Voodoo Moon

SIX

The last trestle was deep in the woods and spanned a dry creek bed. A coyote on the rim of a small hill watched us approach, its scrawny and patchy body aglow with moonlight. I'd cadged a small shovel from the motel office and brought it along.

The woods were heavy, thick, noisy with night.

Steep day and shale cliffs rose sharply in the air, lending the area an isolated sense. Fir and pine stretched deep to the west. To the east was the grassy barren hill where the coyote crouched.

"My last hope," she said. And gave my hand a squeeze.

"I'll leave you alone. In fact, I think I'll climb the trestle."

"Second childhood?"

"Exactly."

So I climbed the trestle. Which was not as easy as it sounds. The brace I used was at a seventy-degree angle. Tandy watched me for a time. "God, be careful."

"You're talking to Tarzan."

"Yeah, right. I can see that. The way you slipped just a minute ago."

I didn't know she'd noticed. So much for my Tarzan image.

I reached the chord, stood up, dusted my hands off on my pants, and took my first good look out at the night. King of the hill. Untouchable. Impregnable. Velvet dark blue sky. Crisp silver moon. A big commercial jet far away, probably heading for Cedar Rapids. The autumn air, cool and melancholy and erotically inspiring. I hoped she'd be beneath my covers tonight, snuggling against the jack-o'-lantern chill, all warm and silky and sexy and still a little sad-faced even in sleep, our bodies entangled and her sweet little mouth against my shoulder, lover and daughter and friend and mystery.

She went about her business and I went about mine.

I'd been up on the chord ten, fifteen minutes, walking back and forth like the ten-year-old I'd always be, when I felt the train coming.

Didn't see it. Didn't hear it. Felt it.

There's a story about Genghis Khan that has always stayed with me. How villages miles from his thundering horseback army, sometimes numbering in the thousands, would literally feel the ground shake with his approach.

And this would give them time to flee before his terrible horsemen reached them.

The train was sort of like that. I had a straight look down maybe a half mile of shining silver track in the vast prairie shadows…and I still couldn't see it. Or hear it.

But feel it, yes.

There was still plenty of time for me to climb down, and I just assumed that's what I'd do as soon as the train came into sight.

As for Tandy, she had suddenly vanished. That didn't trouble me. She might be forming images, and the images leading her somewhere down the creek bed. I sure didn't have to worry about her drowning.

Then the train was sliding around the distant bend, and it was an imposing ghostly figure in the Iowa night, a long freight of jerking rumbling boxcars and tanker cars and lumber cars, and one big golden boogeyman eye scanning the countryside for anything that displeased it. Roaring, rushing toward me.

There were all kinds of stories about people who stood on trestles when the heavy trains came through. How they fell to their deaths and were ground to bloody fatty hamburger after several train cars had passed over them. So the sensible man would quickly work his way down the brace and stand in the dry creek bed and watch the train go by.

But as Tandy had hinted, I was having a second childhood experience. So I decided to stay right where I was.

You could smell the train coming. The hot oily engine. The friction of steel wheel and steel track. The taint of the various products the train was carrying.

And the whistle. I always thought of Jack London and Jack Kerouac when I heard train whistles like that, so lonely and longing in the Midwestern night those whistles, both men rushing their whole lives to a haven they never lived long enough to find, and probably wouldn't have found anyway no matter how long they'd lived.

And then the train was crashing through the tunnel the trestle had created. And the steel bridge jerked and swayed and bobbled as the roaring train seemed to explode beneath my feet. The noise of engine and steel and speed obliterated everything else.

I stuck my arms out for balance, the way I would on a surfboard. But it didn't help much.

I was being tipped off the chord.

The creek bed was sandy, true. But the fall was a good twenty-five feet. Far enough to break more than a few bones, no matter how gentle the landing.

The noise was starting to spook me now. I was inside it. There was no escape. I had one of those paranoid flashes that I'd somehow crossed over into another realm. And I was in this realm forever.

I did the only thing I could. I dropped to the chord, straddling it like a horse bent over and hung on.

I forgot about Tandy. I just clung to the steel.

It was a rough ride, so rough that a couple of times I wished I was wearing a jock.

The train was one of those spectral mythic unending ones you see only on the prairies, long as a country mile, and even rolling at eighty, ninety miles an hour, taking forever to pass by.

The whistle again. And the cold dead air created by the cars as they charged through the night. And the different shapes of the cars-boxlike, cylindrical, open and flat. I even glimpsed a hobo sleeping in a gondola, though God only knew how you could sleep in the belly of such a beast as this one.

I glanced up once and saw the moon and a kind of awe gripped me momentarily, all the things that had happened on this little nowhere planet beneath the moon, before the Ice Age when this prairie didn't even exist, and then water eventually becoming landmass, and since that time so many, many epochs and eras for the moon to indifferently note, culminating in this era of screeching train and girl with psychic power. The moon didn't give any more of a damn about us than it had the Vikings or the Indians or the pioneers from New Hampshire and Rhode Island, or the hairy, forlorn, utterly baffled creatures who'd trod these lands so many millions of years ago we don't even know what to call them.

And then it was gone. And there was this strange quality in the air called silence. And my first reaction was not to recognize it for what it was. My entire body had been shaken by the thunder of the train.

