The Witch's Tongue Read online

  From time to time, a privileged few were granted special passes. These hardy souls were typically archaeologists, anthropologists, biologists, or geologists—and always matukach. The reckless white-skins did not believe in the People’s legends, and so had some measure of protection from those unspeakable things that haunted the canyon.

  The more sensible folk among the Southern Utes would not have thought of visiting this forbidden place; even the braggarts and scoffers and show-offs generally came up with an acceptable reason to avoid its dark recesses. And so it was that human beings—particularly tribal members—were not to be found in this particular canyon.

  Except for the exceptions.

  THE EXCAVATION

  BETWEEN THE canyon walls, beneath the cloud-shrouded slit of sky, the lonely soul attended to his solemn business. He was confident that in this forbidden place, his enterprise would be safe from prying eyes.

  Vain are the thoughts of men.

  Jacob Gourd Rattle was already being watched.

  OPPOSITE THE Witch’s black Tongue, perched on the Witch’s black Thumb—reclines the cougar. Her unblinking yellow eyes are focused on the man on the canyon floor. She does not wonder about what the peculiar biped is doing down there—such complex thoughts are not in her nature. The hungry feline licks her lips. Imagines how his warm flesh will taste.

  THE BUSY man was unaware of the mountain lion’s pitiless stare—or even the fact that she was there. As Jacob Gourd Rattle removed earth and stones from the hole in the ground, he concentrated on the happy thought that the troublesome woman was not with him.

  Kicks Dogs would return, of course. She always did.

  But, Jacob hoped—not until the appointed time.

  Not until his work here was done.

  CHARLIE MOON would have been quite interested in Jacob Gourd Rattle’s clandestine activities, but the tribal investigator was a long drive to the north of the Southern Ute reservation. And like the man digging the grave in the canyon, Daisy Perika’s nephew was also engaged in important business.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE PLAYERS

  The three serious men were in the antiquarian’s storage room, seated around an unusual table.

  Charlie Moon—intent on the delightful task of fleecing his friends of their currency—hardly noticed the furniture.

  Scott Parris had already described the card table as “kinda sissy for a man’s game of gut-bucket poker.”

  The mildly miffed owner—who made his quite comfortable living buying and selling fine antiques—informed his gaming companions that they had the distinct honor to rest their elbows on a genuine George II demi-lune mahogany card and tea table with a two-fold top, baize-lined surface with wells. Not to mention club legs and pad feet—thank you very much.

  Ralph Briggs’s semibrutish guests had not been impressed.

  On the mantelpiece, a Victorian brass lantern clock twirled its delicate hands in the slowest of motions to measure the flow of that indefinable river called Time. When it chimed once to announce the eleventh hour, it so happened that Scott Parris was the dealer. The broad-shouldered, sandy-haired, blue-eyed chief of Granite Creek PD was also the heavy loser.

  Charlie Moon was down by eight blue chips, but not defeated. The Indian was lying low, waiting for his chance to ambush this mismatched pair of matukach.

  Ralph Briggs, banker of the game, was nearly twelve hundred dollars up. Hoping to get away while the getting was good, he faked a yawn. “Last hand?”

  Scott Parris took a sip of black coffee from a china cup that was almost as translucent as the antiquarian’s ploy. “Okay,” he said. “But how about we switch to Leadville stakes and White Mule rules.”

  The Ute nodded his assent.

  Ralph Briggs considered protesting, saw the flinty look on the white policeman’s face, thought better of it. “Very well.”

  Parris rubbed his hands together. “Then let’s play poker, gents.”

  Each of the gamblers anted in a white chip.

  The chief of police shuffled, offered the cards to the player on his right.

  Charlie Moon cut the deck, passed it back to the dealer.

  Scott Parris dealt five rectangles to each of the players, pulled his own hand close to his chin. Garbage. He looked to the antiquarian. “Okay, Ralph—how many do you need?”

  The smallish man pursed his lips. “Two will do.”

  The dealer dealt the pair.

  Ralph Briggs looked at his new hand. Well, now. Look at that.

  Parris eyed his best friend. “Charlie?”

