Ghost Boy (4 page)

Chapter

7

T
he old Indian built a fire by a little stream. He made it out of sticks and grass, and the smoke went up in a spiral. From his bundle he got a pot that he filled with water and set by the fire to boil.

He had taken off his headdress and left it lying across the horse. His hair was gray and very long, tied in double braids. He crouched by the fire and the smoke wrapped around him, thick as woolen blankets. It covered him completely, then drifted on and up.

“How old are you?” asked Harold.

“Very old.” He looked all around, across the stream and across the prairie. “There's nothing you can see that was here when I was born.”

“The grass?” asked Harold.

“It burns and grows again.”

“The river, then,” said Harold.

“It rises from a pond that was dug by cattle herders. Fifty years ago it wasn't here.”

“The Oregon Trail,” said Harold. “The ruts the wagons made.”

“I remember when they passed.” The old Indian smiled. He threw a bunch of yellow grass onto the fire, and the smoke came up through the stems. “I saw them from a distance. I thought they were clouds floating on the ground.”

Harold squinted at him through his round glasses. “That was more than a hundred years ago.”

“It seems like yesterday,” said the old Indian.

Harold stood up to see farther. Bands of grass, one after another, rolled for miles around him. There were clouds far to the west, low in the sky, like enormous sheep grazing beyond the horizon. And the faint lines of the Oregon Trail led toward them like a mystical road.

“My grandmother wasn't born then,” said Harold. “
Her
mother rode in the wagons, and she was only thirteen.”

The old Indian grunted. “Maybe I met her,” he said.

It seemed impossible to Harold. His great-grandmother had kept a diary of the trip. He had peered at her penciled writing until his eyes ached, puzzling out stories of broken-down wagons and river crossings and buffalo by the million.

“I remember when the ground was covered with buffaloes,” said the old Indian, as though reading his mind. “I remember thinking they would last forever.”

“I wish I lived back then,” said Harold.

“It was the best time to be alive, I think.”

Harold sat beside him, close to the fire, smelling the grass that was burning. “Did you meet Jesse James?” he asked.

“Only once. Didn't care for him much.”

“And Custer?”

The old Indian stretched out his leg. He pulled the fringes aside and pointed to a button that kept the leggings fastened. “That was Custer's,” he said. He rubbed the button with a gnarled old finger, and the tarnish came away, showing silver swords. “I wove a string from his yellow hair, but it turned to brown and then to black, and I threw it away. People laughed; they said it was my own hair, not the Son of the Morning Star's.”

“Did you know Crazy Horse?”

“Like a brother,” said the old Indian. “He used to sit me on his knee and tell me legends.”

“What sort of legends?”

“I don't want to talk about it,” said the old Indian. “We've talked enough.”

“Just tell me one,” said Harold. “Tell me why they named you Thunder Wakes Him.”

The old Indian placed his grass on the fire, and the smoke became so thick that Harold couldn't breathe. He staggered from it, blinded and choking, but the old Indian stayed where he was. The smoke wrapped him up and made a ghost of him as he poked at his pot of water.

They ate their breakfast, slept and carried on.

All that day they rode to the west. As the sun rose higher their shadows shortened ahead, as though they somehow overran them and, at noon, trampled them under the hooves of the big chestnut horse.

And then the old Indian spoke, the first time since that morning.

“All right,” he said. “I'll tell you one.” And he began the legend of Buffalo Woman.

Harold wriggled forward. He pressed himself against the old Indian and
felt
the words that rumbled from his chest.

“She appeared before my people on a summer's day,” he said. “She came walking from the clouds, dressed in white skins. A warrior saw her and thought she was so beautiful that he would carry her off and take her for his wife. But a cloud descended on him, a swirling cloud that caught him up and turned him into dust and bones. Then Buffalo Woman came to the village, and she showed my people how to live in peace, all together, all the people and all the animals and all the world we shared. And then she left again, and she rolled once across the ground and became a black buffalo. She rolled a second time and became a brown buffalo. And the third time that Buffalo Woman rolled across the ground she rose again as white as snow.”

The old Indian raised his arm. “She went across the prairie at a walk and then a run. She left the ground and galloped through the sky.” His hand rose higher. “She ran up and up. A white buffalo calf running through the clouds. She vanished in the clouds.”

The old Indian's fingers closed in a fist, as though he clutched at the sky. Then he lowered his hand and took up the reins. “The legend is that one day she'll return. And the buffalo will roam again, the fences will be gone. It will be as it used to be in the days I can't remember.”

