Dark Doses Page 8

  I confess that I was tempted.

  The precious liberties and semi–autonomy granted by the US government to Native American tribes enticed me to exploit that modest degree of freedom in a speculative way. Who wouldn’t consider it? Native American people are such a rich, diverse culture, rife with fantastic and astounding lore.

  Surely there were plenty of opportunities to bridge that incredible wealth of folklore into a modernized work of speculation. Right?

  Wrong.

  Every attempt I made seemed hypocritical. After discarding a number of ideas, I reached the conclusion that this is not my story to write. I am not privileged or worthy enough to tell it. That right belongs to someone with a Native American heritage. Not me.

  What kind of speculative story could I write involving Native Americans?

  Sadly, one of exploitation. How stereotypical.

  Except in this case the tribe voluntarily enjoys a lucrative and socially–impactful role, and one where tribal lore prevails.

  #

  Suffering death came to her door every day that week. Most often the grim faces appeared solo, but sometimes family, lovers, or dear friends accompanied, each suffering in their own fashion. Alise greeted them as she had for the past 18 years, with a welcome embrace, rapt attention, compassion, and empathy—always limitless empathy, at least she made it seem.

  There was the AIDS victim on Monday. The frail woman succumbing to congestive heart failure on Tuesday. Wednesday brought a shriveled coal miner enduring black lung and advanced emphysema while Thursday bore a man nearing end–stage hepatitis.

  They arrived just before the sun blazed the start of its daily sojourn across the midsummer New Mexico sky. With their help, Alise had quilts prepared, financials transacted, paperwork completed, and instructions reviewed, all within an hour before she ushered them on their way to their final stop.

  After 18 years and an encyclopedia’s worth of maladies, none gave her pause anymore; well–rehearsed empathy made for a fine hooded cloak. Secure within her shell, she marveled over each victim’s courage and fortitude in the throes of their personal torture. Such stamina and resolve they showed. Such unbreakable will.

  Should fate be so unkind to her, could her spirit be as indomitable?

  No. Far from it, she feared.

  Cloak or not, Friday’s victim wrenched her heart. It was a kid, Thad, 10–years–old and living too long with the leukemia that played a vicious game of hide–and–seek with no intent of surrender.

  “I won’t hurt you,” Alise said as she delved the boy, who recoiled at her touch like she was some kind of ghoul.

  Her turn to cringe followed. Thad’s inner beauty—an unsullied cherub so new to discovery, so eager to experience, to flourish—neared total eclipse from the defiling shadow.

  It was cruel. Wrong. Frustrating.

  Such an innocent, promising spirit should not be shackled to a fatally poisoned container.

  Kids were the hardest, chinking her armor like nothing else could. As her hands left his face, Thad’s mom stood beside her and wept tears of sorrow and joy that came with every bitter end welded to a desperately hopeful beginning.

  Alise knelt before the boy’s gaunt figure and took his trembling fingers, tiny popsicles lying limp in her grasp.

  “What’s your favorite place in the whole, wide world?”

  “San—” Thad gulped a raspy breath. “San Diego Zoo.”

  “Perfect.”

  She knew just the quilt and fetched it for him.

  “One of my favorite zoo exhibits.” She unrolled at his feet a lanky polar bear rearing up to embrace an ice–shrouded dawn of crystalline blues on white.

  “Could you imagine riding on the back of something so big, strong, and fearless? If he carried you on your last ride, would that make it better? Something extra special?”

  For a fleeting instant, the boy’s exhausted eyes lit. It was enough.

  It wasn’t possible to provide too many special touches for the children. Never would be. Not for her.

  The rest of the day Alise couldn’t quilt, could barely breathe until Thad’s moment finally came in the fire of the setting sun. She sobbed all night over the senseless waste, as she’d done for every child, beginning with her own.

  Light tapping woke her. She wrapped her robe against the dawn chill and shuffled to the door. Two faces waited there in the mottled light, a much older man with a younger woman clutching his arm.

