Burial (58 page)

He looked around, the black wind ruffling his hair. ‘
I'd seen this place before, through the eyes of other people … I didn't think that I'd be coming here so soon
.'

Papago Joe stood up, and I stood up, too. It was then that a really weird and wonderful thing happened. Singing Rock
stepped
into Papago Joe, literally stepped right into him, and the two of them became one.

‘How did you do that?' I asked Papago Joe, in amazement

‘Your friend is only a spirit. He can enter anything and anybody he wants to. The beauty of it is that I now possess his wonder-working skills, and all of his knowledge of the Great Outside.'

I was about to ask Papago Joe what it
felt
like, having a spirit entering your body, when I found out. A warm sensation came over me, warm and totally enveloping, like immersing myself in a huge old-fashioned tub of hot water, and putting my head under, too. I suddenly realized that I was not only me, but Martin Vaizey, too; that his mind and mine were intermingled inside of my head, all of his memories and all of his education and all of his ideas. I suddenly
knew
what had happened in his cell at the 13th Precinct. I suddenly
knew
what the Celtic forks were for.

I laughed out loud. The sensation of being inside somebody else's mind was exhilarating. I had memories of ocean-side vacations at Cape Cod. I had memories of meals and birthday parties and Christmas trees and summer days, and they were all Martin's memories, not mine.

‘Martin?' I said. But it felt like talking to myself.

‘
I'm here
,' said Martin, his voice reverberating inside of my eardrums.

I had often heard of people being possessed, or ‘taken over', but I had never experienced it, not first-hand. All I can tell you is that it made me feel awed and impressed by the powers of the human mind. But it also made me feel love for another person in a way that I'd never felt it before. I felt all of Martin's strengths, all of Martin's frailties. I was Martin and Martin was me. I knew that he could be sympathetic and devoted and self-sacrificing and funny. I knew that he had a dry sense of humour. I also knew that, during his life, he had lied a lot, and that he always felt that he had under-achieved.

Jesus, I even knew that he liked veal Holstein.

Papago Joe said, ‘Come on, Harry. We have to find out where Misquamacus is now. Then we have to decide how to deal with him.'

‘How are we going to locate him?' I wanted to know.

‘We use these eagle-sticks. They're spiritually sensitive, as well as geographically directional. Indian wonder-workers discovered a long time ago that wherever a spirit travels, he leaves a trail behind him … the spiritual equivalent to footprints. And if they leave a trail, that trail can be followed. Where was the last place you saw Misquamacus?'

‘Back at my motel room.'

‘Very well, then … that's where we'll start.'

Papago Joe sorted through the eagle-sticks until he found one that would take us westward. ‘This is where Singing Rock's talents come into play,' he told me, holding up one of the feathered sticks. ‘I never could have found this so quickly, not without him. Come on, take a hold. We're about to go travelling places.'

I stood beside him in that darkest of worlds, and together we grasped the eagle-stick. I didn't dare to look upward, because I knew that there was nothing above me but empty sky, and I was terrified that I was going to fall. But Martin did a lot to calm me down and steady my nerve. He had
already experienced enough of the Great Outside to know that the only real danger came from the spirits and shadows who roamed it — spirits of shamans and wonder-workers, shadows of demons and men who were not only men, but wolves and buffalo, too.

I felt the eagle-stick's spiritual sensitivity. I felt it so quickly and acutely that I whipped my hand away, as if it had caught fire. Martin of course was highly responsive to spirits — much more responsive than I normally was. But I hadn't been prepared for the flash of razor-sharp darkness that cut westward straight through the air towards Phoenix, and the Thunderbird Motel.

‘Hold on!' shouted Papago Joe. ‘Don't let it go again!'

I gripped the eagle-stick and it was then that we flew. Well, we didn't actually fly, not in the sense that we flapped our arms and went up in the air. But the darkness flashed past us with an ear-splitting
kkrakkkkkkkkk
! and we were someplace else altogether.

I almost lost my balance. I staggered, slipped, and then managed to stand up straight.

‘Careful,' said Papago Joe. ‘The last thing you want to do now is sprain your ankle, or something stupid like that.'

