“Do you have a
plan?” asked Neil.
“Sure,” put in
Harry. “We promise
them
beads and firewater, just like
we used to do in the old days. Then, when they’re trying on their beads and
drinking their firewater, we steal their sacred medicine circle and build a
downtown shopping mall on it.”
Singing Rock
took out a pack of chewing tobacco and grinned. “I’m sorry, Harry. It won’t
work a second time.”
Neil bit his
lip. “Listen,” he said, “that’s my son out there.
My son and
all my son’s friends.
What’s going to
happen to them?” With a measured bite, Singing Rock took a mouthful of tobacco
and chewed it steadily for a moment. Then he spat out onto the dust.
“That’s
something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about,” he said, in his deep,
serious voice.
“You have to
understand that if
Misquamacus
successfully emerges
out of Toby’s mind and takes on physical shape, then the drain of energy which
Toby suffers will almost certainly be fatal.”
Neil felt as if
someone had hit him from behind. “What?” he said weakly.
Singing Rock
lifted both his hands. “I am telling you that because you must be prepared for
the very worst. There is very little chance that once the medicine men have
used those children to reincarnate
themselves,
they
will allow them to live.”
“Then what’s
the use?” asked Neil. His face was very white. “What’s the use of trying to
save them at all?”
“It’s not just
the children,” said Harry. “We’re trying to prevent this whole state from being
torn apart. But there’s something else, too, isn’t there, Singing Rock?”
Singing Rock
hesitated,
then
nodded. “I guess you have a right to
know the best as well as the worst. If by any slim chance we do manage to
defeat these medicine men, and send them back to the outside, then the children
will be restored unharmed. It is hard to explain to a white man why this should
happen, but there is an eternal natural principle in Red Indian magic of
balance and redress.
A sort of occult Newton’s Law.”
Neil turned
away and walked to the end of the veranda. Harry glanced at Singing Rock with
an expression that suggested he might go after him and try to reassure him, but
Singing Rock shook his head.
“Leave him. If
he’s going to help us, he has to face up to the truth.”
Neil heard
Singing Rock’s words, but he didn’t turn around. He looked out over the small
yard that, until last week, had been his plain but happy home. With a feeling
that brought tears to his eyes, he noticed that Toby had left his Tonka
bulldozer out by the woodshed. He would have been annoyed normally, in case it
rained and the bulldozer got rusty. But now it didn’t matter.
Toby was never
going to play with it again. It might as well stay there.
Inside the
house, the telephone was ringing. He guessed it was probably Mr. Saperstein,
but somehow he couldn’t summon the energy to move from where he was. He heard
Harry go inside and bang the kitchen door. His senses seemed to be dulled, and
all he wanted to do was find a bed someplace and go to sleep.
Out of the
corner of his eye, though, he was sure he could see something wavering in the
grass beyond the fence. He peered more intently, and shaded his face against
the dull, coarse light that filtered through the heavy clouds. There was
something out there that was shifting and flapping like a pale transparent
flag. Then it began to grow clearer, an instant photograph developing on plain
paper. It was the figure of Dunbar, in his wide-brimmed hat and his coat, and
with his gun belt slung low around his hips.
“Singing Rock!”
said Neil, breathlessly. Singing Rock raised his eyes, and then quickly looked
to the place where Neil was pointing.
“It’s Dunbar!”
said Neil. “That’s him-the man in the long white duster coat!”
The Indian
medicine man rose to his feet. As he did so, Dunbar lifted his hat from his
head and waved once. Then, gradually, like the morning mist from the ocean, he
faded away again.
“Did you see
him?” asked Neil, almost frantic. “Did you see him out there?”
Singing Rock
said, “Yes, I saw him.”
“Thank God.
Thank God for that. I was beginning to think I was imagining him.”
“I don’t know
that his warnings can do anything to help us,” said Singing Rock. “It looks to
me as though he’s just some disturbed spirit, vaguely manifesting himself
around the fringe of all this astral activity.”
Neil didn’t
take his eyes away from the grassy slope where Dunbar had vanished. ‘Tm not so
sure,” he said softly. “I believe he helped me when the wooden man was after
me, and I believe he’s going to try to help me now. Whenever he appears, I have
this feeling of reassurance.”