  “Hi. I… I’m Susan Campbell and this—”

  “Go away,” Alise said, harsher than she intended. “I can’t help anyone on the weekend.”

  “Please! If you’d just listen—”

  “Monday. Come back then.”

  She whirled from Susan Campbell’s desperate expression and went to the kitchen to brew tea. As extra dollops of honey spiraled into the cup, tires crunched on gravel and faded.

  They would be back, she knew, and many more besides, with more Thads and other kids like him in an endless parade of victims. An 18–year–long parade. Despite her heavy touch with the honey jar, bitterness persisted on each swallow and a dull ache began deep in her chest.

  At lunch, Junior dropped by to collect fees and forms from the prior week’s tally. As usual, he politely declined her offer of a sandwich and conversation and hurried off with claims of too many pressing tribal duties. He was very young and vibrant, brimming with enough life for three. Alise couldn’t fault him. Who would want to linger any longer than necessary at death’s last way station?

  She spent the day quilting and, other than the rattling cycle of the window air conditioner, oblivious to the passing hours. But the Hessian cloth backings abraded her, more than usual, even through her thick calluses. Each stitch dragged, as if she were forcing her needle through sun–cured cowhide. The ache persisted, fluttering under her breastbone like an ailing, second heart. She willed herself on until her hands could take no more and she surrendered her weary body early to bed.

  Heavy thuds woke her at daybreak. Susan Campbell stood at the door again, alone this time.

  “I’m really sorry, but—”

  “Monday. That’s the rule.”

  Susan’s voice pleaded behind her as Alise shuffled to the kitchen, refusing to listen. This one will be bad.

  As if echoing her worry, the ache inside her throbbed, worse than yesterday.

  Sunday wore a veil of dense clouds wrapped with an oppressive air, ominous, but the threatened storm never broke. Alise struggled. She felt as if she’d run a full marathon with collapsed lungs and a seized heart. The ill feelings intensified as the gloomy day ground on. Late in the afternoon she called Junior to come fetch her.

  By the time he dropped her off on the high bluff, the ceremony was nearly finished. Alise stood patiently outside the circle, shielded from gusts spawned off the stillborn storm, and stared out over the vast burial ground far below.

  In the distance her shack was a speck nudging the foot of Singing Mountain, the name of her solitary peak neighbor she much preferred over its given Mescalero title. Sitting on her porch late in the evening as the dry southwest winds spun dust devils in a dervish dance, the mountain rocks keened and moaned a somber tune of appreciation, as though the mountain acknowledged her importance in the relationship they shared.

  After the breeze bore away the last ceremonial chant, Ulysses hobbled over. The wise one had to be near 90. Though his stooped frame, gnarled hands, and etched wrinkles suggested an even more ancient age, Alise envisioned a spirit eternally young and energetic whenever she spoke to the medicine man.

  “A busy week for you,” the deep voice said, booming in her ears even after completing two hours of continuous chanting. “With an especially tragic and difficult end. I am sorry.”

  “It’s why I needed to see you, Ulysses. I feel… pained. Still. Here two days afterward. Never before like this, though. Not this bad. I wonder if—”

  “Your pain,” Ulysses said, turning to her and leveling a
gaze from razor sharp eyes the color of beach sand, “began well over 18 years ago. Mostly, you’ve kept it away. Suppressed. I’ve watched it lurk within you, biding its time, which has finally come.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Take my hand.”

  She frowned and placed her fingers on his fleshy palm. He clenched his grip and her hand felt like it caressed the heart of a blast furnace. Just as quickly, he let go. Her fingers tingled as they cooled in the high mesa breezes.

  “Tomorrow, you can have Junior drive you to Alamogordo and let the big hospital and formally–educated doctors examine you. Or you can accept my diagnosis. There is darkness inside you, Alise, feeding, and being fed by, your pain. You’ve seen it countless times in the people who come to you. It has rooted in your breast and spread throughout. And it cannot be dispelled, not by medicines of mine or any other.”

  “Then… I’m going to die?”

  The corner of his mouth twitched, as if he’d heard a wry joke. “From the darkness? Yes.”

