by Anne Rice
I didn’t go to Uncle Will’s to see Ferdie anyways. I was there to see Will. He was always there because he’d been laid off for three months. His girlfriend, a directory assistance lady, was paying all the bills, except his liquor bill which he would get the money for by standing at the entrance to the Sacramento Freeway with a big old sign that said he was homeless. By lunch time he would always have enough for a couple of forty-ouncers.
He often had his homies over. There was Bill and Ted, forty-year-old surfers, from the apartment next door, and Armando, who was dying of AIDS, and Lupe the hooker, and Jungle George the loan shark, but most of all there was Mr. Death, an old black dude with long white hair. His real name was Daniel Moreau. Mr. Death was his professional name. He was a houngan—a voodoo witch doctor. Retired that is. Used to hang out with Baby Doc in Haiti. Told wild stories: political prisoners getting burning tires hung around their necks, magic potions, and zombies, naturally, except, the way he told it, there wasn’t nothing supernatural about them. He was my favorite of Uncle Will’s friends, but his stories about Haiti made the East Valley sound like buttfuck Egypt, I mean nothing happens here except like, drive-bys and drug busts and shit.
My cousin Ferdie was usually nowhere to be found. That was fine with me. Then, one too-hot day in April, I totally saved his life.
It was kind of an accident. I was at the 7-Eleven trying to buy a pack of cigarettes. Usually the dude just sells them to me but this time I think it was a different person even though it’s like hard to tell them apart. He stood there, six feet six in his turban, and he’s all, “You cannot be purchasing cigarettes here, young man.”
I’m all, “Why not?” and he’s all, “Because you are being too young,” so I’m all, “You motherfucking camel jockey,” and slamming the hardpack on the counter and jamming out of the store. But because I’m in such a hurry, everything I’ve jacked starts tumbling out of my pocket: two Twix bars, a packet of condoms, a bag of peanuts, and a Bic lighter.
“Shoplifter!” he screamed, and started loping out from behind the counter.
But I’m all, “So what are you gonna do about it, fag?” because I knew I could outrun anybody, and I started running, but he pushed some kind of alarm button and I didn’t make it out of the parking lot before a cop car pulled in and two big dudes jumped out with big old PR-24s. They started chasing me but they didn’t know the alleys like I did. I lost them but then I heard the sirens and I knew they were going to try and head me off somewheres. I hopped a chain-link fence and dove through a hole in a churchyard shrubbery and I came out behind our apartment building. I was in an alley that was too narrow for the squad car to squeeze through but I seen it through the gap and the lights flashing and I knew that they’d be running after me again and I didn’t feel like getting beat up. Them plastic ties they put around your wrists can really cut you.
I shimmied up the wall where an orange tree grew, swung over the branch, and found myself on the balcony outside my cousin’s room. I could tell they hadn’t seen me because I heard them running all the way past the complex shouting, “Stop, you little cholo shit, stop or I’ll shoot your fucking face off,” and I knew I’d gotten clean away. They’d never even gotten a good look at me since they thought I was a cholo; I may dress like one but I don’t look like one.
So I slide open the door into Ferdie’s room and there he is, standing on a chair with a belt around his neck, tightening the buckle and getting ready to kick. His eyes were all empty and he had wet his boxers.
I didn’t waste no time, I just grabbed a hold of him and yanked the belt out of the buckle. There was like a red bruise all around his neck where the leather had cut it. I lifted him up real easy (he was a head shorter than me) and carried him to the lower bunk and I’m all, “What do you think you’re doing, dude?” and pulling off his boxers and drying him off with a Ren and Stimpy towel.
“Jesus, Ferdie,” I said, “you could at least have pissed in the bathroom.”
“Not allowed in the bathroom.”
“What do you mean?”
“Not allowed to leave my room for two weeks on account of I’m stubborn.”
“Not even to go to the bathroom?”
“Sometimes there ain’t no one out there to let me out in time.”
I tried Ferdie’s door. It was locked from the outside. Then I heard my Uncle Will’s voice: “Don’t you try the door, it’s no use; I’ll double your time if I even hear you breathe.”
