The Witch's Tongue (3 page)

At about the time the poker game in Granite Creek was coming to an end, Daisy Perika had turned out the lights. On the morrow, she was expecting her nephew for breakfast and Charlie Moon’s arrival generally echoed the crack of dawn. The elderly Catholic got into bed, pulled the quilt to her chin, whispered a hurried Our Father, drifted off toward that gray land where dreams are born.

If she had known what was happening just up the canyon from her trailer home—and the astonishing events that would transpire there before the sun came up again—she would not have slept a wink.

But Daisy Perika was quite ignorant of all that wickedness. Sleep came quickly. The shaman dreamed her dreams. The phantom sights and hollow sounds were ripped from the ragged edge of sanity.

A TALKATIVE
owl flies beside the shaman. They discuss a recipe for squash-and-sandstone stew, the bitter taste of dogbane tea, and how Sunflower Woman got her name. Daisy soars over the ruins of a foreign city. Rows of fluted granite columns stand above a cerulean sea painted on bone-dry sands. On the crest of a whitewashed tomb, a pregnant wolf raises her head, howls at a moon that was never there. In an alley of ice and cinders, ghosts of ragged old men dance and sing ribald songs
.

Being late for a previous appointment, the owl takes her leave of the Ute elder. The dreamer twists and turns through time and space. She hears a coarse, humming sound—“Voooom…vooooom!”—a giant hornet darting about in search of someone to sting?

She hears a sonorous voice: “In respect of the soon-to-be deceased, let us pause for a quarter-second of silence. Well done! You may dispose of the remains.”

Daisy plummets from the sky for eleven heartbeats, strikes the earth hard enough to rattle her teeth. She is on her back, in a narrow pit. A knobby elbow of juniper root pushes up under her left shoulder, the smell of freshly turned earth settles into her nostrils. A glistening snow drifts down, decorating her dark skin with six-sided silver ornaments. An indistinct figure materializes above her, mouths a slow chant in a guttural tongue that is alien to the Ute shaman. The ritual ends
.

Sand and stones are falling on her face
.

She cannot breathe
.

UNEXPECTED THEATER

CUTTING THE
empty silence with feathered whispers, a red-tailed hawk wings its solitary way through the meandering canyon. Happily for an unwary rodent, the hungry raptor passes without noticing the jumping mouse perched in a clump of dead rabbit grass—its long, naked tail coiled around a brittle twig. With a blissful mix of suspicion and curiosity, the beady-eyed little mammal watches the labors of a human being. Also entranced by the unusual spectacle is a nervous chipmunk, whose rural life offers little in the way of entertainment. And of course the hungry cougar is counted in the audience.

The muscular Ute, stripped to the waist and sweating, was on his knees.

Jacob Gourd Rattle was not praying.

He was hacking maliciously at the earth with a U.S. Army surplus foxhole mattock. The grunts of the worker and the dull thump of the steel implement were perfectly synchronized. And so it went until the canyon was awash in moonlight. Bone-weary from his labors, Jake Gourd Rattle tossed the mattock aside. The trench was more than a yard deep. He got to his feet, pulled on his shirt.

In the secretive manner of a miser checking on his treasure, Jacob removed a precious object from his hip pocket. It was a thin blade of polished bone, wrapped in a sturdy leather cord.

A dozen times he had tried, with no effect. He would make another attempt.

After muttering the old incantation, the Ute called to the Thunder. There was no answer. He called again. He heard it. Not the Thunder.

Up the canyon, where the steep trail wound its crumbling way down from the mesa, someone was singing. It was a woman’s voice.

Jacob Gourd Rattle’s wife called out when she was still a hundred yards away, “Jaaa-aaake…Jaaa-aaake. I’m baa-aaak.” A pause. “Jaaa-aaake?”

Her footsteps crunched on the sandy canyon floor. Closer now.

Kicks Dogs had a canvas knapsack strapped on her back, a spindly walking stick in her hand. Like a hound sniffing him out, the white woman walked back and forth, looking this way and that, finally stopping within two paces of her man. “Jaaa-aaake,” she screeched, “where
are
you?”

The response came from behind her: “Here.”

She whirled around, clasped a hand to her throat. “Oh—you shouldn’t go scaring me like that!”

He took a quick step forward, backhanded her across the face.

The woman dropped the walking stick, stumbled back two steps—but did not fall.

“Stupid white trash,” he growled. “I told you
four
days—and you come back in three!”

Intimidated by the bully, the woman looked at her feet.

“Say it,” he snarled.

She mumbled the required response.

“So I can hear you!” He raised his hand to strike her again.

Her lower lip trembled. “I’m sorry, Jake. You know how I am—I just can’t keep track of time.”

It annoyed him that she was not weeping. Kicks always bawled when he hit her.

Not very much later, the curtain had fallen on the small melodrama. This being so, the furry audience dwindled one by one. The jumping mouse found a cracked acorn under a dwarf oak, gnawed on it. The chipmunk darted off into the recesses of a hollow log. The cougar on the Witch’s Thumb stretched her tawny limbs and yawned. On this night, perhaps the predator would sleep. Dream otherworldly feline dreams. Perhaps not.

