There was a long silence, a silence, Harris thought, of reevaluation and regret for earlier, hasty judgments. “That is a very ugly story,” his wife said. She took the autobiography away from him and began to turn the pages.
“Isn’t it?” Harris wiggled his arm underneath her. There was a longer silence. Harris stared at the ceiling. It was a blown popcorn landscape, and sometimes Harris could imagine pictures in it, but he was too tired for this now. He looked instead at the large cobwebs in the corners. Tomorrow Harris would get the broom and knock them down. Then he would get out the vacuum to suck up the bits of ceiling that came down with the cobwebs, the little flakes of milky asbestos, the poisonous snow, the toxic powders. Nothing the vacuum couldn’t handle. And then Harris would need a rag to remove from the furniture the dust the vacuum had flung up. And then the rag would need to be washed. And then… it was almost like counting sheep. Harris drifted.
“You can’t possibly think those things happened because of Carry’s prayers,” his wife said.
Harris woke up in amazement. His arm had already gone numb from his wife’s weight. He pulled it free. “So now she’s Carry?” Harris asked. “Now we’re on a first-name basis?”
“Look at the religious climate she grew up in. You don’t believe God afflicted a little girl with such a horrible condition because her mother asked Him to?”
“What kind of mother would ask Him to?” said Harris. “That’s the point, isn’t it? What kind of a horrible mother is this?”
Harris’s wife was still reading the autobiography. “Carry worked for years to earn the money for surgery,” she told Harris.
“I’ve read the book,” he said, but there was no stopping her.
“She ignored the doctors who said the case was hopeless. Every time a doctor said the case was hopeless, she went home and earned more money for another doctor.” Harris’s wife pointed out the relevant text.
“I’ve read the damn book.”
“The condition was finally cured, because Carry never gave up.”
“So she says,” said Harris.
His wife regarded him coolly. “I don’t think Carry would lie.”
Harris turned his back on his wife and lay on his side. “It’s very late,” he said curtly. He turned off his light, punched angrily at his pillow. Unable to get comfortable, he flipped from side to side and considered getting himself another sherry. “What’s to like about her? I really don’t understand.” Harris felt that his wife had suddenly, frighteningly, become a different person. They had always been so consensual. Not pathologically so — they had their own opinions and their own values, of course — but they had also generally liked the same movies, enjoyed the same books. Suddenly she was holding unreasonable opinions. Suddenly she was a stranger.
His wife did not answer, nor did she turn off her own light. “This is an interesting book, too,” she said. He heard pages continuing to turn. “There are hymns in the back. Honey, if you dislike Carry Nation so much, why do you have all these books about her?”
Harris, who always told his wife everything, had not yet found just the right moment to tell her that, the last time he was in Panama, he had summoned a loa. Harris pretended to be asleep.
“You just don’t like her because she had a hatchet,” his wife said quietly. “Because she was a big, loud woman with a hatchet. You’re threatened by her.”
Harris sat bolt upright so that the comforter slid off him. Was that fair? Was that at all fair? Hadn’t they had a completely egalitarian, respectful, supportive marriage? And didn’t it make him sort of a joke in the DEA for his lack of machismo, and hadn’t he never, ever complained to her about this?
“Good night,” his wife said evenly, snapping her light off. She had her side of the comforter wound in her fists. It fell just a bit below her shoulders so he could see her neck and the start of her spine, blue in the moonlight, like stitching down her back. She breathed, and her spine stretched like a snake. She pulled the comforter up around her again. She had more than her share of the covers.
Beside the books on her nightstand was the little black toad. Harris had given it to her for Christmas. It stared at him.
And wasn’t he, after all, the person who’d brought Carry back? Now he was glad he hadn’t told her. Harris’s feet were too cold, and he couldn’t sleep at all.
• • •
“I’VE READ OVER your report,” Harris’s superior told him. “I took it up top. It’s a little spotty.”
Harris conceded as much. “The form was so small,” he said.
“And not really designed for exactly this sort of problem.” With tone of voice, phrasing, and body language, Harris’s superior managed a blatant show of generosity and condescension. Harris’s superior was feeling superior. It was not a pretty thing to see. It was not a pretty thing to see in the man who fought so hard to award the Texas Guard a $2,900,000 federal grant so they could station themselves along the Mexican border disguised as cactus plants and ambush drug traffickers.
Harris looked instead at the map on the wall behind him. It was a map much like the map in Harris’s study; the pins were different colors, but the locations were identical. “This is the DEA’s official position,” his superior said. “The DEA does not believe in zombies. The DEA believes in drugs. One of our agents was inadvertently drugged on Christmas Eve and imagined a great many things. This agent now understands that the incidents in question were hallucinatory.
“If it is ever proved that this agent called forth a loa, then it is the DEA’s position that he did so in his leisure time and that the summoning represents the act of an individual and not of an agency.
“The DEA has no knowledge of or connection with the gorilla woman. Her malicious and illegal destruction of private property is a matter for the local police. Do you understand?”
“Unofficially?” asked Harris.
“Unofficially they’re reading your report in the men’s room for light entertainment,” said Harris’s superior. “You’ll see bits of it on the wall in the second stall.” Harris already had. Item six: I don’t know where she got the body. Scratched with a penknife or the fingernail-cleaning attachment on a clipper, just above the toilet paper dispenser.
His superior leaned forward to engage in actual eye contact with Harris. It took Harris by surprise; he drew back.
“Unofficially we were impressed with the report the General gave us. We were impressed enough to interview some of the Miami eyewitnesses. They’re not the sort of wing nuts in sandals you might expect to find in the tabloids. Our agent spent two hours with a Mr. Schilling, who owns the Miami bar. He’s a pretty savvy guy, and he says she performed feats of superhuman strength. How did she get into the Vatican embassy? No one ever sees her come or go. She took out a crack lab in Raleigh, North Carolina, a week ago. Did you hear about that?”
Harris had not. He was alarmed to hear she was already as far north as Raleigh. He rechecked the map. There it was, a black pin through the heart of North Carolina. “Unofficially the DEA doesn’t give a damn where she came from. Unofficially the DEA expects you to take care of her.”
Harris nodded. He had always seen that the burden of responsibility was his. With or without the DEA, he had never intended to shirk it. He had already been spending his sleepless nights making plans. “With support?” Harris asked.
“At my discretion. And certainly not visibly.”
It was more than Harris had hoped for. He moved to the map on the wall. “She seems to be moving directly north. Sooner or later, I figure she’ll hit here.” He drew a line north from Raleigh to Richmond, a small circle around Richmond. “Somewhere in here. So. We concentrate our forces in the larger bars.