TWELVE
NATHANIEL RED CLOUD stood outside the Ute Mountain Youth Center and yanked a hot drag from a cigarette as the sun dipped below the sleeping indian ridge. The wind blew his shoulder-length hair into his face, and he shook it out like a pony. His hair would have been the envy of any movie star, raven black and somehow always random in that way that hairstylists charged plenty to painstakingly arrange. He liked to stare out from under his stringy bangs and pout. He knew how he looked, young and lanky-beautiful. Nathaniel took another drag and squinted up at a cornflower sky. No clouds today, red or otherwise. He finished his smoke and flicked it into the empty parking lot.
Where the hell was the Padre? He was supposed to be here by now, wasn’t he? Nathaniel wished he could go inside and get on one of the center’s computers while he waited. The Internet and television were his only conduits to the real world, but it was Sunday, God’s day, and the center was closed.
He lit another cigarette, dragged and blew hot smoke into air that stole the moisture from his breath. One day, soon he hoped, Father Katey would finally make good on his promise and take Nathaniel off the res. The Padre had done that for a few of the other kids, taken them off the reservation and gotten them started in places like Durango and even as far as Vegas. In the last year alone, Katey had helped five of Nathaniel’s friends. He’d told Nathaniel that he and the kids had made it look like they’d just run away so their parents and the elders couldn’t get them back. The Elders didn’t want anybody to go anymore. Nathaniel had even seen an article in the Colorado Sun-Times on-line edition about how a lot of the Native American tribes were becoming decimated culturally, spiritually and whatever because all the young people were taking off.
Nathaniel guessed he could just leave on his own one day, but you had to be eighteen and the elders weren’t about to grant him special dispensation. He was only fourteen and didn’t have a lot of prospects, wasn’t in any special program or anything. Just helped the Padre out at services. Some of the older kids got to leave early, though, for school and all.
Tracy Shy Wolf had received a full scholarship to Yale last Fall and she was only seventeen, but her parents had gone to the elders and asked for special permission. Tracy got it, but only if she promised to take the knowledge she gathered in the White Man’s World and bring it back for the good of the Ute. Of course, she’d said she would.
Nathaniel watched a fat red ant crawl along a crack in the pavement. Little fucker. Nathaniel was like a god in comparison. He lifted his foot and brought it down on the ant with a satisfying crunch. Tracey was never coming back. “Jesus,” he muttered. “Neither would I.”
A shadow fell. “Blasphemy, Nate.”
The boy looked up, caught, looking younger than his thoughts. “Hey, Padre,” he said. “Where’d you come from?” Nathaniel glanced out past the parking lot. He’d expected the usual dust cloud to betray the Padre’s old Subaru as it approached. “Where’s your car, man?”
“Parked out back,” said Father Matthew Katey. A big man at six foot three and two-thirty, he loomed over young Red Cloud. Such a beautiful boy, lean and doe-eyed, with the hair of an angel. Katey smiled, his skin falling into sun-damaged seams like a map that remembers where to fold, the white square at his throat catching the evening light. “I’ve been here a while, thinking.”
Nathaniel took a drag. “Yeah?” He leaned up against the wall and blew it out, his head to the side. “What about?”
Katey tried not to smile at the boy’s posing. He knew just how beautiful he was and what effect that had on the priest. Katey didn’t believe Nathaniel had much sexual experience outside of the usual fumblings and experimentation, but he already knew how to manipulate. If anyone needed to get away from the reservation it was Nathaniel. There was no room in such a backward place for a beauty like him with such an expansive sexuality. The reservation would eventually chew him up and spit him out a fat, used up old drunk like most of the others. Unless someone saved him.
“I’ve been thinking it’s time we got you out of this place.”
Nathaniel’s head whipped over, his super-cool forgotten. “Really? When?” He shifted from one foot to the other and leaned off the wall. “Tomorrow, or what?”
Katey stared off into the desert along a dirt track that ran for about a mile and then emptied out into a warren of small gullies, miniature canyons that ran in and out of each other in a natural labyrinth. The sun slid below Ute Mountain and threw a sanguine line along its contours. Venus hung alone in a transitory blue. Katey looked back at the boy as something deep in his mind grew dark and settled. He smiled. “I think we should go now, Nate.”
