the tribe. Witches caused bodily harm, illness, but by remote control—they seldom took the initiative.
“Have I lost you?”
“Sorry,” Julie looked up sheepishly, “I was going to ask why Tommy locked up Sal in the first place. He didn’t confess?”
“Not in so many words. Tommy feels circumstantial evidence implicates Sal. The fact that he gave this Ahmed’s widow a bag of amber seems to indicate a pretty definite involvement.”
“He does a lot of work in amber,” Julie said.
“Sort of his signature, from what I gather. One of a handful in the village who can afford the stuff at thirty dollars an ounce.”
“Hannah carries supplies for carvers in the trading post. I wonder if she’s the one who sells it to him?”
“Or trades it out for work. That might make it accessible.”
Ben glanced at his watch then reached for her hand. “This has been great.”
“How does that line go—‘just like old times’?”
“Better,” Ben said.
“Better?”
“Now I may have some idea of what might be important to me in life.” One big grin and he opened the car door but didn’t get out.
“What was all that about a prince?”
“Got me out of kissing a frog. I told .22 I already had a prince.”
Ben laughed. “Maybe I should make an honest woman out of you.” The kiss this time was tender and loving, almost chaste—but it still left Julie trying to catch her breath.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The molds were made out of rubber as heavy and thick as treadless tires. Sal had experimented with metal and plastic, but the first was too rigid and the second melted. He moved the tray holding a rubber mat that contained over a hundred indentations to better light. He needed good light when he poured. The florescent bulb above his head was fizzling and popping. He snapped it a couple times with his thumb and middle finger. The two other banks of lights gleamed a soft yellow. Hannah had thought of everything for his underground workshop— the lights emitted vitamin D, like the sun. Only these were grow lights for humans. It was supposed to keep him from becoming depressed. They had tested them on people in Alaska. Sal wondered how they had worked.
It was comfortable down here, cool, fairly well ventilated. Hannah had moved in a straight-backed chair and a cot. Not that he was the napping type, but it made the place seem more homey. And he was going to spend a lot of time down here, afternoons, evenings over the next couple months when he wasn’t needed at the store. In two months he’d produce enough amber to pay off all Hannah’s bills. Then, he was finished.
The heat from the Bunsen burner warmed his face. The open flame wasn’t a problem. There was good air circulation. If he could just get over feeling trapped. He had a hunch he’d test the ability of those lights. It would take some getting used to, working underground.
He straightened the rubber mold in front of him. It was pliable; he never had to fear breaking the nuggets. He filled the holes with molten amber and switched on the timer; their cooling time was crucial. He seldom had throwaways.
Hannah had treated his being in jail like he’d taken off on vacation. But she was right. It had been over a month since he’d produced any amber. The house painter wanted the second half of his payment, and the school had called. She was being pressured. She had an order for fifty pounds, half of it had to be plain. Those were her instructions, her orders. He didn’t really mind. This would be the last of it. The last made under their business agreement.
The fifty pounds would pay off everything—the school, the painting of the house, the plumbing. Sal agreed that the boarding house needed renovation in order to attract a buyer. Hannah was right to invest in its upkeep in order to get top dollar. It was .22’s inheritance as well as Hannah’s—maybe the only money he’d ever have in life. He deserved a fair start.
Twenty-five pounds would go quickly without enclosures. Besides, most of the beetles had died. It was hard keeping insects alive in jars even with a good food source. He hadn’t been here to look after them. And he could always get more.
He looked around the lab. In three short months, maybe less, all this wouldn’t exist. Would he miss it? A little. Aside from helping .22, he liked the challenge. He proved something—did something that no one else could—he rivaled nature. But his deceit had brought him trouble. And he’d never had a clear conscience. That’s why he sold very little of the carved fake locally. Ninety-nine percent of his amber carvings went out of state or were sold to tourists. People from Nebraska or Illinois or Alabama—people he’d never see. Nameless, faceless dupes who wouldn’t remember that he was the carver of their treasure, their supposed gem.
Still, he’d put in a lot of work—tested recipe after recipe, adding something here, deleting it there. He wondered if people would believe him if he told them he combined tree sap with clear, melted plastic? To be more exact polyurethane, polyester and resin. The resin added color and sheen.
But the resin had been the difficult part. First, he had ordered mastic, an aromatic, astringent resin from a small anacardiaceous evergreen native to the Mediterranean. That had been expensive. And he had had to drive into Albuquerque to find someone who could order it for him. Next, he tried copal, a highly lustrous resin from tropical trees. But, if anything, it made the amber look too shiny, too fake.
He then learned to distill the oil of turpentine from the crude oleo-resin of the piñon pine and produce a hard, brittle resin of deep yellow-brown. Closer. But the color was still too dark—too much like Haitian amber and wouldn’t bring top dollar. Then he read that the resin could be manufactured by the polymerization of simple molecules like they did for varnishes. And he knew he had stumbled upon an important piece of the puzzle. He went to see his niece’s husband.
