Last Chants

by Lia Matera

  I must have looked as unhappy as I felt. As he said good night, Edward did the unexpected: He gave me a brief squeeze, promising, “I’m on it.”

  I was startled. We’d squandered little good will on each other over the years.

  “I’m booked tomorrow, but I’ll try to get up here if I can,” he continued. “Wish this place had a phone. But you can always call me from town—just follow the road down.”

  I thanked him. Arthur did, too.

  After he left, Arthur and I lapsed into tired silence. We soon turned the light off, lying side by side in our sleeping bags. We might as well have been on different planets.

  Arthur wept quietly, presumably over his dead assistant. I didn’t cry, but I certainly mourned the blow to my career.

  I had no idea how to explain this failure of professionalism to Curtis & Huston—or to future employers. My one consolation was that, since I hadn’t begun the job, I wouldn’t have to list it on my résumé. I wasn’t actually worse off than I was last month. Except that I’d lost a wonderful option.

  Arthur suddenly spoke. “It’s uncanny how often the universe will build an unexpected carriage of experiences to take you where you should be.”

  “You think this”—I could barely restrain my scorn—“is where we should be?”

  “Oh, most definitely. Can’t you feel it?”

  I could feel the hard floor beneath my sleeping bag. I could feel dust and grime clog my nostrils and tighten my lungs. I could feel a half-dozen insects—imaginary, I hoped—crawling on my legs.

  “Feel what?” I asked.

  “The spiritual power here.” His tone said, What else? “You know, our gods used to be part of us, part of where we were, the very ground, the greenery, the vicissitudes of climate. We were all aspects of the same grand something; spirit, soil, and flesh. But in postulating a heaven, we moved God into the manor house, we turned Him into an absentee landlord. It allowed us to despoil, to pave over, to exploit and ignore—after all, God didn’t live here with us; and we could expect to move in with Him, one day.”

  When I didn’t respond, he continued. He’d been a lecturer at Yale too many years to stop mid-thought.

  “Our political structures were basically feudal: Pharaohs and princes and emperors lived in palaces, and so must God, you see. We took the earth’s spirit and banished it into the clouds. And in the process, we lost our fellowship with nature, our very sense of consanguinity. But there’s tremendous spiritual magnetism here, Willa. Modern religions—including science—insist we ignore it. But you feel it, don’t you?”

  “Magnetism?”

  “A feeling of power and communication from the land. From woods, sea, open space.”

  “Well, no.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m a city girl, Arthur. Golden Gate Park’s as far out into the country as I ever get.” And its most powerful communication so far had been rollerbladers mowing me down.

  “Ah, but you haven’t really seen these mountains yet.”

  That was true. We’d traveled unlighted roads, the trees in the Jeep’s headlights telling me only that we were on forested terrain.

  “When you see it, you’ll experience it. You’ll understand about Billy Seawuit.” I could hear his quiet sniffles.

  “I’m sorry, Arthur.”

  After a few minutes, he pulled himself together. “Well, perhaps he’ll speak to me again. At least we’ve come to the right place.”

  I hoped he didn’t bring up fate’s carriage of experience again. To me, it felt more like we’d been thrown aboard irony’s paddy wagon.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I awakened first. My body screamed at me, angered by the absence of foam or cushions. Then my nose twitched with the stench of Edward’s bedding. I opened my eyes to find dust motes and cobwebs glowing surreally in a shaft of light from an uncurtained window.

  Arthur lay snoring in his bag, his face tranquil, his mane of gray and white hair tousled.

  It was dreary in the cabin, chill with the damp of a cold forest. I climbed stiffly out of the sleeping bag.

  I showered, wishing I had clean clothes to get into. (Edward’s sweats were too big to wear outside.) I poked quietly through the cupboards, praying for coffee. I found none. My luck was worse than I’d supposed.

  Edward had left us all the cash he had—eighty-seven dollars. I grabbed three twenties and stepped out into a gray morning made gloomier by tall redwoods and firs.