I held my breath. This was another Uncle Will than the down dude I could get stoned with. I’d never heard Uncle Will scream like that before. Never even heard him raise his voice.
Ferdie was all shivering even though it was probably 106 outside and the swamp cooler wasn’t working too well because of the humidity. I looked around the room for some clean underwear, but when I found it he wouldn’t let me take away his towel. I had to trick him and whisk it away and that’s when I saw all the bruises because he stepped out from the shadow of the bunk, into the harsh light. There were some thin red stripes, like maybe an electric cord, and some wide purple ones with punctures, like the buckle end of a belt, and a couple of cigarette burns. I was too shocked to say anything at first, and then all I could say was “Why?” because something this bad had to have a reason, it couldn’t just happen.
And he’s all, “I dunno.” And he shrugged. “I guess it’s because I’m stubborn, that’s all, stubborn.”
“How stubborn?”
“I forget. I think I wouldn’t eat my cereal.” He gave a sharp giggle, like a girl. “I don’t like Captain Crunch.”
There had to be more to it than that. I figured maybe he wasn’t thinking straight seeing how he’d just been this close to history. Uncle Will wasn’t like one of them dudes on Geraldo, you know, one show they had with like kids who had been locked up in cages, used in satanic sacrifices, shit like that. Was he? I’ve known Uncle Will since the fourth grade, when we moved down to the Valley from the trailer park in Lancaster. Maybe Uncle Will had gotten weird from being laid off so long.
“You still shouldn’t of tried to kill yourself,” I said. “It’s a sin.”
“I know, Oz,” Ferdie said, “but hell can’t be no worse than this.”
Then he looks at me with big sad sunken eyes and picks at a scab on the back of his hand. The way he looks at me is all, I’m in hell now, Oz, and you gotta help me, cuz I’m sinking fast. But I still couldn’t believe that Uncle Will would have done that to him. I didn’t like Ferdie, you understand, on account of he could stare anyone down and he made you nervous just being around him. And he read books, too, and he could toss of a string of facts that would make you feel totally stupid and want to punch his head in. But he was my cousin and, you know, family is all you have, and less and less of it because they keep getting gunned down in your backyard.
“You don’t got to help me any,” Ferdie said, “next week they’re gonna put me on Ritalin and maybe I won’t be so stubborn no more.”
I’m all, “Shit, Ferdie, of course I’ll help you.” I gave him a piece of bubble gum that I’d jacked along with the other stuff, that hadn’t fallen out of my pocket. He swallowed the whole thing. “Me and Uncle Will are homies. Maybe I can find out what’s making him act this way.” Because I still thought that it was just some kind of temporary craziness and I could get Will to come to his senses, and I knew we couldn’t turn him in, because that would tear the family apart forever.
So I waited for a couple of hours and I snuck back over the balcony and around to the front of the apartment building. Mr. Death and Uncle Will were sitting in the living room chugging their forty-ouncers. They were talking in whispers and they didn’t see me come in. So I sat down on the bean bag behind Will’s armchair and pretended like I wasn’t there.
Uncle Will’s all, “I don’t know what to do, I try so hard, he’s so stubborn.”
“I would say you was probably stubborn too,” Mr. Death said. “Stubborn runs in families.” His voice wa
s deep and it rolled like a tubular wave. The way he talked wasn’t like the black people in my school exactly. I mean it had like a foreign lilt to it, French or something.
“Yeah,” Uncle Will said, “I reckon I was. Stubborn I mean. My Dad used to whip the shit out of me. But Ferdinand’s a different kind of stubborn. He’s stubborn like a block of granite that you want to carve into a statue and it won’t give. Drugs don’t help him; whipping don’t make it any better.”
It’s weird. Stubborn ain’t a word you hear people use much about kids, well, just old people, and they’re more’n likely talking about a mule or a dog when they say it. When I heard Uncle Will talking this way it was, you know, like when I heard his voice booming through Ferdie’s locked door—it didn’t sound like the Will I knew, my bud. Suddenly I realized that it sounded like Grandpa.
