by Glover, Dan
Evalena's death would've been but a temporary solution. Yani knew that but her rage had gotten the better of her. Now, she had to take more care. It all had to end even if that meant her own death in the process.
They had to change places, her and Evalena. It wasn't something easily accomplished yet under the present circumstances she doubted if she'd anything to lose in the trying.
If she could trap Evalena in the aged body she now inhabited the girl would have no opportunity to reclaim her memory before she died. She'd need the piedra—did Church still have it?—but even if she had the stone in her possession she didn’t understand how to accomplish the feat. Still, without it she was lost.
Maybe the translucent patches on her skin were the key... with the sudden onset of age they had grown even more pronounced. Yani suspected it'd been some sort of macabre experiment... what they did to her on her quinceañera. Most likely someone had mixed water with the piedra and impregnated the resultant liquid into granules of sand before scattering the concoction over her body.
She'd always thought it was the work of the madman she called father but now she suspected the truth. Evalena was behind it. What was she trying to accomplish? Was she seeking to replicate the piedra using living flesh? Was that the secret? Was the piedra actually alive?
It made sense. How else could something inanimate interact with biological beings like it did? If the piedra was alive it could reproduce. Was that the experiment that had taken place on her body? If so, what did she need to do to activate the reproduction?
She had plenty of questions but no answers.
"I've revised my will, Yani. You and Church will never have to worry about money again."
"Hush please, Rancher... I don't care about any of that. Don't try and talk right now... you'll be feeling better soon."
She was lying and his eyes told her that he knew it... the light in them was slowly going dim like a fire burning low, flickering a few times, and then finally going out. During her long life she'd seen it happen countless times before, the intensity of life turning into resignation and then evaporating all together.
"Listen, Yani... there isn’t much time left. I made sure my attorney has a copy of the will plus the original is in the safe. Promise me one thing..."
"Of course, my darling... what is it?"
"Hunt down that witch and kill her for me... she had no right to do what she did to Billy... and I'm pretty sure she's the reason I'm dying too."
Getting to Cuba wouldn’t be a problem. She'd decided flying wasn’t the best idea but there were plenty of boats for hire. She hadn’t been on the island in decades... perhaps their old house had been razed or someone else lived there now, but she doubted it. That was where she'd find Evalena.
Leaving the air conditioned airport she walked into the tropical sun of a blast furnace. Though Texas was hot the humidity wasn’t as oppressive as in Miami. It gradually sapped what little strength she had left until she had to sit down on a bench.
Her tattered heart was yelping so loudly she wondered if passersby might hear it. The sound of it had a raspy quality that disturbed Yani, like thickened black ink being pumped through a billows... she hated to think she might die before she could fulfill Rancher's last request.
"Are you all right, Miss?"
For just a second she thought Billy Ford was standing in front of her. He had a concerned look on his face... there was an unmistakable furrow between his brows that always formed when Billy worried over something or someone.
As she blinked her eyes against the harsh light of day the face gradually morphed into that of a stranger, a boy who was unmistakably Cuban with his green eyes and olive dark skin. He reminded her of someone she once knew long ago. Hajdani was his name... the man she once called father. Had he recognized her somehow? Of course that boy would be an old man by now. What could she be thinking?
"I just need to sit a minute... I'll be fine. Thank you for your concern, young man."
"They'll be waiting for you. Take care, old woman... no one's forgotten who you are and what you've done."
"What do you mean by that, boy?"
The boy was looking at her now as if he was ready to flee. Did he think her mad? She wondered if the words she heard didn't issue from his throat but instead erupted inside her mind. To his credit the boy held his ground... in fact, after looking at her for a good long while he sidled up to the bench to sit beside her.
"They said you'd be coming."
"Who said that, boy?"
"You know who... if you leave this country you'll not return alive. Take my advice, old woman... turn around and to back home. This is a fight you cannot win. Leave her to us."
"I can't do that, son. I made a promise and I aim at keeping it."
The boy nodded his head, stood up, and strode off down the sidewalk trailing a lengthening shadow behind him like the devil claiming his due. It would be dark soon... she wouldn’t be going anywhere except to a motel room, at least not tonight.
When she looked again, the boy had vanished. Or more likely he'd never been sitting beside her at all... her imagination was probably working overtime again. Her aging body seemed to have lost all capacity to tell reality from illusion... she yearned for a good and a deep sleep... instead, she merely napped.
She missed lying down in her warm bed while darkness descended with the sound of the stone singing in her ears and arising with the dawn to greet the new day. She longed for the forgetfulness of slumber yet she dreaded the dreams that were bound to find her. Even as a girl she'd been prone to nightmares... now, they invaded her waking life.
Or had they? On the bench next to her lay a scrap of paper which she was sure wasn't there when she sat down. Picking it up, she saw it was a voucher for a boat ride to the Cuban shores.
Chapter 44
Waking next to Tree Patterson was like a lightning bolt to his heart.
