Hymn

by Graham Masterton

  Kathleen held Lloyd’s arm as they skirted around the growling, slavering dogs. ‘That’s one guarantee that I wouldn’t like to put to the test,’ she told Tony Express.

  Tony Express opened the high wire gate to the compound, waited patiently while they filed in, and led them between the trailers with the nonchalance of somebody who knows exactly where he wants to go. He dodged potholes, washing-lines, upturned Coca-Cola crates. He acknowledged old men sitting on dilapidated armchairs under tattered awnings, he called to women and children, and even said, ‘Hi, Geronimo!’ to a cat that was sleeping in the middle of a worn-down tyre.

  ‘It’s hard for me to believe that this boy is blind,’ Franklin remarked.

  ‘In his way, he can see more than we can,’ Lloyd replied. ‘He’s a damned sight more intelligent, too.’

  Tony Express didn’t say anything, didn’t turn around, but he lifted one finger in the air to show Lloyd that he had heard.

  At last they reached a large, sagging, green-painted trailer with overgrown window-boxes and a Charley Noble stovepipe sticking out of the black-tarred roof. Tony Express opened the front door for them and let them take a look inside.

  The trailer was gloomy and fiercely hot, but almost the first thing they bumped into was a huge Westinghouse air-conditioner which looked as if it had previously been used to cool the Superbowl. The rest of the interior was surprisingly clean and tidy. There was a table, set with a vase of dried flowers, a dresser with willow-pattern plates arranged along it, an old-fashioned but scrupulously neat kitchenette, and a tiny bathroom with a mahogany-veneered Civil War washstand and a bean-shaped re-enamelled bath.

  Lloyd went to one of the bookshelves and picked out a paperback at random. ‘The poems of Sterling Brown?’ he queried.

  Tony Express laughed and quoted.

  O Ma Rainey

  Li’l and low,

  Sing us ‘bout de hard luck

  Roun’ our do’;

  Sing us ‘bout de lonesome road

  We mus’ go

  He added, with a smile, ‘Zuni Tone is heavily into the emancipation of oppressed people, man.’

  ‘Yes, well, I think we are too,’ Lloyd replied.

  Tony Express circled around and around in the middle of the floor, as if he were looking at everything. Maybe he was picking up vibrations, maybe he was picking up smells, or noises, all of those nuances which sighted people are usually too insensitive to notice.

  ‘You like it, man? What do you think?’

  ‘It’s better than I could have expected. Cleaner, for sure.’

  Tony Express stopped circling. ‘You think that Indians are dirty or something?’

  Lloyd felt uncomfortable. ‘No, no. Of course not. What I meant was . . .’

  Tony Express flapped his hand at him as if to tell him to forget it. ‘The twenty up front, man. In folding. Our credit-machine’s broke.’

  Lloyd produced a twenty, and pressed it into Tony Express’s hand. ‘It’s yours,’ said Tony Express. ‘Power extra, depending on what you use. There should be clean linen in the closet, Zuni Tone’s very particular. Like he always sweeps up the rug after he’s been clipping his toenails.’

  ‘Glad to know it,’ said Lloyd.

  Tony Express was about to leave the mobile home when they heard a car horn honking, out by the front of the store. ‘Wait up,’ he said, and swung himself down the steps, and jogged off between the mobile homes. Lloyd went through to the kitchenette and tested the gas and the water. The gas was working and after a brief, asthmatic pause, the water came coughing out of the tap.

  Kathleen sat down on the bed. ‘You know, you always picture these trailer-parks as being so slummy. But look how neat everything is. I guess it’s the discipline of living in such a small space.’

  They were still talking when Franklin lifted the net curtain and peered out. ‘The boy’s coming back,’ he said. ‘He’s got two policemen with him.’

  ‘Oh, what?’ Lloyd demanded. He lifted the other side of the curtain and saw that Franklin was right. Tony Express was weaving his way back between the trailers closely followed by a fat ruddy-complexioned highway patrolman, and a thinner, darker officer in designer sunglasses and a sharply pressed shirt.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Kathleen asked, as Lloyd let the curtain fall back.

  ‘Nothing we can do,’ Lloyd told her. ‘Tough it out, is all.’

