Last Chants

by Lia Matera

  “But you didn’t hear me?” Edward confirmed.

  “And nothing in my dream told me to go to Montgomery Street.”

  “Ask Arthur for me. As his fellow traveler.”

  “No way.”

  He looked a little surprised by my vehemence.

  “Edward, I almost totally believe I was dreaming. Even if I’m wetter than I should be.”

  “You’re wet because the rock—”

  “Fine. But I’m not going to compare notes with Arthur. I don’t want to know what he thinks happened.”

  To that end, I staked out the middle ground between Arthur, who trailed dispiritedly, and Edward, who couldn’t seem to go fast enough. We hiked single file back to the creek bed.

  I caught up to Edward. “Where are we heading?”

  “Right now, to the Jeep. Arthur’s not going to make it much farther. Then we’re off to the Nelsons’.”

  “The Nelsons’? That’s exactly where we’ll find the police.”

  “We’ll find them any damn place we go from now on. And we should, too, with Toni Nelson missing, and Pan up there . . . And look at us,” he added, matter-of-factly. “Never mind you two, now I can’t go home because someone made off with my keys. I’m paranoid about using my credit card. I’m reduced to borrowing money and a telephone from my brother.”

  “Fred is your brother?”

  “I never told you about Fred?”

  “No.”

  “Well, he used to steal all my girlfriends. That’s probably why.”

  I nodded. “He is kind of cute.”

  “Naw. That’s a post-hypnotic suggestion.”

  I glanced over my shoulder. I was glad we were on our way back to the Jeep. Arthur walked slowly, shoulders drooping.

  “See.” Edward followed my glance. “We need to get all this settled as soon as we can. We need a plan.”

  “I don’t suppose you have one?”

  “I thought I’d keep it to myself so they can’t torture it out of you.”

  “You always could keep a secret.” Like the girlfriend he acquired while we were together.

  He shot me a paranoid glance. “I was going to tell you about her. But you got yourself thrown in jail before I had a chance.”

  “I can be so inconsiderate that way.”

  When we reached the Jeep, we were a bedraggled threesome with damp hair, muddy clothes, and no spring in our steps.

  Before we climbed in, I begged Edward, “Tell me you really do have a plan.”

  “Would I kid you?” he asked.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Edward stashed the Jeep in another off-road pocket, commanding us to wait there. I knew we were somewhere near the Nelsons’; I recognized the road.

  Arthur sat in the front as motionless as a rag doll, staring at nothing in particular. He didn’t seem inclined to talk, but I was taking no chances. I got out and moseyed through the woods within sight of the Jeep.

  The sky glowed with twilight colors behind a low overcast. A thin wind rustled duff and branches. If I closed my eyes, I could almost resolve the sounds into speech, I could almost believe the trees were conversing. I wished I could listen hard enough to hear Pan’s pipes. I wished I could hear that perfect music, perfectly suited to the woods, again.

  I took the opportunity to mourn the strange man who’d rediscovered himself as a demigod. I put my forehead against the rough, spongy bark of a redwood and closed my eyes.

  When Edward returned an hour later, my skin felt refrigerated, and I was as goosebumped as a raw chicken. It was dark out.

  I climbed back into the Jeep. It was beginning to feel like my home.

  Edward sighed, long and loud. “It wasn’t easy—obviously, I wanted to be careful, not be seen. Plus, a high-tech guy like Nelson, I wanted to be sure he hadn’t put up security cameras.”

  “Cut to the chase, Edward. Did you get a look at the basement?”

  “Through a window, yeah. It looked tidy as a pin to me. I checked the garbage, too. Nothing weird, just food.” He let his head loll against the seat back. “Plus I broke into the mother-in-law unit; poked around, went through Seawuit’s duffel bag. Nothing interesting there, not that I noticed.”

  “You think Nelson’s lying about the break-in?”

  “I have no idea,” he admitted. “I don’t know what he meant by ‘damaged.’ It could be pretty subtle, damaging computer parts. I don’t know.” He slumped over the steering wheel, looking discouraged. “I guess I was hoping for a smoking knife.”

