OMALLEY: You ain’t got a friend, buddy. You’re taking everybody’s fall for them. And this friend of yours is letting it happen.
TULL: You don’t know this friend of mine. I’ll be all right.
OMALLEY: Face it. He went off and left you.
TULL: God damn you. You pig. You don’t know him. You don’t even know his name. You don’t even know where he is. He never will let me down. He never will.
Leaphorn looked up from the page, closed his eyes and tried to recreate the voice. Was it vehement? Or forlorn? The words on paper told him too little. But the repetition suggested a shout. And the shouting had ended that particular interview.
Leaphorn put that folder aside and picked up the psychiatric report. He read quickly through the diagnosis, which concluded that Tull had psychotic symptoms of schizophrenic paranoia and that he suffered delusions and hallucinations. A Dr. Alexander Steiner was the psychiatrist. He had talked to Tull week after week following his bout with chest surgery and he’d established an odd sort of guarded rapport with Tull, surprisingly soon.
Much of the talk was about a grim childhood with a drunken mother and a series of men with whom she had lived and finally with the uncle whose mule had kicked him. Leaphorn scanned rapidly through the report, but he lingered over sections that focused on Tull’s vision of his own immortality.
STEINER: When did you find out for sure? Was it that first time in prison?
TULL: Yeah. In the box. That’s what they called it then. The box. (Laughs.) That’s what it was, too. Welded it together out of boiler plate. A hatch on one side so you could crawl in and then they’d bolt it shut behind you. It was under the floor of the laundry building in the old prison the one they tore down. About five foot square, so you couldn’t stand up but you could lay down if you lay with your feet in one corner and your head in the other. You know what I mean?
STEINER: Yes.
TULL: Usually you got into that for hitting a guard or something like that. That’s what I done. Hit a guard. (Laughs.) They don’t tell you how long you’re going to be in the box, and that wouldn’t matter anyway because its pitch black under that laundry and its even blacker in the box, so the only way you could keep track of the days passing is because the steam pipes from the laundry make more noise in the daytime. Anyway, they put me in there and bolted that place shut behind me. And you keep control pretty good at first.
Explore around with your hands, find the rough places and the slick places on the wall.
And you fiddle with the buckets. There’s one with drinking water and one you use as a toilet. And then, all of a sudden, it gets to you. Its closing in on you, and there ain’t no air to breathe, and you’re screaming and fighting the walls and . . . and . . . (Laughs.) Anyway, I smothered to death in there. Sort of drowned. And when I came alive again, I was laying there on the floor, with the spilled water all cool and comfortable around me. I was a different person from that boy they put in the box. And I got to thinking about it and it came to me that wasn’t the first time Id died and come alive again. And I knew it wouldn’t be the last time.
STEINER: The first time you died. Was that when the horse kicked you?
TULL: Yes, sir, it was. I didn’t know it then, though.
STEINER: And then you feel as if you died again when this truck guard shot you at Santa Fe?
TULL: You can feel it, you know. There’s a kind of a shock when the bullet hits-a numb feeling. And it hurts a little where it went in and came out. Lot of nerves in the skin, I guess. But inside, it just feels funny. And you see the blood running out of you. (Laughs.) I said to myself, Well, I’m dyin again and when I come alive in my next life, I’m going to have another face.
STEINER: You think about that a lot, don’t you? Having another face?
TULL: It happened once. It’ll happen again. This wasn’t the face I had the first time I died.
STEINER: But don’t you think that if they had taken you to the right kind of surgeon he could have straightened it out after you got kicked?
TULL: No. It was different. It wasn’t the one I had.
STEINER: When you look in a mirror, though. When you look at the right side of your face, isn’t that the way you always looked?
TULL: The right side? No. I didn’t really look like that in my first life. (Laughs.) You got a cigarette?
STEINER: Pall Malls.
TULL: Thanks. You know, Doc, that’s why the pigs is so wrong about my buddy. The one they call Hoski. They don’t even know his real name. He’s like me. He told me once that he’s immortal, too. Just let it slip out, like he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. But it don’t make any difference to me if everybody knows. And there’s another way I can tell he’s like me. When he looks at me, he sees me. Me. You know. Not this goddamned face. He sees right through the face and he sees me behind it. Most people they look and they see this crazy eyeball, and they flinch, like they was looking at something sick and nasty. But but my buddy . . . (Laughs.) I almost let his real name slip out there. The first time he looked at me, he didn’t see this face at all. He just grinned and said Glad ta meetcha, or something like that, and we sat there and drank some beer, and it was just as if this face had peeled away and it was me sitting there.
STEINER: But the police think this man sort of took advantage of you. Left you behind and all that.
TULL: They think bullshit. Theyre trying to con me into talking. They think I’m crazy, too.
STEINER: What do you think about that?
TULL: You ought to see the Kiowa. He’s the crazy one. He’s got this stone. Claims its a sort of a god. Got feathers and fur and a bone hanging from it. Hangs it from this goddamn bamboo tripod and sings to it. (Laughs.) Calls it Boy Medicine, and Taly-da-i, or some damn thing like that. I think its a Kiowa word. He told us there at Wounded Knee that if those AIM people was willin to start shootin to kill, then this Boy Medicine would help them. The white man was goin to be wiped out and the Buffalo would cover the earth again. (Laughs.) How about that for crazy shit?
STEINER: But isn’t that the leader of the organization? The one you’re supposed to be following?
TULL: The Kiowa? Shit. My buddy, he was workin with him, and I’m workin with my buddy. Following? We don’t