  They stood waiting in silence while Tony Express and the two highway patrolmen approached the trailer. The door opened, and the entire trailer groaned and dipped to one side as Sergeant Jim Griglak climbed aboard, closely followed by Ric Munoz. Jim Griglak shuffled his way toward the living-area, holding his wide-brimmed hat pressed against his chest, as if he were paying a respectful visit to some friends of the family. Ric Munoz was relentlessly chewing Orbit, and he left his sunglasses on.

  ‘Sergeant Jim Griglak, Highway Patrol,’ said Jim Griglak, although Lloyd could read that for himself. ‘We’ve been asked to stop a Mercedes-Benz sedan answering the description of the vehicle parked by the roadway back there, and detain the occupants. Are you the occupants?’

  Lloyd shook his head. ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about, Sergeant. I never owned a Mercedes-Benz in my life. Beverly Hills Skodas. I’m a BMW man, myself.’

  Jim Griglak breathed patiently. ‘We’re not talking ownership, here, sir. We’re talking grand theft auto.’

  ‘Still don’t know what you’re talking about. If I don’t like Mercedes-Benzes, why should I steal one?’

  Ric Munoz put in, ‘Sometimes any vee-hickle is better than no vee-hickle.’

  Jim Griglak looked around the three of them. ‘Do you want to tell me your names, and what you’re doing here?’

  Lloyd said, ‘We’re an ethnic study group from UC San Diego. I’m Professor Holden Caulfield, these are my assistants. We’re putting together a social profile of small disaffected Indian communities, such as this trailer park.’

  Jim Griglak closed his eyes for a moment as if summoning huge internal reserves of patience. At last he said, ‘I’m arresting all three of you on suspicion of grand theft auto. I’ve read The Catcher in the Rye, too, Professor Caulfield. Pity you couldn’t have thought of some much more convincing alias, like Bruce Wayne.’

  He sniffed, and recited their rights. Then he said, ‘Let’s go. You’re going to make me late for my lunch.’

  Ric Munoz added, ‘Sergeant Griglak get seriously pissed if he’s late for his lunch.’

  There was nothing they could do. Led by Tony Express, they filed out of the trailer and back through the gate toward the store, where the dogs snarled and yapped and hurled themselves wildly against their chains.

  ‘Thanks a lot, pal,’ Lloyd told Tony Express, as they walked around the side of the store. ‘Remind me to do you a favour some day.’

  ‘I couldn’t help it, man,’ Tony Express replied. ‘They’d already seen the car, they knew you had to be around someplace.’

  Lloyd said, ‘That guy we’re trying to catch . . . the one who said “Junius! Junius!” when the bus was burning . . . I want you to know that he’s just about the most disgusting slime on two legs. So if we do manage to get this sorted, and we do manage to catch him, I hope you’re going to be ready to come forward and identify his voice.’

  ‘What if I don’t?’

  ‘Then he and his friends are going to do to today’s Americans what yesterday’s Americans did to the Indians. Capiche? He and his friends think they’re some kind of master race, do you understand what I mean? They think the world belongs to them, and they’re the people to rule it. You ever heard of Adolf Hitler?’

  ‘Sure I heard of Adolf Hitler. I told you I was over-educated for a kid of my age.’

  ‘Well, what this Junius guy is trying to do is carry on where Adolf Hitler left off.’

 
; ‘Here? In California?’

  ‘Why not? It’s one of the richest and most influential places in the world. What California does today, the rest of the world is going to be doing tomorrow.’

  ‘Give your mouth a rest, will you?’ Jim Griglak called out. ‘You elected to remain silent, so frigging well remain silent.’

  Tony Express looked pale and his breathing was oddly shallow. ‘I couldn’t help it, man. They’d already seen the car.’

  They reached the road. It was grillingly hot, and heat rose from the blacktop like the shallows of a wind-ruffled lake. Jim Griglak opened the rear door of his Highway Patrol car and indicated with a curt nod of his head that Franklin should climb in. Franklin hesitated, and looked dubious.

  ‘Come on, bonehead, we’re going for the scenic tour,’ Jim Griglak rasped.

