Night Wings (5 page)

T
he big man who caught me unclips the cell phone from his belt, flips it open, and thumbs a number.

“Stazi here,” he says. “Got him.”

He clicks the phone shut, slips it back onto his belt, and starts the truck.

By the time we pull onto the drive, the first light is starting to show. The catbird that lives in the blueberry bushes behind Grampa Peter’s trailer is singing its greeting to the new day. And there, sitting at the picnic table in front of the trailer, is my welcoming crew.

It’s not a pleasant sight. I’d seen Darby Field before, but not with the wide grin he’s now wearing. It’s not a friendly smile, but a fang-bearing threat.

The anticipation in his look worries me. As does the array of things he has laid out on the table. It’s half the contents of Grampa Peter’s tool chest. Grampa Peter is a master craftsman. He carves, does flint knapping and woodworking, and makes baskets. He also knows how to make things like survival shelters and snares—give him four feet of rope and he can catch anything in the woods from a rabbit to a bear. But I don’t think that craft work or carpentry is what Darby Field has in mind for the hammer, the nail gun, the power saws, and the drills spread out in front of him. My fingers tingle as my imagination goes to work.

The two people with Field don’t make me feel any more comfortable. Tip, the guy with the South Boston accent, is a little smaller than I imagined him to be. Probably no more than five feet nine and not that bulky, with jet-black hair tied back in a ponytail. He has one of those port-wine birthmarks on his left cheek, the shape and size of a potato, and his nose looks as if it’s been broken a time or two. His eyes stare into mine as I am pulled out of the truck.

Louise is actually worse. There is something positively predatory about this woman’s expression as she looks me up and down and licks her
lips. Whatever unpleasant stuff Field has in mind for me and Grampa Peter, Louise is ready and waiting for it.

I look at Grampa Peter, who has been tied to one of the bentwood chairs he crafts to sell at the shops in Conway. His mouth isn’t taped shut like mine, but he still doesn’t speak out loud. He just gives me the smallest nod and presses his lips together.

I’m sorry this is happening to you.

It’s okay, Grampa. I’m okay.

Stazi hooks one arm under my right elbow, drags me over to the bench that has been placed in front of Field, and sits me down.

Field reaches out and rips the tape from my face. My mouth burns and I suck in my lower lip and taste the blood. I’d cut my lip while I was rock climbing four days ago. The scab was just beginning to heal over.

“Hell-lllooo,” Field says in his irritating accent. “How nice of you to drop in, young Paul.” He makes an expansive gesture toward the top of the picnic table behind him. “As you can see, we have been expecting you.”

I bite my tongue. I’m not going to say anything.

“Oh my, are you as mute as your grandfather?
Fear not, lad, we have our little ways of eliciting a response. But we don’t need you to talk, we just need you to scream.”

His open hand whips out like a rattlesnake striking as he slaps me across the face. I turn my head to look back at him. I won’t give him the satisfaction of showing how scared I really am.

He chuckles. “Made of stern stuff, eh? I do like a bit of a challenge.”

Field turns back to look at Louise, who is now leaning over his shoulder and staring at the blood dripping down my chin as if she wants to drink it. “Remember that chap in Colombia?”

“‘Quest for the Forbidden City of Gold,’” Louise whispers.

“Was his name Martin?”

“Yes, it
was
.” Her emphasis on that last word sends a chill down my back.

“He insisted that he knew nothing. But it turned out that he knew quite a bit more than he said.” Field picks up a pair of needle-nose pliers and taps them against his palm. “It is truly amazing what losing a few fingernails does for one’s memory.”

He looks at the pliers and then shakes his head regretfully. “But we don’t have time for that, do we? And I have found that sometimes
the most effective methods are the oldest ones. No need for modern tools at all.” He tosses the pliers back onto the table and snaps his fingers.

“Tip!”

Tip leans over to pick up a big white plastic bucket, one of the empty ones that Grampa Peter has stacked up behind the trailer.

You never know when you’re going to need a good bucket,
I find myself thinking.

But the bucket is not empty now. It’s filled to the brim with water.

Tip sets the bucket in front of me. Stazi places one of his huge hands on top of my head, and the other goes on my shoulders. He pushes down, bending me forward until my nose is almost touching the water. A single drop of my blood falls from my cut lip, strikes the surface, and then disperses in a circling red cloud through the water. I take a deep breath.

“No!” Grampa Peter says. It’s probably his first spoken word since being taken captive.

Field chuckles.

“Now,” he whispers.

And my head is thrust under the water.

H
aving your head pushed underwater, even by a friend joking around in a swimming pool, can be a very unpleasant experience. Especially if you don’t expect it. The situation I am in right now is a lot worse. Needless to say, the ones thrusting my head underwater are not my friends. There is no kidding around involved. Their intentions are deadly serious.