  He started the engine.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Beats me,” he admitted. “Off the mountain. I am truly out of steam. I think Nelson’s full of shit, but I don’t have a handle on why I think so, and I can’t think of any way to prove it.”

  “If we could get him to say something, admit something,” I vented.

  With Toni missing and Martin-or-Joel gone, we’d run out of options. All we could do was keep hiding, keep hoping for news.

  Arthur surprised us by saying, “May I make a suggestion?”

  “Sure.” Edward pulled the Jeep back on-road.

  “About Billy.” Grief deepened his voice. “If I could give you a better sense of him, perhaps it would help you understand his relationship to the Nelsons.”

  “It couldn’t hurt,” Edward agreed.

  “The other thing,” Arthur said slowly, “is nightmares.”

  We were barreling down the fire road now.

  “Nightmares?” Edward repeated.

  “Willa’s need to believe she was in a dream rather than a journey, that’s what made me think of it,” he explained.

  “Think of what?”

  “Nelson, you say, hoped to create a shamanic computer program. This reflects certain beliefs about the nature of reality, beliefs that are more . . . receptive, shall we say? Perhaps we could use those beliefs against him?”

  “In what way?”

  “From what I understand, Nelson is most intimate with, and most attuned to his computer. It would seem to be the only thing getting his full attention,” Arthur mused. “Perhaps a custom nightmare, something we could load onto his system?”

  “No way we’re going to hack into a pro’s hard drive.” Edward sounded a little wistful. “Jesus, with Nelson’s paranoia about spying, his computer’s probably the equivalent of a medieval fortress.”

  “I doubt he’s even on-line, not with his sexiest machines,” I agreed. “That’s the most foolproof way to keep hackers out. No modem connection, no way in.”

  “Perhaps we could load something manually?” Arthur persisted. “Unless his computers are somehow locked?”

  I’d watched Toni Nelson fire up one of them and start a program. She’d hit a switch and selected a menu item, just like us lower-tech folk.

  “Rather than break in through a network,” Arthur continued, “couldn’t we simply break into their house? Turn their computer on the usual way?”

  “Say we did get inside,” Edward didn’t sound optimistic. “What kind of program would you put on there? What are we talking about?”

  “We’d need several things before we could even . . . We’d need a good graphics application.”

  “I could get that,” I intruded. “If Edward has a modem, we could download one from my dad’s computer.”

  “Of course I’ve got a modem.” Edward sounded insulted. “And I know how to do two whole things with it.”

  “My father’s got every artsy application you can imagine—bootlegged, of course.” Cyberpunks believe “information wants to be free”—which was about all my father could afford. “But the programs are huge; it would take hours.” Still, I’d rather do anything than nothing. The illusion of forward movement would be a big improvement over the reality of hiking around avoiding sheriffs. “It’d be much quicker if you knew someone here who had them.”

  “Piece of cake.” I couldn’t tell if Edward was being sarcastic.

  Arthur took him at his
word: “We’d also need an instamatic camera, or better yet, a video recorder. And a way to feed the images into a computer.”

  “Yeah,” Edward said. “I could swing it.”

  “You’d have to have a video-ready computer,” I pointed out. “A fancy one.”

  He surprised me by saying, “Done.” He turned to Arthur. “Anything else?”

  “I would need to get into Billy’s possessions.”

  “Jesus—you couldn’t mention this before I went through his duffel?”

  “Not Billy’s clothing, no. I was thinking of his rattle, his drums. But they’re in San Francisco, in the trunk of my rental car.”

  “Do we have to use Billy’s? Can’t we get something similar?”

  “These aren’t items you’d find at a supermarket,” Arthur pointed out.

  “Oh, but you don’t know Santa Cruz.” Edward nodded. “If we can get there before it closes.” He stepped on the gas, careening wildly down the mountain.

  A half hour later, we walked along a downtown alleyway. We entered the oddest specialty shop I’d ever seen: a boutique of tribal instruments from around the world.

  Arthur looked like a boy in a candy store. “Look,” he cried, “South African talking drums. And Kenyan rattles!”

