by Sarah Cortez
Heather walked and walked until she lost all sense of time and place. There was a buzzing in her head. Images swam vaguely in her mind. For a while, someone seemed to walk beside her, a presence felt rather than seen. When she turned her head, nothing was there but swirling snow.
Then a heavy drowsiness came upon her. She felt her knees give way and her body sink into the softness. Rest and sleep, she thought. Rest and sleep. Memories passed like strands of mist, like fragments of a dream. It was summer, and Don lay beside her on the plaid blanket, down by a river, just past a little town that was out of sight behind a hill. She made an effort to touch his face. But she was too tired.
There were voices in the wind. They came from above her and from every side, chanting in a language she did not know. She heard drums too, but that might have been her blood beating in her ears, fainter now and far away.
New York, New York
he was a different kind of incoming, bursting like a hungry TRex through the City Hall subway platform crowd thick from track pit to tile wall with suits and stiffs. Her eyes zeroed in on half a dozen guys, me included, for a split second before dismissing us all. We weren't on the menu. I wouldn't have minded, even after she near knocked me over chasing a train that hadn't come in yet.
Funny how little of my life sticks with me. But, of course, things sticking to me isn't the problem at all.
She put a good lick into me with her shoulder. Played some games, that one. Curtain of black hair had my heart racing before I remembered her lips, thin because they were pursed, and her small nose, nostrils flaring like a horse in full gallop. I liked the way her hips shoved the sides of a loose cotton top out as she bulled her way through a New York crowd that really didn't give a shit about being pushed around by her.
Almost like they forgot she'd been there as soon as she passed. But I didn't.
Wake up, white man, and see what's coming.
That's what Grandpa said, inside my head. Normally, I'm sleeping when I hear him. Usually, I'm dreaming when I see the world so sharp it hurts, in a quick-cut slide, down a looping water ride that doesn't ever want to stop. Like a house-to house fire fight. Or an RPG blazing a smoke trail for a Humvee parked at a market.
Grandpa says I should take up the pipe if I want to understand where I'm going and what I'm seeing in these dreams. Then he laughs when I think about it, and tells me I don't have enough First in me to handle a pipe. Yeah, and you weren't there when I needed you, ghost warrior.
I couldn't remember the last time he warned about something in real time.
I turned, a little slow because I didn't want to let go of her, and looked. Got two looks in, really. First take was of a big, goofy, golden-haired boy with porcelain skin and muscles on top of muscles packed under a shiny custom suit, slipping and sliding his way through the crowd like a king snake with a thousand excuse-me's slithering from his mouth in a few different languages. Pretty. Officer candidate material. The type that goes down hard and doesn't bounce. People didn't look twice at him either.
Second take went toward the same place as Grandpa's voice.
I never saw nothing in any dream like what was coming on my second take. Sure, I've spent time with ravens, cougars, coyotes, rabbits, squirrels, even talking water bugs. Trees and leaves turning into freaky faces, speaking words I can't understand, and even when I do, I still don't get what's up-yeah, plenty of that.
But this check-off got me a vision full of toothy, mangy, wild-eyed wilderness surging like a market crowd running from a bomb blast. Where the eyes were supposed to be in the lump that might have been a head, there were holes, redrimmed fire pockets like sniper muzzles loaded with bullets with names on them.
Two faces. Walking in the waking world.
Something inside me felt cold, but it wasn't really me. Grandpa was upset.
The station already smelled like meat turned bad from the mass of sweaty bodies perfumed for the day at the office, but what I saw pushed out a shockwave stench like a body cooked in burning wreckage. Or a fresh, dug-up grave stacked with the dead.
Two-face didn't single me out. It was stalking the woman.
I moved. Didn't think twice. Not scared. Hell, Grandpa'd been talking to me since I was a kid, saying he's in my blood and telling me I should do this or that crazy thing. Scared always bounced off of me, even in that shit-and-rock country they sent me to after I enlisted. This was just one more dream I was walking through.
