Carrion

by Gary Brandner

  “Hey, Xavier, cómo está?”

  Cruz looked up from the engine cavity where his head had been buried. He wore a black T-shirt with sleeves rolled to his shoulders, displaying a tattooed eagle on his brown biceps.

  “Talk English, man. Your Spanish sucks.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m working on it.”

  “Work harder.”

  Xavier dived back into the engine compartment. Fain picked up a loose spark plug and played with it idly. He made it vanish from his left hand and plucked it out of the air with his right.

  “Say, neighbor, I wonder if you could help me.”

  Xavier emerged and squinted at him suspiciously. “Help you do what?”

  “Not do anything, actually. I need a little information.”

  “I thought you knew everything. Ain’t you a college man?”

  “Ha-ha. Seriously, though, you could do me a favor.”

  “How?”

  “What can you tell me about voodoo?”

  Cruz stared at him. “You crazy, man? I’m Cuban. I don’t know nothing about that stuff.”

  “Hey, I’m your neighbor, remember? I live right up there. Once a month I see twenty, thirty people coming to your place all dressed in white with bandannas around their heads. I hear chanting inside the house. I see the chicken population drop to nothing.”

  “So we have a barbecue.”

  “I don’t smell any cooking.”

  Cruz hefted the crescent wrench he was working with. He slapped it several times against the callused palm of his left hand. “Why you asking me this shit, man?”

  Mac produced a neighborly chuckle. “Well, I’m in sort of a bind. I promised to put on a little show for some people, and it would help put it over if I threw in a little voodoo shtick.”

  “Voodoo is not a show, man. It’s like a religion, you know? Heavy stuff. You stick to card tricks.”

  “Then it is voodoo that goes on over here,” Fain said.

  The Cuban did a noncommittal flip-flop of one hand. “Something like that.”

  “So fill me in.”

  “Listen, man, I don’t really believe in that stuff, but a lot of people do. They wouldn’t like me talkin’ about them. I let ‘em use my house, okay? I can’t tell you nothing.”

  “Ever see this trick?” Fain said. He made a pass and slowly drew a twenty-dollar bill from the Cuban’s ear.

  “Pretty good,” said Cruz, pocketing the twenty. “If you got to hear about voodoo, what you want to do is talk to the Haitian. He’s the houngan. The priest.”

  “Has he got a name?”

  “All I know is they call him Le Docteur.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “I don’t know where he lives, but he’s down at the clinic a lot.”

  “The place next to Big Mary’s on Sunset?”

  “Yeah, that one.”

  “Thanks, Xavier.”

  “Hey, man, you di’n’ hear nothin’ from me.”

  “Right. Gotcha.”

  Fain walked back up to his apartment, humming to himself. He mentally entered the twenty dollars under expenses, then mentally raised it to fifty. What the hell.

  • • •

  The People’s Sunshine Clinic was located between Big Mary’s lesbian bar and a motorcycle repair shop on one of the sadder blocks of Sunset Boulevard. The clinic existed as though in a time capsule from the sixties. The face of the cinder-block building was painted with rainbows and flowers and the swirling paisley colors of the psychedelic generation. The people who hung out in front of the place looked like a road company of Hair.

  In the unpainted waiting room young people with beards and beads and headbands and granny dresses sat around on thrift-shop furniture. KRTH, the Golden Oldie station, played Led Zeppelin on somebody’s portable.

  Mac Fain, in his clean Levi’s and Arnold Palmer jacket, felt decidedly overdressed. He edged past a young woman reciting Kahlil Gibran and pushed through a door at the rear labeled NO ADMITTANCE.

  A Latin woman with enormous dark eyes intercepted him. “You’re supposed to wait out there. Somebody will come and help you.”

  “I’m not a patient,” Fain said. “I want to see Le Docteur.”

  The woman took a step back and looked him over. “Wait out there. A doctor will come.”

  “No, no, I don’t need a doctor. I want to talk to Le Docteur. The Haitian.”

  The woman’s eyes clouded. She pointed down a short hallway with curtained doorways on both sides. “Find an empty room and wait.”