  They climbed into the back of the patrol car and Jim Griglak locked the doors. Then they U-turned and headed back toward the main highway, while Tony Express stood forlornly by the side of the road listening to them go.

  Ric Munoz picked up the intercom and reported back to headquarters that they were bringing in three suspects for the theft of Otto Mander’s Mercedes. Jim Griglak sang to himself under his breath as he drove, and occasionally made comments about the passing scenery, or if there was life after retirement, or baseball. He went with tedious detail into an explanation of the Boudreau Shift, which is when a manager counters a slugger who always pulls to the right by shifting all of his fielders to the right of second.

  Lloyd and Kathleen and Franklin said nothing. Franklin was bemused. Lloyd and Kathleen were both physically and emotionally exhausted. The jiggling of the car began to send them to sleep.

  ‘I have often walked . . . down this tooty-wooty before . . .’ sang Jim Griglak. ‘And the pavements tooty-wooty frooty-woot before . . . Hey, did I ever tell you that story about Yogi Berra, when they gave him a cheque that said, “Pay to Bearer”?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Ric replied, manfully. He was beginning to look forward to Jim Griglak’s retirement.

  Jim Griglak chuckled. ‘He said, “Hey, they spelled my name wrong!”’

  They had travelled nearly six miles across the dazzling desert landscape before Jim Griglak suddenly began to slow down. The change in speed woke Lloyd almost immediately, and he sat up abruptly and said, ‘What is it? What’s happening?’

  But Jim Griglak didn’t answer. Instead he drove slower and slower, peering ahead of him as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  Kathleen grasped Lloyd’s arm and said, ‘Lloyd, look!’

  Lloyd shifted his position and frowned ahead into the sunlight. What he saw gave him a feeling of delight and terror, both at once, as if he had woken up one morning and found that he could fly.

  ‘This can’t be so,’ whispered Jim Griglak.

  ‘It’s so all right,’ said Ric Munoz, echoing the moment that they had found that burned bus, and all of its charred and grisly occupants.

  Standing beside the road not a hundred feet ahead of them were two figures. One was an elderly Indian, in jeans and red plaid shirt. The other was the skinny, wind-tattered figure of Tony Express. In his hand he was holding the long stick decorated with strips of skin and fur, squirrel-tails and beads, the sundance doll that he had shown them back at the store, the first time they had met him.

  The sun lanced off the lenses of his sunglasses. He wasn’t afraid. He was simply waiting. Jim Griglak slowed the patrol car to a whining crawl, and at last to a halt, still thirty feet shy of the skinny Pechanga blind boy with the ragged stick.

  He applied the parking-brake with a heave of his foot, and then switched off the engine. It was hot and bright and suddenly silent.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Lloyd asked him, at last.

  Jim Griglak shifted himself around in the driver’s seat and stared at Lloyd balefully. ‘You’re looking at a young blind Indian kid who has just managed to overtake a car travelling at fifty-five miles an hour, on foot, across a desert landscape heated well in excess of one hundred and ten degrees fahrenheit. And you’re asking me what’s wrong?’

  ‘Maybe he has a brother,’ Kathleen suggested, without much hope. ‘Maybe he telephoned him, and arranged for him to meet up with us here—you know, pretending to be him.’

  Jim Griglak slowly and flatly shook his head. ‘That is the same kid. That is the exact same kid who stood outside his dad’s store less than fifteen minutes ago and watched us drive away.’

  Ric Munoz gave an unbalanced laugh. ‘Come on, Sergeant, what are we saying here? We know there’s only one kid. Anyway—who’s the old guy with him? You’re making a mistake, you must be. All ethnic minorities look the same.’

  ‘You’re an ethnic minority,’ Jim Griglak reminded him.

  ‘Oh, sure, but some of us transcend our origins, right?’

  ‘You think a frigging Toyota Turbo and a frigging pair of designer sunglasses changes what you are? That’s the same frigging kid, Munoz, on my mother’s grave.’

  Jim Griglak turned back to Lloyd and Kathleen and Franklin and said, ‘Stay put, you got it. Watch my lips. S-t-a-y p-u-t.’