I left a wake of curses. Guess I was the only one running who wasn't invisible. Put out a hand, caught a flap of cloth that felt slippery. Kept the other tight for a punch to what I hoped were ribs.
Two-face raised an elbow and I barely cleared a broken jaw. The thing shrugged and I heard the buzzing of a nest full of hornets barreling into my ear drums.
I went down, sparks flying. No concussion or ringing eardrums, no smoke curling from singed cloth. No flashbacks either. Got up quick. People muttering didn't bother me. I'm used to folks thinking I'm crazy. Best four years of my life were in the service. I was normal there. Bugfuck as I wanted to be. Grandpa didn't visit me. Not even in dreams. No signs or warnings. Reality was the dream. I'd been sent all alone to the mountaintop in a shit storm to find my way, my tribe, my vision.
You had to make it on your own, is what Grandpa told me when I came back and he started speaking to me again.
Where's my way, my tribe, my guide?
You on the path for it now.
Thanks for nothing.
I followed in the big man's wake, catching up, thinking about what I was going to do-jump up and grab the choke or go low and take out the knees. He stayed mostly man, which made it easier to think. Of course, when you have to think about these things before you do them, they don't turn out well.
I wasn't fast enough. Good thing, or else I wouldn't be talking about it now. And the woman, she'd be dead.
He caught up to her and shoved. She screamed as she went flying into naked air, and when she stopped flying she vanished into the track pit.
A gust of warm, humid air blew in, then surged out of the tunnel.
The man kept moving on through the crowd as I came to the platform edge. A few suits shouted, stirred from their iPod cocoons by a sense of having just missed something. I knew the feeling. A young girl in a school uniform pointed down at the tracks. A knot of teenage boys whooped and laughed. Maybe there was something down there, maybe there wasn't. A fat rat plodded away to the other side of the station. Fast food wrappings and newspaper pages danced in the air. A roar was building.
The big man wasn't so big anymore, like he was making his way down a different horizon line than everyone else. He looked back at something way behind me, maybe the distant crowd of its and his victim, and then he dipped below the range of shoulders and was gone. There was no two-faced man. No woman either.
Grandpa settled down inside me. I never knew he could get upset like that.
On the uptown side of the station, a twenty-something who looked like he'd stayed up from a night of clubbing broke into a free-form flow like he was the headliner and we'd all come to hear him and the sound of that train coming was our love and adulation taking him higher and higher. I have no idea what he was rapping about.
So I jumped.
The lights of the lead subway car were the eyes of that thing I'd seen on the second take of Mr. Muscle, only they were flashing with the fire from full clips being dumped on me.
My hand settled on something warm, soft. Moaning. There she was. I grabbed an arm, pulled. Got hold of her hip, slid my hand up under the other shoulder. There was space below the platform. I dragged her to cover.
Happened to me once. Small, smelly guy, spilling blood himself, pulled me from a burning wreckage over stone and dust and sheet metal, through a tangle of poles and beach umbrellas and plastic sheeting, to a quiet little spot underneath sides of meat quietly flaming. We listened to gunfire crackling and kids crying for a while. Don't know what happened to him after the evac
.
I held the woman tight against my chest, legs around her hips to keep her from rolling. Her hair flew and crawled all around my face and head as the train blasted past its inches away. For a second I didn't know where I was anymore. Too many dreams, too much reality.
She was a warm, trembling bundle against my beating heart. I closed my eyes, and turned my head so her hair could get all of me, neck, ears, eyes, and lips-like she cared-and her fingers were memorizing the shape of me and I was something special to her.
But the train screeched to a stop and we choked and coughed on a burnt, electric stink and dust and she broke free but knocked her head against a car's undercarriage and stared at me like I was the one who'd thrown her down there.
Her face was rounder than I thought, now that I could see it with her hair flowing away, reaching for the light and the air and freedom.
