They’d wanted the bodies found. They’d wanted her to know which eagles. They knew she’d find the bodies, this was her sanctuary, those were her eagles. They knew everything about her. Dead crows hanging in a cornfield. A warning.
Like Bitch, her dog killed and skinned and butchered and left lying on her bed. She plodded up the slope, through the woods, eyes unseeing to the beauty that had thrilled her coming down, ears dead to the silence. Dead crows hanging in a cornfield. Her dead dog.
She stopped and vomited as memory-pictures spilled through her head. She stared down at the yellow-brown splash of her breakfast fouling the clean snow. Don’t think about it. Put one foot in front of another, diagonal stride, right kick and left pole, left kick and right pole, slide the skis uphill. But she didn’t move.
She stood and listened, stood in a broad clearing, blueberry barren under an early two feet of snow, listened to the insect buzz of that snowmobile again, was it closer or further away, was it the same stinkpot that had carried a rifle to the eagle’s roost and carried it away again? She felt the weight of the pistol in her pocket, the loaded pistol she’d never fired. Didn’t know how to fire. The gun dealer had had to show her where the safety was.
The air hissed overhead, and she ducked. Shadows chased across the snow, circled, returned. She twisted around, feet anchored by the skis, and saw them.
Eagles.
Two eagles, low and huge, she’d heard the air torn by stiff wing-feathers and tail. Mature birds, white heads and tails gleaming in the clear sun as if they were suns themselves, the yellow beaks and feet glowing golden and giving off more light than fell on them. She felt her heart stop in her chest.
They circled her. Once, twice, three times they swooped past her and wheeled and returned, powerful wings driving by her so low she felt the wind from them, she thought she could have reached out a ski pole and touched the birds but they flew silent except for the ripping sound of feathers slashing air, no threat, no move to strike her with those fishhook talons. She felt the hair stand up on the back of her neck. Eagles didn’t act like this. Even protecting the nest, they didn’t act like this.
“Guard us.”
The words rode on an eagle’s scream. And then they vanished. She twisted back and forth, scanning the air, even staring into the sun, and couldn’t find them. Black dots swam in her eyes. She dragged one breath into her lungs, let it out, and fought for another. Eagles.
Her heart pounded.
Spirit birds. She didn’t know Naskeag myths, didn’t know what those birds meant. Hell, she didn’t even know Vietnamese myths. Mom wouldn’t tell her that kind of thing, wouldn’t teach her the language. She caught her finger in a door when I was maybe five, shouted a long something in Vietnamese. Silly kid, I asked her what those words meant. “You are American girl. Eat American food, watch American cowboy movies, dream American dreams. You need bad words, use American bad words.”
Don’t think about it. Put one foot in front of another, diagonal stride, right kick and left pole, left kick and right pole, slide the skis uphill.
She pulled her pack off and set it on the skis, pulled out a plastic water bottle from a side pocket, she didn’t have to open the pack cover and see the wrapped corpses there. She washed sour acid from her mouth and spat it into the snow and swallowed clean cold spring water to replace the taste.
And this time she took her own advice, after scuffing loose snow over the splash of her vomit. Uphill again, she concentrated on the skiing, the focus of the next stride and the next glide, not thinking, just get back to the car, nothing further. Spaced out, almost like the couple of times she’d smoked a joint. Not thinking about her eagles. Not thinking about the corpses in her backpack, not thinking about Bitch, not thinking about strangers calling her Gook and telling her to go back where she belonged. Kick, glide, kick, glide, as if she was watching herself from ten yards away.
Not thinking about Naskeag spirit birds.
She slogged up the last ridge and paused halfway, listening again, sniffing again, forced to think about what she listened and sniffed to find. Snowmobile. Snowmobile with a rifle scabbarded across the handlebars or strapped behind the rider. Probably scope-sighted, for long-range shooting at small targets. She was a small target, standing dark on an open ridge against bright snow.
