She Walks in Shadows (23 page)

Tío Gaspar nodded. He looked back at the house, where Sara was fussing with the last things to pack. Grandpa Estéban was testing the vapor-absorption systems for the freezer and the RV. I could smell ammonia.

Gaspar leaned in. “I know why you did it,” he whispered. “I would do it, too, if Papá died, or if he wanted to. But you know how he is.”

Grandpa Estéban started singing to himself. His voice was cracked and tiny, but I could make out “We Three Kings of Orient Are.”

“You have relatives in other places,” I whispered back. “Omaha. St. Paul. Maybe even New York, for all I know. Or you could go somewhere new.”

He shook his head. “I’m going to Portland with you. It’s what Papá wants and where he goes, I go.”

“Westward leading, still proceeding …,” sang Grandpa Estéban.

“I don’t have to agree,” said Gaspar. “I’ll always stay with my family, no matter what we are.”

He closed the freezer lid gently. I heard some stumbling as he helped Grandpa Estéban in. The whole RV would be cold. Since Grandpa Estéban had never gotten a death certificate, he could have the run of the cabin.

“No matter what we are,” I repeated in my forceless murmur.

“King and God and Sacrifice,” sang Grandpa Estéban, barely audible through the freezer walls.

I heard the RV’s motor start, smelled the ammonia anew. I buried my face in my hands. Without breathing, I took in the scents of frankincense and myrrh: the oils I had blended, the scent of our stone-cold tomb.

EIGHT SECONDS

Pandora Hope

EVER PLAYED A
hand of poker with the Devil, knowing that if you could keep the game going for eight seconds, just eight seconds, you’d beat the bastard and then you’d get to be a god for a day?

That’s how it is for me with rough riding.

Before she left me, Lula said that only a person with a sickness in the head would want to sit a thousand-kilo bucking bronco and stay on for eight seconds. She said a lot of other things, too, wound after wound, but I hung on, not saying a word. I’d learnt in the ring that you just had to hold on until you were beyond feeling the pain. Beyond feeling anything.

I remember Lula at the door of the motel room, screaming that I had no right to be a mother, that she knew I was going to get hurt every time I rode. The only question was,
How bad?
Maybe a bruised leg — maybe a broken neck. Lula saying she couldn’t live like that anymore, that she wished I would just die out there, on the sand, and get it over with. I couldn’t explain about the Devil, shuffling those cards. I couldn’t explain that life was just a matter of hanging on, hanging on for those eight seconds when the world threw everything it had at you and you survived. Or not.

I always made a point of being honest with her, so in the end, I said, “Yeah, you’re right, Lula. I never should have been a mother.”

Lula was an accident in a motel room in Mount Isa where the toilet didn’t work properly and the sheets had a thin layer of red dust on them. I had beat the Devil that day. The prize money was $650 — even back then, Mount Isa had the best-paying rodeo in Australia — and the event had never been won by a woman before. There was this pretty-boy tourist up from Melbourne, doing a backpacker jaunt through Outback Queensland. Well, when you beat the Devil, you get the crazies, like the whole world is chanting your name, so I took that pale-skinned kid to the motel and nine months later, Lula was born.

Lula took off when she was 16. It hurt more than I thought it would, but I always said people should lead the lives they want, no questions asked, and if Lula didn’t want to stay with me, well, that was her business. She never wrote or rang and I never knew where she went. Laurie, who was a rodeo clown and likely my only friend, said I shouldn’t have told her about not wanting to be a mother. He said that would break a kid. But I believe in telling it how it is and what does a clown know about kids, anyway? Except how to make them laugh.

So, now, I looked at the flimsy, photocopied leaflet I’d found shoved under my door and I said to Laurie, “Looks like Lula’s found a new mother.”

We were sitting on the barrier surrounding the Noonamah arena. I’d fallen badly that day. I was starting to wonder whether I was just getting too old for the game and that pretty soon, I’d be lying in the sand for the last time, just like Lula wanted. Laurie’s clown makeup was streaked down his face so he looked like a painting that got itself rained on. He’d worked hard at the show, pulling the riders from under the broncos, bulls and steers.

