Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (30 page)

Sir Walter Scott's ghost had told them how
hard it was for him to amount to much in the daytime, even though
he was still around. He said he was sort of like the moon in
sunlight during the times when there were lots of vital, living
people around. Juli figured that must be pretty universal with
ghosts, and she said gently to the woman, "Hi there. Can you talk
now?" But the woman put her head in her hands and rocked. Juli got
up to go comfort her. "Why didn't you come on in last night?"

The ghost did the sort of thing ghosts were
always doing in songs—she pointed, this time at the house. For the
first time Juli noticed the tastefully executed hex signs, charms
to ward off the supernatural executed in natural wood that matched
the rest of the house. The ghost led her onward, and she saw that
the signs were prominent on each side of the house and over every
door and window. At the window to her room, the chimes hung out a
little ways, and the ghost stopped, stood on tiptoe, pursed her
lips, and blew.

The chimes played the first few notes of
"Banks of the Ohio." Juli stared first at them and then back at the
ghost, but by now the ghost was disappearing into a thicket pressed
up against the hillside.

Who was this spirit? She really wanted to
talk to Lucien about her. But when noon came, then one o'clock,
Lucien did not appear. Juli decided to walk toward town in hopes of
meeting him on the way. If not, maybe she could make a trip to the
library and see if she could research this site. The ghost's
silhouette was not Indian, nor was it old-fashioned. She looked as
if she were wearing trousers and some kind of sweater. Who could
she be?

Juli popped back into the house and started
hunting for a sweater. Lucien's room was upstairs, and she thought
he probably wouldn't care if she just nabbed something out of his
closet. She had been living more or less communally with the other
musicians for so long that it really didn't occur to her that he
might mind an invasion of privacy.

His room overlooked the creek and featured a
big canopied bed. The walls were uniformly paneled in oak, and she
didn't see drawers or closet. A door opened into his bathroom,
however, and she thought maybe he might have hung a sweater on a
hook in there. No luck, however. The bathroom was just about
sterile, looking as if it had been recently wiped down and smelling
of chemicals. She wrinkled her nose. She wondered if he had a
cleaning lady. If so, she wanted to talk to both of them about
maybe using products that were a little better for the environment
than what she smclled in there now. The bathroom had a connecting
door, and it hung a little ajar.

Bingo! That door opened onto a study, the
kind with wonderful floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, Oriental
carpeting, and huge arched windows, these with stained-glass panels
in them that she realized at once were hex signs too. A rolltop
computer desk was open, and a wooly sweater hung on the back of the
upholstered office chair. She swooped down on the sweater and
plucked it up, noticing as she did that there was a shelf of
computer programs held between gargoyle bookends on the top of the
desk. One title that leapt out at her was "Voodoo for Power and
Profit." Maybe Lucien was doing some kind of reviewing for computer
or metaphysical magazines, she thought, though the program didn't
appear to be a prepackaged manufactured kind.

She slipped on the sweater and headed for
town, carrying the banjo in its padded case over her shoulder.

* * *

When the two federal cops had gone, Tom
George turned to Anna Mae. "Now then, who are you and what do you
want?"

"I told you. I'm Anna Mae Gunn. I used to be
called Mabel Charley, I'm Chickasaw and Comanche, and some Alaska
Native and I need to sec the elders about a medicine ceremony."

"You're absolutely sure a simple appointment
with me won't do the trick, huh?"

"Absolutely," she said.

"Okay, then, come on."

"Where are we going?"

"To find the elders. That's what you had
your friend get me up for this morning, isn't it, Porcupine
Woman?"

She looked at him oddly but didn't question
him. The drive to the home of the most senior elder in the tribe
took a long time. On the way, Tom told her about the porcupine.

She seemed relieved, even grinned at him,
and then he noticed again how attractive she could be.

"You just made it a lot easier for me to
tell you what happened last night," she said. "I think I can also
explain about your porcupine." She told him about the animals, and
how their visit was followed by the original Anna Mae's. She showed
him the bracelet.

