Hymn (28 page)

Tony Express looked pale and his breathing was oddly shallow. ‘I couldn't help it, man. They'd already seen the car.'

They reached the road. It was grillingly hot, and heat rose from the blacktop like the shallows of a wind-ruffled lake. Jim Griglak opened the rear door of his Highway Patrol car and indicated with a curt nod of his head that Franklin should climb in. Franklin hesitated, and looked dubious.

‘Come on, bonehead, we're going for the scenic tour,' Jim Griglak rasped.

They climbed into the back of the patrol car and Jim Griglak locked the doors. Then they U-turned and headed back toward the main highway, while Tony Express stood forlornly by the side of the road listening to them go.

Ric Munoz picked up the intercom and reported back to headquarters that they were bringing in three suspects for the theft of Otto Mander's Mercedes. Jim Griglak sang to himself under his breath as he drove, and occasionally made comments about the passing scenery, or if there was life after retirement, or baseball. He went with tedious detail into an explanation of the Boudreau Shift, which is when a manager counters a slugger who always pulls to the right by shifting all of his fielders to the right of second.

Lloyd and Kathleen and Franklin said nothing. Franklin was bemused. Lloyd and Kathleen were both physically and emotionally exhausted. The jiggling of the car began to send them to sleep.

‘I have often walked . . . down this tooty-wooty before . . .' sang Jim Griglak. ‘And the pavements tooty-wooty frooty-woot before . . . Hey, did I ever tell you that story about Yogi Berra, when they gave him a cheque that said, “Pay to Bearer”?'

‘I'm not sure,' Ric replied, manfully. He was beginning to look forward to Jim Griglak's retirement.

Jim Griglak chuckled. ‘He said, “Hey, they spelled my name wrong!”'

They had travelled nearly six miles across the dazzling desert landscape before Jim Griglak suddenly began to slow down. The change in speed woke Lloyd almost immediately, and he sat up abruptly and said, ‘What is it? What's happening?'

But Jim Griglak didn't answer. Instead he drove slower and slower, peering ahead of him as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing.

Kathleen grasped Lloyd's arm and said, ‘Lloyd, look!'

Lloyd shifted his position and frowned ahead into the sunlight. What he saw gave him a feeling of delight and terror, both at once, as if he had woken up one morning and found that he could fly.

‘This can't be so,' whispered Jim Griglak.

‘It's so all right,' said Ric Munoz, echoing the moment that they had found that burned bus, and all of its charred and grisly occupants.

Standing beside the road not a hundred feet ahead of them were two figures. One was an elderly Indian, in jeans and red plaid shirt. The other was the skinny, wind-tattered figure of Tony Express. In his hand he was holding the long stick decorated with strips of skin and fur, squirrel-tails and beads, the sundance doll that he had shown them back at the store, the first time they had met him.

The sun lanced off the lenses of his sunglasses. He wasn't afraid. He was simply waiting. Jim Griglak slowed the patrol car to a whining crawl, and at last to a halt, still thirty feet shy of the skinny Pechanga blind boy with the ragged stick.

He applied the parking-brake with a heave of his foot, and then switched off the engine. It was hot and bright and suddenly silent.

‘What's wrong?' Lloyd asked him, at last.

Jim Griglak shifted himself around in the driver's seat and stared at Lloyd balefully. ‘You're looking at a young blind Indian kid who has just managed to overtake a car travelling at fifty-five miles an hour, on foot, across a desert landscape heated well in excess of one hundred and ten degrees fahrenheit. And you're asking me what's wrong?'

‘Maybe he has a brother,' Kathleen suggested, without much hope. ‘Maybe he telephoned him, and arranged for him to meet up with us here—you know, pretending to be him.'

Jim Griglak slowly and flatly shook his head. ‘That is the same kid. That is the exact same kid who stood outside his dad's store less than fifteen minutes ago and watched us drive away.'

Ric Munoz gave an unbalanced laugh. ‘Come on, Sergeant, what are we saying here? We know there's only one kid. Anyway—who's the old guy with him? You're making a mistake, you must be. All ethnic minorities look the same.'

