Ghostcountry's Wrath (11 page)

“Sammy?”

“Sammy Davis. What else would you call a runty one-eyed 'coon?”

“Tsk,” Calvin clucked as he followed his cousin back outside. “I figured you of all people'd be politically correct.”

“I am,” Kirk countered instantly. “Money's the most P.C. thing there is. I mean, do you s'pose old S.D.J.'d have got rich if he'd been a two-hundred-pound white Baptist?”

“Search me…but—”

“That's not why you came.”

In reply, Calvin slumped down on the split-log steps, leaning against a porch post. Kirk sat opposite. For a while they busied themselves with biscuits and coffee. The 'coon found its way from the rafters and nuzzled Kirk's greasier hand. He passed it half a biscuit. It trilled.

Eventually Kirk cleared his throat. Calvin saw him watching and cleared his throat in turn. “I want some advice.”

“First time in your life!” Kirk snorted.

“Possibly. But I really do need some. I mean, I know I've been kinda distant the last couple of years—preoccupied, and all. But you've gotta remember that I was hangin' out up here while you were off at college, so it's not like you've exactly been available either.”

“So which me do you need?” Kirk asked seriously. “Your cousin, your
Cherokee
cousin, your
mechanic
cousin, or your
anthropologist
cousin?”

“I
need
my shaman cousin, 'cept I don't have one.”

Kirk gnawed his lip. “
That
stuff, huh?”

An eyebrow lifted. “You've read Mooney?”

“Does the pope shit in the woods?”

Calvin grimaced and exhaled slowly. “What would you say if I told you that a shitload of the stuff in there's true?”

Kirk puffed his cheeks. “I'd say…well, first I'd say you were crazy—if you're talkin' about what I think you are. But then I'd remember that my flaky young cousin's always been a straight shooter, so he must have good reason to believe it's true, whether or not it actually is.”

“That's as much as I could hope for, I guess.”

“There's more, I take it?”

Calvin nodded. “How 'bout uktena scales, an ulun-suti, and Spearfinger, for starters? Mix in shapechangin' and ghostly visitations. Spice with over-rash promises.”

Kirk whistled. “Sounds like heavy stuff.”

“You could say that.”

“Sooo,” Kirk wondered, leaning back, “how long a tale
is
this, anyway? I ask because, unlikely as it may seem, I've actually gotta
do
something this mornin'—and I've gotta run on white man's time.”

Calvin looked crestfallen. “It's a…long 'un, actually, to tell it right—couple hours, at least.”

“Well,” Kirk announced, “the way I see it is that you're freaked out over something and dead on your feet on top of it. So I tell you what: you grab some
Z
s now, and tonight we can burn the midnight lamp as long as we have to.”

“And until then?”

“Like I said, you crash here this morning, I'll feed you tonight…and this afternoon…”

“Yeah?”

Kirkwood Thunderbird O'Connor smiled fiendishly. “That's when I exact my consultant's fee.”

Calvin regarded him warily from over the rim of his cup.

“You remember how to play stickball, don't you?”

Calvin's eyes narrowed. “You mean
anetsa
?”

Kirk rolled his eyes in turn. “God, cuz, you're a worse purist than
I
am!”

“You know I hate that game!”

“I know you hate rollin' around on the ground and gettin' hurt, which is not the same thing. I also know you're damned good—or
used
to be,” he added with a challenging sneer.

“You got sticks?”

“I always got sticks.”

“Got a ball?”

“I don't
need
a ball.
I'm
the driver. You're the one who needs a ball—balls, too, if you got 'em.”

“I meant to practice with.” Then:
“Driver?
What happened to Lloyd Arneach?”

“More money elsewhere.”

Calvin merely grunted.

Kirk's face softened. “Hey, if it's that big a deal, I'll get somebody else.”

“No.” Calvin sighed. “It can wait.”

“Good man!”

“So who's playin'?”

“Bunch of the guys up here.”

“Pow-wow practice?” Calvin asked, thinking of the big yearly festival on the Fourth of July.

A shrug. “Kinda. Wolftown boys—of whom you, by clan, are one, if I recall—are playin' a bunch of white guys from the University of Georgia.”

“
White guys
can't play stickball!”

“These can—well enough to make the Choctaw world champs sweat—and
they
play regularly. As, I might add, do the Na Hollos.”

Calvin scowled uncertainly. “Na Hollos?”

“Choctaw for ‘White Thing.'”

“Oh.”

“I assume you've been abstaining from the company of women like you're supposed to?”

“No more than you've been fasting!”

Kirk smiled lopsidedly. “Well, coffee's close to black drink.”

Calvin polished his off and levered himself to his feet, suddenly all weariness. “And if I play, you'll hear me out with an open mind?”

“Promise, cuz. Promise!”

“Promise,”
Calvin muttered to himself as he slumped back inside the cabin.
“That's the whole damned trouble!”

Chapter VII: Hard Falls and Close Calls

(early afternoon)

The big July Fourth pow-wow was still two weeks off, Calvin knew, as he surveyed the mixed-culture crowd ambling about the Qualla Ceremonial Grounds, but you sure couldn't prove it by him. Part of the present press was simply the economics of tourist season, of course: one more opportunity to twist a few extra bucks out of flatlanders who might otherwise have driven straight through to max out their plastic up in Gatlinburg or the Smokys. But with what was at least
apparently
an event taking place—well, folks were just naturally more inclined to stop. He didn't blame the locals for profiting from illusion. Qualla wasn't exactly the richest square mile on earth, even if it didn't look as bad as some other reservations—like Rosebud, South Dakota. Or at least not as bad as it had looked in
Thunderheart.

