Last Chants (29 page)

A group of men in tie-dye and Jerry Garcia T-shirts tapped on them, earnestly discussing their tones.

Behind them were shelves of rattles made from gourds, skin, wood, even tin cans. There were also strange xylophones and instruments I couldn't begin to place. One wall was hung with African masks and figures. The back was lined with books, compact disks, and tapes, apparently of tribal music.

“Can a place like this do enough business to stay open?” I wondered to Edward.

“It's been here for years,” he whispered back. “You can't buy a set of sheets downtown, but you can pick up a hookah, curly-toed slippers, a real scarab, or an African drum, no problem. I'd better go baby-sit. We've got to get him out of here before some college student recognizes him.”

Edward squatted beside Arthur, who was pawing through a bottom shelf full of rattles. He whispered some sort of entreaty.

Twenty minutes later, we walked back into the alley carrying a bagful of rattles, two skin-on-hoop drums and a leather striker. We'd spent most of the cash in Edward's wallet.

So he looked a little disconcerted to hear Arthur say, “Now we need paint and some sewing supplies.”

“Looks like we'll be hitting Fred up for dinner,” Edward said. “Unless you feel like panhandling.”

Edward's brother, we soon learned, lived in a condo full of photographs of his children from three previous marriages.

“He keeps marrying my girlfriends.” Edward told me again. He didn't sound like he was joking. “These guys,” he pointed to the rogue's gallery of kids with front teeth missing, “could be mine genetically. How about that? I get to throw around the football with them, but I don't have to pay their college tuition.”

The condo was conventional and sparse, with wood floors, white walls, and white couches. It might have belonged to Every-bachelor.

Except for one thing: a living room table was taken up with a computer and its peripherals. I stroked the scanner and digitizing pad: They were at the top of my “to buy” list. I guessed psychiatrists did pretty well for themselves.

As if in response, Edward said, “You should see the place he moved out of—mansion city. But wife number three got it. He's paid for more houses than I've lived in.”

Arthur was already busy on the floor, pulling shells off one rattle, beads off another.

He kept shaking his head. He was muttering, “Raven, wolf, bear.” He looked up at us. “I've seen them so often, but I'm not an artist.”

“You've seen what?”

“Depictions by the Kwakiutl and Haida. They are absolutely distinctive, and I certainly recall the elements, the shapes within shapes. But painting them . . . ” Again, he shook his head. “Of course, Billy was a carver. But I couldn't begin to achieve anything like that. We'll just have to hope . . . ” He reapplied himself to the task of stripping rattles.

What Fred would think of the mess was of little concern to Edward. “Place looks worse,” he nodded at the littered floor, “when the kids visit.”

Edward had already foraged though Fred's cupboards, bringing forth crackers, cereals, and paté samplers from a gift basket. We'd eaten them without complaint. I hoped Fred was feeling generous. Bad enough we'd made him an accessory. Now we'd eaten all his food. I hoped I didn't screw up his computer as well.

I turned it on, relieved to see he had some hot-rod programs: Morph, Photoshop, Adobe Premiere. He had more CD-ROMs than a rich teenager.

“And the video camera?” Arthur asked suddenly. He was unscrewing the tops from hobby shop paint jars. “Help me, friend,” I heard him murmur.

Edward stood. “Fred's going to love me rummaging through his porn collection looking for a camera.” He left the room.

I had no real work until Arthur was done, but I thought I'd better load the programs and see how well I remembered them. I fussed for a while, getting more and more frustrated, as I usually did at a computer. I could see no evidence the programs had even been opened before. I could understand that; they were more fun to own than to use.

After a while, I lay on a throw rug, not wanting to inflict my dirty clothes on Fred's furniture. I watched Arthur paint precise patterns on a rattle. Either he was more of an artist than he thought, or friend Billy was indeed helping him.

I'd been napping awhile when Edward prodded me with his foot. “Okay, cyberlawyer: Show time.”

Fred also stood over me, arms folded across his chest.

