Underground (32 page)
“You could have changed it,” I suggested.
“Nah. It was a little rough when I was a kid, but now I kinda like being Reuben Fishkiller. ‘Reuben Williams’ would have been boring.”
I was a little confused. “But you call yourself Fish, not Fishkiller. ”
“Not all the time,” Fish said. “Most of the kids I grew up with have a totem name of some kind—an Indian name we earned— but we don’t usually use them outside the tribe. It takes some explaining and . . . well . . . it sounds kind of pretentious on most people. I mean, you’d look funny at some guy who came to hook up your cable and his name tag said ‘Swimming Bear,’ right?”
I chuckled. “I’d look pretty funny at anyone whose name was ‘swimming naked.’ ”
Fish sputtered and laughed. Quinton snickered and fell silent again as Fish and I chatted on, but Quinton’s mood didn’t have the same brooding feel after that.
When we got to Marysville, the casino was easy to spot. The Tulalip reservation started just to the west of I-5 and went all the way to the waters of Puget Sound around Tulalip Bay. The area was beautiful once you got away from the highway, and when I’d first moved up to Washington, only a few billboards advertising bingo and cigarettes had given any indication there was commerce tucked away in the tree-covered hills of the rez. That wasn’t the case anymore. The consolidated tribes of the Tulalip reservation had replaced their kitschy old casino and “trading post” with the largest casino complex in the state and a pair of massive malls—one anchored by a Wal-Mart and the other filled with designer-goods outlets—right up against the freeway where there had once been nothing but fields of creek-fed bracken and marsh grass. Now there was hardly a sign of the overgrown fields behind the new buildings and the massive lot that hosted the Boom City fireworks marketplace every year from mid-June through Independence Day.
Fish directed me to the main casino, which featured a pool with a realistic, life-size orca—the reservation’s emblem—rearing out of it and an imposing bronze statue of a native spear fisherman about to get his point across to a smaller creature a little farther up the driveway’s artificial river. I parked off to the side of the massive, triple-peaked portico with its colorful pyramid lights on top. Construction of a hotel tower had begun beside the casino, and the site had a lightning-struck look in its winter weatherproofing.
“It’s almost too bad they’re going to put up the hotel,” Fish said. “Until recently, you could see those lights on top of the casino for miles when they turned on the show. Drives the Marysville people crazy.” He chuckled and got out of the Rover, stepping carefully onto the ice-crusted asphalt of the parking lot. Quinton and I followed his example.
In spite of the development, the parking lot had a fair number of ghost images, flickering like film projected on smoke. Several of the spirits, both human and animal—and some were a bit of both—turned their night-sky eyes on us as we passed and watched us with curious expressions.
Quinton and I followed Fish into the building, through a soaring lobby of stone and murals and colored lights where the hotel’s reception desk would someday greet guests. Then down a wide corridor and into the gaming rooms with a ceiling of twinkling stars and sudden simulated thunderstorms. Circular banks of slot machines stood in treelike groves around the periphery, raising neon branches into stylized Art Deco canopies. The walls swam with murals of salmon, orca, otter, and trout, and the carpet was patterned with water currents and stones. The space felt disorientingly like a drowned forest in which the patrons floated in a watery twilight. The building itself was so new it hardly had a ghost, but a few were there, as were the silvery striations of time and the blue and yellow lines of the Grey’s power grid. A pair of sly eyes in a vague, misty shape kept a close watch on us from beside a tree of nickel slots as Fish led us over to a small gift shop against one of the river walls.
A burly man in a three-piece suit rearranged a group of expensive watches under the glass countertop. He looked up as we entered and grinned, his eyes taking in everything in quick twitches. He had the hot, gold-sparked aura of a man with boundless energy. “Hey, Fishkiller!” he cried, closing up the case and dropping the keys into his vest pocket.
“Heya, Willet.”
“So, what is it?” Russell Willet asked. “Your mom’s birthday or something?”
“Nah. Taking these white eyes out to see Grandma Ella.”
“Whoa!” Willet peered at us as if we were exotic beasts. “What do you want to see Grandma Ella for— No, wait. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“Nope, y’don’t,” Fish said.
“But I bet I know what you want.” Willet turned and ducked down under the counter, rummaging through a cabinet. He brought out a wooden box a little larger and flatter than a shoe box. When he opened it, the smell of tobacco, cocoa, dark soil, and pepper floated up into the air. A red triangle around a little gold crown adorned the white label inside the lid, with the word “Montecristo” under it. Neat rows of cigars about as thick as my thumb and twice as long nearly filled the box. Willet carefully removed two of the cigars, which made an oily crackling sound as he touched them, and slipped them into a bag before he put the box away again.
He handed the bag over to Fish and admonished him with a raised finger and a twinkle in his eye, “All right, then. Those are for Grandma Ella—because I swear she’d put a curse on me or something if she knew I didn’t hand them over. That is my personal high roller stash for buttering up the big winners. If you want your own, there’s plenty to choose from,” Willet added, pointing to a humidor cabinet on the back wall of the tiny shop.
“I don’t smoke,” Fish objected.
Willet looked at Quinton and me again; we both shook our heads. “Too bad,” he muttered. I started to reach for my wallet, but he put up his hands. “No, no. Can’t accept payment for a gift to Grandma Ella. Just tell her I sent them. I want to start off the year on her good side.”
Willet shooed us off to deal with a couple of other customers and we continued on our way.
