Psychic Detective 30 By: Jake Preston
This is a work of erotic gay fiction, intended for readers who enjoy a murder mystery in which fully developed characters interact sexually and in other ways. Their sexual encounters are sometimes romantic, sometimes recreational, sometimes spiritual, and almost always described explicitly. My attention is equally divided between narrative, character development, and sex scenes. If you don't care for this combination, there are many other excellent "nifty" stories to choose from. And remember that while nifty stories are free, maintaining a website is not. Please think about donating at http://donate.nifty.org/donate.html
Writing is usually a solitary avocation, but not necessarily so on nifty.org, where a longer story appears in installments. If my characters and my story grab your attention, you can always intervene with suggestions for improvements. All sincere comments will get a response!
Jake, at jemtling@gmail.com
Chapter 30 The Shaman and the Psychic
The source of water for the spring at Red Bluff was a geological mystery, all the more so when it gushed and expanded into a pond. The solitary willow not had a sizeable branch overhanging the pond. Water overflowed in a winding stream that ended at the hill, and formed a second pond that deepened until it was evident that it, too, was fed by water from a second spring. The valley became a sanctuary for birds and a hunting-ground for rabbits and deer.
The Lakota people attributed the 'miracle of waters' to Billy Blue Heron. They said that the valley was watered by two springs because Billy Blue Heron had two spirits. "It's true that I'm a two-spirited man," Billy would say, "but the springs are a gift from Manitou." For the Lakota, Billy's denial was proof that he caused the miracles. When a pair of herons took residence in the valley, Jack told Billy that he should stop making denials, as no natural explanation made sense. The Tribal Council made plans to establish a cooperative farm in the valley. They debated about stocking the stream with trout.
Days after G?ran Svenson arrived in Lakota, Dark Eagle returned to his home in Crane Lake. Before he left, he settled on a plan for the education of Billy Blue Heron. He was to attend Lakota College during the academic year, and spend his summers at Crane Lake, where he would study shamanist arts with Dark Eagle. 'Summer', for this purpose, began with the Summer Solstice Powwow at the Ojibwe Monument. The Tribal Council decided to send a Lakota delegation there each year. In return, the Waabooz ['Rabbit'] band of the Ojibwe agreed to send delegates to the Lakota Powwow, which started each year on Columbus Day, in subversive (if only symbolic) declaration of tribal independence.
Anna Ravitch decided to stay in Lakota until the next Summer Solstice Powwow. She pledged herself to an artistic mission- a pictorial record of the Lakota people in a new series of paintings. She hoped that she could express her interest in nude male figures in some of the paintings, but the opportunity hadn't come yet. She had her eye on Jack, who would have consented if she had asked, but he always seemed too busy to pose. Still, she approached her task with a youthful spirit and the expertise of old age, and would count herself blessed even if she never painted a naked Lakota.
That's where matters stood when G?ran first visited the crime scene, accompanied by the three tribal leaders- Jonathan Sand Crane, Sheriff Jackson, and Billy Blue Heron. The remnants of four skulls, and the fifth skull, still intact, had been left in place. "Can you work your psychic magic on these?" Jack asked when he showed G?ran.
Jack expected that G?ran would start with the intact skeleton. Instead, G?ran sat Indian-style in front of the smallest fragments and meditated, moving from one bone-shard to another. He started at ten in the morning, and picked bits of feathers and textiles and put them in plastic baggies, which he handed to Jack. No one broke the meditative silence.
Ignoring the darkness, G?ran came at last to the intact skull. He touched it with an index finger on each side where the temples would have been. "When is the peyote ritual?" he asked Billy Blue Heron.
"Tomorrow at noon."
"Can it wait for three days?" G?ran asked.
"If you say so, G?ran," Billy replied.
"We must prepare for the peyote ritual by practicing sexual continence for three days. Absolutely no sexual contact of any kind! The peyote ritual will be a funeral ceremony for Johnnie Elk Heart, the shaman of the Wallowa tribe in the Nez Pers? Nation. We must not pray for enlightenment from the Great Spirit. If Manitou sends an omen or an oracle, it will be an unexpected gift."
"Is this the skull of a shaman, then?" Jonathan asked.
