Fatalis (13 page)

He looked at samples of the Cherokee alphabet, of the Mohawk, the Blackfoot, the Cree, the Lakota, the Potawatomi, and others. There was nothing that looked like what he'd seen in the tunnel.

"Maybe you're still going about this the wrong way," he said to himself.

Typically, Chumash cave paintings were not interrelated. Designs within individual caves were often random, like the rooms in a museum. They were linked only by the artist or the era. Maybe these were different. Perhaps the mountain with the snake and the mountain with the dolphin were designed to lead to the paintings in the tunnel.

"The dolphin mountain is white," Grand said. "Maybe the pictures are supposed to be ice or snow."

But deep inside the mountain? That made no sense.

Maybe the designs were meant to be read the other way, from the bottom up. The circles and crescents could be leading
to
the mountains, flowing from inside the earth.

"What about seeds?" he thought out loud. "Maybe the Chumash thought that mountains were born from rock-eggs. Or maybe the designs are supposed to be clouds formed inside the earth-"

Grand liked that one. Maybe the shamans thought that clouds were smoke, that they were formed by fires that burned inside the earth. He decided to word-search
clouds
, see if there were other examples of subterranean origins. Even when ancient peoples had no contact they often came up with similar ideas, such as boats or rafts that took the dead to the underworld or newborn kings being sent to earth in baskets. The phenomenon was called "cultural parallelism" and it had helped Grand interpret cave paintings in the past.

As the computer searched for
clouds
. Grand looked down at Fluffy. The dog was asleep on his mat.

"What do you think, boy?" Grand asked. "Did the shamans believe that clouds were made from fire?"

Fluffy looked up and Grand reached down to scratch the dog under the chin. As he did, Grand saw something he hadn't noticed before.

"Shit," he said as he swung back to the computer, canceled the search, and started a new one.

The two luminescent eyes watched the long, deserted roadway from low on the gusty promontory. Moist and dark, like large oily pearls, the eyes shifted and widened almost imperceptibly at every movement a hundred feet below. They roamed among the dim lights and deep shadows, the tall waves of the sea beyond, the dark beach, the large sea animals that broke the surface in the distance, the night birds that soared and hovered above the rocks, the flat clouds, the misty raindrops, the signposts rattling in the wind.

Most of these things were familiar; a few were not. But new or old, it was a world of constant movement, a world where any motion could be enemy or prey. Which was why the eyes missed nothing. Nor did the ears, which were shaped like gold tulip petals. They stood high and faced the front or the sides, wherever they heard a disturbance. Nor did the light-brown nose, its finely cobbled surface flexing restlessly in the wind. And then-

It froze as the scent came suddenly, from the north. Unlike many of the smells, this one was familiar and welcome. Prey from the sea. A moment later, when it grew stronger, the head turned back. The black eyes were met by other black eyes and they all began to move, though not in the same direction.

Quickly and silently they slid through the brush and stones, causing mice to flee and rattlesnakes to freeze and commanding the foothills simply by moving through them. The color of the prey was different, the speed was greater than they had seen, but the size was familiar.

They knew just what to do.

Glen Grey was a happy man.

Ten years before, when be was an eighteen-year-old high school graduate-and just barely-the Pacific Palisades native was a beach bum. He sold himself to volleyballers who wanted a good game or a championship; he gave surfing tips for pay; and he held spots close to the water, then sold them to late comers for a twenty. When there were no gigs to be had, he grilled burgers and hotdogs at Ma's and Paz on the corner of Via de la Paz. Grey slept on the beach or crashed with friends or found an open car door and dropped on the backseat. When there was nowhere else to go he went home. Actually, where he went was "house" since it wasn't really a home. Not with his unemployed actor dad who toked-up or coked-up and took out his frustrations on his only son, and his entertainment lawyer mom who was never home even when she wasn't on a case.

Things changed for Grey when his friend Bartok broke his leg on a new board. While Grey sat with him waiting for the ambulance, Bartok complained that he was dead shit. He drove a refrigerator truck from the Santa Barbara marina down the coast to Los Angeles with fresh fish for over two-dozen restaurants. How was be going to drive with a broken leg?