  Fain started to protest, but the woman had turned away. He shrugged and wandered down the hallway. The first cubicle he looked into was occupied by a youth with ghastly sores over most of his body. Fain quickly zipped the curtain closed and looked into the next. There an old man lay on the floor in a pool of vomit. He was relieved to find the third cubicle unoccupied.

  The side walls were plywood. There was no window, and old linoleum on the floor. The furnishings consisted of a waist-high padded table, a white-enameled stool, a locked metal cabinet, an empty Kleenex box, a cotton-ball dispenser. Fain peeked into a trash can filled with tongue depressors, wadded tissues, used bandages, and other items he didn’t want to think about. His nostrils stung with the smell of disinfectant.

  Fain hoisted himself to a perch on the edge of the examination table, thought better of it, and moved to the stool. Across the hall someone groaned without letup.

  He started as the curtain was slashed aside and two men entered. One was a totally bald Anglo with the mashed-in face of a professional wrestler. Biceps the size of cantaloupes bulged from the sleeves of his T-shirt. The other was a whip-thin Latin with a Zapata mustache. They eyed Fain with icy suspicion.

  Mac rose from the stool and tried to look friendly. “Hi. Is one of you men called Le Docteur?”

  An uncomfortable pause went by, and Fain’s smile grew strained. Finally, the Latin spoke. “You a cop?”

  “Me? No way,” Fain said hastily. “I live in the neighborhood.” That wasn’t going to make them all brothers, he thought, but it couldn’t hurt.

  “What you want with Le Docteur?”

  “It’s … a business matter.”

  The Latin looked to the wrestler. The muscular man wore studded leather wrist bands. His hands were balled into fists like boulders.

  “What kinda business?” the wrestler growled.

  Sweat dampened the shirt under Fain’s armpits. He swallowed hard and said, “Personal business.”

  The Latin and the wrestler exchanged a look. The Latin put his face very close to Fain’s and said, “You gotta do better than that, man, or they gonna have to put you back together out front.”

  Clearly, evasiveness would get him nowhere here. Fain leaned even closer to the swarthy man and said through his teeth, “It’s about magic. Want to make something out of that?”

  The others backed off a little. “Who sent you here?”

  “Xavier Cruz.”

  “That name don’t mean nothing to me.”

  “He didn’t send me to see you.”

  “Let’s crack him a little,” said the wrestler. The muscles in his upper body strained to burst through the tight T-shirt.

  “Look, it’s not really all that important,” Fain said. He made a tentative move toward the doorway. “If you’re busy here, I’ll just run along and try another time.”

  The two men stepped closer together, blocking his path.

  “I knew he was a cop,” said the wrestler.

  Oh, shit, Fain thought. Then he saw the glint of a steel scalpel in the Latin’s hand and groaned aloud.

  The curtain whipped open again, and an enormously fat black man pushed himself into the room. The other two stepped back deferentially. The fat man’s eyes, glittering from deep in the folds of dark flesh, looked into Fain’s soul. He made a small motion with one pudgy hand, and the other two slipped silently out, closing the curtain behind them.

  “You have business with Le
Docteur?” The man’s voice seemed to belong to another body. It was clear, high-pitched. He spoke in a lilting Caribbean accent.

  “Y-yes,” Fain said, improvising frantically. “I’m a screenwriter, and I’m researching for a movie that has to do with black magic.”

  “Do you mean voodoo?”

  “Well, uh, yes, but it’s no big thing. The movie will probably never be produced. But I got your name from a friend and thought maybe, if you had the time — ”

  “All that is bullshit,” the huge man said. “You have been lying from the moment you came in here. That is very dangerous with these people. You came very close to dying just now.”

  “Well, I’m sure glad you came in when you did,” Fain said.

  The black man held up a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt. “You have not walked out of here yet. So I say again, state your business with me.”

  “Right.” Fain dug into his wallet for a bent business card. He straightened it out and handed it to Le Docteur.

