by Burton Hersh
“That wouldn’t work. I know I look like a human being, but I’m still Regular Army. I can’t take meetings, especially with the functionaries of blacklisted regimes.”
“Can you help at all? We’re pretty generous.”
“We’ll have to play it as it lays. Lies.”
“I guess,” I said. “The first thing we’ll have to do is convince Ramon he’s got to give up the originals. That he should write that entire project off. That won’t appeal to him.”
“It just might,” Sonny said. “More than another bomb.”
Once the chili showed up we worked on that for a couple of minutes. We both ordered tea. “I met your mother,” I remarked to Sonny. “How was the ride?”
“With my mother? Across six states? Long.”
“It gave you a chance to catch up, though.”
“On what? You’ve got to understand. She’s a solid citizen, she’s got a lot of amazing qualities. But she’s a throwback. A refugee from the stone age. She knows a few words of English, but most of her life has been spent grinding stuff up and memorizing chants. I grew up with my father, who at least made it most of the way into the nineteenth century, and as the token aborigine in military boarding schools where the off-duty staff supervised the showers and you got demerits if you refused to grab your ankles.”
“Look, I didn’t mean to—“
“In my world you had to look after yourself. Whatever protection you got came basically from the tribe. At that Passover thing the other night I got a feeling for what your family is all about. Rough once in a while, but basically love.”
“I guess so,” I said. I didn’t know what to say. “We have our ups and downs. My mother is getting pretty sick. She’s in an advanced stage of lupus, which is—“
“I know what lupus is.”
“I think it’s worse than she lets on.”
Sonny nodded, sipping at his tea. Beneath his thatch of straight ebony-black hair his face over the rim of his teacup seemed preternaturally narrow, the jaw so hollow the cheekbones cast shadows almost to his jutting chin.
“I didn’t mean to put our mother down,” Sonny commented after a moment. “She did what she could do.” He continued to examine me. “I imagine Linda already told you this, but our mother is a healer. An eagle doctor. I suspect Linda tipped her off when she called to let mother know when I would pick her up, because I couldn’t get her out of that hutch she lives in until she had packed all her roots and dried herbs and powders so she could stuff everything in that carryall of hers. She spent an hour trying to find her charcoal burner.”
“You think Linda—“
“Linda loves your mother. She thinks they’re kindred spirits or some such. It may be that she feels that our mother and those supposedly supernatural powers of hers could help.”
“That’s going to be a hard sell,” I said.
“You think your mother would object?”
“Dad, possibly. Carol, certainly. We’ll change Linda’s name from Dances Like Fire to Plays With Fire. “
“But how do you feel?”
“Me?” I finished my tea. “What’s to lose?”
I started by broaching the idea of letting Linda’s mother loose on Mother to Dad. He was basically noncommittal, which was uncharacteristic and probably an index to the level of his desperation, now that Mother was losing ground so fast. Ultimately, the decision was up to Mother. I stopped by late one afternoon, while Dad was teaching his post-modern-capitalism seminar.
“But can you tell me in specific terms what this sort of procedure actually amounts to, Mikey?” Mother inquired. She looked as pale as her ivory dressing gown. The butterfly on her left cheek seemed to have grown darker, appeared to throb, palpably. “So often this sort of thing doesn’t seem worth the discomfort. I’m not that infatuated with colonoscopies, for example.”
“I’ll ask, if you want me to. But I don’t think what Linda’s mother has got in mind involves a lot of – you know – orifice-invasion-type activity. Anything like that.”
“But what--?”
“My sense is that it is closer to massage. Laying on of hands. Prayers – that sort of thing.”
“Not that I would care that much whatever she did to me. If it worked. I’ve never been particularly…persnickety about my person, as you well know. I just want something that works. I’ve gotten to feel so listless these last months I suspect I’ve died already and everybody around here is too polite to tell me about it.” She conferred on me the suggestion of a smile, her indication of agreement. “I gather that Linda thinks this is a good idea, “ Mother concluded, fatalistically. “Why don’t you set the whole thing up, Mike, and tell me when and where?”
