It takes a minute to recognize Mona from just her head and the pile of chains around her neck. You don't want to get caught looking anywhere else, but her pubic hair is shaved. From straight on, her thighs are two perfect parentheses with her shaved V between them. From the side, her breasts seem to reach out, trying to touch people with her pink nipples. From behind, the small of her back splits into her two solid buttocks, and I'm counting 4, counting 5, counting 6 ...
Oyster's carrying a white deli take-out carton.
A woman named Honeysuckle in just a calico head wrap talks about her past lives.
And Helen says, "Doesn't reincarnation strike you as just another form of procrastination?"
I ask, when do we eat?
And Mona says, "Jeez, you sound just like my father."
I ask Helen how she keeps from killing everybody here.
And she takes another glass of wine off the mantel, saying, "Anybody in this room, and it would be a mercy killing." She drinks half and gives the rest to me.
The incense smells like jasmine, and everything in the room smells like the incense.
Oyster steps to the center of the room and holds the deli carton over his head and says, "Okay, who brought this abortion?"
It's my three-bean salad.
And Mona says, "Please, Oyster, don't."
And holding the deli carton by its little wire handle, the handle pinched between just two fingers, Oyster says, " 'Meat-free' means no meat. Now fess up. Who brought this?" The hair under his raised arm is bright orange. So is his other body hair, down below.
I say, it's just bean salad.
"With?" Oyster says, and jiggles the carton.
With nothing.
The room's so quiet you can hear the Battle of Gettysburg next door. You can hear the folk song guitar of somebody depressed in the apartment upstairs. An actor screams and a lion roars and bombs whistle down from the sky.
"With Worcestershire sauce in the dressing," Oyster says. "That means anchovies. That means meat. That means cruelty and death." He holds the carton in one hand and points at it with his other, saying, "This is going down the toilet where it belongs."
And I'm counting 7, counting 8 ...
Sparrow is giving everyone small round stones out of a basket she carries in one hand. She gives one to me. It's gray and cold, and she says, "Hold on to this, and tune to the vibration of its energy. This will put us all on the same vibration for the ritual."
You hear the toilet flush.
The parrot on Badger's shoulder keeps twisting its head around and yanking out green feathers with its beak. Then the bird tilts its head back and gulps each feather in jerking, whiplash bites. Where the feathers are gone, plucked, the skin looks dimpled and raw. The man, Badger, has a folded towel thrown over his shoulder for the parrot to grip, and the towel is spotted down the back with yellowy bird shit. The bird yanks another feather and eats it.
Sparrow gives a stone to Helen, and she snaps it into her powder-blue handbag.
I take the wineglass from her and sip it. In the newspaper today, it says how the man at the elevator, the man I wished to death, he had three children, all under six years old. The cop I killed was supporting his elderly parents so they wouldn't be placed in a nursing home. He and his wife were foster parents. He coached Little League and soccer. The woman with the walkie-talkie, she was two weeks pregnant.
I drink more of the wine. It tastes like pink lipstick.
In the newspaper today is an ad that says:
Attention Owners of Dorsett Fine China
The ad copy says: "If you feel nauseated or lose bowel control after eating, please call the following number."
To me, Oyster says, "Mulberry thinks you killed Dr. Sara, but I don't think you know jack shit."
Mona reaches up to put another sacrifice on the mantel and Helen lifts the glass out of her fingers.
To me, Oyster says, "The only power of life and death you have is every time you order a hamburger at McDonald's." His face stuck in my face, he says, "You just pay your filthy money, and somewhere else, the ax falls."
And I'm counting 9, counting 10 ...
Sparrow shows me a thick manual open in her hands. Inside are pictures of wands and iron pots. There are pictures of bells and quartz crystals, different colors and sizes of everything. There are black-handled knives, called athame. Sparrow says this so it rhymes with "whammy" She shows me photos of herbs, bundled so you can use them to sprinkle purification water. She shows me amulets, polished to deflect negative energy. A whitehandled ritual knife is called a bolline.
Her breasts rest on the open catalog, covering half of each page-Standing next to me, the muscles jumping in his neck, making fists with both hands, Oyster says, "Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It's because they know what it's like to be treated like an animal."
The body heat coming off him, he says, "In egg production, did you know all the male chicks are ground up alive and spread as fertilizer?"
Sparrow flips through her catalog and points at something, saying, "If you check around, you'll find we offer the best deals for ritual tools in the medium price range."
The next sacrifice to The Goddess, I drink.
The one after that, Helen downs.
Oyster circles the room. He comes back to say, "Did you know that most pigs don't bleed to death in the few seconds before they're drowned in scalding, hundred-and-fortydegree water?"
The sacrifice after that, I get. The wine tastes like jasmine incense. The wine tastes like animal blood.
Helen takes the empty wineglass into the kitchen, and there's a flash of real light as she opens the refrigerator and takes out a jug of red wine.
And Oyster sticks his chin over my shoulder from behind and says, "Most cows don't die right away." He says, "They put a snare around the cow's neck and drag it screaming through the slaugh-terhouse, cutting off the front and back legs while it's still alive."
