Текст книги "Haunted"

Автор книги: Charles Michael «Chuck» Palahniuk

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

It's maybe not the Good Life, but it's the Good-Enough Life. The washer and dryer sitting on a covered deck next to the trailer. Everything painted metal, pimpled and blistered with rust.

If she'd just listen, I could tell Ms. Broome just where to find my carotid artery. Or where on my head to connect when she swings the sledgehammer.

No, Sarah Broome just tells me to wait a spell. She shuts the doors to the shed and leaves me sitting here inside. A padlock snaps.

Right this minute, she's sharpening a knife. She's looking through her clothes, her slacks and blouses, jeans and sweaters, looking for an outfit she'll never again want to wear.

Waiting for her, I'm yelling for her not to feel bad. I'm yelling that what she's doing is all right. It's the only perfect way for all of this to end.

Standing behind the lobby snack bar, Agent Tattletale tells us, “Turns out, she was smarter than me, that Sarah Broome.”

Instead of killing him, she left the video camera recording. She got the story of his past on tape. The murder of Lewis Lee Orleans. And after she'd hidden the tape, she drove him to the hospital.

“That,” the Agent tells us, “is what I'll take for a happy ending . . .”

17

Some stories, Mr. Whittier would say, you tell them and you use them up. Other stories, they use you up.

Miss America is clutching her belly in both hands, squatting on the yellow seat of a wing chair in the Gothic smoking room, rocking forward and back with a shawl around her shoulders. If her belly looks big, or if she's just overdressed, we can't tell. She rocks, her arms and hands lined with the swollen red welts and scabs from cat scratches. She says, “You ever hear of CMV, cytomegalovirus? It's deadly to pregnant women, and cats carry it.”

“If you feel bad about that cat,” the Missing Link says, “you should.”

Holding her belly and rocking, Miss America says, “It was either that cat or me . . .”

We're all of us sitting in the “Frankenstein Room,” in front of the yellow-and-red glass fireplace, watching each other. Making mental note of each gesture and line of dialogue. Taping over every moment, every event, every emotion with the next.

Sitting in a yellow leather wing chair, the Missing Link turns to the Countess Foresight in the next chair and says, “So? Who did you kill to get here?”

Everyone pretends not to know what he means.

Each of us trying to be the camera, not the subject.

“Doesn't it seem like we're all hiding out from something?” the Missing Link says. With his long nose, his awning of a single dense eyebrow, his beard, he says, “Why else would people walk through that door with Whittier—a man they don't really know?”

On the yellow silk wallpaper, between the tall, pointed windows of stained glass with the eternal twilight of fifteen-watt lightbulbs behind them, on the yellow wallpaper, Saint Gut-Free has drawn hash marks to count off our days so far. With just the thumb and forefinger he has left on one hand, he holds a pastel crayon and makes one mark for every day Sister Vigilante turns on the power.

On the fit-stone floor, Agent Tattletale rolls back and forth with the pink exercise wheel, trying to lose more weight.

The furnace is broken—again. The water heater, too. The toilets, stuffed and choked with popcorn and dead cat. The washing machine and dryer are both hairy with yanked and hacked-off wires.

People piss in a bowl and carry it to a sink. Or they hike their skirt and piss in the dark corner of some huge, grand room.

Us in our fairy-tale wigs and velvet, killing each day in these echoing cold chambers, in the stink of piss and sweat, this is what fancy court life was like for the aristocracy a couple centuries ago. All those palaces and castles that look clean and elegant in today's movie version, in reality—brand-new, they were stinking and cold.

According to Chef Assassin, the kitchens in French châteaux were so far from the royal dining rooms that the food would arrive at dinner cold. That's why the French invented their zillion thick sauces, as blankets to keep food hot until it arrived at the table.

Us, we've found all the scavenger-hunt items: the bowling ball, the exercise wheel, the cat.

“Our humanity isn't measured by how we treat other people,” the Missing Link says. Fingering the layer of cat hair on his coat sleeve, he says, “Our humanity is measured by how we treat animals.”

He looks at Sister Vigilante, who looks at her wristwatch.

In a world where human rights are greater than at any time in history . . . in a world where the overall standard of living is at a peak . . . in a culture where each person is held responsible for their life—here, the Missing Link says, animals are fast becoming the last real victims. The only slaves and prey.

“Animals,” the Missing Link says, “are how we define humans.”

Without animals, there would be no humanity.

In a world of just people, people will mean nothing . . .

