I shut my eyes and squeezed the arms of my chair, exerting myself in an attempt to suppress a shout. Eventually I relaxed and my mind snapped back into on-duty mode. “What kind of shadows?” I asked Pellerin.
He gazed at me blankly. “Huh?”
“You said you were seeing shadows. What kind?”
“You’re starting to sound like Jocundra, man.”
“What, is it a big secret?”
He licked salt off the rim of his glass. “I don’t guess they’re shadows, really. They’re these black shapes, like a man, but they don’t have any faces. Sometimes they have lights inside them. Shifting lights. They kind of flow together.”
I laughed. “Sounds like a lava lamp!”
“Everybody’s got one,” he said. “But it’s not an aura. It’s more substantial. I see patterns, too. Like…” He poked around in the pile of money and trash on the table and plucked out a napkin bearing the McSorely’s logo. “Like this here. The whole thing creeps me out.”
On the napkin were several sketches of what appeared to be ironwork designs: veves. I asked why it creeped him out.
“When we were on the island,” Pellerin went on, “I found these books on voodoo. And while I was leafing through them, I saw that same design. It’s used in the practice of voodoo. Called a veve. That there’s the veve of Ogun Badagris, the voodoo god of war. And this…” He pointed to a second sketch. “This one’s Ogun in his aspect as the god of fire. I get that one a lot.” He paused and then said, “You know anything about it?”
I had no doubt that he could read me if I lied and, although it was my instinct to lie, I didn’t see any reason to hide things from him anymore; yet I didn’t want to freak him out, either.
“Jo told me she had another patient who saw this same sort of pattern,” I said.
“What else she tell you?”
“She said he did some great things before…”
“Before he died, right?”
“Yeah.”
There ensued a silence, during which I noticed that the song playing over the speakers was now “Margaritaville.”
“She told me he got to where he could cure the sick,” I said.
He stared at me. “Fuck.”
“Let’s get through the weekend, then you can worry about it,” I said.
“Easy for you to say.”
“It’s a lot to process, I give you that. But you can’t…”
“I knew she was holding back, but… man!” He picked up his drink, put it back down. “You know, I don’t much care if we get through the weekend.”
“I care,” I said, but he appeared not to hear me, gazing out across the pool toward the hedge of palms and shrubbery that hid the concrete block wall that separated Seminole Paradise from a Circuit City store.
“You ever have the feeling you’re on the verge of understanding everything?” he said. “That if you could see things a tad clearer, you’d have the big picture in view? I mean the Big Picture. How it all fits together. That’s where I’m at. But I also get this feeling I don’t fucking want to see the big picture, that it’s about ten shades darker than the picture I already got.” He chewed on that a second, then heaved up to his feet. “I’m going to the casino.”
“Wait a second!” I said as he walked away.
I busied myself plucking the hundreds out of the mess we’d made on the table, and I pressed the clutter of bills into his hands. He seemed startled by the money, as if it were an unexpected bonus, but then he stepped to the edge of the glittering pool and said in a loud voice, “Hey! Here go, you lucky people!” and tossed the money into the air.
There couldn’t have been more than four or five thousand dollars, but for the furor it caused, it might have been a million. As the bills fluttered down, people surged through the water after them; others sprawled on the tiles in their mad scramble to dive into the pool. Children were elbowed aside, the elderly were at risk. A buff young lad surfaced with a joyous expression, clutching a fistful of bills, and was immediately hauled under by a bikini girl and her boyfriend, their faces aglow with greed. The water was lashed into a froth as by sharks in a feeding frenzy. Terrified screams replaced the prettier shrieks that had attended roughhousing and dunkings. One man dragged a woman from the melee and sought to give her mouth-to-mouth, whereupon she kicked him in the groin. The lifeguard’s umbrella toppled into the water. He shouted incoherent orders over his mike. This served to increase the chaos. He began blowing his whistle over and over, an irate clown with his cheeks puffed and a nose covered in sunblock.
Pellerin was laughing as I pulled him away from the pool, and he was still laughing when I shoved him through the double glass doors of the hotel. I adopted a threatening pose, intending to lecture him, and he made an effort to stifle his laughter; but then I started laughing, too, and his mirth redoubled. We stood wheezing and giggling in the lobby, giddy as teenage girls, drawing hostile stares from the guests waiting on line at Reception, enduring the drudgery of checkin. At the time I assumed that we were laughing at two different things, or at different aspects of the same thing, but now I’m not so sure.
That picture of Pellerin laughing by the side of the pool, bills fluttering out above the water… It emerges from the smoke of memory like a painted dream, like one of those images that come just before a commercial break in a television drama, when the action freezes and the colors are altered by a laboratory process. Though it seems unreal, the rest—by comparison—seems in retrospect less than unreal, a dusting of atoms, whispers, and suggestions of hue that we must arrange into a story in order to lend body to this central moment. Yet the stories we create are invariably inaccurate and the central moments we choose to remember change us as much or more as we change them. And so, in truth, my memories are no more “real” than Josey Pellerin’s, although they have, as Jo would put it, more foundation… But I was saying, that picture of Pellerin beside the pool stayed with me because, I believe, it was the first time I had acknowledged him as a man and not a freak. And when I went to see him late the next morning, it was motivated more by curiosity over how he’d made out with Tammy and Tomasina than by caretaker concerns.
The door to the suite had been left ajar. I sneaked a look inside and, seeing no one around, eased into the foyer. The living room was empty, an air-conditioned vacancy of earth tones and overstuffed furniture, with potted palms and a photomural of the Everglades attempting a naturalistic touch. Everything was very neat. Magazines centered on the coffee table; no empty glasses or bottles. On the sideboard, a welcome basket of fruit, wine, and cheese was still clenched in shrinkwrap. I proceeded down the hall and came to an open door. Wearing a terrycloth bathrobe and sunglasses, Pellerin sat beside the rumpled bed, his feet propped on a table covered with a linen cloth and laden with dishes and metal dish covers, drinking champagne out of a bottle and eating a slice of pizza, looking out the window at the overcast. In the bed, partly covered by the sheets, a brown-skinned girl lay on her belly, black hair fanned across her face. Tomasina. There was nary a sign of Tammy, though the bed was king-sized and she might well have been buried beneath the covers. I knocked and he beckoned me to come on in. A big scorch mark on the wall behind his head, about the size of a serving tray, caught my notice. I asked what had happened and he told me that Tammy had shot an aerosol spray through a lit cigarette lighter, producing a flamethrower effect.
“You know those sons-of-bitches wouldn’t let me order in a pizza last night,” he said. “Is that bullshit or what? I had to bribe the bellboy.” He pointed to a Domino’s box on the floor—it held two slices fettered with strings of congealed cheese—and told me to help myself.