I opened a can of Miller Draught that I had brought into the library along with my hamburger and other essential items of sustenance, like a large bag of Ruffles and several sticks of beef jerky. I was just about to take my first swallow when I became aware of one of the library ladies standing over me.
‘Pardon me, sir, but eating and drinking are not permitted.’
I turned around. She was small and sweet and quite petite, a serious brunette in her mid-twenties, wearing a crisp blouse and a camel-coloured skirt.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I haven’t eaten today.’
‘Well, I’m sorry, too,’ she said. ‘But we can’t have people bringing their meals in here.’
‘I see,’ I told her. ‘A restaurant for the brain, but not for the belly.’
She blinked furiously. I don’t think she understood me one bit. It was the eastern accent, no doubt, and the eastern sense of humour. They don’t have a sense of humour in Arizona, and who would, living in 90-degree heat amid geriatrics and mafiosi, and even some geriatric mafiosi.
‘Actually,’ I told her, leaning back in my chair and crossing my ankles and putting on my full Harold Erskine M.D. act, ‘actually I’m researching the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and Custer’s Last Stand, and I’ve been finding some very interesting research material here … better than anyplace else.’
‘All the same, sir, you can’t eat and drink while you’re doing it.’
‘Can I finish my beer? Would that be allowed?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, too. Very sorry. Just when I thought I was making progress.’
She flushed, and eyed the can of beer with uncertainty. ‘You can stay provided you don’t actually drink. The Little Big Horn, that’s a real interesting subject. Did you see our book of contemporary newspaper stories?’
I set my beer-can down on my desk. ‘No, I didn’t, but I’d like to.’
‘You’ll have to promise me not to drink.’
‘Hey, come on, Boy Scouts’ honour.’
She disappeared on squeaky rubber-soled shoes. I sat and drank the rest of my Miller in a leisurely fashion. Outside the windows the night was now glossy and black, like the lake of shadows which lay beneath our feet. Eventually the librarian returned, and laid an oversize book in front of me.
‘There,’ she said. ‘We’re really proud of this book. Facsimiles of newspaper pages, all the way back to 1840.’
She had opened the book to the front page of the Bismarck Tribune, published in Bismarck, Dakota Territory, on July 6, 1876. The headlines cried, MASSACRED — Gen. Custer And 261 Men The Victims — No Officer Or Man Of 5 Companies Left To Tell The Tale — Squaws Mutilate And Rob Dead — What Will Congress Do About It? — Is This The Beginning Of The End?
The first paragraph was electrifying. ‘It will be remembered that the Bismarck Tribune sent a special correspondent Mark Kellogg with Gen. Custer’s expedition. Kellogg’s last words to the writer were, “By the time this reaches you we will have met and fought the Red devils, with what result remains to be seen. I go with Custer and will be at the death.” How true!’
The type was tiny, and my eyes were bleary, but in the third column of the report, I read, ‘The body of Kellogg alone remained unmutilated and unstripped of clothing. Perhaps they had learned to respect this humble shover of the lead pencil and to that fact may be attributed this result. Perhaps they feared that his photographic equipment had captured their souls, and that he would wreak an awful revenge on them if they desecrated his remains. As it was, his camera remained untouched also, and his photographic plates have been safely returned to Bismarck for development.’
I sat back. Jesus. So that was it. That was what Samuel had been trying to tell me. Mark Kellogg had been a reporter and photographer for the Bismarck Tribune, and he had actually taken photographs of the massacre at the Little Big Horn.
I couldn’t believe that nobody had ever said anything about these photographs before. In spite of the eyewitness accounts from Indian warriors, in spite of all the drawings, the truth of what had happened by the Greasy Grass River had never been fully explained. But if there were photographs …
The lady librarian came up to me and said, ‘We’re closing now, sir. If you need to do any more research, I’m afraid you’ll have to come back tomorrow.’
‘No, no thank you,’ I told her. ‘You’ve been terrific.’
She picked up my can of Miller Draught, presumably with the intention of saying that I could take it outside now, and finish it off. But she realized at once that it was completely empty.
‘You drank it,’ she said. ‘You drank it. In contravention of library regulations, and city ordinance, and state law.’
Obediently I held out my wrists in the handcuff position. ‘So arrest me,’ I said.
I took her for dinner at Mother O’Reilly’s up on the hills north of Phoenix, and afterward we sat on the terrace and finished a bottle of Chandon’s Napa Valley Brut between us, while the night massaged us, soft and warm and Arizona-velvety, with all the glittery lights of Sun Valley spread out below us.
She told me her name was Nesta and she was twenty-six years old and lived with her parents. She reminded me of those secretaries in true-love comics like Apartment 3-G or The Heart of Juliet Jones. She was shy and self-deprecating, almost as if she couldn’t believe that she was at all attractive. She loved baking and horses and ballet and poetry — particularly Longfellow.
Once upon a time, I could recite almost the whole of The Song of Hiawatha,’ she smiled.
‘As far as I’m concerned, Indians aren’t the flavour of the month,’ I told her.
