Dark Doses Page 9

  “Maybe so. If I agree, though, you realize he must go up the mountain alone. You can’t help him, or else his spirit won’t soar free.”

  “Another Indian rule? That’s ridiculous. Stupid. How many who come see you can actually make that climb by themselves?”

  “True. Some can’t manage the final one after climbing so many mountains by now.”

  The tea tasted bitterer than ever. Alise added a generous glob of honey and shoved the jar toward Susan, who still stared at her. Waiting.

  “The mountain plays its role in the spirit passage,” Alise said. “For centuries it has completed the cycle for the Mescalero and ancestor tribes, everything I described to you before. For people with enough resolve and determination to accomplish that one, last ascension, the reward is unmatched. But if you drag your father up there, you’ve broken the cycle with bad consequences for his spirit.”

  “With all due respect to the tribe’s customs,” Susan deliberately spaced out her words, “but this will finally be over.”

  “It will. But no different than if you had… chosen one of those other alternatives.”

  “You won’t help me then?”

  “If you insist on doing this, pay the fee, complete the paperwork, I can’t say no. Be certain, though, who I’m helping here.”

  “I insist.” She scooted her chair back. “Let me get my purse.”

  Susan rushed through the official forms, scribbling names, numbers and required personal information. She passed them over along with an envelope stuffed with bills. As Alise thumbed through the ten 100 dollar notes, she recited another of her tribal responsibilities.

  “For the client service it performs, the tribe incurs certain fees. There are affidavits and death certificates to be filed. Material and handling costs. Vehicle disposals. Obituary information to publish. Lawyers and the government to pay. A portion of the money also goes into a trust. That trust funds a lobbying effort intended to make the federal government institute a nationwide policy sanctioning and supporting assisted suicide.” She looked up. “Any questions?”

  Susan took her first sip of tea. “None goes to you?”

  Always the same question.

  “I get a stipend. A living allowance that pays the bills and lets me do what I do for the tribe.”

  “Ah.” Susan glanced around the spartan kitchen. “The tribe isn’t one for expensing luxuries, are they?”

  “Where would you prefer the money go? Do you have his birth certificate?”

  Alise accepted and added the notarized paper to the mix before placing everything in the steel lockbox she kept under the sink. Then she took out and sanitized a long silver needle in the stove’s flickering blue flame. Susan watched her every move and finished her tea, without once touching the honey jar.

  They went back into the sitting room where Edmund remained as they’d left him. Dawn’s cheery glow streamed through the window, bathing his features in fiery oranges and reds. He greeted it like any statue would: impassive and unmoved.

  “I need a drop of his blood for the quilt,” Alise extracted a single white thread and cloth swatches from her sewing box and squatted by Edmund’s side.

  Susan frowned. “Why did you bother to—”

  “In case a client changes their mind. Which does occasionally happen. Wouldn’t want to cause an infection.”

  “Or a lawsuit.”

  Alise tucked one thread end into the corner of her mouth. She flipped over Edmund’s hand and gently extended his fleshy pinky. With a single thrust, she stabbed the tip.

  The statue roared to life. Edmund jerked away and flailed his wounded hand as if it were ablaze.

  “Take this.” Alise shoved the needle back to Susan and snatched at Edmund’s waving arm.

  The needle struck again. “Ouch,” Susan cried.

  Alise corralled Edmund’s arm long enough to draw the thread across the beads of bright crimson before she yanked a swatch from her robe pocket and wrapped his finger.

  “Hold this for him.”

  Susan knelt and did so. Smears of red coated one of her fingers.

  “Did I do that?”

  “It was me. Shhh, Daddy. It’s okay now.” Susan held firm to her father’s hand and stroked his arm to soothe him. “I’ve always been clumsy with needles. Can’t sew a single stitch.”

  Alise handed her another swatch and went to the storeroom. Five minutes later, the blood–soaked thread lay embedded in the quilt she selected for Edmund. She stitched a second thread alongside his, one soaked in her own blood, thus properly completing the ritual requirement.

