Rook & Tooth and Claw (29 page)

Jim hesitated. “A bear, maybe, or a mountain lion.”

“It certainly wasn’t done by humans, was it?”

“Not unless they had some kind of fancy claw.”

“Well, sure,” said Grey Cloud. “But can you imagine the strength you’d need to do something like that? And what happened to this fancy claw? Did we throw it away? Did we bury it? Is it hidden in our house?”

“OK,” said Jim, “supposing you find a way of convincing me that this spirit-beast exists. What do you want me to do about it, apart from making a laughing-stock of myself in front of a court of law?”

“We want you to arrange for the curse to be lifted, so that the beast returns to where it came from.”

“Oh, yes? And how can I do that?”

Grey Cloud said, “You will have to make a journey – a journey that will take you many miles in distance, and a long, long way inside your soul. You will have to learn what it is to be a Navajo. You will have to acquire the great understanding.”

Seek the advice of two friends, thought Jim. Travel on a long journey. But then he said, “Don’t you think one of your own kind would be better at this? A Navajo? Somebody who believes in this stuff already?”

Grey Cloud shook his head. “Too many Navajo have lost their faith. They should be looking for their spirits, but all they want is automobiles and housing developments and factories. When white men first came to our land, they defeated us not only by slaughtering us and giving us white men’s diseases, but by shaking our faith in our gods. One by one, all of our deities lost their power to defend us. Even Gitche Manitou the Great Spirit was rendered powerless and silent. How could he speak to people who no longer listened? We used to hear his words in the wind, but after the white men came all we heard was train-whistles and traffic and radio shows. In the same way, where can the spirit of water survive, when the
rivers are poisoned by industrial pollution? There is no place for a spirit of fire when men have atomic bombs.

“The spirits are still there, but the people are blind. Only
you
can see them.”

“Well, this all sounds very mystical,” said Jim, “but I’m not at all sure that I can do it. I’m not at all sure that I
want
to do it.”

“I’m sorry,” said Grey Cloud, “but you
have
to. You know that you do. Not just for our sake, but for yours, too. If you don’t go looking for this beast – this beast is going to come looking for you. It knows that you’ve been protecting our sister – and, what’s more, it knows that you can see it.”

Jim wasn’t sure that he believed any of Grey Cloud’s warnings or not, but they gave him an uncomfortable feeling that he was being
watched
– or, worse than that, that something very dark and malevolent was
sniffing him out.
He glanced up at the window, but the shadow he had seen out of the corner of his eye was only the shadow of a nodding leaf.

“So where am I supposed to journey to?” he asked. “And what am I supposed to do when I arrive?”

“You have to journey to the Navajo capital of Window Rock, in Arizona. Take Catherine with you, and three other friends. My father will pay for the air fares. When you reach Window Rock, you will meet a man called John Three Names. He will take you to Fort Defiance, which we call the Meadow Between Rocks.”

“Then what?”

“Then he will take you to the man that Catherine is supposed to marry.”

“So Catherine’s betrothal has something to do with all this?”

Grey Cloud said, “Yes. The man that Catherine is supposed to marry has gone to a wonder-worker and
conjured up the spirit-beast to prevent her from forming any attachments to anyone else.”

“I see.”

“You don’t believe us? It’s true! He was so angry and jealous that he would have done anything to stop anybody else from touching her.”

“Supposing I
do
believe you?” said Jim. “Why did your father promise this guy that Catherine was going to marry him in the first place? Is he rich, or what? I mean, that’s not a Navajo thing, is it? Arranged marriages?”

Paul paused, and then he said, “Our father did it because our mother was dying of ovarian cancer. The man said that he knew a wonder-worker, and that the wonder-worker could intercede with the spirits to save our mother’s life. All he wanted in return was to marry Catherine and breed children with her.”

“And your father agreed to that? Without asking Catherine what
she
wanted?”

“He was losing his wife, Mr Rook. He was losing our mother. He was desperate.”

“But your mother died anyway, didn’t she?”

“Yes, she did. The spirits obviously thought that it was time for her to die. Afterward, my father went back to the man she was supposed to marry and asked if Catherine could be released from her betrothal. But the man said that a sacred promise was a sacred promise. Our father begged him, but he refused to change his mind. He said he wanted Catherine and he was going to have her, whatever it took.”

