The Purification Ceremony (30 page)

    “His side!” Phil shouted. “You fucknut, I should bust your ass right here, right now.”

    “Hoping to dominate me, to feel like you’re king of the jungle?” Kurant asked snidely. “I don’t think so, Phil.”

    My laugh was coarse. “You set him in motion as sure as I’m sitting here.”

    Kurant shook his head. “I’ll never believe that. I’m not responsible.”

    Nelson got up from the couch. “What about when we started finding the bodies, eh? You must have known then.

    You could have warned us.”

    Kurant’s expression, so arrogant, so sure, wavered. “I didn’t know.”

    “Bullshit,” said Arnie. “You had to have.”

    “I didn’t.”

    “Not even when we started finding feathers and scalps?” I demanded.

    “No, no, I… that is… ” A cold sweat had formed on his upper lip.

    “I mean, I was afraid. I was afraid… the feathers and everything, ‘cause I’d seen that kind of thing before in Mexico… but I told myself it was impossible. I mean, it is almost five thousand miles. Impossible, right? You know, I — ”

    The flat of Phil’s beefy hand caught the reporter flush on the side of the face, sending him crashing to the floor. “You lying sack of shit! You knew and you didn’t say nothin’!” he roared. “You helped kill my man Butch just so your story’d be juicier. In ’Nam we would have fragged you for this. You’d already be in the body bag. Fuck it! I’ll do ya right now.”

    Phil went for the Buck knife, in the sheath on his belt. Nelson and Arnie tackled the huge man high and low. The pediatrician sat on Phil’s chest while he struggled. “Don’t, Philly, the scumbag’s not worth it.”

    “Get off me, Doc,” Phil pleaded. “For Butch. For Vinny. The hunter would have wanted me to do him.”

    “No, he wouldn’t have,” Arnie said softly. “Vinny was better than that. Your dad was better than that.”

    Phil glowered, but finally stopped struggling and dropped the tension from his barrel chest. “Keep him away from me. That’s all I’ll say.”

    Kurant got to his knees. A trickle of blood showed in the corner of his mouth and his cheek was purpled from the blow. He looked warily at Phil. And for a fleeting moment I caught something in that action, a sense of dismay, of knowing deep down that his noble intentions had turned foul and deadly. But the regret was gone in an instant.

    “What do you want from me?” Kurant asked sullenly.

    I wanted an admission of complicity, but I knew we’d never get it. Instead, I said, “If we’re to have any hope of stopping him and surviving, we need to know everything about Ryan. Tell us what happened in Mexico.”

    Kurant hesitated.

    “Talk,” Griff ordered. “Or we’ll let Phil have a few minutes with you alone.”

    Kurant moved his jaw and swallowed several times, then resigned himself to our demands. He said thickly, “I’d been on this story a couple of weeks and I got a tip that the Teagues were getting back in the business up in Canada under a different name. I went after the story.”

    “Couldn’t leave us alone, could you?” Cantrell said.

    “I didn’t ask you to go back into guiding,” Kurant said, the hatred pure and open now. “You did and I followed.”

    “Get to Ryan,” Arnie commanded.

    “It didn’t take long to figure out through court records that they’d changed their name to Cantrell, and from there it took some digging, but I found out they’d leased this estate. I got the history on it and knew the place was a rich vein of story material. So I booked a slot.”

    Kurant shifted uncomfortably in the chair and rubbed at the swelling in his lips. “I could use some ice.”

    “Forget about it,” Phil said. “Keep talkin’ or I’m goin’ for my blade.”

    “All right, all right, no need to prove what a man you are,” Kurant sniped. “I tracked Ryan through the Anthropology Department at Michigan State and they said he’d quit the year after the trial and gone back to live with the Huichol Indians in northern Mexico. I guess from the insurance settlement he could afford to do that. Can’t cost anything to live down there.

    “I speak pretty good Spanish, so I went down in June as a kind of whatever-happened-to-Ryan sort of thing. Took me about a week, but I finally found the village where he’d lived in the Sierra for the first couple of years after Lizzy’s murder.”

    “Her accidental death,” Sheila said, glaring.

    “Her murder,” Kurant replied.

    “What did the people say about Ryan?” I asked, remembering how upset he had become when he talked about being thrown out of the community.

