Burial (52 page)

This was it. This was what had happened in Colorado and Chicago and Las Vegas. This was the Ghost Dance, the
dragging-down, the day of all shadows. And now it was happening here.

I went back inside, and dressed and packed as quickly as I could. Outside, I heard a crunching, scraping noise, and when I looked out of die window I saw a Dodge van being pulled on its side all the way down Indian School Road, and a man in a baseball cap desperately and unsuccessfully trying to stop it. In the Thunderbird Motel's parking-lot, a Winnebago suddenly crashed onto its side, and a brand-new red Allante rolled onto its roof.

My television swung around on its castors and knocked against the wall. My bed began to slide towards the door. I heard shouting from almost every room in the whole motel, and a woman screaming; and then there were people running down the steps and across the courtyard, and a devastating crack of thunder that seemed to break the sky in half from Paradise Valley to the Manzanita Race Track.

In a jumbled way, I began to understand what Misquamacus was doing.

First, he was calling together the direct descendants of all of those pioneers and troopers who had killed or murdered Indians, back to the very same places where the killings had taken place. How he was managing to call them, and why they felt compelled to come, I simply couldn't say. Maybe he had plucked some chord in some sort of long-buried inherited memory, who knows? Misquamacus had very strong powers of suggestion.

He was calling together people like George Hope and Andrew Danetree — like the seven who had died in Papago Joe's inspection pit. Once they were assembled, Misquamacus had been able to open up the door to the Great Outside and let Aktunowihio have his way with them. Aktunowihio, the Dark One, who had stormed up the hill at the Little Big Horn and massacred Custer and all of his men. Aktunowihio, whose smoke-like tentacles had forced their
way into old man Rheiner's body, and pulled him into hell.

Misquamacus was travelling around America, summoning the guilty, and having them killed, and counting coup. And
then
, in all of those places where the white man had spilled Indian blood, he was opening up the very gates of the land of death, and dragging down everything that the white man had created — his buildings, his railroads, his television sets, his highways, his airports, everything.

It was revenge on a scale that was almost unimaginable. You destroyed my culture, white devil, now I'm going to destroy yours.

I felt the floors of the Thunderbird Motel shuddering beneath my feet. I decided it was time to leave. If only I knew where Karen had gone. I dressed, and then I quickly stuffed my shirts and my shorts into my overnight bag, and hurried along the balcony to the steps. The dead armadillo had gone, so I guessed it couldn't have been dead after all. The steps were already cracking, and as I gingerly climbed down them I felt them tilt and the steel handrail dislodge itself from the concrete.

My rental car had slid fifteen or twenty feet sideways across the parking lot, and was resting up against a low concrete retaining wall, with its nearside fender badly dented. It was quite a risk, driving in these conditions, but I needed to get after Karen as quickly as I possibly could and there wasn't time to walk.

Maybe I was wrong, but it was my guess that Misquamacus was taking Karen back with him to the Great Outside. If that was the case, I needed Papago Joe to guide me there, and I needed him now.

I climbed into the car and started the engine. As I started to negotiate my way out of the parking-lot, a Cherokee truck came sliding past me sideways, its tires singing a deep rubbery protest song. It struck my car a glancing blow on the front bumper, which turned it round in a quarter-circle, but that allowed me to drive through a gap in the retaining
wall without having to do one of my famous 103-point turns.

I drove east on Indian School under low, hurrying clouds. The light — what there was of it — was a thick grainy red. To my left I could just make out the hump of Camelback Mountain. It was nearly six-thirty now, but it looked as if this was going to be the darkest morning that Phoenix had ever known.

Trying to drive in that storm was like trying to drive in a strange dream. Even though my foot was pressed down hard on the gas the Lincoln was struggling to hit thirty miles per hour. The engine was straining and the transmission was whining like a lost dog. The dragging sensation from behind me was so strong that I felt as if I was driving up a very steep grade. I could manage to steer due east without much difficulty, but when I turned right on Alma School Road to head towards Mesa, the car was pulled so powerfully and consistently to the west that I had to keep the wheel twisted off to the left, and by the time I finally managed to reach Apache Boulevard, where I could turn due east again for Apache Junction, my hands were aching with the strain and the wheel was slippery with sweat.