Paul said, “We lit out of Window Rock overnight, leaving most of our possessions behind. Catherine didn’t know why and we weren’t going to tell her. We came here to Los Angeles and my father was lucky enough to get that part in
Blood Brothers.
The studio needed a full-blood Navajo and he was a full-blood Navajo, and he could act.”

“But then?”

“Then we had messages that this man was going out of his mind with jealousy, and that he was going to ask the wonder-workers to put a curse on Catherine, so that no other man would ever be able to touch her. If they did – well, you saw what happened to Martin. The spirit-beast destroyed the locker-room, as a warning, and then, when he refused to be intimidated, it killed him.”

Jim stood up and walked back to the window. A small puffy cloud had appeared in the rectangle of blue sky, and the squad car had gone. “This is a seriously weird story, I’ll tell you that.”

“Believe me, Mr Rook, this is the truth. Would we tell you a lie, when our freedom is at stake? We might even go to the gas chamber if they find us guilty.”

“Think of Catherine, too,” said Grey Cloud. “Think of all the other people who could get hurt.”

“Yes,” said Jim. “Including me.”

“Will you help us?” asked Paul. Behind him, the police officer sniffed and carried on chewing his gum.

Jim said, “I don’t know. You haven’t told me what I’m supposed to do when I meet this spirit-man. How am I going to persuade him to give Catherine up?”

“John Three Names will explain all of that. But the main thing you have to do is make him an offer. Money, mainly. But some other promises, too.”

“I’m sorry, guys. I think I need to know much more before I say yes or no.”

“Mr Rook – it’s far too complicated to explain right now. But I promise you – it isn’t anything difficult.”

“All right, maybe it’s not difficult. But is it
dangerous
?”

Grey Cloud gave an evasive shrug; but Paul said, “It won’t be dangerous if you remember everything that John Three Names tells you.”

“I don’t know,” said Jim. “I’m still not sure about this.”

Paul clenched his handcuffed fists and banged them on his knees. “You
must
!” he said. “
You have to
! There isn’t any more time and we don’t have anybody else.”

“Excuse me. You may not have anybody else but I just get the feeling you’re not telling me everything you know.”

“There’s nothing else
to
know. You go to Arizona, you talk to this guy, you make a deal with him, and that’s the end of it.”

“So why do I have to take three friends?”

“To take care of Catherine, that’s all.”

“Can’t Catherine take care of herself?”

“Mostly … but with all this going on, we think it’s a good idea for somebody to keep a close eye on her. That’s why we always picked her up after college. You know, just in case.”

Jim said nothing for at least a minute. The guard sneezed twice. Paul and Grey Cloud watched him with tightly-contained unease. He didn’t understand this situation, not at all. But he took his grandfather’s warning very seriously, and he took Mrs Vaizey’s fortune-telling very seriously, and it seemed as if he were following the destiny that they both had predicted for him.

“All right,” he said, at last. “Let me talk to your father again. Then I’ll see what I can do.”

He found Henry Black Eagle at Universal Studios, on the set of
Blood Brothers.
A small scrubby area of backlot was supposed to be the Navajo reservation in Arizona, although Jim could easily see the
Psycho
house on the horizon, and coachloads of tourists being trundled around the
Jaws
pool and through the parting of the Red Sea.

Henry was sitting in the front seat of a dusty blue-and-white police car drinking coffee from a styrofoam cup and smoking a cigarette. Jim leaned over the roof and said, “I talked to your sons. It looks like I’m going to Arizona.”

Henry nodded, without looking up. “Thank you, Mr Rook. One day, you’ll get your reward for this.” He checked his watch, and said, “There’s a flight to Albuquerque at seven tomorrow morning. I can get you a charter from Albuquerque to Gallup. John Three Names will meet you there and drive you the rest of the way.”

Jim said, “There’s only one thing I’m going to ask you. What kind of a character is this man who’s supposed to be marrying your daughter?”

“Clever. Devious. He can twist your mind like a helter-skelter.”