‘You're an ethnic minority,' Jim Griglak reminded him.

‘Oh, sure, but some of us transcend our origins, right?'

‘You think a frigging Toyota Turbo and a frigging pair of designer sunglasses changes what you are? That's the same frigging kid, Munoz, on my mother's grave.'

Jim Griglak turned back to Lloyd and Kathleen and Franklin and said, ‘Stay put, you got it. Watch my lips. S-t-a-y p-u-t.'

He heaved himself out of the car. Ric Munoz hesitated for a moment, then unclipped the pump-gun from its rack in front of the dashboard, and followed him, keeping the gun held high. Lloyd watched them walk slowly toward the two Indians, the old Indian in the baggy jeans and the young blind Indian in the headband, and for a moment he found himself unable to speak. It was like watching history.

Kathleen whispered, ‘Is that really him? It looks like him!'

‘It can't be him,' Lloyd told her. ‘How could anybody run six miles in less than ten minutes, and arrive here well ahead of us? He may be precocious, and he may be just a little crazy, but he's human.'

‘So you think that's his double?'

‘It makes a damned sight more sense than it being him!'

‘But supposing . . .'

‘Supposing what?'

‘I don't know,' Kathleen replied, flustered. ‘It just seems to me that if Otto is capable of burning people and bringing them back to life again, maybe there's more to this world than we usually allow ourselves to see.'

Jim Griglak approached the old man and the young boy with all the caution that a working lifetime in the Highway Patrol had taught him. Watch the eyes. Watch for the slightest flicker of movement. Watch the hands, too. Apart from good old straightforward honest-to-God handguns, there are plenty of other weapons that can kill and maim. Knives, small-calibre guns that spring out of the sleeve, and all of that ninja crap like stars and chains.

The boy was standing with his head held slightly higher than a sighted person would have held it, his lips drawn back across his teeth, but with great poise and certainty. The furs and tails that decorated his sundance doll swung around and around in the hot afternoon wind. Jim Griglak saw the tiny malevolent face on top of it and decided that he didn't care for it at all.

In contrast, the old man appeared to be quite benign, just one of those old coots that you might see at a charity lunch for senior citizens. His face had that distinctive leathery look that only Indians have, his eyes were bloodshot and filmed-over, but he was smiling to himself as if everything was just the way he liked it.

Jim Griglak stopped, and sniffed, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘How'd you get here?' he asked, bluntly.

‘How'd you get here?' the boy replied, with a blind smile.

‘Listen,' said Jim. ‘Don't you start jerking me around. I want to know how you got here.'

The old man said, ‘Same way that you did, sir. By air, by fire, by wind, and by water.'

‘What's your name?' Jim Griglak asked him.

‘John Dull Knife. What's yours?'

‘Mind your own goddamned business.'

‘Interesting,' John Dull Knife nodded. ‘Don't like it much, though. Your parents atheists?'

‘Listen,' said Jim Griglak. ‘I don't know how the hell you managed to get here so quick, less'n you've got yourselves a Ferrari Testarossa hidden behind that dune. But I do know one thing. You're going to get yourselves back where you came from, both of you, and stay well out of stuff that's not your frigging concern.'

John Dull Knife said, ‘My parents always taught me to speak to everybody, even my enemy, with respect. Respect is power, my friend. Contempt is weakness. The greatest power in the universe is the appreciation of one human being for the strengths of another. Only the weak seek out weakness.'

‘How'd you get here so quick?' Ric Munoz asked him. ‘Come on, let's hear it. You know some secret shortcut, or what?'

John Dull Knife turned to the boy and smiled. ‘We were not quick, my friend. It is you who were slow. Look at the time. Look at the position of the sun. How did it take you six hours to travel no more than six miles?'

Jim Griglak lifted his head and looked around. John Dull Knife was right. All of the shadows had mysteriously swivelled from one side of the compass to the other. High up above them, the sky was already beginning to show signs of darkening. He checked his wristwatch and it was almost five. They had been driving at the legal limit all the way from Tony Express's store, and yet they couldn't have chalked up more than one mile an hour. At that speed, John Dull Knife and Tony Express could have strolled past them with their hands in their pockets.

