The Wind in His Heart

by Charles de Lint

  Though his features were stern, he didn’t seem to be too upset about their deception.

  Leah tried to figure out who he was. He was too young to be a husband. Maybe he was Aggie’s son? The weird thing was, she felt like she’d seen him before, but in some other context.

  “They wouldn’t let us stay unless we were family,” Marisa said. “We didn’t want her to be alone in case she woke up and no one had come from the rez yet.”

  The man nodded and came all the way into the room.

  “That was kind of you,” he said. “Ohla. My name’s Ramon Morago and I’m not family either.”

  Marisa introduced Leah and herself, then added, “But they’re letting you stay? Please don’t make us leave before we know if Aggie’s going to be all right.”

  “No one will make any of us leave,” he assured them.

  He looked from one to the other, and Leah couldn’t help shake the feeling that he was looking past their faces, right under their skin and straight to their hearts.

  “You were there when the girl attacked Aggie?” he added.

  Marisa nodded. “But I don’t know if it was actually a planned attack,” she said. “Sadie was trying to leave and Aggie stood up to stop her, and then I’m not sure exactly what happened because the next thing I knew, Aggie was collapsing and there was blood everywhere. And Sadie took off.”

  “Jerry said your quick thinking probably saved Aggie’s life.”

  Marisa shrugged. “I hope so. I just did what anybody would do.”

  “Or what we wish they would do,” Morago said. He shook his head. “I warned Steve that girl would be trouble.”

  “Steve?” Leah asked. “You mean Jackson Cole? We met him on the way to the police station.”

  Morago studied her for a moment, then he smiled. “Is that who he told you he was?”

  “I… What do you mean?”

  “It’s just… Where do I begin?”

  He pulled a chair over in front of them and turned it so that he could rest his forearms across its back. “You know Jackson Cole’s dead, right?” he said in a quiet voice. “Died in a plane crash, a long time ago.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Oh, I know. There are always rumours. But the thing is, you’re not too far off with Steve. He’s a Cole, but not the famous one. He’s Jacko’s cousin.”

  Jacko? Leah thought. Who was this guy? Only Jackson’s band and crew referred to him as Jacko. But all she said was, “His cousin? The Steve Cole that Jackson played with as a kid?”

  Morago nodded. “They grew up together back in Texas, had that little band and everything.”

  “Jackson always said that it was Steve who got him into music—taught him to play the guitar.”

  “He sure did. And Steve’s maybe the better guitar player of the two, but he didn’t have Jacko’s vision, or his gift for words and melody and arrangements. Play something for Steve and he can play it right back to you, but he can’t bring the magic out of nothing. Not the way Jacko could.”

  “You talk like you knew him,” Leah said.

  “That’s how I met Steve—we were both part of the Diesel Rats’ road crew. I packed it in and came back to the rez before all the heavy crap went down—you know, Sully ODing, Marty taking off, Toni banging Conway. It just turned into a bad scene, as we used to say.”

  Leah stared at him, sorting through images in her head: memories of old photographs, concert and home movie footage, newspaper and magazine clippings. Her main focus was almost always on the band, Jackson in particular, and she hadn’t really paid as much attention to the hangers-on and crew.

  “You were really part of the Diesel Rats’ road crew?”

  Morago nodded.

  “And now? Are you still involved with music?”

  Morago laughed. “Not the way you’d think. I came back home to the rez and now I’m the tribal shaman.”

  After everything she’d already experienced today, Leah didn’t find it hard to accept that the man in front of her was a shaman who could probably work real magic, which made her wonder why he didn’t use that magic to help Aggie.

  “Can’t you just heal Aggie?” Marisa asked, obviously thinking the same thing.

  “I could try. The trouble is, she’s not home.”

  Leah and Marisa exchanged puzzled looks.

  “What does that mean?” Leah asked.

