Echoes of the Bones

The Stones Remember

I was juggling house-keys, cell phone, and groceries, while restraining a sudden and urgent need to pee, when the the phone began to laugh maniacally. It actually startled me. “You’re not the boss of me,” I said, thinking, “no wonder Katrina hated that ring-tone.” I stumbled through the door, dropped my bags, and made a beeline for the latrine.

Composure recovered, mostly, I gathered my groceries from the couch and floor and proceeded to put things away. More relaxed and beginning to ease into the blessed mindlessness of the mundane, I noticed my little digital drill-sergeant lying smugly on the rug by the coffee table. I bent over to pick it up thinking, “it’s probably someone with an amazing offer!” I never get a call from someone I might actually want to talk to.

“That’s weird,” The caller ID said, Katrina. ” Now what? I haven’t heard from her in months.” After a painful breakup, moving on is the rational thing, you know, and Katrina tended, generally, always to do the rational thing, as any self-respecting analytical, rational, scientific materialist, philosopher would, generally, always tend to do. Me? I’m more the stomp-around-and-rail-against-heaven sort of guy.

“Shit!” I decided to make some coffee. “Whatever!” As the coffee brewed, I paced back and forth between the cell phone, still resting comfortably on the rug, and the kitchen stove, all the while muttering, “I don’t need this!… What don’t I need?… Whatever it might be, I don’t need it,” and finally coming to rest on, “okay, I’ll call her back.” You never know. Maybe something horrible happened and she needs my help. Maybe she’s wasting away without me. Yeah, right. I took a deep breath and punched her number.

She answered at once, “Hi Paul,” sounding vaguely annoyed… and a little relieved. “I wasn’t sure you’d return my call.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I mean, of course I would. What’s up?” Just passing the time of day, right?

“I need to talk to you, but I need to talk in person. Could you come over?” So much for just passing the time of day.

“What’s it about?” I asked. “Why me? I mean why not call your sister? I mean what do you need? I mean…”

“I’d rather not say over the phone,” she said, coming to my rescue. It’s embarrassing and a bit disturbing. And it’s more up your alley. Anyway, just please come over.”

“Give me a hint?” I said.

“Paul!” she said. And then, quietly, almost in a whisper, “please.”

“Okay,” I said, my bluster suddenly deflated. Something was seriously wrong. “I’ll be there in twenty.”

“And bring a change of clothes, toothbrush, and all that. I need you to spend the night….” My lower jaw went into free fall. ” … on the couch.” My teeth snapped back together. ‘There’s something I need you to see.”

I swallowed very hard, and started gathering my things… and turned off the gas under the coffee maker, which had already completed its volcanic eruption, leaving coffee all over the stove like fresh lava flow.

*****

Barelas neighborhood, where Katrina had landed, is the oldest neighborhood in the city, older than “Old Town.” The area was first settled at the end of the 17th century, twelve years after the Pueblo revolt of 1680 had driven the Spanish back to Mexico. The tribes, it seems, had lost faith in the Power of the Spanish gods to guarantee good crops when a long term drought came along and destroyed them all. By the time Diego de Vargas Zapata returned with fresh troops bent on Reconquest, the drought had not abated. Apparently the locals concluded that if twelve years free of the Spanish rule hadn’t healed the land, then the drought was more powerful than anyone’s gods and so didn’t care anymore one way or the other. The Spanish soldiers, without much else to do, gradually settled in and became farmers themselves.

When Katrina was moving into her new place, I told her, just to annoy her, that such an old area would be full of ghosts. “You’re the one who believes in that nonsense,” she had retorted. “But with any luck it will keep you from showing up and bothering me.”

“I have seen ghosts.” I told her. “I didn’t say I was afraid of them.”

“If I had known from the start how irrational you were….’ She trailed off, letting the implication sink in.

“I’m irrational?” I had responded, “well, Horatio, there are more things…”

“Whatever!” She cut me off.

Katrina lived in a small, three-room, addition attached to the back of a 120-year-old sod-block structure, now stucco’d a charming roseate pink, that had originally been a farm house. I parked on the street and walked around back. She was standing outside the back door, smoking and gazing at thunderheads accumulating above the Sandia Mountains.

“Since when do you smoke?” I asked.

She waved her hand vaguely over her head and walked to the back of the property, sitting down on the bench of a rickety old picnic table that squatted beneath a scraggly elm. “I don’t know, couple weeks.”