‘Ric,' said Jim Griglak, between tightened teeth, ‘what time do you have, please?'

‘Almost five, Sergeant.'

‘That's what I have, too. And look around you. It's definitely five o'clock, no mistake about it. But you know and I know that it takes less than seven minutes to travel six miles at fifty-five, and you know me. I always hit fifty-five right on the nose. So what the hell's going on, I'd like to know?'

The blind Indian boy shook the sundance doll. ‘We don't have your firepower, man. We never want to, and we never will. But this land is ours, and always will be. So if we want you to go slow, then all we have to do is to ask the land to carry you slow. You don't even understand “travelling”, do you? Why “travelling” is so important? When you travel, it's not just you moving over the ground, it's the ground moving underneath you. Time and distance, they're elastic, don't you understand that? After all that Einstein taught you? It's not fantasy, it's not magic, it's true.'

‘How old are you?' Jim Griglak asked him.

‘Thirteen come February.'

‘Jesus,' said Jim Griglak. ‘When I was thirteen, my parents thought I was a genius because I could recite Casey At The Bat.'

Ric Munoz took the gum distastefully from his mouth, gum that he must have been chewing for over six hours. ‘Thought the goddamned flavour'd gone out of it.'

‘Listen,' Jim Griglak told Tony Express and John Dull Knife. ‘I don't know what the hell kind of a stunt you've pulled here, but it amounts to interference with officers of the law in the execution of their duty. I don't have room for you in my vehicle right now, but I'm warning you that you face possible arrest, and that as soon as I've delivered these three suspects to San Diego, I'm coming back for you.'

‘That could take you many hours,' smiled John Dull Knife.

‘I don't care how frigging long it takes,' Jim Griglak retorted. ‘I don't care if it takes me past my frigging retirement. You've been frigging around with me, injun, and nobody frigs around with me and gets away with it, never.'

‘Never is a white man's idea,' John Dull Knife answered him. ‘My people only say “ever”.'

‘Well get this,' Jim Griglak snapped back, ‘nobody never frigs around with me, ever. Understandee?'

He jerked his head to Ric Munoz and said, ‘Come on, Munoz. I'm getting hungry.'

He turned around, but to his astonishment, their patrol car had disappeared. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but empty road.

He turned furiously back to Tony Express and John Dull Knife, but they had disappeared, too, and the road was just as empty ahead as it was behind. He turned and stared at Ric Munoz but all Ric Munoz could do was stare back at him.

‘Where'd they go?' he demanded. ‘Did you see them go?'

Ric Munoz shook his head. ‘I didn't see nothing.'

Jim Griglak stood in the middle of the Anza Borrego desert, and for the first time in his career he let out a long bellow of frustration and rage.

To Lloyd and Kathleen and Franklin, who had been sitting in the back of the hot patrol car waiting, it had seemed that Tony Express and John Dull Knife had simply walked around the two Highway Patrol officers, leaving them standing by the side of the road.

John Dull Knife leaned into the open driver's window with a smile. ‘Do you think you can drive this vehicle back to the trailer park?' he asked Lloyd. ‘Then you can collect your own car and be on your way.'

Lloyd frowned at Jim Griglak and Ric Munoz. ‘What about those two? They're not exactly going to stand and wave while we take off in their patrol car, are they?'

John Dull Knife continued to smile, unconcerned. ‘For the next hour, those two will be living at a different pace from the rest of us. By the time they regain their normal perception, we will have long been gone.

‘How do you do that?' asked Kathleen, amazed.

‘You must have heard of the Yaqi, and their ability to change perception. What I have done to our friends from the Highway Patrol is a very similar procedure, not at all unusual or difficult to achieve.'

Lloyd gave Jim Griglak and Ric Munoz a long uncertain stare, and then opened the patrol car door and stepped out. The two officers remained where they were, not even turning their heads around. ‘That's incredible,' Lloyd told John Dull Knife. ‘That's the weirdest thing I ever saw.'