“Seriously,” the boy beamed, “now? I don’t have any of my stuff. What’s my mom gonna’ say?”
“C’mon, I’ve got it all worked out,” Katey said and put a hand on Nathaniel’s shoulder. “We’ll talk in the car on the way.”
They walked around the side of the center and there was Katey’s Subaru, a black Justy hatchback under layers of red dust. They got in and Katey turned toward the boy.
“You didn’t tell your mom you were coming here tonight, right?”
Nathaniel smiled. “I didn’t tell her shit. She wasn’t even home yet.”
“Well, she has to work to feed you, Nate. Don’t be angry with her.”
“Look father, I don’t mean to sound all hard about my mom or nothin’. I mean, I know she loves me an’ all,” Nathaniel said and peered through the dirty windshield. “But it’s just that she’s just like everyone else. She don’t understand…the way I am.”
Katey looked through the glass as well. “I understand, son.” He put a hand on the boy’s thigh and looked into his dark eyes. “There’s something I have to show you,” he nodded toward the desert, “before we really get moving.”
There was something special, reverent in the Padre’s voice. Nathaniel whispered, “What?”
Katey smiled, warm and compassionate. “Something I showed the other kids before they left. Something important.”
JOHN CALVIN WATCHED father Matthew Katey start up the little four-wheel drive Subaru and putter off into the desert. He slid down the side of the arroyo in which he’d been hiding for the last hour and trotted over to his Mercury Mountaineer. He jumped in and started up the SUV, but left the headlights off as he guided it down the dry wash. Calvin had a good idea where Katey was taking the boy, and this arroyo paralleled the road for the most part. He’d watched the other priest visit the site earlier, a vascular maze of gullies about a mile into the scrub. Katey had driven out there first, then backtracked to the youth center to wait for the boy. Calvin hadn’t been able to see well enough from his hiding place to be certain, but suspected he already knew what the kid looked like up close. Missionary!
Calvin had been Katey’s shadow since after Sunday morning services. He’d waited in the parking lot, a dusty SUV in a crowd of old pick-up trucks and degrading sedans slung low on tortured suspension systems. Calvin watched Katey smile and shake hands with a small crowd of worshipers, mostly old folks as dusty as their cars. He tracked Katey to the store and back to his modest trailer behind the church.
Through all of it, Calvin barely took the trouble to disguise himself or hide the Mountaineer. He was devoid of caring. This was the last one. He would end Katey and fly home to Italy. He needed to talk to Thom, needed his friend’s help. That other had come to him again and he didn’t know what to do. Bishop Thom Neary had been there when it left before, so maybe he could help Calvin with it this time. Maybe he could help Calvin get his mind straight, because waking up after writing a strange name in blood all over the bathroom tiles in his motel bathroom was more than he could deal with right now.
“Shit,” Calvin said, swerving to avoid a small boulder in the arroyo bed. The dash lights illuminated him, a ghastly green face hanging in the windshield glass. He reached forward and dimmed down the dash controls. The face fade
d, but did not vanish. He still needed to see the tachometer to stay on top of the distance from the youth center. Dusk had given way to full on night. The black walls of the arroyo slid by, shapes and humps reared up on either side of the SUV. Calvin checked the tachometer and gently brought the Mountaineer to a halt.
He got out and caught the sound of wind as the exchange of day heat for night cool pushed the air over the desert. A jackrabbit stopped at the top of the arroyo, silhouetted against a star field. It froze, long ears up and twitching like radar locked onto something Calvin’s ears couldn’t detect. A moment later, the jack bolted as a spray of car headlights splashed over the top the arroyo. Calvin walked to the back of the SUV and removed a canvas sack slow and easy, lest its contents give him away. He waited for the thunking of car doors, crunching footsteps and fading voices before slipping over the edge of the arroyo in pursuit.
“WHAT ARE WE doin’ out here, Padre?”
