The Face-Changers (37 page)

“Where are you going?”

“To meet someone.”

After Jane was gone, Christine sat in the middle of the living room and stared out the window at the upper branches of a tree slowly swaying against the cloudy sky beyond it. She thought about Jane on an airplane. Pretty soon the silver airplane would rise up to pierce those clouds like a little needle. Christine was already alone.

The silence of the apartment was suddenly palpable, and it forced her to think. She kept coming back to a nagging worry that was almost like guilt. She had let Jane save her life, then spent all of this time with her. Had she remembered to tell her everything? Probably it wasn’t worth anything to Jane, she assured herself. And Jane wasn’t the problem. Christine was the one who had to be afraid. She had only a few secrets left.

Something just below Violet Peterson’s chest was clutched again by the throbbing of the drums, quickened and carried along with their rhythm. The wild, falsetto voices of the singers rose and fell and made her throat contract with theirs as she waited in the crowd. This was the part of the doings that she had found she loved the most. It brought back the amazement that she had felt as a small child, when the sound of the drums had held her in some space between physical and emotional, and the wailing male voices that were clearer and a pitch higher than the voices of normal life had seemed to come from somebody far older and more important than her uncles and cousins.

Violet glanced at her watch. It was seven o’clock, and the Entry was beginning. She saw the four men of the honor guard moving up into the big circle. The first of them carried an American flag; the next, a blue one with pictures on it she couldn’t make out that she supposed must be the flag of Oklahoma. Then there were two men carrying feathered staffs.

They all wore Cherokee gear – beaded buckskin shirts, tall horsehair roaches on their heads with feathers jutting out at angles. She recognized some of the medals pinned to their shirts: two – no, three – purple hearts, a silver star. The one with the American flag had a few she had not seen before.

She had gotten used to the way powwows went. It seemed unsurprising that the honor guard was always made up of combat veterans, because that was the way people had done things in the Old Time. Next came the traditional male dancers, mostly older men who wore not replicas of costumes but the family heirlooms of twenty or thirty nations. Tonight, in this group, there were plains shirts made of deer that had probably died before Custer, embroidered with trade beads and porcupine quills, and bear-claw necklaces and eagle-feather war bonnets. Then came the grass dancers with long fringe, then the fancy dancers, wearing iridescent colors that didn’t exist a hundred years ago and bells and turkey-feather bustles and hoops and war paint.

Next came the traditional women dancers, then women in jingle dresses with cones made of the shiny metal tops of chewing tobacco cans, clacking together as the women danced. Then there were the women fancy dancers, with dresses embroidered and beaded and even sequinned so they reminded Violet of hummingbirds. Nearly all of the fancy dancers wore a single feather in their hair, something that in the Old Time would have been about the same as wearing your husband’s breechcloth. The shawls were breathtaking, worn over the shoulders and held out in the dance like the wings of birds.

Violet looked around her at the crowd. Before she had hit South Dakota she had never seen anyone wearing a cowboy hat except on television. There were lots of people here tonight with them, and she was starting to get used to them.

Even two of the F.B.I, stalkers had worn them tonight. The man with the little mustache and the blond woman posing as a couple were wearing black ones with fancy decorations on the crowns. She supposed that the black ones must be evening attire, because the sun during this afternoon’s doings would have baked their brains. She took another look at the woman.

She had a cute shape – probably from all the exercise they got running and jumping and aiming guns at decent people – but she had made a mistake with those blue jeans. They were way too tight. Violet almost felt sorry for her, because she just didn’t know any better than that.

She turned away from them and checked on the man with the glasses. He seemed to be fascinated, watching the dancers come in. No, she remembered. He was watching her. No matter where his eyes were when she looked at him, that was what they were all here for, and they were distressingly good at it.

She moved back from the dancers and began to circulate in the crowds. She paused at a few of the booths. At some they sold turquoise and silver jewelry from Arizona, reddish gold from the Black Hills, some beaded moccasins that were sort of like the ones she had at home, some tall ones like boots that the Apaches made. There were Navajo blankets and rugs, a lot of baskets, Hopi pottery. She stopped and bought some fry bread with powdered sugar and a Coke. She could get used to this stuff, she decided, but it had to be loaded with calories.

