“I shall await you on the island of birds, pale fish man,” he said quietly. The old Indian and his dog stood silhouetted in the red dawn light of the vermilion desert, and soon they were lost in a fog of dust.
AS THE MORNING drew on and the temperature in the car grew to a comfortable level of nearly oppressive heat, Lovecraft halfheartedly attempted to dismiss the old shaman’s intimations of death. He held forth about savage superstitions and parlor tricks; he brought up Harry Houdini’s campaign to expose spiritualists and charlatans who performed such deceptions, then drifted off into a digression about ghost-writing a story for him set in the pyramids of the Giza plateau. “I find myself unable to take seriously anyone, even a man who appears to be a reputable noble savage like Imanito, who believes in the existence of Atlantis,” Lovecraft said finally. “I must confess I was impressed at first by his seeming keen knowledge about us, but upon reflection I am inclined to think the way Houdini thinks about such deceptions.” But much to his surprise, he could get no corroboration from Howard, whom he knew to have similar sentiments. At least they’d had occasion in the past to argue rationally about the existence of lost continents like Atlantis and Mu. But now his friend seemed too seriously disturbed by recent events to support his criticisms of Imanito. Lovecraft was much relieved when Howard finally made light of things.
“I have a joke for you,” said Howard. “What does Santa Claus say in the Southwest desert?”
“What?”
“Nava-ho ho ho!”
“Shouldn’t that be ‘Nava-ho ho Hopi’ in order to be more inclusive?” Lovecraft said.
“Well, ain’t you suddenly an Injun expert. I have another joke for you, then,” said Howard. “What leaks out of a Southwest desert Injun after he’s drunk too much?”
“What?” Lovecraft asked.
“Nava-Ho-pee,” said Howard, bursting into giggles at his own wit.
Lovecraft gave a high-pitched titter of approval.
“I have a joke, too,” Glory said after a few moments.
“What is it?” asked Howard.
“What do you call a Texan who makes a damned fool of himself?”
“What?”
“A Tex-anus.” Glory and Lovecraft laughed this time, and Howard glowered at them from under his thick brows.
Soon Lovecraft had dozed off while scribbling in his journal, and in the moments of uncomfortable privacy it offered, Howard tried awkwardly to break the silence.
“What do you suppose he meant about you?” Howard asked. ” ‘A mother who ain’t a mother; who wants to visit a mother.’ That’s a pretty riddle, ain’t it? And right on the button as far as I reckon, at least the first half of it. But then that thing about your dyin’ in cold air-that seemed pretty peculiar.”
“I am visiting a mother,” Glory replied. “My sister lives in Vegas, and she has a little boy. I’ve wanted to see them for a long time.”
“You believe the old Injun?”
“How could he have known?”
“Anyone who reads Weird Tales could find out about me and HP easy enough,” said Howard. “There was an Injun at the last gas station who could’ve brought him the hose-and put a hole in the old one, come to think of it. He coulda told him the three of us were comin’. The rest is just mumbo jumbo.”
“Why would he bother?”
“Huh?”
“What would the old man have to gain by feeding us and repairing your car? Why would he go through such an elaborate charade just to do that?”
Howard scratched his hat. “I don’t know. Maybe he’s workin’ with those fellas in black who tried to kidnap you.”
“He certainly didn’t seem to want to harm us in any way.”
“Well, who the hell knows?” Howard said, losing his patience.
“Maybe they got some custom among the Hopi to help people of the Master Race.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Glory.
“Well, I can’t figure it. Everything that’s happened in the past couple of days has been spooky as hell, and I’d just as well it all stop. I like to write this sort of thing, but livin’ it ain’t exactly my idea of fun. We’ll see what Klarkash-Ton has to say about it when we see him.”
“Klarkash-Ton? That sounds like some Moorish prince.”
“Sorry,” said Howard. “It’s Clark Ashton. Clark Ashton Smith.”
“The poet?”
“You heard of him?”
Glory’s voice suddenly grew soft. “Hasn’t everyone? I love his work.”
“Figures.” Howard sped up and passed a slow-moving truck loaded with empty chicken cages. Feathers flew outside the window. “I been meanin’ to ask ya,” said Howard. “Why did you scream back there? Another nightmare?”
“Yes,” said Glory. “It was bad. The same dream I had before about those men in the black suits taking my baby. There really was something uncanny about that hogan.”
“Could you tell it to me?”
Glory was quiet for a moment, ruminating. “I’ll tell you why it was so terrible,” she said finally, “but I can’t bear to repeat the dream.”
“Fair enough,” said Howard, glancing at her in the mirror.
“I was away at college back East when my mother passed away.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Miss.”
“Thanks for your sympathy, but it was a while ago. I was a junior when I heard the news. It was in the spring, and losing her that time of year was terrible for me. My mother was the most important person in my life. When I got the telegram I couldn’t stop crying for days. I hate telegrams now. I cried my eyes out, and then I had to get away from everything. My roommate and I ran off down to New York City with our clothes packed in typewriter cases to fool our professors. We hitched a ride on the Old Post Road with two men who were going down from upstate to work on a skyscraper. They were just workers, you know, the coarse and rough type, though they were really nicer than any real gentlemen or the West Point boys we knew. We stopped along the way by a beautiful lake for a picnic, and then one thing led to another, as they say. My friend was fine, but by the’ time the school year was over, I knew I was pregnant.” She saw Howard’s grip tighten on the steering wheel at the mention of the men. She knew what he was thinking. “And you’re right,” she said to him, “the boys were probably Indians, though we never asked. You must be wondering why a college girl would sleep with an Indian. You must think it’s demeaning, don’t you? But then you never would have imagined me at a women’s college until I told you, right? You boys have been thinking of me as a common oil-town whore. You boys really don’t know all that much about the world, though you seem to pretend an awful lot.” She saw Howard’s grip relax, perhaps out of embarrassment, perhaps because he was just sleepy after having stayed up through the night.
“You got me there, Miss.”
“Please call me Glory.”
“Glory. You’re right. I never woulda pegged you as a college girl. So you never finished school?”
“My father’s plan was to have me graduate and find me a West Point man. They used to come up from the Academy by bus for our dances almost every weekend. I was able to hide the pregnancy all summer, and I had to do some real soul-searching to decide if I wanted to keep the child. You know what I decided?”
“Well, I woulda kept the baby. God’s gift, even if his father was an Injun…”
“You’re right. I decided to keep him. Halfway into the fall semester I couldn’t hide it anymore. There’s only so much you can do with baggy sweaters, especially in a school full of women. They found out and sent me back home to have the baby, and then everything went to shit.” She saw Howard visibly wince at the word. “I decided to keep him, but it wasn’t because of God or anything like that. It was because my mother was gone, and I had to balance things. lowed it to her. My father knew plenty of good doctors and even some shady quacks who would have done the job, but I wouldn’t hear of it. He said it was too much of a shame on our family, and Grandmother agreed, and I was supposed to disappear for a while, as if! were still away at school, until they could find some story to deal with the baby. I don’t know what they had in mind-probably something laughable like finding the poor infant on their doorstep in a basket-something like that. Well, they sent me off to a sanitarium, and I heard the rumor there that Grandmother had found a family to take the baby, so after he was born I took him and ran away.”