"Sorry," I said, pulling my legs away from her because I was afraid that even with everything going on I'd get a hard-on and that would make the situation a complete cluster fuck.
People were shouting above me and I thought I was okay, though my knees and hips were singing like an out-of-tune choir. I thought we could crawl to one end of the station and get out, so I pointed and started moving. If there's one thing hearing voices, much less combat, taught me, it was recovery. If you just lay there, you're screwed. Keep moving.
I grabbed her arm. She brushed me off. "Don't touch me," she said, like it was the worst thing that had happened to her so far that day.
You can't touch the moon.
Great, Grandpa.
I said, "Hey, I just saved your life." Getting pissed now. Like when you take fire from people you're supposed to be saving and you want to lob a few shells back to say, You're welcome.
Somebody with training interrupted from above and got me to answer her questions: no blood, moving my limbs, breathing regular. "The woman's fine too," I added.
All I got back was "What woman?" and "Stay calm" and "Help is coming." After a few whispers, the voice asked, "What meds are you on?"
My heartbeat woman was still staring at me, hard, reading between my lips and holding on to steel-smoking motor mounts that looked hot to me. But her skin wasn't blistering and I figured, well, I don't know what. She had to be in shock. I was. So I told the voice from above, who identified herself as a nurse, what had happened: I saw a man chasing a woman through the crowd, tried to stop him, couldn't catch up, and he pushed her into the train tracks. I jumped down after her.
I didn't mention the vision I had of that man, or that I was in love with the girl in the tracks.
This is the stuff of heroes, I was thinking. I mean, I'm a Marine. A vet. Doing my warrior thing. That meant name in lights, spot on the Late Show, cash rewards. I'd have to play down the Java programmer angle, though. Nobody wants to know about a smart vet.
"You saw the monster," my heartbeat woman said.
"Yeah. If that's what you call it."
My father killed something on high steel when he was young.
Thanks, Grandpa, but I'm busy right now.
"I'm real to you." She looked into my eyes like she was trying to see through them.
"Shit, yeah."
He killed something like that. And afterwards, the bridge came down.
Yeah, Grandpa. Quebec Bridge. Mohawk disaster. I remember. Can we talk about it later?
"You're not afraid to die."
"Right." Easy to stay loose about the death end of life when the living part doesn't stick.
Its blood's a curse. Mixed with ours. The dealing with it is our duty. Even down to you.
Blood? What? Never told me that one, Grandpa.
"I can't save everyone," she said, and in that dark place tears shone in her eyes. "I can't do more for you. I have others to take care of."
In that small space she seemed to be crawling backwards away from me. I reached for her again, but this time I missed, like my hand went right through her.
I thought it had to be that thing's blood that drew me to you. Hard as it is to believe.
And here I thought I was special.
You are. Though I've been wondering if that thing was ever going to show up. You carry the responsibility.
What responsibility?
There aren't many descendents left. Seems like you're all that's left.
For what?
Did my best to show you the way. Wish your father'd lived long enough.
And then she was already halfway under the subway car, folded over but still facing me almost between her own feet like a circus contortionist, sliding back without making a sound or moving a muscle. Her eyes were darker than any space in the tunnel or under the train, darker than a night without stars and moon, or a dreamless sleep. But when I looked into them, I gave that darkness a touch of light and she nearly cracked a smile. That's when I knew I'd been talking to the wrong ghost. Family just never knows when to get out of the way.
"Wait, what's your name?" If this had been a Manhattan lounge maybe she would have said something like Cinderella and I'd never have seen her again.
"Medicine Snake Woman."
"What the hell kind of name is that?"
"You're welcome," she said, and flashed me a small, sad smile like she'd already read everything she needed to know between my lips and she was moving on to bigger and better things.
Then she was gone, and it hit me. She was the one who should have said thanks, and "You're welcome" should have been my line.
I woke up dizzy back in the real world underneath a train with police and EMTs talking to me through the crevice between the platform and the train, rats piling up around the third rail wondering if the lunch buffet had arrived.
