by Brian Hodge
And dropped the black fetish.
It fell into the fire.
He stared, horrified, at the obsidian fetish, lying in the midst of the burning piñon and yucca. He reached for the stone, but white flames shot up, singeing the hairs on his arm.
Then the blue and yellow flames leaped beyond the circle of feathers and sticks, spread outward like a wave of water, stretching quickly throughout the kiva, igniting the dirt floor and walls. The white flame, still contained within the circle, towered toward the ceiling in an immense column of fire.
Outside the flames the shadoweyes danced, threw themselves toward the ring, and were repelled. They screamed his name, and he could feel his mind, his will bending to them. Their power was too great. He was feeble. His beliefs were too weak.
He would give in, give in to them, succumb and at last rest.
Fire, blazing blue and golden, lapped at the throne of bones, scorched the shadoweyes, embraced him. He heard the hissing of the creatures, and he knew they had won. They were too strong for him, for any human.
His flesh was melting, oozing down his face, his chest, his legs. He was dying. His skin was burning away from him in great hunks, leaving raw muscle that would melt into greasy puddles, and soon, too soon, only his charred bones would remain.
The fire leaped to his eyes, to his hair, and he screamed in agony. He threw himself on the ground inside the circle, trying in vain to put out the flames. He rolled, shrieking, knowing it was too late, knowing that he couldn't stop the fire, and a great thundering blinding blackness swept down on him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
When he woke, his cheek was lying pressed into the pebbles. He blinked once in the darkness, then slowly sat up. He groped along his body, felt the blisters from the flames. He found the flint and steel, then slowly got to his feet and struck it, lighting the remainder of the twigs in his pouch.
The fire had swept through the kiva, destroying everything, and all that remained outside the circle of feathers and twigs was an oily smear of black.
He saw none of the shadoweyes; he did not see Junior Montoya.
The fetish no longer remained in the now-burned piñon and yucca. All that was left was a dark powder, which he touched with his fingertips.
He didn't care; he just wanted out.
Slowly, his arms and legs aching, he left the circle, walked over to the opening in the kiva ceiling and looked up. The ladder had burned as well. He kicked at some of the adobe bricks in the wall, pulled out the loosened ones and stacked them until he could touch the frame of the doorway with his hands. Then, his muscles cramping from the effort, he pulled himself up and out.
He ran a hand through his hair, the brittle ends where the fire had burned his hair snapping off. He wiped his gritty face on his arm and started walking for the mouth of the cave. He coughed, choked, the greasy smoke still in his lungs.
He followed the path back the way he'd come. The large stone was gone, broken into hundreds and thousands of pebbles. The stream was gone, dried up, and he plodded toward the pueblo. Faint light came to him down the pathway, and as he walked out into the cave, he could see it was daylight out. He frowned. He'd entered in the late afternoon. Surely the light was gone now and it was night. He was puzzled, but could think no more about it because, even as he watched the pueblo, its mud walls began to crumple. Layer after layer of adobe brick collapsed, crumbling into fine golden powder.
The destruction thundered in his ears, deafening him, and dust in giant, throat-choking clouds billowed outward. He couldn't see, couldn't breathe. Under his feet the floor vibrated as tremor after tremor shot through it, and he knew that, somewhat belatedly, the Mountain People, the gods of his people, were answering him. Shaking off his languor, he staggered toward the lip of the cave. It was hard-going, with the floor shifting beneath his, feet at each step, and with the obscuring dust swirling around him, he almost overstepped the rim. For a moment his arms wind-milled as he balanced on the edge, and then he threw himself backward, away from the void. He lay on his back, cold sweat breaking out on his body, and thought how close he'd come to falling to his death.
Overhead, cracks appeared in the cave's ceiling, and chunks began falling. He leaped to his feet, almost fell, groped his way to the rim and stared down.
The ladder he'd originally used lay at the foot of the cliff. So what the hell was he supposed to do? A boulder whirled past him, and he hunkered down.
Jesus. The mountain was going to kill him. Whatever he was going to do; he'd best do quickly.
He stepped through the dusty fog, fingers feeling for something he could use. At last he found a single tree trunk with shallow gashes cut into it. He would have to use that, climb down it. There was no other way, no time for anything else.
He slid the trunk down the face of the cliff, watched and he saw it was short, too. Slowly he turned around, used the hand and footholds. It was difficult to hang on, with the cliff trembling, and he prayed that he could at least reach a low place where he could safely jump down. His feet found the primitive ladder, and he began descending that. He looked up in time to see the last of the pueblo disintegrate. The clouds surged out, and he choked, gasping for air. The cave shook, and he could feel the ladder waver. As quickly as possible he climbed down, slipping from time to time. As he reached the canyon floor, the cave collapsed, hurtling rocks hundreds of feet away. Shivers of stone shot outward. A rock thudded against his back, knocking him to the ground. He stood up unsteadily just as a rain of rocks poured down on him. He crouched down, covering his head with his arms, and felt the stones tearing at his skin.
Finally he staggered to his feet. Above, the canyon dust swirled into a giant dust devil, sucked upward by the wind outside.
