The Cutthroat Cannibals (10 page)

“Mountain cat, Martin, see?” The boy looked down. Stone remembered being both very cold, his breath falling from his mouth
like liquid oxygen from the tail of a rocket, and at the same time very excited. A mountain lion. He had never seen one. “It’s
the little things that tell you everything son, see.” He traced the outline of the track with his finger. “We know by the
size and shape of the foot what it is, and by the fact that the edges are still almost straight, not rounded off by the wind,
that he’s probably within a hundred yards of us. It’s the little things around you that reveal everything.” And though Stone
could hardly believe that even his father could predict such things, lo and behold they moved on slow and quiet as possible
and within seventy-five yards came to a good-sized cat behind a bush ripping away at a cottontail. The lion looked at them,
they looked at the lion, and young Martin’s heart sped up to the beat of a drum machine. But it was the lion who broke and
ran first. The little things. They revealed all. So Stone set to find those little things in every action, every movement
he could make out through the slits and cracks of the tire palace.

Excaliber as well seemed to have found ways to occupy himself. The dog had discovered that it could use the spaces between
the tires to sort of half climb/half hang off the wall. And by taking a good running jump the animal was actually able to
scamper right up the side of one of the walls nearly to the ceiling where, after a few frantic seconds of trying to get a
hold on anything at all, it would fall back to the earth below with a thud. But the dog was so tough that it wasn’t fazed.
And each time, the canine would rise up again, bouncing right off the earthen floor like a ball, get a good running jump,
and try again. No matter how many falls it only seemed to drive the terrier to greater efforts. It virtually flew up along
the walls and ceiling like some sort of misfit that had neither the physiology nor the muscular abilities to climb.

Meanwhile, Stone was fascinated by what he observed outside. It was like looking back onto a primitive world, almost prehistoric.
Men had doubtless lived like this ten thousand years ago. Carrying water in gourds from the river, living off the fish pulled
from the roaring waters with crude nets they had set out. Women on their knees wearing thick buffalo and buckskin outfits
grinding corn kernels that had been stored from the summer before, into paste for breads and crackers. Young braves running
around half naked as they played at spearing one another with branches, shooting each other with imaginary bows and arrows,
each one taking turns to kill and then be killed. Everywhere there was a myriad of activity and over the hours Stone counted
at least a hundred people as he tried to keep mental track of those who went by.

After a while in fact, he came to recognize and name—at least in his own mind—those he was observing. There was the Old Lady
with a Face Like Leather Who Could Carry a Thousand Pounds. She would go up and down the hill on one side of Stone’s rubber
home with a look of supreme patience on her copper red face filled with cracks and rivulets that life had chiseled across
her features. Down the hill to the river, filling four huge gourds with water and then carrying them back up balancing them
on a long pole that she carried over her shoulders. Just by the way the pole bent Stone knew that the weight was 150, possibly
200 pounds, far more than the ancient squaw’s weight. When people didn’t know they “couldn’t” do something, they seemed to
have the remarkable ability to do it.

Then there was the Hunter Who Liked to Brag for Hours. Stone sort of liked the guy. A huge brave, garbed in a bizarre sort
of costume created of equal parts of bear pelt and plastic spandex ribbing in the arms and waist, with football shoulder protectors
sewn in with leather thongs around the shoulders. Then a baseball cap with
NY METS
on it, feathers stuck in top through the
green sunglass visor that had been built into the brim for watching games. The combination of styles gave the yellow striped
face a look of something the avant garde fashion designers of Soho and Paris were playing with before there were no more clothes
to design and no more stores to sell them in. Still the guy could doubtless have made quite a hit back in the right circles.
But he seemed to be doing pretty good right here. The Indian had bagged a moth-bitten mountain goat and had dragged it back,
depositing it on the ground where he proceeded to spend hours bragging to whoever he could get to stop how big the thing was.

