Tailed (16 page)

“Otto, no more singing!” I hissed.

“But why, Garv? Otto to sing all time when tub to soap.”

“Just get dressed, quickly.” I looked back apologetically at Nekked Cowboy.

A long string of quiet, but no less frantic, prayers streamed through my brain as I stabbed my foot into my trouser leg.

Nekked Cowboy tapped Otto on the shoulder.

“You some kind of comedian?”

Sasquatch appeared beside him. “C'mon, Carl, the guy's nuts. His partner here said he was sorry.”

“He called me a ‘
rimjob cowboy,
' Roy. You heard it. An' after I warned him.”

My guess was that Carl had been on the road way past his bedtime, strung out on bennies or Vivarin, and was preternaturally irascible as a result.

My fingers began to misalign the buttons on my shirt.

“Honest, fellahs, he doesn't know what he's saying. He's a simpleton.”

“I don't care if he's a Baptist!” Nekked Cowboy started to flush, and I knew then that the confrontation meter was tipping into the red. “Nobody comes in here and makes fun of Calgary Carl Jones.”

Another trucker stepped forward, this one fully dressed in jeans, plaid shirt, vest, and the gentle bearded countenance of Mitch Miller. “C'mon, Carl. Get some shut-eye. Don't mess with that runt, not worth your time.”

Otto was humming to himself, and finally turned from his locker to behold the menace standing behind him. “Ah, my friend!”

“Otto…” I implored. “Please, Otto…”

“You see, Garv?” Otto took an index finger and began bouncing it off Cowboy's belly button. “Very nice fat man.”

Calgary Carl lurched forward at Otto, who seemed suddenly to vanish. Carl crashed headfirst into the open locker, and Otto was suddenly behind him giving him a shove.

“Byk bychara!”
Otto whispered in surprise—labeling his attacker a redneck. “Garv, cowboy not nice!”

As Carl lumbered to his feet, several of the other truckers gathered around.

“Whoa! Hey, guys, let's simmer down, just some miscommunication here…” Garth, the sensitivity trainer.

I didn't hold it against the truckers assembled. One of their own was, by all appearances, under duress and possibly attack. A couple of them came forward to restrain Carl. The others closed in on Otto and me.

“What's goin' on here?” A tall, angular trucker with a long white scar down his face came forward.

“These two were razzin' Carl,” one of the crowd accused.

Scarface turned to me. “Who are you two?”

“Just passing through. He's Russian, doesn't speak English well, insulted Carl by accident…” I tried to explain.

“He called Carl ‘fat,' right to his face…” Sasquatch pointed.

“An' he sang ‘Eastbound and Down' as somethin' about sailors fuckin' dogs,” someone else said. Interesting interpretation.

Otto looked dismayed. “Yes, Otto say to cowboy ‘Very nice fat man.'”

“He doesn't know what he's saying,” I insisted, my eyes scanning the direction of the exit. “To him, ‘fat' isn't bad. He's translating it in his head from Russian as something like ‘jolly,' or ‘happy.'”

Scarface eyed me shrewdly, and I continued.

“You think a runt like Otto would intentionally come in here and start a fight with you guys?”

Otto didn't understand a lot of what was being said, but enough. He stepped up to Scarface, grabbing him by the forearms in what he felt was a friendly gesture. Otto never picked up on the notion that Americans aren't quite as touchy-feely as his comrades back on the Ural steppes. It was plain to see that Scarface didn't like being touched by a stranger.

“Please, Otto very ashamed to tell cowboy any bad. War in bathtub, eetz not lookink.” Then he looked at Scarface's elaborate belt buckle, which was about the size of a steak platter. On it was the silhouette of a reclining and buxom stripper, the same symbol emblazoned on truckers' mudflaps from Portland to Portland, except this one had red rhinestones for nipples. Below it said
KEEP ON FUCKIN'
.

Otto is, among other things, a silversmith and engraver, and is never shy about showing admiration for the craft at large. Or admiration for the nude female form. Or in this case, both.

“Oh, my Got!” Otto enthused, staring at the belt buckle and then pointing. “Eetz big and very nice!”

Then he reached to touch the overly elaborate belt buckle.

I can't say for sure what happened next, except that there was a sudden tumult behind me as I made for the fire exit. I slammed through the door and an alarm sounded, matching the alarm bells going off in my head.

Believe me, if there were any chance I could have helped Otto physically—and let's face it, I did my level best to help him verbally—I would have. But that Slavic dumbbell just kept making one gaffe after another. If only he'd just shut up.

