Burial (44 page)

‘Yes, I sure did. Quite a character.'

‘All they say was the cars all kind of slid across the lot and crashed into each other. When the deputy came to see what all the noise was about, Stanley kept on screaming that there was somebody inside the workshop. So they opened up the workshop and there they were, all dead, all chopped up.'

I frowned. ‘Had Stanley been in the workshop before?'

‘Unh-hunh, it had been locked up for years.'

‘So how come he knew there was somebody in there?'

The young woman shrugged. ‘I don't know. Childish intuition I guess. Kids can pick up vibes that grown-ups can't
pick up, do you know what I mean? They're like dogs and gophers.'

‘Is Stanley around?'

‘Oh … sure.'

‘Do you mind if I talk to him?'

The young woman's eyes narrowed. ‘Are you a reporter?'

I shook my head. ‘My name's Harry — Harry Erskine. I'm kind of an investigator.'

‘Oh, yeah?'

‘Did you ever see that movie
Poltergeist
? I'm kind of a psychic investigator.'

‘You mean you go looking for ghosts and stuff?'

‘That's it I go looking for ghosts and stuff.'

‘Gee, I never realized people actually did that.'

‘Oh, they actually do that, all right.'

The young woman held out her chilly little hand and I shook it ‘My name's Linda Welles,' she said. ‘You stay right here and I'll go find Stanley.'

While she was gone, I looked up at the television over the bar. Although the sound was turned down, I could see flickering images of downtown Las Vegas, taken in what looked like the middle of a blood-red night. I saw the ornamental fountains in front of Caesar's Palace churning with debris and fallen statues and crimson foam. I saw a row of casino billboards on Las Vegas Boulevard toppling like bowling-pins: the Silver City, the Morocco Motel, the Riviera, the Silverbird, the Sahara. I saw cars tumbling over and over — a stretch limo sliding sideways along Desert Inn Road, trailing a shower of sparks.

People were running, buildings were falling. I saw the pink-and-white striped tent of Circus-Circus collapsing. I saw the Aladdin vanish. Then, in terrible silence, the Landmark hotel-casino tower dropped into the ground — literally dropped right into the ground.

Linda came back, leading a small grumpy boy. I pointed
up at the television. ‘Have you seen that?'

‘Sure,' she said. ‘It was on earlier. Isn't it awful? I sure hope we don't get a cyclone like that round here.'

‘Do you mind turning up the volume?'

She turned it up. A voice that sounded like a strained Dan Rather was saying, ‘—
fifty or sixty square miles … all flights to Las Vegas have been diverted away from the area and highways have been cleared for emergency services … so far impossible to estimate how many people have died … although the toll of dead and injured could run into thousands
…'

We listened soberly. There were interviews with seismologists, meteorologists and engineers. The engineers were anxious that the ‘tremorless earthquake' could affect the integrity of the Hoover Dam, thirty miles south-east of the city, and that Lake Mead might suddenly burst down the valley of the Colorado River, causing widespread destruction. So far it had been impossible for rescue helicopters to fly through the storms.

‘
It was red … the sky was red
…' said one exhausted-looking pilot. ‘
But right in the middle there, where all the hotels were falling … we saw something black, like black smoke — black kind of tendrils of smoke … like a boiling octopus
.'

The man in the green suit said, ‘Hey, Linda, switch over to the game, would you mind?'

Linda obediendy switched channels to Phoenix playing the L.A. Clippers. The game was almost over. ‘Have to oblige the regulars,' she explained, rolling her eyes up.

Stanley whined, ‘Mom, I want to go back outside.'

‘No, Stanley. I want you to talk to Harry first. Harry this is Stanley. Stanley this is Harry. Listen, Stanley, Harry wants to ask you some questions about what happened when all the autos crashed at Papago Joe's.'

‘I don't want to talk about it,' Stanley protested, trying to twist his hand free.

‘Well, you have to talk about it.'

‘Don't
want
to talk about it.'

‘Hey, Stanley,' I said. ‘Come around here. Come on. I want to show you something.'

Linda nudged him and Stanley reluctantly came around the bar.

‘You have a quarter in your ear,' I told him.

