Ain't Talkin'

Some miles further down the 50, Roche turned his mare off the highway and into the aspen forest to the south of the road. What was left of the trees was the bare-bones and husks of once proud evergreens. The rocks that supported them had been bleached by the sun. The rivulets of mountain water that had once run down into mighty rivers and fueled Colorado Lakes spilled only water thick with salt and trace minerals that drinking the stuff too long wore your teeth to nubs.

Lucky was sure of foot picking her way through the hills and along the faces of higher landmarks. Roche followed the saddle with his hips in the way of a long-rider, settling his weight low. He smoked and shut his eyes and smoked some more, peeking up only occasionally to see that they were making along the appropriate path.

“Is this the way to the hole?” Markus asked after a time, his voice thick with dehydration.

Roche tossed his water skin and cursed himself for always forgetting that he needed less water than the average folk. “Yep. Along this ridge a ways more and we’ll meet the fella who keeps the gate.”

“A gatekeeper?”

“Something of the sort. More like a man who has little of a lot left in this world.”

“Who is he?”

“You’ll see, kid. Might be the first and last one you’ll see.”

Roche let Markus chew on the vagueness of his statement and savored the return to quiet. Besides the shimmer of hooves against stone and dust, the rustle of his leather duster and the snapping of sticks and kicking of stones along the way, the world was queerly at peace with it’s epilogue for the nonce.

The travelers arched over an elbow-bump in the hills and the sound came. It was a sound that pre-dated civilization. Hammering like a heartbeat on a strike of panic, and the tongue and cheek howling of a world that had been decimated thrice over before it had even been recorded in the histories.

Bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom. . .

“Drums?” Markus whipped around looking, his mind quickly concluding that the sound was echoing across the hills and could be coming from anywhere. “Who’s playing drums?”

“Our gatekeeper. Keep on movin’. We ain’t far.”

The drumming and ululating vocals grew clearer and louder, crisp noise in the red afternoon.

They descended another rise in the earth and now Roche could smell the campfire. The sounds of loss and tragedy were thick in the vocals and Roche could feel their direction. He turned Lucky towards the source of the singing and Markus followed.

In a dent in the earth, a bomb crater, sitting at the epicenter amidst animal drawings scratched in the earth in massive scale was an indian.

His clothing was frilled and frayed leather, tanned with care, and a pair of jump-boots. His breast was bare and painted with red clay, and around his throat hung a respirator with two soda-can tanks for filtering the air. In one palm he held a wide drum, and he beat it in timeless rhythm with the other palm. His voice was the high-and-low song of his people, and it was at all times both beautiful and haunting.

Roche approached on horseback and only slid from the saddle when they reached the edge of the crater.

“Don’t step on his drawings. Walk between them.” Roche chided Markus, who was wide-eyed on starstruck at seeing a Native American this far into the wastelands, probably one of the only few hundred remaining in the world.

Roche led his mare carefully through salt etchings of great birds and bears, men with many faces and the world borne on the backs of shelled turtles.

As the hunter grew near the shaman took no notice, it was not until Roche in his long oilskin coat, hat tipped low, leading his bay mare stood within ten feet of the old indian that the music abruptly stopped.

“Hello, Wind In the Trees.”

The shaman looked up. His hair was sleek and black and worn in a braid that fell to his buttocks. Setting his drum down the old shaman held his palms in his lap facing the sky. “Walks With Many Legs. It has been some time since you came to these parts. What brings you?”

“A job, Wind. I require passage.”

“You spend much time walking in the spirit realm, Walks With Many Legs. I see more and more of the great spirit’s essence surrounding you each time we meet. Who is your fellow?” Tired eyed nodded to Markus across Roche’s shoulder.

“This is my charge. I’m to return him to my employer in Polkun County.” Roche gave Alex Markus a ‘sit-still-and-shut-up’ look with his eyes and a turn of his mouth.

“The wind whispers of that place. The places northeast have seen hardship only since last you passed through. There is a white-eyed wolf at your heels, Walks With Many Legs, and he will tail you until the afterlife.” The shaman, Wind In The Trees, sat stock-still, palms still up and spoke only with his mouth, like a puppet whose master hid deep in the earth.

