Ghost Dance (10 page)

‘Praying it somehow holds trout?’

Gallagher jumped about three feet in the air. ‘You must be some kind of predator.’

‘Me?’ Emily asked, taking a step closer. She adjusted the thin purple batik cloth she had wrapped as a nightgown around her full, remarkable body. ‘Why?’

‘Because you have the uncanny ability to get close to me before I know it’s happening,’ he said.

‘Soft soles,’ she said, smiling and holding out a tapered calf and bare foot. Her toenails had been dyed with henna. ‘Yesterday I found a nice hole upriver that probably holds fish. Come on. I’ll show you.’

They walked along the river in the gathering light, talking about the project. Emily was convinced that if they stayed in the area another day or two they might find the temple. But Gallagher argued for moving on and filling in that section of the film with another ruin two hundred kilometers to the east.

The riverbank soil was black and fetid. Pungent flowered vines hung in twists over the trail like a rastaman’s braid. Gallagher had to help Emily over the tangled roots of silver-barked trees and through dense stands of bamboo.

‘Where’s the fishing hole?’ he asked after they’d walked nearly half an hour.

She gestured ahead through a swath of green bathed in dawn light. He eased through the curtain and froze. The pool was still and beautiful. Insects hatched and rose in the thick air. Fish slapped the water, feeding. But on the bank on the far side of the river a tiger crouched. He panted. His Asiatic eyes were yellow half-moons, rolled up halfway into the head. He watched a young wild pig watering at the hole.

Emily came up behind Gallagher, blind to the hunter. He reached back and placed his hand flat on her lower tummy to stop her. She pressed into his hand. The tiger sprang.

Gallagher spun and hissed, ‘Tiger! Run!’

There was a splash, then the pig squealed and shrieked as they sprinted back down the trail. Emily tripped, staggered and fell. He got her up under the armpit and they tore ahead into the maze of paths that jutted off the riverbank. They made a wrong turn almost immediately. Five hundred yards later they stood in the jungle silence before the vague outline of a small stone building strangled in yellow jungle flowers. The air was saturated with their perfume. Monkeys chattered in the trees.

‘We found it!’ Emily cried. ‘The temple!’

She grabbed Gallagher and tugged him toward the entrance. The stairs were built of pitted, igneous rock. They had to tear away the vines, then duck to get inside. A monkey scrambled between their legs, scaring the hell out of them. Gallagher shone a flashlight. On the walls were carvings and chipped paintings of men and women joined in intercourse.

‘The Tantrists believe that it is possible to discover the divine within ourselves through sexual union,’ Emily whispered.

Perhaps it was the fear of the tiger replaced so suddenly by the excitement of discovering the temple with its explicit art, but Gallagher was suddenly more aware of her than he had ever been with a woman. Emily was staring at him. A wave of pressurized, buzzing warmth enveloped his head. The soft glow of day came through the temple entrance and bathed Emily’s damp skin in a copper light. They moved toward each other. The blue cloth around her fell away.

Somewhere far off in the jungle, Gallagher heard the tiger roar at the beat of distant drums.

T
HE DRUMS GREW LOUDER
, closer and more insistent, and Gallagher awoke and realized it was midmorning and someone was pounding on the door to the cabin. He got up bleary-eyed and stumbled down the stairs, peeked out the curtains, and found it was pouring again. His Explorer was the only vehicle parked under the birch trees.

Gallagher opened the door and found Andie Nightingale sopping wet, wiping tears from her eyes. ‘My trucks broke again,’ she sobbed. ‘I need a ride. Now.’

The pelting rain and the patchy fog on the River Road switchbacking up the south flank of Lawton Mountain created the claustrophobic illusion of a slick pearl tunnel corkscrewing into the blind sky. The truck fishtailed wildly in the two inches of mud the storm had whipped onto the surface of the road.

‘Can’t you go any faster?’ Nightingale demanded.

‘Not without killing us,’ Gallagher yelled back, clawing at the wheel for control.

His head pounded with the speed and severity of the morning’s events. There had been a fire. Olga Dawson was dead.

Nightingale yelled at herself as if she could not believe it. ‘When I left yesterday, she was alive and fine, but not thinking straight. I should have stayed. I should have stayed with her!’

Then she fell silent again and searched the fog for familiar shapes. She hiccuped. Gallagher wanted desperately to soothe her, but the words would not come. After his mother’s death and the day Emily left were the two times Gallagher had endured what he could see enveloping the detective.