Behind her she could hear the blaring amplified voice of the master of ceremonies making the opening speech, then some words that must be a prayer in his own language. Then the drums began again, and the grass dancers were out in the circle. They wore costumes with two-foot fringe swinging from their arms and backs and around their legs as they whirled and dipped and spun, doing the Kiowa dance that was supposed to stomp down the tall grass so the night’s festivities could begin. The stomping down wasn’t literal. She had seen an Ottawa on a tractor-sized lawn mower cutting the grass on the day she had arrived. It was a preparation in the Indian sense, the way Seneca negotiators used to tell the whites they would uproot brambles and cut down tall trees to clear a path to the spot where negotiations would take place. It just meant they would make things right.

The grass dancers were spinning and stomping wildly now, working up a sweat. People around Violet were nodding their heads in time with the drums and smiling to themselves. It was a nice feeling, being out here in this rolling country with strange bright-red dirt and fragrant grass, all being Indians together.

Violet was a bit of a conservative in her own ways, and had always favored the old Seneca songs and dances and customs.

She understood the words and had the feeling that they were about her and her family and their relationship with the universe. But the powwow circuit was about just being Indian.

It was probably something like the great councils had been, when dozens of nations who had little in common, speaking unrelated languages and wearing all of these different costumes, had traveled thousands of miles to come together in the same circle for a time.

If it hadn’t been for the F.B.I, agents following her around like circling vultures, she might have enjoyed it even more.

Maybe when it was all over and she had time by herself in the old house at Tonawanda, when new sights weren’t being flashed in front of her eyes every few seconds, she would formulate the spectacle into some general impression that would fit into her head all at once.

She had been gazing around her at the groups of dancers and celebrants as she walked, but now she found herself in the middle of a dozen costumed dancers she had seen in the entry of the traditional women. A voice beside her ear said, “Vi.” Violet turned. In front of her stood a Seneca woman got up to look the way women had not looked since the 1790s. On her cheeks were painted two vermilion circles from the eyes to the chin, and four broad red lines made by a horizontal swipe of the fingers crossed her forehead. The part in her hair was bright yellow. Handsome Lake had dissuaded women from painting themselves in this fashion because it was calculated to attract the gazes of men they weren’t entitled to entice. The woman wore the old-style beaded moccasins, leggings, skirt, and overdress, and around her shoulders was a dark blue shawl embroidered with daisies and apple blossoms. But still, she was Jane Whitefield.

She spoke in Seneca. “I see three people keeping watch over you. Are there others?”

Violet forced her eyes toward the circle as though she were watching the dancers and answered in Seneca. “The woman with yellow hair, her husband, and the one with glasses.”

“Have they spoken to you yet?”

“Oh yes,” said Violet. “They raided my hotel room in Eagle Butte.”

“I’m sorry,” said Jane. “Were you afraid?”

“Of course,” she admitted. Then she quickly added, “But I’m fine.”

“What did they do?”

Violet risked looking into Jane’s eyes for a second.

“Nothing. But they were prepared to shoot you when they came in. They were all ready, you know.”

“I thought they might be,” said Jane. Violet saw a flash of white teeth smiling in the red paint. “It’s a good thing it was only you.”

“It’s not a good joke, Jane.”

Jane shrugged. “It’s the only joke we have. Tell me about Carey.”

“He’s exactly as you left him,” said Violet. “He’s so worried about you he looks like something hurts.” Jane said, “I came to tell you to go home, Vi. Tell Carey where we were when you saw me.” Jane’s body seemed to pick up the beat of the drums. She began to dance a little, moving slowly away into the crowd.

“Wait,” said Violet. She reached into the pocket of her jeans and slipped a small piece of white paper into Jane’s palm. “One of the agents gave me that. It’s his name and the number you call to get connected directly to him. He said it was in case I change my mind. Keep it in case you change yours.”

