Cold River Resurrection (2 page)

That’s what I’ll do, go back to the woods, put a tree to my back, start a fire, figure out what to do next.

Jennifer bent over, reached for one last piece, and stared into the vacant eye sockets of a human skull, inches away from her face, the skull seeming to mock her, the eye sockets cracked and broken.

She screamed, not a horror movie matinee squeal, but the scream of pure terror, its power and volume scaring her beyond all reason. She turned and ran, her pack bouncing on her back, brush punching her face and arms, and ran headlong into a tree, the bark smashing into her forehead, blood springing out, and she fell below the tree, alone and bleeding.

She lay like that as the sun slipped behind the mountain, the glacier glowing pink, and then red.

It was full dark when Jennifer opened her eyes. She had never confided in her closest friend the one thing she feared the most was to be alone in the woods in the dark with unknown wild animals. She told her doll, Nanna, that she would rather be stranded in Central Park at midnight. At least I could jog out of there, she told her doll.

She began shaking.
What am I going to do?  I . . . can’t think . . . I don’t know, I’m afraid. Someone help me.

Wild animals were here for sure, especially the ones chewing on Mr. Ferragamo Oxford back there. I’m alone and lost in the rugged wilderness with wild animals.

And dead things.

As Jennifer faded into unconsciousness, she knew not all the things to be afraid of at night in the wilderness were alive.

She soon learned that while animals could be territorial and make you part of their food chain, man was still the craziest, deadliest of all to inhabit the planet.

And walk the wilderness.

Her last thought was,
I want my Nanna.

When Jennifer was two, her grandmother gave her a homemade doll, a canvas-covered human form without the eyes, nose, or mouth.   The doll looked more like a dough figure, without much form, but Jenny loved it just the same.  From her earliest memory, she was clutching the doll.  She named it Nanna.

Nanna went with Jennifer to college (her friend Jill was the only adult person who knew this, and was sworn to secrecy
.)  Nanna had been re-covered more times than Jennifer could remember, but she was still Nanna.  When Jennifer was troubled, she would find her Nanna and hold the old cloth doll, her comforter in a world not so nice. She would absently rub the cloth through her fingers like a tailor checking the fabric of a suit, or a latter-day Captain Queeg. When she caught herself rubbing her doll she would laugh, thinking that whether one used metal balls or cloth, is wasn’t about the material.

She had left Nanna home for the trip to find Bigfoot.  She didn’t want to risk her
doll in such a harsh environment.

Alone on the mountain, Jennifer moaned in her sleep and thrashed her legs. She turned over into a ball and twisted the tail of her shirt and pulled it up to her face. She opened her eyes to full dark.  It was never completely dark in her apartment. Streetlights brightened the corners of her window in the middle of the night.  She moved and pain lanced through her head, making her cry out. 
Where am I?
 

And then she remembered. The wilderness.  And the dead things.  She had never wanted to be in the city, any city so bad in her life. The places she had thought of as scary in New York
City she would have willingly traded for the wilderness. She would gladly be in Central Park at midnight, to be able to jog a few blocks away from trouble and to civilization. The NYPD patrolled there, didn’t they? Won’t be any cops up here. She pushed up to sit. Her arms shook and the pain bounced in her head.  As she sat up she saw that it was not completely dark. A half moon and starlight made the clearing behind her a place of shifting shadows. 

I want Nanna.

The thought came to her without warning, that she really
did
want Nanna.  Jennifer Kruger, a twenty-eight year old adventurer, sometime Deadhead who used to follow Jerry Garcia, owner of two cats, copy editor for a small romance novel publisher in Portland, and woman who sometimes thought she could handle just about anything - now just wanted her Nanna, her doll. She didn’t want Carl, just Nanna. And she didn’t care who knew.  She would tell the world.

If I live.

For the first time, she began to have the notion that she would not make it out of the woods alive. You don’t want to end up like Mr. Ferragamo Oxford back there, for things to snack on, do you? Something crashed far off, on the other side of the clearing, and she moaned.