  I found myself in thick woods carpeted with oak leaves and evergreen needles and vines sporting purple flowers. Fallen logs hosted huge colonies of mushrooms and furry lichens. The air smelled of cold mud and pine trees.

  I started down the gravel path leading away from the cabin. A creature darted in front of me, stopping in apparent surprise when it saw me. Twenty yards ahead, a mountain lion stood watching me.

  It was skinny, small; not, I felt, a threat. I was surprised to feel no fear. Before it ran back into the woods, it engendered in me a feeling of good fortune, of a special day. Perhaps I was braver than I’d supposed.

  I walked along in better humor.

  A series of trails eventually led me to a paved road. Another half-hour’s walk took me into a mountain community consisting mostly of hardware stores and coffee shops along a small highway.

  I went straight into a restaurant and tanked up on java. I warmed up, apologizing to my bones for their hard night.

  I was ready to go find a grocery store and head back to Arthur when a group of men entered.

  “Hey, Mary,” a man in a leather hat said. His tone was coy, as if the greeting carried years of prior teasing.

  “Now, Louis,” the waitress replied.

  She handed the men menus, asking, “You still working on your bug zapper over there?”

  When she brought me my check, she said, loud enough for them to hear, “They’re making a computer that can sniff out moth smells. Just what we need in this world, huh?”

  I hoped my lips were smiling. The rest of me was panicking. Computers that could detect pheromones were under development by one of Curtis & Huston’s clients. Cyberdelics (as the firm was called) was doing interesting stuff in search of future applicability. I’d met two of its designers during one of my interviews.

  I doubted they’d remember me after so brief an introduction. But I didn’t make eye contact on my way out.

  The street wasn’t very busy, but the traffic was fast. A road sign read HIGHWAY 9. Beneath that, someone had graffitied “From Outer Space,” presumably to echo the B-movie title Plan 9 from Outer Space.

  I passed a hardware store, a used bookstore, a crafts gallery. I found myself staring into a hair salon with two chairs and a longhaired man flipping through a magazine.

  I whipped my hair over my shoulder, clutching its outdated length in my fist. I’d wanted to feel it again, all that hair, to feel it and remember. But even nostalgia gets old.

  When I walked out of the salon, my hair barely reached my shoulders. I had bangs. I searched for my reflection. Asking to have my gray covered. I’d chosen a darker shade than my natural.

  For twenty-five bucks, I was a different woman this morning. I hoped Edward didn’t mind the loan. God knew, he’d often wished for a change in me.

  I hadn’t walked ten more feet down the street—the highway, I should say—before I saw a storefront with windows completely painted over in balloony letters reminiscent of sixties posters and the Rubber Soul album. They spelled out: CYBERDELICS. A note pinned to the door read, “Out to breakfast. Find us if you can’t wait.” Apparently, I’d happened into the breakfast joint.

  I hurried past. Another few paces put me in front of a place called the Virtual Garage, which I knew produced virtual reality hardware and software. It shared a wall with a gallery displaying computer art and quantum physics books. Posted on its door was a list of upcoming local multimedia events. It was as long as any list in San Francisco.

  I looked up and down the highway, confi
rming the boondocks tininess of this place. Judging by the number of stores here—four or five blocks worth—I’d be surprised if it served more than a few thousand diehard mountain-dwellers. Why would so many of them be multimedia buffs?

  I wandered to an organic market, stepping over lounging dogs to get inside. Standing at the register with my basket of fruit and bread and coffee and juice, I took a map from the top rack of a paperback turnstile.

  Boulder Creek, I saw, was miles up the mountain from Santa Cruz. It was remote, certainly, surrounded by parkland and timber companies. But it was close to Silicon Valley, far closer than San Francisco was. Depending on the condition of the roads, I’d guess it took only as long to drive to San Jose from here as it did to drive to Santa Cruz.

  I dropped the map into my basket.

  I’d spent a little time in San Jose—as little time as possible, in fact. It was a flat, hot shrine to suburban strip malls. If I were a graphics designer, a computer artist or engineer, I’d rather live in the mountains and commute down when necessary. But I’d never have guessed the commute was so convenient.