I was racing across the parking lot, jacket and shoes cradled in my arms, dodging cars at the pumps, leaping over fuel hoses, headed for where I last saw the Pixie dry-cleaning van, my bare feet slapping the macadam. In my half-dressed state, I must have looked like a boudoir interloper on the skedaddle. The jingle of the fire bell faded with distance, and I didn't know if the truckers were after me or not. But zippy, unhalting, and furious flight has been the hallmark of a number of my narrow escapes. My fighting abilities are largely untested. I have the lack of permanent and disfiguring injuries to prove it.

I scrambled under an eighteen-wheeler or two, crab-like, and came to where the van had been.

Had been.

OK, the Tupelca trio obviously hadn't abandoned me here. They needed my vuka. Angie wouldn't leave me there. So they must have pulled around to get gas or go to the store. But I hadn't seen them. Not surprising, as I was pretty focused on a set course for the moon when I launched out of that locker room. But I didn't dare head back into the fray, and at the moment was safely sheltered from view of the truck stop by a maze of Macs, Peterbilts, and Kenworths. I put my hands on my knees, leaned over, and tried to get my breath back.

Otto suddenly rounded the corner of a tractor trailer.

“Poluchit' pizdy!”
The sleeve of his jacket was torn, and there was the beginning of a shiner around one eye. “Garv, my friend, I very glad you go quick. Why fat man to be angry? And man with very nice…” He gestured at his belt.

“Buckle. You OK? They coming?” I scanned the sky, which had been sunny but was now turning dark with clouds.

“Yes, of course.” He gestured to where the van had been. “But tell to me: where to Angie and Tulips, eh? Not lookink. I thinkink maybe we must
pizdyets,
yes?”

“Yes, we should
pizdyets,
” I panted.
Pizdyets
was his Russian word for everything from “it's over” to “let's go.” What it actually means, well, is not for polite company. Like many of his Slavic mutterings. “You didn't see the van?”

“Otto not see.”

“Come on.” We darted around to the end of a truck and caught a view back toward the gas pumps, where a group of agitated truckers were checking all the nearby hiding places, much to the bewilderment of onlookers. No Pixie van in sight.

I leaned against the truck, thinking. Couldn't I have one day's peace? Is this what it was going to be like all the way to New Mexico? Farmers with pitchforks, Wal-Mart greeters amok with shopping carts, Navajo trinket salesmen with turquoise and silver nunchakus?

“Otto to say something bad to fat cowboy?”

“We'll talk about it later.” I didn't want to get into it, not then. “Not good to call a man fat, not good to touch strangers with big nasty scars on their face.”

“I dunno.” Otto stroked his beard. “But we must make to go,
s'ebat'sya,
yes? Ah, look…”

He bent down to pick up a twisted piece of wire from the ground, admiring it. There was no piece of junk too small for him to see as possibly useful.

“Otto, stop picking up trash and concentrate. The van has to be here somewhere!” I yanked my running shoes on and donned my jacket.

I peered around the corner again in vain hope—and was rewarded. The van was slowly turning the far corner of the truck stop diner. I could see Norman searching for us from the driver's seat, Angie in the passenger seat. I could also see some truckers headed our way.

I put a foot on the truck cab's running board. “Up here.”

A few footholds afforded us access to the cab's roof, and then we scuttled onto the top of the trailer itself, lying flat.
The tiger never looks up.

Atop the trailer I could feel a cold wind start to kick up, and noted clouds roiling in from the north, not too unlike those I'd seen over Omaha. We could hear the truckers filing along between the trucks, and I slithered close to the edge to take a look. Angie and the three Tupelca were now standing beside the Pixie van, scratching their heads.

I waved to Otto. “Now or never—let's go!”

We shimmied down the far side of the truck.

“Garth!” Angie waved. “Over here!”

Otto and I broke into a run.

“Start the van!” I shouted.

“What?”

“Start the goddamn van now!”

The four of them stared dumbly for a millisecond before seeing our pursuers and scrambling hurriedly into the van. I glanced behind me and saw the pack of truckers had rounded the corner out of the truck maze as fast as their Timberlands could carry them.

By the time Otto and I reached the van it was already moving, away from us, back doors open. Timmy had his hand extended. “What the heck is going on? Get in!”

With the help of a quick tailwind from the approaching storm, Otto bounded past me, latched onto Timmy's hand, and was yanked into the van with such force that he tumbled head over heels.

“Slow down!” I shouted.

“Hey, slow down!” Timmy shouted into the van.