“How old is he? Do you know where he comes from?”

“He’s as old as he looks. Where he comes from – well … where do any of us come from? The trees, the rocks, the dust on the ground.”

“Does he have a name?” asked Jim. “It seems a little odd, flying all the way to Arizona to meet a guy and I don’t even know his name.”

“Well, he has several names, as many Navajo do, but most of the time they call him He Who Speaks To Animals, or Dog Brother.”

“And what does he look like? I mean, how old is he? Like, what can I expect?”

“You can only expect the unexpected, Mr Rook. He’s a very devious man, very unpredictable. You should take care not to upset him.”

At that moment, a podgy assistant director in a sweaty green
Blood Brothers
T-shirt came waddling up and said, “Come on, Henry. We’re ready to shoot the explosion scene.”

“OK,” said Henry, and eased himself out of the car. “How about it, Mr Rook? Do you want to watch?”

“Yes, sure. I’d love to,” said Jim. He followed Henry and the assistant director to a small corner of the lot where an elderly black Lincoln Continental was already tilted into a ditch. In the driver’s seat sat a dummy with a blue flowery dress and a blonde wig, slumped over the steering-wheel. Special effects technicians were still fiddling with wires and detonators, and the camera crew were standing around, switching on dazzling photo-floods and then switching them off again, smoking and drinking bottles of Evian water.

On the other side of the set, on the porch of a ‘sheriff’s office’ that was nothing more than a front wall propped up with joists, Jim caught sight of Catherine, wearing a yellow checkered shirt and jeans, talking to a script assistant. “You brought her to work?” he asked Henry.

“What else could I do? Her brothers are in jail. Somebody has to watch over her.”

“She could have come to college. We keep a pretty good eye on our students there.”

Henry said, “Yes, I know,” but that was all; and then the assistant director came over to put him in position.

Just before the clapper-board snapped, however, Henry turned to Jim, and the expression on his face was unlike anything that Jim had seen before. Haunted, haggard, almost pleading. Jim looked over at Catherine. She was still talking with great animation to the script assistant, flicking back her hair and moving her hands. She was just as beautiful as ever – her hair gleaming, her eyes bright. But Jim was sure that he could see a shadow around her. A dark, dim shadow – much bigger than she was – and
hunched up,
as if it were trying to hide itself within her.

The longer he looked at her, the clearer the shadow became. It followed every movement she made, but it
was obviously another being altogether, a being that was imitating her, in order to stay concealed. Jim couldn’t take his eyes off it.

He was standing right next to the best boy, who was wearing a
Blood Brothers
baseball cap backwards and trying to sort out a wildly frayed arrangement of multicolored electrical wires with a pair of pliers.

“Let me ask you something,” he said. “That girl over there … the one in the yellow shirt. Can you see kind of a
shadow
all around her?”

The best boy peered at Catherine, and then looked back at Jim as if he were two fajitas short of a Mexican picnic. “Shadow?” he said, as if he didn’t know what the word meant.

“It’s nothing,” said Jim. “Forget it.” But after the best boy had gone back to his electrical spaghettini, he looked at Catherine again, and there was no doubt that there was a dingy shadow flickering over her. Even when she got up from her seat and walked across the set, the shadow followed her, like smoke, like clouds, like a black-and-white movie projected over her face.

She saw him, and waved, and he was still watching her when there was a deafening explosion, and the Lincoln blew up in a scorching ball of orange flame. The windows were shattered, the tires caught fire, and the hood was flung twenty feet up into the air. Jim turned around just in time to see Henry Black Eagle rolling away across the dust with a gun in his hand.

When he looked back, Catherine had disappeared behind the dust and the smoke and the milling crowd of extras. But he glimpsed the shadow, sliding across the front of the ‘sheriff’s office’, and it was crouched, and angular, with a jagged, bristly outline.

Chapter Five

He met Susan in the corridor outside the geography room and asked her if she was interested in a trip to Arizona.

“Arizona? Why on earth should I want to go to Arizona?”

“I don’t know. You like cacti, don’t you? And the weather’s pretty good.”

“The weather’s pretty good here. Besides, I’m right in the middle of the busiest semester I’ve ever had. And also, I thought that you and I were taking a raincheck.”