  The black man read the card carefully and looked again at Fain. The smooth, round face was unreadable. “You represent yourself as a ‘master of the occult’?”

  Mac attempted a chuckle. “That’s just advertising. Got to make a living. You know how it is.”

  “Yes, I do know,” the Haitian said. “But I do not think you do. Come with me.”

  He heaved his bulk around like a tugboat in a snug harbor and pushed back out past the curtain. Fain looked after him for a moment, then followed.

  In the hallway stood the two men who had first confronted him. Their eyes were still cold, but to Fain’s relief the scalpel was nowhere in sight.

  Le Docteur marched on to the end of the hallway and out a back door, with Fain hurrying to keep up. They crossed a small yard choked with weeds and trash barrels to a windowless shed of corrugated steel. The black man keyed open a padlock on the door, and they went inside.

  He motioned Fain into one of two chairs on opposite sides of a battered card table. Then he lit a fat yellow candle. The flame sputtered and gave off the smell of rancid fat. The Haitian pulled the metal door shut and sat down across from Fain.

  The flickering light of the candle illuminated their faces and little else. Fain looked around and got a shadowy impression of things hanging from the walls. The hanging things seemed to writhe and twist with the wavering flame. He looked away quickly.

  “You have come to ask something of me,” said the Haitian. “It is not my function to give answers. Do you know why I am spending this time talking to you?”

  “No,” Fain said.

  “Because of what I see in your eyes. They are the eyes of a gangan. Do you know what that is?”

  “No.”

  “I thought not.” He made a rumbling, wheezing sound that might have been a laugh. Or a growl. “A gangan is a man born to special powers. Not, certainly, a ‘master of the occult,’ but a man with a gift, all the same. Do you know what a houngan is?”

  “A voodoo priest,” Fain said, remembering Xavier’s description of the Haitian.

  “Good. You are not totally ignorant. I am a houngan. It is a level a gangan like you could not attain in a hundred lifetimes. Do you understand?”

  Fain nodded. The air in the steel shed was stale and damp. He shivered with a sudden chill.

  “Since you do have the gift — from where, I cannot guess — and even though you are unaware of what you have, I am required to answer you. What is it you want?”

  Fain worked his mouth to relieve the dryness. “I want to know the ritual for raising the dead.”

  For a long time the only sound was the whistling breath of the black man and the thudding of Fain’s heart. Finally, Le Docteur said flatly, “You do not want to know that.”

  “Not for real, of course not. It’s just for a … kind of a show I’m putting on. I want to make it look authentic.”

  “You are a greater fool than I thought. A show!” The Haitian rolled his eyes up until all that showed in the candlelight were the yellowed whites.

  “You said you would tell me,” Fain reminded him.

  “So I did, and so I must. If you were less a fool, you would know how much more valuable is the secret of returning the spirits of the dead once they are risen.”

  “Thanks, but I don’t need that one.”

  “It is well. You would find it much more costly.”

  Fain was growing dizzy and claustrophobic in the airless shed. He held his wallet up to the candle and thumbed out several bills. “Naturally, I’ll pay you for the information.”

  The Haitian spat on the table. “I have no use for your money. If you must know the ritual of the dead, I will give it to you. I do this only because you have the eyes of a gangan and I am bound by my oath.”

  “I appreciate the trouble you’re going to,” Fain said. “I’d really like to thank you in some way.”

  The Haitian shook his massive head. “You owe me no thanks, as you will soon see. Let us begin.”

  Chapter 6

  A rooster was crowing.

  McAllister Fain pried his eyes open and saw nothing but darkness. The rooster crowed again, splitting the silence of the night. Fain coughed and licked his lips. They were dry and tasted salty.

  Damn bird, he thought. If the Cuban next door had to keep those suckers, why couldn’t he teach them to crow when the sun came up the way roosters were supposed to?

  His mind began to function, slow and balky like a cold engine on a winter morning. He had a growing feeling of unease. Things were not as they should be.