    “That’s the thing,” Kurant said. “The Huichol were incredibly friendly, welcomed me into their homes, fed me, but when I mentioned Ryan, they got these clouds on their faces and they’d politely ask me to leave. I finally got one old woman to open up. I’d read Ryan’s dissertation on the Huichol, so I understood some of what she was talking about, but a lot of it went over my head. Basically, they have this religion based on deer, corn and Peyote.”

    “Some religion,” Theresa sniffed.

    “It’s very ritualistic,” Kurant went on, ignoring her. “The deer is one of their gods and the Peyote allows them to talk to their gods and obtain visions. It’s real weird, complex stuff, like I said, and I don’t claim to understand it all. But from what I can gather, Ryan had gone native and was training to become what they call a Mara’akame in the religion.”

    “Like a witch doctor or something?” Lenore asked.

    “No, not like a witch doctor, like a shaman,” Kurant said condescendingly. ‘These shamans are more spiritual guides and leaders than voodoo men, from what I could gather. Becoming one’s not easy. Takes years, according to the old woman, and most of the people who try aren’t up to the training.”

    “Was that what happened to Ryan, he wasn’t up to the training?” Griff asked.

    Kurant nodded. “The old woman said he was willing enough, but there was something about ‘his heart being spoiled for it.’ She said the shaman who was teaching him refused to continue after Ryan started screwing around with Datura. That’s what they call Jimsonweed, a real powerful psychotropic that has some bad side effects. Ryan left all pissed off and moved to a settlement higher in the Sierra, a community of what the old lady called ‘sorcerers.’ “

    “Give me a break,” Arnie scoffed.

    “I’m just telling you what she said,” Kurant replied in a huff. “To the Huichol this stuff is real. They believe sorcerers are failed shamans, people who have acquired some powers but who haven’t demonstrated the strength and knowledge to control that power for good. They’re like a kid whose father gives him a Corvette for his first car. An accident waiting to happen.”

    I shuddered at that last statement. I hadn’t told them about my encounter with the wolves yet. I wanted to hear everything before I did.

    “Did you see Devlin in the mountains?” Sheila asked.

    Kurant’s expression turned grim. “Took me two days to get up there on horseback with this kid Ramon that the old woman had set me up with. Ramon didn’t like the idea of going up there, but I paid him enough, so he did it. It was real wild, jumbled terrain, you know? Boulders and walls of red clay and flats choked with purple cholla cactus. What you’d expect in the desert, not the mountains. Two days of riding and we came to this ruin of a town. Dusty. Mangy dogs ruling the streets. Fifteen, maybe twenty people living in it. Ryan had set up house in the wreckage of a two-room mud hovel set flush against the bottom of a cliff, just beyond an abandoned adobe church. There were a couple of chickens roosting in the thorn brush and they flushed when Ryan came out.”

    Kurant hesitated. “He wasn’t what I expected.”

    “How’s that?” It was the first time Cantrell had looked up from his hands or spoken since Kurant began his story.

    “Well, he’d… he’d aged a lot from the pictures I’d seen of him at the time of your trial. Grayer certainly. Skin blasted by the sun. His eyes were almost opaque.

    And he was dressed in this ceremonial outfit, what the Huichol call the dress of the Peyoteros, the pilgrims who travel on sacred missions in search of Peyote: bleached baggy pants and a shirt made out of flour-sack cloth, sandals and a bright red blanket around his shoulders and this domed straw hat with brilliant yarn tassels of blue and yellow and red hanging down from the brim.”

    I said, “There was a photograph in the cave of a man dressed like that, but it wasn’t Ryan.”

    Kurant nodded and went on: “Probably one of the Mara’akame who taught him. Anyway, I got down from the horse and introduced myself, said I was working on a story about what had happened to him and I’d come a long way and would appreciate it if we could talk. He didn’t say anything at first, just motioned to me and Ramon to come inside. Ramon was freaked just being there in the sorcerers’ village, He said he’d stay in the yard with the horses. Inside, it was actually very tidy. There was a rough table and a couple of chairs, a straw mat for a bed and lots of books and local artifacts — earthenware bowls and pitchers and stuff. Kind of what you’d expect… except for the… “

    Kurant hesitated, as if he were groping for words.