* * *
I arranged for the treatment itself to take place the following Monday morning, when I knew Dad would be teaching his course on top-down economic management in authoritarian societies. The place Mother and I selected was her second-floor office-sitting-room suite, where there was a sofa and privacy and a kitchenette where Mother could brew herself tea when she was going through her art books or reading during the afternoons. I asked Anastasia to make sure the area got a good vacuuming and that the drapes off the balcony were drawn and that the overhead ventilation system in the adjacent bathroom worked. I remembered the charcoal burner. I explained that Linda’s mother was a Native American healer, an expert in ancient tribal ritual we thought might help Mother.
Anastasia dropped her heavy shoulders and looked at me, her you-white-people-all-crazy look, between amused and horrified. “You don’ wanna mess with nothin’ like that, Mike!” she broke out. “That voodoo, the devil like to play around with spells and all that foolish damn exorcisms like you hear about. I had a friend of mines stroked out after she went into one of them spells like you’re talkin’.” Anastasia and Max were Christians, hard-shell Baptists.
“I think she’ll be all right. Conventional medicine certainly isn’t making it.”
At ten sharp Linda appeared in her Volkswagen with her mother and her mother’s satchel. By agreement both mothers had fasted for twenty-four hours to clean out and purify their bodies. Linda had told me that it was important that Mother not be encumbered with tight clothes – or many clothes – so mother came in from her bedroom in her dressing gown and underwear. Linda’s mother introduced herself. She was Sakwa. She held Mother for a moment by both shoulders and indicated that she must now lie down on the Pakistani area rug on the tile floor. There was a linen closet across the hall in Mother’s bathroom, and I hurried over and grabbed a couple of clean sheets and spread them out on the rug for Mother.
Mother eased out of her dressing gown and lay down on her back. I showed Sakwa where she could ignite the charcoal burner under the window in the bathroom. It was as if a single very high note, almost higher than any of us could hear, had been struck by a tuning fork. For perhaps a minute I could not speak.
“Look, Mother, would you be more comfortable—“
“Stay,” Mother said. “It wouldn’t be the first time you’d gazed upon thy aging mother’s nakedness, would it Mike? This is your party, after all.”
Sakwa pulled the charcoal burner from her satchel and went into the bathroom to prop it up on the window sill and light it with a wooden match. Then she came back and removed a shapeless object bigger than a softball covered by some unidentifiable animal’s hair out of the satchel and pulled it open.
“That is my mother’s medicine bundle,” Linda said. “She believes that everything inside there is magic.”
Sakwa tugged several clumps of dried sage grass and three semi-translucent stones and a big tuft of weeds that were still green and something black from the medicine bundle and went into the bathroom and heaped everything onto the small grate of the charcoal burner and watched it a while until it started to smoulder. The smell was heavy, a little bit dizzying.
“The black thing is something she has kept for a long, long time,” Linda whispered to me. “She will now sacrific
e it for you. It is the belly button of an antelope. The antelope is a holy animal for us.”
Sakwa knelt beside Mother. Impassively and with great diligence Sakwa unhooked and lifted off Mother’s brassiere and slid her panties down off her legs. Mother gazed back, registering little. She looked so wasted to me, like the last survivor from a concentration camp.
Sakwa felt the top of Mother’s scalp. Then she looked up and muttered something in her dialect to Linda. “She says the top of your mother’s head is very wet.,” Linda said. “Somebody put a curse on her a long time ago. That is why she is sick. Mother will try and take out the curse.”
Sakwa pulled slowly from her satchel a golden eagle’s feather, the tip of which she let play all along the shrunken muscles of the front of Mother’s body. Then, gingerly, she rolled Mother over and traced the lines of Mothers legs and back and shoulders. Then she placed Mother on her back again and rooted in the satchel before withdrawing a jar of what looked like glass slivers from broken beer bottles. Carefully selecting each sliver Sakwa began to make a series of criss-crossing incisions in Mother’s stomach, under each lapsed breast just below the areole, in the bony hump of her mons Venus, and at the top of each thigh. Then Sakwa found another jar of what looked like a heavy paste and smeared it onto each of the incision areas. Sakwa waited several minutes before pressing her thin lips against the treated areas one by one, expectorating delicately into a rag after sucking out the paste.