I looked around us. At first I couldn't understand where we were. There were no lights, no signs, no streets, no nothing. But then I saw a dark and shadowy hump in the distance, and there was no mistaking that dark and shadowy hump. That was Camelback Mountain, just outside of Phoenix. In fact — when I looked around — I realized that we were standing on the exact location of the Thunderbird Motel, except that the Thunderbird Motel wasn't here any more, or maybe it hadn't been built yet. The landscape was dusty and rutted and cracked with drought, and not far away a dry riverbed twisted its way toward downtown Phoenix: or what had once been downtown Phoenix, or would be, or
might
be, I couldn't decide which.

‘What is this?' I asked Papago Joe. ‘The present or the future? Or what?'

But even before he could answer me, I heard Martin Vaizey's answer inside of my own head.
Not the future. Not the past. This is death. The land of the dead. Time never passes. Nothing ever changes. The dead never grow old, Harry. Not like you and Karen and Papago foe are going to grow old
.

Papago Joe was fumbling with his eagle-sticks again. ‘Here —' he said. ‘Here. This is where Misquamacus walked. This is where Misquamacus went to. Harry! Follow me … I've got traces of him everywhere!'

We walked westward, almost as far as 24th Street — or at least as far as the dusty burro-track where 24th Street would eventually be, or
was
, in some alternative reality. The whole thing was beginning to confuse me badly, and I was glad that we didn't run into Misquamacus right then, because I think that he could have taken me out like a cheap candle. I was scared, shocked, and was seriously uncomfortable with the idea of being dead.

Phoenix had been forcibly dragged downwards — down to the Great Outside. The city looked like nothing more than an isolated mountain range, its foothills formed from twisted automobiles and collapsed motels and crumbled adobes — its high-rise office buildings marking out the peaks. In spite of the wreckage, in spite of the windblown trash, Phoenix still retained a dark funereal dignity, because most of the major buildings still stood, here in the darkness of Indian magic, here in the darkness of death. They had been dragged downwards into their own mirror-image, and stood together like so many brooding gravestones: the Valley National Bank and the Arizona Bank and the First Federal Savings Building and the Hyatt Regency, the pride of Sun Valley, all in darkness, all suspended like stalactites over a sky that would never see the sun.

The Great Outside was becoming what Misquamacus
and all of the Ghost Dance preachers had predicted it would be: the cemetery of white supremacy.

Papago Joe said, ‘Here … I've found his trail here … off to the north-east'

‘How far?' I asked him.

‘I'm not sure … six hundred, maybe seven hundred miles.'

‘Colorado?' I suggested. ‘He dragged down two towns in Colorado. Maybe he's counting coup there, too.'

Papago Joe looked serious. ‘You realize something, don't you, if you and I don't stop him? This is going to be worse than any nuclear holocaust. This is going to be worse than anything you ever believed possible. When we bombed Iraq, we talked about bombing them back to the Stone Age. Well, Misquamacus is going to do that to us,
now
, for real. He's going to drag us back to buffaloes and bows-and-arrows and living like savages. It
wasn't
wonderful, it
wasn't
idyllic, it
wasn't
paradise. It was only white men's fiction that made it sound that way, and Dee Brown being dewy-eyed. The truth was that it was hard and it was dirty and it was wasteful and it was primitive. Fuck Hiawatha. Fuck
Dances With Wolves
. We were a throwback, an aboriginal people who outlived our time; and that's all there is to it. And if I'm not being a good proud Native American and politically correct, then so be it But at least I'm telling it like it is.'

I stared at him. ‘I never heard an Indian speak like that before.'

‘They daren't, usually, said Papago Joe. ‘But a lot of us feel the same way. If there's anything worse than being killed by cholera and rifles, it's being killed by understanding.'

He lowered his head. I didn't know what else to say to him. But at last he looked up with those dark glittering eyes and said, ‘Come on. We're after Misquamacus. By the time it gets dark tonight, I want that son-of-a-bitch's scalp on my lodgepole.' With the same rush of darkness and the same
instantaneous
krrrrakkkkkkk
! we found ourselves in black undulating grasslands, amid the wreckage of a small town.

