Valley of Bones

by Michael Gruber

  “Santería isn’t about fair. It’s about balance and walking with the saints. Christ, Lorna! Do you think I comprehend what the fuck is going on here? What my mother is up to with me? I just keep my head down and do what I’m told. And it works. I felt clean and I still feel clean. Except for the occasional demonic attack, there’s less buzzing shit in my head. Things look brighter, I mean things in the world, like those flowers.” He pointed to a bush of hydrangeas. “And your eyes.” He stared into these. “Now, what’s wrong with you?”

  “I’m dying of cancer.”

  His face contorted into that ridiculous monkey expression we all wear, with the semismile, when we have heard impossibly bad news. “What do you mean you’re dying of cancer? When were you diagnosed?”

  “I haven’t been yet. But I have all the classic symptoms of lymphoma.”

  “Oh, please! What is this, the do-it-yourself school of cancer research? Lorna, they have machines now, microscopes, chemicals, whatever….”

  “But I know. I know, Jimmy. My grandmother died of cancer, my mother died of cancer, and now it’s my turn. I have enlarged lymph nodes, sweats, weakness, weight loss, skin itching. I feel nauseated all the time, which means it’s really locked in there, it’s spread to my internal organs, maybe even the pancreas.”

  Paz cursed in Spanish under his breath and hung his head like a boxer who’s taken one hit too many. Time slowed down a little in the car; even the wind seemed to die. He asked, “How long has this been going on?”

  “I don’t know. Months maybe, but I’ve been in denial about it. It got so obvious recently that I couldn’t do that anymore.”

  Paz started the car and tore down the priory drive in a spray of gravel. He was surprised at himself. He was usually a really focused guy, he prided himself on it, in fact, and the other parts of his life he kept in neat pockets—life as a fishing vest, a tackle box. He was on a case now, certainly the most difficult case of his career, with no backup, with no support above him, confronting forces of unknown dimension, not all of them in the material world, but certainly malign, and nothing else should have mattered very much. But now he found that this did matter, Lorna being sick, and it occurred to him as he barreled along the mountain roads that this was a real difference. He told himself he hardly knew the woman, sad sure if she was dying, but people die, and anyway the whole thing was a rebound from Willa, he needed something and she was it. Sorry, so sorry and good-bye. No! He caught that line of thought and strangled it in its cradle. And then he broke the speed limit more than he usually did driving to Roanoke, and bullied her into going to the emergency room, and he completely abandoned the tempo of his investigation to sit in waiting rooms in hospitals in Roanoke and then Washington while they looked at her and he pretended to be her husband and got in the faces of doctors and nurses to ensure that they treated her like a human person and not a diseased lump of meat.

  LORNA WONDERS WHY he’s doing this. She wonders why she has relaxed so entirely into the hands of a man she hardly knows, why her will, which she had thought was of steel, has proved in these last weeks to be taffy. She allows him to move her around like a mannequin, she submits to the probing and questionings and procedures, although previously she would never have allowed a doc to touch her without the most elaborate investigation of her background and record. It is very strange, and in a peculiar way, it contents her. She has never allowed strangeness to enter her life, and now she is with this strange man, who lights up her (unfortunately dying) body as it has not ever been lit up before, who defies her lifelong understanding of what a suitable mate ought to be, who participates in voodoo, sorry, Santería, and kills people. From time to time she finds a foolish grin arriving on her face, startling the oncology nurses. The tests take a good long time, days and days. She is in the hospital, the hypochondriac’s wet dream, but she finds she has become passive about the practice of medicine on her body. Paz will take care of everything. He is in and out, seeing people in Washington offices. He tells her things he’s learned, things he suspects. There really is an outfit called SRPU, it’s part of the Department of Homeland Security, and they never heard of Floyd Mitchell or David Packer and they really can’t tell him anything else, he doesn’t have the clearances.

