Indian Country Noir (Akashic Noir) (10 page)

What was I thinking? These are the moments I need
Grandpa, I said to myself. What good is not being afraid if you
can't figure out what needs to be done.

I pulled the gun out-what I should have done in the
first place-and stuck the muzzle in the vague borderland
between the monster's neck and head. "Where is she?" I demanded, keeping the question as simple as the threat of a released safety.

"I don't know."

I lowered the gun and put a round in its kneecap. The
explosion was muffled, the kick subdued. The monster didn't
fall, but its blond mask hair ruffled. I put one in the hip. Nothing. Elbow. Shoulder. Sternum. I finished the clip into its head
out of sheer defiance. When I was done, I dropped the gun. It
felt like I'd been firing a .38.

"You didn't die, so she didn't," the monster said.

"Is that important?"

"Yes."

The strong arm ending in a big bruiser hand grabbed me
by the material at the back of my neck like a kitten, lifted, and
carried me off. Except the fingers felt like claws scratching the
bones of my spine.

We went off into the subway tunnel gloom, monster feet
splashing through puddles and kicking refuse. My head got
knocked into a few caged lights along the way.

As a warning gust of air blew at our backs, a side tunnel opened up. The tracks ended, the lighting dimmed. The
monster's footsteps were drowned by the screech and grind of
a train turning out of the station.

Someone cried out from a niche and scuttled away as we
passed.

We entered another station, the mix of raw rock face, rusted
wrought-iron gates, and bare sculptured sconces and pendants
telling the sad story of abandoned visions of grandeur. Faded
graffiti peppered tiled walls curving into the arched ceiling
decorated with an incomplete mosaic. Something mythological. Modern banks of lamps set high on the wall at each tunnel mouth defined the boundaries of the excavated cave. The
monster threw me onto the steel and rotten wood platform
and hopped up after me, making the floor tremble.

It was the laser-pointer eyes pricking the back of my eyeballs with burning needles that made me blink and flinch. Not
fear.

Looking back on the situation, the smart move would
have been picking up right away on the monster not knowing
where Medicine Snake Woman was and blowing its eyes out
to buy time to get away. But I wanted her. And this thing was
my only connection to her. The way to my Medicine Woman
was through it. Plus, it tried to kill her. And I never got an
actual clean shot at the monster.

And here was my true warrior moment. The one that
came after the last ass kicking. And the best I could do was
say, "What do you want?"

"Her."

"Can't help you there, big fella."

"Yes."

"How?"

"Because she'll come for you."

See, in the movies and books, this works the other way
around-she's supposed to be the bad guy's prisoner and I'm
the one who's supposed to do the rescuing. Of course, that's when I stumble into the setup and maybe I die but for sure I
lose the woman and the bad guy puts a hurt on everybody.

I remembered that look she gave the bunch of us in the
station when she was running, and wondered if she'd been
searching for a chump. I like to think it was a warrior she'd
been after.

But right then I felt like my long-lost cousins and distant
great-uncles walking high iron without nets or cables. Only
on this job, I'd run out of bolts and there was no way off the
beams, and that iron was shaking and it was 1907 and the
Quebec Bridge was falling into the St. Lawrence River all
over again. Grandpa told me everything he could about living
through that terrible day, losing his father, mourning with the
rest of the Kahnawake Mohawks, but this was the first time I'd
connected with the words he'd whispered in my head.

This time, the past was sticking to me, and it weighed
more than all the steel that fell into the river that day. That
past, it was as heavy as the spirits of the men who died under
the steel, and the sorrow of their families, and the strength it
took for those left to keep living another day.

The monster, it watched me like it couldn't decide if it
was time for me to die yet. So I did the only thing there was
left to do.

Sat down. Not so hard, carrying that weight. Waved a
hand at the space in front of me. All I needed was a pipe to
share a smoke with a monster.

"Why her?" I asked, like I had something to trade of equal
value.

The monster grumbled and clicked. Tree trunks snapped
somewhere inside it. I think it was laughing. "Medicine."