  Not that it would matter for him.

  In the sitting room, Susan’s head nodded in approval at the choice of quilt. On it, a burly Native American warrior confidently forded his way through a menacing forest in the glare of a sputtering torch. Numerous glowing eyes and dark shapes surrounded him, but none offered any challenge.

  Alise rolled up the quilt and tied it with jute. Then she described the short drive over to the trail head and the winding path to the mountain top. Most victims needed the better part of a day to make the ascent to where a great cleft rent one of the mountain’s shoulders. To where the mouth of the chute waited.

  “The burlap backing of the quilt faces down on the steel lining of the chute,” Alise said. “Whenever you’re ready, just hold on to the edge of the quilt and tip yourself in. No need to run or push off.”

  Susan shook her head. “He won’t be able to—”

  “Here.” Alise handed her several oversized silver safety pins. “Wrap him in the quilt and pin the sides together. He won’t have to hold on.”

  Susan stared at the pins. “I didn’t think I’d be the only person with someone who couldn’t…. And… and they still decide to go ahead with….”

  “You’re not and they do. It changes nothing, though.”

  “Changes?”

  “His spirit. Consequences.”

  “Oh. That.”

  “Tribal custom says an individual is given life, the most personal gift possible, from the heart of the cosmos. Only the individual can rightfully decide when to surrender it back.”

  “Surrender? Seems like another word would be better.”

  “Choose one, then. Something close.”

  “You believe this?”

  “I—” Days wound back to a bittersweet moment 18 years earlier. When she had made her own choice.

  “Yes, I do. Now.”

  “Good for you. I can’t. Neither can Daddy.” Susan gathered her purse. “I’m very sorry if the—cycle, you called it?—gets ruined, but he’s not Mescalero. So in his case, why should they care? What does it really matter? Besides, you’ve got your money now, your trust, your… stipend.”

  “His death is still a ways off. It’s not his time yet.”

  Susan’s eyes flashed. “Who really determines that? What condition decides it, beyond any doubt? Arguments have raged for decades and won’t stop, even if Congress issues some ground–breaking policy. It won’t matter. People like my father will still get neglected or shortchanged or screwed. And, at the end of the day, it’ll still come down to an excruciating, very personal decision where you do what you absolutely have to do. Whatever the reason or cost.”

  Susan laid a hand on her father’s cheek. “I’ll take him up that mountain. Wrap him like you said. Kiss him. Hold him tight one last time. Then, send him on his way. When it’s over, whatever comes next, he will be much better off. That’s the only thing that matters.”

  An impassioned speech, one Alise had heard numerous times—including once, years before, uttering from her own lips.

  Dust swirling in their wake, the Campbells backed down the drive and turned toward Singing Mountain. Many hours passed until Alise felt the mountain’s pull.

  She went out onto the porch into the lingering heat where, moments later, a narrow speck emerged from a protruding buttress set low on the mountain’s westward flank. It arced lazily into the setting sun, tum
bling in a slow end–over–end motion. At its apex, the point when Alise expected a slight flare of sunlight, she held her breath. The object tumbled on, bathed in the sun’s steady glare, until it finally careened out of sight.

  Exactly as she had feared.

  Midstream of that final flight, Edmund Willis Campbell should have departed, his spirit drawn up in the Mescalero way of rejoining the unbridled, creative force of the cosmos, leaving only an empty, spent carcass to tumble back to the dust. But it wasn’t to be.

  “I’m so sorry.” Alise watched the spot in the vast burial ground where he’d vanished.

  As the sun slid behind the western plateaus, her dry lips pursed and blew a weak, feeble whistle—a pitiful note unworthy of marking the end of any contest of significance. She tried again with the same result before giving up.

  Deep inside, the ache throbbed anew.

