Songs of the Dead (32 page)

I hear her take a deep breath, then, “What does that mean?”

“It means we have to stop the
wétikos
. It means we have a lot of work to do.”

Another deep breath, before I hear her say, “You're right. We do.”

The day is gray and windy, and cold enough for us to wear jackets. We drive back to that trailhead, and this time walk together toward the ponds. I feel the same things I did before, but still I do not fall through time. We turn east, drop down, walk a maze of paths. The day is still windy, still cold. We walk, sometimes hand in hand, sometimes not.

It's been a while since we've made love. Her parents' home has an open design, and privacy has been at a premium. We've snuck into the forest a couple of times, but our daily average is plummeting. My prostate is by now much better, and I'm fortunately no longer bound by Dr. Lu's prescription. Not that it's mattered the last few days.

We both notice something as we walk. Have you ever been to a place where the land demanded you make love? Even if Allison and I had already made love several times today, even if we were both sexually exhausted, we both would have been compelled—
compelled
is not too strong a word—to intertwine our naked bodies. We would have been compelled not solely by our selves, not solely by our respective muses, but by the land.

We don't talk about it. We don't have to. The only thing Allison says to initiate is, “How about there?”

We walk to the spot, a bed of moss and tall grass at the edge of some trees. We face each other, hold both our hands. We kiss, and my hands slip out of hers, reach behind to pull her close. After an embrace we step apart, remove our jackets, our clothes. I start to lay down my coat for us to lie on but she says she wants to feel the moss on her back.

“That's cold,” I say.

“I don't care,” she says. She sits, shivers, lies back, says, “Will you cover me, please?”

I do. She wraps around me and I fold into her. We stay like that, not moving. I close my eyes, feel her, then open them to see she's looking over my shoulder. “What do you see?”

“The sky,” she says. “The trees. They're all so beautiful.”

I move slightly, keep staring at her eyes. I say, “You have the face of an angel.”

She smiles. “Would you like to see god?”

“I already do.”

“I want you to see the sky, the trees. Like this. Together.”

We roll over, still on the bed of moss. I look at the sky, the trees, a distant hawk. She's right. I've never seen anything so beautiful. She moves her hips, rises up then down, softly, slowly. I look at her face. Her eyes are closed, her expression soft, her lips slightly parted. My eyes move down, to her neck, shoulders, breasts, ribs, belly. I see goosebumps. Further down I see where we come together, see her moving slowly, softly, up, then down, up, then down.

Her pace quickens. So does mine. She opens her eyes, looks straight ahead at the trees, the tall grasses. She says, “Oh.”

Faster, and faster. I look at the sky, the trees. I close my eyes and still I see them, still I see her, still I see us.

The trees close in, the grasses join us, the mosses, too, and the soil beneath them, all of them join as we move together, slow, then fast, then slow, then fast.

“Oh,” she whispers. “Oh.”

And I hear the trees whisper in return, and the grasses. “Yes,” they respond. “Yes.”

Afterwards we don't spend much time basking together. It's too damn chilly. We whip on our clothes and continue walking the path.

It heads sharply uphill. At the top we see a small fence surrounding a forty-by-forty-foot area.

“Oh,” she says.

“Oh,” I say.

She says, “You were right.”

“What?”

“It was me.”

“What was you?”

“At the cemetery. Making love. We just hadn't been here yet.”

I look inside the fence. There are small markers. “You're right.”

She says, “I'm sorry I got upset.”

“That's okay. I probably would have done the same.”

She stops, then says, “But in your dream we lay atop the coats.”

I think, say, “Yes.”

“What do you think that difference means?”

We stand silent a moment, then she says, “You said
Oh
too. For the same reason?”

“No. I said it because I've read about this place. It's called Yontocket. For the Tolowa people, this is the center of the universe, where land first came up from the water.”

“Your dream a few days ago.”

“Yes. And each year they'd have their world renewal cere- monies here. They'd dance and sing and perform rituals to help the world renew itself. But one year the whites. . . .”

“What?”

“I need to sit. It's happening.”

She helps me sit on the short grass.

It begins. I see people dancing, and I see a fire. The fire is alive, and it is speaking, to the Tolowa, to itself, to the wood it consumes, to the land. It is speaking in the language of fires, a language I do not understand. But it is speaking. The Indians are dancing.

And then they aren't. They are screaming. They are falling. They are dying. They are running. I see men—white men—shooting them, stabbing them, throwing Tolowa regalia into the fire, throwing Tolowa infants into the fire. I hear the same laughter I heard in Spokane at the murder of the horses. And I hear the voice of the fire, different now, saying something different, something I still don't understand.

I see the whites bashing out the brains of the old, young. I see them holding children by their feet and swinging them against trees. I see them chasing adults who run down paths toward the ponds, and I know the Indians will dive in, hide, breathe through reeds.

And now I see Allison, wearing her jacket the color of camel skin, and I see the pale gray sky, and I see the short grass, and I tell Allison what I saw.

She doesn't say anything.

Suddenly again I don't see her, and instead I see Indians dancing. I see fires. I see days and nights and years of celebrations and mournings. I see people making love. I see the same for all kinds of animals, all kinds of plants. I see them living, dying, loving, hating. I see generation after generation of human, generation after generation of cedar, generation after generation of porcupine, generation after generation of ant, generation after generation of grasses, mosses, generation after generation of fire.

