Revenge of the Manitou (20 page)

“You’re
kidding,” said Neil. “You mean we can’t use guns against these medicine men?”

“No way.
Not unless we want to massacre ourselves in ten
seconds flat with no break for commercials.”

“Jesus,”
breathed Neil. “That never occurred to me.”

Harry turned
away from the door. “It’s this way,” he said. “We’re basically a European culture,
with European ideas of religion and spirituality. That makes us outsiders in
this country, without any real understanding of the spirits that live in the
soil and the rocks and the water. The Indians spent thousands of years getting
to know them, getting to understand them. They know the ways of conjuring them
up, and the ways of controlling them. We’re just floundering about here, Neil,
with no spiritual help to call on, and with about every odd you can think of
stacked against us. They’re going to-”

Just then Toby
came into the kitchen with his catcher’s mitt and his baseball. Harry changed
the subject in
mid-sentence,
and said glibly, “-bring
me a new rental car up in the morning, as soon as their office opens.”

Toby ignored
him and said to his father, “Can I go out to play in the yard, sir?”

“Sure, as long
as you don’t go any further than that.”

“Is mommy
coming back today?”

Neil shrugged.
“Maybe.
When we’ve sorted out all our
problems.”

“Daddy-” began
Toby.

Neil raised his
eyes. For one fleeting moment, he had heard Toby as he used to be.
Toby the child.
Even Harry turned around, and then glanced
back at Neil and lifted one questioning eyebrow.

“What is it,
Toby?” asked Neil, softly.

Toby blinked,
as if he’d started to think of something, and then forgotten it. His eyes
clouded again.

“Nothing, sir.”

He went out
into the yard to play with his ball, and Harry sat with Neil at the table for a
while, finishing his cigarette.

The day slowly
began to darken.

The next
morning, Harry invited himself along on Neil’s regular drive up to the school
to drop off Toby. They sat side by side in the front of the pickup truck in
silence. The weather was heavy and threatening again, with a sky the color of
bruised fruit. Harry smoked too much, while Neil looked pale and tired, and
drove badly.

Only Toby was
composed, sitting with his hands held together in his lap, unsmiling and quiet.

The pickup
truck circled the school yard in a cloud of lingering dust and stopped. Harry
climbed down and helped Toby jump after him.

The yellow
school bus was already parked by the fence, waiting to take the children up to
Lake
Berryessa
for the day. Neil had awakened early
to make Toby some peanut-butter sandwiches, and they had stopped at the store
on the way to school to buy him a Milky Way and a package of Fritos.

“Have a nice
day,” said Harry. “Don’t fall in the lake.”

Toby looked at
him gravely. Then he turned and walked across to the corner of the yard, where
the rest of his classmates were beginning to assemble. Harry recognized the
carroty hair of Andy
Beaver,
and a couple of the other
children that Toby had pointed out on their trip around Bodega the previous
day. Harry gave Andy a cute little wave, but the boy simply turned and ignored
him.

Mrs. Novato
came out of the schoolhouse and started to count heads. Harry was about to
climb back up into the pickup, but then he changed his mind and said to Neil,
“Wait here a minute, will you?” and he walked across the yard to where Mrs.
Novato was standing.

“Good morning,”
he said, in a friendly way.

“Good morning,”
said Mrs. Novato distractedly.

Harry coughed.
“I was wondering,” he said.

“Oh, yes?” said
Mrs. Novato. “Daniel-keep still,
will
you? I’ve
already counted you five times.”

“My name’s
Harry Erskine and
I’m
a friend of Neil
Fenner
.”

“I see.”

Harry cleared
his throat again. “What I was wondering was, ma’am, if you could do me a favor
if anything weird starts happening in your classroom.”

Mrs. Novato
stopped counting, her finger poised in midair. She turned to Harry and said in
an offended tone, “Something weird! What on earth are you trying to suggest?”

Harry gave her
a defensive smile. “I’m really not trying to suggest anything. But Mr.
Fenner
has been kind of worried about some of the
nightmares your kids have been having, as well as some of the peculiar events
that have been happening in his
home,
and, well...”

