Canyons (8 page)

Before now.

Crazy.

But something in him, some other part of his thinking told him to keep the skull and he could not think of a single reason why.

To know it.

That thought crept in and had been in his mind before. Every time he thought of the skull. He was supposed to know it.

Take me, spirit
had been there, in his thinking, and now,
to know it
.

Know
what?

It was so frustrating! Here he was, hiding a skull with a bullet hole in it in his closet, hiding it even from his mother, maybe breaking the law and he had no reason for it, no excuse.

Well, see, Officer, every time I thought about calling you this little thought came into my head and it said something about a spirit and that I was to know something.…

He wheeled the mower around another rosebush and
looked up to see Stoney glowering at him from where he was working with the string cutter around the small flower beds.

The house belonged to a judge and Brennan kept finding himself looking at the windows thinking what if the judge was home and knew he had a criminal working in his front yard.

Possible criminal, he thought, make that a possible criminal.

The week had been almost completely insane.

He no longer slept well. At night in his room he lay with his eyes open, thinking of the canyon and the moonlight and, of course, the skull.

Always the skull.

The first night back he had taken it from the closet and examined it in better light at the small desk-table in his room after his mother was asleep.

It was so small.

That was what hit him the first time. The back half of the skull was gone but even if it had been there it was a very small skull and he thought it must have been a child’s skull.

So he took a tape ruler out of the drawer and measured it, across and from front to back, as best he could and then—because there was nothing else to compare it to—he measured his own skull.

They were nearly the same.

He had to press through his hair to get the tape tight down on his own skin, and make a guess at the measurement
around the missing back part of the skull but when he did there was only a slight difference in the measurements and he thought then that it must have been a boy.

A boy like him.

There was no reason to think it. He would not have a much bigger skull when he was a grown man, so why could it not be a man’s skull? Or a woman’s or girl’s skull?

Yet he could not shake the feeling and that night, the first night back, he put the skull back in the closet, went to bed but could not sleep though he was tired from the camping trip and not sleeping well the night before.

At last his eyes had closed and he felt that he was still awake but somehow he dreamed, slipping in and out of the dream.

The dream that night made no sense. He sat cross-legged on a high ridge overlooking the desert and the canyons below, apparently near where they had camped, and watched an eagle flying. It moved in huge circles, taking the light wind, climbing and falling, and he just sat and watched it fly and didn’t think or say anything, didn’t do anything.

He could sometimes see the eagle very closely, see the feathers, the clear golden eye, then it would swing away and go higher and higher and finally become a small speck against the blue sky and then, in the end, nothing, and he just sat all the time on the ridge watching.

Then he had opened his eyes and was awake. When he looked out the window it was light, well past dawn, and
he was surprised to see the clock on his desk at seven-thirty. Stoney was due shortly and he had jumped out of bed and gone to work without eating.

All that day, and the next, and the next he had thought of the skull. And during the nights he did not sleep but lay back and closed his eyes and had strange dreams until he opened his eyes and had to go to work.

After the eagle dream he dreamed of a snake. The snake was a rattler, coiled in a lazy
S
on a rock in the sun. Brennan was afraid of snakes, snakes and spiders, but in the dream he had no fear of the snake and sat near it on a stone and watched it. The snake moved this way and that, back and forth, but not forward, the head weaving gently, the tongue flicking out in silence. Then it swung its head around and looked directly at Brennan, into his eyes, and Brennan was still not afraid. In the dream he studied the snake and the snake seemed to nod, its head moving up and down once gently, and Brennan answered the nod and was awake and the dream made no sense.

He knew nothing of snakes. Except for one dead on the highway as they drove by he had never seen a rattlesnake, knew nothing about them. But the snake seemed to know him, seemed to be trying to say something to him, and in the same dream he danced with a group of dancers in a circle, holding arms and moving to the rhythm of a drum.

In the dream he looked down and watched his feet move in the sand, kicking up small puffs of dust, and he
yelled with the rest of the dancers, yelled a word he did not understand when the dance was done.

And came awake. That night he sat up in his room for close to two hours after the dream and thought he must be going crazy.

Of course he knew it came from the skull, and thought in some way that it had to do with a guilty conscience that came of not calling the police, or telling his mother. That feeling guilty was making him have bad, or at least strange, dreams.

But when he came to the edge of it the next day, telling his mother or calling the police, when the pressure grew and bothered him that much he could not do it.

It was not that he didn’t want to, not that he didn’t feel like it.

He couldn’t.

He simply could not make himself do it and that frightened him more than having a guilty conscience. Why could he not do it?

In the third dream there was a horse.

He was riding the horse in bright sunlight and heat. The horse had light, almost yellow hair but he thought of it as having the color of straw in the dream, a straw-colored horse, and it ran beneath him, between his legs with a power that seemed to come from thunder.

The front legs pounded up and down and he felt the back legs bunch and spring each time, driving the horse forward,
the front shoulders rippling against his legs, driving, pounding.