Katey didn’t answer, just continued to walk into the desert. He could hear the boy stumbling along behind him, unsure in the dark. Katey had spent a great deal of his time out here at the edge of the reservation. He moved over the dark terrain as easily as he would have walked from his bed to the toilet without turning on the light.
“Father Katey?” Fear edged into Nathaniel’s voice. “We, uh, we almost there or what?”
Katey side-stepped the short fountain of needles from a prickly pare cactus, waited for Nathaniel to find it.
“Ah, shit!” came from behind him and to the right. Katey smiled in the dark, his teeth and the white collar the only evidence of his presence. Finally, he stopped as the maze of gullies and dry washes spread out before them, darker cracks in an already deep night. “Stop here a moment, Nate.”
Nathaniel almost ran into the priest. His breath came in quick gulps. “You gonna’ clue me into to this deal, Padre?” He wasn’t totally stupid. He figured the priest was an old queen and wanted a hand job before they got moving, but why he thought he needed to take Nathaniel all the way out in the scrub to do it was beyond him. Didn’t matter as long as Katey got him the hell off the reservation. He sure was being weird about it though. Maybe he was feeling all guilty about it or some shit and needed a push in the right direction. Nathaniel reached out and put a soft hand on Katey’s arm. Even in the dark, he thrust out his lower lip and let his hair fall forward. “Can I give you a hand with something, Padre?”
Katey stared straight ahead over the labyrinth, his voice devoid of emotion. “You’re a beautiful boy, Nate.”
Nathaniel squeezed Katey’s arm. “Thank you, Father.”
“Too beautiful to stay on the reservation. You’re life would be wasted here.”
The boy moved closer, brushed his hip against Katey’s leg. “I know.”
“Too beautiful for the rest of the world, I’m afraid.”
“Thank you, Father.” Jesus, why did he have to drag it out like this? Nathaniel dropped his hand down to Father Katey’s belt and started tugging. He glanced up to the priest’s face as he unzipped his jeans, but couldn’t make out Katey’s expression in the dark. Well, he certainly wasn’t putting up a fight, so this must have been what he’d dragged Nathaniel out here for. Nathaniel slipped a hand into Katey’s shorts.
The boy froze and gasped.
“Cut it off a long time ago,” the priest’s voice came like wind off a rotten swamp, “but it didn’t help.”
Nathaniel tried to pull away, but Katey’s big hand cemented around his wrist. “No,” the boy whined. “Lemme’ just…leave it be.” Terror desiccated his voice, stole its power. “Lemme’ go.”
Incredibly, the priest did just that. Nathaniel hit the ground in puff of dust and a scrabble of pebbles. He gawked into the gloom. The impulse to run was just pounding through a block of fear when he heard Katey zip up his pants and move around behind him. The boy twisted in the dust and looked up. A black tower with a perfect square tooth at its throat rose against a wheeling starfield. It was as if the galaxy were swallowed within the depths of this man.
“I’ll give you a chance, Nate,” he whispered. “About a half mile in front of you there’s an old wire fence. Marks the southwestern boundary of the reservation. If you can get to it before I get to you, I’ll let you go. This is what you’ve always wanted…off the reservation.”
Nathaniel tasted salt and snot as the tears came. “I cuh-can’t see anything. What happens if you get to me first?” Stupid question. Stupid boy. Dumb like his father, dumb.
“It’s a straight shot over flat desert,” Katey said, staring over the boy’s head at the drop-off into the maze. “And I’ll give you a head start. I’ll count to ten.”
Nathaniel sobbed once and got to his feet. He started moving before Katey even began counting. “One,” he said, and listened. The boy cried out, a surprised sea bird, as he pitched over the edge of the gully. Katey heard him scrape down the sheer side before he thudded at the bottom.
“Nathaniel?” Katey called, white teeth in the dark. “Silly, beautiful boy.” Katey moved over to the edge and picked his way down the slope, taking his time, sure the boy had knocked the wind out of himself and lay helpless. If not, well, only the coyotes knew this natural labyrinth as well as he did, and a bit of a chase might be fun. Who says a man shouldn’t take pleasure in his work?
