Last Chants (6 page)

“Back in the seventies. There was some dumping of dead bodies here back then. Then the Trailside Killer did in all those hikers, so they started calling it that. But no.” She sighed, looking down at Seawuit's photo. “It's been a couple of years since the last one. Not counting the dump-offs.”

I tried to smile thanks for her words of comfort.

“No, really, don't worry,” she added. “We have more mountain lion attacks up here than murders!”

I walked on before I lost all courage. I thought I heard her snicker.

“W
hy didn't you tell me this was where he was murdered?” If I sounded shrill, I couldn't help it.

Arthur, his chin stubbled and his hair wet from the shower, blinked at me. “But that's why we came here,” he said.

“No. No, it isn't. This is the very last place we should be.”

“But how odd, Willa. That's not what you said yesterday.”

I groaned, brushing off a wood chair at a plank table. “Yesterday I didn't know this was where Seawuit died.”

Arthur winced, then began going through the grocery bag. “Then I don't understand. Why did you want to come?”

“It seemed like a good hiding place.”

“But there was no reason to hide. Not by then.”

“Are you kidding? Our faces were still fresh in that cop's memory. Of course there was reason to hide. Especially you, Arthur.” I knotted my fist into my bangs—the very reason I'd let them grow out. “The point was to take you where you could establish an alibi.”

He seemed pleased to find orange juice in the bag. “We'll do that this morning if you like. There are people here I'm anxious to contact.”

“Don't you get it, Arthur? Yesterday someone tried to hand you what was probably the murder weapon. Now we've brought you to the scene of the crime.”

He suddenly looked perplexed.

“You can't deny there's something fishy about a man handing you a gun then screaming his head off.” It struck me that Arthur resembled a blend of my parents. He had my mother's scattershot goodness, and my father's calm intellect. Maybe that's why I wanted to protect him; I'd been protecting my parents all my life. “We'll figure out later where to say you've been. But for now, don't talk to anyone, okay? Don't let anyone see you around here.”

He stood there, carton of orange juice in hand. “Your hair,” he said.

“I ran into someone who might recognize me.” Which brought me to the real question: “What were you and Seawuit doing for Cyberdelics?”

“I wasn't doing anything at all. Billy may have been lending respectability to the project, but I don't think so. It's called Tech-noShaman; a way for computer users to access nonordinary states. They say computers are becoming more like drugs, you know, and that drugs are becoming more like computers.”

“Huh?” I couldn't begin to imagine what that meant.

“Technology keeps striving to provide a psychedelic experience—graphics, special effects, a certain freewheeling, mind-expanding quality. And recreational drugs are being designed to stimulate precise impulses, to amplify comprehension. For example, the so-called smart drugs.”

“Okay.” That would do for now. “Did Cyberdelics contact you guys? How long had you been here?”

“Galen Nelson, the owner, met us at a conference on shamanism. He persuaded Billy to come. He offered what they call a mother-in-law unit behind the Nelsons' house—excellent access to Bowl Rock. I visited him there. I'm sure they'll have a great deal to tell me.”

“I'll talk to them, Arthur—without telling them you're here, without telling them who I am. We need to keep you out of this for a while, for both our sakes.” I put my hand on his arm. “If the police find you, they find me, too. And it's too soon for them to see us together. If you don't stay out of sight, you put us both at risk. You mess up my future, too.”

There wasn't much he could say to that, which is why I made a point of it.

“Well,” he conceded, “there are other, more authoritative voices here.”

I shuddered to think who he had in mind. “Such as?”

“The place itself.”

I was relieved. He could talk to the trees all he wanted.

He set the juice down, looking suddenly bereft. “And Billy himself.”

I sighed.

“We've come to the right place for a reason, Willa; you'd agree with that?”

“In a way.” My ignorance was most of the reason.

“We've come here to do the right thing.”

“What right thing?”

“Listen to Billy, and to the mountain. Find out what happened and what they want done about it.”

