KACHINA DREAMS

a novel by

Robert Pratt

PROLOGUE

              Dust has always been a problem on the parched summer days of the American Midwest, especially in towns without paved streets, which was the case in the sleepy rural community of Sentinel Beach.  It didn't help much that the government was continuing its work on the levee across the river, perpetually moving earth and stirring up thick, choking clouds of dust.  When the wind was right, every flat surface was coated with fine, gritty powder.  Even residents who normally kept to themselves began to complain.

            It's easy to see why they turned to George Grimm, an enterprising young businessman, to spray the town's unpaved roads with waste crankcase oil to keep the dust down.  The fact that he took cash only for his work and did not accept the city's checks was just one of his quirks.  Like them, he was just a hard-working local boy trying to make a living.  Why not give him a break?

            "Cash never talks," he told City Aldermen.  "No one will know how much money you gave me, and no one will know how much I took."

            It was no secret that Grimm didn't deposit that income in the bank where it could be tracked by the IRS.  Instead, he invested his money in antique cars.  Whenever he needed cash, he simply unloaded one of his vintage rigs and made himself more liquid.  Residents felt if he could get away with it, then more power to him.  The government was contributing to the problem anyway, with all the dust they were stirring up across the river.

           What city officials didn't realize was that dust-control wasn't Grimm's only line of work.  He was also a salvage waste hauler.  The clients on that side of Grimm's little homespun enterprise included print houses, metal fabrication plants, chemical processors and a variety of pharmaceutical firms.

          "Everybody's got some kind of shit to get rid of," he told the owner of a machine tool plant one day.

          "You're right about that."

          "Everything your shop makes out of metal has to go through some kind of solvent before it's shipped out.  Right?"

          "That is correct, sir."

          "Well, I pick that crap up when you're done with it and get it off your hands."

          "And what do you do with it?"

          "What do you care?  What else are you gonna do with it?  Just give me a call and I'll get rid of it for you.  George Grimm's the name.  Waste hauling's the game."

          The problem for Grimm boiled down to what to do with the malodorous muck after he collected it.  When one of his workers told him that dumping a tankful of poisonous chemicals into the Mosquito River outside of town was probably not a good thing, Grimm held the man's job in abeyance.

          "Just fucking do it," he snarled.

          Then one day Grimm got an idea:  why not mix the chemical garbage he was collecting with the crankcase oil he was using in his sprinkle-trucks?  In that way, not only would he be paid to remove the chemical garbage for his industrial clients, the citizens of Sentinel Beach would provide him with a dumping site for the substance he had a hard time getting rid of anyway.  And pay him for it to boot.  The whole thing made perfect sense.  It was elementary capitalism at its lowest ebb.

          "George," a Sentinel Beach Alderman told him, "that crap you're spraying on our roads smells like sodden cat litter.  I know you use expired oil, but can't you change to 10W-40 or something?"

          "The birds are getting to be a problem too," another councilman added, referring to the increasing number of sparrows found flopping around on the roadside after Grimm's sprinkle-trucks had passed. 

          "What the hell," Grimm said defensively.  "A few dead birds stupid enough to swallow oil along with their grit is a small price to pay for getting rid of your dust problem, don't you think?"

          "It's more than birds, George.  The fenderwalls of my car are turning purple," the councilman said, scratching a pesky rash on his neck.

          "If you don't like it, maybe you should pave your damn roads.  Be glad to handle the job for you."

          "We can't afford it, George.  Just stick to suppressing the dust, okay?"

          'Fucking tightwads,' Grimm mumbled to himself as he got back in his car.  

          The devil's shopping list of PCBs Grimm was mixing with his waste oil and sprinkling on the streets of Sentinel Beach was bad enough.  But the death knell sounded even more portentously when he paid a visit to an industrial plant across the state line that manufactured diaper disinfectant, which produced a viscous, iridescent sludge as a by-product.  The material was 2-3-7-8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-D, or what is commonly known as dioxin, one of the most toxic chemicals ever created in a laboratory.  Like the chemical waste Grimm collected from his industrial accounts, he mixed the toxic sludge with waste crankcase oil and loaded it into his sprinkle-trucks bound for Sentinel Beach.