The sky grew darker and darker, particularly behind me, over downtown Phoenix. I saw hardly anybody else on the streets, although I came across rubbish and fencing and billboards and baby-buggies and God knows what else, all being dragged westward along the highway. Just as I reached the outskirts of Mesa, I saw a huge red gasoline truck sliding sideways along the highway towards me, and I had to steer onto the pavement to avoid it. In my rearview mirror I saw it roll over onto its side in a cascade of sparks and start to burn.

More vehicles came rolling and tumbling along the highway, and my car was struck twice — once by a driverless van, and once by a station wagon. I wasn't sure if there was anybody alive inside the wagon, the windows were blanked out with blood.

Outside of Mesa, I saw sheds and houses being slowly dragged across the landscape. I saw groups of people, too, trying to escape to the east. They were plodding along the side of the highway, their backs bent, as if they were trying to climb a mountain. I felt like stopping to give three or four of them a ride, but if I had a full load of passengers I doubted if the car was powerful enough to keep going. As it was, it was beginning to smell of hot rubber, and the transmission was whining even more loudly.

The wind blurted and howled against my windshield, and the combined rumbling of houses and cars and tumbling rubbish was deafening. I tried the car radio, but all I got was a blurt of static and — for a moment, very faintly — a blue-grass station from somewhere far away. It sounded like a song from another world.

I met her when the rains began to fall
…

I met her and I loved her from the first sweet kiss
…

Four miles out of Mesa, a red flashing light on the instrument panel warned me that the car was overheating. It faltered and shuddered, and I began to worry that I wouldn't make it. The engine ground slower and slower and the warning alarm started up, a high-pitched penetrating noise and a red light that demanded STOP ENGINE NOW.

There was a moment when the car was travelling so slowly that I thought that I would probably get to Papago Joe's a whole lot faster if I abandoned it by the roadside and tried to hike it. But then something curious happened. The car began to roll just a little faster, just a little more easily. After two or three miles, it picked up even more speed. The warning alarm died away and the red light blinked off as the engine was relieved of the strain of having to pull against such an overwhelming force.

With fewer than eight miles to go to Apache Junction, the car began to travel at fifty, then sixty, then seventy. It
was when I hit 75 that I realized what was happening. The car hadn't simply broken away from the force that had been dragging it back towards Phoenix, it was being dragged
forwards
in the direction of Apache Junction. The blizzard of dust and trash that was blowing all around me had changed direction, too, and I began to hear pieces of fencing and empty Coke cans and all kinds of detritus knocking and pattering and clanging on the back of the car.

Frightened by my rapidly-mounting speed, I jammed my foot on the brake, but the highway was slippery-dry with dust, and the car slewed from one side of the blacktop to the other, tires screaming, almost out of control. My offside wheels jounced and slammed against the rough stony edge of the highway, and my front bumper snagged a length of twisted wire fencing. I took my foot off the brake, and steered myself back to the right-hand side of the road. There was nothing I could do but let the force drag me forwards, unimpeded, otherwise — shit — I was going to end up killing myself.

At least I was being dragged where I wanted to go. All I was worried about was what would happen when I got there. How the hell was I going to stop?

As I approached Apache Junction, the speedometer needle was nudging eighty-five. The highway was littered with debris and derelict cars, and I had six or seven noisy but not serious collisions. It was only when I started running over bodies that I began to panic. Right on the outskirts of Apache Junction, twenty or thirty people lay dead or dying in the road — men, women and children — and I was driving right through them before I even realized what they were. But suddenly an old silver-haired man was flung up onto the hood of the car, and then a girl in jeans and a T-shirt was slammed up against the windshield, and my wheels went bumpity-bumpity-bumpity over arms and legs and bodies.