I set my backpack by the door and followed her back, checking the bench for splinters before easing down onto it. Acrid smoke burned my throat and sinuses.

“Damn!” I said, “Unfiltered Camels? Really?”

“Huh?” she replied. “Oh yeah. The farmer likes them.”

“Who, if it’s not too indiscreet, is the farmer?”

“Oh, he hangs out back here,” she said. “You can see him around dawn or dusk. He’s one of the ghosts.”

My carefully crafted composure wobbled for a moment. “Ghosts…” I said, casually, the way you might remark on the probability of rain. “Hmmm… you seem pretty okay with it….All things considered… On the phone you sounded kind of… freaked out?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. Her distracted air had me a bit off balance. “Gimme a sec.” She opened her mouth, and a low, raspy, old-guy voice came out of it: “Ernesto! Pendejo! Cabrea te!”

“What the fuck was that?” I said, almost pitching backward over the bench.

“I told him to piss off,” she said, her voice resting in a more normal range.

“Told who?”

“The Farmer.”

“You told him? It didn’t sound like you.”

“Sometimes we get a little… mixed up.”

“Ohhhh-kay. So now you speak Spanish.” I said, casually, sure…why not? She turned her head to look at me, cocked it to one side, raised an eyebrow, and shrugged.

“Hey!” I said, “that’s my annoying mannerism!”

She repeated it, and looked down at the cigarette. She was holding it with the thumb and two fingers, with the flame sheltered by her palm, protecting it from the breeze. She gagged, took a long drag, gagged again, and began coughing like a consumptive.

Suddenly she shook her head. “Get Out! she wheezed .

“What? Me? You asked me to…. ohhhhh,” My brain jumped through the hoops and landed.

It landed on a strange and lonely runway. “You’re a goddamn medium! Not a career move I would have expected from you.” I looked at the gathering clouds for a minute, then said, “I thought you said that the farmer, Ernesto, is it?… was only around at dawn and dusk.”

“Oh, he’s always around,” she rasped. “That’s just when he’s easiest to see… and when he is around, and he’s not talking about the weather, he tends to say weird shit that gives me the creeps.”

“What kind of weird shit?” I asked.

“Well, most recently, he’s started saying el oscuro quiere ser liberado.”

Blankly, I stared.

She translated: “The Dark One wants to be set free.”

“Shit! I feel like I should cross myself,” I said, “but…”

“But what?”

“But I don’t know how, since I’ve never seen the inside of a catholic church.” I took a deep breath. “Okay, so aside from acquiring certain nasty personal habits and having your jealously guarded world-view dumped unceremoniously on its head, you seem to be adjusting fairly well to your new neighbor.”

“Well,” she cleared her throat, “give me a minute.” She wheezed while I looked around, wondering where the next appalling revelation might lie in wait. “Ernesto’s not my only unexpected roommate.” She sneezed.

“Bless you,” I said, reflexively, and handed her a handkerchief. She nodded a thanks.

“But hell!” she said, allowing her inner conversation to leak out a bit. “How am I supposed to go to class tomorrow and lecture on the functionalist theory of cognition and identity?”

“Tongue in cheek?” I suggested.

Startled, she looked back up at me. “No!” she insisted, “How do I know some random wraith won’t decide to pop in and put in its own two-cents worth”?

“I haven’t seen many wraiths recently,” I replied, “and not a single one that was random.” “Functionalism, huh?” I went on. The word tasted sour and faintly metallic.

“In crude terms,” she explained, “the mind is like software. The brain is the hardware.”

“Yeah,” I said, “guess your banishing spell’s not working so well.”

“My what?”

“Vell look,” I said, trying my hand at channeling an Austrian psychoanalyst, “it vas clear that you ver’ repressing sahm deep aspects of your subconscious experience.” I adjusted my imaginary monocle and pretended to write something in my invisible notebook. “Clearly, your obsession with rational materialism…”

Katrina interrupted me, suddenly and with intense focus. “Are you telling me that there’s a way to make them go away and leave me alone?”

“Why?” I sniped. “So you can go back to being little miss ‘I’m a robot, you’re a robot, everyone’s a jolly robot?’”

“Well,” she said. “I’m afraid that’s out of the question, since unless I’m going crazy, we, here, today, have falsified the functionalist model of the mind.”

“What do you mean we, kemo-sabe?” I said. “I didn’t see any ghost.”