Behind him is a naked girl named Starfish, who flips open a cell phone and says, "Dooley, Donner and Dunne, Attorneys-at-Law." She says, "Tell me, what color is your fungus?"
Badger comes out of the bathroom, ducking to get his parrot through the doorway, a shred of paper stuck in his butt crack. Naked, his skin looks dimpled and raw. Plucked. If the bird sits on his shoulder while he sits on the toilet, I don't want to know.
And across the room is Mona.
Mulberry.
She's laughing with Honeysuckle. She's pinned her red and black dreadlocks up into a pile with just her little face sticking out the bottom. On her fingers are rings with heavy red-glass jewels. Around her neck, the carpet of silver chains conies down to a pile of amulets and pendants and charms on her breasts. Costume jewelry. A little girl playing dress-up. Barefoot.
She's the age my daughter would be, if I still had a daughter.
Helen stumbles back into the room. She pinches her tongue between two fingers and then goes around the room, using the two wet fingers to pinch out the cones of incense. She leans back against the fireplace mantel and lifts the glass of wine to her pink mouth. Over the glass, she watches the room. She watches Oyster circling me.
He's the age her son, Patrick, would be.
Helen's the age my wife would be, if I had a wife.
Oyster's the son she would have, if she had a son.
Hypothetically speaking, of course.
This might be the life I had, if I had a life. My wife distant and drunk. My daughter exploring some crackpot cult. Embarrassed by us, her parents. Her boyfriend would be this hippie asshole, trying to pick a fight with me, her dad.
And maybe you can go back in time.
Maybe you can raise the dead. All the dead, past and present.
Maybe this is my second chance. This is exactly the way my life might have turned out.
Helen in her chinchilla coat is watching the parrot eat itself. She's watching Oyster.
And Mona's shouting, "Everybody. Everybody." She's saying, "It's time to start the Invocation. So if we could just create the sacred space, we can get started."
Next door, the Civil War veterans are limping home to sad music and Reconstruction.
With Oyster circling me, the rock in my fist is warm by now. And I'm counting 11, counting 12 ...
Mona Sabbat has got to come with us. Someone without blood on her hands. Mona and Helen and me, and Oyster, the four of us will hit the road together. Just another dysfunctional family. A family vacation. The quest for an unholy grail.
With a hundred paper tigers to slay along the way. A hundred libraries to plunder. Books to disarm. The whole world to save from culling.
Lobelia says to Grenadine, "Did you read about those dead people in the paper? They say it's like Legionnaires' disease, but it looks like black magic, if you ask me."
And with her arms spread, the plain brown hair under her arms showing, Mona is herding people into the center of the room.
Sparrow points at something in her catalog and says, "This is the minimum you'll need to get started."
Oyster shakes the hair off his eyes and sticks his chin at me. He comes around to poke his index finger into my chest, poking it there, hard, pinned in the middle of my blue tie, and he says, "Listen, Dad." Poking me, he says, "The only culling song you know is 'Make mine medium-well done.' "
And I stop counting.
Fast as a muscle twitch, muscling Oyster back, I shove hard and slap the kid away, my hands loud against the kid's bare skin, everybody quiet and watching, and the culling song echoes through my head.
And I've killed again. Mona's boyfriend. Helen's son. Oyster stands there another moment, looking at me, the hair hanging over his eyes.
And the parrot falls off Badger's shoulder.
Oyster puts his hands up, fingers spread, and says, "Chill out, Dad," and goes with Sparrow and everybody to look at the parrot, dead, at Badger's feet. Dead and plucked half naked. And Badger prods the bird with his sandal and says, "Plucky?"
I look at Helen.
My wife. In this new creepy way. Till death do us part.
And maybe, if you can kill someone, maybe you can bring them back.
And Helen's already looking at me, the smeared-pink glass in her hand. She shakes her face at me and says, "I didn't do it." She holds up three fingers, her thumb and pinkie touching in front, and says, "Witch's honor. I swear."
Chapter 18
Here and now, me writing this, I'm near Biggs Junction, Oregon. Parked alongside Interstate 84, the Sarge and me have an old fur coat heaped on the shoulder of the road next to our car. The fur coat, spattered with ketchup, circled by flies, it's our bait.
This week, there's another miracle in the tabloids.
It's something folks call the Roadkill Jesus Christ The tabloids call him "The I-84 Messiah." Some guy who stops along the highway, wherever there's a dead animal, he lays his hands on it, and Amen. The ragged cat or crushed dog, even a deer folded in half by a tractor-trailer, they gasp and sniff the air. They stand on their broken legs and blink their bird-pecked eyes.
Folks have this on video. They have snapshots posted on the Internet.
The cat or porcupine or coyote, it'll stand there another minute, the Roadkill Christ cradling its head in his arms, whispering to it.
Two minutes after it was shredded fur and bones, a meal for magpies and crows, the deer or dog or raccoon will run away complete, restored, perfect.
The Sarge and me, a ways down the highway from us, an old man pulls his pickup truck off the road. He gets out of the cab and lifts a plaid blanket out of the bed of the truck. He squats to lay the blanket on the side of the road, traffic blasting past him in the hot morning air.