“Oh never mind,” I said, glad my own sunglasses were on. “My boyfriend could never survive without me.”
Alonso stroked my forearm, tense as a spring. “Sweet,” he said, “I’ve already been married once. All you need is once.”
I nodded and took a swig from the Chocolate Soldier. Maybe looking like dog vomit makes you feel like dog vomit after all.
“But I’d like to see you again, after we get to the city.”
I ate a couple peanuts.
“They don’t need me until day after tomorrow.”
“They?” I’d never thought to ask what he was going to New Orleans for. What a kid! I guess I thought he was just there for me.
“The company that hired me. I work the oil rigs.”
“Oh.”
“You know how Indians are famous for not being afraid of heights.” For the first time, his voice sounded bitter.
“All that experience in the pueblos.”
He grinned then. “That’s right!”
By tacit agreement, we held hands for a minute. Afterward, we ate the food, silently and hungrily, as the bus pulled out of Houston. The land was green now and lush, everything full of too much water.
“It does stuff to you,” he said dreamily. “All that blue and green around all the time. It interferes with your imagination, but it adds to it too, like it’s all one big swamp—”
“I may be a child in your eyes, but I have read Jung.”
He snorted through his nose. “Get out that journal you showed me.” He tilted his head back in the seat. “I have three things to say.”
In a moment my pencil was poised over the page. “Ready.”
“Number one. Every emotion in the world wishes to be expressed, every task desires to be done. Coincidence is the perfect texture.”
“Come again?” I clapped my hand over my mouth. “Whoops.”
Alonso looked at me like get serious.
“I mean, I get the bit about expressing emotions.” My handwriting definitely didn’t look one little bit like Deane’s. Or whoever was writing in my journal. “And, okay with the work ethic. But ‘coincidence is the perfect texture’?”
“We met, didn’t we?”
I wanted to say How’s that a coincidence? but the juju burned around my neck. Plus, there was the bit about Sammy, which was too much to think about. Basically, that was the problem here: all this stuff was too much to think about.
“You know what they say about there being no such thing as coincidence?”
“Yeah.” But I didn’t want to think about that either.
“Well, this is just one simple step farther along that track. That’s why write it down. One day: clear as glass.”
You hoped so.
“How about this,” he said. “Don’t write this part down, it just needs to be said. Three pains you remember all the time are the Invisible, the Ever-Present, and the Consecutive—”
“But—”
“Close your eyes. Don’t think about what I’m telling you. See if you can’t just feel it.”
I closed my eyes and saw a starry field of midnight satin.
“That’s better. Now, three pains: the Invisible…”
The stars faded and all there was was this midnight blue satin, on and on. It was cold, remote, beautiful, and I felt it like an icy girdle around my chest.
“The Ever-Present…”
Now the satin changed, glowed up until it was a rich golden shimmer. Like a late autumn afternoon. But it hurt too, in that peculiar way that makes autumn so aching.
“And the Consecutive.”
This one came like a flash. It was a chain of things, like poodles, and Deane’s altar, and the spell that Sammy gave me, and they were in these little frozen boxes, chained together, connected like those Christmas tree chains you make out of strips of paper. Everything tied together, like an endless shave of tinsel…. “Deane!” I shouted. “You know who Sammy is! Did you ever know my sister?”
“Hush, now.” His voice was so very soothing. “You begin to see that the world moves in a slick, primal order. But every now and then, you got to shake it up. You got to rock it hard from top to bottom.”
I opened my eyes, and the bright light and passing green of the countryside seemed very peaceful.
“Okay,” he said. “You don’t need to remember that stuff. Not word for word. That’s stuff to be forgotten most of the time. But here’s the second thing you need to write down.”
The pencil readied itself.
“Sex is stronger than doors and windows.”
No joke. I printed this carefully. If what happened last night was how it could be, sex ruled the world! My stomach felt bubbly and rich, like eggnog, and if I shifted my eyes inward, without any attention from the brain, there was a warm pink glow covering my forehead, oozing down from the cranium.
That kind of sex. Did Alonso speak out loud?
But I wasn’t going to look up and make eye contact, feeling he wanted me to.
“Third and last.” He sighed. “Coincidence. Sex. And the last one is ritual. Get this exactly as I say it. Rituals align the molecules of the object with the cells of the observer. It is the visceral way of snapping together the attention of the orisha. That’s o-r-i-s-h-a.”
No way was I going to ask what orisha meant. And then, may my heart be shattered like crystal and tossed East of the Sun and West of the Moon, a voice spoke in my head: Deane! The Òrìşà, no h, are the divinities that intermediate between people and the Supreme Being.
But how could she speak to me in my head? And her presence was there, something you sense like an aroma, before the words. Not to mention that she corrected the spelling.
“What is it?” Alonso asked.
I closed my journal.
He stared at me a moment, but I shut my mind down like a lead door. “Well,” he said, “you know those three things, you know it all.”
Coincidence. Sex. Ritual. (The Òrìşà.)
He did his hat-over-the-face siesta bit. “Time for a little snoozing after all that wholesome food.”
In a minute, he was snoring away. But that was all right.
Deane? I called out in my head. Deane, are you there? Yet, what was “there” anyway?
There wasn’t any answer, no big surprise. Maybe she wasn’t “there” now, but she had been.
The Great Chain of Excitement, like The Great Chain of Being, began to connect itself in my mind. Tommy existed, told me that Deane existed, so I met Alonso, who told me that Sammy existed. In short, the whole enchilada looked like part of the world, not just a story kids might make up to amuse themselves. The next step, natch, was to see my own sister in the flesh—but then all kinds of stuff popped up, stuff I didn’t want to worry about yet. Like, why did Sammy want Deane’s book anyway? And did he double-cross me, or single-cross me, by telling me to reverse the magic spell?
And, the worst one: Was it my fault what happened?
My head went all tilty and I lit a cigarette, scanned out over the greeny swamp we were entering. If only you could be a tree instead of a person, think how neat that would be: out in the swamp, edging up to the deep secrets of the mysterious bayou….
The sign said WELCOME TO LOUISIANA.
Mile after mile of murky swamp, cypress trees draped in crinkly gray moss, what June always called vampire moss. That water, it sucked you right in. The slowness, like one of those miniature Japanese gardens with the mirror embedded in clay, and with your eyes soft-focused, the mirror was real water all right.