His niece was married to a chemist, professor at the University of New Mexico. It was his analysis that helped him decide the amounts, the ratios. But the clever part, the trick, was in the cooling—cooling the amber so that it wouldn’t crack—that and keeping the color pure. His amber wouldn’t turn dark or streak if left in the sun. He came up with a product that would stand up to the heat of polishing and drilling. The chunks were hard without being brittle. His product never lost its unique transparency under high powered buffing and would never feel slightly tacky if forgotten on the dash of the car in hundred degree weather. It even stood up nicely to the old fashioned, hand operated bow-drill.
And it wasn’t just that he had mastered the amber. His inserts were lifelike, perfectly encapsulated specimens of nature. That was another tricky part, a challenging part. The better the insert, the higher the price a piece could command. Hannah had gotten seven hundred dollars, wholesale, for a one inch oblong with a housefly.
He didn’t use them very often. Houseflies were difficult to work with—and too common. But they were safe. Flies preserved for 40 million years appeared as lifelike as modern houseflies, Musca Domestica. He’d read that somewhere, in a report on genetic research on prehistoric organisms, then he’d seen a piece of 40 million year old amber in the Museum of Natural Histor
y in Albuquerque, and it was like staring at his own work.
Amber had suddenly become popular to study. Thanks to the movies, everyone wanted to believe that you could reconstruct dinosaur DNA from blood-sucking insects found in amber. But science was worried about pathogenic microbes. They thought ancient bacteria found in beetles, which could defoliate a modern forest, might be accidentally released.
Sal wasn’t sure about that, but the article had reassured him that encapsulating the scavenger beetle was a good idea. Beetles had been around for a long time and they hadn’t changed much in appearance. And they looked good. If he placed them just right, their pinchers stood out like weapons. He’d also come close to mastering leg placement. Seldom did he allow a specimen to rest with legs doubled back under its body. He was proudest of those whose wings flared slightly revealing an iridescent body poised on six legs. One time he had managed a mosquito right in the center of a two inch cube. He liked it so much he carved a frog around it. An amber frog with a mosquito in its stomach had gotten a lot of attention—and a big price.
It would be funny if someday a million or so years from now, entomologists would search his amber for viable bacteria. Or today. Would one of his nuggets find its way into a lab? Then what? Could he be found out? Sal didn’t want to dwell on that. He’d been lucky so far.
He wondered what would happen to the drying chambers when the lab was dismantled—the vacuum tubes that sucked the juices from the insects, twigs and leaves until all that remained was a shell, an opaque hull, a shadowy outline of veins, hairy legs, pinchers in shades of brown. He laughed. Placing the inserts had been tedious—more error than success at first. But then he learned to pour a base in a tiny mold, place the insect—seldom in the middle, more often to one side—then fill the remaining area with cooling amber. The trick again was temperature but the result was almost always stunning. He had discovered that if he dipped the dried insect in liquid resin and allowed it to semi-dry it would hold its shape. The resin melded with its surroundings so that this original bubble was never detected.
Amber was expensive, much in demand. Good carvers like Rhoda Quam, Annette Tsikewa and Eddington Hannaweeke preferred amber. All purchased amber from the trading post. Even those who used to go into Albuquerque and buy African amber trade beads paid the extra for his and saved themselves a trip. And there was never very much available for the local carvers, never enough to arouse suspicion. Hannah knew her market; he always gave her that.
The timer went off. He switched on the fans, circulating air, equal distribution, and poked the chunks from the mat letting each roll onto the wire rack and made certain that none was touching another. Their color was perfect. Each nugget glowed a warm, fiery gold. He had experimented with the color on this batch. A touch more resin, a mixture this time from Chinese elm. The formula was complicated, intricate, and constantly evolving.
It would take the better part of two months to make fifty pounds. He couldn’t make more than sixteen ounces at a time. Slow. Hannah always tried to rush him. But he’d finish before they left, before new people would take over the trading post. The result was the most important thing, like the nuggets in front of him. They were above suspicion. Wasn’t that what she had insisted upon? He wondered what she would say if she knew he was also able to make tortoise-shell?
The work almost always took his mind off of his problems. Lulled him into believing that all was well. Once, he could get lost in its intensity—the making of amber, the shaping of fetishes. Today, he had some thinking he had to do. He was almost sorry the jail was closed. He had felt safe—had wanted to be there because Atoshle wouldn’t find him there, wouldn’t come to him. Now? He was worried. Atoshle was here; he felt his presence—was it an omen of his death? Unless he could figure out how to stop him, find out what he wanted, who had sent him—Sal would die. But that meant a ceremony and cost.