  The mountain sang to her through the long night, a sorrowful lament sprinkled with wry overtones. Long ago, Ulysses had described to her the mountain gaan residing within the barren peak, claiming it was an unforgiving, overbearing task master and perfectionist. He also said it possessed an impish streak. Over 18 grueling years, Alise could not recall a single instance when her demanding partner seemed less than a megalomaniac.

  The week went on.

  Tuesday brought to her doorstep a detestable man and his battered, near–invalid wife. Despite what she’d told Susan Campbell, she refused to transact with him, certain she had no business abetting the culmination of a long stint of abuse.

  Briefly she felt in danger as the monster raged at her but he stormed off empty–handed, his tires screeching on the road to the mountain. Alise phoned the license plate number to Junior and allowed herself a tiny hope that the woman could be spared a horrible, premature death. That hope evaporated when the mountain’s pull came later.

  On Wednesday, Odette Armstrong declared that she would forever be a crackhead, unable to properly care for herself let alone her infant boy, Derrick. She was quite right, Alise saw. Odette’s years of illicit narcotics prior to and during pregnancy had afflicted tiny Derrick with numerous debilities, several of which would kill him before two more birthdays passed. With a heart of icy lead, Alise made the necessary arrangements.

  In the evening, she watched yet another bundle tumble to earth without any intervening flare of sunlight. As the mountain song bubbled on the evening breeze, she prayed that Derrick at least found some peace and that his mother would find infertility. Soon.

  Gunther and Ted claimed to be at wits end when she opened the door Thursday morning. Both men solemnly attested they wanted to be forever bound in death as a means of cementing their eternal bond. They paid, signed, and she made the preparations feeling wooden, unable to contain her annoyance at two healthy men anxious to abort the prime of their lives. But she didn’t judge them. Oh no. That was not her place.

  Only one object soared from the mountain later in the day. Some time afterwards, the sky blue Camry that had sat in her driveway at daybreak sped by, a lone figure hunched over the wheel.

  So much for utter devotion.

  A parched wind gusted through the night. It diced the mountain’s song into twisted chuckles. Alise smothered her head under the pillow, but the sound permeated her dreams.

  When the ruddy light of Friday greeted her along with a woman and her wheelchair–bound, diabetic mother, Alise was ready for the joke to end. She much preferred the overbearing mountain gaan instead of the obnoxious prankster.

  It was hard to say what might drive her insane first, the now constantly throbbing pain in her chest or the gaan’s apparent amusement at her predicament. She knew neither could be endured much longer. That night, Alise reached a difficult decision.

  Saturday morning she wrote a paragraph of scrawl worthy of a doctor’s prescription and stuffed it into an envelope bearing Susan Campbell’s address. Two weeks later, a blistering reply arrived. The follow–up letter that Alise drafted brought Susan back to her doorstep.

  “How dare you! I loved my father more than anything. Anything!”

  “I know. I’m counting on that.”

  “Counting on what?”

  “Your love for him to help me reach the end. My end.”

  They argued for a while at the kitchen table before Alise played her trump card.

  “Everything you’ve done so far has been for your benefit. For you.” When Susan’s mouth flopped open in denial, Alise rushed on. “That included research, selection, and ultimately you dragging him to see me. You could have just as likely chosen a gun, a knife, poison, gas, or some other unsavory method to end his life, but you brought him here. To the mountain and me: a legalized drive–through clinic dispensing the mercy kill you hoped for. So do this thing. Now, it’s for him.”

  Susan slumped back in the chair.

  “What do you want of me?”

  “Two things actually. I want the quilt he used, and I’m in no shape to scour the desert for it. That’s where you come in. On Friday, I’ll go up the mountain and use that quilt for myself. When my spirit soars free, I’ll take your father’s with me. Another of those Indian rules, you see, this time working in your favor. So stay and help me get through the week, which includes handing Junior the lockbox in case I forget.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Then it’s really over?”

  “Then, I’m gone. You’re on your own.”

  Susan frowned and grudgingly acquiesced.