Gotta get out of here, gotta leave, gotta  run.

Pain flashed as she tried to stand, fighting panic.  She whooped, fought for air, and got to her feet, trembling, her legs weak, her mind screaming for her to run.

If you panic now, Jen, she told herself, you are go
ing to die here for sure.  Make a fire, wait for morning, then make a huge fire, catch some attention.  She shook, afraid of every shadow, every noise making her jump, and she slid down to her knees.  She clasped her left hand over her right to stop the shake, then scraped up some twigs and fumbled in her pack for her lighter.

Jennifer woke in the night, the fire at her side a small mound of embers. She sat up slowly, her head a dull throb.  She pulled her water bottle from her pack and took a long swallow, then another, and snapped the lid back on.

If I make it through the night . . .

A shadow moved in the clearing, dancing on the breeze. The shadow joined with others and then moved away, a solo disco of darkness and light.  Jennifer didn’t think she could possibly be more scared than she had been earlier, but she was wrong.

The shadow hopped on one leg, and where the head should have been, the moon peeked through. The lunar skull skipped on the shoulders of a one-legged man, a ghostly dance by Mr. Ferragamo Oxford.

Jennifer moaned and shrunk back against the tree, the bark lancing pain through her shirt.

This is not happening, Jenny. This is a shadow.

Instead of running, she was unable to move. Her mind screamed the insanity of what she was watching, her body a rigid knot as the shadows played in the dark. She clutched her pack to her face, and began to stroke the cloth as if Nanna were there.

In the early light of morning, the shadows were gone, and Jennifer knew what she would do. She wasn’t going to take the time to build a fire. She stood and carefully checked her body, wiped her forehead, and ate an energy bar. She carefully took the items out of her pack:  Two energy bars, a thirty-two ounce water bottle (minus a few swallows) a pocket knife, some rope, a lightweight sleeping bag, a piece of jerky, a star guide, a first aid kit, and a paperback by Michael Connelly,
The Brass Verdict
.

She stretched, ignored the pain, and walked to the edge of the clearing.  She talked herself through the next part.

“Walk through the clearing, Jenny old girl, yep, just walk through it.”

She started into the clearing, walking on a careful line to the remains of the man. He was in the same position as the day before. So he didn’t dance after all. She stared at the remains. The ant (or its cousin) from the day before
, scooted out along the leg, then hurried back out of sight. Well, more of your brothers will find Mr. Farragamo here when the day warms up. She looked around, thinking that whatever had been feasting on him might be back for another snack. She turned and walked toward the other shoe. She stared at the foot, and stepped back and took a deep breath. It was daylight, and she was going to get tough. Get out of here.

She began talking to herself again. “Walk through the clearing, Jenny. Walk to the nearest stream. Walk downhill to a logging road. Get the fuck out of here.”

She had read somewhere that the Indians had logged the place to the point of unsustainable yield, whatever that meant, so there must be plenty of logging roads on the mountain.  Find a logging road.  Follow it down to a bigger road.  Get saved.

A good plan.

By midmorning she was well beyond the clearing. The game trail she had been following ended at a sheer cliff of basalt rock, a hundred feet to the forest below. She worked her way around the cliff, sliding on her butt and grabbing branches to slow her journey. At the bottom, in the forest again, she drank deeply from her water bottle. She ate an energy bar and began walking toward what looked like another opening in the trees.

As she got closer, she could see the remnants of a large forest fire, some trees with upper limbs burned, and then she stood at the edge of a blackened, burned forest. Dark limbless trees pointed to the sky, like exclamation points (use sparingly, Detective Biscoani!). Across the scorched valley a rock wall stood watch over the desolation. As she made her way through the wasteland, it reminded Jennifer of pictures she had seen of Hiroshima after the atomic blast. At least she could see where she was going for the first time since she had entered the wilderness.