‘Oh, dear! Well, how about There is a Reaper whose name is Death, And with his sickle keen, He reaps the bearded grain at a breath, And the flowers that grow between.’
‘Cheerful,’ I nodded.
She said, ‘Will you read my palm?’
‘For sure,’ I told her. ‘But let me tell you this: a palm-reading is very superficial. A palm-reading is like the Reader’s Digest You know what I mean? Your whole life, condensed into six or seven crinkles. I mean, it’ll give you a rough idea of how long you’re going to live, and a rough idea of how happy you’re going to be. But if you want to be specific and detailed — if you want to know what kind of men you’re going to meet, and when, and what colour underwear they like the best, and the minute-hour-day when your cat’s going to be run over by which particular make of automobile — then you need a full-scale card-reading.’
She smiled enthusiastically. ‘Great! Okay then, a card-reading.’
I patted my shirt pockets, I patted my pants. ‘Oh … just a minute. Oh … that’s a pity. I left my cards back at my hotel.’
‘Oh,’ she echoed, and she was much more disappointed than I was. She was wearing a tight black sleeveless sequin top, and she had lovely rounded black-glittery breasts. She needed some frontal orthodonty, but then wandering Lotharios can’t be choosers, can they?
‘Hey, no worries,’ I told her. ‘You can come back and have a couple of drinks and then I can give you the whole shooting-match.’
‘I … unh, I don’t think so,’ she said.
‘Hey, what have you got to lose?’ I said, and then I wished I hadn’t I sounded like the Fonz.
She glumly shrugged. ‘I guess I can turn it down because I’m a twenty-six-year-old librarian and you’re a forty-five-year-old fortune-teller, and if you think that’s any kind of recipe for happiness? Even, what — even fleeting happiness?’
I could have said something but I decided not to. She was right and she was wrong. The main thing was that if she didn’t feel like it, if she didn’t feel like taking the chance, then it was best for her if she didn’t. There was no point in her going to the library tomorrow and despising herself. There was no point in me over-exerting myself on a sweltering Arizona evening, just for the sake of company, or lust, or frustration, or God knows what
We sat in sil
ence for a long time. We saw a faint distant display of shooting stars. She reached across the table and touched my hand.
‘I hope you’re not angry,’ she said.
‘Angry? Why should I be angry?’
‘You expected to take me to bed.’
‘No, I didn’t’
‘Then why did you take me out to dinner?’
‘Why did you accept?’
She didn’t answer for a long time. When she did, she spoke very carefully and very seriously, making sure that her answer was clear, and that she wasn’t befuddled by too much sparkling wine.
‘I didn’t realize what kind of man you are. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that you had some kind of shadow following you. And you do, Harry, you can’t deny it There’s some kind of darkness about you, I can’t describe it. But it’s there, I can feel it, and it frightens me.’
I could have laughed. I could have cried. ‘It frightens you?’ I asked her.
I was booked into the Thunderbird Motel on Indian School Road, an unprepossessing collection of concrete apartments that looked like an abandoned filling-station. It had frosted-glass balconies, every one of which was cracked, and plant-tubs littered with cigarette-ends and an ice-machine that made a grinding, ratding noise all night. Something dusty and scaly was lying in the middle of the walkway that led to my room. It could have been a dead armadillo but I didn’t attempt to find out.
The Thunderbird wasn’t the Biltmore, but the price of my plane ticket to Phoenix had already stretched my Mastercard to the point where I had started stammering when the girl at the United Airlines desk had swiped it through the computer.
I arrived back at the Thunderbird at about ten past eleven, after I had driven Nesta home. She lived in a neat suburban house near Chris-Town. The net curtains had twitched as she pecked me on the lips and climbed out. After the front door had closed behind her, I had switched the car radio onto Bat Out Of Hell, deafened-for-life volume, and swore myself a terrible and comprehensive oath that I would never date a librarian again. All that stuff about ‘Why, Ms Hempstead, without your glasses, you’re — you’re beautiful!’ is bull. Nesta had been just as plain without her glasses as she was with them on; and her brain had been plain, to match. And her observation that I had a shadow following me had put me seriously out of sorts.
We all have a shadow following us, for God’s sake. That doesn’t mean we want to be reminded of it.
I took a sixpack of Coors back to my room, kicked off my shoes and collapsed onto the bed to watch television. The room was small and square and very chilly but surprisingly airless, and brown. The carpet was brown, the drapes were brown, the bedcover was brown-and-orange striped. They seem to have a thing for brown in Arizona. The only decorative touches were a huge Indian-pottery ashtray on top of the television, and an amateurish picture of an Apache chief, with the caption, ‘It is better to have lightning in the hand than thunder in the mouth.’ I paraphrased that as, ‘It is better to have dollars in the bank than it is to have limitless credit.’
I watched Terminator 2 for a while, and finished a couple of beers. Then I undressed and showered. The tiles in the bathroom were brown. Even the water was brown.
