Shotguns v. Cthulhu

by Larry DiTillio

  They’d been taking off her clothes as she screamed names I could no longer remember. Two of the men had started to fuck her and another had a knife and was cutting. The sickness in my stomach had tried to swallow me but I’d vomited it out. I hadn’t thought of White-feather Girl since. I hadn’t truly thought about Rain, either. We had left her there in Sunward in a village that was dancing for the Ocean Mother.

  “Ancestors… help me kill the Ocean Mother.” That was the last verse of the first new song. I felt the long-whip thing inside my stomach die. This time I didn’t need to vomit it out. It had just been a ghost of a bad thing. My heart started filling with other songs that the ancestors could have known.

  “Your voice is different. But it’s not bad. Just different,” said my mother, two weeks later when she walked out to the spit to bring me fish soup I hadn’t asked for and a bundle of berries. I think she was worried about me, spending so much time in the trees.

  “Every singer should lose a tooth,” I said. It was my first smile that day.

  After the song on the water, I had asked the ancestors for the songs that I would need to fight the Ocean Mother. These new songs were about spears and throwing things and standing when hurt, about resisting fear. Sometimes they were about jumping and running. And when men had been with me a of couple days, they found that the songs were also about killing, and death, and dying without failing, and things that had nothing to do with the way we had lived before.

  I hadn’t intended to teach anyone else. I started with the idea that I could fight alone. But a day or two after I sang to the ancestors, one of my uncles failed to come back from fishing on a calm day. We found his boat and he was gone. And the day after that, another man went out alone and disappeared. He had also eaten the New Yams.

  I didn’t want Grinner disappearing, so I taught him a few of the songs. And of course Grinner talked with everyone. Men who had been at Sunward felt better just humming the new tunes. So one by one or three at a time, uncles and cousins and brothers began visiting me where I was fishing from the point. They asked me to teach them.

  As soon as they learned three or four songs well, every man said what I thought: they felt like they already knew these songs. They were familiar already, not entirely new, something our grandfathers might have heard of, or their grandfathers. I thought to myself that it went back further than that, but I didn’t need to tell people what to think. I just needed them to sing.

  Soon we started doing the things I was singing about, or some of them anyway. We didn’t sing my new songs near the village, but in the trees we practiced throwing spears and stabbing and running until we collapsed.

  Until the others collapsed, anyway. After the third week, I decided to stop pretending to be tired, and to stop missing sometimes on purpose to make people feel more comfortable. The new songs suited me, and with the taste of blood always in my mouth it didn’t feel like I needed to be calm like a man trying to avoid being called Rock. I threw three times as far as the other men, when I wanted to. When no one was around to see, I sometimes took a spear that was close to breaking and ran toward the water. I threw north, just to watch the spear disappear, a far flash of black.

  One moon into my new songs, people in the village started calling the spit where we practiced Singer’s Point. I didn’t stop them. So the Chief caught up with me on the beach one morning as I was about to go fishing with a few of my new brothers. Chief looked over my head but his two brothers looked at my hands and my eyes. Once I had thought they were dangerous men.

  “Naming a place after yourself is a bad idea, Singer.”

  Naming? Naming a place?! I had forgotten until that moment, the strange names of the places that didn’t exist, Gsesh-na-rahgnan and the other names White-Feather Girl used that night on Sunward. The terrible names swam into my memory but our new songs stabbed them until they became like stumps of something broken. They wanted to bite but they weren’t truly there, not for me.

  I can’t say what happened to my face as I remembered the names. But the Chief stepped backward and both his brothers turned in different directions. One brother kept turning and walked away, pretending to be interested in another man’s nets. The other brother backed down the sand until he could put his hand on his canoe.

  The Chief spoke again before I could. “Well. That’s good then,” he said. “We can talk later. All good.”

  I had no need to look in his eyes because I did not want to see him afraid. “It will be good,” I said. “Very good.” Chief turned to walk to his canoe.

  “Chief,” I said. He stopped, not wanting to. “When did Wide Man say he was bringing you the pink shell?”

  I watched as the words broke inside him. It was less important, now, to avoid seeing his fear. It was more important to show him that I was not afraid. “How soon?” I asked.

  Chief was a brave man, really. He must have remembered more than the other men. He unclenched his teeth and said, “It could have been last week. Next week? It could be moons.”

  I waited.

  “Wide Man wanted to keep it longer than usual and I said that was fine. And that’s when he said that he might bring the shell sooner. So we left. But we dragged you from the village first.”

  “I will be honored to take a Red-Shell kalaa to Sunward,” I said. “Kano’s father has one, a necklace named Day Flyer. Or you could give me a Red-Shell. And when I’m there I will see how they have done with the Ocean Mother. Maybe I will take it away so they do not have to bring it all the way here. I will pass it on somewhere else, somewhere people want things like that.”

  The Chief’s hands shook as he took a Red-Shell necklace named Twelve Paddles off his neck and handed it to me. “Take Twelve Paddles and Day Flyer, Singer, take them both. They will bring you luck.”

  “Good, they are good kalaa shells. I know their songs. I will give them to Wide Man if he is still in the village.”