“Maybe that's how the folks at the Villa Diodati kept from killing each other, all those rainy days, trapped indoors,” the Missing Link says.

By having their big collection of dogs and cats and horses and monkeys, to make them behave like human beings.

Looking at Miss America, her eyes red and her face sweating with fever, the Missing Link says how, in the future, the people protesting outside clinics—those people holding picket signs that show smiling babies, those people cursing and spitting on expectant mothers—in that miserable, crowded world, the Link says, “Those folks will rail against the few selfish women who still choose to give birth . . .”

In that future world, the world outside here, the only animals will be the ones in zoos and movies. Anything not human will just be a flavor for dinner: chicken, beef, pork, lamb, or fish.

Miss America clutches her belly and says, “But I needed to eat.”

“Without animals,” the Missing Link says, “there will be humans, but no humanity.”

Looking at her engagement ring, the fat diamond of Lady Baglady sparkling on her thin finger, Mother Nature says, “What you said about protesting babies . . . it's so terrible, you sound like Comrade Snarky.”

The fourth ghost of here.

“I agree,” says Saint Gut-Free, watching Mother Nature. “Babies are . . . wonderful.”

Mother Nature and the Saint—still our romantic subplot.

Then the Missing Link lifts his hands and shakes back the sleeves of his coat. With an index finger pressed to each temple, he says, “Then I'm channeling her.” Channeling Comrade Snarky. And, channeling Mr. Whittier, he's saying that human beings need to accept the wild-animal side of their nature. We need some way to exhaust our fight-or-flight reflexes. Those skills we learned over the past thousand generations. If we ignore our need to hurt and get hurt, if we deny that need and let it pile up, that's when we get wars. Serial killers. School shootings.

“You're saying we have wars,” Saint Gut-Free says, “because we have a low threshold for boredom?”

And the Missing Link says, “We have wars because we deny that low threshold.”

Agent Tattletale videotapes the Earl of Slander, who tape-records the Missing Link, all of us looking for a telltale bit of physical business we can relay to an actor, on a set, someday. Some detail to make our version of the truth more real.

Reaching one hand up, underneath the layers of her skirts, Miss America lets her eyes roll down to stare at nothing on the carpet. While the fingers of her hand work under her skirts, her breathing, the rise and fall of her chest, it stops.

When she brings out her hand, the fingers shine, wet with something clear. Not blood. She brings her hand to her nose and inhales the smell. Frowning, her skin pulls together into deep wrinkles between her blue eyes.

Poor Director Denial has stopped crying, oh, forever ago. Since then, she just sits, watching Miss America. Following her from room to room. Waiting.

“You have a bacterial infection,” the Missing Link says, looking at the scratches on Miss America's arms. “Bartonella bacterium, an infection of the lymph nodes.” And he stops talking long enough for people to take note. Letter by letter, he spells, “B-A-R-T . . . ,” while the Earl of Slander scribbles.

“And if I'm not mistaken,” the Link says, sniffing the air, “your water's just broke . . .”

Miss Sneezy coughs into her fist, and against the quiet, the sound of the pen scribbling on paper is loud as thunder.

When Miss America's wet hand goes to her nose, Director Denial's eyes follow it.

Each of us, the camera behind the camera behind the camera.

Brushing the loose fur from his coat sleeves, without looking up, the Missing Link says, “The common name for your disease is ‘cat-scratch fever.'”

“I have a migraine headache,” Miss America says, and she wipes her wet fingers on her shawl. Lifting handfuls of her skirt, she topples forward out of her chair. She pulls her shawl up, higher around her scratched neck. On her feet, Miss America starts toward the stairs, saying, “I'm going to my room.”

The leather seat of her chair is dark. Wet. With water, not blood.

As Miss America disappears, dropping lower and lower as she steps down the stairs, only then does Director Denial move.

As soon as Miss America is out of sight, Director Denial starts after her.

And the rest of us watch, and write this down. The way the Director's hands each hold a fistful of her uniform, a Clara Barton–long skirt and bib apron with a red cross on the chest and a folded nurse-cap pinned to the top of her wig, her fingers grip the skirt so tight they look blue. The way her chin tucks to her chest so her eyes roll up to see out from under the shelf of her brow. Her mouth is shut so tight, the muscle at each corner of her jaw is balled up, big. Without a sound louder than our pens on paper, Director Denial starts off after Miss America.

The rest of us sit, waiting for the scream.