          The effects of being drenched in dioxin hit the community like a sledge.  Dogs, cats and assorted wildlife died within weeks.  One of the town's best known citizens, a breeder of AKC Doberman Pincers, was crestfallen when his prize female lost all her hair, then gave birth to a litter of two-headed puppies.

          There was a human toll as well.  A disfiguring skin disease called chloracne wracked almost everyone in town.  Expectant mothers in the area had so many problems with childbirth that pediatricians advertised special Sentinel Beach rates.  An epidemic of cancer roared through the community like a freight train. 

          Throughout it all, empowered by the city council to treat the roads whenever he felt it was necessary, Grimm continued spraying.  Whatever problems Sentinel Beach may have had, dust was no longer one of them.

          The people of Sentinel Beach remained stubbornly fatalistic, refusing to acknowledge that anything was wrong in their community.  They were horses with blinders on, galloping straight for the cliff.

Finally, a young mother chasing her children down in the yard one day suspected that the town's health problems might be connected to the oil Grimm was spraying on the roads.  She followed him to the diaper disinfectant plant across the river and saw him transferring a load of chemical garbage from the company's slop tanks into his sprinkle-trucks.

          She alerted the city council.  Coming to their senses, the Aldermen fired Grimm and scheduled a meeting with the regional head of the EPA, J. Phillip 'Rusty' Caldera, a stiff, austere-looking Irishman who always wore three-piece suits.

          "I'll use the full power of my office to investigate the situation," he promised.

          Initially, Caldera was good on his word.  In the midst of record first quarter earnings, the diaper disinfectant plant filed Chapter Eleven and closed down their business.  But since there were no laws about the disposal of hazardous waste at the time, the only charge they were able to level on Grimm was tax evasion.  After being hounded by the IRS, he went on the lam, leaving behind a warehouse full of vintage cars for the federal auction block.

          After that … nothing.  Months passed without a hint of interest from the EPA.  It was government indolence at its most typical.

  Meanwhile, following a year of unusually high precipitation, the Mosquito River surrounding the community began to swell.  With no ground cover to stem the flood, which had long since dried up and blown away in the drought, the river rose beyond its banks and submerged the town.  It was as if Mother Nature was trying to regurgitate the poison out of her system.  While Sentinel Beach had been a hotbed of hazardous waste prior to the flood, in a matter of days, it turned into a slowly percolating cauldron of toxic soup.

          In the midst of the town's flood clean-up activities, a small army of EPA troops descended on them like a swarm of locusts, dressed in silvery-white protective suits.  Surrounded by curious children with muddy faces and dirty T-shirts, government researchers looked more like astronauts from NASA than agents of the EPA.  No advance warning was issued, except to the press, who covered the event like a blanket.  The incident seemed designed more as a publicity stunt than an effort to accomplish any kind of meaningful dioxin testing.

          Nonetheless, the results of the tests gathered that afternoon were shocking.  In a dramatic press conference on Christmas Eve, Rusty Caldera announced that his pictures were back from the drug store. 

          "Our investigation has proven that Sentinel Beach is a hazard to the general public because of the dangerous level of dioxin saturating the soil," Caldera said.  "Our recommendation is for all private flood clean-up activity to cease immediately and for the government to buy out the town." 

           Whereas the flood did not destroy everything, humanity took care of the rest.  Furniture was hauled out of houses and left to rot in the sun.  Copper was stripped from interior wiring.  Every window in town was broken.  Graffiti left on the side of one garage spoke eloquently for residents' frustrations.  Its simple, straightforward prose said it all:  'FAREWELL, SENTINEL BITCH.  GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN BY THE U.S. GOVERMENT.'

          Sentinel Beach was officially disincorporated and air-brushed off the maps.  After mortgage contracts changed hands, Caldera called a public hearing at neighboring Titonka High School, where he delivered the coup de grace. 

          Looking like a stern but sympathetic high school principal, he declared that residents of the area would be happy to learn that a final solution to the dioxin problem at Sentinel Beach was pending.