There was great joy in the run, the wind against his face, the heat on his back, which was bare, and the horse thundering across the sand and his hair blowing out in back of him, his hair blowing like the straw-colored mane of the horse. He laughed in his throat in the dream and laughed in his bed and the sound awakened him and he came awake and sat up and was glad.

Glad. His heart felt gladness and he did not know or understand why. It faded, slipped away as he sat in the dark looking at the small light on the smoke detector thinking again, or still, that he was going crazy.

On the second to the last morning, two days before the day when he would come close to wiping out the rosebushes at the judge’s house, he sat at breakfast with his mother.

She had been drinking coffee and he had a bowl of oat bran.

She was sitting in silence, sipping the coffee, looking out the window at the morning sun coming in, lost in thought, and he coughed to get her attention.

“Is it possible for crazy people to know they’re going crazy?”

She studied him for a time over her cup. The famous mother look, as he thought of it. The Mother Look. The what-are-you-up-to Mother Look.

“That,” she said, “is a very strange question for dawn on a Friday morning.”

He didn’t answer at once, thinking. “It’s not me, understand. I was just wondering, you know, if someone is crazy do they know they’re crazy?”

She put her cup down. “I don’t think so—but I’m no expert. You’d have to ask a psychologist to be sure.…”

They had dropped it, and that night he had gone to bed half afraid to sleep.

And a dream had come.

This time there was another person in the dream. A girl. He could not quite see her as she moved ahead of him, walking somewhere—he did not know from where or to where—but he wanted to know her better. Wanted badly to know her. And she was gone, walking into a mist that he could not pass through, a mist that frightened him very much.

This time when he awakened he was drenched with perspiration and his mother was sitting on the side of his bed.

“You made noise,” she said, “a funny sound, like words I couldn’t understand. Do you feel all right?”

“A cold,” he said, though he knew it wasn’t true. “Maybe I’m getting a cold.…”

She had stayed with him until he had closed his eyes and feigned sleep but that night he did not sleep any more.

And the final day in the week he decided that he had to do something, find out what was wrong.…

Find out what the skull was doing to him.

And the best way to find that was to try to find out about the skull. He had to know more about it, all he could know about it.

That’s where the answer was, somewhere in the skull.

It was one thing to say he had to learn about the skull, and quite another thing to do it.

Aside from taking it out of the closet again and looking at it—which he did on Saturday morning, turning it over and over—there didn’t seem to be a way to know anything.

On closer examination in good light the skull proved to have all good teeth, no cavities. At least in the upper teeth—he did not have the lower jaw or teeth.

“Does that mean anything?” he said aloud in his room. It was early on Saturday morning and his mother was gone—off on some trip with Bill. They were growing closer and Brennan was happy for her—although it had happened many times before. Getting this close.

“It could mean he was young.…”

There it was again.
He
. Why did he think the skull
was male? No, why did he
know
the skull was male? Because he knew it, was certain of it.

And without any reason.

“All right.” He set the skull on his desk, the eye sockets staring up at him. In a second it bothered him and he turned it sideways. “All right—so the teeth are good and that might mean it—
he
—was young. And if he was young, then the measurements could mean he was about my age.”

Of course it’s all guessing, he thought, leaning back. From the side he could see the damage done by the bullet. The entry hole in the forehead was a little over a half inch in diameter, and almost perfectly round. But a piece of bone as big as the palm of his hand was missing at the back, broken out in a rough oval.

God. How must that have been, he thought. How could that be? To have an explosion and then a bullet slam through your head that way and carry away the back of your skull and all the things you are, all the things you were or are or ever will be are gone then, blown away.

He shook his head. He was squinting, feeling the pain, and he tried to think of something else but could not. Instead he thought of the film he’d seen of Vietnam, an old film showing a man shooting another man in the temple on a street. It had been a television news film. He remembered the way the shock of the bullet had made the man squint.

He stood, turned away from the skull, looked out the window, and broke it then, broke the train of thought.

A week. I’ve had the skull a week and a day and I’m going crazy. What have I done?

He wrapped the skull up again and put it in the closet. I’ll do it now, he thought, I’ll call the police.…

But he didn’t, couldn’t. Instead he found himself putting his running shoes and shorts and a T-shirt on and heading out into the cool Saturday morning air.

He set an easy lope away from the house, not meaning to head in any direction but in a block he turned left and started the long road that went up and around the side of the mountain overlooking El Paso.

There was almost no traffic yet, no distractions, and he gave himself to running, did not think but increased the pace until he was driving up the mountain road, his legs pumping.

In moments the work made him sweat and he pulled his T-shirt off, still running, and rolled it and tied it around his forehead to keep the sweat from his eyes.

Running hard now, pushing himself, deep breaths, deep and down his legs knotting and bunching and taking him up the steep road, his shoes slamming on the road, no thoughts, a blank …

And the word
Homesley
came in.

Perfect, he thought. Homesley.

Maybe he’ll know what to do.