ONE CRYSTALLINE
perfection at a time, the snow jewels began to fall from heaven.

SOME NINETEEN
miles northwest of the dismal canyon, and just beyond the boundary of the Southern Ute reservation, the curator of the Cassidy Museum was tucked snugly under his patchwork quilt. He had tried counting sullen llamas, noisy guinea hens, even a long line of ancestral black sheep—but Bertram Eustace Cassidy could not find sleep. Finally, in the wee hours, he thought he heard something. The insomniac propped himself up on an elbow, shuddered as he stared into the black mouth of a horror barely held at bay by the fragile windowpane. For all the darkness and dead silence, he might have been on the far side of the moon.
Fiddle-dee-dee—it must have been my imagination
. No, there it was again—the sharp, tinkling sound of glass breaking.
Oh dear me—I do believe we are being burgled!
Bertie fell back on the bed, pulled the covers over his head.

His poker winnings nestled satisfyingly thick in his wallet, Charlie Moon arrived at his aunt’s trailer home with the first stirring of smoky-gray light in the east. He jackknifed his long, lean frame into a straight-backed wooden chair, eased his knees under Daisy Perika’s kitchen table. The tribal investigator stirred several helpings of sugar into a mug of scalding coffee, noted with approval that the brew was coal black even in the spoon.

The Ute elder, who had risen well before daylight to have a meal of warmed-over posole and saltine crackers, fussed around the propane stove to prepare a proper breakfast for her nephew.

The fifty-year-old vacuum tube radio was tuned to KSUT—the tribe’s FM radio station. The paper diaphragm of the permanent-magnet speaker vibrated to reproduce the haunting voice of a long-gone Hank Williams. The unspeakably sad soul wailed a melancholy lament about his lover’s cheatin’ heart.

Moon looked at the old woman’s back. “Good snow we had last night.”

“Good for you, maybe. This cold, damp weather makes my bones ache.” Daisy Perika cracked three brown-shelled eggs into a cast-iron skillet where a half-dozen pork sausage links soaked in a blistering bath of popping grease. The cook was startled to discover that the third egg was abnormal. “Uh-oh.”

Moon raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“This cackle-berry’s got a double yolk.” She scowled at the thing. “I don’t remember right off if that’s a good sign or a bad one.”

Her nephew saw the opportunity and seized it by the neck. “It depends.”

“On what?”

“It’s good luck if one yolk is bigger than the other one. But if the other one is the biggest, that’s serious bad news.”

Daisy glared back at the offensive double-eye floating in the skillet. “That doesn’t make no sense at all.”

He was very pleased with himself. “It’s just my notion of a yolk.”

The old woman sighed, shook her head. “There was always rumors of insanity on your father’s side of the family.”

Moon grinned. “If I recall correctly, you are my father’s oldest sister.”

She did not miss a beat. “It was only the men that was affected.” The tribal elder remembered the significance of cracking a double yolk. This was a double omen. Unexpected company was coming, and trouble was not far behind. Daisy Perika was not surprised. Bad news was always knocking at her door.

THORN BUSHES
reached out hooked talons to rake her naked arms, tear at her cotton skirt. Terrified that her heart might stop beating—or that something far
worse
than death might embrace her soul—Kicks Dogs hurried along through the snow, stumbling over juniper roots and jagged pieces of stone. Though trembling with fear, she was immensely relieved to be out of that horrible canyon. Despite her unhappy night, the woman had an iron-willed determination to survive. She also had a particular destination in mind—the old Ute woman’s home, which was out there somewhere. Over and over, the thought raced through her consciousness:

All I have to do is get to Daisy’s little trailer…then I’ll be all right
.

Though she did not know why, she knew this was a lie.

She would never be all right again.
Never
.

AS IF
bent on the complete and utter destruction of the eggs, Daisy Perika selected a delicate three-tined fork, stirred viciously at the yellow-white puddle.

Charlie Moon, who had his heart set on sunny-side-ups, grimaced. “Scrambled, huh?”

“This ain’t no fancy restaurant.” The cook did not bother to look at the hungry man. “The rule here is you take what you get and you like it.”

He raised his nose to sniff at the sausage scent. “It smells almost good enough to eat.”

The old woman muttered a phrase that was pointedly profane and, fortunately, unintelligible.

Moon turned his attention to the weekly tribal newspaper.

Daisy Perika raised her voice so he could hear her complaint: “I didn’t sleep very good last night.”

He took a taste of the sugary coffee, waited for the rest of the story. It would be because of the cold winds that moaned all night or a noisy coyote or some spicy leftovers she ate right before going to bed or bad dreams or—

“I had some bad dreams.”

Aha
.

“Somebody was throwing dirt in my face.” She flipped a sausage. “And there was an owl on a tree limb right out there”—Daisy pointed a dripping spatula at the wall—“that hooted for hours and hours.” She glared at the small, curtained window that looked out onto the pine porch. “At least a dozen times I thought about hauling myself outta bed, loading up my old twelve-gauge, blowing that big-eyed screecher into a splatter of guts and feathers.”