Though the Indians seemed to take pride in how they looked, many of them had physical infirmities and deformities. Most had
lost their teeth and had mouths of wooden teeth that kept coming out. Others were missing arms, hands, a leg here and there.
And as always, as Stone had seen throughout his travels, radiation burns and the resultant symptoms and diseases caused by
it. Some of the children were the worst. Their parents would have been exposed to high levels of radioactivity out here. Stone
had seen two H-craters within a hundred miles of the place. And it was their children who had paid the price for those who
lived to breed, for many were deformed, some quite horribly. Arms twisted at odd chicken-wing like angles, faces missing chins
or ears, lips where noses should have been, three eyes. Even a pair of completely legless boys. And yet he had to hand it
to all of them, to the sheer tenacity of the Atsana spirit. For the ugly bastards played and laughed and ran with the others
like the healthiest of children. Even the legless ones were carried, the eyeless ones were led. All were allowed to join in,
all screamed out in wild childish laughter.

Late that afternoon, after he had had a huge bowl of corn soup and slabs of venison, and he and the dog were just stretching
out for a little post-imbibing siesta, the pseudo medicine man showed up, with his usual rattling and snake dancing, to check
on his patient. After the guards had rolled the two huge tractor tires back in front of the entrance he took off his headdress,
an upside-down boot with a Dolly Parton wig hanging down over it.

“Damn, this thing is heavy—you’d be amazed,” Nanhanke said, and as always Stone could hardly believe the almost New York accent
that emerged from the purple lips.

“I can imagine,” Stone said, sitting up from his prone position.

“How’s the leg?” the Indian asked as he walked over, tucking his rattle in his belt and leaning his huge mop-handled scepter
against the tire wall.

“Not as bad as it was,” Stone answered, looking down at the appendage. “I don’t know if it’s healing, but it sure as hell
doesn’t hurt as much as it did before you dropkicked it for a field goal.”

“Good, good,” the medicine man exclaimed, bending down and pulling back the split sides of the pants leg. “Less pain is a
sign that the bones are fusing more properly together. The body doesn’t like things not to fit right, so it lets you know.
Pain is the language that it speaks.” He got down on the earth floor on his hands and knees and sighted up along the leg like
sighting down a pool cue to see if it was straight before heading for the table.

“Looking good, looking real good,” the witch man said, rising up again. “Couldn’t have done better if I was back in Union
General and had a whole team of surgeons, an operating room, and malpractice insurance and everything. I think the damn thing
is going to heal almost perfectly. You’re incredibly lucky, Stone. You came millimeters from being a cripple for the rest
of your life.”

“Well, I’ve already got mental problems,” Stone smirked, “might as well have the body to go along with it.” He looked hard
at the Atsana. “Tell me, how’s it going out there? I mean as far I’m concerned. I can see they’ve been powwowing all day.”

“Don’t know, man,” Nanhanke replied, leaning up against the tires and looking out as if trying to see what Stone had been
gazing at. “The chief’s so uptight on this one that he won’t let any but his top two men in on the actual decision making.
Me and the other four witch doctors ain’t even allowed in on the negotiations. I think the truth is”—he paused—“he’s scared
shit of that damned dog and he don’t want no one to know it except his most trusted pals. Don’t want to look bad to the rest
of the tribe. That dog plays an incredible role in the religious and historical background of the tribe. It’s sort of like
Jesus Christ, George Washington, and Thomas Edison all rolled up into one.” The medicine man looked over at the dog, who was
half asleep with one eye open just a crack looking straight back at the Indian. He swore it could see right into his brain.
“And sometimes I wonder myself.”

“Oh, he’s just a damned dog, and not a very good one at that,” Stone said, annoyed at the glorification of the overeating,
overburping, and overfarting canine. He paused, and looked hard again at the witch doctor. “Listen, what about your helping
me to escape, just even—”

“Forget it, pal, no way,” Nanhanke said, waving his hands in front of him like a customer at a sales clerk who was holding
a shirt five sizes too small. “I’m glad to help you with your leg and I sincerely wish you the best of luck. But I’m here
for the duration. I ain’t going back out there. It’s only going to get worse. Here I’m a respected pillar of the community.
Got me a good job—probably work my way to the top, Head Bullshit Talker—got me a squaw with tits the size of watermelons,
own my own all-weather teepee. Are you kidding, I got it better now that I ever did in the old days. No mortgage, no alimony,
no way.”

