Irene, hearing the tone if not the reference to her, blinked at him expectantly, as if she understood. Or maybe she just knew what was usually meant by the word “breakfast.”
“Then what? Because I hope you’re not going—”
“Not directly at him, no. I need to find out what’s in his head. What he’s doing makes perfect sense to him, the way it does to most people who are insane. Killing Fremont, Runciman, what he did to Pete Kearney and Crucio Churriga, probably the murder of Milo Tillman, all these acts have been highly organized, not the work of a disorganized schizophrenic. There’s a map in his head. I want to be able to read it. If I can, then the next time we run into each other, I’ll be there first, waiting for him.”
“Why alone?”
“Because Gibson wants me alive. He’ll kill everyone else.”
“Why does he want you alive?”
Dalton had a brief flash of Pete Kearney’s ruined face, the sockets of his eyes seething with squirming life, the walls of his cabin crawling with bloated flies in all the colors of spilled gasoline.
“I’ll make it a point to ask him. Send the fax, Sally.”
It arrived at the front desk of the Greybull Motel ten minutes later. The young Eastern Shoshone girl running the machine stared at it as she handed it across to Dalton, obviously curious and quite unashamed to show it. She actually craned her neck to look at it as Dalton held it in his hands. Dalton, his attention fixed on the letter, missed her intense interest. Although the letter was exactly as Sally had described it, what had been missing from the description was the violence of the line, the coarse brutality of the letters, the way the words had been carved, gouged into the paper itself.
“That’s a weird drawing,” she said, smiling at him, her broad, dark-skinned face and high cheekbones framing lively gray-green eyes.
Dalton looked up at her and realized that he had been lost in the letter. “Yes. Damn weird.”
“Are you a sociologist?”
“A sociologist? Why do you ask?”
“I’m working for my degree in Bozeman. We had eight units in cultural anthropology and the professor was a sociologist. He looked just like you. He was interested in the Native American Church too.”
“Was he? And how did you make that connection?”
She touched the center of the fax page.
“That’s the symbol for Peyote, the Messenger. I mean, not the whole drawing, and it isn’t very well done. Normally the roadman — he’s like the priest? He does a very careful drawing of the god Peyote, sometimes in the sand. See there, it’s just a kind of flower-looking thing and it’s supposed to be a button. That’s the button of Peyote. It’s placed on a cross — I guess that’s what this thing here is supposed to mean — but the cross is leaves of sage. The button and the cross of sage are placed on this — the crescent shape here. That’s the altar. The altar is always shaped like a crescent. Then Peyote is covered with a scraping gourd, because Peyote likes the sound. Don’t you already know this stuff?”
“No. I had no idea. What about the rest of this? Does it mean anything to you?”
She considered the scrawled words, the lines and arrows, chewing the inside of her plump cheek. She smelled of mint toothpaste and green-apple shampoo and he had a vision of Cora Vasari pushing her hair back from her fine-boned face as she counted his shaky drug-addled pulse in her villa in the Dorsoduro.
“Nope. Although I guess the stuff about answer, and question, and atonement, that would be part of the ritual. That’s at the heart of the Native American Church, the ceremony of atonement.”
“You mean, like a confession?”
“Sort of, but not like in the Catholic Church. In the Peyote ritual the priest hears your sins, each one, and for each one he ties a little knot in a piece of string. One sin, one knot. As many as it takes. The idea is you have to speak your sins out loud, in front of the others at the ceremony. That means you are releasing the evil spirit that lived in that sinful act. The sin goes into the string, and then they burn the string in a bowl. They call it asking the question, and if you answer falsely, then Peyote will punish you. If you want to hear Peyote’s answer, you have to be pure, to have made your confession and to promise atonement, or you will not survive the question. Not like you’ll explode or anything. But you could have a very bad experience under the influence of the drug itself, if Peyote is not pleased with you, or if you are false in your confession. But people usually pass this test — unless they’ve done something very, very evil — because Peyote, the Messenger, is a loving god. Then you’re ready to hear Peyote’s words, his message, as a new soul, someone without sin. But first you must confess and atone.”
“Atonement is different from confession?”
“Oh yes. Confession is simply to declare your sins, whatever they are, no matter how terrible. Atonement means to try to make things right, sometimes through your own suffering, or sometimes by going to the people you have hurt in your life and trying to undo that hurt. I guess whoever made this drawing wants to make things right.”
Dalton stared at the young girl as a passing eighteen-wheeler drowned out all possibility of conversation. There is a hidden rose by every dusty mile of road, he thought, deciding not to actually kiss her.
“Well,” he said, folding up the letter, “I learned a lot here. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”
“You’re not a sociologist at all, are you?”
“No. Just a tourist.”
She shook her head, smiling at him.
“No. Not a tourist. You have a shadow around you. You have been with darkness. Perhaps you are a policeman. Can I say something to you? It’s none of my business, but I think you should know.”
“Sure. Anything.”
“This drawing at the top here, the word ‘culebra’ with those arrows pointed at it? That’s called ‘sign.’ The arrows mean that there is danger, and what the arrows point at is the source of that danger. ‘Culebra’ means ‘snake’ in Spanish, so the danger comes from a snake, which could be a man or an animal — but the sign definitely means danger. Like, mortal danger, you understand?”
Dalton, who knew what “culebra” meant, had not known the meaning of the arrows, although the entire page literally shrieked of lunatic killing rage. She drew back and regarded him with a gentle but searching expression on her round, intelligent face.
“Well, I’ve said enough. I don’t get a good feeling from that drawing. There’s stuff in there that goes way beyond the Native American Church. I’m not a member. Shoshone are plains people. We were in Montana long before the Sioux, the Cheyenne, and those ugly Arapaho ever got there. We do the Sun Dance. Peyote belongs to the Kiowa, the Apache, the Comanche. Many of these folk have maggots in their heads. You need to be careful around them.”
He was in the room, packing, remembering the last time someone had used the term “maggots in the head,” while Irene rapidly devoured a plate full of huevos revueltos and a side of refried beans.
He was trying to get the plate away from her before she ate that too, getting an accusatory look from her as he did it, when the phone rang again. It was Sally.
“I talked to Zoë Pontefract. She tells me the central drawing is the symbol for the god Peyote. He’s the—”
Dalton stopped her, with some effort: she had done a lot of work and was not happy to be robbed of the chance to lay it out for him. He managed to fill her in on what the Shoshone girl had told him.
“Was she pretty?”
“Stunning. Did Zoë come up with anything beyond that?”
“Essentially, no. Although the ceremony your Shoshone girlfriend describes varies quite a bit from the chronicles of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, who studied the Chichimec and Toltec versions—”