Dance for the Dead (41 page)

“Seneca?”

“Some. The Iroquois all
lived in New York State in the beginning. But there were some Seneca
and Cayuga families who used to go into Ohio every fall to hunt.
After the Revolutionary War they didn’t see any point in going
home. They were on reservations at Lewistown and Sandusky until they
got pushed out in 1831 and sent to Oklahoma.”

“But this isn’t your
hometown?”

Jane shook her head. “Not
me. My family stayed in New York.” She watched Mary closely.
“Look, Mary. There are going to be a few things you see and
hear that won’t make sense to you. Like that girl back there
saying we could stay with her, when she had never laid eyes on us
before.”

“It did seem a little
odd,” said Mary.

“Smile a lot and ignore
anything that seems unfamiliar. I didn’t want to bring you
here, but we’ve run about as far as we can for now. Barraclough
already knows I killed his men, and pretty soon he’ll know you
took all his money and gave it to the government. He’s going to
be searching, and this time he won’t let anything distract him.
He wants us dead.”

“I know that,” said
Mary.

“A few of the people here
know me. Most of them don’t. A few are – in the way that
we figure these things, not the way you’re used to –
relatives. We need to get you to a doctor, and we need a place to
rest. This is it.”

They left the car parked on the
road and walked along a path to the trailer park. It took Jane a few
minutes of searching before she found the mobile home she remembered
on the very edge of the lot. There was a small stenciled sign on the
door that said “mccutcheon.” She knocked quietly and
listened.

The door of the mobile home
opened and an old woman in a cardigan sweater and a flowered dress
stood in the doorway three steps above them. Her long straight hair
was thick and gray, tied back in a tight pony tail as though it
belonged to a much younger woman, but her mouth was toothless and her
jaws were clamped together so her chin nearly touched her nose. She
said simply, “Hello.”

Jane spoke to her in Seneca. “My
name is Jane White-field, Grandmother. Do you remember me?”

The old woman squinted, smiled
happily, then said in English, “Just a minute.” She went
away and came back with her false teeth in. “I remember you,
Granddaughter,” she said in Seneca. “I’m glad to
see you again.”

Jane said in English, “This
is a friend of mine, Mary Perkins.”

The old woman scrutinized Mary
in mock disapproval. “Not another anthropologist.”

“No,” said Jane.
“She’s only a safecracker.”

Martha laughed happily.
“Dah-joh.” She repeated it in English, stepping back to
make way. “Come in. I’m having trouble with the lock on
this door. Maybe you’re the one to fix it.”

Jane and Mary climbed the wooden
steps into the tiny, neat kitchen. Mary could see that the television
set was on in the living room, but Martha seemed to notice it at the
same time. She reached into her sweater pocket, pulled out the remote
control, aimed it carefully, and killed the machine. She said, “Sit
down, sit down. I’ll get you something.”

Mary drew a breath to say “We
just ate,” but Jane touched her arm and gave her head a single
shake.

Corn bread, honey, and
strawberry and blueberry preserves appeared so suddenly and with so
little preparation that Mary instantly perceived that this was
another of the things that she must simply smile at and not question.

Jane and Martha walked out among
the dry, frost-flecked flower stalks in the garden and spoke to one
another in Seneca. “What happened to her?”

Jane had come here because it
was the only place she could think of in this part of the country
where she could trust people absolutely, but when the question came
she could not relinquish her old habits. She quickly manufactured a
story, but when she looked into the old lady’s eyes to begin,
they seemed already to have penetrated the lie. Telling it would be a
waste of time. “She was kidnapped. She had money that wasn’t
hers. Some men wanted it. They tortured her. She hasn’t said so
yet, but they raped her.”

“Did the police catch
them?”

Jane shook her head. “We
couldn’t even call the police. She’s done too much. She’d
end up in jail and the men would find her there and make sure she
never got out.”

“What’s a Nundawaono
girl got to do with that kind of business?”

Jane looked into her eyes. “It’s
what I do. Fugitives come to me and I guide them out of the world.”

“Why?”

Jane laughed a sad little
chuckle. “Because if I didn’t, they would give me bad
dreams.”

