Shadow Play Read online

Some nights she’d be home, other times she’d be away for two or three days with a crew of Mexican men and women. One night I found her sobbing in her bedroom and I lay beside her, stroking her arm, trying to cradle her body into mine. I need your help, she’d said finally. I’m two months pregnant and I don’t know what to do. She wouldn’t say anything about the father, wouldn’t even say if she wanted the baby. It was a particularly bad time for me. Nathan and I wanted to live together again, I struggled with which of the two people was more important and to his great credit and love, Nathan finally decided for us, telling me that my daughter needed me.

  Weeks stretched to months, Spider now in her second term, triggering my own instinctual desire to have a baby of my own. I grew more and more anxious and started carrying my Beretta everywhere I went.

  Some time after nine I realized Spider wouldn’t be home. I ate some sharp cheddar and slices of fresh prosciutto and called my anxiety counselor.

  Never wanting to deal again with panic anxiety attacks, I’d been working with a counselor from the Tucson Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders, run by a former meth addict and heroin smuggler named Choochee Madona.

  Choochee’s method was as peculiar as his name. Instead of doing traditional relaxation exercises, meditation, waterfall imagery, and other soothing practices, Choochee made people confront anxiety by deliberately concentrating on whatever people dreaded the most. One woman so dreaded claustrophobia she rarely left her house, keeping all the doors and windows open. Choochee had the woman crawl into the trunk of her Buick, curl up inside with the trunk door open, until one day Choochee shut the door on her and quickly opened it and from there she went to staying inside for an hour and her claustrophobia gradually disappeared.

  Since I’d participated in so many gun-related deaths, Choochee instructed me to carry a gun and take target practice once a week. Blow up the cardboard targets, he said, until the sensation of terror at the destructive power of a bullet is reduced to something immaterial.

  A gun is just a tool, I joked. Alan Ladd, Shane.

  So is Prozac, he said. So which tool do you want to use?

  gun

  15

  I did something I’d promised Nathan I’d never do again.

  Home alone, restless beyond control, I left for a ten-mile run.

  While I ran almost every day, Nathan made me pledge that I’d never do it at night. In the dark. Even during my early-morning runs he demanded I carry Mace, a fold-out metal crunch baton, and my cell phone set on Vibrate so even when I cranked volume through my headphones I could get a call. Never really understanding technology, Nathan didn’t think about me needing to make an emergency call in a hurry, but I had a mike-and-earplug cord attached to the phone, clipped to the top of my sports bra along with the pulse-monitor sensor.

  This night, after two hours making unanswered phone calls, I inserted a freshly charged battery in my cell and got suited up with my usual running gear. Running ten miles over the same route is so repetitive that I’d miss my MP3 player and headphones, but I wanted to keep making calls until I at least reached Bob Good Fellow and Antoinette Claw. After one call to the Green Valley sheriff’s office, with a new deputy on duty and Mangin not there, I gave up, concentrated on finding Good Fellow and having him fax whatever kind of authorizing letter would get Nathan released.

  Extra strips of orange light-reflecting tape on my running shoes and shorts. A ten-ounce Bauer .25 automatic in a mesh holster, clipped uncomfortably in the small of my back, canister of Mace, totally overprepared but after the first mile the weight of the .25 steadied into a spot that didn’t chafe and reminded me it was there with every step, reminded me this wasn’t an ordinary run.

  “Bob Good Fellow?” I said, finally connecting.

  “What…here…what?”

  At the bottom of a dip in the roadway, I knew signal strength was fading, dashed to the top of the hill beside the road.

  “Can you hear me now?”

  “I’ve seen that commercial,” he said. “I’ve got some news.”

  “Listen, just listen to me, Bob. The connection’s not great, you’ve got to hear what’s happened.”

  “You all right?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You running away from something? You seem, a bit out of breath.”

  “I’m out running, just something I do. Nathan’s in jail. We went to Leon’s house, first, the power went off, I couldn’t check Nathan’s computers but I took out the hard drives, they’re being looked at. But I left to talk with Antoinette Claw.”