"So what kind of medicine do you think we
have that can top that? Sounds like you've been involved in some
pretty heavy magic already."

"Well, yeah, I have. But it's been white-man
stuff, mostly, and for one thing, I need to be sure I'm purified
before I start in on my own journey."

The psychologist nodded as if that were a
perfectly reasonable thing to say. "We could manage a sweat lodge,
I suppose. Can you supply a feast?"

"Yeah. What about songs?"

"Songs?"

"You know, for the ritual."

"Well, we could have somebody express the
general idea maybe, in English. We had one guy who was learning
some of the old songs from his grandfather, but the grandfather
died. The father just dried out not too long ago and says the old
man taught him some stuff when he was a kid, but he doesn't
remember any of it."

Anna Mae shifted from one hip to the
other, feeling itchy. "Well, maybe, since it's not going to be real
traditional and it is
my
purification and
my
feast, I could do some songs that might—remind some people of
ones they knew."

"Like what?"

She threw back her head and sang him the two
songs about Anna Mac she had sung to the ghost the night before.
The hairs rose on the back of his neck, but he sort of liked the
way it felt.

"You don't happen to speak any of the old
languages, do you?"

"Only a little I tried to teach myself in
college. Not much. And these songs aren't our songs, but—well, I
think it will work out." She sang him "The Ballad of Ira Hayes"
then, and he nodded.

"Where'd you find these songs?" he
asked her later, when they stopped off for gas and a Coke. He was
dragging the journey out longer than he needed to, he realized,
getting to know her better. He would never have described her as
beautiful when he first met her, but now he was fascinated by this
quality she had, especially when she sang and added the rich timbre
of her voice to her particular brand of beauty. It was the kind
that seemed to come from the way the light reflected off the skin
where it folded close over her bones, or the way it glinted from
her eyes and sparked red glints in her hair. It came from the way
she held herself, from the quiet passion she had for her songs and
stories, so that the psychologist thought to himself, "Well, I
bet
her
great-grandma was a
goddamn Cherokee princess if anybody's great-grandma ever was." She
had presence. She looked as if she were somebody, and he didn't
wonder for a moment why the ghost of the original Anna Mae would
choose to communicate with her, to adopt her.

Later, when they located the elders one by
one, he discovered that she was as good a listener as he was.
Better maybe, even though he considered himself a professional
listener, and often kidded his clients about being a surrogate
bartender except that he didn't need a ball bat to finish his
conversations.

He took her to meet people to ask them for
something and saw that instead of seeming to ask, by her attention
and interest in them, she seemed to be giving something. Soon she
was talking to and listening to a lot more people than she had ever
asked to meet. People, relatives of the elders who were visiting,
neighbors and friends, just decided to tell her about how the oil
royalties didn't amount to enough to buy a day's groceries this
time, or how the developers were swarming around the area, or how
it was good that it was finally raining again. Then, eventually,
they stopped talking to listen to her. At first they'd just steal a
glance now and then, not understanding why they did. She was just a
skinny middle-aged Indian woman, the sharp-faced kind, not the
round-faced kind, and her shoes looked almost worn out and her
jeans were baggy and worn through in a couple of places, her
sweatshirt soaked from the rain. But they'd look again pretty soon,
and she'd still be there, talking and using her hands in a kind of
graceful way, a little like sign language. The way she used her
body reminded Tom George of the old days at powwow dances when all
the women, no matter what they were wearing—shorts, skirts, jeans,
sweatpants, anything—would put on their embroidered dance shawls
with the foot-long silk fringe and stand close together in a circle
and move, a foot pat at a time, and all you could see was their
bright-shawled backs with those fringes softly undulating with
their moccasin-soft steps.

Anna Mae said to one of the elders, "There
was a woman who told me she was responsible for all the
drunkenness, all the bad times our people have had."

