So I got my penknife and cut the line. I needed some more coffee, I could feel it was going to be hot and the bugs started coming out and it was definitely time to go. That poor little bat’s still flopping around in the water, so before I left I got my rod and leaned over and pitched it onto the shore. I didn’t want it to drown. Lot of trouble for a stupid bat, right? But I think it was just a baby, it was so tiny, not even big as a mouse. It stopped struggling but I could still hear it crying and no kidding, it was like fingernails on a blackboard, gave me the chills.
So I turned around and got my stuff, started to head back out of the woods when behind me I heard a noise. Not the bat but something splashing in the water. Otter I thought first but it sounded pretty big and I stiffened because you know there’s a lot of bear down here, see them up on Skyline Drive all the time. Just little black bears but my daddy didn’t raise no damn fool, you don’t turn your back on a bear! Wished I had my camera, but I didn’t. It was still splashing around back there, didn’t see me or didn’t care. So I turn around very slowly and damn straight, Joe, I wish I brought my camera!
It was Angie. No damn bear and I know you’ll think I’m nuts, but it was her. I know you remember the same things I do, so I don’t have to tell you: I wasn’t drunk, I wasn’t stoned. It was her.
She was in the stream—the pool, actually, the open space where the stream had swelled after the rain and snowmelt. I didn’t think it could be deep enough in there to swim but that’s what she was doing, stroking through the water and her hair floating all behind her.
I just about had a heart attack. She was naked and I swear to god she didn’t look any different than she did that other time, remember that weekend in W. Va? This was like that, she was swimming and she’d stand and the water would just slide off her and still she didn’t see me. I just stood and stared, I mean what would you do? Wanted to say something but I was so shocked I couldn’t. Couldn’t even move.
Then she turned around. Sort of holding her wet hair up off her neck and her eyes closed and then I really did think I was going to have a heart attack. Because her eyes popped open and she was staring right at me. Those amazing eyes and her face just like it always was, not any older at all, and you know I might have been hallucinating except I knew I wasn’t. She stared right at me and I wanted to say something but she wasn’t smiling. Looked right at me and I could tell she recognized me, I almost thought she was going to say my name but she didn’t. She had a funny look on her face, not a very nice look to tell you the truth, and I thought maybe she was pissed I was there watching her without her clothes on but hell, this was Angie—I mean, when did she care about that?
You tell me, Joe. Next thing I know my rod fell on my foot and when I grabbed it and looked up again she was gone. She was gone and that little bat was, too. I looked for it, swept the tip of my rod through the muck and waded out a little but I couldn’t find it. Guess it rolled back into the water and drowned after all.
So there it is. A weird story, and I don’t know who else I could tell it to. “A Current Affair” maybe, huh? Jesus. Let me know what you think.
And let me know when you’re heading down this way—we’ll go fishing.
I put the last page of Hasel’s letter on the side table. There was one more page: a Xerox of two newspaper items, with arrows scrawled by Baby Joe. I didn’t want to read but of course I did. What would you do, Joe?
It was a short article from the Charlottesville paper, about the death by drowning of a local attorney. The date was June 27.
“Tragic and almost inexplicable,” the paper said; he had been fishing in the Branch Creek near Crozet, and somehow had fallen into the stream and drowned in a few inches of muddy water. There was no evidence of foul play.
The other item was his obituary: Hasel Atkins Bright, attorney. Age 36, drowning accident; survived by his wife and two young daughters. In lieu of flowers, contributions could be made to a scholarship fund in Hasel’s name at the English Department of the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine.
So.
Hasel was dead, Oliver was dead. Baby Joe was drinking heavily but otherwise okay in New York. Annie was famous, and Angelica—unless one was to believe Hasel’s account of seeing her bathing in the Branch Creek near Crozet, Virginia—Angelica was still unaccounted for.
And me? At 38, I was a GS-11 and holding, just barely holding on.
Once, I’d dismissed Angelica’s account of the Benandanti as craziness. But during the years following my expulsion from the Divine, I often thought that she had been right. That whatever opportunity for change or expiation or revolution the dark goddess and Magda Kurtz and Angelica herself might have represented was now gone forever. The Benandanti had not relinquished their control over the world. They never would. If anything, their hold was stronger now than it ever had been. Fourteen years earlier, the day after the presidential inauguration, I stood at the entrance to the Dupont Circle Metro subway and watched as workmen hauled away the newspaper racks selling the Atlanta Constitution and Village Voice and Mother Jones, binding the flimsy metal-and-plastic machines in heavy link chains and dragging them down Pennsylvania Avenue to a waiting garbage truck. The next day, shiny new dispensers appeared, holding the LA, Times and Wall Street Journal. What Angelica had told me of the Benandanti made it all sound mystical and darkly glamorous, secret shamans ruling the world from behind a scrim of smoke and leaping flames.
But the truth was as banal and everyday as the headlines of the Washington Post and the endless parade of silver-haired men frequenting new restaurants in the corridor between K Street and Georgetown, lobbyists and lawmakers trailing in their wake like remoras. And like everyone else I knew in the city, I just got used to it. My life never stopped, I had a few casual friends and occasionally lovers, and through it all I was lucky enough to have a fairly decent job and a nice place to live.
But I knew that my heart had gone to sleep at the Divine. When it woke nearly two decades later, I started to emerge from Ignoreland, just like everybody else. It was going to take a teenage riot to get me out of bed, but that’s just what I got.
CHAPTER 11
Ancient Voices
TO REACH THE ANTHROPOLOGY Department, you ascended a series of grand curving marble staircases, up through Plant Life and Vertebrates and Paleontology, past the enclaves of Man and the Higher Mammals, skirting the secret temples of Egyptology and the Ancient World and stopping short of Gems and Minerals and the breeding cells for the Living Coral Reef and the Insect Zoo. Each marble step held a shallow depression worn into the stone by more than a century of thoughtful treading by scientists and receptionists and cleaning personnel. Slender grooves showed where hundreds of fingers had absently traced the edge of the marble banisters; if you knew where to look you could see a faint rusty stain, like the shadow of a raven’s wing, that marked the exact spot where Othniel Marsh and Edward Cope had grappled during an argument concerning the use of the name Titanosaurus for an immense herbivore. The steps to Calvary or Mount Olympus could not have been more resonant with ancient secret power than those of the Museum of Natural History.