Читать книгу Little Red War Gods - Patrick PhD Marcus - Страница 6

Dan turned on the dome light.

“Is it time for my surprise?” asked Becka, stretching to her full length across the cabin.

“Be patient,” he said, smiling as he reached for the glove box. Dan wasn’t really sure when he’d decided to show Becka the item he’d been entrusted with. He hoped the thing wasn’t going to embarrass him, whatever it was. More than that, he hoped sharing it would help him forget to be afraid. He just wanted to slow things down a little and everything would be fine, then he would put the item back and no one would be the wiser.

Hearing him fumble with the latch, Becka pinched his Achilles heel hard.

“Ouch,” Dan grumbled. Past his shoulder she could see he held something biggish, wrapped in black felt.

“What is it?” she asked, reaching for Dan’s retracting hand.

“Hold on, hold on,” Dan said, half-heartedly resisting Becka’s attempts to snatch his prize. “You’re not even supposed to see it. It’s totally against the rules, just like painting your face. I’m not even sure if I’m supposed to see it. No one would tell me.”

Becka pulled back the layers of thick felt one at a time until the item was revealed. A long moment passed while Becka digested what she saw. Dan watched expectantly. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, but breaking the brothers’ simple, clear directive – “Do not show her the item” – was beginning to pick at him.

“My God, Dan, she’s exquisite.” Becka’s tone was awe-struck. “She is…Earth Mother come to life. She is the eagle who sits on this nest. We are her children.” The sacred item was a female statuette, a foot-tall, shiny green miniature carved from indefinable stone. Her features were amazingly lifelike, and clearly those of a young Indian woman. She was naked.

Becka gave Dan his favorite grin as she pulled the Indian girl out of his reach, kissing her in little pecks as she pretended to run her hands though the Indian’s long, green hair. “That’s what I am going to do to you,” she said, half-whispering to the statuette even as she addressed Dan. “Work it out…be hard, make you taste me…”

Dan wasn’t sure how to respond, though he concluded that Becka’s enthusiasm couldn’t be a bad thing as it totally turned him on, his nerves all but forgotten. Becka settled back into the blankets, staring silently into the Indian’s green eyes. She breathed deeply over and over again. After two eternity-drenched minutes, Dan was beginning to feel like a pariah in his own backseat. Regretting his decision to share, he reached for the idol, certain it should return to the security of the glove box. Something in Becka’s expression stopped him.

It was plain to see, even to an eighteen-year-old boy, that Becka was no longer herself. It was like she had been possessed. Her eyes were fixed on the idol’s. Her face had hardened, an unnatural palsy altering her pallor. The blue of her eyes radiated as her pupils contracted.

Dan snapped his fingers loudly. Becka didn’t blink, her features phasing out as if she were underwater. “Becka? Becka!” Dan yelled, shaking her. For his effort, a low, rumbling chant left Becka’s lips and drifted upward like smoke from an extinguished candle. “Becka! You’re freaking me the fuck out,” Dan nearly screamed.

The chant turned from a mournful hum into actual words, Becka’s voice sweet and filled with echoes. To Dan, it sounded like she sang from the shores of another world. He froze next to her and listened, unaware of the panicked tear making its way down his cheek.

“Oh, Great Spirit, whose voice I hear in the winds and whose breath gave life to all, hear me. I come to you as one of your children; I am weak, small, and in need of your wisdom and strength. Let me walk in beauty, and make my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunsets. Make my hands honor the things you have made, and my ears sharp so I may hear your voice. Make me wise, so that I may understand what you have taught my people and the lessons hidden in each leaf and rock. I ask for wisdom and strength, not to be superior to my brothers, but in order to fight my greatest enemy: myself. Make me ever ready to come before you with clean hands and a straight eye, so as life fades like light from the setting sun, my spirit may return to you without shame. Walk in beauty.”

With the word “beauty” still on her lips, Becka blinked hard, her face and body phasing back to the present. Her eyes registered a look of astonishment as they rotated to stare at Dan. He looked dumbfounded.