After a time, I heard the night birds and the coyotes and the horses in the hills. And feeling, human feeling, came back to my limbs and my crotch, and into my mind, too.

I looked for Tandy and didn't see her.

The creek bed was pale and shadowy in the moonlight. I followed her footprints westward. You could smell mud and wet dead leaves from the recent rains.

I listened for her, too. Light as she was, she had to make at least minimal noise as she moved.

I didn't want to call out for her. She might be in a trance. My voice could destroy whatever she was learning.

The creek narrowed at one point and became little more than a path. I had to duck beneath low-hanging branches. Moonlight glinted off beer cans and pop cans angled out from the sandy creek bed. A possum switched its lengthy tail, watching me.

In the tree-broken silver glow of the moon, standing perfectly still on a hill, fingers touching her temples, eyes crazed and raised skyward, she stood like some piece of mad statuary, a benign prairie Medusa, slight as a child, frail as an autumn flower, a song of some kind coming from her lips, or what I mistook as a song, at first, anyway. It was really a moan, I realized, as I climbed the bank and started up the small hill toward her. In the sudden wind, the trees around her bent branches toward her, as if in supplication. Her crazed gaze was unwavering, and the moan grew only deeper and more disturbing.

I stopped several feet from her. I didn't want to scare her. She was completely unaware of me.

And then she started moving. There was a moment where her movement was almost comic, melodramatic and stagy as a zombie sequence in a bad, old late-night TV movie. Her arms weren't outstretched before her and she didn't plod as she walked, but still there was something overwrought about her, and I even wondered guiltily if she might not be faking all this for my benefit.

She answered my question by pausing halfway down the hill and throwing up.

Moaning ended. Eyes became real and focused again. And the throwing up was all too real.

She sank to her knees to do it, and I rushed to her and knelt next to her and held her as she finished her work.

And then I recalled another night. The first murder case we'd worked on together. Near the time when the image came clear to her and she was able to lead us to the buried body. Vomiting, then. Inexplicably. Me holding her.

Now she said, "I didn't get it."

"Get what?"

"The location."

"A body?"

"Yes. A child. An infant."

"Oh, shit." A child, let alone an infant, is always the worst to find. It changes you. You can never quite look at the human heart the same way again. In a very real way, you're no longer a virgin. In my FBI years, I'd lost my cherry early on. I'd worked a case in which a child had been mutilated and then burned. But Tandy still had her virginity. Until tonight, anyway. "Anything I can do?"

"No. Just please don't talk. In fact, how about walking back to the car? I'll come back when I'm through. Maybe-maybe something will come to me yet."

I touched her arm. "You've already accomplished something, Tandy. You've located a body."

"No, I've seen a body. In the old days-before I ruined my gift-I would have known where it is by now." Then, frowning, "Listen to me, Robert. There's a dead child somewhere out here and all I can talk about is losing my gift. Me meme. Laura's right. I'm not better than she is. I just hide it better." Shaking her head. "And anyway, maybe this is all just fantasy. Maybe I'm just feeding myself images. Maybe there's no body of any kind around a trestle bridge."

I knew there was nothing I could say.

She was right. She needed to be left alone.

I walked back to the car. I saw a doe on the way, standing at the edge of a shallow woods. A couple more weeks, the hunters would be out here blasting away. Maybe I'd seen Bambi too many times when I was a kid, but somehow hunting with guns has always struck me as singularly unfair. Maybe we need to teach the deer how to shoot back. Even things up a little.

I sat in my car listening to a National Public Radio story about the state of tabloid journalism in England. Impossible as it sounded, the Brits were even sleazier at the tab game than we were.

The cell phone rang. I once saw a cartoon where a man was out in the woods in walking shorts and backpack taking a pee in some bushes and talking to his cell phone at the same time.

I picked up.

"Laura gave me your number."

"Who is this?"

"It's Noah Chandler. Who the hell do you think it is?"

"You sound different."

Pause. "We need to talk."

I realized why I hadn't recognized the voice at first. He was so upset, his voice had gone up half an octave. "What about?"

"You know yesterday when you accused me of being the one doing the shooting out at the old asylum?"

"Yes."

"Well, you were right. It was me."

"Why the hell were you shooting at us?"

"Publicity, of course."

Of course.

Pause. "It's getting out of hand."

"What's getting out of hand?"

"The whole thing-the plan."

"I wish I knew what the hell you were talking about, Chandler."

"When're you getting back to the motel?"

"I'm not sure. Hour, hour and a half maybe. Why?"

"I'll watch for you. I'll come to your room."

"So I don't even get a hint?"

Pause. "Paul Renard? The guy that Rick Hennessy claims to be possessed by?"

"Yeah."

"That's what Kibbe the private eye was working on."

"So you knew Kibbe?"

"Yeah," Chandler said. "Pretty well, in fact."

"So he was out here because of you?"

"Because of me and Paul Renard."

"Paul Renard's dead."

"Maybe not."

"What the hell're you talking about? He jumped off a cliff into rapids. According to the locals, nobody could have survived those rapids."

"Well, Kibbe and I were working on evidence that Renard is still alive and that he's come back to town here." Then, "I've got to go. Somebody's coming. Like I said, Payne, I'll watch for you."