Something gristly needs to happen.

Something ghoulish needs to happen.

The mythology of us—only with the royalties split one less way.

Agent Tattletale flops on the floor, resting on his side, panting and shiny with sweat. His caftan showing billowy harem pants underneath, his wig pulled down low and warm on his head. To the Missing Link, he says, “To test your own theory,” Agent Tattletale says, “who did you kill to get here?”

Evolution

A Poem About the Missing Link

“What will you do today?” asks the Missing Link. “How will you justify it?”

That mountain of dead animals and ancestors on which you stand.

The Missing Link onstage, his eyes stare out, yellow eyes,

from deep in the shade of his brow bone.

His eyes and nose, they're crowded into the clearing, the small open space

between the hair bushy on his forehead and the forest of his beard.

His hands hang too near his knees,

his knuckles hanging with black curls.

Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:

The sixteen-millimeter footage of a monster covered with red fur,

tall as a man on horseback, with a pointed top to its head,

running away from the camera.

A sunny day along a river, with pine trees as a backdrop.

This documentary monster, superimposed over the Missing Link,

her red-furry breasts swinging,

she turns to look back.

Onstage, the Missing Link says, “Every breath you take is because something has died.”

Something or someone lived and died so you could have this life.

This mountain of dead, they lift you into daylight.

The Missing Link, he says, “Will the effort and energy and momentum of their lives . . .”

How will it find you?

How will you enjoy their gift?

Leather shoes and fried chicken and dead soldiers are only a tragedy

if you waste their gift

sitting in front of the television. Or stuck in traffic. Or stranded at some airport.

“How will you show all the creatures of history?” says the Missing Link.

How will you show their birth and work and death were worthwhile?

Dissertation

A Story by the Missing Link

It turns out this wasn't a real date.

Sure, it was beer in a tavern with a pretty-enough girl. A game of pool. Music on the jukebox. A couple hamburgers with fried eggs, French fries. Date food.

It was too soon after Lisa's death, but this felt good. Getting out.

Still, this new girl, she never looks away. Not at the football game on the television above the bar. She misses every pool shot because she can't even watch the cue ball. Her eyes, it's like they're taking dictation. Making shorthand notes. Snapping pictures.

“Did you hear about that little girl getting killed?” she says. “Wasn't she from the reservation?” She says, “Did you ever know her?”

The rough cedar walls of the bar are smoked from years of cigarettes. Sawdust is thick on the floor to soak up the tobacco spit. Christmas lights string back and forth across the black ceiling. Red, blue, and yellow. Green and orange. Some of the lights blinking. Here's the kind of bar where they don't mind you bringing your dog or wearing a gun.

Still, despite appearances, this is less of a date than an interview.

Even when this girl's stating a fact, it comes out as a question:

“Did you know,” she says, “that Saint Andrew and Saint Bartholomew tried to convert a giant with a dog's head?” She's not even trying to line up her next shot, saying, “The early Catholic church describes the giant as twelve feet tall with a dog's face, the mane of a lion, and teeth like the tusks of a wild boar.”

Of course she misses, but she won't let up. Just: yak, yak, yak.

“Have you ever heard the Italian term lupa manera?” she says.

Bent over the pool table, she muffs another easy shot, the two-ball straight in line for a corner pocket. All the time, she's saying, “Have you heard of the French Gandillon family?” Saying, “In 1584, the entire family was burned at the stake . . .”

This girl, Mandy Somebody, she's around campus for the past couple months, since Christmas break maybe. Short skirts and boots with pointed heels sharp as a pencil. Not any sort of clothes a girl could even buy around here. At first, she hung around the anthro office mostly. In “World Peoples 101,” she was the graduate TA, and it's there her staring routine really started. Then she's hanging around the English department, asking about the prelaw program. Every day, she's there. Every day, she says hello. Still, always spying. Her eyes snapping pictures. Jotting down notes.

Being: Mandy Somebody, Secret Agent.

Major eye contact goes on through all winter term, and this week she says, “You want to get a bite?” Her treat. Still, even with hamburgers, the Christmas lights, and beer, this is no date.

Now, scratching on the six-ball, she says, “I'm a better anthropologist than I am a pool player.” Chalking her cue, she says, “Do you know the word varulf? How about a man named Gil Trudeau? He was the guide to General Lafayette during the American Revolution?” Still grinding that little blue chalk cube on the tip of her cue, Mandy Somebody says, “Or have you heard the French term loup-garou?”