Her nephew’s mouth made a wry half-smile. “So why didn’t you?”

She gave him a poisonous look. “You know why.”
Big smart Aleck
.

Charlie Moon put on an innocent, perplexed expression. “You fond of owls?” The old woman could barely tolerate any of God’s creatures.

“Owls are messengers—they come to tell us when somebody’s going to die.” She twisted a knob on the propane stove, lowering the ring of blue fire under the iron skillet. “Any fool knows that.”

“Oh yeah.” The specified fool nodded. “I’d forgot to remember.”

Ignoring a hint of amusement in the unbeliever’s voice, she assumed a pious tone. “It’d be wrong to harm one of God’s hardworking creatures when they’re just going about their job in this world.” And it would certainly summon up the very worst kind of bad luck. The human being foolish enough to kill a messenger owl might very well be selected to cross that dark, deep River before their appointed time. Daisy opened the oven door, pulled out a tray of made-from-scratch lard and buttermilk biscuits.

Charlie Moon watched Daisy hobble about her small kitchen, wondered how long it would be before the Owl called her name. Life without the superstitious, cantankerous, unpredictable old woman was unthinkable.

“I don’t know why you bother to come out here,” she grumped. “You with your fancy big ranch to run.”

Moon winked at his aunt. “Must be the free food.”

She held back a smile, slammed a plate on the table. “Well, here’s your grub, so shut your mouth and eat!”

He nodded a happy assent to this contradictory order, and got right into the job.

The old woman sat down to watch her nephew enjoy his breakfast.

KICKS DOGS
thought she could see the old woman’s trailer, yonder just below the slope of the long, sinuous ridge.
All I’ve got to do now is keep on putting one foot in front of the other
. She tried to smile.
And keep my wits about me
.

The snow fell harder.

MOON GAZED
out the window toward an invisible Three Sisters Mesa, watched the snow scatter in a light breeze. It was peaceful here, near the mouth of
Cañon del Espiritu
. Aside from the occasional groan of restless west winds, or the calls of night creatures scurrying about, the quiet in this place was more than the mere absence of sound. The silence was a palpable, intense medium that issued from the cool depths of Snake and Spirit canyons. It had a way of hushing those troublesome noises in a man’s soul.

Daisy frowned at his faraway expression. The elder knew this look. It could come upon a man when his spirit was about to slip away from his body. Or when his mind was occupied by idle, foolish thoughts. As far as she was concerned, the former state was highly undesirable—the latter an outright affront. “Charlie!”

Mildly startled, he turned to focus on the old woman’s wrinkled face. “What?”

Having nothing in particular to say to her nephew, Daisy was momentarily befuddled. She fumbled around for words. “You—uh—want some more coffee?”

Coffee?
“Way you yelled, I thought maybe I had a six-inch centipede on my neck.”

“What you had was a more-than-usual stupid look on your face. Now do you or don’t you?”

“Coffee will be fine.” He flashed a smile. “In all my life, I never shunned a second cup of stimulant or a lady’s well-meant compliment.”

Daisy poured a thin stream of ebony liquid.

He stirred up a small whirlpool in the mug. Watched another storm brewing behind the old woman’s black eyes.

She tried to think of just how to say it. “How’s you-know-who?”

“Could you be more specific?”

“That woman.”

“Miss James?”

“When are you gonna tell me her first name?”

“I’ll let her tell you.”

Daisy snorted, swiped a damp dishrag across the oilcloth. “And when’ll that happen?”

“When I bring her to see you.”

She paused in midswipe. “You intend to bring that white woman to my home?”

“The thought had crossed my mind once or twice.”

Daisy frowned, shook her gray head.

“Is she not welcome?”

“You men don’t understand nothing.” Daisy scrubbed at a sticky jelly spot. “I’m your closest family. You bring your white-eye sweetie pie out here to see me, she’s liable to get ideas.” She left the unsettling thought to curdle in his mind.

Charlie Moon watched his aunt rub a hole in the oilcloth. “I see what you mean.”

Daisy sighed with relief. “Then you won’t be bringing her.”

“On the contrary.”

She sat down, stared across the table.
Well, he’s a grown man. It had to happen sooner or later
. “You goin’ to ask this
matukach
woman to share your bed?”

He raised an eyebrow. “I had thought about proposing something a bit more formal.”

Daisy closed her eyes. “Oh, God.”

He smiled, reached across the table to touch her hand. “But if she says yes, we’ll want your blessing.”

Daisy got up, stomped off to the stove with the coffeepot. She tried very hard to think of some suitable response to this thunderbolt from her nephew. Something to say that she would not regret until her dying day.
Which, the way I am feeling, could be tomorrow
. She was distracted by the sudden sense that someone was
out there
. The tribal elder went to the window, pushed a curtain aside just a notch, groaned as she saw the bedraggled woman hurrying toward the trailer. “Oh no—it’s Kicks.”