  Late the next afternoon she trudged in, the warrior quilt tucked under her arm, tear–streaked grime plastering her face. She spoke no words. Explained nothing. Alise didn’t ask what sights Susan encountered combing the burial ground. She recalled in vivid detail her one–time experience 18 years ago.

  Victims came every day that week. Alise helped them while Susan steadfastly assisted Alise without reluctance or complaint. But Susan refused anything to do with quilting, claiming no interest or need.

  Late Thursday night, Alise tore discolored strips out of the pair of blood–stained swatches leftover from the day Edmund died. She used her largest needle to work them into the warrior quilt.

  “I’m coming, Edmund,” Alise told the warrior, who seemed more lost than before. “Your daughter’s provided for both of us.”

  The mountain’s song that night was a lilting lullaby.

  Next morning the two women stood together on the driveway waiting for the sunrise to bring Junior and his truck. Alise snapped three large safety pins on one of her belt loops while Susan hugged the warrior quilt to her chest.

  “Don’t want to worry about holding on,” Alise said. “Much easier this way.” She patted the pins.

  “Right.”

  Nothing in the predawn chill betrayed the heat to come. Alise knew it would be another scorcher though.

  “When’s your flight?”

  “Dinner. I’ll pack after you go. Want me to lock up or anything?”

  “No need.”

  “Who’ll take your place here?”

  “The mountain will see to that.”

  “Sooo… what if someone comes before I leave?”

  “Tell them sorry. We’re closed.”

  “But….” Susan squeezed the quilt. “But they could be like Daddy.”

  “Possibly.”

  “They could just go, couldn’t they? Up to the chute.”

  “Sure. But that’s a lot of trouble. And effort. And extra pain. Why not just pick up that rock over there and use it? Quick and easy.”

  “That’s not—” She shook her head. “Can’t somebody else…? I mean, why couldn’t Junior—”

  “No. It’s their problem. If you’re feeling up to it, you could discuss alternatives with them. Compare notes. Methods. Talk about the pros and cons. But that excruciating, personal decision has to be rethought now. Time for a new choice.”

  “Until some day, when the mountain finally….”

  “Until then.”<
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  Susan’s gaze dropped. She dug a toe into the gravel and ground the dust.

  A pair of headlights cruised up the highway and whipped into the drive. When Junior’s truck skidded to a halt, Susan tossed the quilt into the bed.

  “Wait,” she said and darted into the shack.

  Alise climbed into the passenger seat and laid her head back on the filthy glass. It rapped her skull as the idling engine sputtered.

  “Are you up for this?” Though his face was granite, Junior sounded on the verge of tears.

  “I hope so.” She flashed him a weak smile. “It’s a long, hard path.”

  “Which you’ve done before.”

  “18 years ago. When I was a younger woman.” And less sick but a lot more foolish, she didn’t add.

  Susan returned, wearing a deeper scowl, and passed her the lockbox. Which reminded her—

  “My form’s on top,” Alise told Junior as she set the box on the floorboard. “Birth certificate. Everything. I didn’t pay though.”

  “Deal’s off then,” Junior said. The engine choked. “On second thought, I think the tribe can probably afford it.”

  “Glad to hear it.” Alise glanced back at Susan. “I hope your trip goes well.”

  “Yours too,” she said, her voice croaking.

  And then Susan Campbell fell behind, swallowed up by the same desert silence that blanketed the truck’s cab all the way to the trail head.

  The engine rattled and died with the jingle of Junior’s keychain. They sat and watched the growing glare banish the last of the night murk.

  “Junior, what will you do now? With your life?”

  He nodded. “Been thinking about that. A lot.”

  He thought some more.

  “Washington. I’m going to move there next year. Attend a university. Join the tribal lobby, the one funded by your work.”

  He stared at her. His eyes twinkled.

  “No, Junior. Don’t. Don’t look up to me. I’m not worth it.”

  “Wrong.”

  “You can’t possibly understand what I—”

  “My great grandfather says there are as many shepherds and their ways of tending spirits—both living and dead—as there are stars in the sky. So how can any one way be more right than the other?”