"No," G?ran said. "I believe that Forensics will confirm that this skeleton belonged to a young man from Superior named Craig Clark. He was a drummer in Calvin Cohn's band at Apollo's. It's essential that Calvin be here for the peyote ritual. The Wallowa shaman's remains are ten yards to my left." G?ran then broke into an unearthly wail and beat his chest with his fists. Jack had seen this before at other crime scenes, but the others looked on in shock. Jack signaled for them to wait in silence until he spoke, as he did: "It grieves me to say that all five victims went blind from thirst and starvation, before a flock of crows swooped down and pecked out their eyeballs. They suffered other humiliations, but that was the worst."
Next morning G?ran and Jack took Anna Ravitch to the hidden valley at Red Bluff. She wanted to paint the willow in its rocky landscape. "The 'solitary tree' is one of the oldest themes in literature," she told them. "The earliest example is in the Sumerian epic of Lugalbanda, more than four thousand years ago. It's the oldest extant epic in the world, and the solitary tree is one of its images." Imagine Jack's surprise, and G?ran's, when they entered the valley and saw that the spring had expanded into a clear-water pond, suitable for swimming and deep enough for diving off the overhanging branch of the willow! Mrs. Ravitch put the tree at the left and the pond at the center and right, against rugged red rocks instead of sky, giving the landscape an otherworldly aura.
While she kept busy at her easel, Jack and G?ran examined the ground for remnants of feathers and cloth, and any other objects that might suggest Native American symbolism- Albino's signature in the other crime scenes. Each object they found was stored in a plastic baggie, and labeled according to its direction and distance from the willow. Their most important discovery was an elaborate turquoise necklace. Jack said the metalwork was not Lakota. "I know the craftsman who made this," G?ran said. "He has a shop in Joseph. I recognize his style."
"Could the necklace have belonged to Johnnie Elk Heart?" Jack wondered.
"That's possible," G?ran said. "But Howard Coleman and Robert Staley were in Joseph, too. They could have bought it at the same shop. Still, I think it belonged to the shaman."
"Staley- that's the name of Albino's companion, then?" Jack said.
"Tom Eidan confirmed that," G?ran said. "The FBI checked for missing persons starting in Wyoming. They got lucky. He lived in Cheyenne. They linked him to the murder of a gay man there, too- a rugged itinerant bull-rider from Idaho who followed the rodeo circuit. Another cold case solved by the FBI!"
Anna Ravitch had prepared lunch. They sat in the shade of the willow and ate, in view of her painting. She had taken artistic license with the overhanging limb, painting it lower and longer and up-turned at the right. The willow and its oversized limb formed a frame around a panoply of light blues below mineral shades of red. In the real world of 'open sky country', the most obvious feature would have been a bright sky, but Mrs. Ravitch wasn't interested in realism. The effect of light on a bright day was suggested by chromatic streaks of light absorbed in the water and bouncing off red rocks and yellow-green leaves. The landscape set the stage for the real subject of the painting.
"If you gentlemen would be so kind as to step out of your clothes, I'd like to adapt this picture to my 'waterhole' series by painting you into it. The setting is unique. The painting will stand out as an unusual variation of in the history of 'waterhole follies'," Mrs. Ravitch said. She didn't have to remind them of her 'Waterhole Follies' hanging over the hearth in the lodge at Wayward Island Resort.
G?ran doffed his shirt and kicked off his boots. "Do what the lady says, Jack," he said as he pulled down his trousers and shorts. When they got naked, Mrs. Ravitch posed them with G?ran seated like Rodin's 'Thinker' and Jack half-crouching with his right leg extended.
Mrs. Ravitch disclosed her plan for the nude figures: "Jack will be seen left of center, scaling the overhanging tree-limb, with his left leg dangling down. G?ran will be seated on the rock jutting out of water to the right, like the 'Thinker' in reverse with his gaze fixed on Jack as he climbs the tree-limb. A second figure of Jack will be seen standing in the water, in almost-frontal nudity gazing on G?ran, who is gazing on the 'other' Jack." Mrs. Ravitch pointed to relevant sections of the painting as she described the 'historia', as she called it. "The theme of the painting is same-sex attraction. It's a psychological narrative in a dream-world. That's why there's no sky," she said.