  “Her spirit’s gone off wandering somewhere. I need her to be in her skin to work any kind of medicine on her.” At their continued blank looks, he added, “My medicine speaks to the spirit. It teaches the spirit how to heal itself. But her spirit is no longer in her body, so I can’t sing to it.”

  “But she’s still alive,” Marisa said. “How can she not have a spirit or soul anymore?”

  “Oh, she still has a spirit. That’s what makes us who we are. It’s just, you know how when you sleep, your spirit travels to other worlds?”

  The two women shook their heads.

  “Trust me,” Morago said. “It does. We all visit the dreamlands when our bodies are sleeping, but we don’t all remember those journeys we take.”

  “So she’s…dreaming?” Marisa asked.

  “In a manner of speaking. We need to wait for her spirit to return to her body before I can sing my medicine song. Until then, we must trust to the medicine of the five-fingered beings to keep her alive. We can only wait and pray for her safety.”

  It was a lot to take in. Marisa and Leah exchanged glances.

  “I feel like I’m still in the otherworld,” Leah said.

  Marisa nodded. “And waiting’s hard.”

  “It is,” Morago agreed. “Especially in a situation such as this, when we have no control.”

  They fell silent, and once again time began to drag.

  After a while Leah asked, “Did you really work with the Diesel Rats back in the day?” She spoke as much to distract herself as out of curiosity.

  Morago took out his wallet and pulled a worn picture from one of its slots.

  “That’s Steve and I at the beginning of the last tour,” he said as he passed it over to Leah.

  Marisa leaned closer to have a look for herself as Leah studied the photo. It was black and white, marred by a crease and dog-eared edges. But it was easy to make out the features of the two men, one Native American and one white. Morago and—it looked so much like Jackson Cole sitting there beside him. Shorter hair than Jackson had ever worn, a little more buff in a sleeveless tee and jean cutoffs, but if no one had told her beforehand, she would have thought it was Jackson.

  Leah felt a sense of déjà vu. “Is this part of a larger picture?” she asked.

  The two men appeared to be in a crowd of some sort, but only hints of the other people remained. The edge of a shoulder. The side of a knee.

  When Morago nodded she got out her phone and went online. After a few moments of searching she found the photo she was looking for. It was a famous shot—the last time the whole band had been alive and before the acrimony set in. As Morago had said, it was taken at the beginning of the final tour, the band and full road crew posing on the bleachers of a stadium in California. She expanded the view to find Jackson Cole, then moved the focus of the screen around, examining the faces until she reached the portion with Morago and Steve that the shaman had in his cropped version.

  How had she never noticed the close resemblance between Jackson and his cousin? She’d known Steve existed—he was a big part of Jackson’s early history, the two of them growing up in Texas a few blocks from each other, playing music together in high school. But there weren’t a lot of pictures of him, and those that she could recall never seemed to show all of his features. He was always turning away, bent over a guitar or some gear. One of those guys who shunned any focus on himself as a center of attention. And really, didn’t everybody fall by the wayside when it came to the bright, larger-than-life star that Jackson Cole had been?

  “When I was leaving,” Morago said, “I told Steve that
if he ever got sick of the rock ’n’ roll life to come look me up. I have to admit I never expected him to actually take me up on it. But some forty years ago, who does Possum bring by, but Steve Cole with a broken leg. Fell off the side of some canyon and snapped it right in two. He’s stuck around ever since.”

  “I wish I hadn’t started off on the wrong foot with him,” Leah said, “because I’d really like to talk to him about Jackson and the band. You, too.”

  Morago laughed. “I can’t tell you much. Roadies didn’t hang around with the headliners. We just did our jobs. But I can tell you that even before I left, I could see the writing on the wall. I don’t mean the exact details of what went down in those last days, but you could feel the train wreck waiting to happen. And we all knew there was going to be some serious fallout when Jacko found out about Toni and Ben’s little something-something on the side.”

  Leah hung on to his every word. She might have tried telling herself she was going to move into a different kind of journalism, but after all her years studying the band, finding a whole new source of information such as this was like stumbling upon a gold mine.