  In the first place, he was not in his bed. He was not in anybody’s bed. He was sitting in the reclining chair in his living room. He had not fallen asleep watching television, because the screen was dark. And the heat was turned off. He felt cold and cramped. He groped beside him for the switch to the table lamp and snapped it on.

  It took a minute for his eyes to adjust to the sudden light. He looked down and saw that he was fully dressed. There was a faint rancid smell that seemed to come from his clothing.

  Beside him, on the lamp table and the floor beneath it, was a collection of jars, bottles, scraps of paper, bits of fur, and feathers. There was also a bundle of oddly shaped candles in assorted colors.

  He sat back in the chair, closed his eyes again, and slowly began to remember. He had talked to Cruz next door about the voodoo business; then he had gone to the People’s Sunshine Clinic on Sunset. There he had met the big black man called Le Docteur and followed him into that metal shed out behind the clinic. That was where his memory became jumbled. He had no conception of how much time the two of them had spent in the shed. His digital wristwatch told him it was now 4:35. That would be A.M., Wednesday, unless he had lost a day somewhere.

  Fain stood up and stretched. His muscles and joints ached as though he had come through a vigorous physical workout. He turned on more lights and went into the kitchen, where he drank two glasses of cold water. A sudden chill made him shiver and raised gooseflesh on his arms. He went back out to the living room then and shoved the thermostat lever forward until the gas wall heater came on with a soft whump.

  He took time then to examine the objects on the lamp table and on the floor. He had a vague memory of Le Docteur loading him down and explaining in rapid accents what each was for. What the hell were they all for?

  The jars contained powders and ashes in many colors and consistencies. On the bits of papers were scrawled barely readable passages in some language that was not English and not quite French. On others were sketched inticrate designs. These Fain recognized as vévés from his reading of the voodoo book. They were diagrams to be drawn on the floor with the powders to call up desired spirits, or loa.

  He picked up one of the candles, thick as a man’s wrist. This one was an unhealthy gray-green and gave under his touch like the body of a snake. The wax, or whatever it was, gave off an unpleasant odor. Fain put it down quickly.

  He was even less anxious to handle the little sh
riveled bits of fur and feathers. They reminded him of the shadowy hanging things on the wall of the voodoo shed. He resolved that whatever use he made of the other things, these he would do without.

  Bits and fragments of the time he had spent in the stifling shed with Le Docteur began to come back. He saw again the huge face like a black jack-o’-lantern in the candlelight, eyes glowing deep in their fleshy pockets. He heard in his mind the voice of the houngan, sometimes high and piping, at other times dropping to a hoarse rumble. The words were partly in English, partly in French, and partly in a Creole dialect, which Fain could not understand.

  The acrid smoke from the sputtering candle, the heat, and the lack of oxygen in the shed had numbed his brain, distorting the memories. Sometime during the night he must have left and returned to his apartment, but of that he remembered nothing.

  On a sudden impulse he grabbed for his wallet. He counted the bills inside. All there. So were his Visa and his Mobil credit cards. At least he had not been rolled. And apparently he had not paid anything for the material he had brought home. Mentally he added a hundred dollars to his expense account. What the hell.

  Suddenly he was very tired. Without bothering to turn off the lights or the heater, he stumbled into the bedroom, stripped off his clothes, and collapsed on the bed. The rooster crowed several more times before dawn, but Mac Fain did not hear.

  • • •

  At nine o’clock he was awakened by a persistent knocking at the door. Still groggy, he stumbled out to find a uniformed messenger there with an envelope for him from Elliot Kruger. He signed the man’s book, took the envelope inside, and ripped it open. The amount written on the check snapped him wide awake. He sat down and spent a full five minutes savoring the beautiful symmetry of the figures.

  One-oh-comma-oh-oh-oh. Ten thousand dollars. It was easily the largest check Mac Fain had ever seen. He hummed softly to himself and petted the slip of paper as though it were a small, lovable animal.

  He was still carrying the check when he went into the bathroom. There he leaned across the sink and studied his face in the clouded mirror. There were dark smudges on his cheeks and forehead. Grease or ashes, or something. His hair was matted, and he needed a shave.