And like I’m all cold suddenly, cold and clammy, even though the air from the electric fan is as burning hot as the smoggy air outside. Because I seen my grandfather dead, at the wake. They made me kiss the corpse on the cheek. The makeup rubbed off on my lips and I sucked in a cold and bitter-tasting wind. Even though that had been a totally hot day too, a heat wave, and me six years old and standing on a crate and sweating like a motherfucker.
Uncle Will said, “I wish there was another way.” And popped the cap off the second forty-ouncer. “Jesus I try so hard but him and me, it’s like I’m butting my head against the biggest-ass wall in the world.”
And Mr. Death said, “Well, Will, there be other ways. There is things in the world you can only see if you choose to open your eyes. There is doors you can unlock but only if you know they there.”
I could tell that like, Mr. Death was about to totally launch into one of them stories of his. Maybe if Uncle Will got all involved in the story I could slip out from behind the armchair and act like I just arrived. But Will cut him off and he just said, “Daniel, I got no patience for your bullshit today. I’m scared, man, scared for me and my son. What if I accidentally kill him one of these days? I ain’t a bad man, I ain’t a murderer, but the kid just plain makes me go berserk.”
“Well, back at home there is a little trick I do,” Mr. Death said. “And after I do this little trick, my patients they all calm, they do what they told, they never ever complain no more.”
“What is it, some kind of voodoo therapy?”
“Maybe you call it that.”
“Is it expensive?”
“Not for you. You can’t afford not to have it done. You drinking yourself into the grave because how much it trouble you. You want to feel that love God say you got to feel for the child of your own loins.”
“I’d give anything.”
“And you will. Not just anything. Everything.”
“But what will you give Ferdie in return?”
“I will give him a new life,” Mr. Death said. “A kind of being born again, starting with a clean slate.”
That’s when I really got scared, because before you can kind of be born again, you have to kind of die. And I knew Mr. Death was talking about turning Ferdie into a zombie.
I didn’t come out from behind that armchair until long after Daniel Moreau had gone home and Uncle Will dozed off after his second forty-ouncer. I crept up the stairs to my mom’s apartment. She was lying on the living room floor, past noticing anything.
I dreamed about my brother. I never saw him dead because they couldn’t fix his face and so they had a closed coffin funeral. Then I dreamed Ferdie was dangling from the end of a noose, swinging like a busted naked light bulb. Then I dreamed about Grandpa. Bending down to kiss the body. His eyes popping open. Staring straight at me. Fixed. Like the lens of a camcorder. Staring. Videotaping me, my lips still freeze-dried from brushing his cheek, too scared to scream.
Then I dreamed it was me in that coffin, and I’m all rigid but not from death, only from terror because the three of them are standing around me and all of them are dead and all of them with their fixed-focus eyes….
I woke up and I thought: Uncle Will didn’t come to the funeral. I didn’t meet him for another three years. I wondered why he didn’t come. I’m all, I think I’ll ask him tomorrow. I looked over at the VCR and the timer said 3:30 in the morning. I tried to go back to sleep.
But like, every time I closed my eyes, I would see all three of them again. Night of the Living Dead-style, with their arms hanging limp and shambling around my grave. And their heads swiveling like the security cameras at the K-Mart. And that’s how it goes on, all night long, so I can’t get to sleep, so when I finally do it’s almost dawn and I know I’m going to have to sleep through first period or totally ditch.
I got up around twelve. I couldn’t leave the house because there’s always a cop prowling around somewheres and they can’t wait to truss your wrists with them plastic ties and haul you off to school. So I decided to go down to Uncle Will’s apartment.
Actually I went down the fire escape first, slipped Ferdie a couple of cookies and a wine cooler—he just sat staring into a broken television set—then worked my way back around to the front, let myself in.
Uncle Will gave me a big old hug and I told him I had nightmares all night long and he’s all, “It’s okay, son, I’m here for you. Calm down now.”
And I’m all, “Dude, I dreamed everyone was dead.”
“You’ve had it rough, kid.” He steered me toward the sofa and gave me a couple of Valium. “You want to hang out here for a while? Your mom don’t give a shit.”
I sat on the sofa juggling the Valium from hand to hand. “Uncle Will? Why didn’t you go to Grandpa’s funeral? Like, he was your dad, wasn’t he?”