“I’ll bet a lot of
them do anyway,” said Martha. She looked at Jane with her
bright old eyes and shook her head. “People like me – the
old longhouse people who believe in the visions of Handsome Lake –
we’re always saying the young have forgotten everything. So the
one day I stay home from work my own great-grandmother comes to my
door. I should learn to shut up. Now I have to help you take care of
her, don’t I?”

Jane said, “You’re a
clan mother. You must have learned enough in all those years to make
a decision by yourself.”

“Has she been to a
doctor?”

“Not yet. I’m going
to call a doctor friend of mine and have him use his connections to
get us one who won’t call the police when she walks in.”

“I know one who will see
her today. Leave her to me,” said Martha.

A few days later, Mary opened
the trailer door and walked outside to find Martha standing alone in
the weeds. The old woman was already looking at her, as though she
had been watching the door and waiting for it to open. “Come
on,” she said, and began to walk.

Mary Perkins caught up with her.
“Where are we going?”

“No place. I’ve been
walking like this for seventy-five years, and if I stop doing it,
I’ll stiffen up and die.”

They walked along in silence for
a time. Every few minutes Mary found that her steps had started to
move toward the highway without her thinking about it, and she had to
correct her course. Martha showed no interest in the road. She kept
walking straight through the weeds. After a time Mary noticed that
Martha’s dress was hemmed precisely a half inch above the weeds
so that it didn’t get caught in brambles or pick up seeds. “How
about you?” the old woman asked. “Have you decided yet?”

“Decided what?”

“To die.”

Mary walked a long time. “I
don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s already happened and I
missed it. I don’t know exactly when. I was beyond noticing
things by the time Jane came. After that I concentrated on staying
upright long enough to do something I had promised myself to do.
That’s over now, but nothing has come to take its place.”

Martha walked along in the
weeds. The cold made the dry stalks snap as her feet pushed them
aside to touch the snow. “Each time I walk through here it’s
different. In four months this will all be wildflowers. Tiny white
ones, lots of blue and gold and pink, all mixed together. There are
about four hundred acres here that nobody has farmed since I was a
kid, and the flowers grow like crazy.”

“I’d like to see
that,” said Mary.

“Then you’re not
dead yet.”

Mary walked stiffly, not paying
much attention to the rattling stalks of the weeds. “Maybe that
wasn’t me. It’s been so long since I used my real name
that it doesn’t sound like me anymore. Maybe Jane didn’t
tell you, but that’s why this happened.”

“Whatever you did, what
was done to you wasn’t the punishment. It was only something
else that happened. Now something else will happen.”

“That’s my problem.
It’s not that I don’t know what will happen, or that I’m
afraid. I can’t even think of anything that I would like to
happen.”

“Maybe you need some help.
You could spend the rest of your life going to see psychiatrists.”

“I take it you don’t
approve.”

“It’s okay with me.
Some people like drugs, and I think a lot of them just like getting
dressed up and having a place to go where they’re expected at a
certain time.”

“Right now I can’t
see any difference between that and anything else that people do.”

“Maybe Mary Perkins got so
torn up that she isn’t worth much anymore. Maybe you didn’t
like her much to begin with. Forgive her, because you know that she’s
suffered. Love her, because you traveled together and shared secrets.
Then end her life and bury her.”

“Kill myself?”

“Unless you still want to
see the wildflowers.”

Mary studied her carefully. “You
made that up about the wildflowers, didn’t you?”

Martha nodded. “Of course
I did. This is all thistle and buffalo grass. I’d like to see
some wildflowers, though.

Most winters I find that’s
all that’s necessary.”

Jane waited until Martha
McCutcheon had gone to work at the store, then sat beside Mary on the
steps of the trailer.

“I didn’t ask you to
talk much about what happened because I didn’t want to upset
you,” Jane began. “Now I need to.”

Mary’s voice was tense,
but she said, “Okay.”

“They probably asked you a
lot of questions – things that didn’t seem to make any
sense, right?”