“Well, it won’t be just us. One of my students is coming along. In fact, two or three of my students may be coming along. We’re visiting the Navajo reservation at Window Rock.”

Susan shook her head. “I can’t believe you sometimes. You are the most – I don’t know. You are the most off-the-wall person I ever met. Sometimes I feel like you arrived here from another planet, and you haven’t quite learned how Earth people behave.”

“All the same, how about coming to Arizona?”

“No, Jim. I can’t.”

“I need you, Susan. I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t need you. And I’m not talking about sexually. I’m talking about
needing
you, okay? Like needing your support.”

“Why?” she demanded.

“Well…I’m taking a couple of my girl students away
with me, and I think it would be more appropriate if they had a female chaperone.”

“I suppose you’re taking Catherine White Bird?”

“Of course. I mean, this was what inspired the trip in the first place, her being a full-blooded Navajo and everything.”

“And a very alluring full-blooded Navajo, too.”

“What am I supposed to say? That she looks like the back side of a totem pole?”

“OK. Who else is going?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t asked them yet. But I really wanted you.”

Susan said, “This won’t work, Jim. You and I, we’re just not suited. You say tomayto and I say tomato.”

“I know that. But that’s not the point. I need a clear-thinking, intelligent, responsible adult on this trip. I need a woman who can keep an eye on two or maybe three young girls in a difficult situation. I need somebody with a good grasp of ethnic cultures and the ability not to annoy me. You were the only person I could think of.”

“Window Rock, you say?” she asked him.

“Window Rock … and maybe Fort Defiance, too. You know what the Navajo call that? ‘Meadow Between Rocks.’ It’s going to be really, really interesting.”

She looked up at him and he wished desperately that she were in love with him, but that was fate. “I don’t know why I’m saying yes,” she told him. “But, yes. When were you planning on going there?”

“Oh … there’s no rush. I’ll pick you up tomorrow at five o’clock.”

“
Tomorrow
? I can’t go tomorrow. In any case, my last lecture doesn’t finish until twenty after four.”

“I meant five o’clock in the morning. We’re catching the first flight to Albuquerque.”

Susan opened her mouth and then closed it without
saying a word. She watched Jim walking off down the corridor to his classroom and she thought to herself that she might like him more than she had ever admitted.

“I’m taking a short cultural trip to the Navajo reservation in Arizona,” he announced to Special Class II. “The reason I’m doing it is to find out more about Catherine’s background so that I can help her develop as an English student. Of course I’ve done the same for several other members of the class … Rita, you remember when I spent some time with your family and friends, so that I could get a better handle on Spanish culture. John … you kindly invited me to spend a weekend with your Vietnamese friends, and I enjoyed every minute of that, except that I was so clumsy with my chopsticks that I kept dropping
thit bo to
on my shoes.

“I can take two of you with me. One of you should be a girl, so that you can share a room with Catherine. The other – well, it doesn’t matter. Girl or boy. Whoever wants to come.”

Sharon X put up her hand. “Please, sir, I’d love to. I’m so interested in oppressed cultures.”

“OK … anybody else?”

Mark Foley cautiously lifted one finger. Mark was cocky and funny, but he was one of the least academic students in the class. He was shorter and slighter than most of his contemporaries, with a pale, bruised-looking face and badly-cropped blond hair. His jeans and T-shirts were always very clean, but most of them were worn out and frayed. The sole of one of his trainers flapped when he walked.

“You, Mark? You want to come along?”

“Well, sure. I never flew before. It won’t cost anything, will it?”

“No … Catherine’s father is generously picking up
the tab. All you need is a couple of changes of clothes and a toothbrush.”

“Hey – think your dad’ll let you go?” asked Ricky Herman.

“I don’t care what my dad says,” said Mark, defiantly. “I’m going anyway.”

Jim said, “If you have any problems with your father, Mark, just have him give me a call.” He had dealt with Mark’s father before: a real Bluto type who owned a run-down body shop in Santa Monica. He spent all day thumping second-hand Chevies into shape and all evening sluicing down jugs of draft beer at KC’s Bar. He had told Jim to his face that as far as he was concerned Mark’s English course was a waste of time because Mark spoke English already, didn’t he? and poetry was ‘all that faggot stuff’.