“Will she come back as a buffalo?” asked Harold.

“I believe so. But who can say?” The old Indian shifted on the horse. The lance, in his left hand, tilted toward the west.

They came to a fence of barbed wire stretching as far as they could see to either side. The posts seemed to shrink away, as though the fence was only inches high everywhere but right before them. A tumbleweed was jammed below the lowest wire, and a clump of fur clung to the one above it. The old Indian got down from the horse. He closed his big fists around the upper wire and popped the staples loose. He held the wire down and whistled to the horse, which stepped across beside him. And on they rode toward the west.

“Where's the circus now?” asked Harold.

The old Indian pointed over the horse's ear, a little to his right.

“When do we get there?”

“Not tonight. Tomorrow, maybe.”

The grazing clouds were coming closer. The wind that drove them bent the grass and lifted the feathers on the old Indian's lance.

Harold smelled smoke on his buckskins. “Why do you follow it?” he asked.

“I'm in it,” said the old Indian. He sounded a bit offended.

He was small and withered. Harold couldn't imagine him performing in a circus.

“I do some fancy riding,” said the old Indian. “I whoop and holler and dash around the ring a bit. It's just a show; it's what the people want.”

Harold smiled. “How long have you done that?”

“I started with Buffalo Bill. In that Wild West show he had.”

Harold straightened; his head came up from the old Indian's back. “You knew Buffalo Bill?”

“No one knew Bill,” said the old Indian. “He was a different person for everyone he met. He was full of himself. Read too many of those books.”

“What books?” asked Harold.

“The ones about himself.” The old Indian bent his shoulders back and straightened them again. “He was always reading them. Sometimes he'd laugh and sometimes he'd say, ‘Yeah, I remember that.' Didn't matter if it never happened. He lost himself inside himself. Not like the Cannibal King.”

“What do you mean?” asked Harold.

“You will understand when we find him.”

It was all the old Indian would say. They rode along, and the tumbleweeds went sailing by on the waves of grass. The buildings of a town rose up far to the north and vanished again behind them. They spent the night on the open prairie and heard the coyotes calling.

Chapter

8

T
he morning clouds were thick toward the west. Blue and black, smeared with yellow, they made the sky look bruised and battered. The feathers of the old Indian's headdress flapped like wings, and Harold was forever fending them off.

“He's a good man,” said the old Indian suddenly.

“Who?” asked Harold.

“The Cannibal King.”

The old Indian glanced back. He saw the feathers fluttering and took off his headdress. He added it to the bundles, folding it carefully as the reins hung slack across the horse's neck and the animal plodded along.

They crossed another fence, and a third, a dirt road running north to south between them. Again they ran their shadows down and trampled them at noon. And then the sun went on ahead, and the clouds came up to meet it.

Darker than before, the clouds oozed across the prairie, pressing on the grass. Lightning flickered through them, faint in the distance. And they drove before them a herd of tumbleweeds that bounded in fright. They drove black streaks of crickets, songbirds by the hundreds and a flock of whirring crows.

Harold sat closer to the old Indian, until they shared his tattered saddle blanket. He heard the wind passing through the feathers on the lance. His helmet straps slapped his neck, and he heard the snorting of the horse's breath.

“We'll have to stop,” said the old Indian. “We'll have to find a shelter.”

They rode west toward the lightning and the hollow sound of thunder, toward a belt of purple clouds. The old Indian turned the horse, and the wind blew sideways at them. The rain started, warm and heavy, and soon was thicker than the Rattlesnake. The old Indian hauled his deerskins around his shoulders; he made a hood that covered his head. Then the horse stepped down into a shallow bowl of grass and dirt where a buffalo skull—half buried—lay staring at the sky.

It was there that Harold the Ghost and Thunder Wakes Him took shelter from the storm. Side by side they lay, one as bright as whitewash, the other dark as terra-cotta. In an ancient buffalo wallow, worn into the prairie by the trampling and scraping of a million shaggy hooves, they lay with a blanket around them as the wind tore at the mane of the chestnut horse.

The rain slashed across the hollow, driven by the wind. For Harold, it was like looking at a river flowing past above him. Waves of rain went by.

The wind howled from the west, and suddenly from the south. It came with such a strength that the horse tilted up on two white-socked feet, with a roaring and a scream that made Harold press his helmet against his ears. He felt himself grow lighter, lifting from the ground. But the old Indian stretched out an arm and held him down, his other fist clamped into the empty eyes of the buffalo skull.