But knowing I was about to be dunked, even a split second before it happened, gave me enough time to do what I could to prepare. To plan three steps ahead of them.

The first step, taking a series of quick deep breaths before I was pushed under—packing air into my lungs—is the one I’ve already taken.
It doesn’t mean I’m not in danger of being drowned, but it does give me time. I’ve always been able to hold my breath for a long time, so the strategy I have in mind ought to work.

Step two is to make them think I am panicking. So, even though I’m not terrified, I wave my arms and bang them against the side of the bucket as if trying in vain to lift my head out, which of course I cannot do with the meaty paw of a 250-pound East German gorilla on the back of my head.

Step three depends on my assumption that Darby Field does not want to actually drown me. His objective is to force my grandfather to do what he wants by torturing me. Actually killing me would defeat the purpose. Field wants me alive—at least for now. So, here goes step three. I stop pushing my head back against Stazi’s hand, stop waving my arms. I go totally limp.

And just like that I am yanked out of the water and dropped on my side on the ground, where I lie like a limp dishrag.

“No!” Grampa Peter is yelling. “You’ve killed him, my poor grandson!”

It almost makes me smile. I can hear from the way he’s yelling that he knows exactly what I am up to. It ought not to have been hard for
him to figure it out. It would be more than a little strange if the kid who, at the age of seven, was already diving thirty feet deep to free our lures when they got stuck in our favorite fishing lake, could drown after less than a minute in a bucket. Plus the fact that he has just said more than four words in a row is a sure sign that he’s acting as much as I am.

“What did you do?” Field is snarling. “Did you break his neck?”

“I do nothing,” Stazi answers, his tone more than a little defensive. “I only do what you say.”

I’d like to lie here and listen to their argument heat up even more, but I might start laughing if I do that. Plus any minute now someone might decide to start doing CPR. The thought of any of them giving me mouth-to-mouth is enough to turn my stomach. So I cough convulsively and spit out the mouthful of water I sucked in just before being pulled from the bucket.

Stazi pulls me up from the ground, thumping his hand on my back in an effort to be helpful. He hits me so hard that he almost knocks me down, and I start coughing for real.

“Back off,
dummkopf
!” Field pushes him away from me, steers me to the bench, and sits me down. He’s trying to regain control of the
situation, the movie director getting things back on script.

I sit there, wiping my face, snuffling, being the pathetic kid who has just had the scare of his life but is still trying to be brave. Out of the corner of my eye I see Grampa Peter wink at me.

“No more,” Grampa Peter says. Even though he is wrapped up in more tape than a Christmas package, his voice is so strong that it turns every head toward him.

Field keeps his eyes on my grandfather, but reaches out to grab my shirt and pull me toward him, a further reassertion of control on his part.

“What’s that I hear?” Field asks. “Are you ready to cooperate?”

Grampa Peter stares at him, his eyes as fierce as an eagle’s. Then he nods his head.

“I will do it.”

T
here are all kinds of old stories that our elders tell about monsters, like the story that Pmola’s wings made the wind blow so hard on top of Mount Washington. One of my teachers said it was because we were superstitious back then and didn’t understand science; that we made up creatures like Pmola to explain dangerous forces of nature because we didn’t understand that winds are caused by temperature changes and the motion of the earth.

I kept quiet while the teacher said all that. I didn’t even bother to shake my head inwardly. I just did what I usually do whenever I start hearing that sort of talk. I left the classroom. Not physically, of course. I wasn’t about to end up in detention. I just drifted off into my own daydreams.

It’s not that I don’t believe in science. But science doesn’t explain everything. My ancestors were not stupid or foolish. We had our own ways of understanding the world. Our stories taught us all kinds of useful lessons, like the lesson that we need to be careful when it comes to power. Some things—and some places—really are dangerous, and the best thing to do is to avoid them.

For example, there is this one river gorge in Vermont, near a town called Huntington. The old Abenaki name for that gorge is Place That Swallows Us, because our stories told of a monster that sucked people underwater and killed them. So we never seam there. Modern people who don’t believe in or who don’t know our old “superstitious” stories swim in that gorge every summer. And every three years or so some of those swimmers drown when the current catches them and sucks them under.

I am thinking about our monster stories right now as I sit next to Grampa Peter in the back of Darby Field’s van. The truck that I tried to take was left behind when they picked up this van from a spot hidden even farther down the road from Grampa Peter’s trailer.

The van is filled with all kinds of expensive-looking equipment. Right now,
Field is confidently narrating his plan and building the suspense for his imagined viewers as he talks to the camera about his daring to go to a forbidden place that is unknown to much of the world even though it is in the heart of one of North America’s favorite hiking areas.