That's when I tripped—one of my laces had come undone. Stormy sky, a white, streamer-like shoelace, and asphalt kaleidoscoped as I tumbled, and the next thing I knew five angry truckers had their hands on me and were holding me up like they'd just pulled a rabbit out of a hat. I thrashed for all I was worth, but they had me firmly in their grasp. I was going to take a beating, I had no doubt of that, so I focused on trying to cover my face, my eyes, and my crotch all at once.

If I had an ancient alien vuka spirit inside me, maybe they would knock it out so I wouldn't have to go to New Mexico. That mildly amusing notion was fleeting, and the sound of thunder made it even more so.

“Let's drag him on the interstate!” someone hollered.

“Put him in the Dumpster and ram it with the semis!” hooted another.

“Make a bug shield outta the cuss, strap him to the front of my rig!”

From behind my forearms I could see Carl the Fat Cowboy approaching at a trot. His fist was balled, and it was plain he meant to find purchase with it on my body. I curled up tight and tensed.

A ferocious wind hit me, and I thought it was just the result of being punched by Carl, like the moment of panic just before the pain hits. Then I was spinning, sand and gravel stinging my face—I thought maybe I was on the ground being kicked. When I peeked, I found I was indeed back on the ground, but I could see a black snake writhing in the sky. Was I already un-conscious, awakening in the hospital, and this was the doctor's stethoscope reaching toward me?

I shielded my eyes again with one hand, but now through the torrent, I could see the black snake tossing the truckers aside like Neptune flicking sailors off the deck of the
Argo
. The snake lurched toward me, but never struck me, swerving instead to one side and taking out another trucker. It was no wider than five feet across, spinning impossibly fast.
It couldn't really be a tornado, could it?

Curled into a ball that would be the envy of any armadillo, I lay there and awaited the snake's wrath. But the dervish's torrent suddenly subsided, and I peeked just quickly enough to witness the black snake dissolve back up into the sky. The world suddenly seemed impossibly quiet.

“Garth!” Angie was kneeling over me, gasping with fright. “Holy buckets! Did you see that? Are you all right?”

The Tupelca were suddenly there with the van, hoisting me into the back. Before the doors closed, I saw the truckers hiding under one of their rigs, staring after me like the Argonauts before the Colossus of Rhodes.

chapter 20

T
here are plenty of times in life when one feels one's been somewhere before, a sense of déjà vu. In most cases, it's a dumb situation, like cutting a bagel toward your hand. Or leaving a frying pan handle pointed out from the stove where you bump into it. Or like setting your car keys in the car trunk
just for a second.
Wisdom is often nothing more than weaving a path through the minefield of your past mistakes.

Unfortunately, my sense of having been “there” before was being in a situation where something completely unworldly occurs, and in such a way as I've had the inkling I made it happen. Perhaps it's not a very common phenomenon for anyone else, but it was beginning to seem a perennial occurrence for Garth Carson. And we're not talking about a phenomenon like smacking the photocopier and suddenly having it work.

I was currently faced with being possessed by an ancient spirit that needed to be exorcised. And this had indirectly pitted me against an angry mob of truck drivers who were, improbably, chased away by a tornado.

At a certain point, one has to consider whether a string of similar events such as this is more than coincidence. And at a certain point, one just gets plain freaked out.

We were hurtling along the interstate through Fort Morgan, hell-bent for Denver and a turn south toward New Mexico. Angie and I were in back, my darling engrossed in a Sudoku puzzle book, her brain clicking away. Across from us, sitting on the floor, were Timmy and Brutus, both reading sports magazines. Norman was up front at the wheel, Otto riding shotgun and humming tunelessly as he surveyed the passing terrain.

Wilco was feigning sleep at my feet. Every once in a while I'd see his eye tweak open and that little evil smile cross his lips. I wasn't convinced he still yearned for an excuse to sink his teeth in me so much as to somehow tell Angie about that episode with Amber.

And just where was Wilco when the tornado hit? His saving grace was supposed to be that he howled when a tornado was about to strike. Ha! He most certainly did not—I'd asked the crew in the van.

Unlike the other humans, I couldn't concentrate on reading. I found myself unable to do anything but ruminate. And idly hope I could get rid of Wilco somewhere.

What if the weird stuff that's happened to me over the years has been caused by this vuka in me? What if I am cursed, or the walking damned, or telekinetic? Did I smite my enemies with a tornado? Could I really be living out some sort of bizarre, protracted quest of the Greek tradition?
I only hoped Hera or some other god was looking out for me.

I'd never been able to read anybody's mind that I knew of. I'd be a phenomenal taxidermy dealer if I knew how much loot someone wanted for their used wildebeest before I made an offer. This was the first time in my life I felt I needed some spiritual guidance, when enough bizarre things had happened that I didn't know how to make sense of them all or to know if they meant anything. And I wasn't going to find the answers with my traveling companions. Gabby and Stuart hadn't raised me and Nicholas in a religious household, so I didn't have any particular affiliation, any rabbi, reverend, or Parsi priest, to whom I could turn.