Jane closed her fingers around it without glancing at it. She said, “Please, Vi. Don’t worry about me.” Jane looked over her shoulder at the crowds of people of both sexes and all ages, wearing every kind of gear and ornament that had ever been seen on the continent, almost all of them with hair that gleamed black in the floodlights above the field. “They can’t even see me.”

Jane walked out past the man in the glasses, nearly brushing his shoulder as she went, then slipped between the man and the woman in cowboy hats. They looked at her, but they saw only a flash of bright paint and the clothes of a woman who might have lived long ago.

When Jane returned to Cleveland she seemed different to Christine. She spent the first day in the little apartment staring at the wall. On the second, she went out for the whole day. She came back with shopping bags full of new clothes, some hair dye, and a shoulder bag full of hundred-dollar bills. She sat Christine in the living room beside the telephone.

“What’s going on?” Christine asked.

Jane said, “I had hoped to avoid doing anything as risky as this, but nothing that wasn’t risky has worked. When that man pretending to be a policeman came to you, he gave you a phone number that you were supposed to call and ask for Jane.

Dial it.”

Christine frowned and looked at her, but she could see that she wasn’t supposed to say anything. She dialed the number and handed the telephone to Jane.

Jane listened for a moment, then broke the connection.

“Try again.”

Christine dialed the number again; Jane listened, then hung up. “They must have found the body.” Christine picked up the receiver, dialed the same number, and listened to the voice. “The number you have reached is out of service. If you feel you have reached this number in error, please hang up and dial again.” Christine set the receiver down.

Jane took a deep breath and blew it out again. “I was hoping they needed to keep that number open, because they had other runners out who might need to get in touch. But they’re too smart. They must have used it for initial contact only. Maybe they used it just for you.”

“What were you going to do?”

Jane sighed. “Tell them I had embezzled some money and needed to disappear.”

Christine realized that her mouth was open. “You wanted to be their client? But they saw you.”

“Two of them did. One is dead.”

“Still…” said Christine.

“It doesn’t matter,” Jane said. “It isn’t going to happen.” She walked into the bedroom, tossed the bag of money on the bed, and looked at the shopping bags doubtfully. “Those might fit you.”

“I can’t believe you were going to do that.” She realized that she sounded foolish. “What are you going to do now?” Jane shrugged. “Go back to Minneapolis. If I can find more of their runners, it’s possible I’ll learn who they are, where they are…”

Christine looked at her for a moment. She couldn’t keep it a secret, but she wasn’t sure how to admit she hadn’t told Jane everything. “Other runners? Like me?”

“Yes,” said Jane.

“Then I guess I have something to tell you. It didn’t seem like it was important, and I kind of forgot – ”

“Tell me.”

“I was in Baltimore when the policeman told me to call the number. The woman on the phone said to wait on a particular corner. A car drove up and a man took me to an apartment, and explained what I had to do: get plastic surgery, collect money, and get ready to go. Then they flew me to Chicago, put me in another apartment, and had me wait some more. I lived there for a long time – a couple of months – and they would come about once a week with groceries and things.

They said they were getting ready to move me someplace where I could live permanently. I kept asking, ‘Where am I going to live?’ and they’d say, ‘We’re looking for the perfect place,’ or, ‘We’re getting it ready.’ Each time they had some agenda. Once they took my picture for IDs. Sometimes they told me things about how to stay hidden, brought me new clothes… things like that. There was a closet in the apartment that was locked. One day they opened it up, and it was filled with boxes.”

“What kind of boxes?”

“About the size that copy paper comes in. About a foot wide and two feet long. They were all wrapped in brown paper and sealed with packing tape. One of the men put stickers on them and they carried them away.”

“Stickers?”

“Mailing labels.” She looked a little uncertain. “I wasn’t supposed to go near the closet. One man would carry a couple of boxes down to the car, and when he came back, the other would carry a couple. After a while, they got careless, and they were both outside at once, so I looked: 80.183 Padre Street, Santa Barbara, CA 93.101.”