He had to get going. Ran for the crevice. It was shaking too, and he crawled as best he could through the narrow fissure. Above him the rock trembled, and a boulder, larger than his body, thudded downward, narrowly missing him, as he slipped from the crevice and began climbing down the face of the cliff.
So far to go. He wouldn't make it. He looked up, saw the rock cracking, splitting, disintegrating under his hands.
The granite crumbled into dust, and he fell. Was falling, falling, falling. Landed. The air knocked out of him, he lay there blinking upward, watched as rocks came pouring down. Rolled out of the way. Stood. Nearly fell. He hurt. All over. Bones and muscles and sinews. Even his hair.
He stumbled down, the slope, staggered through the forest. Overhead, thunder hammered insanely, and wicked lightning, as yellow as the eyes of the shadows, sliced through the dark, boiling clouds, slammed into rock and trees, and beneath his feet the ground swayed, shaking him so hard he fell to his knees. He cried out at the added pain.
And then he was past the trees, out of the forest, still running, his heart pounding until he knew it would burst. Then he looked up and saw it, the most welcome sight of all
Sunny and the truck.
Her arms folded against her breast, she leaned against the front end, and when she saw him, she waved frantically, happily. He tried to wave, couldn't, and she ran toward him. He stopped, unable to go on for the moment.
"Oh my God," she said when she reached him and saw him up close. He looked down at his body. Soot mingled with blisters; piñon pollen still clung to his face; blood seeped down his chest, arms and thighs.
She opened her arms and he went into them. He could hear her heart beating, and its steady beat was the most reassuring sound he'd heard in a long time. Calmness enveloped him. Slowly his pulse steadied, his breath returned.
"Are they—" she began.
"I think so." Weakly he raised his head, looked back as the western wall of the mountain collapsed, burying forever the entrance of the secret canyon. "I think so." He breathed deeply, listened to the birds sing overhead, and tried to smile, without success, at her. Her gentle fingers caressed his cheek. "Day," he gasped.
"Sunday," she said quietly, knowing what he meant. "You were gone a
ll night, Chato."
All night he had been there, but he had survived his time in the underworld with its demons. Sunday.
He stared back at the mountain where he'd been such a short time ago. He felt … empty. Devoid of anything, of pleasure at his triumph, of fear, of surprise at being alive.
They had sucked him dry, those evil creatures; they had taken away his emotions, his humanness. He would have cried, but couldn't.
And who was this Chato? he wondered. Newly risen from the flames. No, he was no phoenix. No phoenix. But it had worked. The Old Ways. Those ways had triumphed over the shadoweyes, over the creatures in the kiva. Triumphed. He had his faith, his gift, his knowledge. Knew that his way was best.
God, he was so cold.
He drew in a ragged breath. "Let's go home now, Sunny."
She put her arm around him and helped him down to the truck parked only a few feet away. He eased into the cab, leaned his head back against the seat as she climbed in. She released the handbrake and they pulled away.
He did not look back, could-not.
When they were once again in the city, he shifted positions and felt something hard in the pocket of his shorts. He frowned. He'd left everything behind in the kiva. Brought nothing out with him. Nothing but his life, thank God.
The frown increased as he thrust a hand into the pocket. He withdrew his hand, opened it. And stared at what lay on his palm.
Black and carved with eyes that bored into him.
The fetish.
It had returned to him.
From the shadows of the branches it watched, its eyes bright in the darkness. In its bulging belly the embryonic life it had been given stirred. And it watched as the humans left.
Beside the shadow the blackened heap of rags stirred, lifted its ruined head and stared through rheumy eyes toward the departing truck and its occupants. It laughed then, the demented sound cackling and echoing against the scarred mountainside. It rolled into silence, and when no birds remained to sing, the shadow slipped away.
WITH WOUNDS STILL WET
By Wayne Allen Sallee
Dedication
For Ashley Delora, that she may one day see how her uncle tried to make sense of all his days.
Also, in memory of those I hadn’t expected to leave so soon: Grover Sallee, Grace “Busha” Malone, Robert Bloch, and Karl Edward Wagner. When I catch up with you, I’ll tell you what else I saw.
Contents
Coming Home – Introduction by Kathe Koja
Wilhelmina
Defining the Commonplace Slivers
Skull Carpenters
The Dennis Cassady Trilogy
Rapid Transit
Take The "A" Train
Bleeding Between the Lines
Girly Girl
The Pink Twist Inn
The Touch
Rail Rider
Bumpy Face
Blind and Blue
Orient Are
Choirs
Another Face of Celandine
The Land of the Free
Every Mother's Son
Matchmaker
Family Fiction
Don's Last Minute
With Wounds Still Wet
Things We Do at Night
Author's Endnotes
For it's still a godforsaken spastic,
a cerebral-palsy natural among cities,
clutching at the unbalanced air: top
heavy, bleeding and blind.
Under a toadstool-colored sky.
— Nelson Algren,
Chicago: City on the Make
Coming Home
An Introduction – by Kathe Koja
All geography is internal: we all have, past point of origin, a home, whether of birth or heart's choosing, somewhere we know past every doubt that we belong.