          "Pending?" an irate citizen screamed from the floor.  "What do you mean 'pending'?" 

          A local pig farmer grabbed the microphone.  "Our neighbors have died, we've been contaminated, flooded, kicked out of our homes, and forced to sell our property to the EPA for half of what it's worth.  And now you tell us we're gonna be 'happy' about your so-called solution?  That's hogshit, mister."

          The crowd rose en masse and slammed themselves against the stage, shouting obscenities.

          "Order, please," Caldera said into the microphone, hammering his gavel against the lectern as the seething crowd pressed toward him with hisses and jeers.  "For God's sake, people, let's be civilized."

          Since that fateful public hearing, it has been said that Caldera banged the gavel so hard, the echo can still be heard ten years later in the quiet hills above Sentinel Beach.

Chapter 1

          KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK ...

          Zachery Sands woke from a sound sleep with a start.  His head was throbbing.  He rolled over and stared at the knotty pine ceiling, trying to focus.  Last night's festivities had been too much.  There was food, and drink, and people.  So many people.  After a disorienting few moments, he rubbed a fleck of sleep from the corner of his eye, rolled over and scanned the face of his wife, Meagan, who was lying beside him.

          "Meggins, did you hear someone knocking or was I dreaming?"  She murmured as if to acknowledge him, then faded back to never-never land.

          Somebody at the door so early in the morning?  No way.  He relaxed and tried to fall asleep.  The dawn was cracking through the east window, sending a shaft of sunlight between the trees, burning into the side of his face.  He chose not to drag himself out of bed and close the drapes.  Instead, he simply buried his poor hung-over head under the pillow to avoid the unforgiving morning light.

          On most days Zachery Sands was a clean-shaven, altogether average-looking young man in his early thirties.  Average height, average weight, average demeanor.  The only physical trait that distinguished him from the crisply attired businessmen with whom he spent his time was a head of curly brown hair, which he wore on the long side as insignia of his role as a Creative Director with one of the area's largest marketing firms.  At risk of being considered too 'creative' in a notoriously conservative business world, it was an image that served him well.  At any given meeting around the conference table, there was little doubt who counted the beans and who hatched the schemes.

          On this sun-drenched morning, Zack's rat's nest of uncombed hair smelled of cigarettes and alcohol from last night's party, making him look scruffy and unkempt, which was exactly how he felt.       

          Outside, the songs of the early birds sounded especially sweet.  As if they were running through their repertoire just for him, trying to serenade him back to sleep.  The repetitive call of a meadowlark on the far end of the property was bewitching, hypnotic.  He dozed off again.  Like a child with an imaginary friend, a tiny voice stirred in the depths of his consciousness.

          "You need to see without using your eyes.  Hear without your ears.  Think without using your mind."

          "Huh?" Zack blustered through a boozy fog.  "What?"

          In the gauzy nether world between waking and sleep, the voice transposed itself into the lonely coo of a mourning dove, perched on a branch just outside the window.

          "These woods are so beautiful," he mumbled to himself as he drifted back to dreamland.

          Privacy like Zack and his wife enjoyed was hard to come by.  The approach to their hill was surrounded by a scourge of pre-fab tract developments - instant neighborhoods named after the trees that canopied the area before real-estate moguls bulldozed them all down.  Zack felt lucky to have found this pocket of wilderness twenty miles outside of the city.  The world had gone crazy putting up little boxes made of ticky-tack on every vaguely open space.

           KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK ...

          He bolted upright in bed.  Yes, someone was definitely at the door.  No doubt about it.

          "Just a minute. I'm coming."

          Meagan stirred.  "Who is it, honey?"

          "I don't know, Meggins," he said, scanning the room for his clothes.  "But it damn well better be good at this hour."

          KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK ...  The rapping was clear, measured, insistent.

          "Hang on.  I'll be right with you."  He lurched out of bed, his head spinning.     

          Spotting his shirt and pants in a rumpled pile where he had torn them off last night, he scrambled across the room.  He threw one leg into his slacks as the other leg flailed wildly.  In his effort to hurry himself up, he stubbed his toe on the bed-post.