  “She’s here now. Why’s Nathan in jail?”

  “He destroyed almost everything in Leon’s house.”

  “Chindi house,” Bob said shortly. “Doesn’t surprise me, him doing that.”

  “Surprised the hell out of me, Bob. Why did he do that?”

  “Hard to explain to somebody not Navajo.”

  “Bob, Bob, don’t give me more ghost stories, no more skinwalker stuff. This is real trouble, somebody heard Nathan breaking up furniture, reported him to the sheriff just when Nathan and I were there asking about Leon.”

  “Okay, don’t worry. Yesterday I found one of Leon’s uncles. Frank Everwool. One of the elders in the Begay family. By rights, Leon’s property belongs to him. I’ve got a sworn statement that Nathan did the right thing, the traditional way of dealing with a chindi house. I can bring the statement with me, that oughta get Nathan out of jail.”

  “Fax it,” I said, giving him the sheriff’s fax number.

  “About chindi,” he said. “You don’t understand much of what Nathan’s dealing with.” Not a question, saying it to himself. “You contact the brother?”

  “Tomorrow morning. At his casino. He wanted to see me tonight, but I refused. He didn’t say much about Leon. Sounded, I don’t know, strange, something’s not right about his response.”

  “Frank wants to tell me more about the family. Hard to get him talking, I’ve gotta go through all these rituals, can’t push him. Laura, this will work much better if I don’t come down until tomorrow afternoon. I can rest up, I really need it, I can get official leave for the next few days, however long it takes. And I can get the statement from Frank, can find out what else he wants to tell me.”

  “Any clues what he wants to say? Does it have anything to do with Leon?”

  “He’s worked up about skinwalkers.”

  “Bob, I don’t want to hear that kind of talk. I don’t even believe that Leon was murdered, there’s nothing at his place makes me believe it’s not murder and suicide.”

  “And Nathan?”

  “Nathan,” I snorted. “He works a sixteen-pound sledgehammer, but he doesn’t really seem to care about explaining why he smashed furniture.”

  “I can help, Laura. Give it time. Talk to the brother. Tomorrow’s another day.”

  “Tomorrow’s almost here,” I said.

  “Does running help you deal with things, get you settled down? Just go on running for a while, then get some sleep.” In the background, a voice on a radio. “Tomorrow, okay?” He hung up.

  Tomorrow.

  I started running again, almost at the return road on the ten-mile loop, decided to take a shortcut through a patch of leveled caliche and something leapt at me from behind a creosote bush, not really at me, something hiding there until I went past, but exploding only two feet from my legs and then between my legs, high enough to brush my thighs as it plunged on behind me, a long hairy tail wrapping my thighs and my heart rate cycled between panic and fear, blood pounding my temples. I yanked the Bauer .25 from the mesh holster, fumbling with it in the dark, trying to find the safety and clumsy with the weapon, it squirted out of my hands and disappeared. I dropped to my hands and knees, not even looking for the .25, just wanting to huddle into a protective ball if the beast returned, but I could see it running toward the full moon and momentarily cresting a small rise at high speed.

  A coyote.

  I’d startled a coyot
e. I’d seen several hundred coyotes, I knew what to do when they came close, they scared off easily but this one had waited behind the creosote bush. Waiting for me, I thought, gripped by the irrational fear that it was a skinwalker, that the coyote lay waiting for me. I quickly fanned my hands over the caliche, trying to find the .25 and there it was behind the creosote bush, right next to a half-eaten jackrabbit that the coyote hadn’t wanted to give up.

  Finished the return loop in seven-minute miles, anxious to return home, take stock, make sense of…nothing made sense.

  But I never believed in ghosts. Inside my mind, sure. Outside, in the world, no ghosts or child-eating skinwalkers or chindi spirits with hairy bodies.

  I usually peeled my soggy running clothes off and took an immediate shower, but now, sweat running off my face, stringy-wet hair tickling my bare shoulders, runnels of sweat between my breasts and on my legs.