“Don't get any ideas about her,” Edward told him. “She's not our type.”

I
'd fed a video of the newly altered rattles and drums into Fred's computer, which was indeed “video ready” (code for “very expensive”). This had entailed connecting it to a VCR with a special cable and following Abode Premiere's directions. I'd changed the video background by substituting clip-art forest for everything white—that is, for Fred's wall. I'd blurred the images—Arthur's artwork was barely passable, according to him—and made them more dramatic with lighting tricks. Now, I was experimenting with Morph, blending one object into another for smooth transitions.

It wasn't much of a feat, but it pushed the envelope of my capabilities. And it certainly wasn't the custom nightmare Arthur had envisioned; at best, it was a half-baked crochet. I'd taken computer tutorials, I'd messed around with these programs. But my agenda had been to get a job, not to truly “learn” the skills. I was shaking as I worked.

As I struggled with the video, Arthur told us a story.

He described the night he met Billy Seawuit.

“I'd heard tell of a shaman,” he began sadly, “who lived in a remote area on the northern tip of Vancouver Island. I found him living in a longhouse he'd built himself from the cedars there. Have you ever been inside a longhouse? They're magnificent structures, thirty or forty feet long, perhaps twenty feet wide, with roofs of overlapping shingles that can be moved to make skylights. And the smell—it's literally the inside of a cedar box. Billy had erected four totem poles, topped by the eagle or the raven, with the wolf and bear below. He had another pole inside the longhouse, partially carved. And of course, he had two carved beams facing the fire.

“He wore his hair long. He was a very handsome man with a stoic face and an intense brightness in his eyes. He told me he'd set out to become a carver, an artist, not a healer. But the trances were powerful for him. He knew Raven and Bear and Wolf intimately, you see, from carving them. And in his trances, they would give him gifts of spirit and energy for the sick. But he was best at finding souls that had fled from their bodies.”

“When people died?” Edward stood behind me, watching the computer screen, making me nervous.

“Shamans believe that trauma causes a person's spirit to flee. It's not unlike the recent views of psychiatrists.” He cast a glance at Fred, who sat on the couch sipping wine. “When a person is traumatized, psychiatrists say they dissociate; they retreat, if you will, into insanity. Well, shamans believe the same thing. Except they don't view the mind as a structure with a subconscious or unconscious. Because they have journeyed to the lower and upper worlds, you see. And when you do that, you do quite literally see those pilgrim souls. You see where the sane part of a traumatized person has fled.

“Shamans have had phenomenal success in the treatment of mental illness,” Arthur asserted.

“I've heard something like that.” Fred looked interested, if easy in his European ways.

“Shamans ask the spirit to return. A depressed or traumatized person is literally seen as ‘dispirited.' And when the errant part
of the spirit is returned, well, I've never seen transformations so dramatic.”

“Similar to faith healing, I'd think,” Fred said comfortably.

“No,” Arthur disagreed. “The person is not healed by a belief in the grace of God, or a god. The person can be quite mad, you see; scarcely cognizant of the shaman beside him. But when the shaman blows the spirit back into that person, he'll sit up like his old self. The sick don't begin with the same depth of belief and sense of petition as someone visiting a faith healer.

“But my point is that Billy set out to be an artist, not a shaman. And yet he acquired a reputation as one of the foremost shamans in the world.” Tears sprang to his eyes. “In the treatment of mental illness, he'd never failed.

“I was traveling in British Columbia. I had visited a family there whose child had been brutalized. She had retreated into clinical autism, which I understand is highly resistant to psychiatric treatment.”

Fred nodded.

“The family had tried for three years to bring her back. They begged me to take her to Billy Seawuit. And I did. Her nurse went with me—she was in a wheelchair, poor child; she'd retreated even from movement.

“And so the first time I met Billy, a group of us were in his longhouse with this child. He asked us to journey with him. He said he needed many eyes to search for her spirit because it had obviously run very far away.”

Fred was sitting forward, apparently taken with the metaphor.