All the time, her eyes, watching. Measuring. Looking for some answer. A reaction.

It's the anthropology part of her that wants to meet and go out. She moved here from New York City, all that way just to meet guys from the Chewlah Reservation. Yeah, it's racist, she says. “But it's good racist. I just think Chewlah guys are hot . . .”

Over hamburgers, Mandy Somebody leans forward, both elbows on the table, one hand cupped to hold her chin, her other hand fingering an invisible design on the greasy tabletop. She says guys from the Chewlah tribe do all look alike.

“Chewlah men all have a big dick and balls for their face,” she says.

What she means is, Chewlah men have square chins that stick a little too far out. They have cleft chins so deep it could be two balls in a sack. Chewlah guys always need a shave, even right after they shave.

That constant dark shadow, Mandy Somebody calls it “Five-Minute Shadow.”

Guys from the Chewlah Reservation, they only have one eyebrow, a bush of black thatch, thick as a stand of pubic hair on the bridge of their nose, then trailing away to almost reach their ears on either side.

Between this clump of black curls and their bristly sack of low-hanging chin, there's that Chewlah nose. One long swell of tube, flopped down the middle of their face. A nose so thick and half hard, the fat head of it hides their mouth. A Chewlah nose hangs so long it overlaps their nutsack chin, just a bit.

“Those eyebrows hide their eyes,” Mandy says. “The nose hides the mouth.”

When you meet a guy from the Chewlah tribe, all you see at first is pubic hair, a big half-hard dick hanging down, and the two balls hanging a little behind it.

“Like Nicolas Cage,” she says, “but more so. Like a dick and balls.”

She eats a French fry and says, “That's how to tell if any guy's good-looking.”

The table is gritty with the salt she's dumped on her French fries. She pays for everything with a color of American Express card the bartender has never seen before. Titanium or uranium.

It's her dissertation that brought her out here. You can only bear to build a case like this, in Manhattan, in the middle of all those anthropology graduate students, giggling, you can only tolerate that so long before your advisers start coaching you to do some fieldwork. In her field, cryptozoology. The study of extinct or legendary animals, like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, vampires, the Surrey Puma, Mothman, the Jersey Devil. Animals that might or might not exist. It was her adviser's idea she should come here, to visit the Chewlah Reservation, to study the culture and do a little forensic legwork. To build the case for her thesis.

Her eyes jumping up and down, looking for a reaction, some confirmation.

“God,” she says, tongue out, fake-gagging, “does that make me come across like some wannabe Margaret Mead?”

Her original plan was to live on the Chewlah Reservation. She'd rent a house or something. Her mom and dad are both doctors and want her to follow her dream, not turn out the way they have, no matter how much it costs them. Even talking about herself, Mandy Somebody asked questions. Talking about her parents, she says, “Why don't they change careers? Is that sad or what?”

Her every sentence ending with that question mark.

Her eyes, blue or gray, then silver eyes, still always watching. Her teeth take a bite of her hamburger, even though by now it must be cold. Like eating something dead.

She says, “That girl who died . . .”

Then, “What do you think happened?”

Her dissertation is about how the same giant mysterious creatures occur in all regions around the world. Those giants they call Seeahtiks in the Cascade Mountains around Seattle. They're called Almas in Europe. Yetis in Asia. In California, they're the Oh-mah-ah. In Canada, Sasquatch. In Scotland, Fear Liath More, the famous “Gray Men” that roam the mountain Ben Macdhui. In Tibet, the giants are Metoh-kangmi, or Abominable Snowmen.

All of those just different names for hairy giants that wander through the forest, the mountains, sometimes glimpsed by hikers or loggers, sometimes photographed, but never captured.

A cross-cultural phenomenon, she calls it. She says, “I hate the generic term: Bigfoot.”

All of these different legends grew up in isolation, but they all describe towering, hairy monsters that stink to high heaven. The monsters are shy, but attack if provoked. In one case, from 1924, a group of miners in the Pacific Northwest shot at what they thought was a gorilla. That night, their cabin on Mount Saint Helens was pounded by a group of these same hairy giants, throwing stones. In 1967, a logger in Oregon watched as another shaggy giant pulled one-ton rocks out of the frozen ground and ate the ground squirrels hibernating under them.

The biggest proof against these monsters is, none have ever been captured. Or found dead. With all the hunters in the wilderness these days, people on motorcycles, it would seem one would bag a Bigfoot.