He stared at me as if I were a prime candidate for the funny farm. But I reached into his ear and produced a quarter, which I turned this way and that, and then dropped into his shirt pocket.

‘How did you do that?' he said.

‘I didn't do anything. You had a quarter in your ear, that was all.'

‘Are you a fairy?' he asked me.

‘Hey … do I
look
like a fairy?'

‘You're wearing a pink shirt. Only fairies wear pink shirts.'

‘Get out of here. The President wears pink shirts.'

‘Exactly.'

I said, ‘How about a root beer? You like root beer?'

‘Okay, so long as you show me how you do that thing with the quarter.'

‘I told you, I didn't do anything. Is it my fault if you walk around with quarters in your ears?'

We sat at a table in the corner. Stanley had a root beer and a pack of dry-roasted peanuts which he ate greedily and very noisily, with his mouth open.

‘I'm going to go talk to E.C. Dude and Papago Joe,' I explained, ‘but first of all I wanted to hear all about it from you.'

Stanley chewed for a while, and then he said, ‘We heard all this crunching and crashing and everything, and all the cars went sliding across the lot.'

‘Did you see anything else?'

He hesitated, then quickly shook his head.

‘Did you see something that looked like a shadow?'

He kept on chewing. He managed to challenge my stare for about twenty seconds, then he had to look down at the table.

‘How did you know there was something inside of the workshop?' I asked him.

He looked up again. His eyes were dark. ‘I don't know. I just did.'

‘You saw a shadow, didn't you? Something that looked like a shadow?' He nodded.

‘You want to describe it for me?'

He swallowed, and hesitated. Then, very slowly, he raised his hand over his face and parted his fingers so that only his eyes looked out ‘It was dark and it was running and it had a great big head and it was all bent over like a buffalo and it ran like this.'

Here, he hunched himself forward and gave an imitation of a heavy, uneven loping movement.

‘Did you mention the shadow to anybody else?'

He nodded. ‘Deputy Fordyce, and my mom, too.'

‘And what did they think about it?'

‘They didn't think anything. They thought it was maybe somebody's shadow, somebody running away, and it just looked funny because of the way they were running.'

‘Did E.C. Dude see the shadow?'

‘Yes,' said Stanley.

I took a long cold swallow of beer, and then I leaned back in my chair and looked at Stanley intently. ‘What do
you
think it was?' I asked him.

‘I don't know. I think it was a sort of ghost.'

‘Do you believe in ghosts?'

He shook his head. ‘Not ghosts like in
Ghostbusters
. Not Slimer or anything.'

‘But you do believe in the shadow?'

‘Yes,' he said.

I sat thinking for a while, and Stanley sat watching me. Eventually I leaned forward and found a dollar seventy-six in small change in his left nostril.

‘You know what?' I told him. ‘You're better than a one-armed bandit.'

E.C. Dude said, ‘I'd almost given you up, man.'

I climbed the steps into the trailer. Inside, it was frigidly air-conditioned, like everywhere else in Arizona, but
le grande luxe
on wheels it wasn't. The sides and part of the roof were spectacularly stove in, and all the left-hand windows, instead of being glazed, were covered in sun-yellowed plastic sheeting. A television set with no screen sat perched on a broken table, and the only other furniture appeared to be mattresses and broken wooden chairs and Indian blankets. A zig-zag-patterned blanket had been hung across the width of the trailer in order to separate it into two ‘rooms.' In spite of the air-conditioning, the trailer was aromatic with unwashed feet, marijuana, pine-scented toilet block and cigarette smoke.

‘I brought the whisky,' I announced, holding up the bottle.

‘Hey, extra,' said E.C. Dude. He lit a Camel and then held out the pack. ‘Smoke?'

‘Don't, thanks.'

‘That's cool. Wish I could quit. My old man died of lung cancer. I should of tape-recorded some of his coughing, just to remind me, you know. He practically coughed up the soles of his goddamned shoes.'

I looked around. ‘Is Papago Joe here?'

‘He'll be out in a minute. He's flossing his teeth.'

Somehow it never occurred to me that Indians might floss their teeth, but I guess they're only human, like the rest of us. Even Geronimo must have had to go to the little boys' room now and again.