“Yes. It was the older
one, most of the time. It was like he was trying to see if I was
telling the truth. Where did we meet the guy to get a ride in Ann
Arbor? What did we eat – ”

“Names,” Jane
interrupted. “Did he ask you about the names we used when we
were running?”

“Well, yes.” She
seemed to sense she had made a terrible mistake. “I told them.
I was so scared, so tired – ”

“It’s okay,”
Jane said. “It’s okay. Just think back. Are there any
names you know that you left out?”

“No.”

Jane nodded and stood up. “You
didn’t do anything wrong. I just needed to know.”

The “older one” must
be Farrell. He had waited until she had reached the lowest point and
then asked her all of the questions. The answers would have given
Barraclough what he needed now. Barraclough could take something as
trivial as the room number of a hotel on a particular date, approach
the right clerk in the right way, and get the name Jane had used and
her credit card number. If the hotel happened to be one that bought
its security from Intercontinental, then they would give it to him
without any fuss. Whenever Barraclough wanted to, he could be
Intercontinental Security Services.

Jane spent the next few days
watching the horizon. The flat, empty fields on all sides should have
made her feel safer, but the endless sameness induced a panicky
agoraphobia in her. She would sit at Martha McCutcheon’s
kitchen table for fifteen minutes at a time, staring into the west
down the highway, then move to another window to gaze to the south
across the winter-bare fields.

On the fourth night she heard a
noise and sat up in bed, not waking up, just awake. From the other
wall of the trailer Martha McCutcheon whispered, “It’s
the wind.” After a moment she said in Seneca, “Have you
thought about what you were going to do if it weren’t?”

“Always,” Jane
whispered. She stood up, put on her coat, and walked outside the
trailer into the field and away from the lights of the trailer park.
She sat in the weeds in the dark and listened to the wind. It was
cold and wild, coming across the plain in sputtering gusts and
eddies. She had a scared feeling that it carried something that she
couldn’t quite hear. It might be something that she would have
been able to identify if the air had been calm, and it might be
something she should not have been near enough to hear at all,
something the wind had brought from far away.

Either way it was the same
sound. It was car doors slamming, men’s feet trampling the
stiff, frozen weeds, the metallic clicks as shotgun slides pumped and
pistol magazines locked into place. She looked up into the sky and
tried to discern the constellation of the loon that the old runners
had used to navigate as they moved along the Waagwenneyu at night,
but it was hidden behind trailing clouds.

When she looked back at the
little camp, she could see it through Barraclough’s eyes. It
would not be hard to find the right trailer, with the shiny new car
she had rented in Dallas parked beside it. Ordinary .38 ammunition
would pierce the trailer wall. A rifle round in a big-game caliber
could go through both walls and kill somebody behind the trailer from
three hundred yards out. There was nothing in the flat, empty country
that was big enough to hide a running woman.

In the morning Jane went with
Martha on her walk. After a time, Martha said, “You’re
leaving today, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You want something first,
don’t you?”

“It might not be safe here
much longer. I want you to drive up north with her.”

“Where?”

“Nundawaonoga.” It
was the Seneca word for the western half of New York State. It was
like saying “Home.” Jane added, “No planes, no
buses, no credit cards.” She held out a thick stack of
hundred-dollar bills. “This will pay for a car.”

Martha walked along in silence
for a time, then took the money and slipped it into the pocket of her
jacket.

“There are people up there
I haven’t seen in ten years. They’ll be very glad to see
me.”

“Thank you, Grandmother.”

Martha held Jane in the corner
of her eye. “Why aren’t you going with us?”

Jane shook her head. “He’s
not looking for her now. He’s looking for me.”

Farrell
paced back and forth in front of the television monitor, the heels of
his polished shoes clicking on the old hardwood floor of the
Enterprise Development office. “Take another look at her.”
The picture on the monitor was dim and grainy. The sound had been
erased. The woman had been caught in a telephoto lens standing on the
edge of a freeway beside Barraclough. Every few seconds a car or
truck would flash past in the foreground, shrunk by the lens to look
smaller than the people beyond it. The woman was Jane. “Look at
the shape of her face, the way she moves. Forget her hair and
clothes. She’ll change those. Study the things that don’t
change.”