“Mrs Whitman will be taking over while we’re gone … but there’s a special project that I want the rest of you to do for me. I want you to find out all that you can about the Navajo people and Navajo culture, especially their religious beliefs. See if you can find out the names of their spirits and any colorful stories about them. When we come back, we’ll be able to discuss what we’ve discovered in Arizona with what you’ve managed to discover here.”

Ray Vito said, “Have a good time, Mr Rook. Bring us back some firewater and a couple of squaws.”

“You and your racial stereotyping,” Sharon protested.

“Yes, Ray – you should be ashamed of yourself,” put in Ricky. “You greasy spaghetti-eating opera-loving Eyetie.”

Jim stood back in amusement as the entire class started to shout racial insults at each other. Sometimes it did them good to come out with all the words that nobody was allowed to use any more. It made them realise that
most racial slurs were only words, and that what really mattered was how well they got along and how much they liked each other. After a few minutes they all collapsed in laughter.

“Right, then,” said Jim. “That’s enough political incorrectness for one day. I’ll see you Friday morning, hopefully.”

He take a long last smiling look around the classroom, trying to give himself a clear picture of every face. After all, this might be the last time that he would see them.

* * *

Their flight from LAX was delayed for nearly an hour and they arrived at Albuquerque International Airport just before lunch. As they crossed the concrete apron the temperature was over 93 degrees and the wind was as dry as a whip.

All through the flight, Catherine had been unusually quiet and thoughtful. Jim caught up with her as they approached the terminal building and said, “Catherine – hey – are you all right?”

She brushed back her hair with her hand. “I think so. But frightened, I guess.”

“Frightened of what? This guy you’re supposed to be betrothed to? We’ll sort him out.”

“I’m more frightened of me.”

“You? Why should you be frightened of you?”

She turned to him, and looked at him intently through her windblown hair. “I feel like there’s something inside of me…something that’s making me feel confused. Like I’m angry about something but I don’t know what. I felt it the last time I dated Martin, I don’t know why. But here I can feel it much more.”

Jim thought of the dark, jagged shadow that had followed her at Universal Studios. “Maybe it’s just your
age. When you’re young, you know, you
do
feel confused.”

“I don’t know, sir. It feels like more than that. It feels so black. It feels so
angry.
It’s like a wildness in me, do you know what I mean?”

“A wildness,” said Jim. “A wildness that comes out of nowhere at all?”

Catherine said, “Yes. That’s it. That’s exactly it.”

“Let me talk to you later,” said Jim. “Meanwhile, let me see if I can fix up our connecting flight.”

“Hey, it’s hot here,” said Mark, wiping his forehead with the back of his arm. He was carrying an old grey canvas sports bag, but his Nike trainers were brand-new and shining white. When his father had heard about his trip to Arizona, he had taken him straight out and bought them for him. “I think it’s a total waste of time but you ain’t going to show me up by going nowhere with no flappy shoe.”

Sharon was wearing a shocking-pink T-shirt and white satin shorts and she looked like an Olympic athlete. “I’m so excited,” she enthused. “I mean, isn’t it beautiful here? So warm!”

Susan gave her a smile. Susan, as usual, was looking very Doris Day, with a blue headband and a crisp sleeveless white blouse and a pleated skirt in yellow-spotted cotton.

“Jim?” she called. “Don’t forget the infantry.”

Inside the chilly air-conditioned terminal, with its highly-polished floors, Jim went to the West New Mexico chartered airline desk. An overweight woman with a huge blonde lacquered hairstyle turned around and called, “Randy! Mr Rook and party!”

Out of the back office came a wiry-looking pilot with a deep tan and a snow-white crewcut to match his snow-white shirt. “How’re you doing, folks? Anybody
want to use the fixings before we go? Don’t like to see my passengers fidgety, that’s all.”

