Them Bones Read online

  Hamboon Bokulla, the Dreaming Killer, swallowed his, some of the oil black drops, like thin tar, spilling onto the tattoos on his shoulders.

  He put the bowl down and reached his hand toward his leather pouch.

  Moe said something to me, joking about one of the priests, who was definitely in distress.

  Dreaming Killer touched the bowl to my arm. I turned, took it from his hands. He watched me disinterestedly.

  I held my breath, brought the bowl with its inklike brew to my lips, took a chug.

  It was like ink and oil and lighter fluid. I wanted to gag but swallowed anyway. My throat and mouth, thank god, went numb like I’d swallowed novocaine. Anything was better than tasting it.

  Then everybody was getting up from the circle and coming toward me. That wasn’t right.

  I was standing up. The bowl turned over and over, then bounced high from the ground, a long slow black line behind it in the air. The world was turning sideways and so was I, slowly. The world was faces then chests then legs then the dirt. I felt my arms hit a long time after my head.

  They turned me over. I saw the blue sky turning gray at the edges.

  ‘You see,’ said Dreaming Killer, slowly, each word forming in my brain, ‘he was evil. He would have killed the harvest.’ Dreaming Killer was above me, finger pointing down.

  ‘No,’ said Took. Dreaming Killer swam away, Took paddled into view, grayer and smaller, then my view swam away.

  *

  There was crying. There were hands touching me.

  *

  There were hands touching me. There was crying. I could say nothing. I could see nothing. I could not breathe.

  *

  I smelled cedar. I tried to move. There was wailing. I couldn’t move. The first basketfuls of dirt were poured.

  No I said.

  Dirt came down.

  No I said.

  Dirt came down.

  Dirt came down.

  *

  I heard fire. I heard running. I heard screams. I heard nothing.

  THE BOX XIII

  DA FORM 11400 Z 13 Apr 2003

  Comp: 147TOE: 148

  Pres duty

  56

  KIA

  49

  KLD

  8

  MIA

  30

  MLD

  1for: S. Spaulding

  Wounded, hosp.Col, Inf.

  3Commanding

  Total: 147by: Atwater, Willey

  CPT, Armor

  Adjutant

  DA FORM 12206 Z 15 Apr 2003

  Comp: 147TOE: 148

  Pres duty

  49

  KIA

  61

  KLD

  8

  MIA

  13

  MLD

  2

  Wounded, hosp.For: Robert Putnam

  11Major, AGC

  AWOLCommanding

  1by: M. Smith

  Total: 147CWO1

  asst adj.

  Bessie XI

  ‘That’s all we know,’ said Jameson to Captain Thompson.

  Thompson was tall, thin, with a small clipped mustache. He wore his dress uniform, and his issue raincoat dripped onto the sorting tent ground cover.

  ‘The Navy and the Department of the Treasury searches have all been just like ours,’ he said. ‘A few of the names match, but everything else is wrong, the ranks, dates of birth. May I see the things now?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Jameson. He opened the oiled rag on the table. ‘Use these tongs. Here’s the magnifying glass.’

  It was quiet in the tent except for the constant spatter of rain on the tent roof.

  ‘Do you know what these are?’ asked Thompson.

  ‘Pieces of metal with names on them.’

  ‘No, I mean, the tags themselves. Dog tags. They’re like the ones the French and British used in the Great War. There’s a move afoot to get us to adopt them in times of war. They wore them around their necks. When a body is found, the finder is supposed to put the tags between the incisors of the dead person, and to wedge them in with their rifle butts.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ said Bessie.

  ‘Some bodies lie on the battlefields for months, or years. You’d know that metal wedged in the teeth would be about the last thing to disappear. Where are the inscriptions?’

  ‘Hold them at a slant. They’re pretty well obliterated by rust.’

  ‘Got it. Your eyes are a lot better than mine. You got the seventy-five inscriptions off these?’

  ‘There are eighty-two of the tags,’ said Bessie.

