“What the fuck is it to you?”
Okay, so maybe my acting wasn’t quite what it should be. “Nothing! Just making conversation, that’s all. Geez, I love this song.” I made drumming motions on my leg, to demonstrate that I was really grooving on the music.
Tommy, the idiot, relaxed. He lit up another reefer, which he hogged, but that suited me fine. “Heard she was down to New Or-leans not too long ago, but fuck that shit. I can’t be traveling down there, man, with that cocksucking parole fuckhead….” His eyes were getting so glassy, you could practically apply your makeup.
“Way down yonder in New Or-leans!” I beat on my leg some more but the whole display was pathetically phony.
“Working in some queer-ass voodoo shop, the lousy bitch.”
First I wasn’t sure I’d heard right, but the next thing was this feeling of course. The voodoo shop—that was the answer. It was like all along, this was exactly the only possible way things could be: you saw the great steamroller of Destiny coming squash down on you. “Working in a voodoo shop, huh? Did somebody actually see her there?”
Before I could even inhale, Tommy was on me, his forearm pressing into my windpipe, the steely muscles in his body wound up like so many Swiss watches. “You tell me,” he hissed in my ear, “what your connection is or you won’t have a face left to talk out of.”
“Hey, Pet!”
My body was frozen with fear, and anyway my neck was positioned not to swivel. But obviously Darlene had come to my rescue.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m going to split with Jerry here. You gonna be okay?”
Was this for real?
“Tell her to have a nice time,” Tommy hissed in my ear.
“Pusher Man” was droning away on the stereo, and it added that extra, surreal gloss to the whole scenario.
“Have a nice time.”
“Thanks! You too, keep the car ’cause Jerry said he’d drop me home. Sure it’s okay?”
Tommy increased the pressure of his forearm, ensuring an emphatic nod.
“Listen,” she said. “Did you find that friend of your sister’s?”
Chapter Nineteen
There must be a way to stop time or so many different groups of people wouldn’t claim they could do it. At least that’s the way I look at life—I know you could argue the opposite more effectively. Why long for something so much if you’ve got it already? But, and here’s my point: look at the total lack of imagination going on around you: how is it possible for so many people to have the same vision? The thing envisioned must exist.
The aborigines for instance—that dream-time exists. Plus, I’ve seen some of that stuff myself; Sammy could do it. You could argue that I was a kid and didn’t know what I saw, that my state of mind was weak and all that jazz. But that kind of reasoning, if you ask me, gets you exactly nowhere.
Time is stopped right now. Tommy has his forearm at my jugular and Darlene has just said the wrong thing. Nobody moves. Here’s what I see: the voodoo shop glittering in the sunlight as if washed over by a magical powder. I see the ghosts of myself and my family driving past. I see the whole picture, but not the sense of it.
For instance, the last time I saw Deane.
She was disembarking her plane in New Orleans. We stood expectantly in the airport, Stan and Linwood expecting Deane to arrive, June expecting continuing misery, and me expecting not to see Deane, that my spell would have disappeared her. Hadn’t I reversed the love spell just like Sammy told me to?
But Sammy or no, voodoo or not, Deane got off that plane. Her hair was dead black and teased into a beehive that would have put the Supremes to shame. White lipstick, tight skirt detailing her rump, she looked at her family as if observing specimens in an ant farm.
I took a step toward her. I stepped back. My anger over what she’d put us through and my horror over what she’d done to Marmalade, never mind my night in her room, weighed against the sway of my love.
She was my sister. And she walked right by.
“Where the hell is she?” Stan scowled. By now even the most crippled passengers had hobbled off.
Linwood was ominously silent. Her Hollywood shades and sapphire-blue turban left nothing on her face except expertly outlined lips and a small nose with its auto-accident bump.
“She flew the coop,” June opined. “Where are we going for lunch?”
I opened my mouth to say but she was here. The words stuck to my teeth like licorice.
Stan marched off to consult with the airline desk and Linwood lit a cigarette. I moved over to the plate glass windows, where you could see all that flat murk surrounding the airport. Looked like a plane could just dive right into that swampland, terrain neither entirely liquid nor entirely solid either. Vanish without a trace. Distant white specks of bird flew up and over, winging their feathered way over the bayous.
“This is the best thing that’s happened yet,” June said following me. “Maybe she’s dead.”
Maybe what I’d seen wasn’t Deane at all. If that was Deane, for instance, how come nobody else saw her? She’d passed within inches of Linwood, the masklike expression of teenage indifference freezing her striking features.
On the other hand, it was a well-established fact that I had a tendency to see things that other people, for whatever reason, didn’t. On the other hand (that made three hands), with a little effort, I could conjure up whatever spectacle was necessary. If it’s true that the mountain could come to Muhammad, Deane could have come to me, figuring the strength of what I was feeling.
Or, the spell had worked, for everyone but me and Deane herself. She was disappeared to the others.
Whichever way the dial swung, it was all my fault. Or my triumph.
“What’s eating you, Lardo?” June munched on a Snickers bar. The machine must have been out of M&M’s.
I shrugged her off with a pained expression and gesture I’d picked up from an old Garbo movie, another thing you thought you’d discovered but were only a kid cottoning on to.
“Tubs vants to be a-lone,” June concluded, having seen the same film. She licked the candy wrapper.
With a great show of personal dignity, I redirected my gaze to the swamp.
You could blink twice. Those birds rising up were maybe not birds at all.
“June, Pet. Let’s go.” Stan stood next to us, massaging the bridge of his nose, where the sunglasses cut in.
“Was it a clean getaway?” Worry shone under June’s voice.
“The airline said she was on board.” Stan sighed.
She was on board. I almost said it. She was here.
“So how come—”
“How the hell should I know?” Stan snapped. “We called the police and they’re checking it out. If you’ve got any bright ideas, let’s hear them.”
We all waited a minute, listening to the announcements of arrivals and departures.
“No point hanging around that I can see.” He turned away from us and started toward Linwood, who appeared to be carved out of marble.
“Where to?” June asked once we were all in the car.
Stan turned on the ignition. “We’re spending the night at the Royal Orleans. In the Quarter.”
“That ritzy hotel?”
Nobody answered.
“Kind of a celebration, huh?”
“She’ll turn up,” Stan prophesied grimly as we drove out of the airport parking lot. “No doubt some technical error.”
Linwood maintained her silence.
“So what about lunch?”
Nobody answered that either.
Idly, as if my involvement were purely coincidental, I toyed with the amulet around my neck. Everyone else was wearing theirs. “Listen,” I said as we drove down one of those endless streets full of hamburger stands, on our way to the ancient part of town, “could I have my necklaces back do you think?”