Mrs. Novato
took a patient,
schoolmarmly
breath. “Mr. Erskine,”
she said, “I have already given Mr.
Fenner
far more
leeway to investigate his suspicions than I should. Several of the children’s
parents complained to the principal about that business of setting their
nightmares down on paper, and as a result I came very close to losing my
position. Apart from that, it does seem from what I hear that Mr.
Fenner
is suffering from-well, overwork.”

Mr. Saperstein
walked past, and Mrs. Novato said, “Good morning, Mr. Saperstein.”

“Okay,” said
Harry, “I can guess how you feel. But you can still do me that favor.”

“Mr. Erskine,
let me assure you that nothing weird has ever happened in this class or is ever
likely to. Now, please. I have enough on my hands conducting the correct number
of children off to Lake
Berryessa
and back again,
without troubling myself with weirdness.”

“Sure, I’ve got
you,” said Harry. “But I’m staying with Mr.
Fenner
if
you do want to call me.”

“I don’t want
to call you.”

“But you
might.”

Mrs. Novato
closed her eyes and sought strength and fortitude under her lids. Then she
said, “Very well, Mr. Erskine. Should I ever wish to call you, which will be
never, I will know where not to do so.”

“That’s fine,”
smiled Harry. “Now have a good trip, okay?”

Harry walked
back to the pickup truck and climbed in, slamming the door behind him. “Well?” said
Neil.

“I just asked
her to let us know if there was any trouble,” Harry told him. “Not that she’s
likely to. She’s hidebound by educational bureaucracy, and apart from that
she’s married.”

“What’s that
got to do with it?”

“Nothing much,”
admitted Harry. “It’s just that I find it hard to work my charms on married
women of Mrs. Novato’s age. They’re too old to be oversexed and too young to
have husbands who can’t raise it.”

Neil started
the motor. Before he released the brake, though, he took a last look at Toby
through the dust-filmed windshield. His son was standing clutching his
lunchbox, his blond hair as untidy as ever, in a blue windbreaker and denim
shorts. The other children were gathered around him, and he was obviously
talking to them about something lengthy and serious. “I’ve got a feeling about
today,” said Neil.

“You think
today is the day?” asked Harry.

“I don’t know.
But there’s
a tenseness
around. Don’t you feel it?
Like there’s a storm brewing.”

Harry shrugged.
“It’s hard to tell. But in any case, there isn’t much we can do until Singing
Rock arrives. He said he’d be here by lunchtime.”

“It’s just
those kids going off alone, with all those spirits inside them, all of those
manitous
. That really scares me. What do you think I felt
like this morning, giving Toby his lunch and wondering if he wasn’t even my son
at all, but some kind of ghost out of the past? I’m just standing there doing
something really normal, like making sandwiches, and for all I know he might go
off on that trip and never come back.”

Harry laid a
hand on his shoulder. “Stop feeling so guilty, will you? It’s not your fault
this has happened, even if it was your ancestor who led
Misquamacus
here. I mean-what control could you have possibly had over that? There’s
nothing we can do until the medicine men show themselves. We can’t kill the
children; we can’t even take them away from here. Apart from the fact that
Misquamacus
would prevent us, the police would probably
arrest us for kidnapping, and we wouldn’t do anybody any good sitting in the
Sonoma County pokey.”

Neil released
the brake, and drove the pickup out of the Bodega school yard without saying
another word. He didn’t even look back in his rearview mirror to see Toby and
his classmates being ushered by Mrs. Novato onto the bus. Harry turned around
in his seat, and saw how solemn and unsmiling the children were, and a
sensation of sick tension began to rise in his stomach. He knew just what Neil
meant about a storm brewing. It could have been the unusual humidity, or the
soft but uncomfortable wind. But it could have been the beginning of the day of
the dark stars, too. They met John Singing Rock at the bus station. He was
fifty years old, his face creased with the soft crisscross wrinkles of a South
Dakota Indian, but his eyes were sharp and bright, and he walked across the concrete
parking lot to greet them with the tensile step of a man twenty years younger.
The last time Harry had seen him, his hair had been short and swept back with
brilliantine, and he had worn a creaseless mohair suit. But modern trends had
obviously blown with the winds across the plains of mid-America, because his
hair was longer now and kept in place with Gillette Dry Look, and he wore a
camel-colored sport coat and bright red slacks.