  Now she is looking at a doc, whose name (Waring? Watson?) has slipped her mind, although she is certain Jimmy knows and has checked him out like a murder suspect. He is kindly and has a full head of gray hair, like the men on TV who sell drugstore remedies, and he tells her from a long distance away that she has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, stage four, based on the biopsy and her symptoms, and that it may have metastasized to other organs, and that they would like to check her into George Washington University Hospital for more tests. She feels, oddly enough, not the horrified sense of denial that is usual in such interviews but a rush of something like satisfaction. She wants to tell the world, See! Not a crock. She looks over at Paz, the pseudo-husband, and sees his face, his eyes. No, she tells Waring or Watson, I think I’d like to go back home to Miami.

  But first they fly to Orlando, and rent another Taurus, because there is still Emmylou to consider. This is Lorna’s idea, Paz wants to go immediately back to Miami and get her started on therapy, but now she digs in her front paws and hunches her back and will not budge. She is not much interested in the criminal case per se anymore, but she desperately wants to talk to Emmylou Dideroff again.

  PAZ KNEW HE was driving like a maniac, weaving in and out of the interstate traffic, drawing outraged honks and hoots from the 18-wheelers he challenged. He told himself that it was because he wanted to resolve this whole thing so he could get Lorna into treatment, but at some level he knew it was not the real reason. Dangerous driving occupied his mind as ordinary freeway cruising did not; it blanked thought. Had it not been shut out he knew it would turn toxic. He would start asking the why questions, the gut rippers. He would have to think about his life and about his connection with the woman sitting quietly beside him. He would have to admit he’d lost control of his life, that he was scared to death, frightened that she’d die, frightened that she wouldn’t and that he’d have to admit to love, the kind his mother was talking about when she’d yelled at him about Willa, crazy love. And what if she said get lost, bub, no high school grad need apply?

  He exited onto the state road and drove toward Clewiston. At the little county two-lane he had to pull over for an ambulance and a state trooper, screaming by with lights and sirens. When they got to the Barlows’ yard and he saw the cars from the state police and the county sheriff, his heart froze.

  Sometime later they found Cletis Barlow in a waiting room at Community Hospital in Clewiston, sitting calmly and reading a Bible.

  “How is she?” asked Paz.

  “Oh, she’s hurt, but she’s a tough old lady,” said Barlow in a tired voice. “You don’t last long around a cattle ranch if you’re any kind of fragile. She came to in the ambulance, and the first thing she asked was if Emmylou was all right. She didn’t see their faces. Three of them, masked with cartoon masks, Porky Pig, Casper the Friendly Ghost, and Bugs Bunny. They pistol-whipped her for no reason when they took Emmylou. She’s getting x-rayed and some other tests now.”

  “My God, I’m sorry, Cletis. If I had any idea something like this was going to happen…”

  “It ain’t your fault, Jimmy. We can’t be constrained in doing good because evil might take advantage of it. The devil’d be the winner then for sure. What did you learn on your trip?”

  Paz told him. Barlow was silent for a while, and Paz had the strange feeling that time had run in reverse, that he was still the junior partner on the detection team. Surprisingly, he felt relief rather than resentment. One of his virtues was that he knew when he needed help. Barlow was staring at a poster on the wall, the usual cheery art show thing.

  Then he turned his tin-colored gaze onto Paz, with an expression that Paz had rarely seen in it, more Old than New Testament, and Paz felt the hair bristle on his neck
.

  “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay,” said Barlow. “But I’ll have their blood for this.”

  “What’re you talking about, man?”

  “Where you’re going with it now. I figure you got one more card to play and I want to be in on the deal.”

  “Packer.”

  “Him. I’m coming with you. You’ll wait while we make sure Edna’s all right and then we’ll go together.”

  “I don’t know, Cletis…”

  “Yeah, you do. We’ll go after him together, only this time y’all’re going to be the good cop.”