And suddenly I see even more. I see generation after generation of muse, dreamgiver, demon, walking back and forth between worlds. I see geese and martens and wrentits moving between worlds. I see fires moving between worlds. I see humans moving between worlds. I see the living and the dead.

I see all these worlds being renewed by this intercourse, this movement across borders porous and impenetrable and permeable and impermeable and breathing and alive as skin. I see these worlds winding and unwinding, tangling and untangling like the lovers they are, and I see moments in time, too, winding and unwinding, tangling and untangling like the lovers that they are, too. These worlds, these moments, they are not one, they are not two. They are lovers, like any others.

I see Allison. “Hold me,” I say.

She does.

I say, “There was a horrible massacre here. . . .”

“Yes.”

“But this land is not the site of a massacre.”

She holds her breath.

“That was one night among thousands and tens of thousands of years of nights. Yes, it was horrible. Yes, the massacres of the wild continue everywhere. But that's not how the land identifies. That's not who the land is. . . .”

“No more than Dr. Kline raping me is who I am.”

“Yes. There are thousands of years of humans making love here. Hundreds of thousands of years of nonhumans making love here. Fires making love. Everything.”

“That's why the land wanted us to make love.”

“The land misses us as much as it misses the salmon, the grizzly bears. It misses our touch, our participation as much as we miss the touch of the land.”

“Or as much as we would miss it if we were in our bodies.”

We stand, begin to walk a trail across a meadow, away from the cemetery.

Allison asks, “Do you think the demons are real? Do you think plants and animals really don't go extinct, but instead they go away, and they will come back when we are either gone or have learned how to behave? Or do you think we're just making all this up?”

“I don't know.” I pause, think, say, “But I don't think it matters whether we're stopping
wétikos
so the passenger pigeons can come back or stopping
wétikos
so the salmon aren't driven extinct or stopping
wétikos
so the demons don't kill us all. Our actions are the same. We're still stopping
wétikos
.”

“Of course.” She pauses, then says, “What if God is stronger than life?”

“I don't know that either.”

We walk.

I say, “Let's ask.”

“Who?”

I point with my chin at a hawk sitting atop a dead tree at the edge of the meadow. “That hawk was above us when we made love.”

I look up, see no other birds, then say, very quietly, to the hawk, “If plants and animals are waiting for the demons to do their work so they can come back, will you please fly up and circle us?”

The words are barely out before the hawk opens her wings and with two powerful beats takes off. She flies behind us in a semicircle, then lands in a live tree on our other side.

I say, “Maybe that means we're half right.”

Allison gasps, grabs my arm, points with her other hand to the sky in front of us. I look, see a single vulture coasting to finish the circle.

She says, “The demons—the predators—aren't the only ones they're waiting on. That's only half of what's necessary. When the demons are done someone still has to clean up the mess. That's who the vulture represents. After that the plants and animals and fungi and rivers and everyone else will come back.”

“I hope you're right.”

“None of which alters the fact that we need to stop the
wétikos
now.

Allison says, “I need to go back to Spokane.”

“To get some of our stuff?”

“No. To live.”

“I don't understand.”

“We can't live on the run. I can't live on the run. I won't live on the run.”

“If we're going to fight the
wétikos
—if we're going to fight the culture—we've got to start somewhere.”

“I agree, but. . . .”

“And just because we're running away, just because we look away, just because we pretend it isn't happening, doesn't mean he isn't still killing women.”

“Yes, but. . . .”

“And if you and I—you and I, Derrick, with what we know and believe—can't stand up to one person, take out this one person who is doing so much harm, how can we expect anyone else to stand up to the whole culture, to take out this whole culture that is doing so much harm?”

“Yes, but. . . .”

“But what?”

“But we don't win.”

“Don't you see? Somebody's got to take a stand.”

“I'd agree with you if I'd seen
us
dumping
his
body, but I didn't.”

“This isn't negotiable, Derrick. There is too much at stake. You said the demons were waiting to see if humans are redeemable, if humans can clean up this mess. Well, here's one human who is still human, who is redeemable. I'm going to fight back. I may die, but I'm going to go down fighting. I will not live my life on the run. This is who I am. This is what I am.”

I suddenly understand that she is right. This is who and what she is. This is what it is to be a human being. I'm suddenly very glad I never told her about seeing my body at the river. I know she would do what is right at the cost of her own life, but I'm not certain she would do this at the cost of mine as well. I say, “I'm going with you.”

twenty four

deathwatch

Allison tells her parents why we left Spokane, and why we are returning. She wants to do this alone, so I take a walk.

When I get back, their eyes are red. Her father, who normally shakes my hand, hugs me. Her mother hugs me, too. She says, “We tried to raise our daughter right . . . sometimes it's not easy.”

There's really nothing I can say.

Picture this. Your name is Axel Freiherr von dem Bussche. You are a Captain in the Wehrmacht. It is 1942. You are a very good soldier. Later you will win the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Class, the German Cross in Gold, the Knight's Cross, and the Golden War-wounded Badge. But now, in October of 1942, you see something that disturbs you deeply. Entirely by accident, you are at an airfield, Dubno, in the Ukraine, and you see several thousand human beings—men, women, and children—being herded by SS men carrying pistols and submachine guns. The SS men force some of these human beings—Jews—to strip and lie face downward on the ground. The men then shoot them in the nape of the neck. After this another row of human beings— Jews—are forced to strip and lie face down on top of the still-writhing bodies beneath them. These people then are also shot. This continues, and the pile grows.