  “There has to be something you can tell me,” she said.

  Morago regarded her for a moment, then he smiled.

  “I don’t know if this ever made it into the stories about the band,” he said, “but you know the old urban legend about how Elvis traded places with an Elvis impersonator, and he’s still alive because it was the impersonator who died in that Graceland bathroom?”

  Both Leah and Marisa nodded, eyes wide.

  “Well, I know for a fact that Jacko was trying to talk Steve into swapping places with him toward the end. Not forever. Just long enough for him to get his head together again.”

  Leah couldn’t help herself. “And did they?”

  Morago shook his head. “Jacko got on that plane first.”

  Leah wanted to ask him more, but just then the doctor came into the room. He had such a serious set to his features that everything Morago had been telling her faded away.

  46

  Jerry

  There was no way around it. The chief was pissed and Jerry didn’t blame him. Everything that could have gone wrong with this situation had, leaving Jerry feeling like an idiot. He might as well be standing with his pants around his ankles for all the competence he’d shown. The worst of it was Aggie being knifed right in the station by the “victim” of a bogus kidnapping, who then stole one of their own trucks from the parking lot out front to make her escape.

  “Are you telling me this kid hot-wired one of our pickups?” the chief had demanded.

  Jerry’d had to admit that the keys had been in the ignition.

  “Who leaves their goddamn keys in the goddamn ignition?” the chief had yelled.

  We all do, Jerry’d thought, the chief included, but he hadn’t said that. He knew what had made his boss so angry. It wasn’t just the sloppy mistakes, but how they couldn’t be hidden from the sheriff’s department, the FBI and Indian Affairs. They made the whole force look bad. And the chief would have to take the heat for it.

  Jerry knew he should have listened to his gut. He never should’ve tried to hold Steve and Reuben. He should have put the girl’s lying ass in a cell as soon as he got her to the station, locked the door and thrown away the key. But that was easy to say after the fact. At the time, Sadie Higgins had seemed to need his protection. She’d been so damned convincing that he’d swallowed every bit of her bullshit.

  All he could do now was try to salvage what he could as quickly as possible, even if that meant driving every damn road in the county.

  His radio crackled and Ralph’s voice came on.

  “We’ve got tire tracks running off into a wash just a few miles west of the station, on Calle Esmeralda. Bob says his people are pretty sure she never made it to Santo VV, or at least the truck hasn’t been spotted anywhere in the city, so she must’ve gone off-road here.”

  “You’re there now?” Jerry asked.

  “Standing right here looking at the tracks—same tread as on all our trucks. You want me to wait for you?”

  “No, go ahead. I’m ten minutes away on Redondo. But be careful, Ralph. This kid’s as wily as a coyote.”

  “Copy that.”

  Jerry flicked on his lights and siren, pulled a U-turn, and headed back in the direction of the city.

  47

  Ruby

  Ruby stared at Sadie and the witch from the edge of the witch’s property and wished she could sever the incongruous bond she’d formed with the girl. For what Sadie had done to Aggie, she deserved to have her throat ripped out, but instead the bond made Ruby want to do everything she could to protect her, regardless of how the girl had betrayed them all.

  She sighed. The loyalty of the dog clans was so messed up sometimes.

  And she was a fool for always wanting to take the broken ones under her protection.

  Ruby whined in frustration, a barely audible sound that came from the back of her throat.

  She didn’t know what to do. Sadie had added to the problem by pissing off the 66 Bandas when she’d dumped that tribal police pickup right on the edge of their property.

  She was fully aware of the two groups of bandas also watching Sadie and the witch, just as they were aware of her. Earlier, one of the men had made an off-colour remark when she’d stepped out of the desert into the dry wash, but she’d turned and snarled at him, baring a mouthful of dog canines that had the gangbanger stumble back in surprise. He’d quickly recovered his bravado, but when he took a step toward her she’d pointed a finger at him and growled, “Don’t.”