He checked the nuggets and turned each on the rack. He liked the unusual depth of bronze-gold color each nugget emitted from its center. He reached in his pocket; he’d make a note of the addition of elm. It was never far away from him now, his notebook, small enough to fit into a hip pocket, top of his boot, under a buttoned flap in his shirt pocket. All his notes, the trial and error approaches to what was cooling on the racks in front of him were contained, crammed onto those pages. He hadn’t always carried it. But something told him to now. Anything worth one hundred thousand dollars probably needed to be protected. Sal looked around the room. There was a fortune in front of him, but the key was his notebook. Without that, everything else was worthless. No one would be able to duplicate his work—not without the recipe.
Sal turned the nuggets one last time. Perfect. The batch was uniform, striking in color, excellent consistency. Next, he did what he should have done when this underground lab was first completed; he placed his own personal fetishes on a shelf above the cot: a piece of elk antler that resembled a snake; a red pipestone badger; an alabaster wolf with bands of sinew around its middle securing a lightning bolt of abalone, an eagle feather and tuft of hair from the undercoat of a bear; and the quarter-sized flat obsidian circle resembling a turtle.
When he felt his life’s energies sputter like a drowning candle flame, he would call upon Wiloloane, the spirit of lightning personified in the snake—the spirit that would intensify the power of the other fetishes. Sal took the twisted piece of horn in his hands and breathed in its essence. The snake was a reminder that he was mortal but connected with the supernatural—those who had gone before. It reminded him he wasn’t alone, that feelings of isolation were a figment of his coyote nature, the trickster whose weaknesses of selfishness and arrogance could invade Sal’s being, setting him up to be the prey of others.
He thought of the little silver pin he had seen at the Trading Post—a coyote, legs spraddled, bandanna around its neck and a set of perfectly etched tire-tracks across its abdomen—the Santa Fe coyote as road kill. Now, that was a sense of humor he liked. Maybe he should have bought it. It could have been just the medicine he needed.
He adjusted the white wolf to face east. Not that this fetish would see the sun rise from its basement home, but facing the direction of “new light” would help it to generate ideas and truth. Sal leaned forward and breathed in the air surrounding this white figure streaked with orange; its downward pointing tail and sharp pricked ears lending it an air of realism. This fetish had brought his grandfather and father good hunting and had been blessed by the ceremony to give it strength, then later dipped in the blood of the kill to say ‘thank you.’ But now, the abalone arrow secured by the turquoise bead on its back would help the wolf give him insights, flashes of light that would show Sal the truth.
The pipestone badger was the guardian of the south and the summer people. Sal picked it up and absently rubbed its smooth sides. The symbol of his clan—if one fetish seemed to keep him in touch with self, with his surroundings, it was the badger. Aggressive when defending what is his, the badger reminded Sal that all humans have a destructive side—one that can erode good qualities and tempt one to follow base instincts—to put competitiveness or vengeance or physical harm above reason. He placed it back on the shelf and turned its head to the south.
The turtle meant long life. Sal smiled and felt calmer with the thumbnail sized circular piece of obsidian in his hand. Hannah had gotten a sack of “worry rocks” to put in a box by the cash register at the trading post, twenty-five cents each. At first, Sal had thought they wouldn’t sell. Then he watched as tourists would pick one up, rub it, roll it around in their hands and buy it. Attracted by the smoothness, how it would take on the warmth of one’s skin, the customers found them irresistible. He had carried the turtle in his pocket for years and enjoyed it in the same way. This ancient symbol of the mother earth never sought to go where it could not navigate in the water or on land. And always it was tenacious, cautious—achieving where others would fail. It was a good symbol to have with him at all times.
Sal stood ba
ck and surveyed the shelf of fetishes, then prayed that his guardians liked their new home. He held a leather pouch of cornmeal above his head and asked that this sustenance honor and keep them from hunger. He placed a pinch in front of each fetish, and felt relief flood his body. He should have brought these amulets out before. Their home was a fetish jar which he kept secure in the trailer. But this seemed better; they were in a position to do good here. He would let them get used to their new surroundings before he placed them back into the jar lined with feathers and sprinkled with powdered turquoise and shell.
+ + +
Julie had sung the entire musical score from Westside Story, well, at least the most popular numbers, without accompaniment by the time she got back to the boarding house after dropping Ben off at the clinic. Luckily, her audience had been an open road, bright sunshine, and two ground squirrels sitting on a rock because she was tone deaf. But she felt incredible. Would she have believed it? After all this time? Her feelings for Ben were stronger than ever. And his for her? The same, if she could believe that kiss. And he’d sounded sincere. Maybe, she should reconsider career versus commitment.
She’d try to talk with Sal after lunch, try to find out if he was missing any money. She’d promised to do that much for Ben, but she didn’t have a clue how to go about it. She could see Hannah, real estate agent, and prospects talking on the steps of the boarding house as she pulled in. From the smiles it looked like all had gone well. So well, in fact, Julie watched the agent walk over to the For Sale sign and smooth a Sold sticker diagonally across it. Sold. That was fast. Must have been the peach blintzes.
Hannah was waving for her to join them. Why not? What was there to lose? Julie couldn’t be overly excited about a transaction she knew little about. But if she loved it out here, why wouldn’t someone else?