  “How long?”

  He drew a deep breath and gazed out over the parched scrub and puckered swales of the burial ground.

  “A question we all might like to know at some point, though we fear hearing too short a time or, worse perhaps, too long. I don’t have that vision, Alise, but my concern for you is the latter. You understand I mean you no disrespect. None before have offered anywhere near the years of unselfish, devoted service you’ve given my people and, more importantly, humanity.”

  “It’s….” Tiny prickles of heat blossomed on her cheeks. Compliments from Ulysses came very rarely if at all.

  “Perhaps I should have mentioned it before.” His voice wavered ever so slightly.

  “No need to….” She swallowed hard. “Thank you, Ulysses. For telling me… everything.”

  “You had the right to know. So then, you’ve met the one to replace you?”

  That caught her off–guard. “No. No, I can’t say I have.”

  “I see.” Again, his mouth twitched. “Perhaps soon you will.” He looked at her. “Should I call Junior to come pick you up?”

  She nodded. He limped off.

  As long as she could remember, she had idolized the desert southwest: rugged, enduring landscapes, with tenacious life forms able to persist in the harshest of conditions. It inspired her. A thing to draw strength from beneath her cloak of detached rapport.

  No longer.

  Her armor had failed. Fate crooked a cruel finger and the terror she witnessed once–removed within those parading past her door now snatched her in its clutches and squeezed. Her source of strength vanished, a wisp of sand smoke dispersed by the desert wind.

  What could she do? How to go on?

  “Alise?”

  “Y–yes, Ulysses?”

  “For you… your exact time remaining… I might not know for sure. About you and what lies in your heart, I know much better. You’ve shared your heart with so many whose resolve needed one last boost to carry them to the end. Think about that. Depend on it for yourself. Your heart will not fail you. Of that I’m certain. Understand?”

  Hot tears flooded her eyes. She nodded without turning.

  “One more thing. The decision when to go up the mountain is yours. Yours alone. There’s no shame, no regret should you decide to do so before your replacement arrives.”

  Now she spun and blinked at a trio of Ulysses jostling within the prism of her teardrops. “But I can’t just go, not without—”

  “You can.”

  “What about people who—”

  “We will find a way. The mountain will see to it. As it always has.”

  The ride back with Junior seemed much longer this time. They shared the desert silence until his tires skidded to the end of her gravel drive.

  “You’ll call when you decide to go to the mountain?”

  “What?” Halfway out the door of the rusty Bureau pickup, she paused. “Of course. You’ll want to come collect the money and papers for that week.”

  “Actually,” he said in a hushed voice, “I’d like to drive you over to the trail head. With your permission. That wouldn’t be a problem, would it?”

  “No.” She stepped out into the swirling dust. “No problem at all. Tell me, Junior, how old are you?”

  “Just turned 17. Last month.”

  “You’ve been driving me places how long?”

  “Three years.”

  “I’m not sure how you got stuck with me this long, but thanks for all your help. You’ve made a difference in my life and I really appreciate it.”

  “Likewise,” he said, serious as he’d ever sounded.

  She shut the door and the desert silence swallowed him up.

  The next morning Susan Campbell stared at her for an uncomfortably chilly minute before speaking.

  “Now can we see you?”

  “Of course.”

  A fragile old man came through the door with Susan, carefully led by her into the small sitting room. Guiding, positioning, correcting, she manipulated his every move like a department store mannequin.

  “His name is Edmund Willis Campbell. My father.” Susan spoke in a near whisper. She knuckled his chin and brushed a fingertip across his lips.

  Edmund stared ahead. Not one blink altered his vacant expression.

  “Until six years ago,” Susan said, “Daddy was a man more alive than any other. That’s when the doctor diagnosed Alzheimers. Daddy told him no.”

  “No?”

  “His magic word. Had the power to halt a forest fire or stop a twister.” She grimaced. “At least until then.”

  Edmund stared, unwilling or unable to offer any words of his own now, magic or otherwise.

