Revenge of the Manitou (6 page)

“The worst
Fenner
of all was called Bloody
Fenner
,
and I’m surprised your pa never told you about him,” said Doughty.

“I think he
did, when I was younger. An Indian fighter, wasn’t he, back in the 1830s? They
called him ‘Bloody’
Fenner
because he collected ears
and scalps.” Doughty nodded. “That’s right. But the story goes that he did
worse than that. Back when the white men were fighting the
Wappos
up in the mountains, he used to fight on one side or another, according to how
it took his fancy. If the
Wappos
offered him a couple
of square miles of good farming ground, he’d set traps for the white men; and
if the white men were ready to pay him enough, he’d bushwhack the
Wappos
. Nobody ever proved nothing, of course, so he never
came to trial, but the stories went around for years that Bloody
Fenner
was responsible for some of the worst of the Indian
massacres, and it took a good few years before the
Fenner
family wasn’t shunned no more.”

Neil hefted the
ropes back to the White Dove, and heaved them onto the deck. “That’s something
I wasn’t told,” he said to Doughty. “I guess Bloody
Fenner
was someone my family preferred to forget.”

Doughty stuck
his pinkie up inside his palate to dislodge a sticky lump of taffy. “If you
really want to know about the old days, you ought to take a trip across to
Calistoga and talk to Billy Ritchie – that’s if he’s still alive – but I
haven’t heard different. Billy Ritchie’s grandpa was a friend of Robert Louis
Stevenson, and a lot of folks say he was the model for Israel Hands in Treasure
Island. They were a tough lot, in those days, but they say that Bloody
Fenner
was the toughest of all.”

Neil climbed
down onto the White Dove and started to uncoil one of the ropes. The day was
warming up now, out here on the bay, but the gray fog was even denser, and he
couldn’t even see as far as the harbor’s inlet. A fishing boat chugged past
like a gray ghost.

“Here,” said
Neil. He reached in his pocket and handed Doughty a five-dollar bill. “Why
don’t you go set them up in the bar? As soon as I’m through here, I’ll come
join you.”

It was a gentle
way of buying Doughty a free drink. The unwritten code of behavior on Bodega
wharf was that you let Doughty bend your ear for a while, and then you slipped
him a little money to make life a little easier for him.

Doughty said,
“Don’t forget to come along, mind. I’ll set you up an old-fashioned.” Then he
tipped his nautical cap, and swayed off along the boardwalk as if he were on
the deck of an old-time clipper.

Neil grinned to
himself and went back to his painting and tidying up. Although the White Dove
was superficially battered, it wouldn’t take much to bring back her glamour,
and she wasn’t going to need a major overhaul this year. Neil reckoned to have
finished her off by the end of the week. Then he could get back to his small
yard across the other side of the wharf and complete work on a fishing boat he
was refitting.

It was almost
eleven o’clock in the morning, and the fog was at its densest. The sun was a
pale yellow disk, and the wind had stilled. Neil found that he was sweating as
he sorted and tied the new ropes, and he felt for a moment as if he could
scarcely breathe.

He glanced out
toward the bay and frowned. He was sure he could see something out there in the
water. He screwed up his eyes against the yellowish haze of the fog; whatever
it was, it was too far away to distinguish clearly. It was tall and pale and
upright, like a drifting buoy, or the sail of a small weekend dinghy. It was
only when the fog stirred that he began to understand, with an overwhelming
sense of dread, that the shape wasn’t a sail at all, nor a buoy. It was a man.
A man in a long white coat, standing silent and unsupported in the
middle of the bay.

Biting his lip
with uncertainty, Neil rose to his feet. The fog passed in front of the figure
in veil after veil, but there was no question at all. It was a man, or the
ghost of a man. He wore a dark broad-brimmed hat and a duster, and he stood on
the water as if it was dry land. Neil shouted,

“Hey! You!” but
his voice sounded flat and weak in the fog, and the man took no notice at all.

Panicking, Neil
turned back to the wharf and called: “Doughty! Doughty! Come take a look at
this! For Christ’s sake! Come take a look at this!” A voice whispered,
“Alien... please, Alien
. .