“Don’t got no father,” said Uncle Will.
“Well but … Uncle Will? Why do you beat up on Ferdie so much?”
“Because he’s a stubborn little motherfucker.”
“Yeah, but … over not eating his cereal? I mean like, cigarette burns and shit?”
“How d’you find out?”
“I saw him yesterday.”
“Saw him? I told him to stay in his room!”
“I know, I went in through the balcony.”
“I told him not to—” I could see that Uncle Will was getting real pissed. Frothing at the mouth almost. He strode down the corridor to Ferdie’s room and started trying to kick it in.
I’m all, “Don’t you have a key?” and he like calms down, but only a little bit, and fumbles in his jeans and pulls them out and unlocks the door. There’s Ferdie, sitting on the bunk in just a pair of Terminator 2 boxer shorts and crisscrossed with cuts, and I see what Uncle Will means when he says stubborn because there ain’t one shred of fear or self-pity in Ferdie’s eyes; he just glares at Will and there’s more anger coiled up in them eyes than you can imagine. Will just throws himself on Ferdie and he’s all punching him and Ferdie just sits there, taking it, but no matter how hard he’s hit he never gives up one little bit of that fury that’s in his eyes. After a while I couldn’t stand it no more and I’m all trying to pull Will off of him and I’m all, “You’re crazy, dude, you’re not yourself, you’re fucking possessed or something.”
And then it all suddenly snaps to. Ferdie, rigid, Uncle Will stepping back, looking away from those blazing eyes. “It’s them eyes,” he said, “it’s all because of them eyes. Devil eyes. They just keep daring me and daring me. They taunt me and they haunt me.”
He grabbed my shoulders and pushed me out of Ferdie’s room and then he slammed the door shut behind us and locked it again. “I got to do something,” he said. “Or else I’m going to murder him, I really am.”
Once Ferdie was out of sight, he started changing back into the Will I knew. “Let’s go cruising,” he said. “I can’t stay cooped up here. I’ll keep thinking about him.”
So we took off down the San Fernando Road toward Sun Valley, past Foothill Division, with speed metal all blaring on the stereo. I had to shout and he did too. And he’s got his arm around me the whole time, and he’s all, “
Ozzie, I wish you were my kid. We have such good times together.”
“Don’t you love Ferdinand, Uncle Will?”
“I love him with all my heart.” But there’s no tenderness in his voice when he says it, only fear. “I don’t know why I want to kill him so bad. He’s got some devil in him.”
“Maybe it’s in you, Uncle Will. You know”—we turned a sharp corner, bounced across the railroad tracks somewhere around Tuxford, nothing but big old gray warehouses covered with taggers’ writings, and the smog totally hiding the San Gabriel Mountains from sight—“when you were all screaming and shit, you sounded like another person. You sounded almost like Grandpa.”
“Your grandfather was a good man. He never laid a hand on me. Do you hear that? Don’t you ever forget that.”
The tape was getting chewed up, so I had to stop the stereo and pull out the cassette and wind the little ribbon back with the end of a Pilot marker. So we caught the end of some news thing and it was the cops were all found not guilty up there in Simi Valley, and then Uncle Will switched the radio off. “Motherfuckers,” he said softly.
“Uncle Will, where are we?”
We were threading down a narrow winding road, half paved, half dirt, and weeds waist-high on either side of us, and like, it was suddenly getting dark. Then, poking out of them weeds, there’s a big old sign that reads Daniel Moreau, Doctor of Divinity. I get that chilly feeling inside me again because of what I heard them talking about last night, which I’ve been trying to forget all day.
“I’ll be damned,” Uncle Will said. “It’s Mr. Death’s place.”
After we parked we had to walk through a path winding through trees and weeds and here and there little piles of rocks, pyramids kind of, decorated with bunches of wildflowers. Like the place was a kind of homemade graveyard. The house wasn’t much more than a shack, and it was set way in back of the lot. It looked abandoned, but when we got closer we could see the TV flickering behind closed blinds, and Uncle Will knocked on the door. There wasn’t no answer, but we went in anyways.