She punched me in the shoulder, hard. “Owww! Damn!” I moaned. “Is one of your new roommates a boxer?”

“How do I get rid of them!”

*****

I told her that she owed me dinner for assaulting my shoulder, my nostrils, and my nice, comfortable level of angst. So, two hours of grocery shopping and tag-team food prep later we sat at the table in her tiny kitchen while I prepared myself to wade into some deeper water with her.

“Okay,” I said, “‘how do I get rid of them?’ was the question, yes?”

“Please don’t tell me I need an exorcist,” she groaned.

“No,” I said, “you need a psycho-pomp.”

She blinked, “a psycho-pomp,” and raised an eyebrow and the lifted the corner of her mouth while shaking her head.

“A guide to the underworld,” I said.

“You’re kidding, right? You’ve got me in vulnerable position, and you’re making fun.”

“Think of a psycho-pomp as a sort of extra-dimensional lawyer,” I began. “You are, in fact, trespassing, living in the very homes and memories of the non-local residents…”

Katrina dropped her forhead into her palm and shook her head.

“What?” I said.

She groaned. “Please don’t lay any of that quantum mysticism on me; not in the mood just now.”

“Alright,” I said, “let’s look at your other options. You could start with a nice banishing ritual, maybe the LBRP.” Noticing her look of bewilderment, I spelled it out. “Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. To put it legalistically, it’s a little like invoking eminent domain. You establish a circular space, invoke the angels of the four directions, tell any spirits who happen to be hanging around to, by the authority of whichever deity, king, or power you think they might believe in, kindly piss off, symbolically, by tracing pentagrams counterclockwise in the air in the four directions. It’s kind of the magical equivalent of “get off my lawn, punk.” Not very nice, since they were here before you, but it often works, temporarily. It’s not long lasting, so you have to do it every day, and it doesn’t endear you to the, the non-locals, so you might want to be on the lookout for a tendency to become a bit accident-prone.”

“You can try hoodoo style floor washes, sage, offerings of beer and tobacco…. All these yield varying degrees of success. What it boils down to is you either learn the magical geography of the neighborhood where you live in order to become a better neighbor and enlist the aid of the more benevolent of the spirits that inhabit the place, your friend Ernesto, for instance, or you enlist the aid of an intermediary spirit with the ability to negotiate your boundaries. Or you could call in a tactical nuclear strike, figuratively speaking.”

“What’s a tactical nuclear strike, figuratively speaking?” she asked.

“Archangel Michael, Lucifer, you know, the big guns.”

“How do you ‘know’ all this?” Katrina asked, making little quote marks with her fingers.

” I grew up in a similar neighborhood, “I replied: small village, very old, very — like this area — bloody ground.”

“Jeezus, this is getting worse and worse,” she said. “Why is this bloody ground?”

I stood up and clasped my hands behind my back for some pedantic pacing, a teacher-at-the-head-of-the-class sort of thing, but the kitchen was too small, so I sat back down.

“You’ve heard of the Anasazi.” I began

“Sure.”

“Well, around 700 years ago they began to abandon their settlements in New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona. Perhaps there was a severe drought; perhaps there were internal social problems. They deserted the high plateaus and canyons and moved to lower, wetter ground. Along the Rio Grande river they built new settlements where water was plentiful and settled in for the long haul.”

“Around the same time the Navajo and Apache tribes began moving into the region, hunting and raiding as they migrated.”

A couple of hundred years later groups of eastern Shoshone from the upper Platte river and the Wind-River mountain range migrated down the Platte and into present-day Kansas and Texas, where they encountered horses, brought over from Europe by the Spanish. Within a single generation the Comanches had transformed themselves into the most accomplished mounted raiders on the planet. And their reign of terror lasted from the 16th century right up through the middle of the 19th. The enormous herds of bison in the southern plains were an enormous source of wealth, which they wanted to control.

“While the Comanche dominated the southern plains they roamed from Kansas down into Mexico and from east Texas to the Rio Grande. They could hit a village or homestead in the evening and be 100 miles away by morning. Tijeras, the canyon that Route 66 passes through east of town used to be called, The Comanche Trail. The canyon was the highway, the mountain pass, that Comanche raiders coming off the Llano Estacado, the high plains of Texas and Eastern New Mexico, took when they wanted to raid the pueblos along the Rio Grande.”