    “Except for what?” I asked.

    He stood up, his arms crossed. “This is where you’re gonna get pissed off, say I should have known it was him here, but, damn it, I didn’t think it was possible! The Sierra’s thousands of miles from here.”

    “Spit it out,” Phil said.

    “There was a… shrine in the corner,” he said, giving me this chagrined look. “Not as ornate as the one you described in the cave, but a hoop of feathers and some candles and… that, that picture of Lizzy there.”

    “There were feathers and you didn’t put it together?” I cried.

    Kurant hung his head. “I know. By the time we found Grover, I was thinking it, but, you know, I just didn’t want to believe it was true.”

    “Or you did, and you didn’t want it to stop,” Arnie said.

    “Why the hell would I do that?” Kurant shouted.

    “For a better story,” Arnie said.

    “Fuckin’ bastard,” Phil said.

    “No!” Kurant fought back. “He was so calm when I was there that I couldn’t believe he’d be this psychopath. Ryan was this lonely guy who liked to talk about the kind people he was living with. He asked me about what was going on in the world, but he didn’t seem to care much about any of it, though he seemed amused that we had a president from Arkansas.”

    “What about when you talked about Lizzy?” Lenore asked.

    Kurant got this puzzled expression on his face. “He said he’d put that life behind him.”

    “But the picture…” Earl said.

    “I know,” Kurant said. “Looking back, I see it doesn’t make sense. I think he was playing me. From what Diana says, he was probably drugged up, and I didn’t realize how well he was masking what he wanted out of me.”

    There was a moment of silence; then Sheila asked, “And when you told him about me and Mike?”

    Kurant wouldn’t look at her. He didn’t say anything.

    “Kurant?” I said.

    “Well, he didn’t go batshit and drool, if that’s what you’re asking!”

    “What did he do, then?” Cantrell demanded.

    Kurant stuffed his hands in his back pockets. “He… he wanted to know everything about the deal. Where you were going to be. What you’d been doing. And I told him…you know, ‘cause I needed his reaction for the story. And when I said you were getting back into guiding, he seemed to drift off for a while; then he started to speak in this language, Huichol, I guess. I don’t know. I guess he thought I was someone else, because then he started chanting and then dancing around with this yellow arrow in his hand, kind of like you described him in the cave. And I got this sick, closed-in feeling, like he was gonna lose it and I was the one he was gonna lose it on, but he didn’t. He just kept singing and dancing like I wasn’t even there.

    “The kid, Ramon, must have heard the singing, because all of a sudden he came in the door wide-eyed and sweating and shook me by the collar and said we’d better get out of there. I tried to say good-bye to Ryan, but he just kept dancing and chanting that chant over and over and over again.”

    Kurant stared off into space.

    “That’s it, eh?” Nelson asked.

    Kurant went on as if we weren’t there. “Ramon made us gallop out of the town. A wind had come up and there was dust blowing everywhere. A couple of miles out, I asked Ramon what Ryan’d been chanting back in his hut. Ramon didn’t want to answer, but I made him. He said he’d only heard it once before a long time ago, after his uncle’s mistress had been murdered by her jealous husband. He said it was a chant to call animal allies… a chant to invoke devastation and revenge in the wake of a lost love.”

    We all fell silent, each of us grinding on his or her thoughts. Phil looked around at us and started to laugh. “Bunch of bullshit, that’s what it is. Sorcerer bullshit. This guy’s just a fruitcake.”

    I looked at Phil sadly. “I wish he were.”

    “You know something you aren’t telling us?” Griff asked.

    “He has the power to call wolves,” I said, and I told them what had happened after Ryan had taken me from the cave.

    “Oh, c’mon,” Arnie said. “It’s a coincidence. He’d just been feeding the wolves there every day. They came.”

    “Wolves don’t like to go near anything with the slightest scent of man on it,” I said. “No, there was something much more powerful at work than just a behavioral response.”

    Theresa whined, “You’re saying he can’t be killed! That there’s nothing that will stop him?”

    “I’m saying I don’t know how to stop him.”

    “What does he want?” Phil asked.

    “He wants to purify the hunt,” I said. “He sees this as a purification ceremony.”