He looked at the leaflet in my hand. It said, “Temple of the Great Mother,” above a blurred photo of goats, grazing in an idyllic green pasture with the ruin of a castle in the background. No place like that in the Northern Territory, that’s for sure, and probably not in the whole of Australia.

“What d’ya mean, new mother?” he said.

I showed him the penciled scrawl on the back on the leaflet. A single word written so rapidly you could barely make it out: “Mum.”

“Shite,” said Laurie. “Shite. Are you sure it’s from her?”

I shrugged. “Who else? Found it slipped under my motel room door.”

Laurie took a filthy rag out of his striped clown pants. Instead of wiping the grease-paint off his face, he just stared at it, creasing his face like he was thinking real hard.

“You know, Sam, there’s that cult down by the canyon that go by that name. Been there for a long time. A lot of folks reckon they’re Satanists or something like that. A couple of tourists hiking up that way disappeared, oh, just last year. These cult people come into town sometimes, handing out leaflets, trying to get people to join.”

“Look like a pack of goat herders to me,” I said. I hate it when people don’t get to the point. It’s a waste of time. Because I could tell by his nervy expression he was going to wander in circles like a sick dingo and waste more words, I said, “Okay. You reckon Lula’s in some kind of trouble. Well, she’s a big girl and if goats are her thing, that’s her business.”

Laurie shook his head like a sheep dog that couldn’t understand why its bone had been taken away. He was soft and that was a bad thing to be in the Northern Territory, especially if you followed the rodeo circuit.

“That canyon — the aboriginals call it a Sick Place,” he said. “It’s not just the cult. There’s some poison that comes out of the caves thereabouts. It was in the local paper. Radioactive gas or something. There’s uranium there — enough for a thousand bombs, they reckon. You could get real sick, living out there. Stupid place to raise livestock. Stupid place for people, too.”

“That cult is a pack of idiots, then,” I said.

“Maybe they don’t tell their followers about the danger, Sam. They’re a weird mob. I’ve seen them hanging around after the show, talking to the tourists. They look, well ... kinda unnatural. I’m guessing a lot of inbreeding goes on down there. Or maybe it’s the radiation. They just don’t look like normal folks.”

I grunted. “So, instead of leaving the cult, Lula puts recruitment papers in my room. That makes a lot of sense.”

“Maybe it’s not the sort of cult that lets you leave,” Laurie said and I knew he’d been waiting all along to say that.

“Maybe,” I said. I hopped off the barricade. People have a right to live their lives like they want to, good or bad. I hate people who fence things in worse than the wild broncos hate them.

Laurie scrambled after me. “You can’t just leave her there, Sam! What if she wants to go and they won’t let her? You want your own daughter to get radiation poisoning, or maybe … hell, I don’t know. Get sacrificed to the Devil or something …?”

I couldn’t help laughing at that. Laurie had been trying to get me off the circuit and playing happy families with Lula for years, but this one took the cake. I looked back at him. “Sacrificed to the Devil? That’s the best one you’ve come up with, yet.”

“So, what are you going to do, Sam? What are you going to do?” He had that whiney sound in his voice that really irritated me. Pressed buttons I just didn’t want pressed.

“Exactly what you want me to,” I muttered and I flung back over my shoulder. “I’m going to get this dirt off me, go to the pub, and have a few beers. Then maybe I’ll go and check out some goats.”

It was an hour on horseback to Bunyip waterhole, where the tourist road ended. Nothing worth seeing beyond that but salt bush, tiger snakes, and red dirt. The canyon was another two hours beyond the waterhole, but both locals and tourists were discouraged from going further into the Outback. Though it wasn’t exactly sacred ground to the Aboriginals, there was an unspoken agreement that the canyon was off-limits to whites. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard it called the Sick Place. The tribal elders had probably known for centuries that whatever was in those stones caused illness and deformity. There was something evil there — call it a spirit or call it uranium, the name didn’t matter.