Back in the Rover, Fish directed me deeper into the reservation. We headed down toward the water, into an area called Priest Point, where the Snohomish River emptied into Puget Sound. The building I parked near, at Fish’s command, was quietly lunatic—a collection of additions and repairs under which the original building couldn’t be detected, the whole perfectly painted and clean in the midst of its frost-withered yard and a fog of spirits. A narrow dock stuck out into the water a few dozen yards behind the house. I could make out a trail of Grey habit worn down to the end of the dock where generations of fishermen must have sat or stood to cast their lines.
The path to the door looked odd—frosted with Grey and wandering through sudden dislocations of time that looked like fence posts of neon yellow and sparkly blue. As I stepped forward, the smells of brackish water, cedar smoke, and some kind of hot fat sizzling over flame wafted over me in alternating waves. The short walk felt like miles across one of those fun house floors of sliding planks and bouncing, slipping slabs. I was grateful Fish was in front and couldn’t see how hard I concentrated on every footstep. Quinton stayed just behind me and when we reached the comparative stability of the front stoop, he touched the small of my back and caught my eye, giving me a questioning look.
I felt a little dizzy, but I murmured, “It’s all right. There’s just a lot of ghost stuff here.”
He nodded and redirected his immediate attention to the house, though he left his hand a moment longer on my back and a little spark of orange leapt from him in my direction and tingled a second on my skin like the brush of a blackberry leaf.
The front door lay up some steps and behind an enclosed porch with a deep overhang. Inside the porch, several sets of fishermen’s bright yellow foul-weather gear hung on pegs above a bench with two pairs of muck boots under it. Next to the foulies someone had hung a basket that looked like the oversized bell of a French horn and a shaggy cape of some kind with bits of shell sewn on in patterns obscured by the folds. Fish saw me studying the hairy garment.
“That’s a cedar cloak—it’s made of shredded cedar bark. I’m not sure anyone wears it anymore, but I don’t want to ask.”
I nodded, sure it would be a bad idea to remove the cloak and basket while their ghostly owner was standing and glowering beside them. The specter was clothed in the memory of the cape and wore the basket on his head, which made him look remarkably like the shaggy creature who’d brought me the zombie Friday night— if the shaggyman had been wearing a truncated cone for a hat.
Fish knocked on the door.
A voice like a chorus of seagulls called out in incomprehensible syllables. Fish called back and waited.
“Let yourself in!” the seagull voice screeched. “I’m an old woman, you young fool!”
Fish sighed and opened the door, waving us through ahead of him. The interior was bakery-hot and smelled of sage. Another row of hooks waited for our dry coats and we were glad to use them.
Fish pointed to a slatted wooden tray on the floor. “Take off your shoes and leave them there—she’ll rant for hours if we track mud on the floor.”
I was relieved to sit down to remove my boots—it gave me a moment to get used to the tumbling, twisted state of the Grey inside the house. Planes of time and ghosts of trees stuck up or out at tilted angles and a flight of salmon swam past, disrupted by the jerking loop of an owl that swooped through them in multiple exposure. Bits of people appeared, moved, and vanished as if seen in shattered shards of mirror hanging in the air or scattered across the discontinuous floors of every version of the house and land that had ever existed. Animate sparks of colorful energy broke from the grid and scampered loose through the chaos like animals and mythical sprites. I could barely separate the real house from the illusions, so odd was the construction ahead.
Finally, sock-footed and undressed of outer layers, we trooped through a pair of offset doorways, down a hall, and into a sudden calm—the energy within the Grey snapped into a grid of gleaming threads and all the riotous dislocation and overlapping phantasms vanished, leaving only a thin silver sheen to everything. The nearly bare living room we entered must have been as large as the original house and a wall of windows faced south to show the Sound outside. There was a stone fireplace on each end of the room and both of them contained blazing logs of cedar and fir that perfumed the air and lent momentary shape to swirls of cold memory. Rugs covered the wooden floor that supported a couple of low, heavy chairs, a rocker, one sofa at one end of the room, and a scattered herd of red-and-black wool hassocks at the other.
The ancient woman sitting on a hassock near the western fire must have been huge once. Now her skin hung in folds over the jagged frame of her bones, and the long twin plaits of her hair looked like two white snakes coiled on the floor beside her and rising to whisper in her ears. Shapes like the wings of giant birds folded around her in the Grey, glinting with gold tips. She was wearing baggy, old, gray sweats and pink socks. A carved wooden cane poked out from under her cushion on one side. She stared at us, her gaze sweeping over each in turn. Then she put out her hand.
“For me?”
Fish seemed startled, as if he had forgotten she could talk, and stumbled a step forward, holding out the gold-wrapped package with the bag of cigars on top. “Yes, Grandma. We brought you some chocolate and Russell Willet sent you some cigars.”
Grandma Ella cackled. “Hah! Buttering me up.” Her sharp glance cut to me and Quinton. “You two. Go in the kitchen and fetch out that bread and coffee. Can’t tell tales without food and drink.” She pointed with her skeletal hand from which the skin hung loose as tattered fabric.
Wordlessly, Quinton and I went to the kitchen, leaving Fish caught in a net of Ella Graham’s cawing in Lushootseed—the language we’d heard so often among the Native Americans, both living and dead; the same language the young prostitute’s ghost had spoken to me.
Coffee and freshly baked bread were sitting on the kitchen counter. We gathered things together and put them on a tray, while Quinton said, “She’s . . . kind of scary, though I’m not sure why.”
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