.” “Doughty!”
yelled Neil.

The door of the
cocktail bar opened, and Dave Conway from the fish stall came out, a tall
red-bearded man with a well-known line of sarcasm. “Anything wrong there,
Neil?” he called out.

“Dave, do you
see something out there in the bay or am I crazy?” Neil shouted.

Dave peered out
at the fog. It was now so thick that the man had almost disappeared. There was
just a fading trace of his white coat.

Dave said,
“Sure, I see something. You’re not crazy after all.”

“Tell me what
you see! What is it?”

“Well,” said
Dave, “I wouldn’t like to stick my neck out, but I’d say that’s fog.” Neil,
tense, let out a sharp, exasperated breath.

“Did I say
something wrong?” asked Dave. “It’s not fog? It’s gray lint? It’s cotton candy
maybe?”

Neil shook his
head. “Forget it. It was just an optical illusion.”

Dave strolled
up toward him. “You really thought you saw something out there? What did you
think it was?”

“I don’t know,”
said Neil. “It looked so weird I just wanted a second opinion.”

“You can tell
me,” Dave encouraged him. “I won’t laugh at you for longer than a half-hour.”

Neil turned
away. “I guess it was just my imagination. Forget it.”

“You didn’t
tell me what it was, so how can I forget it?”

Neil put down
his
ropework
, “All right,” he said, “I thought I saw
somebody, a man, standing out there in the bay.”

“Standing?”

“That’s right.
Standing on the water, just the way you’re standing on that jetty.” Dave pulled
a face. “Well, you told me it was crazy, and you’re right. Are you sure you
haven’t been reading the Bible too heavily lately?”

“Dave,” asked
Neil, “will you just forget it? It was a trick of the light.”

“Maybe he was
surfing and you didn’t notice the surfboard in the fog,” suggested Dave. “Or
maybe he was standing on top of a submarine.”

“Dave, please
forget I ever told you,” said Neil. “I’m not in the mood for jokes.”

“Nor would I
be, if I’d seen a guy standing on the water in the middle of the bay,” said
Dave, with weighty mock seriousness. “Nor would I be.”

That afternoon,
Toby brought home a large yellow Manila envelope from school, along with a note
from Mrs. Novato. While Toby went out to play with his toy bulldozer, Neil took
the package into the parlor and sat down at his old
rolltop
desk.

Susan came in
from the kitchen in her apron and slippers, and said, “What’s that?” Neil
looked at her, and gave a wry little smile. “It’s an experiment, I guess.”

Susan wiped her
floury hands on her apron. She’d been making apple cookies, and she smelled of
fresh cooking apples and butter. “An experiment?” she asked him. “You
mean,
something to do with school?”

He nodded. “You
remember Toby kept on about Alien in his nightmares? Well, this morning, when I
took him to school, I heard one of the other kids talking about Alien, too, so
I asked Mrs. Novato to let me talk to the class for a couple of minutes. I
asked them if any one of them had dreamed dreams like Toby.”

“Well? And had
they?”

Neil opened the
envelope. “There are twenty-one kids in that class, honey, and every single one
of them put up a hand to say yes.”

Susan looked
confused. “You mean-they’d all had the same nightmare? Surely they were just
pulling your leg, acting like kids.”

“I don’t know
what nightmares they’d had. But I asked them to draw what they’d seen in their
dreams, and Mrs. Novato agreed to let them do it during their art lesson.
Here’s a note she sent along.”

Susan took the
note and scanned it quickly.

It read:

Dear Mr.
Fenner
,

I am sending
you the drawings the children made this afternoon in the hope that they might
put your mind at rest. It seems to me that my first opinion of mild collective
hysteria is the correct one. I am sure that these nightmares will pass once a
new craze starts. There are already signs that Crackling Candy is talking hold!
By the way, if Toby wishes to join our little expedition to Lake
Berryessa
next Wednesday, please give him $1.35 to bring to
school tomorrow.

Yours, Nora
Novato

Neil rubbed his
cheek. “Well,” he said slowly, “that doesn’t sound too promising, does it?”

“I think it
sounds marvelous,” said Susan. “The sooner Toby stops having those awful
dreams, the better.”