  Edward shushed him. “Don’t talk to the clerk, don’t invite anyone to notice you,” he begged.

  Two walls and much of the floor were devoted to drums, drums with metal kettles, skins stretched over hoops, ceramic drums.

  A group of men in tie-dye and Jerry Garcia T-shirts tapped on them, earnestly discussing their tones.

  Behind them were shelves of rattles made from gourds, skin, wood, even tin cans. There were also strange xylophones and instruments I couldn’t begin to place. One wall was hung with African masks and figures. The back was lined with books, compact disks, and tapes, apparently of tribal music.

  “Can a place like this do enough business to stay open?” I wondered to Edward.

  “It’s been here for years,” he whispered back. “You can’t buy a set of sheets downtown, but you can pick up a hookah, curly-toed slippers, a real scarab, or an African drum, no problem. I’d better go baby-sit. We’ve got to get him out of here before some college student recognizes him.”

  Edward squatted beside Arthur, who was pawing through a bottom shelf full of rattles. He whispered some sort of entreaty.

  Twenty minutes later, we walked back into the alley carrying a bagful of rattles, two skin-on-hoop drums and a leather striker. We’d spent most of the cash in Edward’s wallet.

  So he looked a little disconcerted to hear Arthur say, “Now we need paint and some sewing supplies.”

  “Looks like we’ll be hitting Fred up for dinner,” Edward said. “Unless you feel like panhandling.”

  Edward’s brother, we soon learned, lived in a condo full of photographs of his children from three previous marriages.

  “He keeps marrying my girlfriends.” Edward told me again. He didn’t sound like he was joking. “These guys,” he pointed to the rogue’s gallery of kids with front teeth missing, “could be mine genetically. How about that? I get to throw around the football with them, but I don’t have to pay their college tuition.”

  The condo was conventional and sparse, with wood floors, white walls, and white couches. It might have belonged to Every-bachelor.

  Except for one thing: a living room table was taken up with a computer and its peripherals. I stroked the scanner and digitizing pad: They were at the top of my “to buy” list. I guessed psychiatrists did pretty well for themselves.

  As if in response, Edward said, “You should see the place he moved out of—mansion city. But wife number three got it. He’s paid for more houses than I’ve lived in.”

  Arthur was already busy on the floor, pulling shells off one rattle, beads off another.

  He kept shaking his head. He was muttering, “Raven, wolf, bear.” He looked up at us. “I’ve seen them so often, but I’m not an artist.”

  “You’ve seen what?”

  “Depictions by the Kwakiutl and Haida. They are absolutely distinctive, and I certainly recall the elements, the shapes within shapes. But painting them . . . ” Again, he shook his head. “Of course, Billy was a carver. But I couldn’t begin to achieve anything like that. We’ll just have to hope . . . ” He reapplied himself to the task of stripping rattles.

  What Fred would think of the mess was of little concern to Edward. “Place looks worse,” he nodded at the littered floor, “when the kids visit.”

  Edward had already foraged though Fred’s cupboards, bringing forth crackers, cereals, and paté samplers from a gift basket. We’d eaten them without complaint. I hoped Fred was feeling generous. Bad enough we’d made him an accessory. Now we’d eaten all his food. I hoped I didn’t screw up his computer as well.

  I turned it on, relieved to see he had some hot-rod programs: Morph, Photoshop, Adobe Premiere. He had more CD-ROMs than a rich teenager.

  “And the video camera?” Arthur asked suddenly. He was unscrewing the tops from hobby shop paint jars. “Help me, friend,” I heard him murmur.

  Edward stood. “Fred’s going to love me rummaging through his porn collection looking for a camera.” He left the room.

  I had no real work until Arthur was done, but I thought I’d better load the programs and see how well I remembered them. I fussed for a while, getting more and more frustrated, as I usually did at a computer. I could see no evidence the programs had even been opened before. I could understand that; they were more fun to own than to use.

  After a while, I lay on a throw rug, not wanting to inflict my dirty clothes on Fred’s furniture. I watched Arthur paint precise patterns on a rattle. Either he was more of an artist than he thought, or friend Billy was indeed helping him.