  Moon wore a mask that grinned. “I am happy with what I’m holding.”

  Parris snorted at the Ute. “Dealer takes three,” he said, and did. More garbage! He squinted over his pitiful cards at the antique dealer.

  Ralph Briggs raised a thin eyebrow at the crafty Indian, eyed his Hearty flush. I shall demolish Mr. Moon. On the pretense of miserly caution, he started to push four white chips to the center of the table, hesitated—withdrew half of the pale quartet.

  The Ute sniffed the air and smelled the musky odor of deceit. “I’ll see that pitiful wager.” He offered up two whites. “And raise—this much.” The tribal investigator baited the pot with four red chips.

  Parris folded. “I hate this game. I hate it more than dentist drills and cod liver oil and income taxes.”

  As if some dark magic might have transformed the cards since his last furtive glance, Briggs examined what he was holding with exaggerated care. Moon is bluffing. “I shall see you,” he offered a quartet of matching reds, “and raise you—thusly.” The antiquarian sent two blue chips to join their lesser friends.

  The Ute called and raised again. Six blue chips.

  The dapper little man in the tweed suit did the same. Six and six more.

  “You are a bulldog, Ralph.” Charlie Moon pondered his next move. “But I am feeling reckless. So I’ll see that and raise you…hmm…how much? Oh what the hey, a greenback dollar means nothin’ to a fella like me. I will risk all I’ve got.” He pushed a multicolored pile of chips to gorge the pot.

  The folded chief of police stared goggle-eyed at the players.

  As a matter of civilized principle, Ralph Briggs firmly refused to sweat. In lieu of this means by which common men cool their skin, his high forehead beaded with tasteful pearls of unscented perspiration. The Indian is bluffing. I know it! He opened his mouth to call, but his churning stomach had the last five words. But if he is not…His fingers refused to touch the last of his chips. The antiquarian choked. And folded.

  The Ute placed his cards facedown, raked in the red-white-and-blue pot, offered his surly adversaries the consolation of a melancholy sigh. “You fellas are the lucky ones. After you’ve hit the hay tonight, you’ll only think about how bad you played for maybe an hour or two or three. But before the sun comes up, you’ll finally get worn out from all your moaning and groaning, and drift off to a troubled sleep. But me—I’ll be up all night long.” He flashed a toothy smile. “Counting my winnings.”

  Scott Parris shook his head, glanced at the other beaten man. “Ralph, don’t you just hate it when he does that?”

  Ralph Briggs glared at Charlie Moon. Yes. Indeed I do.

  While the winner was donning his fleece-lined denim jacket and black John B. Stetson hat, Briggs counted and recounted the meager remnant of his chips. He mumbled, “I just know Charlie was holding trash—I should have called.”

  Parris leaned close to Briggs and whispered, “That Ute never bluffs.”

  Ralph Briggs desperately wanted a reason to feel better. “Never?”

  The town cop shook his head. “Never. If you’d have called, he would’ve cleaned you out.”

  After the chief of police had departed for hearth and home, the antique dealer followed the Indian into the display room of his expensive, exclusive shop. I should not ask, but—“Charles, just between friends, and just this once—I wonder if I could impose upon you to tell me what—”
r />   The seven-foot Ute stopped in midstride, looked down at the smaller man. Charlie Moon shook his head in a gesture that suggested a mix of sadness and disappointment. “Ralph, it is one of Nature’s fundamental laws—if a player wants to see the hand a man is holding, he has to lay his money down. But you did not call my bet.”

  “You are absolutely right, of course.” Briggs looked away and had the grace to blush. “I do not know what came over me. It must be the lateness of the hour.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Moon clapped him on the back. “Because you and me are buddies—I have already forgot you asked.”

  “I am eternally grateful—and you are very gracious.”

  Moon took a look around. “I might want to make a purchase from your store.”

  The vulgar reference to a store made the pale man wince. “Do you have something particular in mind?”

  “I will know it when I see it. Or maybe the other way around.”