He led them back out onto the heat-baked concrete, where a twin-engined Golden Eagle was waiting to fly them to Gallup. Mark sat up front with the pilot while Jim sat next to Catherine and Sharon and Susan sat in the back. They waited their turn on the runway behind the rippling backwash of a Boeing 737 – then, when it was their turn, Randy took them up ‘like a flea hopping off a dog’s back’. Immediately they angled west-north-westward, with the sun filling the Golden Eagle’s interior with dazzling light.

“Said you’re headed up to Window Rock?” asked Randy.

“That’s right,” said Jim. “We’re on kind of a college field-trip. We’re doing a project on the Navajo way of life.”

“These days, that’s not much different from any other way of life,” Randy remarked. “Don’t be disappointed if you don’t see nobody in feather headdresses and bone breastplates. Window Rock’s pretty much the same as anyplace else around here. It’s got motels and restaurants, and a fairground, and a bank, and a community building and an FHA housing development. They’ve even got their own medical college these days.

He sniffed, and then he said, “Don’t forget to buy yourself a rug, though. You can’t visit the Navajo reservation without coming back with a rug. Teec Nos Pos, they’re the best.”

Jim remembered that Catherine had given a talk in class about Navajo weaving, and told them that rugs from Two Grey Hills were easily the finest, with more than 80 wefts to the inch. But this morning she stared out of the window at the dry, wrinkled ground below them, and said nothing. Once or twice she glanced at Jim and gave him a tight,
uncommunicative smile, but that was all. Jim was trying his best to make her feel protected, but he didn’t really know what he was supposed to be protecting her from.

He had seen a jagged shadow around her – a shadow that nobody else could see – but he had no idea what that meant. Was she actually possessed by this smoky, bristling spirit? Or was it nothing more than an omen – a spiritual warning that the beast was hunting for her, too? The trouble with signs and messages from the other side, they were never spelled out in plain English. Everything was communicated by hints, and suggestions, and faces seen in distant windows.

“Did you ever fly before?” Randy asked Mark.

“No, sir, never. Today’s my first time. I thought I was going to be biting my nails but I wasn’t.”

“I mean did you ever fly an airplane before? I mean, like, yourself?”

Mark violently shook his head. “No, sir! I don’t even own a
car
.”

“Well, you have to start sometime,” said Randy. “Take hold of the controls, let’s see what you can do.”

“Me?” said Mark, in a very much higher voice than he’d meant to. “I can’t. Supposing I crash?”

“You won’t crash. You don’t have the experience to crash. Come on, take hold of those controls.”

Mark gripped the controls so tightly that there were white spots on his knuckles. The Golden Eagle dipped a little, and tilted to one side, and the engines gave a threatening drone. But the pilot said, “Relax, you’re doing fine. Just keep her on an even keel, that’s all. Like, resist the temptation to nosedive.”

Gradually, Mark gained confidence, and began to fly the Golden Eagle straight and reasonably smooth, with only one or two stomach-disturbing dips and swoops. The pilot showed him how to use the pedals and how
to adjust his speed. “You’re a natural, boy. You should make yourself a career out of this.”

Jim watched and smiled. He had never seen Mark so excited. He thought – God, if only more people took a little time with boys like Mark, and showed them what they were capable of doing, instead of always telling them that they were dumb and useless.

“What do you think, everybody?” Mark called back. “Think I’m a pretty good pilot?”

Sharon said, with a big wide grin, “You know something, Mr Rook? I’ve never been so scared in my whole life.”

They were flying over the last slopes of the Cibola National Forest, only a little more than 10 miles away from Gallup. Jim looked down and he could see their shadow dancing through the trees. “Little more height,” Randy told Mark. “That’s it. Want to make sure we clear that ridge up ahead.”

Mark pulled the controls back, but as he did so, the Golden Eagle’s port engine let out a loud burp, and then another, and another. Randy checked his instrument panel and lifted his sunglasses so that he could see the engine nacelle more clearly. “Well,” he announced, “we’re not on fire, I’m very happy to say, and we’ve got plenty of gas. Guess we might have a fuel-line blockage.”

The engine burped even more loudly, and then sputtered, and abruptly died. Susan reached forward and took hold of Jim’s hand, and squeezed it hard. Jim turned around and said, “It’s OK, don’t worry. You too, Sharon. This kind of thing happens all the time.”