Gallagher’s mother’s fifty-seven-month Bloody Mary binge began the day after they buried Seamus. He had lost himself in books to avoid watching her destruction. The only way Gallagher could tolerate Agnes’ presence was to erect mental glass walls that encased him, made him like an audience watching a tragedy unfold in a film.

Agnes received fewer and fewer acceptance checks for her writing. For a brief time she worked at night fund-raising for the ACLU, then lost that position for drunkenness on the job. Her friends and Gallagher begged her to seek help. She refused. ‘Vodka is my only love now,’ she yelled. ‘You can’t take that away from me.’

The summer Gallagher left for Cornell, his mother went on welfare and barely held onto the apartment. He rarely went home during vacations, preferring the life he was inventing for himself outside the horrors of 2120 Clinton Street.

One Easter break, in the spring of his junior year, Gallagher was in a sporting goods store in downtown Ithaca when he spotted Isabel Martin buying a reel for a fly rod. He had attended a lecture Isabel had given on her research into the forced settlement of the Tuareg, a previously nomadic tribe of the western Sahara.

Gallagher went up to Isabel and told her he had enjoyed the talk. She was eleven years older, darkly beautiful, funny and possessing a remarkably lusty laugh. She was legally separated from her husband, and was working on a year’s teaching contract at Cornell while seeking a more permanent position. Isabel’s favorite pastime was fly-fishing, a skill taught to her by her father. She and Gallagher talked anthropology and fishing for a long time. Gallagher had never fished in his life, but her excitement about it was contagious. She invited him to come with her to a nearby limestone stream to learn.

In a whirlwind three months Isabel Martin taught Gallagher the meditative benefits of the rod and the river as well as the physical profits of a healthy sexual appetite. She returned to her husband in June, somehow leaving him both wiser and more confused than ever.

The day after Isabel’s departure, a social worker contacted Gallagher to say that his mother had been hospitalized. She was failing fast. He went to New York to say his goodbyes.

Agnes’ skin was the yellow of a scuffed and bruised lemon when he walked into the room. Racked by deliriums, she barely understood that her son was present, mumbling only one coherent sentence for him to hold onto: ‘Pat, be a good boy and get your mum some tomato juice.’

During the night, she gradually blackened as her liver failed. She died at six in the morning, leaving Gallagher scorched inside. He walked the streets for hours, ending up at his father’s grave site in Queens. He stared down at grass wet with dew below Seamus’ stone. He tried to erect the glass walls, but they would not go up. Gallagher had collapsed on the ground in front of his father’s headstone and cried for hours.

Driving up the River Road, Gallagher could see Nightingale fighting the same sense of hopeless loss, of being cast adrift without oar or anchor. She slammed her fist into her thigh. ‘I left Olga helpless. I should have taken her with me.’

‘Don’t go second-guessing yourself,’ he warned her. ‘It does no good.’

Before she could reply, they crested a rise to see the familiar blue and red flaring lights of police cars, fire engines and ambulances. Beyond, the charred skeleton of a farmhouse smoldered in the rain. Smoke lifted off the beamwork that had survived the fire, lofted and melted with the mist to become a silica-colored veil that billowed and curled like gnarled fingers above the dairy barn and the fields beyond.

Nightingale was out and moving toward the burned house before Gallagher had halted the truck Deputy Phil Gavrilis, clad in a blue, ankle-length raincoat, stepped in her way. The rain poured off his hat brow. ‘It’s rough. You sure you want to go up there, Andie?’

‘Yes, Phil, I do,’ she said, struggling to keep her jaw from trembling. ‘When did it happen?’

‘Sometime between midnight and dawn, before the real rain started; otherwise I don’t think the place would have burned that hard,’ Gavrilis replied.

‘Where’s Chief Kerris?’ she asked.

‘Not here yet,’ the deputy said puzzled. ‘We’ve got calls out for him, but he’s not responding. Tony Fulton, the arson investigator, is already up there.’

Nightingale turned to go up the hill. Gavrilis walked away toward a knot of volunteer firemen. Seeing Gallagher get out of the same vehicle as Nightingale, the three state troopers and the dozen firefighters arrayed on the knoll must have figured he belonged on the scene, because no one moved to prevent him from following her toward the smoking house. Nightingale got to the charred ruins, took one look into what used to be Olga Dawson’s kitchen, spun around and put her hand to her mouth. She staggered toward the blackened trunk of a red oak and held on, taking huge gulps of air.