  The businessman made a halfhearted gesture. “Feel free to browse.” With a greedy glint in his eye, Ralph Briggs watched Charlie Moon examine this and that. He wondered about a number of things. For instance—on top of his winnings, how much more hard cash did the full-time rancher, part-time tribal cop have in his hip pocket? And how much would he be willing to part with?

  As it came to pass, the Ute was separated from the white man by a rift of cultures and a finely crafted walnut display case. The latter barrier was glazed with brittle Venetian glass that cast the contents in a pale bluish hue. On the top shelf, a remarkable assortment of collectibles was laid out on a plush carpet of purple felt.

  An 1857 French Army dental kit, neatly packaged in a small wooden box that presented a silvered mirror on the open lid.

  An ivory crescent of walrus tusk, delicately engraved with the ghostly form of a four-masted Boston whaling vessel, sails still billowed by phantom winds.

  Representing the Yankee invasion of the Confederate States of America, a corroded assortment of powdery-white lead bullets, silver medals, brass buttons, bronze belt buckles.

  A diamond-studded bracelet and magnificent emerald ring worn by the lovely young heiress of the Flint Hill and Nacogdoches Oil Company on the very night she drove her black 1949 Packard convertible into Attoyac Bayou.

  The centerpiece of the display was a .45-caliber Colt Peacemaker with ivory grips. According to the information card, the single-action revolver had been presented to Chief Ouray by his first wife, Black Mare.

  The proprietor of The Compleate Antiquarian observed his potential customer with intense professional curiosity. Though the Ute had a glance for each of the fascinating objects, Moon’s gaze was invariably pulled back to that special item. Of course. Now Ralph Briggs thought he understood what the Indian was doing here. The proprietor allowed himself a knowing smile. “See anything you fancy?”

  Charlie Moon pointed at the item that had caught his eye. “How much do you want for that?”

  The owner of the establishment unlocked the case. “The Colt Peacemaker?”

  The Ute shook his head, tapped his finger on the glass.

  “Oh, that.” He arched an eyebrow at Moon. “What on earth would a hardcase cow-pie-kicking cowboy like you want with—”

  “How much?”

  After a perfectly timed dramatic pause, Briggs told him how much.

  Charlie Moon swallowed hard.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE SHAMAN SLEEPS

  At about the time the poker game in Granite Creek was coming to an end, Daisy Perika had turned out the lights. On the morrow, she was expecting her nephew for breakfast and Charlie Moon’s arrival generally echoed the crack of dawn. The elderly Catholic got into bed, pulled the quilt to her chin, whispered a hurried Our Father, drifted off toward that gray land where dreams are born.

  If she had known what was happening just up the canyon from her trailer home—and the astonishing events that would transpire there before the sun came up again—she would not have slept a wink.

  But Daisy Perika was quite ignorant of all that wickedness. Sleep came quickly. The shaman dreamed her dreams. The phantom sights and hollow sounds were ripped from the ragged edge of sanity.

  A TALKATIVE owl flies beside the shaman. They discuss a recipe for squash-and-sandstone stew, the bitter taste of dogbane tea, and how Sunflower Woman got her name. Daisy soars over the ruins of a foreign city. Rows of fluted granite columns stand above a cerulean sea painted on bone-dry sands. On the crest of a whitewashed tomb, a pregnant wolf raises her head, howls at a moon that was never there. In an alley of ice and cinders, ghosts of ragged old men dance and sing ribald songs.

  Being late for a previous appointment, the owl takes her leave of the Ute elder. The dreamer twists and turns through time and space. She hears a coarse, humming sound—“Voooom…vooooom!”—a giant hornet darting about in search of someone to sting?

  She hears a sonorous voice: “In respect of the soon-to-be deceased, let us pause for a quarter-second of silence. Well done! You may dispose of the remains.”

  Daisy plummets from the sky for eleven heartbeats, strikes the earth hard enough to rattle her teeth. She is on her back, in a narrow pit. A knobby elbow of juniper root pushes up under her left shoulder, the smell of freshly turned earth settles into her nostrils. A glistening snow drifts down, decorating her dark skin with six-sided silver ornaments. An indistinct figure materializes above her, mouths a slow chant in a guttural tongue that is alien to the Ute shaman. The ritual ends.