Laurie was riding Blimp, who was older than God, so we had to take it easy. Shade wanted to gallop; I could feel his muscles quiver under my thighs, and he’d turn his head and nip at Blimp if Laurie got too close.

Blimp was so slow and broad-backed that Laurie rode him like an armchair, letting the reins hang slack while he squinted at the cult’s leaflet. He was whistling like he’d won the lottery, which pissed me off. I knew what he was thinking — dreaming of a mother-and-daughter reunion, with me cooking pancakes for breakfast and wearing skirts, Lula skipping off to college and coming home to cooked dinners. He never told me straight out I was getting too old for the rodeo, but I saw the scared look in his eyes whenever I climbed into the pen.

Pretty soon, we were making our way down a gorge, steep slopes of sandstone boulders on either side blocking out everything but a strip of blue sky above. It was that fake, cartoon-blue sky you get out here in the desert. Looks pretty in the tourist brochures, but hurts like hell to look at. The track was just wide enough for a small truck — I could make out wobbly wheel tracks in the sandstone grit. Probably how the cult made their way into town to pick up supplies and hand out their leaflets.

“Get this, Sam,” Laurie was saying. “This leaflet here reckons a race of cosmic aliens are gonna take over the earth and the only way to be saved is to worship the Great Mother. She’s like a shepherdess of the flock. Shub … er, Shub-Niggurath, that’s her name.”

I snorted. “Sounds like Lula found the mother she was looking for.”

Laurie made a disapproving noise. “You are too hard on that girl. She left because she thought
you
wanted her to go. Because you thought she was weak. Not everyone can ride a bronco — hell, Sam, most people don’t want to.”

“Maybe that’s why we have clowns,” I said, knowing it would hurt him, but saying it, anyway. “The world’s hard. You got to be harder to survive. It’s just the way things are.”

“So, what are we doing here?”

I didn’t bother replying. Not that he expected me to. He knew me pretty well after 20 years on the rodeo circuit. I wasn’t great on answering
Why are we here?
-type questions. He’d got what he wanted. I just wished he’d shut up about it.

We rode in silence for a bit, then Laurie began to whistle tunelessly and edged Blimp closer. “You know we’re being watched,” he said softly.

“Yep. For the last three kilometres. A blind dog couldn’t miss them.”

I nudged Shade into a trot towards one of the sandstone boulders and a figure dressed in a grubby, white gown scrambled for cover behind another of the massive stones. I caught a glimpse of a shaved head, the crown unnaturally flat, and a protruding forehead like a stone ledge. I guess he had eyes, but I couldn’t make them out. I’d seen pictures of victims of nuclear disasters, so I knew exposure to radiation could do weird things to a person, cause deformities. There was something different about this man, though, an unnatural quality that made the hairs on the back of the neck rise up. And I could tell Shade sensed something was off. He was skittish, his eyes rolling, and he danced away from the boulders. I guessed there were at least twenty of them, maybe more, hiding on both sides of the ravine.

“Maybe they think we’re coming to join up,” Laurie said hopefully. He waved the leaflet in the air like it was a flag of surrender.

“I’m not seeing green pastures and goats!” I said in a loud voice. The word, “goats,” echoed down the ravine like a bad rap song. “Hey! We’re here to see the Great Mother!”

Okay, maybe my tone wasn’t the most respectful, but for people who were so keen on recruiting, they sure weren’t eager to come out and say hello.

“I think your whip is making them nervous,” Laurie hissed.

“You think so?” I slipped the coiled leather from the saddle and sent it lashing against a nearby boulder.

The walls of the canyon came alive with the scuttling figures of the white-robed watchers, all of them clambering for higher ground. They were as agile as monkeys and just as scared.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” I called out, lashing out with the whip again.

“Sam!” Laurie squealed, “Don’t provoke —”

The track turned sharply to the left and widened suddenly into a circular cul-de-sac. Massive sandstone walls reared up about thirty metres, dotted with hundreds of holes. The caves ....