Martha settled herself deeper into her papers. “You’re right about him not being all there. He was in a mental hospital for a year and a half.”
“How do you know?”
“He’s got a Medal of Honor in his medicine bundle. Jack Helder spent the morning on the phone running down his war record. Moon was a Green Beret.”
Jason whistled. “Now that really fits.”
“He was in Vietnam. His squad or platoon or whatever you call it was wiped out by the Viet Cong. Apparently it was pretty much of a massacre. Rather than let himself be rescued, Moon went into the jungle alone and spent a month killing guerrillas. And I mean killing them, Mr. Jason. He blew up ammunition dumps, he practically wiped out villages single-handed. There’s no telling how many he got. The way the Army learned he was still alive was when guerrillas began surrendering in droves. Out of fear of him.”
“Him personally? How did they know it was just him?”
“Because of the way he killed them. He used a bow and arrow.”
Jason felt a thrill of disconnected terror. Capable of murder—the Indian was a master of it! He was as brutal as his spirit. Until now Jason had thought his own survival was evidence of some kind of restraint in the Indian’s mind, but Martha had wiped out that possibility. He would never know how he had survived Canada. “What about the mental hospital?”
“He was under treatment in Los Angeles for combat fatigue. That’s when they gave him a medal. Then he was released and went home to Stevensville, where he checked in with a psychiatrist once a month. Last spring he disappeared. The doctor in Stevensville was very worried about him.”
“Why?”
She spoke into her teacup, hair shrouding her face. “He was being treated for schizophrenia.”
“Ah! Which he probably had a long time before he went into the Army.”
“That’s right. You see, he doesn’t have any family. His father left them, his mother died when he was young. Typical broken home. He was raised by priests in a mission school and a grandfather whom he revered. His grandfather apparently was responsible for a lot of his mental problems. He told him all sorts of stories when he was young.”
“What kind of stories?”
“Indian stories that they used to tell their young as they grew up. It’s how the Indians passed on their culture, Mr. Jason. They had no writing, so they spent winters banked up in their lodges, talking about how the chipmunk got his stripes and how the world was made and all that. He revered his grandfather. He was the only family he had. He died just before Moon went into the Army.” Her voice lowered, and her hair slowly covered her face. “You know, when they treated him in the hospital, they gave him all these drugs and shock therapy that wrecked his memory. He had spells of amnesia . . .”
“And still does, I’d venture to say.”
“. . . and couldn’t remember his grandfather’s words. To somebody like him that’s death, Mr. Jason. Absolute death.”
A war casualty like millions of other broken, blasted men through the ages. That was John Moon, Jason reflected. Every world he had lived in crumpled before his eyes. So, like others, he had found religion. A spirit. Something to live for, something to heal the split between his mind and the shambles of his life.
Some guardian angel!
“Could I have some more tea?” Jason held out his cup.
“Of course.” Suddenly flustered, Martha Lucas knocked over papers as she took his cup into the kitchen.
For some moments Jason had been looking at a book cover on the couch next to her. He had wanted her out of the room in order to examine it more closely.
The book cover showed a wooden mask carved by a Northwest tribe called the Kwakiutls, who believed giant cannibals lived in the mountains. The face was a skull with added details. Tendrils of hair formed a widow’s peak, and eyeholes burned from beneath frowning brow bones.
Stretch those brows, Jason thought, and there were the horns. Narrow the nose and forehead, add a bit more hair, and there it was the face of the Bigfoot as he had seen it in the river. Probably the artist who carved this mask had worked from somebody’s description.
He dropped the paper as Martha returned with a steaming cup of tea. Jason forced down a mouthful of the awful stuff. It sure woke him up, he could say that much about it. “That medicine bundle Moon wears. What’s it for?”
“He’s supposed to carry a talisman of his spirit in it.”
“What kind of talisman!” In the dim light, his eyes gleamed.
“If your spirit was a bird, you’d carry one of his feathers. That kind of thing. A piece of its body, or if it was human some belonging, like a clay pipe.”
“Not to change the subject, but how long has this lodge been here?”
She counted with her fingers. “Ten . . . no, eleven months. That’s when the foundation was laid. It wasn’t habitable until last spring.”
“Was anybody killed while working on it?”
“How did you know?” A certain suspicion clouded her face.
“I’m making brilliant deductions. There was somebody killed, wasn’t there?”
“Yes. A plumber. His name was Jameson. Mr. Jason—”
“And it was at night, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And his head was missing, wasn’t it?”
She swallowed hard. “Jameson came up one night with a rifle because something was messing around with his equipment. All the pipes and lumber piles were being thrown around. Jameson wanted to surprise it, but it killed him and took his head away. The Rangers said it was a grizzly bear.”
“And has this grizzly bear been back?”
Her voice became very small. “Mr. Jason, this lodge has been jinxed ever since it was finished. Practically everyday the phone lines go down. Sometimes the garbage is broken into—” Her mouth opened, and tea slopped over her thumb. “Moon’s spirit! That’s it! It’s a grizzly bear!”
Jason found himself feeling protective toward Martha Lucas. He had not felt that stab of tenderness since his last sulfurous blast of temper ended in divorce. She had nice hands. He wondered how she kept them so nice. And she was logical in that maddening perfect way that made things come out wrong. He set down his teacup. “I have to be going. I want to get a room, if it isn’t too late.”
“Wait a minute.” She ran into the kitchenette and returned with a bag of dried tea, telling him it was full of medicinal properties and could cure diseases that had not even been discovered, even snakebite. She told him how to prepare it. Eventually Jason managed to get out of her room without seeming too abrupt.
“I don’t know nothing about no Bigfoots or nothing.” Lester Cole tried to scurry past Jason to his pickup truck. “I didn’t see nothing, I made it up.”
Jason inserted himself between Lester and the kitchen door. He summed up Lester Cole as a man covered with little pressure points of fear subject to minute applications of force. “Why would you do that?”
“Cause I wanted to. I wanted to get in the papers.”
Jason followed Lester out of the kitchen into the parking lot, then cut in front of him again before he could open the door to his truck.
“That’s my truck, mister.”
“What are you going to do, shoot me?”
Lester’s jaw muscles bunched up. “Get away.”
“Sure. Soon as you tell me the truth, Lester. I can tell when somebody isn’t telling me the truth, you know.”
“You can, huh?”
“I mean, if you really wanted your name in the papers you wouldn’t have admitted a hoax. People would come here to interview you, reporters from television and everything. No, you’re just not telling me the truth, Lester.”
The parking-lot lights made Jason’s face a cold series of slabs of the same texture as the granite walls of the lot. His arm bandage glittered whitely under the lights. Lester noticed that Jason was a big man and sprung tight.
“I never could keep my mouth shut.” He laughed.
“Oh, that’s okay, Lester. Look, I’m not going to bite you, I just want to know what it looked like.”