There! A car, a pickup truck in the burned out clearing. She began to run, a ragged scream coming out as a croak. As she got closer the pickup danced away, and she ran harder, dodging blackened trees. The truck changed into a tree and then a rock, and she sank down to her knees, too exhausted to cry. She sat like that until the sun was hot, and she rose up and started walking, the illusion of a truck already gone from her mind. 

Jennifer walked aimlessly through the seared landscape. Tendrils of black dust rose up and swirled around her legs. A shadowy specter of ash floated behind her, marking her progress.

At the rock wall, she found another body. Her mouth was dry. Breathe in, breathe out.

Painted fingernails. Like her Nanna.

She took a souvenir.

No one’s gonna mind.

Eventually she wandered away from the rock wall, back toward the forest. She sang to herself and fingered the fabric of her shirt, clutching the artifacts of her passing.

C
hapter
2

Cold River Indian Reservation

Sidwalter

“Daddy, I want to ask you something.” Nine year old Laurel threw her bag on the floor of the Suburban and hopped in
to the passenger seat. She reached for her seatbelt and looked at her dad. It was an ongoing question, one that usually led to an argument.

“No. Not if it’s about
Twati
.”

“Daddy, why not?”

Smokey sighed. He grabbed the radio microphone from the console and announced that he was on his way to work. “Dispatch, be advised, I have my daughter with me.”

“Copy, call Chief Andrews in his office.”

“Three oh three, copy.” Lieutenant Mark “Smokey” Kukup of the Cold River Tribal Police Department wore a gray and black uniform, kept his hair long, traditional, braided on each side. His face was Chinook, the high cheekbones and dark skin of the Columbia River Tribes. He looked at Laurel. Sometimes he thought she was a twenty-one year old in a nine year old body. He rarely said no. He had been in Afghanistan for three tours, much of Laurel’s life, and it was hard for him to say no, but he was learning. He would hold firm on this request. She wanted to study with a
Twati
, an Indian doctor, a shaman. “Laurel, I don’t want you to learn that type of stuff.”

“
Ila
says I should. She says I have a gift.”

“Your
Ila
, your grandmother, needs to speak to me about it first.” He backed the SUV out from the log house he shared with his mother and daughter and pulled onto the drive. The house, barn, and outbuildings sat in a large grassy meadow. Behind the house the wooded slope ran for miles to the west toward Mt. Wilson. The driveway curled through the meadow, over a small hill for a half mile, and then ended on a wide gravel road that eventually led to State Highway Twenty-six, the Mount Hood Highway that ran through the reservation from Portland to Madras.

“Daddy.”

Smokey turned to look at his daughter. She was so beautiful she made his heart ache. She had her mother’s face and shiny black hair down to her waist.

Like her mother’s face was once. Before Amelia  started drinking again. Before the parties. Before meth, and her death when he was halfway around the world.

“Daddy, couldn’t I just learn a little bit?”

”Laurel, I will talk to
Ila
about this, just don’t ask me. From what I hear, you already know too much
k’inut
(vision).”

“I won’t ask until you talk to
Ila,
Dad, but
k’inut
is traditional, and you try to be a traditional Wasco, to live that way, right Daddy?”

Smokey nodded. Problem was,
Ila
had made all decisions for Laurel for the past several years, and in the eight months he had been home, it had been tough for all of them. And he knew Laurel was trying. His biggest fear was that he wouldn’t be there for her. 

They reached the highway and Smokey pulled out into the summer traffic. Eighteen wheelers interspersed with pickup campers, motor homes pulling boats.

“Daddy.”

He smiled. Sometimes she reminds me of me.

“Daddy, do you
have
to go to work today? Let’s go to Redmond, shop at Wal-Mart for stuff.”

“I need to help with a narcotics search warrant. Stuff is what we don’t need, Baby. But we’ll go tomorrow and shop for
Ila
.”

“Daddy, weren’t you supposed to call the chief?”

Smokey made the call, and when the chief came on the line, he listened.