He set down his
suitcase on the concrete and held out his arms. Harry embraced him, saying
nothing, and for a moment they stood there close, while the other bus
passengers looked at them with curiosity.

Harry stood
back, still holding Singing Rock’s hand. “You look like you’ve been shopping at
Gucci,” he grinned. “And what’s this with the hair?”

Singing Rock
touched his graying sidepieces. “I had to give up that greasy kid’s stuff,” he
said.

“It kept
leaving marks on my tepee.”

Harry laughed,
and gripped Singing Rock’s arm affectionately. “It’s good to see you,” he said.
“If I ever went past South Dakota, I’d drop by more damned often.”

Singing Rock
said, “Is this Mr.
Fenner
?”

Harry nodded
and introduced them. Neil shook hands a little hesitantly, but Singing Rock
reached out and placed his hand on top of Neil’s, and said warmly, “You’re
wondering why I don’t have bones through my nose and feathers in my cap?”

Neil was
embarrassed. “I guess I never met a medicine man before. I didn’t really know
what to expect.”

Harry picked up
Singing Rock’s suitcase and the three of them walked across to Nell’s pickup.

Singing Rock
said, “I’d prefer to wear traditional costume. What’s the point of being a
medicine man if you don’t look like one? But the costumes are pretty rare these
days. They take years to complete, and when they’re finished they’re works of
art. These days, you can’t really walk around in a work of art. You might spill
catsup on it.”

Harry helped
Singing Rock into the pickup, and then they drove off toward Neil’s house. The
sky was still oddly dark, and there was a feeling that rain clouds were
building up.

Harry said,
“Neil has a hunch that the day of the dark stars might be today.
Or soon, anyway.”

“Any particular
reason?” asked Singing Rock.

“I don’t know,”
Neil told him. “It’s a feeling like someone’s trying to warn me.”

“Like when
Dunbar warned you of
Misquamacus
?”

“Harry told you
about that?”

“Harry told me
about everything. The slightest detail could be vital.” Neil brought the pickup
to a stop at a road junction, waited for a carload of women to pass, and then
turned left.

He said, “It’s
not exactly the same feeling. When Dunbar first showed up, I could hear his
voice, appealing for help. Toby heard it, too. Both of us saw him, or his
ghost.
A tall man with a light-colored beard and a long white
duster coat.
But today, the feeling’s just a feeling. I haven’t heard
Dunbar’s voice since last night. This is much more general.”

Singing Rock
said, “You’re very unusual for a white man, Mr.
Fenner
,
if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“What do you
mean?” asked Neil.

“You were
prepared to believe in the supernatural before you started trying to think of
rational explanations for what you saw. Most white men think of the rational
explanations first, and only believe the supernatural when they have no other
choice. Even then, they frequently don’t believe it.”

“How could I
ignore it?” said Neil. “I spoke to Dun-bar. I was only ten or twelve feet away
from his ghost, and there isn’t anybody alive who can tell me I was dreaming.”

“And you saw
Misquamacus
, too, as a wooden man?”

“That’s right.”

Singing Rock
glanced at Harry, and from his expression, Harry could see that he was deeply
disturbed about what he was hearing.

Singing Rock
continued, “I don’t want to alarm you too much, Mr.
Fenner
,
but there’s something I believe you ought to know.”

“Call me Neil,
please.”

“All right,
Neil. What you have to know is that every
manitou
,
according to Indian belief, is reincarnated seven times, and that each time it
lives and dies and lives again, it gams strength and wisdom. After its seventh
life on earth, it’s wise enough to join the gods outside, in what the Micmac
used to call
Wajok
, the abode of the great ones.”

“I see,” said
Neil, turning right and driving up the dusty roadway that wound over the hills
toward his house. “So what does that have to do with
Misquamacus
?”