“What the hell was that?” Dan asked, his lips burning as he chewed them, unprepared to believe she’d been in a trance. Becka said nothing. “Were you singing? Is that from church?” Dan gesticulated wildly as he struggled to grasp the moment. “Was it about death? I mean, it sounded like it was about death. Whose death?”

“I don’t know,” Becka finally muttered, carefully, regretfully, placing the idol on Dan’s lap. She hoped having the idol again would help him feel better. He was upset in a way she was having trouble comprehending. When Dan made no move to lift her, to take her back, to carefully wrap her and put her away, Becka was compelled to speak. “She’s so angelic. Can you see? If you look closely, I’d swear her eyes are sparkling.”

Dan’s focused on the green Indian girl. She was a thing, crafted millennia earlier, whose antiquity had escaped everyone who’d handled it…or rather, almost everyone. As he reached for it, he wondered why his fingertips felt so warm. He wondered how many times the Indian girl had watched a boy and girl in love. As his hand finally closed upon her, Becka intervened, pulling his shoulder playfully towards her so that their lips aligned.

“Last one under the blanket sucks…Sucker!” Dan’s focus instantly, thankfully, shifted to Becka. Placing the idol on the front seat, he dove after her.

Fat drops of rain splashed sideways through the cracked rear windows, making Becka laugh as she kissed Dan passionately, insistently, for a long time. As the rainstorm gathered strength, huge drops pinged off the open window edges and fractured into a heavy mist. From her seat on Dan’s lap, Becka welcomed the cooling spray. She slid sensually from her short pink party dress, then turned off the car’s dome light. Their usual chemistry altered from the shared longing and languid kisses of virgins to something divergent, individual, desperate.

The first real winds began to shake the truck, their invisible hands jostling the young girl and the half-naked boy. Never had Becka looked so stunning. Her thin figure, kiss-shaped breasts and thick, grain-colored hair were washed in the lightning and thunder rolling with unchecked fury in time with her hips. Rivulets of rain spasmodically drained from Becka’s soaked hair and face, ran down the valley of her chest, and pooled on Dan’s stomach. The war paint lacing their faces glowed eerily again as if lit from underneath. They were Navajo now.

As the storm outside became increasingly chaotic, and intense claws of lightening lit the truck’s cab. Becka felt Dan’s body finally come to rest. I love you, she thought, half hoping they might make love again, half glad the pain had ended. Dan pulled at Becka’s wet hair as she cozied against him. Ten minutes passed.

“I love you,” he said, still adrift.

As it had for some time now, water flowed down the inside of the truck’s windows. The wind continued to buffet. Even in his most peaceful state, Dan’s mind began to fill with the noise of it. “Damn it,” Dan said, touching at the streaming water in the near darkness. His fingers sloshed in disbelief at the door rests already overflowing with cold rain. Dan pushed at the window buttons but the truck didn’t respond. Contorting his body, Dan’s knee accidently slid into Becka’s chest. He turned the key still hanging in the ignition and the car roared to life. Light from the overhead dome filled the cabin.

“Get off,” Becka grumbled in a hazy lover’s gruff.

“Roll up the window, please,” Dan answered. “Sorry – I’ve got the front ones.”

The desperate quality in Dan’s voice made Becka comply. “Do you have a towel?” she asked, trying to be helpful but unwilling to give up the blanket she held against her nakedness. With the windows rolled up, she surveyed the damage. “That’s a lot of water. Holy shit.”

Lighting exploded just twenty yards away.

Becka jumped, alarm bells suddenly ringing in her head: something was happening that shouldn’t be. “What is it?” she thought, her mind screaming. Her nudity only served to heighten her anxiety. Scrounging for her dress on the wet floorboards, she muttered something about ruined silk and hastily pulled the fabric over her head.

