Buried Dreams (17 page)

Upstairs the phone rang. It rang and rang and rang, and I looked up at the floorboards above me and said, "Leave me the hell alone, why don't you?"

My words must have worked magic, for when the answering machine clicked on, there was silence. Nobody had left a message.

It was silent again. I shifted my weight, tried to get comfortable, decided sitting in dirt and resting against an oil furnace were never going to be comfortable, any time soon, but I was too tired to move.

"Was this how it was?" I said to the empty cellar. "Hunh, Jon? Lots of long hours, hard work, and nothing to show for it? Was it like this?"

Nothing. Wood creaked as something in the house settled. I bestirred myself and collected my pathetic amateur archaeological tools --- bucket, spoon, and old colander --- and clumped my way upstairs. If I had been a neatnik, I would have washed the spoon, washed the colander, and rinsed out the bucket and returned it to the shed that served as a garage. Instead, I dumped the entire mess on the floor and went into the kitchen, where I did battle with hot water and a chunk of Lava soap, trying to get the worst of the grime off. After a quarter hour of effort, I declared a truce and dried off my hands with a clump of paper towels and made my way to the living room.

A neatnick would also have spread newspaper or a blanket or something on the couch to protect the fabric from the three or four pounds of dirt my jeans were carrying, but I just dumped myself there, and spent a couple of minutes deciding whether I had the strength to pick up the remote. When I decided a few more minutes of inactivity were called for, another challenge approached me when the phone rang again.

I guess I should have ignored it again, but the noise was making my head ache, so I picked it up and grunted something, and Felix replied, "Man, you sound like you just woke up."

That made me yawn. I said, "Mentioning sleep isn't a good idea now, Felix. I've been busting my butt the past couple of hours and I could drop right off. What's up?"

"Oh, what's up is that I'm sitting poolside at my nice little hotel in St. Pete, and there are two sisters looking over my way, one in a pink bikini, the other in a green, and it's a heavy burden to carry, but I think they're about to get into a serious fight over me."

"Things are tough allover," I said. "What else is going on?"

"Not to get spookland on you, but I've made my contact, and I'm meeting him tomorrow. At first he didn't want to talk to me, but lucky for the both of us, I was able to bribe him."

"With what? Cash? Girls? Coupons for the early-bird specials?" He laughed and I could make out a young lady laughing, somewhere in the background. Felix said, "Your last answer's pretty close. I got him through food-related means."

"Which means what?"

"Which means is that before I headed into Logan, I went over to the North End and picked up some specialty items that are hard to get in St. Pete. Certain sauces, spices, cheeses, and meats. When I told him what I had... well, he practically rolled over and started panting on the phone. So it's a go."

"Good." I shifted some in the couch, decided enough energy was coming back that I could start thinking about dinner. "Sorry I missed your earlier call."

"What earlier call?"

"About ten minutes ago, the phone rang. It wasn't you?"

"Nope. Ten minutes ago I was helping a young lady get her back oiled up. So it wasn't me. You okay up there?"

"Yeah."

"Those two cousins, they doing all right?"

"Still on the job, as far as I could tell." I yawned.

"Hey, sorry I'm keeping you up. What the hell have you been doing to get you so tired?"

"I was digging in my cellar."

"Your cellar?" Felix asked. "Your cellar's dirt?"

"It surely is."

"Then stop digging and put in some concrete or something. Jesus. What are you doing tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow," I said, "I'm going back in time."

"Oh. Care to explain?"

"Not yet," I said.

"All right, go back in time," Felix said. "But still watch your ass then, okay?"

"I most certainly will." "Good. See you soon."

After he hung up, I put the phone down and decided to rest my eyes for a moment. I stretched out my legs and folded my arms and rested my eyes, and when I opened them next, an hour had passed. Diane had her Kara and Paula her lawyer friend, and Felix was making do with two sisters.

But I had to make do for myself, so I got off the couch and tried to determine what I was going to have for dinner in the short walk I made from the living room to the kitchen.

Chapter Ten

For thirty years or so, the downtown of Porter, the state's only port, has seen an amazing change. In talking to some old-timers and reading books about the area, I learned some fun facts about the neighborhoods around the harbor, especially the places that have high store rents and which feature expensive hand-blown glassware, jewelry, or pieces of sculpture whose cost could feed a family of four for a year. All the tourists trooping through the little shops with their underdressed and over-pretentious help, none of them would have lasted five minutes in the area if they could magically be transported back in time about forty years. For the dirty little secret of the most high-priced area of Porter is that nearly a half century ago, it was a dark warren of alleyways, bars with sawdust on the floor, and brick boardinghouses where rooms rented for an hour, and where the occasional sailor or marine from the shipyard or one of the ships in port would end up dumped in a dark corner, bleeding and with broken bones.

It was a rough piece of work, where the Porter police only entered in pairs after dark, and attempts by the city --- okay, halfhearted attempts, since so much of the money from the bars and whorehouses ended up in the right pockets --- to clean it up always failed. The only thing that killed the harbor district's reputation was when the shipyard started laying off folks in the sixties, the naval prison at the shipyard closed, and military ships stopped calling on a regular basis at Porter. Customers dropped off, bars closed, and the boardinghouses were boarded up, all because of Department of Defense cutbacks. With land and buildings cheap, it was primed for a boom, which is what happened some years later. Call it military gentrification, if you like.

But if one looked hard enough, there were a few out-of-the-way places where the money hadn't changed the neighborhood, where the drinks were cheap, and if there were no boardinghouses around, late at night the right questions and the right amount of money could rent you some physical entertainment.