The bartender comes by the table, asking who wants another round? And Mandy Somebody shuts up talking, like what she's saying is a big state secret. With him standing there, she says, “Run a tab.”

When he steps away, she says, “Do you know the Welsh term gerulfos?”

She says, “Do you mind?” Twisting herself to one side, putting both hands into her purse on the seat beside her, she takes out a notebook wrapped with a rubber band. “My notes,” she says, and rolls off the rubber band, looping it around one wrist for safe keeping.

“Have you heard about the race the ancient Greeks called the cynocephali?” she says. With her notebook open, she reads, “How about the vurvolak? The aswang? The cadejo?”

This is the second half of her obsession. “All these names,” she says, staking a finger on the open page of her notebook, “people all over the world believe in them, going back thousands of years.”

Every language in the world has a word for werewolves. Every culture on earth fears them.

In Haiti, she says, pregnant women are so terrified that a werewolf will eat a newborn, those expectant mothers drink bitter coffee mixed with gasoline. They bathe in a stew of garlic, nutmeg, chives, and coffee. All this to taint the blood of their baby and make it less appetizing to any local werewolf.

That's where Mandy Somebody's thesis comes in.

Bigfoot and werewolves, she says, they're the same phenomenon. The reason science has never found a dead Bigfoot is because it changes back. These monsters are just people. It's only for a few hours or days each year they change. Grow hair. Go berserk, the Danish used to call it. They swell up, huge, and need room to roam. In the forest or in the mountains.

“It's kind of like,” she says, “their menstrual cycle.”

She says, “Even males have these cycles. Males elephants go through their must cycle every six months or so. They reek of testosterone. Their ears and genitals change shape, and they're cranky as hell.”

Salmon, she says, when they come upstream to spawn, they change shape so much, their jaw deforming, their color, you'd hardly recognize them as the same species of fish. Or grasshoppers becoming locusts. Under these conditions, their entire bodies change size and shape.

“According to my theory,” she says, “this Bigfoot gene is related either to hypertrichosis or to the humanoid Gigantopithecus, thought to be extinct for a half-million years.”

This Ms. Somebody just yak, yak, yaks.

Guys have listened to worse shit, trying to get a piece of ass.

That first big word she says, hypertrichosis, it's some inherited disease where you get fur growing out of every pore on your skin and end up working as a circus side show. Her second big word, Gigantopithecus, was a twelve-foot-tall ancestor of humans, discovered in 1934 by some doctor named Koenigwald while he was researching a single huge fossilized tooth.

One finger tapping the open page of her notebook, Mandy Somebody says, “Do you realize why the footprints,” and she taps her finger, “photographed by Eric Shipton on Mount Everest in 1951,” and she taps her finger, “they look exactly like the footprints photographed on Ben Macdhui in Scotland,” and she taps her finger, “and exactly like the footprints found by Bob Gimlin in northern California in 1967?”

Because every lumbering hairy monster, worldwide, is related.

Her theory is, people around the world, isolated groups of people, carry a gene that changes them into these monsters as part of their reproductive cycle. The groups are isolated, they stay alone on tracts of wilderness, because nobody wants to become a towering, shaggy half-animal in the middle of, say, Chicago. Or Disneyland.

“Or,” she says, “on that British Airways flight, halfway between Seattle and London . . .”

She's referring to a flight last month. The jet crashed somewhere near the North Pole. The pilot's last communication said something was tearing through the cockpit door. The steel-reinforced, bulletproof, blast-resistant cockpit door. On the flight recorder, the black box, the last sounds include screams, snarls, and the pilot's voice screaming, “What is it? What's going on? What are you? . . .”

The Federal Aviation Administration says no guns, knives or bombs could possibly have been carried aboard the flight.

The Homeland Security Office says the crash was most likely caused by a single terrorist, high on massive amounts of some designer drug. The drug gave him or her superhuman strength.

Among the dead passengers, Mandy Somebody says, was a thirteen-year-old girl from the Chewlah Reservation.

“This girl was headed for”—she pages through her notes—“Scotland.”

Her theory is, the Chewlah tribe was sending her overseas before puberty hit. So she could meet and maybe marry someone from the Ben Macdhui community. Where, tradition holds, giants with gray fur roam the slopes above four thousand feet.

Mandy Somebody, she's full of theories. The New York Public Library has one of the nation's largest collections of books about the occult, she says, because a coven of witches once ran the library.