He'd been dreaming that he was caught in a vast cobweb. Though he struggled to set himself free all his exertions only alerted a swarm of spiders to his predicament. Rather than rushing at him they seemed to hold back allowing him to work his body ever deeper into their snare.
The spiders were angry about the cat.
He'd dreamed how when he was a boy he noticed how a orange cat had taken up with his Tia Evalena. The stupid thing followed her everywhere. One day after she'd been particularly mean to him about something he couldn't remember he took it out on that orange cat.
The image haunted him... of how he coaxed the cat into his arms and then carried it off into the hardpan of north Texas where not even lizards could survive more than a day. He'd left it there, chasing it away when it tried to follow him home.
When Tia went outside to feed the critter, of course it didn't appear. She called and called for that cat. Perhaps it was the guilt showing on his face but she seemed to know that he was responsible for the cat's disappearance.
The next day he went to the area where he had left the cat but all he could find was a clump of orange colored fur where a coyote or a hawk had made a meal. For a long time after that he kept hearing a meow following him but when he turned around to look there was nothing there.
"It was just a cat."
It was one of those dreams where he thought he was awake and he was talking to someone standing in the murk watching him struggle against the steel cords of the cobweb in which he had become entangled. He thought if he explained himself whoever it was would come cut him loose before the spiders got him.
But it wasn’t a person watching him... as he struggled to tell his tale the silhouette seemed to morph into a shape not dissimilar to a gigantic cat. Its coat was as dark as the void out of which it seemed to gather its form. Somehow he knew that hate was its name and fear trailing behind it in tiny bundles of spiders.
"It was just a cat."
He knew with certainly that it wasn’t just a cat. What he'd done reverberated through the years and now he was paying for it. Wildly thrashing hi
s arms and legs about only seemed to further entrap him inside the sticky net.
"Church! Wake up! You're having a nightmare!"
It seemed strange how the cat could speak and though he couldn’t tell he'd envisioned it as a male, not a female. Yet the voice was that of a girl he remembered from way back then when he'd exiled that cat to the terrors of the desert.
Surfacing—as if he'd dove too deeply into the cold creek water in back of the chabola and could hardly hold his breath another second—he broke through the dream into the early light of dawn with Tree shaking him by reaching through where a window once was from where she slept inside the cab of the pickup truck.
"Tree... thank you... I thought I was... well, now I can't remember... it had something to do with a cat..."
"You kept saying 'it's just a cat.' You woke me up talking in your sleep several times tonight but this time you seemed to be in trouble."
"I'm starting to remember... it's my Tia... something about a cat that she liked and how I took it away one day... only I don't remember actually doing something like that. Maybe I was having a dream inside a dream... do you ever do that, Tree?"
"No... I don’t think so. Are you okay, Church? You look pale... and your hands are shaking."
"I'm just hungry... let's see if we can find a restaurant, Tree."
If they drove on the interstate highway the map said it was a twenty four hour drive to Miami but since the old pickup truck wouldn't travel more than fifty miles an hour they decided it was best to stick to the back roads as Church had done driving to Mexico.
They'd pulled off the two lane highway to sleep behind an abandoned filling station just across the Louisiana border... Tree had been driving since they left Guthrie and though Church wanted to spell her his eyelids were so heavy he could hardly keep them open.
Unlike the harsh Texas landscape they left behind everything in Louisiana seemed damp. They had to skirt an enormous lake nearly becoming lost in the swampy region surrounding it. Eventually they found their way into a town called Blanchard which didn't seem all together different than Guthrie other than for the name and the way the townsfolk talked with a southern drawl rather than a western twang.
"Oh... they have hominy grits, Church! I thought the diner back home was the only place on earth where you could get them!"
Blanchard seemed lost in time. Along Main Street Church could see brass horse hitches still being used while enormous magnolia trees lined the town square. Inside the restaurant old men in bib overalls leaned over to spit right on the floor while surveying the two of them as they made their way to the nearest empty booth. Church was still dressed as a cowpoke with his ten gallon hat and his hand-made Texas boots while Tree wore her waitress uniform.
"I feel a little out of place here, Tree. Let's make our order to go."
"Oh sit down, Church... I've been waiting for fifteen years for you to ask me out... you aren't getting off so easy now. Buy me breakfast, cowboy."
He felt the blush all the way down to his boots as he grinned back at Tree and slid into the sticky Naugahyde covered seat opposite the girl. He'd always thought she was pretty but this morning she seemed extraordinarily beautiful with her hair all a muss and the crooked smile that kept lighting up her face.
"You're just joshing me, aren’t you."
"What do you mean by that, Church? Joshing you about what?"
"Waiting for me to ask you out... you're kidding me, right?"
"Do you remember the first day you saw me, Church?"
"Sure... it was the day when I got onto the school bus... you were sitting just down the aisle from me."
"So you did notice me!"
"Notice you... Tree... I thought you were the most gorgeous girl I ever saw in my life."
"Well then why didn’t you ever talk to me, Church Gutiérrez? My sister thought you might be gay but I knew better."