  Thompson read: Putnam, Robert NMI RAO 431–31–1616 DOB 06–01–73 Catholic.

  ‘No middle initial. Officer rank. The numbers aren’t right. They’re not ours. We use seven digits. The dates of birth are what’s really throwing us. Most of these were from the ’seventies and ’eighties. We’ve never used identification tags like these. I went through all the personnel orders on the train, all the way back, trying to find anywhere or anytime these could have been issued. Nothing, nowhere. And of course the latter parts of the century before last are out of the question.’

  ‘So you can’t explain it any better than we can?’

  ‘I don’t even know what I’m looking for. How exactly were these found?’

  Jameson sighed. ‘Bessie’ll take you down there in a few minutes, as soon as we find you some high rubber boots. Kincaid’s still down there with Perch and the photographers.

  ‘There’s a conical mound atop a platform mound. That’s unusual. Connected to the bottom of the platform mound is another mound, filled with the skeletons of horses which seem to have been shot to death.

  ‘The bottom platform mound is filled with headless skeletons. There are probably as many skeletons as there are tags, maybe more. They’re lying feet outward, and fill up the whole mound. It is, we decided, what’s usually called a trophy mound.’

  ‘That usually indicates a great victory of some kind,’ said Bessie. ‘What usually happened was that when a leader suffered a great victory, he had all his enemies killed, beheaded and buried in one place. This is one of the largest of those ever found.’

  ‘What happened to the heads?’

  ‘The chief usually kept them as trophies as long as he lived.’

  ‘Pretty outré.’

  ‘In this case,’ said Jameson, ‘they buried their great leader on top of his own trophy mound.’

  ‘You’re sure it’s the same Indian?’

  Bessie looked at Jameson. ‘Pretty sure. One, the connection between the mound full of horses and the one with the human skeletons. On top of the one with the skeletons, they build another mound, using different soil. The bottom of that upper mound was paved with human skulls, lots of them. Atop them was a log tomb, with an upright burial. They usually reserved that for their royalty. The burial was filled with grave goods. Some of them were anomalous.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They shouldn’t have been there. Anyway, around the upright skeleton was a necklace, with these identification tags on the necklace.’

  ‘That makes you sure it was him?’

  ‘Nothing makes us sure of anything,’ said Jameson. ‘Remember I told you the horses had been shot?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, the chief buried in the upright position had a gunshot wound in the elbow. The wound had healed badly. It looks as if the person lived another twenty years after the injury. Why else would they bury you with a bunch of heads, on top of a mound of headless skeletons, unless those heads belonged to you?’

  ‘Let me get this right. Those people were killed with firearms, and the ID tags give their birth dates as in the ’seventies and ’eighties? I thought all the Indians were run out by Andy Jackson in the 1830s?’

  ‘That’s what we’re trying to find out, Captain. Either we’re dealing with a remarkable hoax, and if we are, why don’t the numbers match like you say, or else we’re left with the only conclusion we have – tha
t the people who built these mounds died out around the year 1500 a.d.’

  ‘Jesus Christ on a crutch!’ said Thompson.

  Leake XIII

  ‘To be gnawed out of our graves, to have our souls made drinking bowls, and our bones turned into pipes, to delight and sport our enemies, are tragical abominations, escaped in burning burials.’

  – Browne, Urn Burial

  I woke to the smell of dirt and fire and wood.

  At first I couldn’t move. Then I remembered the black drink, and the tomb and my helplessness.

  Slowly I began to move my arms and legs. I couldn’t make a sound; my throat wouldn’t work. I pushed, felt wood. I was weak, my arms were like rags, and my chest felt hollow.

  I heard something outside, moaning or wailing. I got my shoulder up against an overhead log and pushed. It gave a little, bark scraping into my skin. They’d put one of the damn copper gorgets on my chest; it was digging into my flesh. I jerked at it and nearly cut my throat on the necklace that held it in place.

  There was a club and hatchet in there with me, and god knows what else. I moved them out of the way.