  By the time I left the market, the restaurant coffee had kicked in, cheering me. I was enjoying the strangeness of my unexpected new hairstyle. I was seeing new sights.

  Maybe in my heart of hearts, I was happy not to be lawyering this morning. I was happy to be out in the world, not trapped at a desk.

  I walked back up the town’s only business street. I passed the Cyberdelics group leaving the restaurant. They stared at me curiously—I doubted they had many strangers in town—but didn’t seem to recognize me.

  Anonymity was a wonderful feeling. There was no possibility of running into my parents here, no need to chat with street people I’d come to know by name, no chance of small talk with someone I’d gone to law school with, no reason to worry about how I looked, how much friendliness I could muster, how much change I had in my pockets.

  Just when I was ready to do something wild—break into a smile perhaps—I saw a stack of pamphlet-thin newspapers outside a drugstore. The headline read, LOCAL MAN MURDERED. Beneath it was a black-and-white photo of a handsome man with long black hair. It was captioned, “Billy Seawuit, recent to BC, killed in Bowl Rock.”

  I put my bag of groceries down and stared. No wonder Arthur felt we’d come to the right place, that he could “speak” to his murdered assistant here. No wonder Edward Hershey felt it was, on the contrary, the wrong place for Arthur to be.

  It was where Arthur’s assistant had most recently lived. It was the site—somewhere in these mountains—of his murder.

  In delivering Arthur from the police, I’d brought him to the scene of a worse crime. If the man with the scarf had been trying to frame Arthur by handing him the murder weapon, I’d simultaneously foiled the plot and breathed new life into it.

  I stared at the newspaper, feeling it must be impossible. I reviewed recent reality: It was Arthur who’d brought up coming to Santa Cruz. And I’d jumped at the suggestion; Edward lived here and Edward owed me a favor. Now I realized Arthur had wanted to follow up news accounts of Seawuit’s murder.

  I hadn’t thought to question Arthur’s motives. I hadn’t thought to ask where Seawuit died. I’d blown my chance to cheat irony.

  Of all the luck: Edward having a cabin here. But he was an outdoorsman, a hiker, a sportfisher, a rock climber; I supposed it made sense. Irony always did.

  Even encountering Curtis & Huston’s clients made sense, now that I knew Boulder Creek was half an hour from the heart of the computer industry.

  What I didn’t understand was why a scholar’s assistant would come here.

  As if in response, the opening sentence of the newspaper article read: “Billy Seawuit joined our community last winter along with famous mythologist Arthur Kenna, best known for the public television series Violence, Myth and Culture. The pair were hired as consultants by local computer firm, Cyberdelics.”

  Billy Seawuit had come here to work for Cyberdelics? Doing what?

  I skimmed the rest of the article. Seawuit was known to be a totem pole carver from Canada. He was found dead in Bowl Rock on Sunday. Police were withholding details pending further investigation.

  A clerk stepped out of the drugstore. “Did you want that?” she asked me.

  “Yes.” I handed her two quarters, and she handed one back.

  “Did you know him?”

  “No. Did you?”

  “I wish. They say he was something. But Toni and Galen kept him pretty much to themselves. Either that or Toni shell-shocked him. That’s where he was staying, at Toni and Galen’s.”

  “Shell-shocked him?”

  “Just kidding.” She glanced away, an uncomfortable crease in her forehead.

  I waited, hoping she’d elaborate. She didn’t.

  “How did he die? Do you know?”

  “We heard he was shot.”

  “Definitely murder?”

  “If he was inside the rock.” She nodded. “I mean, nobody’s going to mistake you for a wild boar or whatever in there.” She waved to someone down the street, muttering, “Asshole.” Her eyes continued following the person to whom she’d waved. “Are you new in town? Or just up to hike Big Basin?”

  “I’m visiting a friend for a couple of days. This caught my eye.” I waved the newspaper, not wanting to introduce myself. “Do you have many murders up here?”