  Twenty-one

  The

  CONFESSIONS

  of

  Emmylou Dideroff

  Book IV

  I see I am waxing prosy now though I said I would not, I can’t help it because the memories come that way and besides I am a prosy person, a rude mechanical as Shakespeare says I was never meant to be the person He made me in Dinkaland. Now I have relapsed into my generations, coming as I do from a people used to fixing clutches on old cars and scraping knuckles on rusted iron. So I loved my gun. Peter Mulvaney being SAS knew much about all the nearly infinite varieties of the machinery of death and together we Read the Fucking Manual and we learned how to use the dreadful thing. I assembled a gun crew, the Dinka Nation Automatic Cannon Gurls and Alto Choir, four of them all named Mary and I called them Marys Tok, Rou, Dyak, and Nguan, counting in Dinka, and very regulation for shouting orders. The gun was built in Sweden about twelve years before I was born and was a Bofors Type A L-70 with the generator over the axles. You swiveled it with a little joystick, like in a video game. It had the standard NIFE SRS 5 close-range reflex sight with the integral predictor unit. The five-ton prime mover Bedford contained over a thousand rounds of HCHE multipurpose ammunition plus spare parts and tools and a box of twenty-four TPT practice rounds, and we shot them at long range against the wrecked pickup and at big kites we made, towed by running boys and then by our truck oh Christ Jesus running on running on so I don’t have to

  SISTER PREFECT ALECRAN came for a visit prepared to declare anathemas, but she could see that something strange was going on in Wibok. She looked at me differently than she had in Kenya. It helped that I was not about to lead a crusade on Khartoum. I don’t know whether she ever really got it, that it wasn’t just an unruly sister with a knack for small unit tactics, but really the Holy Spirit once again entering history as of old. She left to repair the ruins of Pibor Post, saying she would get back to me. Most of the helpers left too. Some were made nervous by real religion, God walking in the cool of the day, which I guess they had not seen before and others were made to feel unwelcome, like the nice folks who brought slaves back from the Baggara, so that they would be encouraged to take even more slaves and not have the trouble of marketing them. The only solution to slavery, as I had just demonstrated, was to kill lots of the slavers and terrify the rest into taking up some other business.

  In fact we didn’t need much help anymore. The lands were fertile under the rains, and the durra grew lushly green in the flat acres, and the cattle were fat and bred generously. Trini and her people stayed of course, although she never gave me the time of day anymore. The Jamesons stayed too, a missionary couple who had come to start a mission but had turned instead to useful work, for the people were more interested in hanging out in church with Atiamabi than in points of Christian doctrine. Good sports, the Jamesons. He was a big florid guy who really liked fixing cars and machinery; she was a blond birdie with a steel core who kind of liked how I was reforming gender relations among the Dinka. She ran our primary school and I made an arrangement with her to teach my officers and Dol, my boy-king, how to read. They used the OT as a text. It was like reading the daily paper for us. Nice people.

  TWO WEEKS AFTER we took the gun, the Antonov coasted silently down from the northwest. Warned by our watchers, we had just enough time to set up a mile or so north of Wibok, the four Marys and me in the commander’s seat. It was a dot when we first saw it, no sound of engines, trying that old trick again. It switched on at two thousand feet and came in for its run. I engaged at about four thousand yards, throwing a stream of hopeful red dots into the sky and kept on shooting as the plane came directly overhead. The tracers intersected with the plane and it moved past seemingly unhurt except for a thin stream of black smoke. As it passed overhead I saw that the cargo doors were open and then black tubes rolled out of the bay, one fell and exploded another fell almost on top of us and didn’t and then the Antonov seemed to roll to one side as if tired of flying and we saw thicker smoke with a heart of orange flame and then it went down, boom, and a black cloud somewhere to the west of Wibok.

  We howled, we cheered, we waited to see if another plane would come, but nothing did, the GOS has few planes and its pilots are not used to taking flak. We walked over to where the dud had fallen. It seemed that the crew had tried to get rid of the bombs when their plane caught fire and had not armed this one. It lay broken and half-buried in clay and it meant that I now had nearly five hundred pounds of high explosives to play with. Later, looking at the smoking wreckage I felt no satisfaction in having killed, probably, the people who had killed Nora, although I was full of joy in an impersonal way, victory is a thrill better than sex, why men leave their wives and go to war.

