Black Helicopters (5 page)

He finds books and he studies the bugs — he calls letters “bugs”— they do look like bugs — until he can read.

He finds a knife, and that changes everything.

He is Tarzan. He is a great killer. None is mighty as Tarzan.

We are Tarzan, too.

Bo and I learn to speak Tarzan Talk.

When we wrestle, I say,
“Kagoda?”
Do you surrender? while I bend Bo’s little finger back.

“Kagoda!”
I surrender! says Bo.

Our den is
zukat,
a cave.

Our den is
wala,
our nest, our home.
Wala
sounds like Valhalla.

When we go to sleep, I say,
“Abalu, gree-ah.”
Brother, love.

Bo says,
“Zabalu, gree-ah,”
Sister, love.

Authorities are investigating after berry pickers found human remains in the remote Thimble Creek drainage in western Montana.

“At first they thought it was just a deer, but then they saw part of a human skull,” said Sheriff’s Detective Miles McKinley. According to McKinley, the bones had been scattered, probably by predators. Police search of the area recovered a shoe and a clothing label that indicate that the remains were those of a female. Remnants of a sleeping bag were also discovered on the hillside.

The county sheriff’s office says the group found the remains on Saturday. No identification was found at the scene, and the cause of death has not been determined.

“It is possible that this is just somebody who went out camping and ran into trouble. At this point, we just want to figure out who it was. We don’t have any missing persons linked to the area. We are hoping for a DNA match, but those bones have been out there for years by the look of them, and animals have chewed them up some. Still, DNA, that’s pretty much all we got to go on right now,” said McKinley.

The County Sheriff’s Office now has a DNA sample from human remains discovered last summer, but the sample did not match anyone listed in the national missing persons registry.

A family picking huckleberries found the bones in the Thimble Creek drainage last August.

McKinley says that the sheriff’s office is asking the public for help. “She was an adult woman, age 25 to 40, a little over five feet tall. There’s someone out there who can help us,” McKinley said. “We just need to have them give us some additional information. We’ve got pieces of clothing and the sleeping bag. We’ve got the bones and the DNA. Now we are waiting for a call. Somebody out there knew this woman. She has a family somewhere.”

According to McKinley, authorities handle more than one thousand cases involving unidentified human remains each year. “People think DNA means case closed, but it doesn’t. The DNA needs to be matched with something. We didn’t get a hit in the missing persons. There’s another 3 million profiles in the joint FBI/state database, but there’s a backlog of two years for ongoing priority cases. A cold case like this one, it could be a lot of years before it gets run. Even then, she might not be in there, either.”

In the next ten minutes I learn that Corbin is in second grade, he’s going to be a scientist — a pay-lee-on-tol-ee-jist — and his mom doesn’t get off work until seven tonight. When the brother shows up, he gets out of the car to help load the helicopter shark into the back seat, and Corbin says, “This is Valley. She helped me.”

He’s a taller version of little Corbin, scrawny and spindly. His hair flops down in front and hides the world from his eyes. When he brushes it away, I can see smudges and smears on his glasses. He might as well be blind.

“Hey, ’m Eric,” says the driver, and he sticks his hand out to me. It’s not the worst handshake. It’s not pathetic, but I notice his hand is softer than mine — it feels like there is only gristle where the bones ought to be. I could twist his fingers until they broke, but I don’t think I will need to do that.

“Maybe I can just borrow your phone? I need to call my uncle and tell him where I am.”

He fishes a phone out of his pocket and hands it over.

“I haven’t used one like this. What should I do?”

He takes the phone back and touches the screen. Nothing happens.

“Forgot to charge it,” he says.

“Mom is going to kill you, Eric,” says Corbin. “He’s
always
not charging his phone. And not taking out the garbage. And he
sleeps
in his jeans. He’s a total hobknocker. . . .”

“Shut up, Corbin,” says Eric, and he wraps a skinny arm around his brother and claps a hand over the noisy mouth. It’s an automatic reflex. He’s had a lot of practice with that maneuver.

“Can we go to your house?” I say. “I need to call — and use a bathroom.”

“I guess.”

Things are coming together. I’ve got a ride I can control. And I’ve got some time to think. And I can always break his bones if I need to.

Kerosene casts a warm, yellow bubble of light around the three of us. The nights are growing longer, as they always do when the air grows colder. Bo and I know about the seasons, just like we know how to balance the equations. Da explained it all to us long ago, on a night like this. He drove a screwdriver through an apple, which he said was like the Earth. Some things, he said, are difficult to see because of where you are. One thing that is difficult to see is that the Earth is unimaginably big and the sun is much bigger than that. This apple, he said, is like the Earth, and the lamp there is like the sun. Every day the Earth spins around like an apple on a screwdriver; every year it walks in a big circle around the sun. Sometimes the apple is farther away from the lamp, and that is when it is winter. There is some wobbling, too, that the apple does as it spins, and that makes the days shorter and longer. And then Da peeled the apple with his knife and fed each of us slices off the point of the blade.

We were silly little kids then, Bo and me, and after we ate the apple, we turned around yelling, “Day! Night! Day! Night!” until we got dizzy and wobbled. Da said that was enough of that. “Be quiet or I’ll knock you quiet.”

When we were quiet, we could hear the coyotes talking outside in the cold.

I remember that night, because this one feels the same way.

We sit at the table eating smoked salmon and dried cherries.

Da has covered the table with paper, a clean surface, and the pieces of a clock are all spread out there. The light of the kerosene lamp shines and catches on the inward turning of the flat spring, on the tiny fingers of the cogs and gears.

Da says, “While I was working, a voice came to me and talked to me, and what the voice said, it was true. The customers I work for, they are each a piece of the works. That’s not how they see it, though; far as they know or care, they are the whole story. But the voice talked me through it and
I
can see it. I know they are each like a part of the windup. It is my job to put them together so it ticks, so the alarm goes off.

“I haven’t been doing that. I just sold them what they wanted so they could send messages about abortion or bad laws or whatever their corner of truth is. I never gave two hoots and a damn about any of their ideas. I just took their money and gave them my expertise. It works out pretty good for everybody concerned. Nothing about that has to change. I will still make their messages. The customer will still get the satisfaction of making their point. But I can make sure those messages speak for us, too. From now on, the messages will all be part of the windup. I will make sure Those People know that.”

Da picks up the clock’s spring and turns it over in his hand. He holds it out to me, I reach out, and he drops it on my palm.

“From now on, we will send letters, plain paper letters, after each customer’s message. The letters will go through the regular mail. We will tell Those People things nobody but us knows about how the messages were built. We will make sure they talk to each other. Hell, we’ll give them a list of people they should be talking to. And even with all that, especially with all that, they won’t know who we are, because the customers don’t even know who we are. And the beauty of it? Those People will be afraid. We will be showing them exactly how to be afraid. We will wind them right up.