  She laughed. “Oh, you’ve heard that ‘murder capital of the world’ stuff, haven’t you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Back in the seventies. There was some dumping of dead bodies here back then. Then the Trailside Killer did in all those hikers, so they started calling it that. But no.” She sighed, looking down at Seawuit’s photo. “It’s been a couple of years since the last one. Not counting the dump-offs.”

  I tried to smile thanks for her words of comfort.

  “No, really, don’t worry,” she added. “We have more mountain lion attacks up here than murders!”

  I walked on before I lost all courage. I thought I heard her snicker.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Why didn’t you tell me this was where he was murdered?” If I sounded shrill, I couldn’t help it.

  Arthur, his chin stubbled and his hair wet from the shower, blinked at me. “But that’s why we came here,” he said.

  “No. No, it isn’t. This is the very last place we should be.”

  “But how odd, Willa. That’s not what you said yesterday.”

  I groaned, brushing off a wood chair at a plank table. “Yesterday I didn’t know this was where Seawuit died.”

  Arthur winced, then began going through the grocery bag. “Then I don’t understand. Why did you want to come?”

  “It seemed like a good hiding place.”

  “But there was no reason to hide. Not by then.”

  “Are you kidding? Our faces were still fresh in that cop’s memory. Of course there was reason to hide. Especially you, Arthur.” I knotted my fist into my bangs—the very reason I’d let them grow out. “The point was to take you where you could establish an alibi.”

  He seemed pleased to find orange juice in the bag. “We’ll do that this morning if you like. There are people here I’m anxious to contact.”

  “Don’t you get it, Arthur? Yesterday someone tried to hand you what was probably the murder weapon. Now we’ve brought you to the scene of the crime.”

  He suddenly looked perplexed.

  “You can’t deny there’s something fishy about a man handing you a gun then screaming his head off.” It struck me that Arthur resembled a blend of my parents. He had my mother’s scattershot goodness, and my father’s calm intellect. Maybe that’s why I wanted to protect him; I’d been protecting my parents all my life. “We’ll figure out later where to say you’ve been. But for now, don’t talk to anyone, okay? Don’t let anyone see you around here.”

  He stood there, carton of orange juice in hand. “Your hair,” he said.

  “I
ran into someone who might recognize me.” Which brought me to the real question: “What were you and Seawuit doing for Cyberdelics?”

  “I wasn’t doing anything at all. Billy may have been lending respectability to the project, but I don’t think so. It’s called Tech-noShaman; a way for computer users to access nonordinary states. They say computers are becoming more like drugs, you know, and that drugs are becoming more like computers.”

  “Huh?” I couldn’t begin to imagine what that meant.

  “Technology keeps striving to provide a psychedelic experience—graphics, special effects, a certain freewheeling, mind-expanding quality. And recreational drugs are being designed to stimulate precise impulses, to amplify comprehension. For example, the so-called smart drugs.”

  “Okay.” That would do for now. “Did Cyberdelics contact you guys? How long had you been here?”

  “Galen Nelson, the owner, met us at a conference on shamanism. He persuaded Billy to come. He offered what they call a mother-in-law unit behind the Nelsons’ house—excellent access to Bowl Rock. I visited him there. I’m sure they’ll have a great deal to tell me.”

  “I’ll talk to them, Arthur—without telling them you’re here, without telling them who I am. We need to keep you out of this for a while, for both our sakes.” I put my hand on his arm. “If the police find you, they find me, too. And it’s too soon for them to see us together. If you don’t stay out of sight, you put us both at risk. You mess up my future, too.”

  There wasn’t much he could say to that, which is why I made a point of it.

  “Well,” he conceded, “there are other, more authoritative voices here.”

  I shuddered to think who he had in mind. “Such as?”

  “The place itself.”

  I was relieved. He could talk to the trees all he wanted.

  He set the juice down, looking suddenly bereft. “And Billy himself.”

  I sighed.

  “We’ve come to the right place for a reason, Willa; you’d agree with that?”

  “In a way.” My ignorance was most of the reason.