"Yeah, everybody wants medicine."

"Yes."

"She doesn't know me, doesn't even like me. You've got a
long wait coming."

"No."

The thing became its stubborn resolve, standing by the
rusting iron gate to a shadowy set of stairs, arms by its sides,
blond hair and coal-fire eyes fading, until it was just a part of
the background-another ruined, incomplete part of the city's
foundation. Trains rumbled in the distance. Traffic sounds
from the street above filtered through air vents. I watched a
water bug dart in spurts around me.

Then she was there. Standing next to me. Out of nowhere.

"Get out of here!" I yelled, and then I cursed, because if
the monster had been sleeping, he was awake now.

Of course, it had always been awake.

It rolled great shoulders and shifted forward like a
landslide, its porcelain mask of skin breaking, shattering the
illusion of humanity. The brooding muscle man became a
mountain of broken stone, an avalanche of pebbles that might
have been the calcified souls of the dead, on which floated a
thatch of pale wood that, if alive, would have been a badge
of life in a cold and forbidding world, but since the wood was
bare and brittle, could only be a sign of death.

And I waited for her to fold its out of there, or produce a
magic gun, or call on some other kind of moving monstrosity
to do her dirty work, but no, she just stood by my side and the
monster took her in both its great paws and lifted her high
overhead until she screamed.

Her voice cut into me, clean and fast, a saber slice through
the heart, and my blood ran ghost cold and my muscles stiffened hard as roadside dead and my brain sizzled like a ball of
dough in burning oil.

And I saw, as clearly as the city spread out under me from the high steel, that Medicine Spirit Woman wasn't there to
save me. No. She'd come to see if I could save her.

And I wanted to. With that need, I was alive, more than
I'd ever been. Everyone I'd ever known and left behind-from
my quiet and steady foster parents to my scarred, bony mom
to that asshole whose ass I kicked in junior high and even that
Taliban bastard whose head I opened up real wide with four
from the 9mm when he came at me through a window-was
alive, inside, welcoming me back to my own life with arms
spread.

Where are you, Grandpa?

No answer. No words of wisdom. Again. But I thought I
understood. Fighting was for the living, and that's what I had
to do for her. No gun, but I was a warrior. Maybe I should have
brought a knife.

Jump in. Just do it. That's what warriors do.

I tackled the thing low and from the side, wrapping arms
around hips in a solid tackle. Figured Medicine could take the
fall. But I grabbed a crumbling pile of debris and landed flat on
my face. It stomped on my back once before I rolled and kicked,
ducked a sweeping arm that managed to clip my knee.

The good news when I got myself standing was that Medicine was free. But she wasn't running away. No, she was standing there, watching. Waiting for me to be all I could be.

The monster's first punch sent my flying into solid rock
wall. The second broke a couple of ribs. The third spun me
into a heap that fell through rotten boards and left me hanging ass high halfway down a pit, a horn screaming in my ears
and an earthquake rocking my head. That one brought me
back to the war.

The thing dragged me out and whipped me into tile work
hard enough to chip teeth and ceramic.

This was when I found out it wasn't only the past that
could stick to me. Fear could too.

Things weren't going right. Not such a big deal. Didn't
know what to do. No news there. Pain. I'd had plenty of that
before.

Too much white man, not enough Indian, Grandpa might
have said if he'd been talking. If you say so. None of that
was what was making dread creep out my gut to squeeze my
heart.

I was scared because I was losing her. My Medicine Snake
Woman. She was the future, a hope, the breath of life. I didn't
care what she really was or where she came from, I just needed
her.

Suddenly, I felt bad for my real mom. She'd come to need
what was the death of her, just like me. Medicine was all inside
my head, sticking hard, making me think, holding me back. I lost
that space of doing something when you're ahead of fear, when it
just can't catch you. Couldn't walk the heights no more.

The monster wasn't done with me, but its priorities were
clear. Medicine Snake Woman came first. Blood curse-carrying
duty-bound man later. It went back after her.