Singing Rock
looked briefly over at the hills beyond the fence. “Don’t rely too much on
spirits,” he said. “Some of them are very treacherous. We have stories in South
Dakota of demons who would take the shape of friendly dogs, and lead hunters
into rivers and over the edge of cliffs.”
“Dunbar isn’t
like that,” Neil said.
The kitchen
door opened and Harry came out, holding a torn piece of brown envelope in his
hand.
“Have they
found them?” asked Neil. “Have they told you if Toby’s all right?”
Harry squinted
at his scribbled notes. “They’ve found them. The bus is up at Lake
Berryessa
, where it was supposed to be. A Highway Patrol
car spotted it parked on the bridge over Pope Creek.”
“Parked on the
bridge? What was it doing there?” asked Neil. “Did they say where the children
were?”
Harry nodded.
“The children are inside the bus. When the Highway Patrol officers tried to
drive up close to see what was wrong, their patrol car caught fire and
exploded. One of the officers is suffering from serious burns.”
“Oh God,” said
Neil. “It’s started.” “You’re damn right it’s started,” said Harry. “That must
have been Master Andy Beaver at work.
The automotive arsonist.”
Singing Rock
said, “The boy called Andy Beaver is harboring the Paiute medicine man Broken
Fire. I think so, anyway. He was the only child who referred to the day of the
dark stars as the day of the mouth coming from the sky, which is an expression
that only the Paiutes ever used.
And, of course,
he has Broken Fire’s talent for setting things ablaze at a distance.” “Broken
Fire?” asked Harry. “Was he strong?” Singing Rock laid a hand on his shoulder.
“One of the strongest, I’m afraid. The only possible weaknesses he had were an
inability to appease the demons of cholera and disease, and no talent for
slaving
the souls of his people who had been sent to the
great outside by drinking too much whiskey, or by falling under iron horses. In
other words, he was a master of every occult event except those which stemmed
from things the white men had done-like spreading diseases, and building
railroads, and distilling alcohol.”
Neil said, ‘For
Christ’s sake
don’t
let’s stand here discussing the
situation. Let’s get out there.”
“Neil’s right,” put in Harry.
“If the Highway Patrol starts
getting upset, they’re going to bring their guns out, and that’s going to be no
fun for anyone.
Especially them.”
“Very well,”
nodded Singing Rock. “Can you bring my suitcase, Harry? And Neil-if you have
any beer or soft drinks, and any cookies or cold cuts, then bring them along.
It’s going to be the hardest night you ever went through.”
“Let’s just
hope it isn’t the hardest and the last,” said Harry, pushing open the kitchen
door.
Inland, as they
drove in Neil’s pickup through the Valley of the Moon, the afternoon was
densely hazy and hot. They negotiated the curved, cultivated hills that rose
between Sonoma and Napa counties, past hillside farms of tan-colored cattle and
furrowed fields, and then they were sloping down
Into
the broad flats of the southern Napa Valley. Ahead of them, blue and forested
against dim sky, was the rugged outline of the
Vaca
Mountains. It was up there, beyond those peaks, that Lake
Berryessa
lay
.
A long rectangular sheet of
ruffled water, twelve miles long and two miles across.
Singing Rock,
steadily chewing tobacco, said, “In certain parts of New England, the Indians
called rounded mountains
uncanoonucks
, which simply
translated means ‘women’s breasts.’“
Harry, joggling
up and down comfortably in his seat as Neil sped the pickup along the blacktop,
commented, “What name do they have for medicine men who try to keep you amused
by telling you trivial oddities of Indian lore?”
His elbow
resting casually on the pickup’s window ledge, Singing Rock turned to Harry and
smiled. “The same name they have for irritable paleface mystics.”
Neil leaned
over and turned on the pickup’s radio. He twiddled the dial through blurts of
country-and-western music, snatches of evangelism, burbles of laughing. He
said, “Maybe there’s some news about the school bus. The story should have
gotten out by now.”
Singing Rock
asked, “How long is it going to take us to get up to the lake from here?”