  I pushed again. Dirt ran down into my face in the darkness. I got a hand in the space, heaved up. A tiny piece of daylight appeared. I heaved at the log, got a fist-sized clod in the left eye. Blind, I forced my arm up, clawed, sat up.

  I wiped more dirt into my eyes, trying to clear them. I jerked another log away.

  The mound was less than a meter high around me, only the start of one.

  When I could see, I saw that the walls of the stockade were charred and black to the east. There were only five or ten houses left where once there had been fifty. Smoke hung over the village. Warriors stood on the walls, heavily armed.

  There were twenty or thirty people standing ten meters away, some with their mouths open, looking at me.

  I scraped both my legs on the log bark, reached back in and pulled out the club and my javelin. I had to move broken pots and pipes around to do it.

  My stomach was an empty pit. One of the men had a ripe may-pop in his hand.

  ‘Food,’ I said, my voice as caked with dirt as I was.

  He handed the may-pop to me. I swallowed it in two bites. A boy handed me some plums. I ate them, seeds and all. I drank from someone’s waterskin.

  Sun Man hurried up with two or three of his close followers, all armed.

  ‘How long have I been in there?’ I asked.

  He studied me a moment. ‘Three days,’ he said. He reached out and touched me. ‘It’s good to have you back,’ he said.

  Two of the Buzzard Cult guys, all tattoos in the morning light, stood halfway across the plaza from us. They pointed at me, let out whoops, ran back toward the huts to the north.

  The village was half gone with fire, torn buildings, overturned goods. In front of the temple mound, bodies were laid out in neat rows, three of them. Two men were cutting up house logs nearby. Others were pulling arrows and spears out of the ground and houses where they had stuck.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked the people. Someone handed me dried fish.

  ‘We were burying you,’ said Sun Man. ‘Many were still feeling the effects of the Black Drink. The Huastecas attacked us at evening. We have been fighting them for two days. They have gone now. They killed many, took many prisoners. They got inside the walls twice.’

  ‘They just attacked, with no warning?’

  ‘None at all. Their honor is gone. Their god has driven them crazy.’

  Sunflower was running across the plaza, her arms out to me, crying. She ran into me. I grabbed her and she kissed me. Sun Man looked away.

  ‘Took was captured,’ she said. ‘They have taken him away. I thought I had lost both of you.’ She buried her head. ‘I just heard you had come back to life.’

  I was weak and had a moment of vertigo. I needed a lot more food, water, a bath.

  ‘How long have they been gone?’

  ‘The last of them left before dawn. They probably left with the prisoners last night. There was not much we could do to stop them,’ said Sun Man. He looked very tired and old. Half his village was dead or taken prisoner.

  ‘Is my horse still alive?’

  ‘The Big Dog? Yes.’

  ‘Could you have someone get me food? I’ll be at the temple in a few minutes.’

  I led Sunflower toward the hut. It was still standing, though the thatching was burned. Over at the north end of the village the Buzzard Cult people were starting one of their dances.

  ‘They sound happy,’ I said. I went to my skins, reached under them and took out my waterproof bag. I pulled out the carbine, put it together, loaded up all my extra magazines and put the bandoliers together.

  ‘You’re going after them?’ asked Sunflower.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I’m going to lose you both again,’ she said.

  ‘I hope not. I’ll bring him back. I’ll bring them all back.’

  ‘No, you can’t,’ she said. ‘You are one man. There are more of them than there ever will be of us.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ I said. I picked up my gear.

  I hugged her to my dirty body. She kissed me. ‘I’ll bring him back. Stay here. Take care of everybody.’

  I went back past the plaza and out to the River. I put my things down, jumped in, washed the dirt and grit of the tomb off me.

  Several dozen people were watching me as I came back in the gate with my fatigues on. I went over to the pen and saddled my horse and brought him around to the front of the temple mound.

  I passed the rows of bodies. Curly and Larry were there, their tattoos as bright in death as they had been in life. Larry’s head was turned wrong. Curly had two or three holes in him.

