The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (28 page)

“I learned something while I was living up here this winter,” Lecha said. “I might never have found it without coming here.” The dogsled racer’s misery turned to anger. Lecha had thought about trying to reassure him. She did not want to see him sad, but there wasn’t any way to avoid sadness, so she took a seat next to a well-dressed white man with a briefcase. He was an insurance adjustor celebrating his return to the home office in Seattle, and he bought her drinks all the way to Fairbanks. After she had deplaned in Anchorage, Lecha realized her Athabascan dogsled racer had already gone to make sure the baggage handlers took care with his dogs and the sled. Anchorage was where the racer caught the mail plane to the villages, and Lecha got on a plane to Seattle. The insurance adjustor had a seat on the same flight to Seattle. He was getting seat assignments for both of them. Lecha could hear the sled dogs barking and whining, but she walked into the terminal building without looking back.

The insurance adjustor punched in his favorites on the airport bar jukebox. “Spanish Eyes” was for her, he said. He was very drunk on Black Russians. She wondered if she would be able to endure him all the way to Seattle. In those days Lecha had still got sad when she left a lover. The dogsled racer had been ordinary. Lecha didn’t know why leaving him made her sad. Old Yoeme would have said leaving a dull lover was cause for celebration. Look how happy Rose and the old Yupik woman had been as Lecha climbed aboard the little airplane. The
old woman had shouted something, and Rose translated, “She says she won’t crash
this
airplane! Don’t worry!” Lecha had nodded and waved back to them. Yes. Lecha had seen what the old Yupik woman could do with only a piece of weasel fur, a satellite weather map on a TV screen and the spirit energy of a story.

After takeoff for Seattle, the insurance man started to talk about the wild and exciting life he led with his company. They were the largest single insurer of petroleum exploration companies in Alaska. Now that the big push was on, the energy exploration companies had hundreds of employees, and millions of dollars’ worth of sophisticated electronic equipment flying all over the frozen wastes. “Frozen wastes”—the insurance man really believed there was no life on the tundra, nothing of value except what might be under the crust of snow and earth. “Oil, gas, uranium, and gold,” Lecha said, nodding. She was beginning to think she wasn’t so smart after all because she had let this yahoo get a seat beside her. But just as she was about to move to another seat, the last Black Russian took hold of the insurance adjustor. Here comes the story about his wife, Lecha thought. But instead he wrestled his briefcase out from under the seat and opened it. It was full of forms and a stack of eight-by-ten glossy photographs. Before Lecha could make out the black-and-white images, he plopped a print into her lap. At first it appeared to be blank, but then she realized it was snow-covered tundra against a high overcast sky. White on white. The only figure in the field of white was that of a V partially buried in the snow. Lecha shook her head. She couldn’t make out what it was.

“The tail,” he said. “The fuselage is completely buried.”

“Oh.”

“An airplane. What’s left of a Beachcraft Bonanza. We lost the pilot, one geologist, and a quarter-million-dollar sensor unit.” The insurance adjustor spread the other eight-by-tens on the fold-down trays in front of both of them. The corpses had been draped with blankets. The focal point of the photographs seemed to be the scattered, mangled electronic equipment. Against the snow, the bundles of wires torn loose from the shattered black metal boxes reminded her of intestines. Engine oil appeared like black pools of what might have been blood. “Do you have any idea of the cost of the claims to our company?” Lecha shook her head. He was fumbling with more photographs, and this time she could see the crushed propeller and nose of a plane that had broken in half on impact. In the close-ups, an arm dangled out of the front section of the wreckage. Lecha pretended to be squeamish, and the man gathered
up the photographs hastily. But then he had unfolded a topographical map of northwestern Alaska and the Bering Sea. Red Xs were scattered between the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers. Red Xs clustered around the towns of Bethel and Nome. Before he spoke, Lecha knew what he was going to tell her. There had been dozens of unexplained plane crashes.

The insurance man was shaking his head, and Lecha was aware of the odor of alcohol on his breath. “Whiteout,” he said. “Blue sky and sunshine at five thousand feet and then thin clouds or mist. Suddenly a cloud bank or fog. A tiny storm front—not much more than a squall. But they can’t fly out of it. The pilot goes up and it becomes more dense. The pilot drops down and it becomes more dense. The pilot banks sharply to go back to the hole where they first entered and it’s gone.”

Much of Lecha’s life had been spent listening to people when she already knew the story they were telling, and more; more than she might ever reveal. So to break the monotony she asked about radar and altimeters and other sophisticated equipment. He was on the last Black Russian the flight attendant was going to allow him. He blinked dumbly at the map with red Xs, then slowly began trying to refold it. Then he remembered Lecha’s question about radar and electronic equipment. He drew himself up as straight as he could and shook a finger at her. “Electromagnetic fields! They raise hell with everything—the compass, all the navigational equipment! Instruments and radios malfunction. Like that movie, that movie, ah—” Lecha had to help him sit back in his seat. “
The Bermuda Triangle,”
she said. “Yeah, that’s it,” he mumbled. Lecha thought he had passed out, but he opened his eyes once more and said, “None of that stuff is true. It can all be explained.” Then he sank back in his seat.

LECHA HAD LIED to doctors in strange cities, telling them the pain was caused by cancer so they’d prescribe Percodan. As she rode in the taxi from the airport to the broadcast studios in downtown Miami, she realized the “gift,” her power to locate the dead, was the
cause of her pain. The dream she had had on the plane had been a sort of narrative in code. She had dreamed she was tied and unable to escape. She knew there was no possibility of escape, and although she could not see her captor, she knew very soon he would begin to kill her slowly, first cutting away parts of her body, sexual organs, working slowly so that she would not die until he was nearly finished. But just as she was feeling paralyzing horror, there had come an awareness so sudden and terrifying that she had jerked herself awake. She was the torturer. She was the killer.