I said, ‘The reason I took so long was because I talked to Stanley.'

‘Oh, yes,' nodded E.C. Dude. ‘Linda's kid. I like him. He's something extra, that kid.'

‘He told me about the automobiles crashing. He told me about the shadow, too.'

E.C. Dude lit his cigarette and looked a little shifty. ‘Well, he's a bright kid. He's got a whole lot of imagination.'

‘But the shadow wasn't imagination, was it? The shadow was real.'

‘A trick of the light, man, that's all.'

‘Oh, no. That shadow was really real; and I know it was really real because I've seen it for myself, in New York.'

He stared at me, hollow-cheeked and stubbly-chinned and white as sour milk. ‘You've seen it, too?'

‘Yes. And I know what it is. Leastways, I
think
I know what it is. You've seen what's been happening in Chicago, and Colorado, and Las Vegas … it's all part of that.'

‘I don't understand you, man. Are you trying to tell me that shadow has something to do with all of those storms and all of those earthquakes?'

‘They're not earthquakes. They're part of something else … something that's far more destructive than earthquakes. An earthquake, that's a natural phenomenon, right? The ground shakes, buildings fall down, then it's all over. Maybe some aftershocks, but that's generally the end of it.

‘But what's happening now isn't a natural phenomenon. What's happening now is, revenge.'

‘Revenge?' His eyes slitted. ‘Are you kidding me, or what?'

‘Come on, E.C. You saw those cars crashing, all by themselves. You saw those dead people. There are forces underneath our feet that want to drag us down and bury us for good, and they're not going to stop until we're gone. Not
just us personally, either, but every last scrap of evidence that we were ever here.'

‘Who's this “we”?' E.C. Dude wanted to know.

‘We, the white men, the palefaces, the intruders. Every single person who has invaded this land, from the Vikings and the Celts through to the Pilgrim Fathers and the Poles and the Germans and the Irish. No distinctions, this is it, they want their land back the way it was.'

E.C. Dude blew smoke out of his nostrils, and coughed. ‘That's crazy, man. You're beginning to sound like Papago Joe. He's always ranting on about white men and Indians and all that native American bullshit.'

‘You think it's bullshit? You saw the beginnings of it here.'

‘Oh, come on, man, that's
crazy
.'

I was about to explain about the Great Outside when the rug that hung across the trailer was dramatically tugged back. There, wearing a plaid shirt and faded jeans, stood Papago Joe. He wasn't particularly tall, maybe 5'7″, but he was stockily-built, big-shouldered, which gave him great physical presence. He had a large sculptured head, with a hooked, fleshy nose. His eyes were so deep-set that they looked like fragments of broken glass shining at the bottom of two mineshafts. His hair was long and greasy and pewter-grey, and tied back in a pony-tail. His fingers were yellow with nicotine.

‘Of course you're right,' he said, holding out his hand. ‘Many of us know that this is the hour that was always foretold.'

‘You must be Papago Joe,' I replied. ‘Here — I brought you some whisky.'

He accepted the bottle of Chivas Regal without a word. ‘You're not a police detective or a reporter?' he said.

‘No,' I told him. ‘I'm what you might call an interested party, that's all.' I was surprised by the cultured, collected tone of his voice.

He raised an eyebrow. ‘An interested party? I'd say you were a
very
interested party. You seem to be very familiar with Indian affairs.'

‘I'm very familiar with Indian vengefulness, if that's what you mean.'

‘Oh.' He paused, and he thought about that. ‘
Vengefulness
. Interesting word.' Then, ‘You're surprised that we still feel vengeful?'

His tone was sardonic; but I could sense that he was right on the edge of being deadly serious.

I made a face. ‘Let's put it this way,' I said, ‘I've always believed that there has to come a time when everybody has to forgive and forget.'

Papago Joe unscrewed the cap of the whisky bottle, found three ill-matched glasses, and filled them. He handed the whisky round, and said, ‘Do you think it would be the right thing to do, to forgive and forget — let's say — the Nazis?'

‘The Nazis?' I said. ‘I'm not so sure. The Nazis are a special case. The Nazis wiped out six million people, probably more, and they did it in the most inhumane way that you can imagine.'