          "Sombitch," he said, hopping up and down like a peg-legged pirate.

          "For God's sake, Zachery, slow down.  Whoever it is can wait for you to get there in one piece."

          "Aye, Captain, but we can't.  We got no power."

          Zack's fun-house mirror view of life had gotten him in trouble more than once.  It was Meg's biggest pet-peeve.  She told him many times it was fine being the life of the party, but people had to be serious sometimes.  Zachery Sands never was.  Getting him to take a stand on anything was like pushing water uphill.  His whole life was a history of avoidance, denial, non-involvement.

          KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK ...

          "Hold your horses, damn it.  I'll be right down."

          Half in and half out of his pants, he ripped the topmost blanket from the bed, drawing an annoying look from his wife.  He threw it around his shoulders as if it were an Indian poncho and stumbled out of the room looking like the Grand Poo-Bah.

          KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK ...

          He scrambled down the stairs and poked his head out the front door.  Taken by surprise, a fat red squirrel clamored across the unfinished cedar deck.  It was a nippy morning.  He was glad he had the blanket.

          Despite the chill in the air, the serviceberries had delicate puffs of cotton on the tip of each branch, heralding spring.  The shagbark hickories were just starting to bud.  The dogwoods had already offered their sweet-smelling bouquets.  Plenty of trees to hide behind if it was some kind of juvenile shenanigan, he thought.  But it seemed unlikely at six o'clock in the morning.  Something was going on though.  His two big dogs were crouched low in the kennel and growling ominously.

          "Zachery." He stepped inside the house.  Meg was upstairs, leaning on the banister. "They're at the back door."

          "What?" he said with more than a hint of frustration.

          "I just heard them knocking in back.  You must have missed them as they were coming around."

          KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK ... at the back door.

          Whoever it was seemed to be losing patience and were rapping harder now.  Maybe, Zack thought, their morning visitor was trying to wake them up.  "That's great.  Always like to start my Sunday mornings in a circus."

          He bundled up in his blanket and moved as swiftly as he could across the room.  When he got to the back door, he looked out the window and froze.  In exaggerated slow motion, he ducked down below the door.

          "Honey, who is it?"

          "Shhh.  Come down slowly, Meggins.  And don't say a word."

          "But ... I'm not dressed."

          "It doesn't matter.  Just come down here."

          "Oh, Zachery, can't you just get it?"

          KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK ...

          "Good grief."  Meg slipped into her robe.  When she got to the bottom of the steps, Zack put a finger to his lips and gestured for her to stay low.  He sneaked a peek outside, then knelt back down under the door and motioned her over.

          "Why are you being so damn dramatic?"

          "Just get over here, Meggins.  You'll see."

          Used to humoring him when he got in these crazy moods, Meg hunkered low and followed his instructions, however reluctantly.  At the foot the door, he made hand-signals to indicate their plan of attack:  they would rise together as one, sneak a peek at whoever was outside the door, then duck down again.

          "Zachery, please."

          KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK ...

          On his signal, they rose and pressed their faces to the glass.  Nothing.  Meg looked him in the eye.  "Is this another one of your stupid pranks?  If so, buster, you're going to hear about it this time."

          "Shhhh.  Just watch."

          On the other side of the window, working its way around one of the sturdy split-rail posts supporting the back porch of their modern log home, a woodpecker the size of a hawk hopped into view.  The bird reared back and took several whacks at the post with a beak mounted on its head like a black dagger.

          KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK ...

          "Told ya."

          It was a woodpecker all right, but it was the biggest woodpecker either of them had ever seen.  It had a brilliant, red crest on top of its head in a jaunty elongated top-knot, giving the bird the profile of a mini-pterodactyl.  A shawl of grizzled black and gray feathers wrapped around its body like a robe.  A slim band of black framed its burning yellow eyes, looking like a bandit's mask.  Focused entirely on its work, the woodpecker was cocking its head back and forth, intently trying to locate insects between the cracks of the Sands' log home.

          "What is it?" Meg asked.

          Zack thought for a moment and shrugged.  Seeing this small movement through the glass, the bird turned its head mechanically and stared at him with intense, penetrating eyes.  Sensing more danger than it was worth, the mega-woodpecker sent up a warning cry to the rest of his ilk in the woods.