"It wasn't a woman. It was a government and
a culture," the psychologist said. He sounded exactly the way he
used to sound when he'd been drinking, adamant and unhappy, except
now he could do it over a cup of coffee and not have a hangover
later and could drive his truck without getting arrested for
DWI.

"Yeah, I know all that. But it was this
woman too. She's sort of a supernatural—"

"Must be related to coyote," the elder
chimed in. Anna Mae turned to look at him. He was missing his front
teeth, and his face was deeply seamed. One eye had a bandage over
it. "I always thought he had something to do with it."

"Maybe she is," Anna Mae said. "It doesn't
take much of a stretch of the imagination to see Torchy as a coyote
bitch, laughing her head off as somebody stumbles out of a bar and
into the path of a truck. She's the kind who would get a kick out
of watching someone get drunk enough to stab a relative he'd gone
hunting with the week before. But this woman says that the other
bad ones—the other evil spirits—made her stop inciting drunkenness
for now. They have a new plan."

Tom George grunted. "And I thought it was my
therapeutic technique."

Her stories were wild and improbable, the
stuff of legend or myth, but not one of the elders expressed any
hesitation in granting her a feast and a purification rite. Maybe
she just convinced them that she was crazy enough to need one,
George thought, but he had seen tears rolling down old man Atoka's
face when she sang him the song about Ira Hayes. Atoka's
great-grandson, Charles, had been one of the first casualties of
the war in the Gulf.

The ceremonial grounds were beside the
river, and they found a good place to build the sweat lodge from
sticks and red clay, where people could cleanse themselves in the
river before and after if they wished. The sweat lodge was coed and
slightly interracial, since a lot of the people had intermarried.
There was one Cherokee among them who was so blond and fair she
looked less like an Indian than Julianne Martin, Anna Mae thought.
Old man Atoka said he sure liked these new ways, but he was having
difficulty trying to remember the names of all of his relatives. It
didn't matter, since he was hard to understand without his teeth
anyway, and he'd forgotten and left them at home.

One or two of the people Anna Mae thought
were probably just new-agers, who would have been hippies if they
were old enough. One woman she hadn't met with the rest of the
elders was introduced to her as a former tribal leader.

A little Indian-owned cafe in Cement catered
the feast for a quite reasonable bite out of Anna Mae's expense
money. Brown rice and pinto beans with a little chicken for the
meat eaters compliments of the cafe owner's Salish husband, who was
used to an Oregon diet, and canned corn and a lemon meringue pie
from the woman herself, who had a better understanding of how a
feast ought to go.

When they finally got down to business, old
man Atoka stopped his good-natured attempts at buffoonery and
drummed like the beat of eagles' wings, ushering all of the
participants into the sweat lodge, where they settled down to live
through the heat and let it cleanse them from the inside out.

Tom George said that up until a few years
ago at some of these ceremonies, in some places, peyote buttons had
once been used, or mushrooms, but now with everybody trying so hard
to be straight, the visions and the cleansing were to come from the
heat, the lack of oxygen and the mingling of spirits.

Anna Mae felt her heartbeat synchronize to
the drum, and her mind cleared of everything she had been meaning
to talk about, everything she had been meaning to think. She was
not glamorous now. The fairy dust pooled in her sweat on the ground
beneath her bare buttocks, under the silver disk in the turquoise
bracelet she had not even tried to find out if she could remove.
With the others she stared at the glowing rocks and felt herself,
mind and body, lighten, until what she essentially was
remained.

The drum recalled another drum, and as
memories and dreams and fragments of her life from the last few
years surfaced to be sweated out, song surged up in her. The first
to come was "I Will Go," the one she and Brose had sung at the ruin
of his home.

"Is that an Indi'n song?" old man Atoka
asked. Anna Mae admitted that it wasn't, but the elder paid no
attention. "I learned one like that from my grandfather about going
to war." He sang it, his voice high and whispery, with gaps where
he stopped to breathe.