  The shoe had dropped, the GOS had made its response, and so I had a little leisure to deal with my oil men, for the GOS runs on a slow tempo. Speed is of the devil, as the Arabs say, and a good thing for our side. Terry Richardson, the oil team’s leader, naturally demanded that I release him and his associates with all their equipment and I said I considered him a hireling of the government, with whom we were at war, and so all his goods were forfeit as spoils of battle. It was a civilized discussion, although he got a little pissed when I had all of them strip-searched and found he had a CD taped to his lower back, which I doubted was Joni Mitchell’s Greatest Hits. I gave them their clothes, food, water, their Toyota pickup truck, and safe passage out of our lands. They left a lot of nice swag: besides the customized RV, we now had a radio net with four mobile sets, a couple of ruggedized laptops, a nice HP Inkjet printer, all kinds of geological equipment, and the prize, a satellite phone hooked to a laptop all set up to squirt encrypted e-mails via satlink. I pulled out the old wrinkled, red-dusted card from The Gun Nut that Skeeter Sonnenborg had included with his fudge gift a hundred years ago and one night I tapped the number out on the keyboard.

  Oil company encryption is very good, and Skeeter was much relieved when I told him via satlink e-mail what I was using, because the feds were still tapping his communications. Via e-mail I ordered four thousand rounds of 40 mm proximity-fused high-explosive antiaircraft rounds, in case they ever sent serious jet combat airplanes after us, and the same number of armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot rounds for use against tanks, also ammunition for all our rifles and machine guns plus more AK-47s, 82 mm mortars and rounds, a couple hundred RPG-7 antitank rockets, grenades, mines, other warlike stores and a thousand pairs of Malaysian tire-soled sandals, extra large. To pay for it all, I sent him the location of some of Orne Foy’s golden hoards, with more to come on delivery. He said he would assemble all the stuff at Sharjah, in the Emirates, and fly it in, with a stop at Gore in Ethiopia. It came to a pretty penny including bribes, air freight, and commissions, very nearly all the money Orne had accumulated that I knew about, and so Nietzsche was funding a holy war by the slaves, yet another evidence if any was still needed that the Holy Spirit has a sense of humor.

  BY THEN IT was anyoic the end of the season of Ruel, when the rains cease and the second harvest is brought in. No one, not the oldest of Dinka, could recall such a harvest for abundance. We built round mud-wall silos to store the durra and other grains. Now began Rut, the start of the dry days, when the young men are available for labor. I had them build a landing strip and I had them dig bunkers and revetments and shelters under the earth, for people and cattle, sandbag
ged against flooding. I knew that when the GOS understood what was happening in our country they would send the full force of their military against us, for quite aside from the strategic position we occupied, it would be intolerable for them that the despised abd could defeat them, and under the banner of the church at that. I thought we had perhaps half a year, for they would want the land to be perfectly dry and for our supplies (as they would imagine) to be at their lowest.

  About a month after I placed my arms order, an ancient Hercules landed on our strip and I was not entirely knocked off my chair to find Skeeter himself at the controls. He hopped out of the cockpit carrying a flat box, crowing, anybody order a pepperoni pizza? I let him kiss me. He said, why pay for a pilot and besides I wanted to see Emmylou of Sudan for myself. Peter despised him from instant one and the same back and I pissed away a lot of energy I couldn’t really spare just keeping them from killing each other. One night I caught Skeeter in the oil company RV going through drawers. He grinned at me, with that charming psychopath grin he had, and held up an empty CD case. Lots of cases no data disks, sweetie, why is that? I said I’d given out all the CDs as gifts, the people liked to cut them into spirals and use them to ornament the horns of the cattle, and what was it to him? Information is money, he said, lotsa folks would like to know what Richardson found out there. You know he’s dead. I didn’t I said, and he told me that the burnt-out shell of their pickup had been found just north of Pibor, w/charred skeletons. Looked like they hit a mine, but they weren’t in any mine field, you wouldn’t know anything about that would you, sweetie?

  At that moment I knew of a certainty, I can’t explain how, that Skeeter had been the one who ratted Orne out to the feds, all kinds of stuff clicked in, like how come he was still in business when half a dozen survivors would’ve been glad to testify that he’d supplied most of the heavy weaponry on Bailey’s Knob, and also the look on his face when I blurted it out. He laughed then and grabbed me, his hands crawling up onto my neck and I think he might’ve killed me right then if Peter hadn’t barged in. Skeeter left the next day, good riddance to bad rubbish said Peter what a fucking plague those people are, and added that he thought he might take up a sideline assassinating arms merchants.