But be that as it may, what mattered now was satisfying his cousin's perverse sense of fair trade so that he could, in turn, pick that cousin's mind. Calvin was good at anetsa—almost a natural, some said. But he didn't
like
to play—he supposed because he was at heart a more peaceful soul than the aptly named Little Brother of War required. To be really good at stickball, you had to abandon your higher brain functions and rely on reflex, adrenaline—and killer instinct—at least as much as skill. A high pain threshold helped, too. But Calvin, more so than most, had good reason to fear what might happen if he gave raw emotion free rein.

On the other hand, Kirkwood knew a bloody lot about Native American cosmology, religion, and folklore. And in spite of the fact that Calvin had more “hands-on” experience than any Cherokee had acquired in a couple of centuries, his cousin was more likely to have squirreled away the sort of esoterica Calvin had glossed over in his own wide but less disciplined reading. Kirk also had a solid background in logic and ethics, both Native American and import. And he knew Calvin as well as anyone.

Trouble was, while Kirk had been around enough to be open-minded, he was also educated enough to be skeptical; and though Calvin knew he would
try
to accept what he had to say nonjudgmentally, it was a lot to ask
anyone
to swallow.

It also assumed he survived the next two hours.

He checked his watch. It was nigh onto 1:45 P.M., and the game was supposed to start at 2:00. Scowling, he gave the crowd one final scan, noting that a number of local artisans were attracting good business—folks like Eva Bigwitch, Davy Arch, and Eddie Bushyhead, in particular. Good for them. A quick check on tiptoes to locate Kirk found him conferring with a clump of event coordinators. Pausing only to untie the red bandana that bound his
tihlskahlti—his
ballsticks—Calvin trotted that way, which was also toward the ball ground.

It was roughly the size of a football field, but with far less clearly defined boundaries. Indeed, there
was
no out-of-bounds, and more than once Calvin had seen players tumble into the spectators with little regard for life or limb on either side. Near each end of the long axis a pair of man-high saplings had been thrust into the ground an armspan apart. These were the goals—at least they were in the Cherokee version of the game. The Mississipi Choctaw—the only tribe that still maintained official teams and codified rules—used twelve-foot-high poles stuck in the earth, and other Southeastern tribes had similar variations.

Just like they used different sticks. Calvin's borrowed pair were Cherokee-style: yard-long splints of hickory planed thin with a draw knife, then folded in half and flared to make a hand-sized loop at the bent end, the remainder doweled and lashed together, with leather woven through the loop to form a basket.

The crowd thinned as Calvin approached, and he recognized some people—players on his own team, mostly: the Bauchenbaugh boys and their dad; Casey Cooper, and the inevitable strutting figure of Rifle Runningbear, who'd been in a couple of movies—and was presently flirting with a woman. Most knew Calvin only slightly, and vice versa. He hadn't grown up in these parts but
had
spent summers here in the company of his grandfather, who'd been one of the tribal elders, which connection entitled Calvin to a certain amount of respect. Unfortunately, the old guy had lived way back in the hills, and Calvin hadn't been able to get into town often; thus, he'd had little contact with tribesmen his own age. He was accepted partly because he had a B.I.A. card, but mostly because he had kinfolks thereabouts—and was a good player; though a certain begrudged quality came with it: an ongoing tendency to test him.

But all that was in his head. As far as any of the spectators knew, he was just another Cherokee: taller than some, and maybe a little slimmer than the stocky, neckless, wide-shouldered lads that comprised the bulk of his team. But like the rest he had thick black hair, tending to long. And like most of them, too, he'd be playing in cut-off jeans (a pair of Kirk's, since he'd brought none).

Speaking of which… He paused by a scatter of similarly abandoned clothing at the eastern edge of the field to shuck out of his shoes and shirt, as the rules required. His watch joined them, but only then did he realize that this really
wasn't
a good idea, because it meant exposing his uktena scale necklace, which he wasn't
about
to leave in Fortune's care, seeing as how it still contained an indeterminate number of shape-shifts and only needed to taste blood to stir up trouble. Too, going shirtless revealed the sun-circles Uki and the Red Man had branded into his back. They looked like tattoos, but a sharp eye would realize they were
other.

Oh well, there was no help for it—not if he was going to get anything useful out of Churchy.

The Wolftown boys were warming up now: using their sticks to scoop up the ball (like a lopsided golfball made of hand-stitched buckskin around a rock core), then flinging it at each other—sometimes with appalling force. A really good throw made an audible whistle. They were also laughing a great deal—and tossing good-natured insults at their opponents.

The visitors, he observed, as he intercepted a wayward shot and flung it back, showed more variation than the hometown team, ranging in apparent age from late teens to early forties—(that was a mistake!). Most were leaner than the Cherokee norm, some even downright skinny, with a couple of really small lads, but also with a fair number taller than the tallest Wolftowner—at five ten, Calvin was himself a touch above average. A few were blond, a couple red-headed. Some wore ponytails, many sported earrings, and one had a thick, waist-long braid that was bound to tempt
someone
past endurance. There were even two women: a thin, curly-haired blonde, and a buxom redhead. Calvin wondered if they'd be required to go topless, too. As it was, their whole team wore white T-shirts emblazoned with a pissed-off-looking bat grasping tihlskahlti.

Calvin even recognized a couple of them. One was a middle-sized auburn-haired guy whose intense expression rode raptor-handsome features. Calvin couldn't remember his name, but knew he'd been dancing pow-wows since he was a kid and had lately started a small Drum. A couple of others danced or sang, too: a ballsy thing to do, for white boys.