  He heaved himself out of the car. Ric Munoz hesitated for a moment, then unclipped the pump-gun from its rack in front of the dashboard, and followed him, keeping the gun held high. Lloyd watched them walk slowly toward the two Indians, the old Indian in the baggy jeans and the young blind Indian in the headband, and for a moment he found himself unable to speak. It was like watching history.

  Kathleen whispered, ‘Is that really him? It looks like him!’

  ‘It can’t be him,’ Lloyd told her. ‘How could anybody run six miles in less than ten minutes, and arrive here well ahead of us? He may be precocious, and he may be just a little crazy, but he’s human.’

  ‘So you think that’s his double?’

  ‘It makes a damned sight more sense than it being him!’

  ‘But supposing . . .’

  ‘Supposing what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kathleen replied, flustered. ‘It just seems to me that if Otto is capable of burning people and bringing them back to life again, maybe there’s more to this world than we usually allow ourselves to see.’

  Nineteen

  Jim Griglak approached the old man and the young boy with all the caution that a working lifetime in the Highway Patrol had taught him. Watch the eyes. Watch for the slightest flicker of movement. Watch the hands, too. Apart from good old straightforward honest-to-God handguns, there are plenty of other weapons that can kill and maim. Knives, small-calibre guns that spring out of the sleeve, and all of that ninja crap like stars and chains.

  The boy was standing with his head held slightly higher than a sighted person would have held it, his lips drawn back across his teeth, but with great poise and certainty. The furs and tails that decorated his sundance doll swung around and around in the hot afternoon wind. Jim Griglak saw the tiny malevolent face on top of it and decided that he didn’t care for it at all.

  In contrast, the old man appeared to be quite benign, just one of those old coots that you might see at a charity lunch for senior citizens. His face had that distinctive leathery look that only Indians have, his eyes were bloodshot and filmed-over, but he was smiling to himself as if everything was just the way he liked it.

  Jim Griglak stopped, and sniffed, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘How’d you get here?’ he asked, bluntly.

  ‘How’d you get here?’ the boy replied, with a blind smile.

  ‘Listen,’ said Jim. ‘Don’t you start jerking me around. I want to know how you got here.’

  The old man said, ‘Same way that you did, sir. By air, by fire, by wind, and by water.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ Jim Griglak asked him.

  ‘John Dull Knife. What’s yours?’

  ‘Mind your own goddamned
business.’

  ‘Interesting,’ John Dull Knife nodded. ‘Don’t like it much, though. Your parents atheists?’

  ‘Listen,’ said Jim Griglak. ‘I don’t know how the hell you managed to get here so quick, less’n you’ve got yourselves a Ferrari Testarossa hidden behind that dune. But I do know one thing. You’re going to get yourselves back where you came from, both of you, and stay well out of stuff that’s not your frigging concern.’

  John Dull Knife said, ‘My parents always taught me to speak to everybody, even my enemy, with respect. Respect is power, my friend. Contempt is weakness. The greatest power in the universe is the appreciation of one human being for the strengths of another. Only the weak seek out weakness.’

  ‘How’d you get here so quick?’ Ric Munoz asked him. ‘Come on, let’s hear it. You know some secret shortcut, or what?’

  John Dull Knife turned to the boy and smiled. ‘We were not quick, my friend. It is you who were slow. Look at the time. Look at the position of the sun. How did it take you six hours to travel no more than six miles?’

  Jim Griglak lifted his head and looked around. John Dull Knife was right. All of the shadows had mysteriously swivelled from one side of the compass to the other. High up above them, the sky was already beginning to show signs of darkening. He checked his wristwatch and it was almost five. They had been driving at the legal limit all the way from Tony Express’s store, and yet they couldn’t have chalked up more than one mile an hour. At that speed, John Dull Knife and Tony Express could have strolled past them with their hands in their pockets.

  ‘Ric,’ said Jim Griglak, between tightened teeth, ‘what time do you have, please?’

  ‘Almost five, Sergeant.’

  ‘That’s what I have, too. And look around you. It’s definitely five o’clock, no mistake about it. But you know and I know that it takes less than seven minutes to travel six miles at fifty-five, and you know me. I always hit fifty-five right on the nose. So what the hell’s going on, I’d like to know?’