Likewise all fiction has, or should have, a sense of place, a feeling for where the story lives. Sometimes —as in Chandler's Los Angeles — the landscape is purposely, ironically externalized until it becomes a character in itself; sometimes — as in Nabokov's Lolita — the terrain is ouroboros, shell's whorl leading deeper and deeper inside until all the outward world is one obsession, no matter where Humbert may go.
And yet all fictional journeys, all landscapes are merely that: dry motion in a "setting," a depth-poor artificial scrim until the writer gives us some true and lasting sense of what it is like to live there, to be there; what it is to be the person who knows that landscape for a home; and that understanding gifted to us through a process, truth filtered through the sieve of vision, vision bound to see not only the way things are but the way things hurt in a particular place, a particular time that stands for all time and places, as the fictional construct of character is another name for you and me.
It's real, says Wayne Sallee, because I made it up.
Writers give us truth in differing ways. For Wayne the gift lies in that equation, that pas de deux between geography and pain; a true and final sense of place. The story can happen almost anywhere — the winter concrete of downtown Chicago, all ache and angles; the green deceptive quiet of rural Kentucky; Vegas in all its vamp and shudder — but all is made real, almost hyperreal in depth and detail by Wayne's ability to depict how those lives are lived, whose sufferings flare to birth, whose fears and passions rise to mingle only in places like these. Sometimes that mingling ends in blood, sometimes somewhere worse: a moment, an end unwished-for but still the last and only place to go.
Home is not always safe; what of it? We go where we have to because we belong.
Wayne gives us these harms and sorrows in a variety of ways: sometimes through a lens entirely fictional, people who are not and never were; sometimes through the locus of the personal, using self for landscape, the grief most intricately known — not simply because it is closest but because that nearer pain is then subject to the same examination, the same filter of place that transcends the howl of self to self and becomes instead the greater cry of anyone, everyone who has ever hurt that way, everyone who has ever been frightened, or stoic, or bleak and blackly amused, cramped by drugs or leading plasma and through it all never less than fully aware, aware of the smile and the closed-eye wince, the afternoons that cannot end, the smell of the body as it lies against grey sheets made warm by infection of deadening fear: blood puppet in a bond house, yes. There is great power in sheer mortality.
His fiction can be visceral past shock, stick-rich and sometimes headlong; he can — and often does — show us what we never want to see, in ways that leave a dark taste long behind. Like all writers he has his own relics and totems, each with its own meaning (which may not be the same for us as it is for him) and he leaves them for us, scattered brisk through his stories to make of what we will: symbols as prisms, to which we bring our own discerning light. Or darkness: Wayne has an affinity for the darkness. He has as well a great and almost tender regard for the broken, the troubled, the ones not so much unwanted as unseen, unconsidered in the greater rush of "normal" people living their normal lives. It is a tenderness without sentimentality, without the pity that is more than half distaste; he needs none of those things, and shows us how to do without them as well.
He shows us many things, in these landscapes these places he knows from the inside out and in the showing again and again tells us one true thing: that in the end where home most truly lies is the country of our silence, the beating blood and highways infinite within, where we meet ourselves and more than ourselves, the place where we were born to be: argot and horizon, secret dreams and open eyes because we know — in knowledge shaped of word and image, pictures born of memories and fears — that we are our home, we are the place where in the end all judgment lies, all comfort and all loss; where all the wounds are new again, and wet forever, where all the stripes at last are seen, are understood and — almost — healed.
It's real, because I made it up.
Come home.
Kathe Koja
December 1995
It was Harry Fassl who had introduced me to the child, forever six years of age, her grave in a section of Forest Park Cemetery that was scraped with shades of pockmarked shale and dirty swirls of grey and brown that one could only think that this is what entropy will finally look like.
Like most of Chicago's western suburbs, Forest Park straddled several main thoroughfares, and while many of the neighborhoods were quiet, sedate falling short of stoic, one could easily see the signs of a struggling economy. It was a suburb of duplexes and auto repair shops and taverns, and one might think that most everyone knew each other by name.
There were three cemeteries in Forest Park, and most everyone within their very stoic confines were forgotten long ago. Except for Wilhelmina.
We had been at the largest of the cemeteries, named after the suburb itself, in late January. There had been more rain than snow that winter, and the Des Plaines River, which banked the gravesites at the western end, was swollen to the cement walkways. It was in this area in which the dead were more distant. There were no wreaths left from Christmas, as could be found in newer, more well-kept areas where not a single Stonehenge-like monolith reached up with weather-beaten lumps that were once pleading hands or angels' wings.
In Illinois, this was a thing of the past. The newer graves were square blocks like giant replicas of a Chunky candy bar. Seems whatever union the gravediggers and groundskeepers belonged to successfully sued the state to make the jobs, and lives, more bearable. If there were a Wilhelmina today, she might be recalled by a photograph in the granite bearing her name and final day, granted rainfall had not covered the area of sunken dirt where the headstone rests. Granted there were not weeds covering the headstone because the aforementioned groundskeepers were not on their union-guaranteed vacation.