Snowmobile. She heard the snarl again, closer, but she couldn’t see it. That whine slowed, dropped in pitch and power, stopped. She ought to hide. They’d killed her eagles, her dog. If they killed her, the murder investigation would come down heavy, bring in state resources. If anyone ever found her body. She remembered ten miles of unpaved potholed fire road, even beyond the distance remaining to her parked car. The winter snows would come again and again, to cover everything. She felt distant from the threat, again as if she was watching a movie starring someone who looked like her.
The snowmobile growled, then rose in pitch to full-throttle scream. The sound faded, dropped behind a hill, came back and faded again. Gone. It stayed gone.
She breathed deep, cold clean air burning her lungs, the bite of still living. She kicked back on her right ski, extended her left arm and pole, diagonal stride, one foot and then another. Up the last slope. Her car roof showed above the snowplow berm. The road climbed up and joined it. No snowmobile.
She stopped on the berm, sidestepped down into the trough of the road, clicked the bindings off her boots. Bent to pick up her skis and stow them on the rooftop rack.
The car sat funny. She tilted her head, puzzled. The car sat too low. Bad road, she needed all the ground clearance she could get. Flat tire?
Slashed tire. She looked ahead. Front tire slashed, as well. The other side, rear and then front. All four tires sat low on their rims. She only had one spare.
Road dirt and white salt film coated the side of the car, darker scrawled letters showing clean age-dulled paint, the width of a gloved finger.
GOOK BITCH DIE.
Ten miles of fire road, back to pavement. Then another ten miles to a phone. In Maine winter. Snow squalls forecast again for the afternoon. She hadn’t left any messages about where she was going.
On a paved road, she could drive on the rims. Those tires were already hopeless. She’d ruin the rims, more money there. But on this gravel half-assed excuse for a cowpath, she’d lose the muffler and probably the transmission and rear end before she got a mile.
She had skis. She could make it.
She heard a motor again, the thump of wheels into potholes, a car this time. That didn’t mean safety. These were Indian roads, not open to the public. She slid her hand into her pocket, touched the pistol, remembered her gloves and pulled her hand out and put her hand back into the pocket, now bare, feeling the bite of cold steel on her fingers. Temperatures headed toward the point where bare skin would freeze to bare metal at the touch, leave bloody skin behind when you tried to let go. Tongue frozen to flagpole weather.
The car came into sight, down the road, around the next turn. Brown, she identified an old Jeep Wagoneer, dirt-salt crusted like any other car on the Maine roads this week. Two shapes sat in the front seat, one larger, one smaller, she couldn’t see more through the crap on the windshield.
It rolled closer, slower, studying her at leisure and deciding just what happened next, she felt her fingers clenching around the pistol. She knew that car—two bumper stickers on the front, just visible under all that grime. They’d caught her eye in Stonefort. Clean then, they’d made her notice that same car parked near the tribal corporation office, when she’d gone there to talk about her study permit.
One sticker would have said “RED POWER!” if she could read it. The other, “CUSTER DIED FOR YOUR SINS.” They meant more Indians showing up before the cavalry could charge over the last ridge and save her.
No bugles. No flags snapping in the wind. But then, John Wayne probably wouldn’t have bothered to rescue a Gook girl, anyway. She ran her memory through the gun dealer’s lesson, pointing at the pistol in his ha
nds, and flipped the safety off.
IX
Susan gritted her teeth until she thought they’d crack. That damned Wagoneer just sat there, idling, staring at her with the cataracts of road dirt clouding its eyes. They’d pulled close enough that she could read the bumper stickers now, under all the salt and crap. Red Power and Custer still battled it out for the hearts and minds of America, proving it was the one she’d seen near the tribal offices, not just another of the dozens of dirt-colored old Jeep station wagons patrolling the roads of Sunrise County. Them and beat-up rusty 4WD pickups with their beds full of tangled unidentifiable boatish junk, clamdigger heaven.
She kept flicking the safety on and off inside her pocket, the Walther cold in her hand but warming and turning slick with sweat. Dangerous habit, playing with loaded firearms in your pocket. Almost as dangerous as trusting your life to a gun you didn’t know how to shoot. She had to find somebody to teach her. Maybe Bouchard. If he wouldn’t laugh at her. And if she lived long enough.
Movement inside the car, shadows through the muck on the windshield talking to each other, shadows turning to get something from the back seat. Gun? Klan robe and hood? Rope for the lynching?