Mandy Somebody, she says how the Amish keep books of every Amish community on earth. An inventory of every member of their church. So as they travel or immigrate they can always be among, live among, mate among their own kind.

“It's not so outlandish to expect these Bigfoot people keep the same kind of inventory books,” she says.

Because the change is always temporary, that's why searchers have never found a dead Bigfoot. And that's why the idea of werewolves occurs in all cultures, over all of human history.

The one piece of movie footage, shot by a man named Roger Patterson in 1967, shows a creature walking upright, covered with fur. A female with a pointed head and enormous breasts and buttocks. Her face and breasts and butt, her entire body covered with shaggy red-brown hair.

That few minutes of film, which some call a fraud, and others call undeniable proof, that's probably just somebody's Aunt Tilly going through her cycle. Running around eating berries and bugs, just trying to steer clear of folks until she changes back.

“That poor woman,” Mandy says. “Imagine millions of people seeing a film of you naked on your worst ‘bad hair' day?”

Probably, the rest of that woman's family, every time that footage is on television, they probably call her into the living room and tease her.

“What looks like a monster to the world,” Mandy says, “it's just home movies to the Chewlah tribe.”

And she waits a little window of time, maybe for a reaction. For laughter or a sigh. A nervous twitch.

About the girl on the flight, Mandy Somebody says, imagine how she must have felt. Eating her little in-flight meal, but still hungry. Hungrier than she'd ever felt before. Asking the flight attendant for snacks, leftovers, anything. Then realizing what was about to happen. Until then, she'd only heard the stories how Mom and Dad would hike off into the woods for a few nights, eating deer, skunks, salmon, everything they could catch. Going wild for a few nights, and coming home exhausted and maybe pregnant. Imagine this girl getting up to hide in the airplane bathroom, but it's locked. Occupied. She stands there in the aisle, just outside the bathroom door, getting hungrier and hungrier. When the door at last comes open, the man inside says, “Sorry,” but it's too late. What's outside that door isn't human anymore. It's just hunger. It shoves him back into the little plastic bathroom and locks them both inside. Before the man can scream, what had been a thirteen-year-old girl snaps her teeth around his windpipe and rips it out.

She eats and eats. Tearing off his clothes, the way you'd peel an orange, to eat more of the juicy flesh inside.

While the passengers in the main cabin drift off to sleep, this girl eats and eats. Eats and grows. And maybe then a flight attendant sees the sticky wash of blood coming from underneath the locked bathroom door. Maybe the flight attendant knocks and asks if everything is all right. Or maybe the Chewlah girl eats and eats and is still hungry.

What comes out of that locked bathroom, soaked in blood, it's nowhere near done eating. What bursts out, into the darkened main cabin, grabbing handfuls of face and shoulder, it walks down the cabin aisle the way you'd walk down a buffet, grazing, nibbling. That packed jetliner must've looked like a fat heart-shaped box of chocolates to its hungry yellow eyes.

U-pick human heads on this all-you-can-eat flying smorgasbord.

The captain's last radio transmission, before the cockpit door tore open, he shouted, “Mayday. Mayday. Somebody's eating my flight crew . . .”

Mandy Somebody stops here, her eyes almost full round circles, one hand pressed to her rolling chest as her breathing tries to catch up with all her talk. Her breath, the smell of beer.

From the street, the door opens and a lot of guys walk into the bar, all of them dressed in the same color of bright orange. Their sweatshirts. Vests. Orange coats. A sports team, but really a road crew. On the television above the bar is a commercial to join the navy.

“Can you imagine?” she says.

What will happen if she can prove all this true? If just someone's race will make them a weapon of mass destruction? Will the government order everyone with this secret gene to take drugs to suppress it? Will the United Nations order them all into security quarantine? Concentration camps? Or will they all be tagged with radio transmitters, the way park rangers tag dangerous grizzly bears and track them?

“It's just a matter of time,” she says, “don't you think, before the FBI comes to conduct interviews on the reservation?”

Her first week here, she drove out to the reservation and tried to talk to people. The plan was to rent a place and observe everyday life. Soak up the details of Chewlah culture, how people earned their living. Collect an oral account of their legends and history. She drove out there, armed with a tape recorder and five hundred hours of tapes. And no one would sit and talk. There were no houses or apartments or rooms to rent. She wasn't there an hour before the council sheriff told her about some curfew that required she be off the reservation by sunset. What with the length of the drive, he told her she'd best start on her way back right then.