“Bloody ground.” I continued. “The Comanches were not gentle in their methods or in their treatment of prisoners. Nor were the Apaches. The raids were sporadic, but quick and terrifying. Then there was the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, triggered as much by drought as anything else. There was the civil war. Lots of action over the years. Such bloody ground becomes a citadel of the restless dead, known in popular legend and song as ghosts.”

She stared at me, open-mouthed. “I think I need a beer,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, “you’ll need two, actually, and some tobacco, but not quite yet. We’ll wait until sunset.”

“What for?”

“We’re going to make nice with some of your less intrusive neighbors and ask for their help in reigning in any misbehavior from your nightly haunt.”

“What kind of misbehavior?”

“Oh, you know, slipping into your skin or something.”

We sat up half the night with no sign of anything out of the ordinary. Eventually, I dozed off. But sometime in the wee hours, the room exploded into chaos: shouts, wails, clanking of chains, the works. Too bad I hadn’t thought to ask for protection for my own quivering skin! Leaning over me, just inches from my face, a black man, semi-transparent for the most part and wearing what looked like a dusty, blue uniform of civil war vintage accessorized by manacles and chains on both wrists and ankles was screaming and shaking his chains at me. I couldn’t make out what he was yelling, but his anguish, frustration, and anger were loud and clear.

Suddenly, Katrina’s voice came sailing above the din, a soprano serenading a hurricane. “He wants you to set him free!” she sang.

“What?”

“Take off his goddamn manacles!” she shouted.

“Oh!” I reached up and made motions intended to mime the removing of manacles from spectral feet and hands. The moment I finished, the shouting stopped. The face, formerly frozen in a rictus of agony, relaxed into a faint smile. I thought I felt a cold hand on my shoulder and seemed to hear a faint voice say, “thank you, son,” as the spectral form faded like smoke in a breeze. I got up to say something, but Katrina was fast asleep.

*****

“Go ahead, tell me you weren’t scared,” Katrina grinned from across two plates of huevos rancheros and coffee down at the Barelas Cafe the next morning.

“Thought I was gonna lose my bowels,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, “but you didn’t.”

Well you seem remarkably well-adjusted. This is Katrina I’m talking to, right?”

“Yes, it’s me.” She looked up from her plate, smiled, and looked back down.

“So, how did you know what the old guy wanted?”

“I was terrified. I thought we were both going to be hauled off to the underworld, hijacked for the wild hunt or something, never to be seen again. Then I remembered the odd phrase Ernesto kept repeating over the past few weeks. I thought I had fallen into some low-budget horror movie. But then I stopped. ‘The dark one wants to be set free.’ Suddenly it all made sense. That’s just how a local farmer might have described a buffalo soldier.”

The buffalo-soldier regiments were formed after the war,” I said.

“Whatever!” she said before I could get started. Anyway, the whole thing seemed like a dream, and after that I just remember turning over and falling back to sleep.”

“You were totally in a trance!” I said. “Still, you seem remarkably calm and, dare I say it? well-adjusted to the whole situation this morning.”

“Yes,” she said, “well…, I, I sort of had a, a sort of a revelation last night.”

You had a revelation? I thought I was going to have a heart attack. Where’s my revelation?”

“Actually,” she corrected, “it was more of an epiphany, a memory, long forgotten.” She paused and took a sip from her cup. “I was ten and my sister was seven. I took her into a cemetary one night. She didn’t want to go, but I insisted. As we passed near one of the graves I sort of nudged her so that she had to step on it. She let out a scream like you’ve never heard and lit out like a rabbit with a hound breathing down its neck. I asked her later, after she had calmed down, what was it that set her off. She said she felt a cold hand grab her ankle. She seemed fine after a day or two, like she might have forgotten all about it, but to this day she won’t go anywhere near a cemetery. You can see why I couldn’t call her to ask for help with all this.”

“Yes,” I said, “it might’ve been awkward.”

“But the thing that came back to me, the memory I had blocked, was… that night in the cemetery I thought I saw a hand come up out of the ground, sort of smoky and insubstantial, but I thought I saw it grab her ankle…. I was just ten,” she shuddered.

“Damn.” I said, “That’s messed up.” We sipped our coffees. “Explains a lot.” I mused.

“Say, on another note,” I said brightly, “can you teach me to channel someone who speaks Catalan? I’ve always wanted to go to Barcelona… Ow!!! What are you wearing, steel-toed sneakers?”