When she looked up, Becka wondered why Dan was just sitting in the front passenger seat, his stripped chest wet, his breath coming so loudly that Becka could hear it over the wailing wind and pounding rain. His face was as white and as long as a penguin’s chest. Just as Dan began to recite a long-ago memorized sermon from scripture, she noticed the idol was broken in two halves, each of which Dan held in white-knuckled grips.

“Oh, my God!” Becka screamed, horrified by what had happened to the idol. She was on the verge of screaming again. She never had the chance.

Dan cried out as a wave of water lifted the Expedition like a conductor’s hands signaling for a dramatically building crescendo. The car lurched violently, the passenger side wheel well slamming into a boulder. Dan’s head smashed against a window and glass shattered in a shower of sparkling shards instantly lost to the rain. His body pitched sideways to the floor, where he shook uncontrollably. The two halves of the idol flew in opposite directions.

Becka’s yell was different than Dan’s.

Her eyes focused, like a cat looking for ground during a long fall, even as she felt herself hurtling backwards into the far rear of the truck. The Expedition had become a cork to the flashflood, surging back up the incline faster and faster as the water’s flow intensified.

Becka knew time was limited. She would have to get out, or hope for the best if she stayed in the truck: neither option was particularly appealing. Her gut told her to take a risk outside with the current, and instinct told her that if the truck rolled with them inside, she would be battered against the steel frame and hammered to a pulp. Water was a foot deep up front, pushing and pulling at Dan’s limp figure; his expression was distant, floating just above the waterline.

In a desperate bid to help him, Becka flung herself between the bucket seats, reaching for any piece of Dan in her tough little grip. “Dan! Fucking move!” she implored as the water rose faster, came harder.

Grunting and pulling with all of her might, Becka wrenched Dan backwards and onto the driver’s seat, where he slouched on his side. Lightning flashed. The river came alive around them. Blood tessellated from Dan’s head wound. Becka imagined herself diving from the broken window and fighting the river to its banks. “It can be done,” she thought, “it can be done.”

The dome light flickered and was gone, plunging them back into absolute obscurity.

“Any second it will be over,” Becka thought, as darkness overwhelmed hope.

Lightning burst over the bank. So bright, so close, so like an angel shining in a stained glass relief. “Come to take me away, have you?!” Becka shouted, defiant.

In the fraction of a second before darkness consumed the world again, Becka saw a horse with the dark figure of a man on its back. Then it – they – were gone.

The horse’s whinny was like thunder, only lyrical, its tone knifing through the tumult. Becka scrambled forward into the passenger seat, her weight causing the nose of the truck to tilt precariously downward as it spun through the roiling void. Violently, Becka pushed back against the seat. With one hand, she pulled at the top of the seatbelt mechanism at the base of the roof. She wrapped her fingers around the grey fabric and, with desperate hope surging in her veins as a guide, reached into the black water. Raging waves slapped her arm hard against the side of the truck, forcing her hand down and against the hull of their broken vessel. Becka yelled, fear creeping into panic.

Seconds to go, she thought, feeling the truck’s cab filling with water to her waist. Just then, the horse’s cry sounded not feet away. It filled her with courage. This time, she thrust her entire torso out of the car window. A wave cracked against her chest. She held her ground, reaching, clawing at the water, afraid to let go but terrified to hang on. Then she felt it: something was there. Something was out in the wild, flashing river. She scrambled for it, grappling, and then it was hers, her body sliding the rest of the way from the truck just as it spun away. Her hands were tangled in something thick and stringy, something attached to a body in motion, a horse.

The incalculable force of the river drove Becka’s head underwater.

She could feel the horse’s neck with her other hand as all ten of her fingers fought to hold on.

“Please God,” she thought, help me. At that moment a powerful force, something hard to differentiate from the water itself, lifted Becka by her dress and draped her on her back across the horse’s shoulders.

Lightning showered like machine gun fire over the land and Becka recognized the shape of a man above her. A joyous shock overcame her. “He’s an Indian,” she thought, smiling. And here I was expecting God.