“It was one of the most arduous journeys I've ever undertaken,” Arthur said, paintbrush poised over a drum he felt he'd botched. “And one of the longest. We traveled for hours, searching, at one point through fire, through a sea of it. But we did finally find the poor child's spirit, running as fast and as far as it could, running and running and running, using up all the child's energy and mobility. It took several of us to catch her and soothe her. But only Billy could persuade her to return.”

He stared ahead, not seeing us. He was back on the journey, back in Billy Seawuit's longhouse.

“When he breathed the spirit back into the child, she reappeared
behind the child's eyes just as surely as a face appearing at an empty window. She looked around, asking for her mother, as naturally as if she hadn't been silent for three years. She was alive again. She was with her spirit again.”

Fred continued to look interested, if not convinced.

“Her legs were too weak after the hiatus to carry her, but she wanted to stand, to move and stretch. And though it took time, she is quite normal today, I believe. But what interested me most as a scholar, as a documentor of these experiences, was that, beneath the metal wheels of the girl's chair, deep scars had been burned into the wood floor. She had come through the fire with us.”

He stared at each of us in turn. “I photographed the burn scars, and the photos have appeared now in several journals along with my commentary.”

“I'd be interested in seeing them,” Fred commented.

“I'll be happy to send you copies. I'll jot down the citations for you tonight. I believe very passionately that psychiatry should open its mind to so-called primitive medical practices.”

He bowed his head, taking a few deep breaths.

“But the true miracle,” he continued, “was Billy Seawuit himself. He was free from our modern pettinesses and envies. And he understood what he knew, which is even rarer. He was a blessing. The embodiment of a blessing.”

Arthur went back to painting the drum: A stylized raven—looking somewhat improved—stood atop a clam shell.

Edward, still hovering behind me, said, “Okay, so what was he doing here? What was Seawuit doing for Galen Nelson?”

Arthur looked up from his work. “I can't believe Billy was contacted to help develop a computer program. Nor would he have been interested in coming to do that.” He looked confused. “Once he was here, of course, the rock held his attention; Bowl Rock, I mean. And the Pan legend.”

“They contacted Billy?” I looked up from my work. “Galen Nelson told me they brought you here as a consultant, to help them create mythological background images. He made it sound like Seawuit came along for the ride and got interested in the project.” I racked my brain. “I can't remember exactly how he put it, but that was my impression.”

Arthur looked astonished. “But no. Nelson himself asked Billy to come here. I came later, when Billy told me about Bowl Rock.”

“What reason did he give Seawuit?” Behind me, Edward sounded frustrated. Because it was time to cut to the chase?

“I don't know. Billy didn't tell me.”

“I thought you guys were close.” Edward was sounding suspicious.

“But this was a mundane matter,” Arthur explained. “Simply a travel arrangement, something Billy planned to do for a matter of some days. Days in which we had no plans together.”

“So because you had no plans, you didn't ask him what Nelson wanted?”

“I have only this feeling to offer: that Billy can't have been there in regard to a computer program.”

“Why?” Edward demanded.

“Because no program can substitute for the spirit. It's truly that simple. It may be that Billy was told this was a pretext and was asked not to contradict it. But it's important to remember who he was: a powerful healer of mental illness.”

None of us bothered to say it: Toni Nelson did not act like a sane woman.

W
e weren't burglars, more's the pity. We had no choice but to knock on Galen Nelson's door.

Nelson answered immediately, looking crestfallen to see us. He glanced curiously at the cap that hid my newly blond hair. He looked pale, surprisingly more gaunt. His hair was tousled. He was fully dressed and shod in hiking boots despite the late hour.

He said, “The police have been wanting to talk to you.” He moved backward to let us enter.

I walked in first, as we'd arranged. Edward would linger to make sure the door was unlocked. Arthur would watch through the window for Edward's penlight to flash. Then he would creep inside, go downstairs, turn on Nelson's computer, and load in three diskettes worth of data—we hoped.