One of those places was Stark Street, where I was the day after I came home from my trek up north. It's near a tidal basin that stinks up twice a day during low tide, and since real estate developers haven't yet determined a way of eliminating odors from mudflats, it's still kept its rough-and-ready nature. Right next to the Muddy Bottom Pub was an old storefront that still had Marellis Grocery in faded letters over the glass windows, but which said First People's Civil Rights Council on a cardboard sign in the window. I went into the small storefront, and there were a number of high school kids working the phones, stuffing envelopes. There were four desks-none of them matched-and a longer table on one side that held a photocopier, piles of papers, and other office stuff. One of the young ladies, with a light blue tinge to her hair and a ring through each eyebrow, looked up at me cheerfully and said, "Can I help you?"

"Sure," I said. "I'm looking for William Bear Gagnon. I have an ---"

Just then a voice came from the rear of the storefront, "If that's you, Cole, come on back."

Which is what I did, maneuvering my way across the soiled green carpeting, held together by gray duct tape. On each of the walls was a variety of posters, which could have come from a Smithsonian Institution display on sixties-era protests, with the customary and usual slogans: War Is Bad for Children and Other Living Things, Visualize World Peace, and Think Globally, Act Locally. The door to the rear office was flanked by two dented four-drawer metal filing cabinets, and in the office was a large man, standing behind a desk. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, wearing a denim shirt and blue jeans. Around his neck and on both wrists were elaborate pieces of silver and turquoise jewelry. His dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and his eyes seemed black. He nodded crisply at me as I came in and briefly shook hands, and I was glad it was brief, for if he was in the mood to break my hand with his grip, I'm sure he could have done it with no difficulty.

In his office the posters were of a more direct bent. There were a couple demanding freedom for Leonard Peltier, one showing what looked to be Geronimo, another of Sitting Bull, and a last one showing a Native American woman squeezing an American flag. This last poster said: AMERICA, LOVE HER OR GIVE HER BACK.

"Mr. Cole," he said.

"Mr. Gagnon," I said. "Thanks for giving me some of your time."

"Not a problem," he said, leaning back, the chair squeaking ominously. "I'll only ask you one thing."

"All right."

Gagnon said, "I'll talk to you about when Jon Ericson came by, all right? I'll tell you everything you want to know. I'm sorry he's dead. He seemed like a nice old guy, even though I didn't think he knew what he was talking about. But I want you to promise me that you'll do a column about the council, in a few months. Deal?"

I said carefully, "That's fine. I promise I'll write and submit a column about the council."

"And see it gets published," Gagnon said. "Just so we're clear."

I shook my head. "I'm sorry. I can't guarantee that. I write columns all the time that my editor turns down. I can't promise you that."

"Then I'm afraid this interview is at an end," he said.

"If you say so," I said, and I got up and started out of the office, when he said, "Okay, wait a minute."

I turned and he was grinning. "Can't fault me for trying now, can you."

"Depends on what you're trying to do, I guess."

He opened his arms wide. "What do you think? I'm trying to do the best for my people, and that includes publicity from magazines like yours."

I motioned to the front of the store. "Looks like you've got some awareness going on out there."

Another grin as he folded his arms across his chest. "Oh, that. Yeah. I did a class at Porter High School last week. History seminar. Opened up their little middle-class white minds into what really happened on this soil, nearly four hundred years ago, when the Europeans came and killed off most of us and stole our land. Spread a little guilt around. Guilt can be good and can be used, Mr. Cole, and these kids have plenty of it. So a bunch of them volunteered and I intend to use them until they feel guilty about nuclear power or whales or whatever, and then I guess it'll be time to do another seminar."

Despite the cheerful cynicism he was displaying, I was enjoying hearing him talk. "So the kids out there are part of a plan."

"Sure. The plan is to get organized, raise awareness, and get what's owed us." He turned around and pointed to an old, small plaque on the wall, just above a lamp. "See that? Commemorates the founding of the New England Indian Council, back in 1923. And the motto they chose back then is telling, Mr. Cole: I still live. Get it? The first people of New England are still alive, are still here, though history tells us otherwise. You know, even before the Pilgrims set foot in Massachusetts, many of the New England tribes had been nearly wiped out by disease, from Europeans. Around the time of Columbus --- and this is still a history that isn't taught in schools --- Basque fishermen would take up station off our coastline, fishing for cod. They could give a shit about stealing land; all they cared about were the fish. But that was even too much for the local tribes, because the Basques brought a whole set of nasty things along with them when they traded with the First People: measles, chicken pox, smallpox."

He took a breath, unfolded his arms. "Even when the Pilgrims came here, we still lived. Lived through the wars, through the massacres, through the times when our people were driven north to Canada or were sold south to be slaves in the Caribbean. Lived when our land was taken, the forests cleared, the animals slaughtered. Lived even when the anthropologists and the history professors called us extinct, said that the New England Indians had perished from the scene. We still live, and will continue living."

I took a few notes and said, "Sounds like you have a hell of a job then."

"Don't you know it," he said, moving the chair back and forth a bit. "I've met with my brothers in New York and out West, and in spite of all that we share, I must admit a sense of envy. They have reservations, land that they can call their own, and they have their history. You see, when the white man rolled in here back during the 1600s, this was when they perfected their approach to the First People. At first, they would befriend them, learn how to live in the environment, how to fish, how to eat certain plants. They would trade with them, and then steal their land through treaties or bribes. And when the tribes resisted, well, they were nonwhite and nonbelievers, and they had to be slaughtered. And the survivors were then driven out. Eventually this system was perfected, all the way from here to the Mohawks in New York, to the Delawares and Cherokees and the Seminoles down south."