We walked towards the wreckage slowly. It didn't take us long to find out where we were. Pritchard, Colorado, population 335. The sign lay close beside us in the grass, twisted and spattered with blood.

We circled the debris that was scattered on the prairie, but there was nothing we could do. We saw little children lying dead; we saw women with white faces, their lips already tinged with green. We saw dogs and cats and a turned-over Caterpillar earthmover, and a gas-station canopy, and hundreds of cans of 7-Up.

‘Let's carry on,' I told Papago Joe. ‘We won't find anything here.'

He used another eagle-stick to sense where Misquamacus had gone next. Then
krrrrakkkkkk
! and we had arrived in another part of Colorado. This was high prairie country, buffalo country, where the wind was blowing black and shrill. Across the banks of a slowly-winding river, a town had been torn to pieces. We stood on the summit of a low slope, and looked around at the bodies and the bits and pieces; the tragic debris of a devastated community.

‘My guess is this is Maybelline,' said Papago Joe. He poked at the rubble with a stick. ‘You know something, Harry? This isn't revenge any longer. This is even worse than genocide. This is killing the future. This is going back.'

‘What now?' I asked him, dully.

‘We keep on hunting him, that's what now.'

‘But supposing we never find him? I mean, he's not stupid. He must
know
that we've thought about tracking him down.'

‘Perhaps. But he could be arrogant enough not to worry about it. You know what they say. Pride comes before a pratfall.'

‘Oh, yeah? Who says that?'

‘How should I know? The United Stiltwalkers of America? Who cares? The main thing is that we keep on chasing after him and never let up. This Misquamacus of yours is Mr Relentless, from what you've told me. The only way to fight Mr Relendess is to be Mr Double-Relentless. Beat him at his own game, hunt him down, harry him, chase him; and when you've found him —'

Papago Joe didn't have to finish his sentence. We both knew that neither of us knew how to deal with Misquamacus, once we'd found him. We would have to play it by ear. Misquamacus was already dead. He was even deader than we were. But he had entered a realm of spiritual reincarnation where he was powerful and vengeful and highly magical, and where he was almost ready to sit at Gitche Manitou's right hand. A favoured warrior, a great wonder-worker, the greatest of all the wonder-workers, probably.

How do you finish off a man with those kind of credentials?

Papago Joe sorted through the eagle-sticks, until he found one that tingled to his touch.

‘He's headed north-east again, quite a long stretch. Close on a thousand miles, by the feel of it.'

‘Chicago,' I said. It made some kind of sense, after all. Misquamacus was travelling from one place to another, touching his victims, counting coup. Every dead enemy he touched would gild his reputation even more brightly, and make his eventual glorification all the more certain. By the time he had finished, he would probably be counted as the most destructive Indian warrior who had ever lived. Or died. Or whatever.

I stood next to Papago Joe and grasped the eagle-stick. As I did so, however, I saw something moving in the grass. Not something,
somebody
. At first I thought it was an injured bird, trying to fly. Then I suddenly realized that it was somebody running. A young girl, running.

Without saying a word to Papago Joe, I ran after her. My legs thrashed through the grass. At last I caught up with her and snatched at her arm. She twisted around, staring at me wildly.

‘It's all right!' I gasped. ‘I'm not going to hurt you!'

‘Who are you?' she panted. Her face was deathly pale. She was young — no more than fourteen or fifteen, and yet there was an expression in her eyes, an odd, watchful darkness, that made me think for just an instant that she had to be older. An old personality, wearing a young and flawless mask.

‘It's okay,' I repeated. She was panting and I was wheezing. ‘I'm a friend. I'm not even dead. Not properly, anyway.'

‘Well, no more am I,' she declared.

‘You're not dead? Then what are you doing here? You know where this is, don't you? The Great Outside: the Happy Hunting Ground. This is where people go to die.'

‘I'm looking for my brother,' she said. ‘He was lost in the storm, and I'm trying to find him.'

‘Come on,' I said. ‘Come and meet Joe. He knows more about this than I do.'