Katey put his feet on the bottom of the gully, a trench twenty feet high and no more than ten feet across at its widest point. He held his open palms out to the side and looked at the ribbon of starfield overhead. He took a deep breath and listened: wind rushing through the bowels of the maze, the distant shriek of an owl on the hunt…and nothing. Where was the boy? Where were his gasps, his cries of pain? Katey peered into the dark, squinting, willing his eyes to pull more of the rare light. There was nothing but dark and the paths that lead into the labyrinth.
“Nathaniel?” he called. “You okay, son?”
He looked up again, listening so hard that when a shooting star sketched a line across the sky, Katey imagined he could hear it. He got moving. If he couldn’t hear anything, the boy must be hiding right around the first corner. Probably nursing a broken leg from his fall, crying in the dark and hoping beyond hope that Katey wouldn’t find him. The priest smiled and looked in the dust for drag marks. There was something, maybe a foot print, but it was too dark to be sure.
“C’mon, Nate!” he said sunny-voiced and easy. “I’m sorry, kiddo. It was just a joke, like one of those manhood trials you filthy savages love so much.”
He pounced around a twist into an even tighter canyon, his wide shoulders brushing the water-carved stone. Still nothing. Katey imagined the boy dragging himself deeper and deeper into the labyrinth, pulling his dead legs over sharp pebbles and brush, shredding his soft hands. There was no way out. The only point at which a person could climb out was back the other way. The rest of the trench walls were too steep.
“Listen,” he was giggling now, “you just shout out once, and I’ll come find you. We’ll go get a burger.” Katey moved on around another bend. The light painting the dimensions of the tiny arroyo diminished to a mere suggestion as the walls closed in even further. The ribbon of stars overhead was nothing more than a string. He wasn’t worried. He knew his way. A few of the other “runaways” had made the mistake Nathaniel was making, fleeing, dragging out their inevitable capture and salvation.
Katey reached out and touched a familiar outcrop of rock, a strange double point at his waist. He grinned and turned another corner. If the boy had gone this way, it was over. This trench ran straight for a few yards then dead-ended. Katey reached out, his meaty hands groping, his fingers waving like insect feelers. Any moment now he’d brush a long eyelash, or a flower petal lip. “Mine, now,” he whispered in the pitch. “Mine.”
Katey’s hands flattened against the wall at the end of the trench, the dry rock inhaling the moisture from his palms. He st
opped. What was this? How could—? He turned and stopped. He could feel another presence standing a few feet away at the entrance to the dead end. Katey didn’t know how the boy had managed to get around him, or why he was just standing there, but the Lord’s providence was not to be questioned.
“Hey, Nate, you came back,” Katey said. “I got something for ya’, buddy.”
A strange voice, adult male, cold. “I have something for you, too.”
Katey sucked in a hot breath and stepped back. “Who is it? Who’s there?”
The unmistakable maraca of a rattlesnake scratched out of the dark. It was joined by another and another. After a moment, the trench was filled with the grating white noise of angry pit vipers, but the sound was impure, muffled. The acoustics of the tight canyon scattered and folded the sound. Katey backed up against the dead end, palms against the thirsty stone. The reptile chorus thundered from wall to wall. There must be hundreds of snakes. Katey began to sniffle.
“Who are you?” he shouted over the din. “What do you want?”
“It’s not what I want,” the snake man said. “It’s what you want.”
“I don’t understand!” Katey wailed, and fell to his knees.
“I have a question for you, Father.”
“Anything! What, what?”
John Calvin moved forward in the dark until he was next to the cowering priest. He leaned in and whispered, “Do you want to make a confession?” Calvin moved as quick as the contents of his sack, lifting the drawstring bag and drawing it down over Katey’s head and shoulders. Calvin cinched the string and stepped back.
Katey realized what was in the bag with him and began to shriek as five unhinged jaws clamped down on him. One set of fangs punctured the bridge of his nose, another popped his left eye like a grape, another stapled his lips shut, one buried into the meat of his trapezius muscle, while the last battened onto his adams apple and crushed it. Venom, a necrotic neurotoxin that would paralyze as it turned his flesh to soup, pumped into his body in ten burning streams.