And Medicine didn't move. Didn't look to the monster for
mercy or to me for help. She stood her ground, full of her life, her
strength, standing or falling to whatever came, whether it was
musket fire, cavalry charge, flood, or fire. Or a monster. Leaving
it all to me to do what had to be done. But I had nothing.

Maybe she loved so much she was setting me free by dying.

No.

How much do you love her?

His voice shocked me. I hoped I was in a dream, but my
body told me otherwise.

Grandpa, help me.

Do you love her more than anything?

Do something.

More than yourself?

Yes.

The monster picked her up. Twisted an arm. She cried
out. It liked the sound, shuddering and rattling as if laughing.
If there'd been a fire, it might have stuck Medicine on a spit
and watched her roast. It slapped her with a finger. Poked her.
She sagged, shuddered, a doll in a fighting pit. She was already
dead, but her death hadn't caught up to her yet.

And even on the precipice, half-broken but still breathing
and peering out at the world through eyes that didn't seem
able to close, she was larger than anything I'd ever known, full
of promise and beauty, a treasure fallen from the sky, a thing
no man, not even all living men put together, could wrap their
arms around and hold.

Then the questions hit. Not as hard as the monster, but
they hit. They'd both warned me. Loving the moon was one
thing, but wanting to possess something that wasn't mine,
that was bigger than me and the monster and the whole damn
city, country, world-that was a problem. A transgression. It
wasn't her, and it wasn't my own life sticking to me, slowing
me down to a stop. It was my need for her, for all that love I
thought was missing, that was keeping me down.

Well, that and a royal ass kicking.

I had to get back to having no fear. I had to put all of that
crap about wanting and losing out of my mind. Be strong. Be
alive. Now. Not in the past or in the future. Just alive walking
on high steel like I was on solid ground getting the job done.
A part of everything, holding on to nothing.

I would have to kill her, in my heart.

I slipped past the smiling faces of the welcoming committee to my life, headed for the back room where the mother who
gave me up hides out, along with the father who couldn't keep
himself alive for me. There was a blackboard back there full
of rules. Along the walls stood a police lineup of white, black,
brown people, Indians, Asians, a motley mess of mutts like me,
all proud and pissed. There was that hard-ass DI who smelled
Indian on me and didn't like it. Shadows in the mountains lobbing mortar shells and setting off IEDs. And there was her.

I dove into my life. Went deep. Drowned in all the pain
and hurt I'd been through, the bugfuck craziness of talking
to a ghost in my head and being blown up and falling in love
with the moon.

Went quiet. Silent. Dark. Closed the door to that back
room, and when I did another opened with stairs moving tip
to a light.

Went up high, walking on girders across the sky, not
afraid. Doing what I had to do. Walking in the steps of my
ancestors.

I had to kill Medicine Snake Woman in my human heart
to keep her in my spirit's heart. To walk without fear in the
sky. To perform my duty to all my people.

I stood. Rattled, creaked, and bled. Walked the broken
bits of my body step by step to the monster, staring hard at its
back, not listening to Medicine's panting, her small cries, the
rustle of her blouse, the sounds her bones made.

She didn't belong to me. She was everybody's.

Easy as stepping through clouds, I reached the monster while
it played with its catch and slid my hand through the gravel pit of
its back, sank my arm deep, to the shoulder, until I touched what
I knew I'd find. Everything alive has one. Even the ones who've
transgressed, just like the ones who stay pure and true.

It was small and wet, but it beat hard and fast, like mine had when I'd held Medicine in my arms. The monster stiffened, squeezing Medicine to screaming and locking my elbow
to the breaking point. Another moment and my arm would
have been dead, and so would I.

But I'd already closed my hand, crushing the monster's heart
until it was mud dripping through my fingers. The avalanche of
calcified souls collapsed, sending me flying back to keep from
being buried and crushed. I landed bad and took another knock
on the head. Decided to lay for a while and dream.

If Grandpa was there, he wasn't talking first.

You warned me, I said.

Nothing.