The camera that is focused on him is manned by Stazi, who, like everyone else in Field’s gang, is both a bad guy and a member of the film crew. Stazi is Camera Two, using the small hand-held high-def camera. He’s shooting in black and white, and his footage will be intercut with shots from the big camera on the tripod that is handled by Tip—Camera One. Louise is Sound. Right now she is holding a metal pole with a microphone covered in what looks like rabbit fur just over her boss’s head.

We’re parked at a pull-off that gives a view of Mount Washington through the window behind Field. It’s a set-up shot for him to explain what this episode of
Forbidden Mysteries
is about: “The Search for Pmola, the Winged Monster of the White Mountains.”

Of course, Grampa Peter and I are not in the picture. We are in the third row of seats, way far back. The cameras are in front of us in the middle of the big van, and Field is farther forward on
a seat that has been turned around backward so that the panorama of the mountain view is visible though the windshield behind him. It’s clear that this vehicle has been specially designed and outfitted for this sort of thing. And if anyone had any doubt about that, all they would have to do would be to read what is written in large red letters on both sides of the van:
FIELD’S FORBIDDEN MYSTERIES.

I’m not really listening to all of the blather that Field is spouting about how the sightings of something called the Mothman, a strange giant headless being with wings, are very similar to the descriptions of Pmola.

“Poh-moh-lah and Mothman,” he whispers. “Winged mysteries beyond our comprehension? Ancient beings, or visitors from a distant galaxy or some other dimension?”

And so on and so on. As if there was some connection between Pmola and the Mothman—which there isn’t.

I’m pretty sure I know where Field is getting all this Mothman stuff from. You can find it on the Internet easy. Plus there was that goofy movie made starring Richard Gere,
The Mothman Chronicles
or something like that. I hear that Gere only takes roles like that because they pay
him a lot of money that he can then use for charity—like helping Tibetan monks. The thought of the Dalai Lama watching one of Gere’s movies and giggling makes me laugh out loud.

“Cut!” Field’s angry voice brings me back out of my daydream. He is glaring at me because my laughter has undercut whatever excellent point he thinks he was just making. “One more outburst and I shall have Stazi tape your mouth shut again.” Field’s face is as red as a beet, and he is tugging at one end of his mustache as he snarls at me.

Even though I know that I’m not in a position where I should laugh, he looks so ridiculous—like the corny villain in an old-time movie threatening to tie the heroine to the railroad tracks—that I know I won’t be able to say anything without cracking up. So I just put my head down as if I am scared stiff.

My apparent terror mollifies him, and he makes a circling motion with his index finger to his attentive crew: Start it rolling again.

Grampa Peter bumps his knee against mine. I look over at him and understand the look in his eyes. He is as amused as I am by Field’s dog and pony show, but he wants me to stay alert. Don’t daydream. Listen. Pay close attention. Watch and wait.

I nod to him that I understand.

You can always learn something by listening. And even though I am totally uninterested in the load of horse manure that makes up
Forbidden Mysteries
, which is at least two steps below similar shows about extraterrestrials, strange creatures, ancient curses, and unexplainable phenomena, there are some things I would like to know.

For one, how much does Field really know about Pmola? Does he think it is just an old story made up to explain the strong winds around the mountain? How much does he know about Pmola’s treasure? Does he know as much as the first Darby Field knew when he climbed to the mountaintop hundreds of years ago in a futile search for jewels? Does he know that the first Darby Field was deliberately led to the wrong place by his Abenaki guides? All that anyone is going to find on top of Mount Washington—aside from the things humans have brought up there—is bare stones and hungry wind.

From his bragging about all the research he’s done on all the Abenaki families in our area, I understand better now how Field found Grampa Peter. Even though Grampa Peter always plays it down, it’s common knowledge
that he knows more about the mountains and the old stories than anyone else. It’s also pretty widely known—and not just among Abenakis—that Grampa Peter has the special powers of
medawlinno
and knows the old ways. Field probably just put two and two together and figured that if anybody knew how to get to Pmola’s treasure, it would be Grampa Peter.

As far as I know, there aren’t any people outside our family who know the real role that Grampa Peter plays. You see, Grampa Peter is the keeper of a story that others might know, but a story that only he fully understands.

Lots of people can talk about Pmola and Pmola’s treasure, but our family inherited the knowledge that makes that story real. That’s why my father told me about Pmola and the good hunter when I was little, a tradition passed down among us Fortunes ever since that long-ago man stumbled on Pmola’s cave and was granted good fortune—that hunter was our ancestor. As a result it’s been a sacred trust for us ever since to guard that secret passed down from generation to generation. Of all the people in the whole world, only my grandfather knows the actual place where Pmola hid his treasure.