  Dreaming Killer lay not too far away.

  I handed the reins to one of the priests. He didn’t like it, but he held them. The horse was nervous.

  ‘What about Moe?’ I asked Sun Man, using his real name.

  ‘Captured. I think he was knocked out when they got him. They wanted a lot of prisoners.’ A woman came up and handed me enough food for four days.

  ‘It is four days’ hard march due west,’ said Sun Man. ‘It is a big city. They will kill you before you can get to the gates.’

  I turned and went up the stairs toward the temple, which had been rebuilt after the fire during the storm last fall. A priest made to stop me. Sun Man held up his hand. He waved to the priests at the top. They stepped aside.

  As I walked up I heard the sounds of axes chopping the logs for tombs. People scraped dirt loose from the far edge of the plaza, preparatory to the funeral rites and the start of a new mound. The village around me which had once been beautiful in its way was now charred and half in waste.

  I went into the darkness of the temple. I went into the inner sanctum. I picked up the Woodpecker God costume from its box and stuffed it into my pack. Then I put the headpiece with its bright scalp and gleaming bill under my arm.

  I came back out to the top of the platform. The air was blue, the sun bright to the east. It was a beautiful morning up above.

  Someone yelled when they saw what I had. The high priest dropped to the ground like a stone and lay still. The priests on the temple steps didn’t move.

  I went down the steps to my horse.

  I swung up into the saddle and tied the pack to the saddle horn.

  The people all bowed except for Sun Man.

  I turned the horse and rode out across the plaza, and out the west gate. It slammed shut behind us.

  I put our shadow in front of us.

  Bessie XII

  The motorcycles and the gleaming white cars pulled up onto the bluff. There was a break between storms. The waters of the bayou lapped against the coffer dam and its sandbags, eating at it.

  Men in black suits with bulges under their arms jumped off the cars, eyed people with lizardlike gazes, moved some of the crowd back.

  Perch and Kincaid went to the middle car of the fi
ve. A man in a white suit and hat lounged in the back of the car. He sat up on the folded convertible top, looking at the tents, the dam, the mounds, the bayou.

  Bessie watched from her tent. She was tired; she wanted to sleep for weeks. She saw Kincaid and Perch point to the bayou waters, the mounds, the dam. They indicated the workers filling the sandbags, the mired tractor, the tarps and tents over the mounds.

  Then they talked like she had never seen them do before; their hands shaped mounds, crowns, royalty, lost heritages, millennia, mysteries. They talked for ten full minutes.

  Bessie came from her tent and walked to the knot of men. One of the bodyguards nodded to her. She walked up within a few feet of Kincaid as he finished his plea.

  The man in the white suit pulled a long cigar from his left coat pocket, pulled off the cellophane but left the band on. He snipped off the end of the cigar with a penknife the size of a fingernail. He looked down at the mound, over at the bayou.

  He lit the cigar.

  ‘Bodeaux?’ he said around it.

  ‘Yo, Kingfish!’

  ‘Call the highway department. Give these people what they want.’

  ‘Yes, Kingfish.’

  Then the man in the white suit winked at Bessie. She blushed.

  Men jumped on running boards up and down the line. Sirens started up. The motorcycles wheeled ahead. The cars bounced back to the road, the man in the white suit puffing on his cigar.

  As the convertible turned its wire-spoked wheels out onto the road toward Baton Rouge, he flicked his cigar out onto the highway and put his hands behind his head.

  Leake XIV

  ‘Dead folks are past fooling.’

  –Thomas Fuller

  I rode west, and the trail wasn’t hard to follow. They must have walked eight abreast when they left the siege. It looked like someone had driven herds of cattle through the grass where they left the trail.

  I was weak as a kitten. The jolting of the horse didn’t help. I kept it at a steady trot, stopping to rest and water it every two hours or so.

  When it got too dark to see, I stopped for the night, hobbled the horse and fell into an exhausted sleep, a free-lunch counter for mosquitoes.