  Surprisingly, he’d lowered his gaze. Now the men kept their distance. They were wary of her, muttering comments to each other, but none of them had summoned up the courage yet to make a move in her direction.

  That would come—it was only a question of when.

  She was also aware of the dozen or more crows that had landed in the boughs of the mesquite trees overhanging the wash. Most of them gathered in the tree above her, but a couple flew over to the witch’s house just as Sadie and the witch were going inside. A few moments after the women disappeared, one of the crows drifted down from his perch on lazy wings, transforming into a dark-skinned man just before his feet touched the ground beside her.

  “Word is,” he said, “the girl isn’t to be harmed.”

  Ruby didn’t bother to look at him. “Go away, Manny.”

  When he didn’t respond she turned to see him studying the closest group of gangbangers. There were two up by the road on the other side of the witch’s property, but the ones in the wash had multiplied to a half-dozen. A couple of them carried baseball bats, but one of them, with a tattoo of a Maltese cross on his shaved head, had a rifle in his hand. It was pointed at the ground at the moment, but just as she’d arrived she’d heard him firing it at Sadie.

  The look in his eye was wary. He’d seen her canines, heard her snarl. Seen Manny drop from the tree, turning into a five-fingered being. But his caution was slipping and he didn’t seem as intimidated anymore, which wasn’t good because that meant it was a short step now to his taking action.

  “I don’t think you’re making friends,” Manny said. “Whatever happened to you? You used to be such a friendly pup.”

  “Piss off,” she told him, but she smiled as she said it.

  Manny was one of the crow boys who roosted in Yellowrock Canyon. Tall and dark-complexioned, with hair as luxurious and black as the feathers of their crow shapes, they were an unruly lot, but she’d always liked them. There were usually a few of them around Aggie’s place, ready to play or laze in the sun and swap tall tales with the pack.

  “What are you doing here anyway?” he asked. He nodded with his chin to the low adobe building. “Do you know who lives in that house?”

  Ruby nodded. “The witch they call Abuela.”

  “The formidable witch they call Abuela. She’s supposed to be an hechicera—the kind of
witch that controls spirits.”

  Ruby shrugged. “I’m not here to cause trouble with her or the bandas. I just want the girl.”

  Manny studied her for a long moment, then cocked his head. “To keep her safe,” he said. It was a statement, not a question, and he didn’t bother to hide his surprise. “After everything she’s done.”

  “I made a mistake, okay? She smelled of bruises and blood. I didn’t know she was cutting herself or would hurt anyone else. I thought she needed protecting.”

  Manny nodded. He didn’t say what she’d left unsaid: that she had not done a good job of it so far. But that was the problem with anyone who didn’t live under your own skin. You couldn’t predict who they really were, what they would do. All you had to work with was hope, which eroded a little more every time somebody let you down.

  “And now?” Manny asked.

  “She still needs something, but I don’t know what it is, or if I can give it to her.” She paused, then added, “Or if I’d even want to.”

  One of the crows that had been perched on the witch’s house drifted back in their direction. He became a man as gracefully as Manny had, landing on two feet without so much as raising a puff of dust.

  “Hey, Ruby,” he said. “Ohla.”

  “Hey, Xande.”

  “What’s happening over there?” Manny asked, tipping his head in the direction of the house.

  “The kid just promised Abuela a soul in return for protection.”

  “Protection from what?”

  Xande shrugged. “Gangbangers. Cops. Us.”

  Manny scoffed. “Seriously? Us?”

  “Hey, you may be a little baby crow, but I can kick ass.”

  Manny punched Xande’s shoulder and they both laughed.

  “Whose soul?” Ruby asked, fearing for Aggie, lying in the hospital.

  “Either she didn’t say, or I didn’t hear,” Xande told her. “But I do know that the soul has to be willingly given. And if the kid can’t come up with payment, her own soul is forfeit.”