And here I was all the way out west, virtually in Denver. The only person I knew in Colorado was a guy to whom I'd once sold a bird of prey, a Native American named Two Shirts.

Wait a sec.

Birds of prey are protected species, and one of the only legitimate methods of selling them is to Native Americans who want to use them for religious rites. The U.S. government even has an eagle repository where birds found electrocuted by high-voltage power lines, as roadkill, or seized contraband are portioned off to the Native American shamans upon application. Two Shirts was a middleman, and the only reason I could sell to him was because he was a shaman.

But what could he tell me? What did I want him to tell me?

All I knew was that I needed a second opinion.

I went forward and tapped Norman on the shoulder.

“I need to make a detour.”

“Bathroom break?”

I shook my head. “Need to see my witch doctor.”

         

OK, so Two Shirts isn't a witch doctor. I should show proper respect. Especially in as much as I was putting no little faith in his abilities to give me spiritual advice. Sometimes you grab at straws because that's all there is to grab.

The van gang was none too pleased with this detour, but I put it to them this way:

“The vuka and I need to see this person before we go on. If we don't, we may not get him into his jar. It won't take long, I promise.”

Angie was supportive but wary. I could tell by the way she kept feeling my forehead to see if I was running a temperature.

I guess I expected Two Shirts to live on some dust-bowl reservation with skinny dogs wandering around and lots of ragamuffin kids playing in the dirt. What do I know? That's the way reservations tend to be depicted on TV and in the movies.

What I found instead on Zuni Lane was a row of ranch homes right out of a Steven Spielberg film, each different but also much the same. Driveways. Lawns. Basketball hoops. Sprinklers. Shutters. Addresses painted on the curb. I expected to see a uniformed milkman and his bow tie making deliveries.

I'd tried calling ahead through information, but there was no answer.

As we approached the address, I could see there was someone mowing the lawn in pale blue shorts, a black Ramones T-shirt, white socks, and white sneakers turned green from the grass cuttings. No ponytail, but his black hair was down to his shoulders.

“Two Shirts?” I had to yell over the Briggs and Stratton powering his mower.

He stopped mowing and turned. He looked at me, and then past me at the rest of the crew piling out of the van, stretching their backs. Wilco took the opportunity to piss on Two Shirts's mailbox.

“I'm Garth Carson.”

The look on his face was one Jehovah's Witnesses must see constantly.

“I'm from New York. I sold you some birds.”

He put one hand on his hip and used the other to wipe his brow with the front of his T-shirt.

“About two years ago I shipped you a vintage golden eagle mount, for the feathers.”

A smile flickered on his face, though it didn't quite light up.

“OK, I remember now.” He pointed at my motley crew. “What's all this?”

“Hard to explain. That is, it'll take some time.”

“Whose time?”

“Can you spare some?”

“It's nice to meet you and all, Carl, but…”

“Garth.”

“Sorry.” He looked me in the eye, less perfunctory and more searching. “What is it you want?”

“I know I don't know you except for the thing with the bird and all, and that we spoke on the phone a long time ago…” I felt like a complete ass. How could I have thought to impose on somebody I didn't know?

“Uh huh.” He pushed a lever on the mower handle and the motors puttered to a stop. “Something freaky going on?”

“Freaky? Well…”

“If it wasn't freaky you'd have gone to a minister or a psychiatrist or something. White people only come to me when it's something freaky.”

“I'm not religious, so even if…”

“That big dude looks like he could mow my lawn in about ten minutes. My back is killing me. Think he'd mind? Then we could talk.”

Timmy was soon at the mower, and Two Shirts and I were under a tree in his backyard, sitting on the newly mown lawn, inhaling the heady bouquet of decapitated grass.

“Look, Two Shirts, maybe I was wrong to impose upon you, but…”

“I'm a shaman.” He shrugged. “That's what shamans do, get imposed upon. We like hearing about other people's freaky problems, makes our lives seem simple by comparison. So tell me what's bugging you that you happen to be driving around out West and pop by. You want some sunflower seeds?”

He held up a plastic snack package.

“No, thanks. I feel like an idiot telling you this stuff, but I think there's something wrong with me. Spiritually.”

“Let's have it.”

“See, there have been some very odd things going on in my life for the past five years. I've been drawn into situations, to objects, that have supernatural powers. Well, hypernatural, actually. Things like bear gall bladders, which have—”

“Yup, special medicine there.”