  Sand and stones are falling on her face.

  She cannot breathe.

  UNEXPECTED THEATER

  CUTTING THE empty silence with feathered whispers, a red-tailed hawk wings its solitary way through the meandering canyon. Happily for an unwary rodent, the hungry raptor passes without noticing the jumping mouse perched in a clump of dead rabbit grass—its long, naked tail coiled around a brittle twig. With a blissful mix of suspicion and curiosity, the beady-eyed little mammal watches the labors of a human being. Also entranced by the unusual spectacle is a nervous chipmunk, whose rural life offers little in the way of entertainment. And of course the hungry cougar is counted in the audience.

  The muscular Ute, stripped to the waist and sweating, was on his knees.

  Jacob Gourd Rattle was not praying.

  He was hacking maliciously at the earth with a U.S. Army surplus foxhole mattock. The grunts of the worker and the dull thump of the steel implement were perfectly synchronized. And so it went until the canyon was awash in moonlight. Bone-weary from his labors, Jake Gourd Rattle tossed the mattock aside. The trench was more than a yard deep. He got to his feet, pulled on his shirt.

  In the secretive manner of a miser checking on his treasure, Jacob removed a precious object from his hip pocket. It was a thin blade of polished bone, wrapped in a sturdy leather cord.

  A dozen times he had tried, with no effect. He would make another attempt.

  After muttering the old incantation, the Ute called to the Thunder. There was no answer. He called again. He heard it. Not the Thunder.

  Up the canyon, where the steep trail wound its crumbling way down from the mesa, someone was singing. It was a woman’s voice.

  Jacob Gourd Rattle’s wife called out when she was still a hundred yards away, “Jaaa-aaake…Jaaa-aaake. I’m baa-aaak.” A pause. “Jaaa-aaake?”

  Her footsteps crunched on the sandy canyon floor. Closer now.

  Kicks Dogs had a canvas knapsack strapped on her back, a spindly walking stick in her hand. Like a hound sniffing him out, the white woman walked back and forth, looking this way and that, finally stopping within two paces of her man. “Jaaa-aaake,” she screeched, “where are you?”

  The response came from behind her: “Here.”

  She whirled around, clasped a hand to her throat. “Oh—you shouldn’t go scaring me like that!”

  He took a quick step forward, backhanded her across the face.

  The woman dropped the walking stick, stumbled back
two steps—but did not fall.

  “Stupid white trash,” he growled. “I told you four days—and you come back in three!”

  Intimidated by the bully, the woman looked at her feet.

  “Say it,” he snarled.

  She mumbled the required response.

  “So I can hear you!” He raised his hand to strike her again.

  Her lower lip trembled. “I’m sorry, Jake. You know how I am—I just can’t keep track of time.”

  It annoyed him that she was not weeping. Kicks always bawled when he hit her.

  Not very much later, the curtain had fallen on the small melodrama. This being so, the furry audience dwindled one by one. The jumping mouse found a cracked acorn under a dwarf oak, gnawed on it. The chipmunk darted off into the recesses of a hollow log. The cougar on the Witch’s Thumb stretched her tawny limbs and yawned. On this night, perhaps the predator would sleep. Dream otherworldly feline dreams. Perhaps not.

  ONE CRYSTALLINE perfection at a time, the snow jewels began to fall from heaven.

  SOME NINETEEN miles northwest of the dismal canyon, and just beyond the boundary of the Southern Ute reservation, the curator of the Cassidy Museum was tucked snugly under his patchwork quilt. He had tried counting sullen llamas, noisy guinea hens, even a long line of ancestral black sheep—but Bertram Eustace Cassidy could not find sleep. Finally, in the wee hours, he thought he heard something. The insomniac propped himself up on an elbow, shuddered as he stared into the black mouth of a horror barely held at bay by the fragile windowpane. For all the darkness and dead silence, he might have been on the far side of the moon. Fiddle-dee-dee—it must have been my imagination. No, there it was again—the sharp, tinkling sound of glass breaking. Oh dear me—I do believe we are being burgled! Bertie fell back on the bed, pulled the covers over his head.