Calvin stood back and waited for Katey’s feet to stop drumming against the floor of the gully. Rattlesnake venom turns flesh pulpy and black. If the tribal authorities found Katey before the coyotes, they would need to use dental records if they wanted to confirm any ID they might deduce from the Roman collar. If they got there after the coyotes, all the better.
After a few minutes, the snakes ceased most of their rattling. They would be slow now, exhausted after all this excitement, but Calvin wasn’t taking any chances. He pulled a rope he’d attached to the top of the bag and tugged it off the cooling corpse. The sluggish snakes spilled out and commenced to hiss and rattle again, but with far less ferocity. Cold blooded animals are not the most energy efficient. The vipers would probably attempt to curl up under the priest’s corpse to keep warm. Calvin smiled. It was fitting.
A few minutes later Calvin climbed out of the labyrinth, pulling the empty sack behind him to make sure all the snakes had slithered off. He walked past Katey’s Subaru and checked inside. The keys hung in the ignition. He walked a few yards to the other side of the dirt track, then slid down a short slope into the arroyo. Squatting there in the dark like a faithful dog was his SUV. A pair of red-rimmed eyes watched him from the passenger seat. Calvin reeled in the bag, toed it with his boot a couple of times just to be sure and balled it up. He threw it in the back of the Mountaineer and walked around to the driver’s side door. He got in and closed the door quickly so the dome light wouldn’t illuminate him long.
He looked over at the boy from his dream, real, alive and safe. “How you doing, kid?”
“My ankle hurts,” Nathaniel said, his voice shock-deadened.
Calvin had already been waiting in the ravine when the boy had run over the side and come tumbling down. He’d silenced Nathaniel’s shouts and dragged him to the side, instructing him to be quiet, so Calvin could lead Katey into the maze. Nate had nodded in the dark, eyes huge, Calvin’s rough palm over his mouth. Even as they’d heard Katey picking his way down the slope, Calvin had whispered the location of the SUV to the boy, so he could climb out and find it as soon as Calvin and Katey were around the first bend.
Now, Nathaniel sat in the passenger seat of this stranger’s SUV, terrorized into a state of emotional blankness. A veteran would have said the boy had the “thousand yard stare”.
“I didn’t know he was like that,” Nathaniel whispered.
Calvin sighed. “Yeah.”
“He didn’t have anything down…” the boy trailed off.
“You don’t have to worry about him anymore. He’s dead.”
Nathaniel half-turned, sensed it was a bad idea to get a good look at this guy and redirected his gaze out the window. He looked through the eyes of his own reflection and heard himself ask, “How?”
Calvin smiled in the dark. “Natural causes.”
Nathaniel didn’t care what that meant. He was just glad it was over. A great yawn stretched through him.
Calvin yawned back, then asked, “How bad’s the ankle? Think you could drive a stick? The keys’re in it.” He glanced at the kid. “You can drive, right?”
“Yeah,” Nathaniel pressed his foot against the floor, winced a little. “It’ll hurt more by the time I get home, but I don’t think it’s broken or anything.”
“Lucky.”
Nathaniel was quiet for a while, then sensing it was time to go he asked, “Who are you, mister? Some kinda’ cop or something?”
“A missionary,” Calvin answered without thinking.
Nathaniel put his hand on the door and popped the latch. The dome light flared. He got out and turned, daring to look at Calvin full on, taking in the shadows and how they puddled in the particulars of Calvin’s face. “I dreamed about you,” Nathaniel said and closed the door.
Calvin watched the boy make his way gingerly up the side of the arroyo, favoring his sprained ankle. He waited until he saw the Subaru’s headlights cut through the dark and move away. Calvin started up the SUV and surged over the side of the arroyo and onto the dirt track. The Subaru’s tail lights fled away toward the reservation and disappeared. Calvin waited another few minutes and then got moving. He’d head into Vegas, drop off the Mountaineer, and get a room for the night before booking a flight back home. Back home to talk to His Eminence, to resign.