“I killed men in Polkun County and a some more along the 50 to get this charge. I don’t imagine there’re many spirits all too happy with me at this point.” Roche rolled a smoke from his tobacco pouch in his palm and let Lucky’s reins slide down his wrist.

“All the more legs to walk along beside you. You feel the strength of their numbers growing. Wise man say, he who walks along too-many feet may trip that much more often.” The shaman eyed Roche’s boots as though he expected to see many pairs of shoes beneath Roche’s duster coat, though there was only one.

“You’ve told me before, Wind In The Trees. And this wise man say that wind through these trees brings only dust and ruins your drawings.” Roche spread a hand, now with a lit smoke between his fingers, around and pointed out the acres and acres of dead and fallen trees and the gusts of dust-devils who threatened to erase the old indian’s animal drawings in the crater.

“The wind brings with it only change and the chance to make things anew. The great spirit knows that change is inevitable and that with great change comes new life.”

“So keep to your scribbles and allow me passage, wise one.”

“We make trade, then.” The shaman stood quickly, spry for a man who looked to be nearing a hundred.

Roche settled back on his heels and looped his thumbs into his gunbelt. “I’m afraid I don’t have much this time around.”

“We drank all of the booze.” Markus piped.

Roche sneered over his shoulder at the kid. Fucking idiot. Told him not to speak.

“Pity. We make trade for other things, then.”

“I got guns, ammunition, some odds and ends, and smokes. Take your pick, Wind. We need to keep moving.”

“The Wolf is on your heels, hunter. Great Spirit has shown me the thing that follows you while you came. A great spirit of ill-temper. It seeks the one you bring with you. He is tainted in the way that the spirit is.”

“You’ve seen the thing?” Roche turned and look back the way they had come. He could see nothing, he could sense nothing, but the old indian was seldom wrong.

“I have, and it comes for your companion. But, we must make trade before you may enter the spirit world.”

“How about I trade you getting the fuck out of here, Wind In The Trees. That things that’s coming, it ain’t friendly. You’re better off getting out of here as well.”

Wind In The Trees pursed his lips and looked to the sky, his eyes went far away. “A long time ago the white man pushed my people from these lands. they kept my people in special reservations where we were not guests but prisoners. They gave us false gifts and treated my people like undesirable things. When the Great Spirit opened the spirit realm for men of strange talent to enter, and burned away the wretchedness of the world, he gave my people back our lands. But, few are my people now. Coyote has been trickster again.”

“Yeah. So you’re not coming?”

“No, my friend. I would ask some of your tobacco. And grant you passage.”

“Alrigh’ then.” Roche reached for his tobacco poke, and emptied a portion of it into a leather sack that Wind In The Trees held open. The old indian pinched some into a long pipe and lit it with a match, sitting back in the center of the crater amidst a cloud of smoke. “Thank you, Wind In The Trees. Are you certain you won’t come with us?” Roche already made the assumption that the shaman wouldn’t come. He hitched his gunbelt on his hips and took Lucky by the reins and began leading her past the indian, through his salt etchings. Still stuck and staying quiet, Markus followed.

The shaman did not accept nor decline, he merely remained seated in his crater, smoking long curls of blue. Roche walked his mare on, and in a blink of motion had drawn his revolver and whipped about when he saw the shaman’s hand dart out and grip Alex Markus on his leg.

Markus stood dumbly. The shaman was not hurting the boy, just gripping him tightly, keeping him from moving forward.

“Wind, I’m gonna have to ask you to release my charge. No disrespect an’ I appreciate the cheapness of the passage toll, but I need to get him movin’ again.”

Wind In The Trees acted as though he had not heard the walker, but instead looked to Alex Markus and spoke in monotone.

“The Great Spirit does not walk beside you. What name are you called by?”

“Markus. My name is Alex Markus. Why?”

“I name you Speaks Without Words. I pray that my friend Walks With Many Legs will see you before long in the light of a clean sun. Go.”

The shaman released his grip on Markus’ leg, slowly turned back to face into the wastelands beyond his crater full of drawings and smoke his pipe.

Roche took the kid by the arm and pulled him past the shaman. They walked in tandem ten yards beyond Wind In The Trees.

“Wha-” Markus started to say. Roche took him by the shoulders, turned him around and shoved him through the hole into the void.