“Maybe another
twenty minutes at most,” Neil told him.
They were
speeding along the freeway through Napa now, and he was switching lanes to
leave the main road and head east through the city and up to the mountains.
He added, “I
hope to God we’re not too late. If anything happened to Toby now, I tell you-”
Harry said
reassuringly, “You heard what Singing Rock said. Nothing’s going to break until
the moon goddess appears.
It’s-what-four o’clock now.
We’ve got six hours to go.”
They drove
through the outskirts of Napa, along Lincoln Avenue. The traffic was heavy and
flowing at a slow, sedate twenty miles an hour. There was nothing that Neil
could do except hold his speed down and wait until they were clear of the city.
At each red traffic signal, he sat biting his lip and drumming his fingers on
the steering wheel.
“Come on, come
on, you bastard,” he muttered under his breath, as they finally crossed the
city limit behind a rusting Matador. He put his foot down, and they pulled
ahead, roaring along the eucalyptus-shaded avenue that led to the mountains.
A couple of
miles east of Napa, the road began to rise sharply, and twist and turn itself
between scrub and rocks. The pickup’s tires howled and whinnied as Neil kept
his foot flat on the floor and spun them around one tight curve after another.
They passed by fields of dry grasses, fences, and dusty roadside pull-offs.
They crossed bridges and culverts. And up above them, the sky grew heavier and
darker, thick with inky clouds. A branch of lightning flickered momentarily in
the distance, and dried leaves rushed across the road in the draft of the
oncoming storm.
Harry said,
“The goddamn sky’s threatening enough, let alone the situation.”
Singing Rock
raised a hand to hush him. “We’re getting close now. Very close. I’m going to
need all my concentration.”
They drove
around a curving downward grade, and the lake at last appeared. Its waters were
almost black, even darker than the lowering clouds up above it. A surface wind
lifted the waves in plumes of white spray, like the scattered feathers of a
fallen bird. They looked sinister and unsettled, impenetrable depths that were
waiting for the dead and the drowned.
“The Pope Creek
bridge
is around here,” said Neil, driving them along
the rocky shoreline.
Hardin and
Maxwell and Burton creeks all run in together with Pope and they make quite an
inlet.”
They rounded
the corner toward the bridge, and they were confronted by a roadblock:
half-a-dozen Highway Patrol cars, with their red lights flashing, a contingent
of police from Napa, and a barricade of red-and-white sawhorses.
A cop in
aviator sunglasses waved Neil to the side of the road.
“I’m sorry,
fellow. You’re going to have to turn around and go back. The road’s going to be
closed here for quite a white.”
Neil said, “My
boy’s on that bus. I’m Neil
Fenner
. His name is Toby
Fenner
.”
The cop said,
“You got some proof of that?”
Neil handed
over his driver’s license. The cop scrutinized it, nodded, and gave it back.
Then he pointed to the rough pull-off just before the bridge itself. “Park your
vehicle there,
please
, off the highway. Then cross to
the other side of the road and make
yourself
known to
that officer with the bullhorn.” Neil said, “Are they okay so far?
The kids?”
The cop tugged at the peak of his cap.
“As far as we know, sir.
But nobody’s been able to get
within fifty feet of the bus, and we can’t raise any answers with the bullhorn.
A couple of officers got themselves hurt real bad.” “I heard,” Neil told him.
Turning off the
road, Neil parked the pickup where the cop had directed him. Then he and Harry and
Singing Rock climbed out, and surveyed the place that
Misquamacus
had chosen for his battleground.
The creek was
deep and wide here, and the bridge spanned almost three hundred feet. It was a
straightforward, two-lane bridge, with a crisscross steel balustrade running
along each side. A sign warned that it was forbidden to dive from the bridge
into the creek, but Neil could remember seeing kids jumping off the railing
into the water below just for the hell of it. It was a fifty-foot drop, but if
the creek was flowing well, it was safe enough.
On the other
side of the bridge was a wide dusty area which visiting tourists used as a
motor-home park. The Highway Patrol had cleared it now and fenced it off. A
police helicopter had landed there, and Neil could see a very senior police
officer climbing out.