This person, Sammy, wants you to save him by killing him. As a sacrifice to the Egúngún, his journey through the Other World is assured.
Your arm is too heavy.
Why are you failing him?
You are not strong enough. There is someone else present whose energy intercepts your own.
She is here, your sister.
You always knew she would catch up with you. You have always wanted her to.
But she is stronger.
The Egúngún turns to you, growing ever larger. He raises his huge hands. Will he press on the fragile tissue of your brain? To summon Him and not offer a sacrifice is the greatest possible disrespect.
You no longer have the energy to kill Sammy: you are no longer the most powerful woman in the world.
But you could turn the machete on yourself.
The black charms of the sacrificed loved ones dangle from the white wrappings….
“Deane!” I screamed, leaping up from the bushes, and running blindly into the circle.
PART III
Chapter Thirty-Two
My knees are rigid, sturdily encased in elastic bandages. I goosewalk to the squat rack. My solar plexus is shielded by the massive power belt. My muscles are aligned, at the ready like enthusiastic soldiers.
No one else is in Roy’s Gym.
I grasp the bar firmly and duck my head underneath, as I’ve done so often before. The bar and its heavy cargo of iron rest not across my deltoids but on the fleshy mound of the upper trapezius.
Merely holding the bar in place stresses my arms. Yet, this lift is designed primarily for the legs and secondarily for the back. Arms, forgive me, I underworked you. But don’t fail me now!
My body pressed under the load of weight, I step away from the bar.
Pause.
Then my knees bend, slowly, slowly. Sinking! And there must be total control.
This is the bottom. I am squashed down, stasis, time has stopped. In this moment my body is as alive as a body can be.
Va-va-voom!
My quadriceps belong to Paul Bunyan! I am a mythological beast! I have seen the perfect clarity of Nothing, the Tibetan temple bell pinging out in the void—and survived!
“Come on, baby, way to go!”
As I stagger back to the squat rack, someone helps me hoist the bar back into place.
I have unofficially broken the world’s record.
I have lifted a thousand pounds.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“Who are you?” I ask, turning to look.
He’s gorgeous, not at all what you’d expect from the cracker accent. Auburn hair wafts in gentle waves to his shoulders and his face is clean-shaven, dominated by level gray eyes. His jaw is set solid. Underneath the fresh—ironed?—sweats, a firmly muscled body asserts itself. The sleeves of his shirt are pushed up to display shapely forearms.
“The name’s Barnett, ma’am,” he says, total cracker. Then he extends his hand for a shake.
The jolt comes out of nowhere. You think of wild nights, speeding in a car by moonlight under the lacy black moss that dangles down from the trees and into the swamp below. You race and race: that’s all there is, and whatever is trying to catch you, will catch you, but you keep racing—
Except I’m older now and deep into health. I pull my hand back, as if from the lip of the fire.
Barnett sits down next to me while I unwrap my knees before my legs lose all circulation.
“Look,” he says, “you know what you just done?”
I nod. One thousand pounds!
“You just done lifted a shitload of weight.” He stares at the squat rack. “Lessee. Two, three, four—plus seventy-seven and a half each side.” He lets out a low whistle. “One thousand fucking pounds! No shit!”
Not very gracefully phrased, but my sentiments exactly. I wind the bandages up into two fat packages.
“You just done broke the world’s record, girl!”
From ma’am to girl in less than three minutes.
“You got you a coach?”
I flex my right quadriceps and gaze admiringly at the smooth bulge of muscle. Too bad the skin is freckling up already—too many teenage summers of Southern California beaches.
“I could coach you.”
When I look up to tell him to buzz off, the sight of his shiny hair, pale skin, intense gray eyes…
“You wanna compete?”
“I don’t know.” Once, right after moving out here, I drove over to Houston to catch a meet, but the sight of those growling women with tattoos on their biceps and hairy legs protruding from high-topped tennies—well, it wasn’t my scene.
“You gotta want it bad.”
“There it is—I don’t.” I stand up and put the bandages into my Roy’s Gym bag. A few guys have come in the far end and one of them turns on the radio. Hard rock, clanging and grunting begin.
“You got the power. Cain’t pretend you don’t.”
“Nice meeting you.” I don’t turn back but instead walk toward the exit, passing the obnoxious former marine with the potbelly. He’s setting up his bench and pauses to holler, “Hey, kid, how’s it going?”
I smile and nod. It took me months to get this far.
Next to the dumbbell rack stand Charlie and Phil, two college kids, who stare into the giant mirror, flexing their triceps in Zen self-absorption.
“Bye, Roy.” I lean into his glass office. Dark, handsome, and morose, Roy is propping his bushy head on his arms. He’s one of those veterans who left some important part of himself in Vietnam, but you don’t know which part. Affable one day and sullen the next, he finds a new game plan each week—inversion boots, amino acids, megavitamins. Whatever, he suckers you in every time, because he believes.
“Take care, you hear?” Roy gestures vaguely, probably not knowing which person left.
I slip my hooded sweatshirt on before going outside. Early February, that first Louisiana false spring, the one that makes the azaleas bloom and your heart long for Mardi Gras. The air is fragrant, wisteria or honeysuckle or sweet olive. My legs and back and chest are all pumped, blood coursing through in weird giddiness, good as drugs any day. You get this sense of the quality of life elevated up off its feet, from pedestrians to hovercrafts.
While unlocking the jeep, I try to intuit what particular food my body is craving. No alcohol, no caffeine, no white sugar, no salt—well, after that kind of regime, you can practically identify and isolate each ingredient that enters your body at the point of assimilation. Take the grains apart in seven-grain bread.
“Hey!”
I whip around, keys aloft should the need arise to gouge anybody’s eyes out.
“It’s Barnett. Hey!” This last with a yelp and a jump backward to avoid the sudden turn and the brandished metal.
“You shouldn’t sneak up on people.”
“I ain’t sneaking up, and you ain’t people.”
Yet his eyes look so intelligent.
“Ma’am.”
“Look.” I toss my gym bag into the backseat. “Thanks for the attention and all that jazz, but this lifting is just for me. Just for myself.”
“I’d sure like to discuss that over dinner.” His hair, in the early twilight, glows out rose, vermillion, magenta, coral.
“Dinner?”
“That’s right, little lady, spot of your choice.”
“Pet’s the name.” I hear the snottiness in my voice but feel unable to control it. “Not ma’am, not girl, not little lady.”