Suddenly in a rosy, clear light of sun just risen, a voice inside her had begun speaking. She was not sure how long she had. She only knew she could not go on much longer with this business of daytime television “psychic” and special assignments to police departments. She sensed the change as if the power were turning its face, and its eyes, to look toward the world that was emerging.

The assistant producers were running back and forth with pages of dialogue for the teleprompters. The television cameras were gliding and shifting over the bare concrete floor with a dozen camera assistants dragging cables to prevent tangles. Lecha was reminded of bridal gowns, long lace and satin trains requiring many attendants to keep them from catching in doorways or around corners. Lecha curled her feet under the armchair on the talk show set. Her feet were chilled. She had learned how to dress for television—short sleeves, cool fabrics against the heat of the lights, but her feet always got cold. TV studios were all alike—underground, cold concrete floors, and snarls of black cable thicker than her arms. Television was the same everywhere she had ever appeared. No wonder daytime television viewers were interested in all the bizarre and freakish ways one might be injured or fall ill, all the terrifying, hideous ways a psychopath might torture and kill his victims, all the possible and apparently innocent actions that lead up to the disappearance and loss of a small child. The lights they used in television studios must be related somehow to napalm: the light burns the air itself, burns anything it shines on.

Weeks on the regional daytime talk show circuit had prepared Lecha for the freezing feet and sweaty forehead, but she never quite got over the talk show hosts, who did not know what to say and had to read each word on the teleprompter. She had learned a lot since the first time she had appeared on a TV talk show. One thing was to get there an hour early to make sure the producers had her check, implying that otherwise she might not go on the air. Other than that, the work was
easy. The hosts always asked her the same questions. Was she Indian and what kind? How did she learn she had this psychic power? And of course, which were the most important cases she had ever worked on? Lecha had three cases she cited, although she did not think it possible to judge “importance.” To the family or loved one the loss of the beloved was incalculable. Lecha used to talk about the cases that did not end in death, although these had always been rare cases, and in time, they had become even more scarce. But television audiences didn’t want to hear about those cases; TV viewers were mainly interested in death. Whatever had been in the news most recently was what they wanted Lecha to talk about. Today they were going to want to know all about the corpses of the fourteen young boys Lecha had located in the beach dunes of a state park north of San Diego.

The studio audience streamed down the aisles. Lecha closed her eyes so she didn’t have to see them and tried to relax before the show. She is still feeling faint aftershocks of the headache the two San Diego detectives had induced the day before. She feels a reluctance to talk about San Diego. She feels something inside her balking, and she pictures goats from her childhood in Potam, goats that spread the toes of their cloven hooves and dug into the earth refusing to be led or even dragged against their will.

The talk show host is an aging white man who wears heavy makeup. Lecha wants to close her eyes again. Ideally they would do the show with her eyes closed and tell the viewers and studio audience it was necessary in order for her psychic powers to function at their best. Talk show hosts are the television managements’ idea of what women want to watch. Watch doing what? is the question, Lecha thinks. She is good at imagining sex with men. Lecha has taken the time to check out some of her hunches, and although she never talks about it, her “powers” extend into the bed. She watches closely the way the host walks, stops to talk with one of the producers, and then disappears behind banks of long drapes. The keys to this guy are the carefully tweezed and shaped eyebrows. Lecha can’t get past his eyebrows to imagine herself in bed with him. So while the host with the perfect eyebrows and the rest of the crew stumble over jungle snakes of electrical cable, Lecha thinks about high voltage that causes brain tumors. She thinks about tropical lands. Giant dams in the jungles. Hydroelectric power. Guerrillas as quiet and smooth as snakes. Break open the dams and the electric motors of the machinery, machinery that belongs to the masters, stutter to a halt. She has images of these places, because she always reads her newspapers,
she always has since she first took up her line of work. Tropical lands. Old tourism movies of Mexico City. The floating gardens of Xochimilco. Didn’t the priest in Potam always talk on and on about the heights of Spanish culture? And didn’t old Yoeme always say that priest was full of
caca,
with his lecher stories of devil-men shadowing young schoolgirls who wore even a touch of rouge?

The smiling host joins Lecha on the talk show set, and the studio audience is hushed by the teleprompters and sweating production assistants. The show rolls right along, until the host asks about San Diego and the body count still headlining news nationwide. Lecha smiles. She is wearing a conservative black dress, carrying a black kid purse that matches her high heels. She keeps her hair shoulder length. There is no gray. Lecha smiles and prepares to confound them. Her prim appearance makes her refusal to discuss the San Diego case more shocking to the host and studio audience.

“But the killer is dead. The case will be closed as soon as all the bodies are recovered,” the talk show host says, still smiling, not comprehending what is about to happen. This sudden twist means his teleprompter is of no use. He stalls and then takes a quick, desperate look at the teleprompter to see if the producers can get him out of this one. He asks why she won’t talk about it, and Lecha answers that she does not feel like explaining. Although she is speaking in a calm, level tone, her refusal brings scattered laughs and tittering from the studio audience. Fortunately, time is running out for this half of the show, and at last something scribbled hastily appears on the teleprompter. The host is angered now because he has been refused, and because there have been titters from the studio audience. “Well, then,” the host says in oily tones that barely smooth the sarcasm, “you can’t go leaving us empty-handed. We had our hearts set on—” He stops before he finishes that sentence. Lecha nods and smiles. She is familiar with ghoulish disappointment. They must have at least one thrill. At least one hair-raiser or spine-tingler.