That wouldn't have been my first guess.

I handed him a glass.

He held it in one hand, the juice in the other. “We'll take a walk this morning.” He gestured with the juice, spilling some. “I'll introduce you to the Great Mother.”

I smiled. Lawyers are rarely introduced to the Great Mother on a work-week Tuesday morning. Nor would most of them welcome it.

I made Arthur temper his enthusiasm long enough to have breakfast. Even so, he talked more than he ate. Between sips of juice and distracted bites of sweet roll, he set out to tell me how he'd met Billy Seawuit.

“Almost fifty years ago, I searched for insight in southern places; I'm not sure why. First I went to the Amazonian tribes, including the Juavaro. I spent the questing part of my youth
south of the equator. And then I sacrificed my middle years to academia, endlessly recogitating things I'd already done and was finished with.” He stared thoughtfully into his juice. “What a sad waste of experience scholarship is. The most valuable part of any experience is seeing for yourself. Academics are too quick to accept hindsight analysis over the continuing nuances of observation.”

“Not everyone has a chance to make those observations, Arthur. A lot of people are grateful to you for bringing them yours, even if they do lose something. I wouldn't consider your teaching years a waste.”

“A waste to me. I litanized my experiences to the point that I petrified them. I robbed them of the fluidity to carry me in new directions. But,” he shrugged, “that was my choice. Or rather, my bow to the conventional wisdom. Then I saw myself becoming a sort of parrot of my younger self. In the field, I'd touched something universal. My teaching had become a Cliff Notes version of it.”

He slumped in his seat, bags bulging beneath his eyes. Last night had been hard on me, and I was half his age. Watching him in the harsh light of an uncurtained window, I was more concerned with his health than his philosophy.

“Try a roll, Arthur.”

After a placating nibble, he continued. “I'd already been south, and so I traveled north this time, into British Columbia and the Yukon. That's where I met Billy.” His expression brightened. “By then, I'd concluded that vision questing had nothing to do with ayahuasca, nor yagé, nor Dr. Leary's LSD. The true purpose of the drugs was to induce a state of terror and profundity. No matter what you can achieve by praying or meditating . . . ” He shrugged, roll poised halfway to his lips. “No one approaches meditation with knocking knees and fear in his heart. But you can't take a drug without facing danger and the specter of the unknown. And that's it, you see. You put yourself on the line. The shamans knew it with their ghastly rituals. They knew that the exotic and ancient places within us couldn't be reached cheaply and comfortably; that you can't unroll a little mat and safely mantra yourself there. But it's not the drug itself that's essential. It's the stake. Do you see?”

“I suppose.” I'd been too recently in jeopardy to find glamour in danger.

“I had started out as an anthropologist and ethnobotanist, studying the relationship of plants to culture. But I had turned my experiences into an easy sort of chapbook, describing the mythologies of others without conveying the fearsome passages, the tumult and exultation of survival inherent in them. In the process of relating myths, I'd lost touch with their very source.”

“The individual putting herself on the line?”

“What the individual finds when he's willing to gamble everything to listen to and be led by the universe. It's from that place that all mythologies unfold.”

I liked to have a more detailed map, myself.

He put his hand on mine. “Across the globe, our stories are parallel, you know. Our myths resemble one another. Because their source is common to us all. You don't have to go out and buy
Bulfinch's Mythology,
nor do you have to apprentice with a Juavaro storyteller. If you're willing to surrender control over your very life—and thereby your intellect, your expectations, your limits—if you're willing to take that journey to the source within yourself, the story is waiting there in richest detail. It comes from a vast elsewhere that we've lost the habit of accessing. We literally have to scare centuries of cobwebs out of our mystical machinery.”

I supposed I couldn't keep skepticism off my face.