  It felt right to talk like that. We knew that I would not be giving the shells to Wide Man. We had stopped pretending that everything was alright. But it felt better to use words that offered hope.

  “You should find Rain, Top Woman, Green Eyes, Mirror Tree. All your sisters and aunts. Let them know they can come back. Ask them, please…” He said this even though it was against all the marriage treaties to bring our sisters home. I thought better of him then. Old Chief was willing to change.

  As we walked toward the village I hummed the Four Strong Spears Song in the deep thrum that had become my voice. Old Chief said, “Will you teach me that song?”

  One spear can break

  Two spears can miss

  Three spears might run

  Four spears. Four spears.

  Four strong spears never break

  Can’t miss

  Will not run

  Four strong spears

  Kill so that the people live.

  When we could not find the north-ripple current, when it had disappeared in a splinter of warm water going east and odd cold swells, I realized there would be no one left on Sunward to bring home to Sweetwater. We had brought five canoes and more paddles and spears than warriors, in case there were aunts, sisters, and friends we could take away from the island.

  I tell you this now, about the currents days from Sunward, to make you understand why I am not saying everything about what we found on the island. There are things that must be faced and killed that it is still not right to talk about. What came to Sunward destroyed the ways of the ocean far away. I will not let my words become like those ripples.

  What I can tell is that the smell of the pink shell knocked Dzo and fat Kano out before we got off the beach. We left them with a guard and the rest of us changed our breathing to keep out the worst of it.

  On the path to the village we found ways of dying that the flies would not touch. Two of our men went crazy, so that Grinner and I had to kill them ourselves, and no one thought we had done wrong. The men who died had not been singing with me on the spit un
til the night before our voyage. I hadn’t wanted them along but they had sisters who had gone to Sunward to marry.

  The dead children we found in the dancing circle were worse. The other new men began crying and Old Chief’s strongest brother killed himself by smashing his head into the doorpost of the hut where I had lost my teeth on the night of the feast. I realized that the men who had not learned all the Fighting Songs would be dead soon unless we took them back to the canoes. We circled the six weakest men and walked them back. Kano had recovered. He leaned on his spear and promised to guard them and teach them Song Against Fear.

  As we marched back toward the village, we lit torches. I taught Grinner and the twelve men with us a song the ancestors had just sung for me. You know it: We Are Warriors. But before that moment none of us knew the song, or what it meant.

  We walked into the jungle that had grown from the New Yams and killed things that had once been dogs and other things that should have been women. We heard a conch shell blowing from where the jungle met the sea. It made a sound like the island sinking, like waters crashing overheard, but we could feel our toes digging into dry sand. We sang louder to step above fear.

  We found Wide Man facing the water on a high cliff. He wore Ocean Mother around his waist and blew into a funnel that sprouted up to his mouth, sending the sound of the conch thundering out onto the ocean. There were things and once-men beside him that tried to kill us but they had no war songs. The blood in my mouth carried me up to Wide Man.

  “For Rain. For everyone,” I said, and rammed the spear through him. Ocean Mother screamed and broke. I had some idea of twisting Wide Man into the dirt but he slipped off my spear and ricocheted from the cliff into the water. The sharks clustered beneath the cliff foamed over Wide Man’s red body. I turned to kill the things left on land.

  Burn an end

  To what is dead

  And should not have been

  Burn until ash is clean.

  Burn.

  I’d relaxed when the last of the corpses went into the fire. We had been careful to avoid breathing the smoke. There was nothing we could do about the wrong-jungle and most of the village. Maybe it would recover. Perhaps not.

  We sunk the two canoes we didn’t need, so that nothing we had missed could follow us home, and paddled south toward Sweetwater.

  Five hours later, heading into evening, the storm hit us from the north.

  “Well, at least it waited until we’d finished the fires,” yelled Grinner as he took down the sail. “We could all use a bath. You more than me!”

  The smell of lightning competed with the blood and ashes in my hair. “No choice. Just keep running ahead of it,” I said.

  “We’re all ahead of you, Chief,” yelled Kano from the back of the outrigger.

  I opened my mouth to yell that my name was Singer, looking back over my shoulder, when I saw our slowest boat, the one that had most of the new men, disappear without being hit by a wave. It was a long way off through the rain and the wind but I watched between peaks. There was no sign of the canoe or the men.

  I put down my paddle, motioning that everyone else should keep trying to keep the canoe turned into the waves, and took up my grandfather’s harpoon with its heavy obsidian point and its strong fiber rope.

  Here it came. A great green shark rose from the middle of the seventh wave from our canoe, throwing itself out of the water in a leap. Everyone looked up and saw the shark spread against the sky. It hit the storm wave smooth, with hardly a splash, sliding back into the wave leaving black foam in the air and on top of the water, a dirty-blood mark almost twice the size of our canoe.

  I raised the harpoon and sang We Are Warriors. I would throw the moment the shark showed itself closer. But in the canoe beside me, Grinner screamed. He vomited so hard that he folded in place, smashing his nose against my knee.

  To find a spot for the throw, I had to kick through my uncles and brothers. They flopped and spun in the bottom of the boat or fell off between the outriggers, twitching like fish caught on the points of giant spears.