“Susan, it’s
not just dreams. It’s waking visions as well. What about that old man’s face I
saw on Toby last night? What about the man in the white coat that Toby saw?
What about the guy standing on the bay?”

Susan stared at
him. “What guy standing on what bay? What are you talking about?”

He glanced at
her, and then he lowered his eyes. “I’m sorry. I was meaning to tell you, but I
didn’t know how. It was just something that happened today. Or rather it was
something I thought happened today.”

She leaned
forward and put her arm around his shoulder. “You didn’t know how to tell me?
But Neil, I’m as worried about all this as you are! I’m your wife. That’s what
I’m here for, to confide in.”

He said,
huskily, “Sure, honey, I know. It’s just that it’s kind of hard to admit to
yourself that you might be flipping your lid, or suffering from some kind of
kids’ hysteria.”

“Don’t be so
ridiculous! If you saw something, you saw it. Maybe there’s a natural
explanation.

Maybe it was
some kind of mirage. But if you saw it, that’s it, I believe you.”

He shrugged.
“I’m glad you’ve got some confidence in me. I’m not sure that I’ve got much
confidence in myself.”

Susan kissed
his head”. “I love you,” she said simply. “If there’s something making you
worried,
then
it worries me, too. Don’t forget that.”

Neil reached
inside the Manila envelope and took out a sheaf of brightly colored drawings.

Susan drew up a
chair beside him, and they looked through them, one by one.

The drawings,
although they varied in style and color, were strangely alike. They showed
trees, mountains, and struggling figures. Some of them depicted twenty or
thirty stick people, their arms all flung up in the air, with splashes of
scribbled red all around. Others showed only one or two people, lying on their
backs amid the greenery. There were arrows flying through the air in about a
dozen drawings, and in others there were men holding rifles.

Only about eight
or nine children had written names or words beside their pictures. Toby had
written “Alien, help.” Daniel
Soscol
had written “
Alun
” and then crossed it out. Debbie
Spurr
had put down “Alien, Alien, didn’t come back.”

There were some
odd names, too. “Ta-La-Ha-Lu-Si” was written in heavy green crayon on one
picture. Another bore the legend “
Kaimus
.” Yet
another said “
Oweaoo
” and “
Sokwet
.”
Susan and Neil spent twenty minutes going through the drawings, but in the end
they laid them down on the desk and looked at each other in bewilderment.

“I don’t know
what the hell it all means,” admitted Neil. “It just doesn’t seem to make any
kind of sense at all.”

“It’s strange
that they all have the same kind of picture in their minds, though,” said
Susan. “I mean, how many other groups of twenty-one different people would all
have the same nightmare? Look at this one – this is Toby’s. His drawing is
almost the same as everyone else’s.”

Neil pushed
back his chair and stood up. Outside, through the cheap net curtains, he could
see Toby in the backyard, shoveling up dust with his Tonka bulldozer. Neil felt
such a wave of protectiveness toward him that the tears prickled his eyes. What
on God’s earth was Toby caught up in? Were these really just nightmares, or
were they something arcane and dangerous?

Susan
suggested, “Maybe we ought to talk to Doctor Crowder again. Perhaps it’s some
kind of psychological sickness.”

Neil slowly
shook his head. “Toby’s not sick, and neither are the rest of those kids. Nor
am I, if it comes to that. I feel it’s more like something from outside,
something trying to get through to us, you know?”

“You’re talking
about something like a
seance
? Like a spirit, trying
to get through?”

“That’s right,
kind of. I just have the feeling that there’s pressure around, something’s
pressing in from all around us. I don’t know what the hell it is, but I can
feel it. It’s there all the time now, night and day.”

“Neil-” said
Susan, guardedly.

He turned away
from the window. “I know. It sounds nuts. Maybe it is nuts. But I feel just as
sane as I did last week. And if I’m nuts, then all these school children are
nuts, too, and I
don’t
believe they are.”

He picked up
one of the drawings, showing a fierce battle between men in big hats and men
with long black hair. There were green-and-gray
mountains
in the background, and the sky was forested with huge arrows. The arrows were
all tipped with black, carefully and deliberately drawn with black crayon.