  Equipment, that’s my mind-set. Got my gun and cell phone. Poured French Chablis, looked at the gear, thinking how much they reflected my real world. That, and my computers. Ejected the small clip from the Bauer .25, racked the slide to pop the chambered shell, laid the weapon on the table for a moment and went to the gun cabinet in our bedroom, my fingers moving automatically on the digital touchpad, I’d done it a hundred times in the dark so I’d know how to open it quick.

  Ignoring Nathan’s unused and dusty weapons, I took out my shotgun and a box of double-ought buck shells, remembering the first time Nathan showed me what to do if I was ever awakened at night by a stranger inside the house.

  “You really want to use that thing?” he asked when I bought the shotgun.

  “I might need it.”

  “For rattlesnakes?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Where you going to keep it?” he asked.

  “I figured, under the bed?”

  “On your side.”

  “If you’re that worked up about it,” I said, “I’ll keep it in my study.”

  “Not worked up. It’s just, if you want it, in a hurry, you want to roll over, stick your hand under the bed and find it.”

  “I won’t need it that quick.”

  “You won’t?”

  Two weeks later, he burst into the bedroom at two in the morning. Shaking me awake, he had that look in his eye. The I-want-something-from-you look.

  “What?” I said. I’d been waiting for some kind of a look, we hadn’t had sex for a long time. “What?”

  “It could hurt,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “I think your shoulder would be sore.”

  “Kinky. And just how are you going to hurt me?”

  “Not me,” he said. “C’mon.”

  A long box lay on the kitchen counter. In the dark, I thought it was maybe some long-stemmed roses, except the box was too big. He took the lid off the box, turned on the lights.

  “A Benelli,” he said. “Super 90 autoloader. It’s got two shells in it.”

  Outside, he turned on the workshop lights, led me to the lower lip of a small wash and pointed.

  “Chamber up the first shell,” he said.

  “I know how to shoot one of these,” I said. “But lemme go back inside, get something to pad my shoulder. These things kick like hell.”

  “No padding. In fact, take off your nightie.”

  “Say what? Nathan, I don’t even have panties on. I’m not getting naked just to fire off a shotgun.”

  “Please,” he said. “I’d do it myself, but I want to see how you handle this. If anybody breaks into the house while you’re sleeping, what would you do.”

  “You bastard,” I said, laughing. Pulled the pink-elephants nightie over my head, dropped it on the ground. “You’re gonna pay for this. Stand back. More.”

  Once he got five feet behind, I pumped the Benelli, chambered the shell, hesitated, but knew I’d better get it over with fast. Put it firmly against my shoulder and wham wham got both rounds off.

  “Jesus! That really hurt, Nathan.”

  He took the Benelli while I pulled my nightie back on, rubbing my right shoulder. It hurt bad, my ears were ringing.

  “Sorry about the noise,” he said. Led me into the bathroom, turned both the regular light and the heat lamp on. “Let me see.”

  I looked at my shoulder. A rapidly spreading red mark, I’d probably be purple and green by morning.

  “Yeah,” Nathan said. “That’s what I thought.”

  “Never mind what you thought,” I said, putting his hand on the red mark, moving it down to cup my breast. “You can tell me later.”

  Usually, when I did that, especially when I’d come back from running, sweaty, I’d pull off the sopping clothes and pull him into the shower.

  Months ago, we’d shower together.

  “Now you know,” he said.

  “Know what?”

  “You wanted a shotgun, but you never worked out how to get at it when you needed it the most. Which is always gonna be when you least expect to use it.”

  “Point taken,” I said, rubbing my shoulder.

  “Here,” he said. “Let me rub you up a little bit.”

  16

  Just a coyote, I kept reminding myself. Just an animal.

  At one of my computers, I Googled skinwalker.

  Between man and animal, one website said. Skinwalkers exist between the gap of order and chaos, between being alive or dead, but contrasting a symbolic metaphor of this dialectic with the inescapable reality that man is animal.