Jack asked if she wanted him to climb the tree. "There's no need for that, Jack. It's easier for me if you model your backside up close. G?ran will help by supporting your weight, since your position is impossible to hold." Jack's backside was the focal-point. Mrs. Ravitch represented his musculature as a triangulation of dorsals, trapezials, and lats on both sides of the vertebral line, with subtle variations on each side caused by his half-crouching position. Below each shoulder, hints of the axillary arch lent an aura of mystery that echoed in his almost-visible anus and a glimpse of his scrotum, bisected by a not-quite-reddish mid-seam that reflected the bolder line of his spinal cord. Crouched at the left and vertical at the right, the figure as a whole conveyed an impression of human duality, anatomically impossible, but believable. Jack's face could be seen in profile as he seemed to look back at the viewer of the painting.
G?ran cut a more realistic figure, seated on a rock with one foot in water, his eyes fixed on Jack. Mrs. Ravitch's only departure from nature was his penis, slightly enlarged to emphasize circumcision. To the left of Jack, a second image of Jack stood frontally nude, his gaze fixed on G?ran. His intact penis required no exaggeration, as his foreskin was made prominent by Nature.
Looking at the painting for the first time, the initial impact is shock at the level of anatomical intimacy shared from a distance by three figures, who in reality are two figures. On second look what seems most important is the gaze that they share yet don't share, into which the viewer is drawn by Jack, who, however, seems quite indifferent to the prying eyes of the viewer.
It took Anna Ravitch all afternoon to execute the painting. To alleviate the boredom of posing, she related the history of 'waterhole follies' to her captive audience of two. "This history is part of the painting, too," she said. "It started in 1855 with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. In one of the poems, called "Twenty-eight Men," he describes twenty-eight naked men sporting in a swimming-hole, observed by a lonely woman who imagines herself as the twenty-ninth bather:
The young men are floating on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them, They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and beading arch, They do not think whom they souse with spray.
"In had to be a woman observer, because it was 1855, but 'Twenty-eight Men' is a poem about same-sex attraction. The twenty-ninth bather was secretly a man."
"Twenty years later, Thomas Eakins introduced the theme in 'The Swimming Hole', which shows six men in diverse poses, in and out of water, seemingly unaware of each other, like toddlers in parallel play. From then until World War I, other artists painted variations of Eakins's original. In the 1890s, some rather minor authors wrote pedophilic poems on this theme, in which the naked swimmers were boys.
"The theme took a new direction during World War I. Four British memoirists of the Great War- Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Reginald Farrer, and Brigadier Crozier- describe soldiers sporting in swimming-holes as a temporary escape from the anxiety and danger of war. It's a theme in the war-poems of Rupert Brooke, Robert Nichols, and Wilfred Owen. An American source for 'soldiers bathing' is John Dos Passos's Three Soldiers, where Privates Andrews and Chrisfield are warned off a pond by a self-righteous YMCA officer who was scandalized because two French girls were watching them. During the Great War, YMCA officers had as much authority as MPs. Some of the Great War episodes were fictional. Others were factual, but even the most factual scenes were idealized by a cultural tradition. "Irony and danger first intrudes on 'swimming-hole follies' in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961), a comic-ironic novel about graft during World War II. A flyboy named McWatt liked to show off by buzzing men in his squadron when they gathered on a raft for nude swimming. Once by miscalculation he flew too close to Kid Sampson and sliced his body in two with the propeller. Only the 'plaster-white soles of his feet remained in view', alluding to Pieter Brueghel's 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus', and to W. H. Auden's description of this painting in 'Mus?e des Beaux Arts'.
"Following the example in Catch-22, danger intrudes on 'swimming-hole follies' in literature of the Vietnam War. In Close Quarters (1974), Larry Heinemann recalls skinny-dipping in a river near Tay Ninh with three other Marines, one who could barely swim and two who took high dives from a tree-limb. As in Whitman and in Dos Passos, the swimmers were observed by a woman (a 'dink-chick'). Their sport was interrupted when a 'papa-san' paddled by in a canoe. The Marines ran for their guns, dressed only in bush-hats. Papa-san turned out to be friendly, and offered them a 'numba-one boat ride'.
"A variation of this scene appears in 'The Water Hole Follies', an episode in Larry Gwin's Baptism (1999). An experienced officer named Colonel Cherry allowed his men to sport in a waterhole the size of a swimming pool near the Cambodian border. 'Picture, if you will, sixty or seventy men, bare-ass naked, each reverting to his most delirious childhood?. Guys were jumping from the trunk of the tree that overhung the swimming hole'. Suddenly the Sergeant called them out of the water: 'Choppers on the way? coming to pick us up in fifteen minutes!' Everyone made a mad dash for their clothes. What if the Huey airmen had seen a large group of men out of uniform in the water? This was friendly fire narrowly averted.
