Dead Silence

33

Maybe I’ve done it, Will Chaser thought. Some good luck, finally.

He was hoping he had hammered his head against the coffin so hard, so relentlessly, that he was now unconscious and only dreaming. It struck him as a possibility because the water was up to his cheekbones now, but he no longer cared.

Must be pouring down raining outside.

No… He pictured Buffalo-head cracking the lid and remembered the winter-blue sky, the warm sunlight.

Because he had overheard the Cubans talking, Will knew he was on an island, somewhere in Florida, so now he thought, Could be the ocean is leaking in.

But that didn’t make sense either. He’d gotten a look at the hole dug by Buffalo-head. The hole was about four feet deep, with only a glaze of water at the bottom. Back home in Oklahoma, it took weeks of rain to raise the level of a lake.

Unless… unless the leak has something to do with tides.

All the boy knew about tides was that there were high tides and there were low tides. But it was his understanding that ocean tides changed only once a month, somehow related to the moon phase.

Just my shitty luck, he thought. They bury me on the only day there’s a high tide.

He lifted his mouth to the coffin lid and screamed, “Goddamn it!”

Then he told himself, Relax, stay cool. Now it really can’t get any worse.

That calmed him. His abrupt, overwhelming anger faded.

Hours ago, the thought of suffocating had terrified Will. He had curled his body, positioning his mouth as close as he could to the PVC pipe that supposedly was providing him with air.

Will had refused to allow his brain to explore how that would feel, running out of air. Gradually, though, he had given in to his fear, opening up his imagination to peek at the horror.

Never again. Not after what he had experienced. The panic his imagination had created now frightened Will more than the reality of death.

For the first time, Will had lost control. It had happened when Hump closed the lid for the second time and had filled the grave so solidly with dirt that the rhythmic whoosh of the man’s shovel became but a faint, distant whisper.

The panic Will experienced had started at the base of his skull, then burned like a chemical moving through his veins. It had paralyzed his lungs until it was like those terrible nightmares where he wanted to scream, to shout out a warning, but he couldn’t.

That had terrified him even more, so Will finally lost his grip on the careful emotional tethers he’d constructed. He had screamed and shrieked. He had gone so crazy with fear that he had broken his fingernails off, clawing at the lid, trying to get out. He had used his face to bang and hammer at the wood until he could taste the blood streaming down from his forehead.

No… he didn’t want that feeling to return. Anything but that. It was better to drown calmly than to endure that horror again.

Unconscious… he hoped he was.

As the water rose around him, the boy settled comfortably. He imagined he was in a swimming pool, floating on his back. Bull Guttersen came into his mind, but there was no longer any comfort in the old man.

Guttersen wasn’t his home, not really-probably never could be-because Otto Guttersen was who he was and Will was who he was, a nobody kid from the Rez who most likely would end up a sad, drunken Skin, just another roadside attraction playing dress-up for tourists, pretending to be an Indian warrior, something, Will was now convinced, that had never truly existed beyond the late-night cowboy fantasies of Hollywood.

What was so bad about dying now? Dying in the dead, dead silence surrounding his own heartbeat and the privacy of his own Indian despair.

Nothing. Not a damn thing wrong about it!

Will chose to allow his mind to float, just as his body was now floating, which took some effort because the skull had wedged itself between his neck and the coffin’s air tube. The skull prodded at him as if demanding attention.

After a while, though, Will’s imagination drifted free. Images of the Rez came into his brain, the scent of hay and lathered horses, the faces of girls and women he had lusted after, even though he had not experienced even a momentary sexual thought since the Cubans had kidnapped him. Had Will realized it, he would have been surprised, but he didn’t think of it.

Fear was to blame for that, too.

Every drifting image was familiar, rooted in some life experience, until Will’s consciousness slipped into what he knew must be a dream.

He had never been in Florida yet he now envisioned the Everglades, which he had seen in National Geographic, but never, never anything like what flooded his brain now.

Plains of gold came into his mind, dotted with mushroom domes of mist-blue, a sea of grass clear to the horizon that didn’t slow the wind. Wind spun designs in the grass, drifting streaks and swirls on fields as yellow as a pretty girl’s hair, then mussed and dust-deviled and spread its way toward cypress hammocks in the distance: domes of shade in so much sunlight that it hurt Will’s eyes.

In the distance, Will imagined a man on horseback approaching. He hoped, as the rider neared, to discover it was himself aboard Blue Jacket. That would have been nice to feel, to see. But it was a man, a large man, a stranger, yet there was a familiar curvature to his jaw, the cheekbones, the black Seminole hair, tied back with a red wind band, that Will knew without thinking was not Seminole, because the man was not Seminole. He was a Skin, but from a tribe that was older than the Seminoles, or Cherokees, or Apaches. Much, much older.

The name Chekika came into the boy’s mind.

The horse was brown, at first, but faded to gray as it neared, paler than Cazzio, and it did not possess the expensive confirmation of Blue Jacket. Yet the horse had a sweet, quartering gait, bouncing along as if the earth were a trampoline yet smooth as a rocking chair, the way the large man sat the saddle.

When the rider came to a fence-there had been no fence in the dream until now-the horse wanted to open the throttle, speed up and jump, which caused Will to smile, feeling Cazzio’s spirit alive again beneath him.

For the first time, the man spoke, but to the horse, saying, “That ain’t no fake fence like the horse shows, Buster. You’re in the real world now.”

The real world? Buster?

An awful name for a horse, but Will accepted it because he now recognized the man, even though the two had never met, and Will had never seen a photograph. But Will’s mother had often spoken of the man-a huge, handsome Skin who the women loved.

That sounds familiar.

When a white bird descended and landed on the man’s shoulder, the man’s face zoomed closer, smiling at Will, allowing the bird to communicate a name.

Egret. Joseph Egret.

It was Will Chaser’s grandfather.

The feeling that came into Will’s chest was so powerful that he chose to ignore the rising water that was now lifting him, floating him water light, pressuring his body upward against the coffin’s lid.

Will chose to ignore it even when water began testing his lips and nose, finally leaking into his mouth when the boy could not hold his breath any longer.

He gagged… tried to hold his breath again… then choked as he breathed water into his lungs. After a brief, panicked flurry, Will gave up, before returning his mind to the buoyant, ascending sensation in his chest.

Will clung to that feeling, held peacefully to its warm power, as his lungs ceased struggling… as his heart slowed… the drumming heart muscles dimming, then losing their electric spark… yet Will felt easy, empty of fear, as a small, true voice within him whispered, You have endured enough…

Will’s grandfather remained in focus behind the boy’s eyes, a man astride a good horse, a horse bred for business, the dissimilar images joining as a luminous, knowing energy that offered nothing-not pleasure, not even hope-but was real, as real as his grandfather’s fire-bright face, a face that became serious when Joseph extended his hand, inviting Will… somewhere.

Somewhere, Will decided, was good enough.

But as he reached to take the hand, Joseph was abruptly replaced by the fierce flat mask of a plains Indian, his body, wind-sculpted, sundried, with two cavernous, red-sparked skull eyes glowing with a scent that Will knew too well: rage.

A mask-behind-the-mask appeared, an old male Skin who was thinking loud enough for Will to hear, even as the boy’s heart slowed, slowed, then ceased beating, in a silence that spoke: Come with me… Come with me now…

In what Will did not believe were his final seconds, a windblown name formed. It vibrated drum notes through wood and earth, resonating long afterward in the living flesh of the boy, and the echo of a coffin that housed two skulls.

Geronimo…