The Siren's Tale Read Online Free PDF Page B

say. It is a matter of life or death. Only send me word of where you are living, dear.”
    Caesar's wanderings eventually landed him in Rapid City. After Dakota was born, he sent Miss Carson a short letter. One day, mail arrived for him via general delivery, with a large check drawn on a San Francisco bank. Her signature was not on it, but he knew the benefactor was his birth mother.
    Telepathy being one of his many under-used talents, Caesar can read Dakota's mind, where a suspicion is forming in regard to the revealed family history. Perhaps Miss Carson paid off her bastard son all these years solely to avoid certain inconvenient questions, such as the identity of Caesar's deceased father and what inheritance Caesar (or his son) might have a rightful claim to.
    As a potential for violence lurks beneath Dakota's impassive aura, Caesar hastens to add an explanation. “Your grandmother said…if it was known…we was related, trouble would soon follow. Something evil…judging by the look in them cat's eyes of hers. They was exactly your color. She said…she was marked by a curse. If the curse ever found me…I would be haunted…to my dying day…even beyond it.”
    He wheezes through the end of his story, which is his favorite bit. “I never…saw her again. But as I kissed her goodbye, she told me…about my name. Back East…she played Cleopatra…Queen of the Nile. She named me after…the queen's lover…Julius Caesar.”
    The dying man's energy is depleted. A half hour goes by. A loud snore rattles the cobwebs in the rafters. There is another long silence. Caesar's head drops to one side; his eyes roll and slowly close.
    “ Goodbye, my dear,” the old man whispers. He is gone. The only sign of his passing is a slight lift of the curtain in the dirty window of the airless room. 
    One night, Dakota hears a tap-tap-tapping at the window before falling asleep, and then he dreams about the reclusive grandmother his dying father told him about and her untold wealth. Later in the dream, he sees himself returning to his native people on a white horse, laden with bags of gold and precious jewels, riding past Mount Rushmore and flipping off the four White-Eye images there that deface his tribe's sacred mountain. Dakota's mother was a direct descendant of Crazy Horse, and in Dakota's dream, he makes a dazzling contribution to the 563-foot-tall mountain sculpture under construction in honor of Crazy Horse. He sees himself in a pow-wow with Seth Big Crow, transferring the treasure into his hands. They smoke peyote, and Big Crow says, no matter how he got the money, Dakota has made a proud, defiant answer to the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, and that because of Dakota, the largest monument in the world will be completed.
    When he awakens, he looks up the history of the warrior Crazy Horse, who most famously killed George Armstrong Custer and 264 cavalrymen at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. In the 1868 treaty, the White-Eye handed over the Black Hills to the Lakota, but deliberately failed to address the gold rights. Crazy Horse led his tribe numerous times against miners and settlers in the Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming before his mysterious death almost one hundred years ago.
    In January, bored with his plains life, Dakota heads to San Francisco on a Greyhound bus. He is increasingly resentful toward his grandmother, who should be punished for giving Pa away when he was a helpless infant, then later kicking him from the door like a begging dog. The old broad might reward him handsomely, to keep him from telling the newspapers what he knows about her personal history.
    Perhaps no words will be necessary. When Dakota puts his mind to it, he can silently will a person of any age, appearance, or disposition to do just about anything. Even hoity-toity dames give him a tumble and a month's stay, which is as long as he can stand their White-Eye stink. There is a ritual he follows. He presses a ridged birthmark on his chest with the