“And a hydrogen sphere that can mass-hypnotize people.”

“Read about that in
Weekly World News.
Don't tell me it's true?”

“And then the horn of a mythical bovine from Asia that imparts telekinetic powers. I was almost killed by a mind-reading freak. And pygmies.”

“Pygmies?” He spit some shells into his hand. “This isn't a dream or anything that you had? 'Cause I'm no shrink.”

“Scout's honor.” I held up three fingers. “And now, it seems I have an ancient spirit inside of me that needs to be exorcised or I'll be murdered by a serial killer convinced he'll become immortal and return to his home planet if he takes it from me. I was just at a truck plaza, and a gang of truckers attacked me, and just when they were about to beat the living crap out of me, a tornado came down out of the sky and kicked them around like bowling pins, but left me alone. Oh—and I've had run-ins with a man who thinks he's a werewolf.”

“No shit?” Two Shirts's eyes widened briefly, and he spit more sunflower shells into his hand. “That's fucked up, all right. What do you want me to do about it?”

I threw up my hands and let them drop in a show of complete helplessness.

“I get the feeling that maybe I'm cursed or something. Why did all this suddenly start happening to me?”

“What do you think?” He held up the plastic package. “Sure you don't want some sunflower seeds?”

I waved off the seeds. “I don't know what to think anymore. Is it all some whopping coincidence, or is there some kind of fate at work? I want to know what you think.”

Two Shirts sighed and scanned his lawn, his jawtaut, and he seemed not so much to be searching for an answer as for a way of expressing his thoughts.

“You probably have seen enough movies to know that my people are animists. We believe everything has a spirit—rocks, trees, lawn mowers, everything. Those objects that got you in trouble? Well, some people, maybe scientists, might say that they had powers because various atoms that were part of complex compounds in these objects had free electrons that reacted with other atoms nearby, causing the release of energy at certain wavelengths and frequencies that created an unusual effect. But any hep physicist will tell you that there are four basic forces that make matter do what it does: weak forces, strong forces, electromagnetism, and gravity. Even they will tell you that these four forces remain a mystery, but they suspect all four are governed by a single force that they can't quite see with their electron microscopes and particle accelerators. And yet whatever that force is, it makes things do what they do.”

“Wow, you seem to have done your homework.”

“You hafta look at all sides.” He smiled briefly to himself. “So fundamentally, animists and quantum physicists agree. Every object contains and manifests forces we don't really understand. It comes down to semantics—they call them forces, we call them spirits. A physicist will see a rock and say the forces manifest themselves by making the rock very stable, dense, and hard. To me, the physicist's observation is superficial. As a shaman, I look deeper, at the spirit itself, not just its shell. If I asked you, Carl—” He stood.

“Garth.”

“Sorry, Garth—if you believe in levitation, what would you say?”

“You mean aside from a Vegas magic act? Generally, no.”

“I'll be right back.” He ducked into his aluminum garden shed and came back out holding a dark gray block a little larger than a pack of cigarettes. It had an eye hook on the back, with an attached string. From his other hand he tossed some nails on the ground in front of me. He dangled the gray block over the nails, and they jumped into the air and attached to the magnet.

He shrugged. “You can call that electromagnetism, but it is also levitation. Now watch.”

Squatting, he took a nail and rubbed it vigorously on the base of the magnet. He then took another nail and set it on the ground. He touched the first nail to the second and lifted it off the ground.

“See, the force from the magnet went into the nail. Or, you could say the spirit of the magnet went into the nail. And the nail is now a magnet and attracted to other magnets, other nails.”

“So you're saying that forces and spirits can move from one object to the next. Like the nail, I might have picked up a spirit which attracts other spirits.”

“Could be.” He sat back on the ground next to the magnet and nails, the package of seeds reappearing in his hand. “What kind of spirit did you say is in you?”

“My grandfather picked it up and it was passed to me. It was one of five that were buried in a hill in New Mexico, in jars. The guys over there are Tupelca, you know, the fraternal order, and they told me this whole story. There's a guy out there trying to kill the five people who carry the spirits, to collect them all like trading cards and tap into their collective power. The four other grandsons have already been ritualistically killed, their corpses left with a white gecko—”

“White gecko?” Two Shirts's eyes darkened. “Man, that stuff is bad medicine, my friend. You say those guys are Tupelca?”

“You know about—”

“Five white geckos is the sign of the ancients among the tribes south of here, like a curse on a mummy's tomb. The original Tupelca were bad dudes, prided themselves on being so good at hunting that they were almost supernatural. Used to hunt my people.”

“Hunt your people? You mean…”