Stone laughed at the completion of the man’s little rap. “Okay, I think I get the message,” he grinned. The guy should have
had his own ad agency. Nanhanke fitted his headdress back on until it felt about right, the blond wig falling down over both
sides of his face. He smashed the rattle against the tractor tires and screamed out in dialect for the morons on the other
side to open it up before he used some magic on them, because the white man smelled and he wanted to get the hell out of there.
Nanhanke winked at Stone just before he disappeared outside. The prisoner just stared at the door for a long, long time.

Stone and the dog supped from more food-filled gourds for dinner but otherwise weren’t visited again. Everyone seemed to want
to stay as far away as possible from the magic mutt, which for the moment at least was fine with Stone. It took nearly an
hour for him to fall asleep, though the dog lapsed into blissful farting unconsciousness within seconds of eating its last
bite.

Stone wasn’t sure what time of the morning it was, or what the hell he was dreaming—probably something about April being sliced
up by bikers. But all of a sudden he was bolt upright in the near darkness lit only by the two main campfires always kept
going in the center of the camp about fifty yards off. Something was wrong. He heard a bizarre sound like someone coughing
or perhaps trying to make a mating call but getting the sound stuck in their throat. Stone tried to trace the source of the
sound in the flickering grayness and then heard something straight above him. He raised his eyes and saw the dog, or the lower
half of it anyway, dangling straight down from the rubber-tire ceiling about ten feet above. Somehow the animal, deciding
to take some four A.M. excercise, had gotten its head and right front leg and shoulder lodged into a small car tire that formed
part of the roof, and couldn’t for the life of itself get out. The back legs kicked madly in the air, like an angel trying
to get back up into its cloud before God made bedcheck. And the sound the animal was making was pathetic—a wail filled with
fear and humiliation.

“Christ, Excaliber,” Stone groaned, unable to stop his mouth from stretching into a wide grin as he pushed himself up from
the straw bed he had made in the corner. “You must have watched too many Three Stooges films in your childhood,” Stone said
smirking as he tried to figure out how the hell he could dislodge the creature. He didn’t want to call the Indians in, because
if they saw the mutt in such a dumb predicament all of the dog’s godly and macho powers would evaporate like so many soap
bubbles in the sun. No, this had to be kept in the family, to say the least.

He looked around and saw the crutch with its crook at one end for his arm to rest on. Stone grabbed the thing up and half
walked, half hopped until he was standing right underneath the dog. He balanced himself on one leg until he felt good and
set.

“Dog, this is going to hurt you more than me. Just grit your incisors and we’ll see what happens.” There was a whiny growl
from above, the animal not very audible with its head on the outside of the tire building. Stone pulled the three-inch-thick
branch back and whapped forward right at the animal’s flank. As he swung Stone found himself losing his balance, and he tumbled
forward along with the motion of the blow. The branch hit the dog amidships and the animal swung up toward the rubber ceiling
like a speed bag in a gymnasium. When it bounced off the rubber and back down again the sheer kinetic energy of the ninety
pounds of dog pulled the creature with a loud pop right out of the roof of the vulcanized teepee, like a child popping a nipple
from its mouth. Like some previously unsighted and hopefully never seen again meteor from the darkest nether regions of space,
the animal came hurtling down, every one of its legs spinning in the dark air at once as if flight was possible if one just
tried hard enough.

The animal came down right on Stone’s shoulders just as he was toppling forward himself, and the struggling, shouting, growling
pair crashed down onto the earth in a dusty pile of flesh and fur. When it was all sorted out and every appendage had been
extricated from their pretzellike entanglement, Stone just sat back and tried to still his beating heart.

“Oh dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog,” he said over and over again like some sort of insane mantra, as he slowly drifted back
off to sleep again seeing lines of pit bulls jumping and biting fences.