  “Daddy’s disease is a particularly aggressive strain. What luck to get the biggest and baddest, huh? But that’s his nature, after all: never settle for anything second–class or merely average. So I guess I shouldn’t expect—” She caught herself, almost by surprise. “No. I should expect.” She shuddered.

  “Anyway, the doctor said it would destroy him. Bit–by–bit. A little each day. Not exactly those words, you understand? Close though. I remember Daddy snorting. Laughing at him. ‘You’ll write a paper on the fight you’re about to see,’ he told the doctor. Said he’d win awards. Prestige. Glory.”

  She sighed, squeezed her eyes shut.

  “Somewhere deep inside, I… I feel he’s still fighting. But….”

  “But the doctor was right.” Alise moved to stand before Edmund Willis Campbell.

  “He was exactly right. No paper happened. No headlines. Glory. None of that. Only what the doctor described.”

  Alise squeezed the woman’s slumped shoulder. “I’m Alise. I just want to check your father. This won’t hurt him.”

  Susan nodded.

  Alise placed her hands alongside Edmund’s haggard face and delved, probing what Ulysses called the spirit’s contour lines. Sometimes the ruptures and devastation jolted her, a natural reaction to perceived atrocities, Ulysses had explained, which grave illness or mortal injury could inflict upon a person’s essence. Then there was the darkness—a smothering stain that blotted out the spirit like crude oil atop an ebb tide.

  She braced for the worst.

  Behind her, Susan chattered on about her father. About irony. He, a blue chip athlete and revered university coach, proud to exhibit championship form and grace in every competition, now reduced to an embarrassing also–ran, unable to even concede the contest. A contest he didn’t belong in.

  “So… so….” Susan’s voice faltered. When she continued, her words were ice. “So this is my decision. I’m taking this step on his behalf, asking for your help to put an end to it.”

  After Alise finished, they eased Edmund into the well–worn rocking chair and headed into the kitchen. Alise put a pot of water on the stove and prepared two tea cups while she pondered how to present her findings. This wasn’t going to be easy.

  “No sugar. Honey?”<
br />
  Susan sat, hands folded, one breath dragging slowly after another through parted lips.

  “Fine.”

  “Milk?”

  “No.”

  “I apologize for turning you away this weekend.”

  “No need. I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

  “Obviously, you understand what I do.”

  “Yes. I did my research. Considered all my… alternatives.”

  Alise knew what the woman had learned: nothing but bad options for a hopeless situation she didn’t deserve.

  No one did.

  “Please understand that my role has specific responsibilities. Such as on weekends allowing the Mescalero their customs. They conduct a ceremony, a sacred rite of passage for those departed the week before, which is an essential part of the birth–to–death cycle. To the tribe, that ceremony is as vital as watering a freshly–planted field, tilling and tending the growing crops, carefully harvesting the results, and preparing the soil for another planting. Upset any of it and the cycle is ruined with horrible consequences.”

  “Of course. I’m really sorry. Had no idea.”

  The teapot whistled and then shrieked a protest as she snatched it and poured.

  “Susan, your father isn’t dying. At least not yet.” She carried the cups over and sat across the kitchen table from the frowning woman. “Did the doctor mention that?”

  “He… suggested Daddy’s body might be strong enough to last 15 years or so with this. 15 years.” The frown cut deeper furrows into Susan’s brow. “Understand me now. That’s not my father in there. Not anymore. It might still look something like him, but he’s gone. You saw.”

  “I saw. You’re wrong and exactly right. It is your father. And he is still fighting.”

  “Look… I’ve no idea what you did or how you know. I’ll take your word for it. But what you can’t know is… he wouldn’t want this. He would beg me to do what I’m asking of you.”

  “Really? It seemed to me he wasn’t ready to give up. When the doctor said what was going to happen, you mentioned how your father reacted. Would you expect anything less now?”

  Through the steam wisps curling off her untouched tea, Susan stared at her. “You don’t get it. Even in clear defeat, a true champion still competes. He must. He’s just waiting for the final whistle to blow. That’s what I’m doing.”