  I’d been napping awhile when Edward prodded me with his foot. “Okay, cyberlawyer: Show time.”

  Fred also stood over me, arms folded across his chest.

  “Don’t get any ideas about her,” Edward told him. “She’s not our type.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I’d fed a video of the newly altered rattles and drums into Fred’s computer, which was indeed “video ready” (code for “very expensive”). This had entailed connecting it to a VCR with a special cable and following Abode Premiere’s directions. I’d changed the video background by substituting clip-art forest for everything white—that is, for Fred’s wall. I’d blurred the images—Arthur’s artwork was barely passable, according to him—and made them more dramatic with lighting tricks. Now, I was experimenting with Morph, blending one object into another for smooth transitions.

  It wasn’t much of a feat, but it pushed the envelope of my capabilities. And it certainly wasn’t the custom nightmare Arthur had envisioned; at best, it was a half-baked crochet. I’d taken computer tutorials, I’d messed around with these programs. But my agenda had been to get a job, not to truly “learn” the skills. I was shaking as I worked.

  As I struggled with the video, Arthur told us a story.

  He described the night he met Billy Seawuit.

  “I’d heard tell of a shaman,” he began sadly, “who lived in a remote area on the northern tip of Vancouver Island. I found him living in a longhouse he’d built himself from the cedars there. Have you ever been inside a longhouse? They’re magnificent structures, thirty or forty feet long, perhaps twenty feet wide, with roofs of overlapping shingles that can be moved to make skylights. And the smell—it’s literally the inside of a cedar box. Billy had erected four totem poles, topped by the eagle or the raven, with the wolf and bear below. He had another pole inside the longhouse, partially carved. And of course, he had two carved beams facing the fire.

  “He wore his hair long. He was a very handsome man with a stoic face and an intense brightness in his eyes. He told me he’d set out to become a carver, an artist, not a healer. But the trances were powerful for him. He knew Raven and Bear and Wolf intimately, you see, from carving
them. And in his trances, they would give him gifts of spirit and energy for the sick. But he was best at finding souls that had fled from their bodies.”

  “When people died?” Edward stood behind me, watching the computer screen, making me nervous.

  “Shamans believe that trauma causes a person’s spirit to flee. It’s not unlike the recent views of psychiatrists.” He cast a glance at Fred, who sat on the couch sipping wine. “When a person is traumatized, psychiatrists say they dissociate; they retreat, if you will, into insanity. Well, shamans believe the same thing. Except they don’t view the mind as a structure with a subconscious or unconscious. Because they have journeyed to the lower and upper worlds, you see. And when you do that, you do quite literally see those pilgrim souls. You see where the sane part of a traumatized person has fled.

  “Shamans have had phenomenal success in the treatment of mental illness,” Arthur asserted.

  “I’ve heard something like that.” Fred looked interested, if easy in his European ways.

  “Shamans ask the spirit to return. A depressed or traumatized person is literally seen as ‘dispirited.’ And when the errant part of the spirit is returned, well, I’ve never seen transformations so dramatic.”

  “Similar to faith healing, I’d think,” Fred said comfortably.

  “No,” Arthur disagreed. “The person is not healed by a belief in the grace of God, or a god. The person can be quite mad, you see; scarcely cognizant of the shaman beside him. But when the shaman blows the spirit back into that person, he’ll sit up like his old self. The sick don’t begin with the same depth of belief and sense of petition as someone visiting a faith healer.

  “But my point is that Billy set out to be an artist, not a shaman. And yet he acquired a reputation as one of the foremost shamans in the world.” Tears sprang to his eyes. “In the treatment of mental illness, he’d never failed.

  “I was traveling in British Columbia. I had visited a family there whose child had been brutalized. She had retreated into clinical autism, which I understand is highly resistant to psychiatric treatment.”

  Fred nodded.

  “The family had tried for three years to bring her back. They begged me to take her to Billy Seawuit. And I did. Her nurse went with me—she was in a wheelchair, poor child; she’d retreated even from movement.