‘How do you think Crazy Horse managed to outflank General Custer at the Little Bighorn?' asked John Dull Knife. ‘So many eyewitnesses said that first the Sioux were there, and then they were not there. But of course they were there. It was simply that Custer couldn't see them.'

Lloyd climbed into the driver's seat. ‘Do you want a ride?' he asked John Dull Knife, ‘or will you get back the same way you came?'

‘I'll have a ride, thank you,' John Dull Knife told him. ‘We may have appeared to you to have arrived here quickly, but we still had to walk six miles in hot sun.'

Tony Express sat next to Lloyd, and John Dull Knife climbed stiffly in beside him. ‘Hey man, can we switch on the siren?' asked Tony Express, as Lloyd started the engine and turned the patrol car around.

‘Don't talk like a child,' John Dull Knife told him.

Kathleen leaned over from the back seat. ‘What are we going to do now?' she asked Lloyd. ‘Once those two patrolmen wake up, they're going to come directly to the trailer-park looking for us, aren't they?'

‘My laywer has a small beach house at Del Mar,' Lloyd told her. ‘I'll see if we can use it for a few days. I don't think Celia would think of looking for me there.'

John Dull Knife said, ‘You should take Tony with you. He has told me of your struggle. He knows the magic, and he knows how to use the sundance doll.'

‘Why don't you come along?' Lloyd asked him.

John Dull Knife shook his head. ‘I am too old, my friend. My days of adventure are long gone.'

‘Tony?' asked Lloyd. He was more than a little dubious of taking responsibility for a twelve-year-old blind boy, particularly when they were being pursued by somebody as dangerous as Otto Mander.

‘Sure, man, I'll come,' Tony agreed. ‘Franklin can be my bodyguard, hey, Franklin?'

Franklin grinned and nodded, although he was still plainly bemused by what had been happening to them. ‘I'll be your eyes, too. You can do all the thinking. I can do all the looking.'

‘Hm,' said Tony, as if he wasn't completely convinced by this arrangement.

They drove back to Tony's store, where Otto's Mercedes was still parked. John Dull Knife shook them by the hand, and wished them well. ‘If I had been many years younger, I would have gladly come with you,' he said, ‘but all I can say to you is what Chief Speckled Snake said to his Creek warriors when the white people began to invade their territory.'

‘What was that?' asked Kathleen.

‘You would not understand the Creek, but the words exactly mean, “go out there and kick the crap out of them”.'

Lloyd used the store telephone to call his lawyer, Dan Tabares. But the phone rang and rang and nobody picked it up. He hesitated for a moment, and then he called Waldo at the restaurant.

‘Waldo, it's me.'

‘You're okay, Mr Denman?'

‘I'm fine. But I have to change my plans a little. I'm thinking of using Dan Tabares' beach house at Del Mar for a few days. The only trouble is, he's not at home right now. I wonder if you could call him in about an hour and ask him to leave the beach house keys under the step same place as he did when Celia and me—well, the same place as he did before.'

‘Okay, Mr Denman, sure thing.'

After Lloyd had hung up, Kathleen used the phone to call her sister and talk to Tom. Lloyd stood outside the store in the long shadows of the setting sun and watched her. There was no mistaking the light in Kathleen's eyes when she eventually got through. Lloyd looked away, and thought about Celia, and about the children that they would never have.

Tony Express came up, carrying an Adidas sports bag crammed with jeans and T-shirts and greyish-looking undershorts, which John Dull Knife had packed for him. A spare pair of sneakers were knotted around his neck, and he was swinging the shaggy, stringy-looking sundance doll. His eyes were invisible behind his dark glasses.

‘We ready to roll, man?' he wanted to know.

Lloyd nodded. ‘I guess so. But you listen. If this looks like it's going to get at all dangerous, then you're right back here on the next available bus.'

‘I can take care of myself, man,' Tony Express pouted. ‘'Sides, I got my bodyguard now, don't I?'

Franklin grinned at him, and said, ‘You bet,' and Lloyd rolled his eyes up, wondering what the hell he had got himself into.