I shouted out something, I can't remember what I
stepped on the brakes. The car skidded around and around and hurtled off the road into the side of a shed. Wooden planking exploded all around me, and then I was crashing through shelves of paint and jars of methylated spirits and boxes of screws and paintbrushes and staples, and then I was out the other side of the shed and the car was still skidding from side to side, plowing up dust and bursting into a henhouse. Brown feathers, chickens, straw, netting, wire, and then back onto the highway again with a slam of suspension that must have finished my shocks for good.

Shaking, sweating, swearing under my breath, I looked into my rearview mirror and saw that the highway was strewn from side to side with bodies. Not far away, a bus lay on its roof, its sides split open. It must have been travelling as fast as I was, if not faster, and overturned. I just prayed that all of those people were already dead when I ran over them.

Through the blurry dust and the dim red light, I saw Papago Joe's signboard up ahead. I was travelling at eighty-five now, and I had no idea of how I was going to pull up. I guessed that the only way was to drive straight into his lot, and hope for the best. I switched my headlights onto high-beam and pressed my hand hard on the horn and said, ‘Please God, don't let me die just yet.'

At the last second, just as I reached the entrance to Papago Joe's lot, I saw a man lying in the road. I swerved, and missed the entrance, and crashed straight through his newly-repaired fencing. But that swerve probably saved my life. I pulled up yards and yards and yards of fencing, one fence-post after another was whipped up out of the ground, but it acted like an arrester-net on an aircraft-carrier. By the time I collided with the heaps of Buicks and Oldsmobiles which Papago Joe was still trying to clear from the last disaster, I was only going at about twenty miles per hour. All the same, a head-on collision at twenty miles per hour is no joke, and I was flung around like a puppet. I hit my head
on the top of the steering-wheel, and knocked both of my knees against the underside of the instrument panel.

I lifted my head and looked around me. Papago Joe's lot was crowded — not just with second-hand automobiles but with sheds and signboards and boxes and trailers and all kinds of rubbish, including a sagging clapboard wall that looked like half of somebody's house. I turned around and saw that the Sun Devil Bar had partially collapsed. Its roof was sagging on one side, and all of its outbuildings and garages had been dragged across the road and were shunted up against Papago Joe's Airstream trailer.

I forced open the door of my car and immediately the interior was filled with a blinding, swirling hurricane of dust. The wind was literally screaming, and the air shook with thunder.

I was just about to climb out of the car when I saw Papago Joe struggling towards me, wrapped in a large grey wind-whipped blanket. He was waving to me and shouting something. I waited until he had reached me, and I was glad that I did.

‘Stay where you are until I've protected you!' he shouted. ‘Otherwise you'll get pulled right down into the ground and that my friend — that'll be the end of you!'

‘What's happening?' I shouted back at him.

‘It's opened up!' he told me. He jabbed his finger in the direction of his workshop. ‘The place where those people were killed, it's opened up. It's pulling down everything — cars, people, cattle, you name it.'

‘The same thing's happening in Phoenix,' I said.

He nodded. He was pulling a necklace out of his pocket, and making heavy weather of untwisting it. ‘Much worse in Phoenix,' he said. ‘We saw it on TV, at least till the TV went dead. The airport, the State Capitol, the Art Museum, the Civic Plaza, everything's gone. Not a building left standing on Van Buren Street. They called in the National Guard but
the last we saw they'd lost two helicopters and thirty-eight men.'

‘Why's it so bad in Phoenix?' I asked him. At last he had succeeded in unravelling the necklace.

He put the necklace over my head, and said, ‘Many more Indians died in Phoenix. Over a hundred and fifty Indians were massacred in 1887 when they tried to protest about the railroad running through their lands. Thirty-eight men, the rest were women and children. Nobody ever knew who killed them. In fact, nobody knew that they had died until a prospector found their bones scattered in a canyon up in the South Mountains.'

‘What's this for?' I said, lifting up the necklace so that I could take a closer look at it. It wasn't exactly designer jewellery. It was a combination of coarse, tightly-plaited hair, dull red beads, and discoloured teeth.