Arthur patted my hand. “Ah, all those years you spent among ideologues. I sound like them to you, don't I? But I'm not asking you to accept my view—that's why I stopped teaching. Science, religion, popular culture: they bludgeon us with a theory, a spin, a replacement for personal observation. Consensus trance, I believe they call it. And it becomes difficult to break free, to have one's own experience of anything . . . absent a profound internal upheaval.”

“I hope you're not wishing that on me.”

“I thrust it upon you yesterday morning, my dear.” He attacked the sweet roll as if noticing it for the first time. “How good of you to bring me this. Billy used to provide for me, you know. Make sure I had my keys, put meals in front of me when
I'd forgotten to be hungry.” He looked surprised. “But that's what I started out to tell you: how I met Billy.”

“Enjoy your breakfast, Arthur. We have all day.”

“No, no. We have to get to Bowl Rock.”

“It's not going anywhere,” I pointed out. I entertained an optimistic thought: “Do you think you'll find something the police didn't recognize or understand?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Botanicals? Traces of shamanic ritual?”

“The experience of the place itself.”

To me this seemed a sentence fragment. But he appeared to feel it was a complete answer.

He stooped over his breakfast. “That's what I learned when I went north. I learned that a place can be as revelatory as any drug. A place can tear you from the safe coffin of your assumptions as dramatically as any chemical. I learned that from Billy Seawuit.” He pushed aside what remained of the meal. “His magic will blow away everything you think you know about reality, Willa. I guarantee it.”

“T
he earth used to be covered by redwoods.” Arthur waved his arm at the dense growth around us. “Giants, three or four times larger than these young trees.” The “young” trees were as tall as three-story buildings. “Now they exist only in certain parts of the Pacific Northwest. That's a very important and primal link for us. We've been educated to think of Africa and perhaps parts of ancient France as our cradles of civilization. But our link to the primeval goes back farther than that, to the first botanical habitats of the earth. That's why redwood forests speak to us in a way savannas can't.”

I was aware of the smell of evergreens shading wet earth, the sting of cold mist on my cheeks. I felt an invigorating freedom, probably because I was truant. But if the redwoods were “speaking” to me, they were being far too subtle.

“This particular area is a power spot. If you can survive your most basic emotions, you can feel its history. It was flung up out
of the ocean in a vast upheaval hundreds of millennia ago—very recently, geologically speaking. In eroded areas, it's common to find fossilized shells. It must have been quite a sight, an entire ecosystem of sea creatures and vegetation lying here for however long it took water bacteria to develop a land version. Imagine the ground slowly desalinating in the rain until it could sustain plant life, then giant sequoias moving across it like a green glacier, making shade for ancient horsetails and ferns.”

“What killed the rest of the world's redwoods?”

“The Ice Age. They can survive anything now and again, but for frequent or persistent cold, you need hemlock, spruce, cedar. Ah, the ancient cedars of the Northwest . . . the fragrance! No smell satisfies like cold cedar forest. We're all Kwakiutls at heart.”

I had to smile. I wasn't sure what I was at heart, but Kwakiutl wasn't even on the list.

“What's that?” I spotted something with a bright pattern under a tangle of shrubs.

Arthur stopped, walking closer. “A bedroll. You do see them up here. Perhaps the hard economic times . . . ”

He walked abruptly on, as if embarrassed to find something so depressingly usual in his power spot. He took a left at the head of a trail barely wide enough for one. I hoped he knew his way around. I hoped we weren't going to get lost in the woods. This environment might speak to my primeval soul, but my chilly body didn't want to be lost in it.

I knew we were getting close to Bowl Rock when I saw a snippet of yellow plastic police tape caught in a blackberry vine.

Somehow that shiny yellow strip, not six inches long, brought it home to me. More than Arthur's tears, more than this morning's newspaper account, this accouterment of disaster stopped me in my tracks.

I hadn't known Billy Seawuit, thank God; I'd been spared the pain of surviving him. I didn't want him becoming real to me now. I felt, as usual, that I had enough problems. But I'd never known the universe to agree.