“Mother is trying to be extremely careful not to swallow the paste,” Linda whispered to me. “Sometimes she uses a sucking horn, but now she wants to be sure. She needs to think every second, have I got all of it out? Not swallowing even a little bit.”
“What if she swallowed some?”
“That would kill her. It comes from grinding up a chunk of pork we let a water moccasin strike over and over. Then that is very powerful from the venom, so mother mixes it a little with lard.”
“But how about my mother?”
“Sakwa will lick everything out in time. The tiny little bit that is left in your mother will get rid of the curse. Scare away all that water that makes everything swell up so bad so it will go away.”
“I hope you’re right,” I said. I was genuinely terrified, my stomach was in a knot. Smoke off the charcoal burner was making my eyes water. I was supremely glad Dad wasn’t around.
“My mother has done this her whole life,” Linda said. “For a medicine woman it is all about fingers and lips.”
“I’ve noticed that,” I whispered thickly to Linda. “Part of your training.” That was very clumsy, but I was depleted. “I suppose it makes some sense,” I said. “I know they use bee-stings to help M.S. victims.”
Sakwa rolled mother over and cross-hatched her buttocks at four points and then the backs of her thighs and the wings of her shoulder blades and the nape of Mother’s neck. She applied the lard. Sakwa waited briefly before bending down to recover this last round. Then she traced Mother’s body back and front one last time with the tip of the eagle feather.
“The important thing now is to recover the eagle feather which we cannot see but which was in your mother to make the curse get worse and worse. Sakwa thinks she has pulled it out, but the ghost of the curse will stay in this house for four days, so she must talk to the spirits now and convince them to make the ghost go away.”
Squatting on her hams, Sakwa raised her palms and lost herself for over a minute in a crooning, soaring atonal chant. Then she retrieved something from her medicine bundle and blew through it, five shrill blasts.
“What was that all about,” I asked Linda.
“That is a special protection. The sound from the eagle-bone whistle can be heard even by the Great Spirit.”
Then Sakwa eased herself back down to her knees and began to dab something on each of the abrasions.
“What do you suppose that was?” I whispered to Linda.
Sakwa looked up. “Bacitracin,” she said. “Don’t want infection.”
18
I stopped by Brightwaters Boulevard around noon the next morning to find out how Mother was doing. Max, who was devoting the day to his regular pruning chores, put down his clippers and intercepted me before I got to the door. The day was already very hot, at least 100 degrees, and getting hotter.
“She asleep,” Max said. Max pulled a bandana out of the side pocket of his immaculate coveralls and mopped off his shiny bald skull. “If she ain’t been out she been close to out fo’ twenty-fo’ hours. That not natural, you know it, Mike, and I know it. Anastasia and I been debatin’, hadn’t we ought to maybe call 911 or somebody, relieve our minds. That woman done something to your mother, just sleepin’ and sleepin’ like she doin’ ain’t natural.”
“Let me go up. Is Anastasia around?
“She keepin’ an eye out, nobody going to leave her alone in this condition.”
Full of foreboding, I pulled open the heavy carved front door and crossed into the cool of the foyer. The long winding staircase to the central corridor of the second floor felt like the ascent to the gallows. I knew I’d have to answer for this one.
I knocked on the door to my parents’ bedroom. Dad was inside, and told me to come in. Mother was up, stretched out in a bathrobe on a chaise lounge.
“I ran into Max,” I said. “He thinks the Antichrist has carried you off.”
“I wouldn’t rule that out,” Mother said. “I’m feeling a little bit flirtatious. Maybe I’ll have a fling.”
“Your mother has always been hard to control,” Dad said, and grinned. “Now that she’s feeling better we may have to post a guard.”
“Somebody ought go and relieve Max’ mind. He and Anastasia are obviously close to hysteria.”
