“Templa Una.” His voice was nostalgic. “Yeah, I used to know those people. When I saw your juju—” He reached out and touched it, then brushed against my breasts.
The old heat rose up, but I quelled it. “What do you know about them?”
“Like I said.” He stood up and went to the sink, in a niche off the room. “Want some water? You don’t want to mess with Sammy.”
“Water, please.” I drank gratefully, even though it was mud reclaimed from the Mississippi. “But my sister…”
He sighed and sat back down. “You don’t know what you’re up against. I can give you some protection, but there’re more of them than us.”
Exasperation bubbled up. “Well, what are they? Vampires?”
“You want to see a vampire?” He lunged for my neck.
We played vampire for a while but the truth was my body was pretty sore. That was about enough foreign travel for one night.
“They’re a group of people who practice magic,” he explained some time later, when dawn light began to penetrate the grimy room. “Swamp magic. And it’s some nasty shit.”
“Voodoo.”
“There’s a lot more to it than voodoo.”
“And you think what happened to me really happened to me? I mean, when I was a kid.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. That Sammy’s Snowland stuff is pretty hard to swallow—I don’t know. I only know that you think it happened to you. So what difference does it make if it really happened or not?”
That was a stumper. “But if it didn’t—”
Alonso took my hand and licked the palm. “Sweet,” he said. “I’ve been to India. I saw those ropes going straight up in the air. Not to mention some of the shit that goes down in the secret canyons of the Ancient Ones, out in the desert. Forget truth and real. You just want to find Deane, right?”
I wanted to forget truth and real. Did the Surrealists care a hoot about the “real” world? On the other hand, now that I’d met Alonso and he’d told me the voodoo people were “real,” where farther could you go in the abstract? I guess I just wanted to touch Deane with my own hand. “The main thing is to find her. But I need to find Sammy, too. There’s some stuff I need to know.”
“You sure about that?”
“I want to know why he wanted her magic book. I want to know if he screwed me up with that spell. And I want to know if, uh, if what happened was my fault.” There!
“You know what they say about asking questions you aren’t prepared to hear the answer to.”
You could guess what they said: Don’t ask. “I can take it. I mean, I guess.”
He looked long and deep into my eyes, and those clear whites of his were like Chinese silk. How come they weren’t all bloodshot after a night of merriment?
“Here’s what we could do,” he said. “They have these ceremonies out in the swamp. Or at least they used to. And like I said, I don’t have to report to work until tomorrow. So, suppose they have one tonight—”
“Why would they have one tonight?”
Coincidence is the perfect texture.
“You think they didn’t notice you?”
My arms began to chill, so I rubbed them. “Why would they care?”
Now the full brunt of his stare made its statement. “You got that kind of attitude, you don’t get back alive.”
“Are we going?” But of course we were.
“We’ll party crash!” When he grinned, his cheekbones went up, like little hammers ready to strike.
“And it’s dangerous.”
“Oh, yes.”
“But you think there’ll be a chance to talk to Deane. And Sammy. To find out some of these—”
His shrug was very subtle, but it showed off his beautiful shoulders. “Hard to say. It’s the only thing there is to offer. You got a better idea?”
I reached out and touched his cheek, which was smooth. That was right—Indians don’t grow beards. His body too was like one smooth wash of satin skin. And he smelled like baking corn, dry gourds, verbena. “Why are you doing this for me?”
He smiled sadly. “Sweet, I’d like to say I love you.”
Heart, don’t hurt! You know you can take it.
“But the truth is this sounds like as good a thing to do as any.”
I thought of Bread’s favorite line from Conan. “Do you want to live forever?”
Alonso stood up and scratched his balls, the first thing he’d done that put me off. “That’s not a question of choice. It’s a question of how you wish to amuse yourself.”
I took a little nap and showered while Alonso went scouting for information and checked me out of the Ramada Inn. By the time I emerged all pink with steam, my clean underwear, jeans, and embroidered Mexican shirt were waiting. Okay, it was baby of me to let him coddle, but it felt so good. Anyway, in twenty-four hours he’d be gone and I’d be—
Well, with Deane, presumably.
I felt a pang of nerves. I couldn’t remember what day it was, but I knew it was a school day—even in New Orleans, even in this grubby little pad, where the bathroom was genuinely gross, you could feel it in the air. And I hate to admit it, but there it was: a pang that school, Darlene, Bread, and Aunt Edith were all going on without me. Had my life really been so bad? Sure, I was alienated and melancholy—ennui is the greatest evil and all that jazz—but, according to Linwood, I was going to feel that way as a teenager regardless, come what may.
You could see that maybe real evil was like the voodoo shop. Maybe ennui wasn’t going to look like such an imposition after all.
“They’re up to something all right,” Alonso announced when he emerged from the shower. He had a little towel draped around him like a loincloth, and that was one good-looking guy! His long hair hung down his back like patent leather, unlike mine, which was Straw City. “I saw a couple guys on the street, and they’ve got a big deal scheduled for tonight.”
My stomach heaved a little. “Do they ever, uh, like kill anybody?”
He fixed those clear eyes on me. “Is that one of those questions you’re prepared to hear the answer to?”
“I guess not.” I closed my duffel. Everything was rolled up and packed, dirty clothes segregated from clean. “You got anything to eat around here?”
“No food!” Alonso pulled on some clean jeans, though who knew there were clean clothes in all this filth, and some kind of fringed leather shirt. He didn’t look like a cowboy at all anymore. “We got to stay clean. And besides, what we’re going to take has to go on an empty stomach.”
My spirits lifted. “Drugs?”
He smiled. “Indian medicine.”
First we lay down on the floor and did some yoga stuff. We did a lot of it, breathing and stretching and special movements to rid our bodies of all the white sugar we’d consumed the day before. In between the exercises, we drank a lot of water, and whatever it was, Alonso’s voice or the strangeness of the situation or the movements themselves or the power of all that had gone on between us, I began to feel lightheaded and free, like me was some sort of helium balloon, only connected by the flimsiest string to the muscular shell of my body.
“Feel the breath,” Alonso said. “And let it all go.”
We did a lot of letting go.
At some points during the movements, I could see my past rolling away from me.
“Bless it,” said Alonso. “And let it go.”