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” Smokey flipped the phone closed. If they were activating the Tribal Search and Rescue team, they would have to put the narcotics search warrant on hold, depending on how quickly they found the lost person. Or the body. Sometimes these things ended in a rescue. More often than not, with the rivers and wild terrain they ended with a body recovery. Fifteen years ago three hikers had wandered into the wilderness area of the reservation and became lost on Whitewater Glacier. As far as he knew, they were still there.

“Uh, Laurel, we have a search and rescue activation. A woman is lost near Parker Creek.”

“Do I know her? She a tribal member?”

“No.”

“Indian?”

“No,
Šiyápu
(white) woman.”

Laurel turned in her seat and cocked her leg up under her. “What’s a
Šiyápu
woman doing up there on Mt. Jefferson?”

“Don’t know, but she’s been lost for over twenty-four hours.”

“Can I go?”

“No.”

“But Dad, you’ve been teaching me.”

Smokey shook his head. No. He
had
been teaching her the traditional ways to track animals and humans. Laurel shook her head, side to side. She didn’t give up easy.

“Laurel.”

She hung her head down, then looked out at the crowded highway. “Anyways Dad, what’s this
Šiyápu
woman doing up there in the wild?”

“It’s ‘anyway’ not ‘anyways’ and I don’t know, but I’m go
ing to find out.”

“Whatever,” and then Laurel quickly added, “Daddy, I hope she’s okay, this
Šiyápu
woman.”

Smokey nodded. On these things he had his doubts. He had spent a lot of his life up on Mt. Jefferson, and even in summer a city person could last one night. Maybe. Two nights, remote possibility. Three nights, never.

“Is she pretty?”

“Laurel!” Smokey grinned, and then laughed. Since his return from Afghanistan the last time, Laurel had tried to play matchmaker. Smokey understood, but everything had its own time. Laurel was quiet as he drove into the Agency, the City of Cold River at the southern edge of the reservation.  She started to say something as they drove down the hill, then closed her mouth and stared
out the window.

She had been told she had a
gift,
that she could be a true seer, could make objects seem to be alive. A shaman. A witch was how he thought of it, but people with such gifts were often revered (or feared) within the tribe. Yes, he was traditional, but that didn’t mean he wanted his daughter to take up such a consuming and possibly dangerous activity.

He pulled up at the community center where Laurel had activities planned for lunch. He leaned over the console and she threw her arms around him and kissed his cheek. He didn’t think she could stay mad for long. He held her a moment longer than usual until she started to squirm, and he let her go.

“Call
Ila
, have her pick you up if I’m busy, or go to Aunt Nola’s house. Okay?”

“Dad?”

“Uh –.”

“Dad, if I can’t study with
Twati,
can I have a ‘MySpace?’”

Smokey just looked at his daughter. Laurel laughed, jumped out, and didn’t look back as she walked into the center.

Cold River Tribal Police Lieutenant Mark “Smokey” Kukup watched for a moment after his daughter entered the doors to the gym, and slowly put the Suburban in gear. He thought later if he had known what waited for him up on the mountain, he would have run after his baby girl, taken her shopping at the Wal-Mart Supercenter down there in Redmond. Let someone else go up on the mountain. Or no one. Leave the dead their place. 

You’ve seen horror enough in four years in Afghanistan.

But he hadn’t seen this. And this new horror would involve everyone he loved.

Jennifer’s eyes fluttered. She squinted against the sun, and closed her eyelids to feel the warmth. She was lying on a rock in the middle of an opening in the trees, the clearing from the night before a mile behind. The morning had been spent wandering, stumbling, falling, and finally she had crawled up on a rock in the sun, the mid-morning heat from the rock soothing, a stone womb to comfort her.

Nanna.

She clutched her Nanna, holding tight with her right hand, brushing the fingers of her left hand across Nanna’s smooth surface.  She held Nanna to her chest and fell asleep, dreaming of the doll she had left at home on her bed. 

But Nanna was here now, keeping her safe.