"I could never think of something to say... even now I keep pinching myself just to make sure this isn’t all a dream."
"Hello would have been a nice start... I always thought you hated me for something I either did or didn’t do... or that since you lived on the Triple Six you were too good to have anything to do with a girl like me... or maybe I wasn’t pretty enough like the other girls."
"Tree! I never hated you! I guess I just never knew how to act around a beautiful girl."
"So you do think I'm pretty!"
"Well, yeah... you're the prettiest girl in Guthrie... maybe the whole county... you must know that though, right?"
"I never thought of myself like that, Church. My mother always told me that I was plain. My sisters were the pretty ones... I felt like day old bread next to them. I still do, I suppose. I can't remember anyone ever telling me that I was pretty."
"Your mother is wrong, Tree."
"Do you have enough money for a motel room, Church?"
"Sure... I have plenty of money... why?"
"I thought it might be nicer than sleeping in that old truck of yours... I mean, if you don't mind sharing a room with plain old me, that is."
Chapter 45
She remembered the cat from the hazy days of her childhood.
He'd been her first friend, an ally against the terrors of the world. The cat had followed her from the Middle East to Africa and later to Cuba. In those days it didn't seem strange to her that a cat should live virtually forever but finding him waiting for her after being away from the island for so long was cause for a celebration.
She'd named him Adame... a play on her first father's name and one she thought the man might have appreciated had he lived long enough to know the animal. Leaving Cuba had been hard for her, made even more difficult by knowing she'd left Adame behind to fend for himself.
To the best of her recollection the cat had come through her high window at the temple of Ur. To achieve the feat Adame had climbed up the shear outside wall of stone some one hundred feet above the ground, crawled through her open window, and snuggled under the blankets on her bed.
Entering the room and seeing the big cat sleeping in her bed had delighted her... it seemed some sort of sign that he would come to her room out of all the possible entry ways into the palace though in those days she wasn't an adept at reading the omens.
Later she took him with her to their palace in Alexandria back in the days when her family was still held in high regard among even the pharaohs of Egypt.
When she left Africa under the threat of death having outstayed her welcome Adame followed behind her despite her protestations for him to stay behind. She had no destination in mind nor did she have any method of procuring food for herself much less for him. Still, he followed.
The cat was instrumental in helping her find a way to board a ship going east to the New World. The hold teemed with rats—which kept Adame fat—as well as a group of slaves destined to be sold in the Americas. Evalena and the big cat made a nest among the bales of hay meant to feed the livestock that shared the hold.
The first week she ate nothing. Though Adame brought her freshly killed rats each day she had no way of cooking them without drawing attention to herself. The second week she still shunned the bloody carcasses the cat so lovingly proffered. By the third week hunger got the better of her. She skinned the fresh kill and ate it raw. From that moment on she would eat no cooked meat at all.
It was like he knew, that cat. Once she tasted raw flesh she realized what she'd been missing by searing it with flames. Adame had taken care of her all during the crossing and when they finally came ashore in the Caribbean he had been her only solace after she'd been forced into giving up the piedra.
The man to whom she had entrusted the stone had turned on her by claiming the piedra as his own while simultaneously denouncing Evalena as a woman of ill repute. He caught her by surprise... up until that moment she was sure the man was under her dominion... the stone's pull proved so strong that she was no match for its force, however.
If Yani had the piedra she knew the
girl wouldn't be able to resist it... she'd do anything to keep the stone for her own rather than handing it over to another, unless it was someone she trusted implicitly... someone like Church.
The boy had fooled her. She always took him as one to watch yet she didn’t realize the secret might that he harbored... unbeknownst to her he had the strength of will it took to be a master of the stone. Even she had her limitations...
She'd heard it said that the piedra could sing though she'd never had the joy of having listened to its melody. Perhaps her senses weren't in tune with it... or maybe the stone remembered what she had done to obtain it and it disapproved.
Adame had touched it once.
She'd been careless and left the piedra out in the open... she liked watching it hover in space and flicker... enjoyed the way its colors were constantly flowing and shifting like curtains of light caught in amber... so she'd allowed the stone to remain outside of the box where she normally kept it. Or perhaps she only thought she allowed it... it was more likely the piedra influenced her.
Opening the box in which it was kept and turning it upside down released the stone yet it never fell to the floor. Instead it hung motionless in the air like a tiny planet all its own pulsing and vibrating with an inner energy and rotating ever so slowly. Evalena sat mesmerized by the piedra as its charisma kept her enthralled for hours.
She often saw Adame watching it too... it seemed to excite his attention as much as hers. They both spent hours staring into its ever-altering texture. She never thought the big cat would actually go after it or she wouldn’t have allowed him around it.
The stone didn’t seem to harm him in any way... in fact, when he reached a paw out for it, the piedra simply vanished and reappeared in a different spot. It seemed to be playing games with Adame... the big cat took to stalking the stone and the moment he seemed ready to seize it in his teeth the piedra disappeared only to reappear across the room.