“They’re just traditional,” Dad said. “When I’m on my deathbed I intend to inform them both about the Emancipation Proclamation.”
“But not before,” I said
“Absolutely not. We could never replace those two.”
“So you’re feeling better?” I asked Mother.
“Better? Reborn. Except that my scrofulous old hide is so chopped up I look like a victim of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and everything itches, I’m another girl entirely. Look, Mickey, look. Look! My hand?” She made a fist. “See, knuckles! They’re back! I’m returning to duty, back on the job to meet all reasonable needs. What’s next?”
I let a long breath out, very slowly. “Well,” I said, stupidly, “Let’s hope it’s permanent.” I could still make out the butterfly on her left cheek, but it was very faint.
When I got back to the office I found that the window air conditioners we depended on couldn’t handle the heat. Buckley was a little beside himself. “They’re diabolical, the summers here, they really are.” he honked as I slid by his office. “It’s like a career on Devil’s Island, except that it pours every day at five o’clock and lays waste utterly to the cocktail hour. You never brought any of that up.”
“I’m an unreliable recruiter,” I said. “They pay me by the truckload.”
“Guess who’s back in town. The big guy.”
“Enrique? Things must be settling down in Coral Gables.”
“It could be that. My guess is, your sister laid the law down. She’s getting pretty far along.”
“Wendy can certainly do that,” I said. Buckley obviously was undecided about where to go with this. The day we recovered our units from Sunrise Capital Partners the backstage collaboration between Buckley and Rick had ended, abruptly. No more strategizing lunches in Tampa. The dream of a career-inflating sideline in Cuban beachfront properties went up like a runaway balloon, and Buckley was back to ambulance chasing.
Andrea was in. Nothing urgent that morning – a couple of calls I would return later. I realized I ought to get in touch with Wendy and tell her what was going on with Mother. Carol could wait – the idea that Mother had put herself in the hands of a Comanche medicine woman was likely to send Carol into conniption.
Wendy picke
d up on the second ring. “Hey, bro,” she boomed. “Keepin’ Dad under control? I know I haven’t been in touch, but we’ve been down in Coral Gables a lot and that little fucker in the oven is starting to kick. It is a boy, they’ve done the sonogram. Miniwawa or whatever her name is was right.”
“Linda. Here’s the bulletin of the day. Linda’s Mother is a practitioner of tribal medicine, and she stopped by yesterday and did what she does and Mother is much improved. “
“Really? Send her up to Tampa. I am not enjoying morning sickness. Listen, Ricky and I are leaving for your neck of the woods in an hour or so. Remember Gretchen Loomis, my doubles partner? That head case has managed to get herself into the finals of the women’s singles runoff at Bartlett Park this week, can you believe that? Singles, and without my trusty backhand to carry the bitch. Ricky and I are headed down to dumpy old St. Pete to take in the match. Three P.M. Interested in joining us?”
I was about to beg off, but then it occurred to me that this might be the chance to pull Rick aside and sound him out.
“Why not,” I said. “I’m not doing anything.”
The tennis-center clubhouse at Bartlett Park -- a kind of public-private collaboration intended to generate an oasis of upbeat activity in what was one of the slackest patches of dug-in ghetto in South St. Petersburg -- was on the way out. A sagging green structure redolent of generation after generation of mildew and compounding rot, rumor had it the clubhouse went up during the Flagler era and has been programmatically neglected ever since. The building was scheduled to be razed and replaced. The regulars who played on its twelve clay courts absolutely loved the place.
Everybody in our family had taken lessons there, despite the fact that Dad insisted on joining the much more upmarket St. Petersburg Country Club. We preferred Bartlett Park for the same reason Roman senators hung out around the public bathhouses. The atmosphere was real. An elderly Cuban with outspread ears of great distinction ran the tournaments at Bartlett, backed up by the imperturbable Jackie, who supervised every breath he drew. By the time I got there Wendy and Rick had settled into Adirondack chairs on the cluttered veranda and Gretchen Loomis was down 2-4 in the opening set.