The passenger side door opened. The passenger crouched behind the door, cover against the gun, weren’t Jeeps built heavy? Susan didn’t have a clue how much metal it took to stop these bullets. Black hair showed, as black as Susan’s, the brown skin of forehead, dark eyes. Indian. Native American. First People. Them.
And then the passenger came around the door and stood beside it, not crouching, just short. Shorter than Susan, short like a kid, for chrissakes, a girl, judging by the hair length and style but no chest to speak of under that denim jacket, no hips really in the jeans. But she looked older than she looked, stupid as that thought sounded when Susan ran back through it—a short and skinny nearly-adolescent, maybe twelve or thirteen, something about the insolent stance and stare and the transistor radio in one hand and the earphones dangling around her neck and the slow chew on a wad of gum in one cheek.
They stared at each other, wary as cats. Susan knew that girl from the inside, had been that girl maybe fifteen-eighteen years ago, street smart and rude and more than a little feral, running wild while her mother worked twelve hours a day, six or seven days out of every week. She knew better than to trust the girl she’d been.
“You don’t need the gun.”
The voice wasn’t a little-girl voice, either. Susan raised her estimate to maybe thirteen-fourteen—the kid was going to be one really short woman when she grew up. Short, and damned near a boy in shape. Either that, or one hell of a change in the next couple of years.
Susan ran the words by again, listening to them rather than the voice this time. Gun. You don’t need the gun. She blinked. Probably was a little obvious, her hand hidden, the lump in her pocket poking out like a man with a hard-on. She forced her hand to relax, uncurled her fingers. Snapped the safety back, should be on but she didn’t want to pull the gun out to look at it and make sure the red dot was hidden by the lever.
“The gun, please? Aunt Jean gets real touchy when strangers point guns at her.”
Something in the girl’s tone implied that getting Aunt Jean “touchy” meant serious trouble. That Jeep had been parked close to the tribal office. Susan forced her fingers to relax enough that the pistol slipped loose, then pulled her empty hand out of her pocket.
Tribal office. Tribal Council? “I’ve got a permit to be here. Wildlife study.”
The girl nodded. She stared at the tires on the Dart, the dead-flat tires with knife slashes gaping on each. “A little birdie told us you might need a ride.”
Birdie. Eagles. A chill raced up Susan’s back. That girl, that child, had some kind of tie to the bastards that had killed Susan’s eagles. Her hand wanted to dive back into her pocket, grab the comforting weight of her gun.
A click and groan, rusty hardware complaining, the driver’s side door swung open, and a woman stepped down from the Jeep. A heavy woman, judging by the way the springs rebounded from her weight, short and round and lumpy like a dumpling wrapped in a goose-down parka a size too big, white hair, brown wrinkled face. “Aunt Jean” must be in her sixties, seventies, and didn’t look dangerous. Powerful, yes, self-assured with the calm that comes from knowing that people respected you and did what you asked of them. Must be Tribal Council, one of the matriarch “chiefs” that ran the Naskeags and half of Sunrise County.
“Mind your tongue, Alice. You are talking to a scared woman. If she needs to hold that gun to feel safe, let her hold it.” The woman nodded to Susan. “You would be Doctor Susan Tranh. You have a right to be here, oui. I am Jeanne Alouette Haskell, myself, and this child with no manners is my niece Alice Haskell.”
The old woman spoke with a French accent, a lilt, and Susan remembered that the Naskeags straddled the Canadian border and the more serious border between English and French communities. They had fingers in every pie.
“Aunt Jean” glanced at the tires and shook her head. “Someone brings shame to our People. I am sorry. I offer you a ride, and repairs.”
Yeah. You’re sorry that someone disgraces the tribe. Nothing in there about stranding a woman twenty miles from the nearest help, nothing about making a stranger welcome in your land. And nothing about why I should trust you. Too much coincidence in this. It stinks.
“I can ski out.”
The old woman shook her head. She tilted her head back and pointed her chin to the west, to clouds dark on the horizon. Those clouds hadn’t been there half an hour before. “The winds tell me that snow comes. You must climb over Tall-Rock Ridge to reach the highway. That is not a good place to meet a storm.”