A pillar of clouds passed beyond the rim of the hollow, a dark and swirling pillar that writhed along its length like a shaken bit of rope. It swayed and straightened and traveled on, brown with dirt, green from the grass of the prairie.

And the rain fell harder and flooded the ground. In rivulets and trickles, and then in little streams, it drained across the prairie and into the shallow bowl. It carried a dead cricket and a leaf ridden by a ladybug, spilling them down beside the buffalo skull. A yellow feather, thumbnail-sized, sledded past the old Indian, then a beetle on its back, and then a snakeskin—old and brittle—that tumbled down in coils.

The old Indian plucked it from the ground. He got up and crouched on his ankles, and Harold crouched beside him. He smoothed the snakeskin along his leggings, flattening the curls. “This is powerful,” he said, shouting from the hood that his deerskins made. “It is a good sign.” Then he passed the skin to Harold.

It crinkled in his fingers. Harold too stretched it out, seeing a faint shimmer in its wonderful pattern of diamonds. He wondered why the snake would shake off a skin as beautiful as that. But he envied it because it could. He wished he could do that too.

His eyes closed, he pictured himself squirming on the ground, writhing like Houdini coming out of his straitjacket. He saw his skin peeling loose from his fingers and toes, from his arms and his legs. It would fall away from him, his snow-white skin, his tuft of hair as bright as sunlight still attached at the top. It would lie in a heap and he would step from it all tanned and dark like the old Indian, or as freckled as Dusty Kearns, the rancher's kid from the north of Liberty with a face like a piebald horse. He would love to look like that. No one teased Dusty Kearns; no one laughed just to see him.

“It's powerful,” shouted the old Indian again. “The snake that had that skin, I think that maybe he was white.”

The water streamed down every side of the hollow. It rose above the horse's hooves and up its four white socks. It lapped at the boots of Harold the Ghost, at the beaded moccasins of the old Indian. Swiftly, steadily, it filled the ancient buffalo wallow and drove away the boy and the man and the horse.

They traveled on toward the west as thunder rolled around them and lightning came in hot white flashes. The old Indian wrapped his deerskins tightly, so that every inch of him was covered. He looked like a windblown tent pitched atop the horse, and Harold huddled behind him.

The horse found its own way, tramping over the prairie, splashing down the ruts of the Oregon Trail. It carried its riders into the swirl of cloud, into the storm and the darkness of night.

For hours at a time Harold could only dimly see the old Indian right before him, and the horse's head not at all. Then the rain stopped, and the old Indian threw off his deerskins. He took the reins again and turned the horse to the north. And in a moment a light appeared, a tiny spark at first.

“We've found him,” said the old Indian.

“The Cannibal King?” asked Harold.

“I think so, yes.”

The light grew brighter and larger. It broke into two and then into three, into square little windows that seemed to float in the darkness like the cabin of an airliner.

Harold thought of the man in there, a savage who had grown in his mind to a giant, with bulging arms and a chest like a barrel. He would look at Harold and greet him like a son. “Come with me,” he would offer. “Come home to Oola Boola Mambo. You belong with the Stone People.”

The light from the windows spilled on the ground. But the night was so dark that Harold was nearly beside them before he saw the rounded bulk of an Airstream trailer and the shadowy shape of the truck that pulled it.

“I was wrong.” The old Indian stopped the horse. “It's not the Cannibal King.”

“Who is it?” asked Harold.

“Princess Minikin. It is good the storm guided us here. You will travel faster with her.”

Harold slid down to wet, spongy grass. He held his hands out to take his bundle.

“I liked riding with you.” The old Indian's fingers circled the bat. “We will meet again, my friend.”

“You're not stopping?” asked Harold.

“Not here,” said Thunder Wakes Him. “I am too wet to sit and visit.” He passed Harold's pillowcase down.

Their hands nearly touched on the baseball bat. Harold squinted at them, trying to make sense of what he saw. His eyes, always twitching, blurred the color of his own hand with the redness of the larger one. For a moment it seemed that his was darker now, compared to the old Indian's, or not so shockingly different. But the light was faint and yellow, and it was hard for him to see at all. Even the old Indian's face, high above him, seemed blotched with paler patches.

Thunder Wakes Him put his headdress on. The wind made the feathers flutter. He tossed up his lance and caught it near the base. Then he touched his moccasin heels to the horse's ribs and vanished into darkness.