  No books really exist about skinwalkers, another website said. There are only stories and conjecture, usually by white academics and avoided by Navajos. Nothing to read, anywhere, to give understanding to a skinwalker’s behavior or personality. One discovered a skinwalker by oneself only. One watched, experienced, observed, and learned. Through patience and respect for both tradition and nature, one learned.

  Tony Hillerman’s name everywhere, his wonderful novel, a movie with Wes Studi as Joe Leaphorn, I could see that. Out of habit, I went to my browser menu and clicked on Reveal Source to look at all the hidden search terms for the web page, hoping I’d find some better reference to skinwalkers. Instead, I found politics.

  The Forbes web page search terms included Conservative, Reagan, Homeschool, Republican, National Review, Worldnewsdaily.com, Christian, Regnery, Conservative Leadership Series, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, William F. Buckley, and Matt Drudge. I’d never thought Hillerman’s wonderful books could be used by a political group. I wondered if he knew about it.

  Damn! I’d forgotten to tell Bob about Antoinette.

  After three calls, nobody picking up, I left the same message twice. The Begay father and sons. Left to right, Leon, father, Vincent. Get Antoinette to stay the night, call me when she arrived.

  I checked all the door and window locks before I took my shower, then lay awake for an hour on our bed, the shotgun beside me, wondering what we’d become. And in the morning, a slender strand of drool running down my cheek, a very small sensory feeling on my cheek, I awoke to find myself hunched up on my side in a ball and staring at the shotgun. I threw the sheet and duvet over the gun and got dressed to meet Vincent Basaraba.

  17

  Fighting the morning Tucson traffic on Speedway, Tucson no longer a funky little city but stretching toward a population over a million with main streets meant to handle a third of the cars.

  Nearing Fourth Avenue, police flares ignited all over an intersection two blocks ahead, traffic diverted onto the side streets, impossible to move more than a car length every few minutes. Like everybody else, I cut people off, tried to take shortcuts, even drove half on the sidewalk to get around two Mexicans with locked bumpers and drawn pistols.

  Stalled, not yet late, fuming, for no logical reason I remembered my first gun.

  It was a Spanish .22-caliber pocket pistol. A Bersa with a ten-round magazine. I bought it in Flagstaff, five years before. I remembered the salesman. Freddy. Had a bumper sticker behind the cash register.


  TEDDY KENNEDY’S CAR KILLED

  MORE PEOPLE THAN MY GUN

  “First one out takes just a little more trigger pull,” Freddy’d said. “’Cause it’s double action. But once the slide racks back, the pull is easy and smooth. You want to shoot off a magazine?”

  “No.”

  “No offense, but have you ever fired a handgun?”

  “No.”

  “Again, no offense, but guns kill. You don’t look like you much know what to do with this piece. I suggest, no offense intended, that we just take just five, ten minutes of your time, so you learn how to load it and fire it.”

  “This is a shooting range,” he said in the back of his store, handing me some yellow foam earplugs. “Stick these in your ears before we go in.”

  He pushed another set of plugs into his own ears. After I inserted mine, we went through double doors into the shooting range divided into four sections by upright partitions. We stood at a waist-high Formica counter inside the first section. Empty cartridge brass was scattered everywhere on both sides of the counter. Freddy laid the Bersa on the counter and opened a box of shells. Showing me a small lever on the side, he flicked the lever and the magazine dropped into his other hand. He gave me the magazine and positioned it open-end up and handed me a shell.

  “You’ve got to slide it in. Go on. Go on. Try it.”

  I pushed the shell into the magazine. It took more force than I’d have thought. One at a time I inserted six more, each time getting easier as I learned to push down with my thumb on the rim of the casing and then slide the shell backward. Without thinking I swiveled toward him and he ducked as the barrel aligned with his chest.

  “Jesus, Jesus, don’t ever point that at somebody unless you mean it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Okay. You got six in the pipe. Six is enough. Six is plenty. Now. This is a semiautomatic. A lotta people think that all you gotta do is pull the trigger, but that’s just TV, that’s just the movies. First, you gotta get the first bullet into the gun so it will shoot. Grab the barrel with your left hand and pull it back until it clicks.”