Grey offered to do it for him. He agreed to take only half the salary and tips, which was way above what he was making at Ma's. Bartok agreed.

Grey ended up loving the job. He would spend the entire afternoon on the beach, charging his batteries. Then he would drive south after midnight with the day's catch. He'd make the rounds, leaving it with early-rising chefs or in outdoor freezers, come back after dawn, and sleep in the truck or in an open boat at the marina until after noon.

The owner of the company, Caroline Bennett, also loved Grey. He was easygoing, reliable, and obeyed the speed limit and parking laws. When Bartok returned, the boss asked the young man to stay on. Grey agreed, and nine years later he was still here, taking rockfish, red snapper, yellow-tail, whitefish, and sculpin on what he called "Their last trip along the coast."

Grey especially loved cool, rainy nights like these. Windows open, leather gloves snug on his hands, feeling cool. Doing the reverse commute at this hour, traffic was sparse. Especially here, on the fringe of Santa Barbara County. When the weather was bad, as it had been these past weeks, even the locals stayed off the coastal roads. It was mostly tourists who had no choice. They were here and they had to see Santa Barbara
now
.

The silence was sublime and the solitude was absolute. There was usually just Glen Grey, his ocean, and the growl of the diesel engine. Sometimes he talked to the "once and future-sushi" lying in barrels and lockers in the back-depending on whether they needed to be in ice or in saltwater-and sometimes he just listened to his groovily smoky Audra McDonald and Debbie Gravitte CDs. Sometimes, like now, he just enjoyed the quiet-

The bump startled him.

It was a hollow sound, like something had landed on the roof-maybe a falling branch or a rock or something from an airplane. The Santa Barbara airport wasn't far away. Grey slowed immediately and looked out the side mirror. If something had bounced onto the road he wanted to move it or call the highway patrol and set out a flare.

Nothing was out there. He looked toward the side. There were rows of grassy foothills leading up to a sandy slope and a two-hundred-foot-high promontory. Not much could have hit him from there. He wondered if a gull might have come down for some reason. Maybe it had been attracted by the smell of the fish. Those birds could be pretty aggressive. Grey once had a seagull land on a picnic table and snatch away the slice of sausage pizza he'd bought at the marina. The entire slice, for God's sake-

There was a second thump, much closer to the front of the truck. It was followed almost immediately by a third sound, more like a bang, directly on top of the cab.

"Friggin'
what
?"

Grey needed to stop. He looked out the passenger's-side window. If things were bouncing off the hills and onto the road he wanted to pull over on the ocean-side part of the highway.

As the young man turned, something banged on the windshield. He turned face-front just as the window blew in, showering Grey and cab with particles of glass. The drizzle and wind momentarily blinded him; he jammed on the brakes and shifted gears. Rubber screamed and burned and the cab twisted. Grey dragged the sides of his right glove across his eyes. As he did, the lids filled with motes of glass that had caught on his lashes.

"
Fuck
!" he screamed, wide-eyed. "
Shit
, god,
god
!"

Points of pain drove him mad and forced his eyes to open wide. He released the wheel and picked at his lids, trying to pull them down, as awful pinpicks danced on all sides of his eyeball.

The truck skidded on the wet highway. Grey screamed as the sharp edges stabbed the insides of his eyelids. Shrieking with pain, he squinted into the weather as he tried to regain control of the vehicle.

Suddenly, the darkness turned gold, then red. Pain flooded his body from neck to thighs.

A moment after that he went numb. And his eyes, which had been so anguished, shut for good.

Grand had spent several hours going through the computer files, books, magazines, and Web sites looking through Chumash art. Every time he found an image of an animal he enlarged and enhanced it.

Grand didn't find what he was looking for and at three-thirty in the morning he finally gave up and went to bed. He would start again when he was fresh. Or at least fresher. He was so far behind on sleep that it would take a week of doing nothing just to get back to normal.