Sucks to be you, don't it.
At least I'm alive, Grandpa.
Alive. Yeah. That woman, she made me feel alive. I didn't care what was happening or if I was finally coming down with PTSD. Screw all that. I needed her.
I crawled out on my own while they warned me to stay put. The rest of the day was a fancy necklace of diamond reality moments strung on a flimsy line of breaking-heartbeat woman dream-emergency room, police report, psych eval, criminal and military record check, even a call to my old foster home to confirm I had no psychiatric history. There was also that golden call to the boss saying I wouldn't be working the Java today because I just jumped in front of a train.
Through it all, I couldn't get Medicine Snake Woman out of my mind. When we married, what would I call herMedicine? Med? Snake? What would we name our kids? How would we be in bed-a dance, a firestorm, a tsunami? Would I be able to support her, or was I expected to stay home while she went on with whatever it was she did for a living?
Would my mixed heritage be a problem for her family, who obviously took pride in their lineage? What would it feel like to be scared of losing her?
Hell, I already knew that answer.
The dream came apart and was replaced by another when I fell asleep after a beer later that night.
Bet you think you're something special.
Grandpa likes to talk from out of trees most times, but this night he was a big-ass bear standing on two legs taking a dump in the woods. His paw was bigger than me. So was his dump.
I studied the acorns by my foot and said, No, just crazy, like everybody says I am.
You can't let her go, can you?
I didn t answer because I knew it was going to be one of those dreams, like the one that took me to Afghanistan for four years to make a warrior out of me. Or the time in junior high when I landed in the hospital for standing up to older bullies picking on a skinny black kid who was also in a foster home. Or, best yet, who can forget popping my nine-year-old dream cherry the first time Grandpa paid a visit and convinced me my real mother lived in the next town over and I needed to see her because blood called to blood. Maybe I'd seen her last when I was two or three. Couldn t remember her much, or my father.
Things didn't stick to me even back then.
&
nbsp; Grandpa even showed me where my foster parents kept the real cash stash and what bus to take when and where and the best time to go over to catch Mom. Ran away on a Friday night with a forged note for the bus driver just in case, and sure enough I found my birth mother, who told me about how my daddy died in the service with honor even if it was an accident. How she fell apart and had to give me up and was too ashamed of letting me and her husband and their families down to ever stay clean long enough to take me back. So she left me with people who could love me the right way until she got herself together.
Said she'd been trying. Told me, "You know how it is."
By Monday I was back in my foster home, and we all knew that was the best place for me after that weekend. She gave me tip for adoption. My foster parents made me theirs.
After the Marines, I never went back. Sent them a postcard every now and then. Guess they didn't stick either. Sweet folks. They were a comfort, making me feel like I was loved. And I thought Mom loved me still, so that made two places. But not everything that loved was true.
Not sure what exactly made me stop owning my life and maybe my death. Might have been seeing my mother in her drunken junkie glory. Could have been afterwards, when Grandpa sent me to my father's military cemetery and I saw Dad standing there on a Sunday morning, trees and grave marker visible right through him. Looked like he'd been waiting for me, seeing me coming from years away. Didn't say nothing. Not that kind of spirit, Grandpa said. Killed before his time came to pick up the fight.
I never asked what Grandpa meant by that. I mean, bad enough I was doing whatever a voice in my head told me to do. Dad looked at me like he knew what was coming and couldn't do anything to protect me. We couldn't talk no matter how hard we tried, and Grandpa didn't translate or act like a telephone between us. Dad did try touching my face. All I felt was cold. Wish it was him in my head instead of Grandpa. But apparently there wasn't enough First in him to carry on that part of the tradition either. Well, I guess that was Grandpa's fault.
Wish I'd cared enough to run away again and look for my daddy's family. Ran away for everything else that popped into my head. But Grandpa told me they had enough problems without me, and I still believe him.