          "Kak-kak-kak-kak-kak!"

          Zack and Meg smiled at each other and the encounter.  With that, the creature pushed off the post and flapped into the woods with an impressive three-foot wingspan.  Zack was impressed.  Meg followed him onto the back porch, where they surveyed the tree line to see where it had gone.  But the bird had vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared.

          "I've heard of that thing before," Zack said.  "If I'm not mistaken, it's called a 'pileated' or something like that.  They aren't supposed to be real common.  But when they do make an appearance, because they're so shy, it's supposed to be a sign that all is well in the woodpecker world."

          "Pretty great to have one around here then."  Meg's attention was drawn to a stand of scrub oak behind the house.

          "No joke."

          "Maybe there's some way we can attract them.  I wonder what they eat?"

          "Insects obviously," Zack said, fingering the caulking between two logs.  "That's probably why he was hammering away at the house."

          Meg knelt down to inspect something she saw on the porch floor.

          "Oh shit.  I hope that doesn't mean we have termites," Zack laughed.  "Now there's a nightmare for you, a log home infested with termites."    

          "Zachery, look at this."

          "I'll be damned," Zack said, bending over to pick up a totally unruffled feather, with a pure white stalk tipped with black, as if it had been dipped in a bucket of paint.  "Looks like our pal Woody left us a gift,"

          "That's odd," Meg said, studying the feather.

          "Why is that?"

          "It looks like an eagle feather, not a woodpecker's."

          From deep in the woods comprising the southern boundary of the property, the agitated woodpecker was busy chattering at them.  It was as if the bird was letting him know - in no uncertain terms - that by moving onto this particular piece of property they had infringed on his territory.

          "Kak-kak-kak-kak-kak!"

          Singing the same song as its ancestors, the unusual woodpecker who had just introduced himself and left his calling card croaked his repetitive call over and over again, sight unseen.

          "Kak-kak-kak-kak-kak!"

Chapter 2

          The same galaxy of stars that splashed the sky above the Sands' log home was glittering over Sentinel Beach, a small deserted community a mile or so to the south and down the hill.  The genus of trees were exactly the same.  The flora and fauna were the same species.  But whereas spring was in the air on top of the hill and the world was in full blossom, the landscape at Sentinel Beach down below wreaked of sickness and disease.    

          Zack drove past the abandoned community twice a day, to and from work, and always wondered what happened to make the place such an eyesore.

          One bleak March afternoon on the way home from work, he decided to pull off the main highway at Lost River Road and get a closer look.  What he saw gave his curiosity a jolt.  Homes built in the housing boom of the fifties were in a state of ruin, rotting and blackened by years of Midwestern humidity.  Distressed, peeling billboards advertising the Red Madonna Shrine and the Atomic Bobcat Company stood outside the skeletal remains of the community like tired sentinels.  Broken toys were scattered in abandoned yards, long since rusted to the spot.  It was a modern day ghost suburb, looking like a neutron bomb had made a direct hit.  A sign in bold block letters spelled out a warning:

NO TRESPASSING

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY

DIOXIN CONTAMINATION

          'Dioxin, huh?' Zack thought.  "What the hell is that?" 

          Giving it no more than a passing thought, he pointed his vehicle in the direction of home and made himself comfortable on the back porch. 

          Down the hill, a tangerine bank of clouds opened to the west, allowing a beam of sunlight to cast itself providentially on the suburban ghost town of Sentinel Beach.  The aluminum siding on a faraway building reflected a glint of sunlight and seemed to wink at him.

«««««»»»»»

          As dusk sired the twilight, a scouting party of unusual crows blew in from out of nowhere and parked themselves on a barren dead oak at the entrance to town, flapping their wings like living black leaves.  They remained perched in the skeletal remains of the dioxin-ravaged tree until well past dark, cawing raucously toward the top of the hill.

          It was almost as if they knew that nothing was going to be done about the situation at Sentinel Beach until they had summoned Zachery Sands from his sanctuary on top of the hill.

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