"Jacques Leslie, a Los Angeles Times correspondent, tells another swimming-hole tale in The Mark (1995). One Sunday in Hue, Leslie and four other reporters went swimming on a beach in the South China Sea. At the sound of artillery, they ran for cover. They thought it was NVA, but it turned out to be three GIs target-shooting on a sand dune. They had a narrow escape. They could have been shot by 'friendlies'. On their way home, the reporters invented fictional headlines about 'the tragedy that hadn't quite occurred'. Leslie's favorite headline: 'Five Correspondents Killed While Swimming Nude on the Beach'.
"Tim O'Brien imagines a tragic consequence in July, July (2002), set in Da Nang in July, 1969. The protagonist, David, allowed half his platoon to go down to the river for a swim like boy scouts, while one of them, Hector Ortiz, turned on his transistor radio for news about the Apollo 11 Moon Landing. These were 'blunders [that] violated even the most minimal field discipline'. While they were swimming they were massacred. The narrator describes the scene: a random placement of the dead, and men dying of diverse wounds.1 O'Brien achieves the same 'Brueghel effect' as Heller. No one takes notice, as everyone is kept busy by their own affairs. The whole world is watching news about Apollo 11 while the Marines in David's platoon lie naked and dead or dying at their swimming hole in Da Nang.
"In two Vietnam War novels, the 'swimming-hole' is the Reflecting Pool near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. In Born on the Fourth of July (1976), Ron Kovic describes a peace-demonstration staged by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in April, 1971. Vets stripped and romped in the water 'to the beat of bongo drums and metal cans'. The water-follies ended when a 'blue legion' of cops waded into the pool with their horses, 'flailing their clubs, smashing skulls. People were running everywhere as gas canisters began to pop'. Some veterans sought refuge in the Lincoln Memorial, but Lincoln couldn't help them. In Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story (1986), Jesse imagines what the Vietnam War Memorial should be: an oversized granite bowl near the Lincoln Memorial, filled with sewage and hundred-dollar bills. Sog it up and invite the public to 'fish around in that bowl of shit and keep any hundred-dollar bills they come across? but first they must take off their shoes, roll up their trousers, slug through that knee-deep mud'. Skinny-dipping is metonymized by the removal of shoes and the rolling-up of trousers. The mixture of sewage and money symbolizes the integration of warfare and commerce in the Military-Industrial Complex. Jesse said all this before the Vietnam War Memorial was built. He probably wouldn't say it now that the Wall has been sanctified by the tears of family and friends, but it was his way of expressing opposition to an unnecessary war."
"The Vietnam Vets could be silenced, but truth in art cannot be silenced," Jack interjected, posing in frontal nudity for the 'second' Jack. By the time Anna Ravitch reached this point in her discourse, G?ran had completed his duty as a model. He could have gotten dressed, or gone for a swim in the pond. Instead he sat Indian-style and watched the progress of Mrs. Ravitch at her easel.
"I saved my best example for last," Mrs. Ravitch said. "In Before Night Falls (1993), Reinaldo Arenas takes 'water-hole follies' back to its homoerotic roots- back to Walt Whitman and Thomas Eakins. When Reinaldo was six, he became aware of his same-sex attraction during a St. John's day festival, June 24, 1949, while watching thirty naked men swim in a river, 'jumping from a rock into the water?. I enjoyed seeing them come out of the water, run among the trees, climb the rocks, and jump? their bodies dripping wet, their penises shining. The young men were carefree, cavorting in the water, coming out again, and jumping into the stream?. I watched them spellbound, in ecstasy before the glorious mystery of beauty'. The next day he discovered masturbation and continued to imagine the scene. Maybe this happened. Maybe it didn't. In The Palace of the White Skunks, Arenas tells a different tale about how he discovered masturbation, a tale that has nothing to do with swimming-hole follies. In any case, he draws on 'water-hole' tradition to idealize the scene."
G?ran had heard Anna Ravitch's spiel before, in a version that had more painters and fewer authors, but Jack was astonished. "Where did you find all these sources, and how do you remember them?"
"My dear boy," Mrs. Ravitch replied, "when you were still in school on the Res, I was in Mexico working on my first series of water-hole paintings. It's my duty as an artist to know my themes. Renaissance artists knew the Bible because that was the source for their 'historiae'. Why should the painting of male nudes be different?"