WHERE THUNDER SLEEPS
A Novel
Where Thunder Sleeps
Based on the novel by David cope
Copyright 2015 David cope
Contact: James Clois Smith Jr., Sunstone Press / (505) 988-4418
LOG LINE: A young man just out of graduate school decides to take a trip across country and, in Holbrook, Arizona, finds two strangers, both white and both intertwined in Navajo culture, who lead him on an adventure ending in a magical and murderous climax of grief and envy.
Act I
In the present day, our protagonist drives across country into a small town in northeastern Arizona, finds a room in a motel, locates a diner in which to eat, and discovers three things: extraordinary food of unknown origin; a woman of indiscriminate age who owns The Diner but refuses to take more than five dollars for any meal; and a man who sits and eats a large bowl of green something refusing to speak. On his way back to his motel room, our traveler discovers that while this area of the southwest continues to survive severe droughts, large cumulus clouds with lightning and thunder always seem to threaten.
Flashback:
Our traveler as a young boy walks hand in hand with his father at a Coney Island magic show where a magician presents him with a red ribbon that seems to appear and disappear from nowhere apparently. But he refuses to see the magician make a woman disappear.
Act II
In the present again, our traveler visits Petrified Forest National Park, sees the sights there, but encounters an incredibly violent storm that drops nothing but slight drops of rain here and there around him. During this storm, he has brief contact with a strange multicolored lizard. No words or thoughts are exchanged, just an unusual experience.
Flashback:
As an older but still young boy in his earlier life, our traveler sits next to the bed of his father who is dying from cancer. His mother, incapable of dealing with the issue, is strangely absent, yet we see her knitting out the door in the living room.
Cut to:
The father dies and the young man arranges a memorial service. The mother then comes publically unglued and the young man must care for her. They get along but not without conflict over religion and remembering his father and her absence from his bedside. His mother has now found another man and this too leads to arguments.
Fade to:
At dinner, our traveler meets his step-father-to-be, a rich man with a mad woman for a mother, and all manner of hysterics result. This mother thinking her son is being married for his fortune, that his stepson-to-be has no drive for a respectable vocation, and thus making dinner a monumental disaster.
Act III
In the present day, our traveler attempts to connect with the strange man in The Diner without success. He then discovers a number of things: the man always holds his right arm next to his body with his hand in his pocket; the man eats the same bowl of green something for dinner; the woman who owns The Diner knows the man and speaks to him comfortably in a strange language.
Cut to:
An incredible view of the Hopi village of Walpi on First Mesa where cliffs blend into buildings with a backdrop of the huge canyon of The Painted Desert. While taking a tour of the supposedly deserted town on this mesa, our traveler sees his first moving shadow on the second floor of one of the ancient ruins. A foreshadow of things to come?
Flashback:
In an attempt to find himself, our traveler, still in the East but now as a man, takes a tour of the world: Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America, hitting all the sights the tour books advertise. All without gaining any inspiration of what to do with his life.
Cut to:
Still in the past, he discovers that his mother and father-in-law have met their deaths while vacationing along the coast of California. A wild ride off the cliffs of Big Sur on Highway 1. This leaves our traveler with imaginings of how it must feel to know you’re going to die while plummeting more than a thousand feet down to the shoreline rocks.
Fade to:
In an apparent effort to mend himself from this horrible event, he meets a woman real estate agent on Long Island who, besides wishing to help him sell his father-in-law’s house, decides to couple with him in the most interesting ways she or he can imagine. While this relationship ends as abruptly as it begins, it sends our protagonist on his way across country to Big Sur to witness the scene of his mother’s death for himself. Along the way he makes stops, one in Holbrook, Arizona.
Act IV
Present day. The man eating the green soup agrees to tell our traveler his story. They sit in the motel lobby and this man begins with his Mormon parents assigned to Many Farms on the Navajo Reservation to teach the so-called savages civilized behavior. The Mormon way of life. And our protagonist begins his own life in Navajo Land. As he grows, he makes the only friends of his age he can make, the Navajos in his school, and begins to learn an alternate way to live. He then falls in love with a beautiful Indian princess who’s forbidden to him by both her and his parents.
Fade to:
Going to High School in Gallup, New Mexico, he returns to run away from home. When he decides to come back he finds his parents murdered and mutilated and his Navajo princess the culprit. She cuts off his right hand and runs away.
Fade to:
He eventually lives alone in his parents’ house only to find a Skinwalker present, a Navajo legend similar to a shape-shifter in current parlance. He seeks refuge in a school friend’s house and, with the love of his life, undergoes a Navajo Enemy Way Ceremony, acceptable because he is by now a token Navajo, speaking the language, and knowing the way of The People.
Fade to:
Present day. The one-handed man continues his tale by asking his princess to visit the great Canyon de Chelly for a kind of celebration of being healed by the ceremony. They go, but well inside the narrow canyon a storm hits, a great storm of incredible lightning, thunder, and heavy rains and the canyon floods. She’s swept away in the waters and her body never recovered.
Act V
Our traveler visits the southern branch of Canyon de Chelly to see for himself what the one-handed man dealt with in his ongoing story. He once again sees a moving shadow where none could be in an ancient native ruin and is chased from the scene by an enormous dust storm.
Cut to:
The man who eats green soup together with the owner of The Diner propose that our traveler write a book about his extraordinary tale, and to cement that bargain to go with the man to visit Canyon de Chelly; the northern branch where the flood actually took place. He eventually agrees and they hike to the very spot where the man lost his lovely Indian princess. A thunderous storm strikes and decades after the first one, they stand above the broiling waters confronted by not one, but two Skinwalkers (now incarnations of the shadows our traveler has seen previously) who threaten to throw them into the waters. The one-handed man confesses that it was he who murdered his parents. And with that confession, he sees his princess swim by in the waters drowning. He leaps into those waters this time to save her. Our traveler follows soon after to escape his Skinwalker, survives, and goes for help.
Fade to:
A search party is sent out to find the missing man and woman, but no sign can be found. Except, that is, a necklace worn by the missing Indian princess of long ago. Our protagonist gives up further searching, returns to his motel to find it has no record of his staying there, no diner ever having existed, and only a single newspaper article gleaned from the local office of the Weekly Gazette that a flood did occur several decades previous in Canyon de Chelly, with no survivors or bodies found.
Fade to:
As our traveler leaves Holbrook he passes a coyote, what the Navajos call a trickster, and the animal seems to be smiling.