Gallagher moved up to look for himself.

Olga Dawson rested on her right side in a jumble of black, fallen timbers about fifteen feet from the scorched brick chimney. One of the beams had burned through and the halves made a V near what was left of Olga’s skull. The flames had engulfed her in such intense heat that it had pinched her body so she seemed like a praying figure in an igneous sculpture. Dozens of fissures vented the blackened skin around her spine.

Gallagher wheeled, took about six strides past Nightingale and got the dry heaves. When he was able to stand again, she said weakly, ‘You shouldn’t have seen that.’

‘It’s a little too late,’ he gasped.

Just then a squat, swarthy man walked up. Nightingale stood, wiping at her nose and choking. ‘Tony, I told her every day not to smoke in bed.’

Fulton, the arson investigator, shook his head. ‘Wasn’t cigarettes. The way she’s lying and the scorching on the outer fire wall point to her being overcome by smoke from a creosote fire and then being enveloped in a hot flash. See the way her skin’s broken in those three-inch gashes?’

Nightingale nodded.

‘Skin pops like that when it’s exposed to intense heat in a brief time,’ Fulton said. ‘I figure it for a chimney fire.’

‘She had it cleaned six months ago.’

Fulton shrugged. ‘Maybe she forgot to shut the stove door, an ember popped and hit the rug.’

Nightingale pursed her lips, drinking. It was plain she did not believe this theory. Then she saw Gallagher still standing there.

‘Go back to your cabin now, Pat,’ she said. I’ll be here a while. I appreciate the ride.’

It was the first time she had called him Pat, which he seized on as a positive amid horrible circumstances. ‘If you need anything, Andie—’

‘I’ll be fine,’ she said before he could finish.

Gallagher nodded absently, then wandered back through the crowd milling about in the midmorning rain. He felt too fucked-up to drive, so he sat on the hood of the truck, watching raindrops strike a puddle. In each alternating ripple Gallagher saw Olga Dawson’s blackened body and water draining from Hank Potter’s mouth. And then he saw himself.

Which triggered the sudden and desperate need to walk. As if outward motion could calm the churning within. Gallagher walked a hundred yards beyond the police cars to where the muddy road met a spur path that angled down through an open wooden gate. Forty yards downslope, the path forked. One arm led to the barn. The other curved across an overgrown meadow toward the southern tree line.

Ribbons of fog spiraled through the trees. He stopped, almost hypnotized as dozens of thoughts collided and caromed in his head. Olga Dawson. A chimney not cleaned. Or a woodstove left open. She blips off into the void. Unlike Gallagher’s parents, Olga had done nothing to precipitate her own death. But the parallel cruelty was that, like them, she was alive one moment and gone the next. She was no more than memory and artifacts for someone like Gallagher to sift through, record and analyze. There was no evidence Olga Dawson continued to exist in any sense.

Plato, Descartes and Kant had all argued in favor of the immortality of the soul, of death as a mutation of one form of living for another. Gallagher shook his head, thinking about their theories and how he had rejected each in turn. Then he thought of all the places he had been in the world: Jerusalem, equatorial Africa, Jidda, Tokyo, the Himalayas, Peru, India. In every location he had heard holy men utter wonderful suppositions about the constancy of the spirit and God. But not once had Gallagher found evidence strong enough to make him abandon his father’s gospel of disbelief. It came down to this: where was the experience? Where in all he had learned was the tingling, emotional, ecstatic sensing of the immortal and the omniscient?

Standing there in the wind- and rain-swept field behind Olga Dawson’s bam, Gallagher had to admit that the closest he had come to believing in anything or anybody was Emily Beckworth.

A squall burst across the open field below Olga Dawson’s barn and pelted his face. He drew up his hood, unwilling to think any more about Emily that day.

Gallagher turned his back to the squall and noticed a white, long-haired cat stained with soot and meowing in the grass next to the double door to the bottom of the barn.

‘C’mon, cat,’ he called, walking toward it. The cat darted into the bam. He followed. It was gloomy inside. He waited for his eyes to adjust. Box stalls ran the length of the barn on both sides. The odor of cow lingered. The cat was nowhere in sight. He came to an abrupt stop halfway down the aisle. Mud clots dried on the cement floor, clots that had been stamped into a Z shape by a boot tread. They led toward the last stall.