Fluffy followed him to the bedroom. The Lab hopped onto the foot of the bed, circled his spot twice, then literally fell across the quilt. Grand envied the dog, who was asleep within seconds. The Chumash had had that right too. Animals were superior to humans in many ways. More efficient, certainly.

The scientist pulled off his sweatclothes and slipped under the covers. Grand sat there, his back against the headboard. He looked at the dog.

"We make a good team, Fluff," he said.

Fluffy's head rose an inch.

"You come up with good ideas and I do the legwork," Grand said. "I only wish I knew which one of us screwed up tonight."

Fluffy continued to look back at him, patiently and politely.

"I still like the idea," Grand said, "so it must've been me who screwed up. We'll try and figure this out tomorrow. Right now, sleep."

Fluffy agreed and laid his head down. Grand stretched out too, sliding his tired, swollen feet under the dog. He'd done a lot of climbing and it was good to give them a rest.

He lay there and thought about the idea. It
was
sound. What he'd seen tonight when he looked at Fluffy was something that a Chumash shaman would have seen and pondered and might have painted.

The fact that Grand hadn't found any precedent didn't discourage him. Perhaps if he could figure out whether the images in the passageway related to the paintings of the mountains-

Later
, he told himself, looking over at the clock.
Do this later
.

Grand shut off the light, punched up the pillow, and settled his head in the middle. He closed his eyes. The rain was stopping. The night was still.

He wasn't going to have any trouble sleeping tonight. It had been a long day but a challenging and also rewarding one. If nothing else, he'd reconnected with Tumamait. It was a tentative step but one he'd needed for a long time. And he had a mystery to solve. Because of that, because his passion had somewhere else to go, his thoughts of Rebecca were dreamy rather than sad. He saw Rebecca sitting at the dining room table on her day off, catching up on newspapers, journals, and correspondence. He could still smell the sweetness of her neck, feel her under the pink terrycloth robe. He could smell the Kona coffee she loved, taste the melted butter of an English muffin on her lips. He smiled as he remembered a song she once improvised to get him away from his computer late one night. She had called it "Chumash," a love song about a man and his art, and she sang it to the tune of the old Association song "Cherish."

Rebecca was so alive in his mind and senses. How could he want to send her spirit away? If he did, then he'd lose these precious moments along with the bad memories.

Or would he
? Wasn't there a place he could keep the happy times and still allow her spirit to rest, let himself get on with the business of living?

After a few minutes Grand was too tired to focus on the things Tumamait had said. Consciousness grew heavy and black. But before he surrendered it entirely, the images from the lower cave came back vividly, like the last, memorable bangs of a fireworks display.

Grand cracked his tired eyes. He didn't see how he could be wrong. He had seen the images from the cave in his living room.

The desk lamp gleaming in Fluffy's eyes. A pair of white crescents, side by side.

Grand shut his eyes again. He wondered where a Chumash shaman might have seen those same images. In what animal and under what circumstances? By sunlight? Moonlight? Firelight? And why would he have painted them in that passageway? Had that cave been inhabited by wolves or bears at some point in the past? Did the Chumash believe that one of their gods lived below? Did they think that this was the entrance to
C'oyinashup
, the lower world?

It was the last thought Grand had before surrendering to sleep.

Carl Fischer always took his morning jog just before sunup. The middle-aged manager of the Montecito post office would suit up in his black tights, a singlet and waterproof windbreaker, running shoes, and a tiny "headlight," a flashlight that fit around his forehead like the reflective glass doctors wore when he was a kid. Then he'd do a brisk mile along the narrow, deserted strip of beach.
His
beach, since there was no other human out at this hour and precious few birds. When he got back to his small waterfront home, Fischer would shower, put on the post office blue-and-whites, make apple and cinnamon oatmeal and hazelnut coffee, and enjoy them on his deck facing the Pacific. Fischer loved sunsets over the ocean. He loved having dinner on the deck with his wife and teenage daughter. But the sunrise, lighting the sea as it climbed over the mountains, was even more thrilling. The texture of the water changed with every moment and was different with each new day.