Tall-Rock Ridge? She must mean Warren Ridge, using the old Naskeag name instead of the white family who gave their name to the place before abandoning it. Of course, it’d be the white name the Geological Survey would buy. Yeah, that’d be a bad place for skiing in a northwest wind. One stiff gust would blow me right into the next township.
Susan remembered her car shaking in the wind, one time driving across that ridge. Maine winters could kill. Did kill, every year.
Shaking. Her hands shook. They’d slashed her tires. Killed her dog. Trapped her out in the woods with a storm coming. Mutilated bodies hanging from a spruce limb, swaying in the wind like lynched blacks in Mississippi. Black bodies. Black dots swelling in her eyes.
“They killed the eagles.”
Now her knees shook, now that it looked like the danger might be over. Susan jabbed her ski poles into the gravel of the road, leaned her weight on them, felt the grit as they slipped and caught, and sagged, heart pounding, sight dark. She couldn’t hold her head up.
“The eagles said I should guard them, but they’re dead.”
She was talking to snow-crusted gravel. She was talking to booted feet, she was squatting beside legs wrapped in faded denim, other stouter legs wrapped in worn green whipcord. She focused on the weave of the cloth, making it stand still. A small hand started to search her pocket, searching for the gun, and another hand swatted the first away. Swatted it hard.
“Leave it.”
“But it’s dangerous!”
“And so are we, child. She is afraid. You want to grow into the House, oui? You must learn to make people feel safe. Learn to make people trust.”
Grow into a house?
The smaller hands dropped to Susan’s feet, unclipping ski bindings from her boots. Two sets of hands lifted her, walked her to the side of the dirty Jeep, opened the door, settled her on the front seat in front of a heater vent blowing full force. They lifted her feet in after her. She smelled coffee, steaming, felt hands tugging her gloves off and forcing a warm mug into her hands. “Drink.”
She drank. Hot coffee, just short of scalding, good coffee, straight black coffee-lover’s-dream coffee smooth and rich and aromatic, she tasted dollar signs in it. Many dollar signs. Ratty old Jeep or not, coffee like that told her this Aunt Jea
n was rich and powerful. No reason to trust her . . . .
Hands unclipped the buckle on her pack, shifted its bulk, held her coffee while shoulder straps slid down her arms and off, gave her back the coffee. Now she could lean back against the car seat. The eagles . . . .
“They killed the eagles. I’ve got the bodies in there. Need an autopsy.”
Autopsy wasn’t the right word, was it? She’d heard that just applied to humans. Necropsy? Fuck it. Forensic exam? The long words tangled in her head. Anything longer than two syllables.
“Guard us. That’s what they said, what the eagles said.”
“Eagle spoke to you?” A brown face floated in front of Susan, brown framed by white hair. That must be Aunt Jean.
“Flew past me, circled three times. Two eagles. Big. They glowed.”
The brown face pulled back out of sight. “Alice. Mark her car, front and rear. Guarding signs. Put her skis in the back of the Jeep. Take those eagles out of her pack. We will give them honor.”
Susan shook her head, still dizzy but pulling chunks of herself back from wandering. “Evidence. Federal crime. Got to keep the evidence.”
A firm hand rested on her arm. She stared at it, the strong gnarled brown hand reminded her of someone, must be her grandmother, barely known. She remembered the hands, wrinkled and scarred and strong from decades of hard work. Grandmother Tranh had died even before Daddy just . . . vanished. Susan remembered Grandmother’s hands better than she could frame the face above them. She could trust those hands. Honest hands.
“Federal crime,” she repeated, “endangered species. Evidence.”
She felt the old woman shake her head. Felt it though that hand. “Naskeag crime, young woman. Vraiment, crime on Naskeag land, against Naskeag people. We will speak to Eagle, learn what Eagle wants us to do about it. We will speak for the spirits of the dead.”
Talking as if the eagles were People. Indians did that, didn’t they? Regarded the whole world and everything that lived as People? Even a tree had a spirit that you must ask for permission before you cut it down?
Ghost Point Page 10