  I knew, then, that Grinner and the rest were not prepared for this shark. They did not realize that an old grandmother shark coming from the bottom of the ocean to find its pink shell armband could easily trade fins for arms and its long fish body for something more like a human face. See! Here it came again, rising now from a wave just two lengths away, still the same shark teeth, pink and glinting rows opening wide as it spread its arms and dropped toward the canoe, as if it were the green wave itself that would drive us down.

  My harpoon disappeared into the black between the teeth. The shark screamed. I could not hear it because my ears were full of blood but I felt the scream and then the impact as the skin of a great green arm smashed into the side of the canoe as the shark fell into the water, this time in an explosion of blood and blackness.

  The canoe was tipping over so I threw my body onto the outrigger and smacked it back onto the water. Then I felt the harpoon’s rope where it had wrapped around my body, I had a second to jump far from the canoe before I was dragged down. As I went into the dark, something snagged in the coil beside me, the body of one of my friends. We fell together and I pulled the knife from his belt to saw at the rope around us. When the rope parted and I lost grandfather’s harpoon, I did not know which way was down. The body of my brother went one way, so I kicked the other.

  I surfaced into the rain within sight of the canoe. I climbed back in and rescued three men from the water. As the rain died off and the storm dulled to a squall, I looked at the knife still in my hand. Grinner’s knife.

  Paddling past Sunward

  Straight on to Molawa,

  Slaying in Turtle Pond Island,

  Good War for Flying Fish and Green Fish and Shark,

  Deliverance for Solstice, Solstice, Solstice.

  I have two wives now, as is right for a Chief. My first wife makes me laugh, which reminds me of Grinner. My other wife is from Coraldown, the southern neighbor we had to take when we became Good War Island, so that someone would properly fish and farm. I know she hates me a little, but I hate myself a little, so that is alright.

  When we sail south we carry spears. We break White-Shells and show people why they must not sail south any longer. We teach them a few of the war songs so that they can survive long enough to warn us if Ocean Mother’s children should appear. We teach them that they will be giving us yams and fish in return for their protection. We take some of their children back to Good War Island with us to teach them the rest of the songs.

  When we sail north, we carry all our weapons, war canoes full of men and women singing the songs of the ancestors of war. I used to carry Twelve Paddles and Day Flyer around my neck in case we met someone to talk with. But the currents have gone insane and the stars are wrong. Who can say whether the places we burn are places we used to sing kalaa for or places the Ocean Mother vomited into our lives?

  Sometimes I fish alone and try to remember my father’s songs, or the song for planting yams, or the strong-paddle song that called grandfather turtle. I could teach them to my children. I sing, but all I bring up are tears and the taste of blood and the songs that came after.

  Lithic

  Dennis Detwiller

  I’m going to try one more time to put it all in order. Even now, I can feel it slipping away, moving in my head in waves. Things spin and snap into place, seeming so clear, so perfect; but only for a moment. Then they fade and drift and disappear. But, for now, I have something. Something to hold on to.

  Listen.

  I was on the phone with Nan again. Two years of my life leading to one long, messy breakup spread across the northeast from New York to Vermont. The place I fled to lick my wounds.

  New York was full of places I didn’t want to go and people I didn’t want to see. It was winter break, and Nan was staying. I ran home to Vermont. A place Nan and I always talked about visiting, but now, would never see together. It was smaller than I remembered.
Like everything there had been shrunk by half a foot behind the scenes in some weird conspiracy.

  “What’s wrong with you? You don’t sound right,” Nan said, a wash of noise in the background.

  “I’m trying to get my head together,” I said. And I was.

  Still am.

  Through the phone, I could hear Penn Station. A million snippets of time rushing by the receiver as Nan waited for me to speak. The ghost-whispers of a million lives.

  For some reason, it made me hungry.

  The memories show up, and I really don’t know what to do with them. They smash and pile up and collide and combine, and I don’t know how to sort them. This happened...after Nan. It must have. I was home in Vermont. Home again.

  I think.

  “Don’t go up on Indian Hill no more,” the man said, touching my shoulder. I wasn’t paying attention, I was looking up at the mountain, and I turned and found myself face to face with him. This was...I don’t know when. It was evening. Early evening.

  It was clear, his voice, and not slurred, though his breath was a wave of liquor. I was buckling the belt on the rent-a-cop suit and crossing on the corner of Ulysses Street, and I jumped a little when he stopped me. It had been a long time since I was in town and I wasn’t expecting to see anyone. I wasn’t expecting to be stopped.

  Anyway, I didn’t know him. Then at least.

  He was that age homeless people become when they’ve lived outside for too long, a prematurely aged look that hovers between thirty and sixty, depending on the time of day and how deep in the bottle they are. We didn’t get many homeless in Stoveton. Vermont was well outside the area friendly for year-round outside habitation, and you got used to the idea that past freezing, everyone was inside somewhere, tucked in, listening to the storm. It’s what gives the area that “everything in its right place” feeling that the tourists go nuts for. It isn’t hard-headed New England pragmatism that keeps the streets perennially clean, it’s the fact that homeless people die in Vermont in the winter.