After my shower, wrapped in my old faded-yellow bathrobe, I went out onto the balcony, still towelling my hair. After the deathly Kelvinator chill in my room, the night air was warm and dry and soothing. I could hear a man and a woman loudly and drunkenly arguing, and the distant yowling of coyotes. I felt as if I had arrived here from another planet
I was just turning back to my open door to fetch myself another beer when I glimpsed a young woman walking quickly across the motel courtyard below me. She was visible only for a fraction of a second before she vanished underneath the balcony, and I couldn’t see much more than her shoulders and the top of her head. But the back of my neck fizzed with shock, because I was sure that I recognized her.
I leaned over the balcony. The man and the woman were still arguing. ‘— of all the Goddamned insane things to do — of all the dumb-ass stupid ridiculous things to do —’
I listened, but the night was filled with too much arguing and traffic-noise and distorted radio-music for me to be able to hear footsteps. I heard a door slam, but that could have been anybody’s.
Wrapping my towel round my neck, I walked along the balcony as far as the steps, taking care not to tread on the dead armadillo. I thought I saw a shadow moving, and heard the sharp shuffle of a shoe on dusty concrete, and I called out, ‘Karen?’
I waited, straining my ears.
‘Karen?’ I repeated.
I wasn’t at all sure that it was Karen. The odds against it being Karen were about a zillion-to-one. Even if she was still here in Phoenix — even if Misquamacus hadn’t spirited her away to someplace else — how would she know where I was staying?
All the same, in that split-second glimpse, I had seen hair that was just like Karen’s, and shoulders that were just like Karen’s, and there had just been something in the way she carried herself that made me think that it could be her.
Wishful thinking? Well, maybe. But I stayed where I was at the top of the steps, still listening.
After three or four minutes, the door to one of the ground-floor rooms opened and a fat man with hairy shoulders came out. He saw me and stared up at me suspiciously.
‘You got a problem, friend?’ he asked me.
I shook my head.
‘I’m waiting for somebody, that’s all.’
He eyed me up and down, spat out of the side of his mouth, and then went back into his room. I thought: classy joints I have stayed in, number two hundred and thirty-six.
I went back to my room and locked the door behind me. I sat on the bed and had a long think, but I was too tired to think of anything sensible. Apart from being tired, I was filled up with one too many beers, and a gnawing apprehension about tomorrow. I knew that visiting the Great Outside was probably the only way for me to find Karen and Misquamacus, but the Great Outside was death. It was what we prissy clairvoyants like to call “the world beyond the veil.” I wasn’t at all sure that I really wanted to make a visit, even if that visit was intended to be temporary.
I switched on the television, and found myself watching A Day At The Races. I changed channels to the news, but there were no new updates on what had happened in Las Vegas. A hundred square miles of south-western Nevada are virtually a no-go area … rescue pilots have reported running into dust clouds as high as twenty thousand feet. I switched the television off again, and the bedside lamp, too.
I lay in darkness for a while, listening to the air-conditioning and the sounds of the night outside. It probably took me no more than ten minutes to fall asleep.
Fifteen
I was awakened by the feeling that there was somebody standing in the room with me. The feeling was so strong that for a moment I was too scared to open my eyes, in case it was true.
When I did look around the room, however, there was nobody there. A faint light was straining in between the dark-brown drapes, and the single red eye of the television pilot-light was still glowing, so if there had been anybody there I would have seen them at once. I had probably felt nothing more than the fading vibrations of a nightmare.
I rolled over and checked my watch on the nightstand. It was two-twenty-five in the morning, in those dark and tiny hours when the Reaper is cutting down the bearded grain, and the flowers that grow between.
I lay back on my pillow for a while, trying to imagine what the day was going to bring. But the Great Outside was unimaginable. All I could think of was darkness and more darkness.
I was right on the edge of nodding off to sleep again when I heard a faint squeaking noise from the bathroom. Not a mouse, or a cricket. More like the sound of human skin rubbing against ceramic tiles.
There was somebody there, in the bathroom. I lay totally still and held my breath and kept on listening and listening. My heart ran a slow, deep marathon inside of my ribcage, and I
could hear my blood rushing through my ears. For a very long time, though, over a minute, I heard nothing at all. A plane droning high in the sky; a truck rumbling and rattling. More nothing. And then squikkk.
Slowly, carefully, I climbed out of bed and reached for my clothes. You have no idea how much noise you make when you step into a pair of cotton-twill trousers. It sounds like thirty undisciplined carnie workers putting up a three-ring tent made of Cellophane. I buckled my belt and decided to forget about the polo shirt. I stood in the gloom of my chilly room still listening, still listening. Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming, dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
‘Who’s there?’ I said, in a voice as weak as watered milk. ‘Is anybody there?’
I glanced towards the door. The chain was still fastened, the door was still locked. If somebody had managed to break into my room, they must have come in through the bathroom window. I didn’t quite understand how, because although the bathroom window was quite wide it was only about six inches high, not nearly high enough for anybody to squeeze through it.
I padded on bare feet towards the bathroom and stood outside the door for another half-minute, listening. The hair on the back of my neck was prickling and I was shivery and goose-bumpy all over, but that was because of the chilly air-conditioning. Leastways, that was what I tried to tell myself. Frightened? Moi? Of squeaking noises in the night? I was almost paralysed with terror.
Burial Page 36
