I lie on the bench and begin.
Zen nothingness.
Sufi dance.
Arms bend and straighten, muscles burn, you call out:
“Aurgh!”
And the weight goes up.
In between sets you stand there, as if listening to the music of the spheres, or the sound the electrons and protons make, whirring around the nuclei of the atoms.
“Night, Roy.” Two hours later I exit the gym. The place is packed, all the slight misfits in the town consoling themselves for not having dates tonight or, worse, for having people they dread waiting at home. You come here to bang the iron around and try to connect with a few people who might speak the same language you do.
“You too,” Roy replies vaguely from his glass cubicle, where he is concocting some sort of mysterious beverage in a blender. No doubt next week I will be purchasing the ingredients.
The early evening air is cool and clear. Every pore in my body breathes deeply. As my hand fits the key into the door of the jeep, I envision dinner: fresh salmon, Cajun tomatoes, heaps of snow peas.
A hand clamps down on my shoulder and my body whirls around, keys at the ready.
Barnett!
“I see you got yourself a magic charm,” he says, pointing at the juju hanging from a string around my neck.
My hand lowers the keys; the sight of his level gray eyes and whirling mass of red hair subdues me like a lullaby. “Look, about yesterday—”
He waves away my apology like a gnat. “You needed a day off and that’s the truth. I knew where to find you.”
No doubt he means Roy’s, but my mind flicks back to the ghostly figure crossing the swamp at night….
“But where’d you get this sucker? I haven’t seen one of them things in years!”
“You’ve seen one before?”
“Oh, hell, yes. They used to be all over the Quarter, like pralines or pickaninny dolls.”
“They did?”
Under the pretext of examining the juju, he strokes my throat. “Made them at some sort of tourist trap voodoo store. They closed that thing down after all the trouble they got in—must of been near fifteen years ago.”
The cool night air is now cold night air. “What trouble?”
His face doesn’t look happy. “They had these torture machines in there? Part of the so-called museum? Come to find out they was still using ’em. They’d collect street people, murder them as part of their ceremony, or whatever they called it.”
“What happened to the people that worked there?” All of this is horrible, but none of it is really a surprise.
“The head guy—”
“Sammy?”
Barnett looks at me oddly. “I dunno what his name was.”
“I’m sorry, go on.”
He steps back and looks off toward the lavender remainder of sunset. “Whoever the head guy was, they never could find him. Seems like everybody else, all the women, went to jail.”
Has Deane been sitting in prison all these years, provided I ever saw her, that she was ever there, that they ever caught her… endless unraveling carpets, and whatever matters anymore?
“Do you remember any of the names—”
Barnett holds up his hands. “It was in all the papers is how I know. But, honey, I don’t think they ever named names. Only a couple paragraphs—the rest was word of mouth. You know how that kinda stuff goes down.”
I nod, seeing wild goose chases, corridors running into corridors, mementos that turn to dust and surprise you over time. In the partial light of twilight, I take a good long look at the thing hanging around my neck. “Listen—”
He is.
“Want to come to my houseboat for dinner? We could—”
“Fine.”
Chapter Forty-Three
We take our fresh raspberries out on deck and sit in the canvas chairs. The evening is so lovely, it is like an advertisement for giving up real life and moving into the swamp.
“This is the third night in a row that the moon looks full,” I opine.
Barnett nods. “Maybe this is the third night in a row that it is full. Think of that?”
“But that’s not possible.”
“Oh really?” He tilts back in his chair, one of those overly confident men who will never tilt too far and bruise his butt. “What the hell is a full moon anyway?”
My fourth grade science is rough. After all, that was the year my family tramped around the country. “Well, it’s the night that you can see the whole moon. I mean the whole half of the moon.”
“Now, does that moon up there really change?”
“No.” I sigh. “It just looks like it’s changed because of where we’re standing.”
He grins, his full lips resembling mine in a pout. “Alright! So, if the moon looks full for three nights, why then it is full for three nights.”
“‘Appearances are evil,’” I mutter. “‘But they are everything.’”
“Come again?”
I smile, thinking of Alonso and his double entendres. “That was just something Jean-Paul Sartre said. ‘Appearances are evil, but they are everything.’”
He snorts. “Them Frogs and their ideas.”
The silence, if you can call it that, continues. And all around us, the bayou continues its eat-and-be-eaten agenda.
“Third full moon in a row,” he muses. “That’s the night to do what you’ve been afraid to. Never can tell when you’ve missed your last chance.”
My arms goosepimple up. “Okay,” I say forcefully. “This is it. Now or never. What the hell do you want with me?”
He doesn’t miss a beat. “Honey, the question is the other way around. You called out to me, I came. Here I is. Now then, what do you want?”
“I want you to take me in your pirogue to the place where the boys went into the other world.”
“You sure about this?”
“Absolutely. And I know where that place is going to be.”
“How come?”
“Well, remember the voodoo group we were talking about? Before the shop closed down, I had this sister, and she…”
You’ve already heard the story.
Chapter Forty-Four
We drive and drive through the back muddy roads of the swamp, me at the wheel and Barnett directing us. After the first fifteen minutes I lose all track of space and then, after however long, all track of time.
“Pull over here,” he’ll say, then hop out for a minute, to study a tree or a bog or the angle of the moon.
A couple of times he lights candles at the roadside, which he pulls from his jacket pocket.
“What are those for?”
He smiles. “Offerings for the ancestors.”
Eventually my back and shoulders get tired, my lats and my delts and my pecs are throbbing from the workout. “Are we going anywhere for real, or are you just torturing me?”
“Patience, babe.”
And silence.
Once he asks, “Honey, would you say that the individual was more important, or that the principle was?”
Think a minute. “Depends on the principle. And the individual.”
“Let’s try a for-instance. For instance, would you die for something you believed in or someone you loved?”
“What are you getting at?” Ah, well, all that is left is forward.
“Just answer.”
I try to think about the “thing” I believe in. And who in the world I love. Aunt Edith, Bread. Julie? Die for them? Die for “good”? And what about the cats. “Yes. Who wants to live forever?”
Out the window, the moon grows ever rounder, ever oranger. It is too large to be innocent.
“Would you die for me?”