by Tim Marquitz
“I want to call Agau.”
“Are you mad? I can’t call Agau. Look at me, Erzulie. This body couldn’t stand to be mounted by Papa Legba. Agau is brutal. You’re asking me to sacrifice myself.”
“Then I’ll do it. You do the ritual, and Agau can mount me instead.”
Manno studied me closely. “These visions really have you spooked, to offer that.”
“I’m desperate. And Agau frightened the loa once before…I believe he could do it again. Maybe permanently.”
“You used to hate being ridden.”
“I still hate it. Ever since…” I swallowed against the lump of fear in my throat.
“Ever since we tried to call Baron Samedi and got Kriminel instead.”
I grimaced. “But I don’t see what choice we have. The alternative is unthinkable.”
Sylvenie brought us wooden bowls full of rice and beans. “I forbid either of you to make a decision on empty stomachs.”
I accepted the food and watched as my friend’s wife handed him a bowl and spoon and lovingly kissed his forehead before retreating into the house.
“She seems sad,” I offered.
Manno frowned. “She is sad. She has always been sad, my Sylvenie. She has always known a day would come when someone would need the vodou, and it would be my undoing. She knows this will probably kill me.”
“Not if I let the loa use my body.”
“Even if you let the loa use your body, Erzulie. The cancer has taken its toll. There’s not much left of me to give.”
I had no reply to that, so I ate instead. We sat for a long time, watching twilight conquer the jungle, listening to the birds grow quiet and the insects grow louder. Eventually, our bellies full, we set the bowls aside and Manno sighed.
“Did you bring a chicken?”
“I can’t ask for your life. If I had known…”
“Let my death be a sacrifice. Soon I’ll be going to see Baron Samedi either way. It might as well be in service to a greater purpose.”
“But Sylvenie…”
“Promise me you’ll take her back to the village with you. Don’t let her stay here when I’m gone.”
Numb, I could only nod. “There’s a chicken in my pack.”
“And what about the girl?”
My gaze settled on the tree line. “She’ll come. Baron Kriminel and I have unfinished business.”
#
We built a massive bonfire in the fire pit. Manno sacrificed the chicken and smeared its blood on my forehead and chest. He sat beside the fire with a pair of drums and beat frantic music while Sylvenie and I danced. We pushed ourselves past the point of exhaustion, chanting and singing even when we were out of breath. Eventually, after hours of this, I felt myself step from my thrashing body, and I knew the time had come for Agau to mount me. The sacred trance had removed my doubt and fear, leaving me apathetic, vacant, ready to be ridden.
I felt Agau’s spirit thrumming in my bones, his consciousness filling me until it felt like he would split my skin. But then, suddenly, I was empty, and my own soul snapped back into my body. I collapsed to the ground, disoriented. “Agau! Agau, come back!” My voice was hoarse with overuse.
Manno slid off his chair onto the ground and began to convulse. Sylvenie and I ran to his side and tried to protect him from hurting himself. His body became stiff and for a moment, I feared he was dead. But then he relaxed in our arms, and sat up.
He laughed, and it was a sound like rocks rubbing together, low and gruff. When he spoke his voice was even deeper and more resonant than usual. “Bonswa, my chickadees. I’m hungry.”
Wiping tears from her cheeks, Sylvenie went to fetch food.
“You were supposed to take me,” I told Agau. “Why didn’t you take me?”
“I don’t want to mount you. I want to mount you!” Manno’s hands pressed the flesh of my thighs and his mouth went for my neck.
Desire surged through me at the feel of his callused fingers and hot breath on my neglected skin, but I pushed him away. “No! We’re not here for that! We’re here to talk about a girl. Ayida Fazande.”
“Hungry.” He reached for me.
“Sylvenie is bringing food.”
“Not just for food, woman!” He pulled me to him roughly.
“First we talk about the girl.” I pushed away and rose, stepping back from him.
“First we sate my needs.” He stood as well, grabbing at me again. “I am the god of thunder. You called me here. Now you will do as I command.”
He chased me around the fire, growling and grunting, until Sylvenie appeared with plates laden with food. He crouched over the plates and shoved handfuls of chicken and rice into his mouth, eating loudly and with no care for manners.
“We called you because we need you to protect Ayida Fazande,” I said as he ate, careful to stay an arm’s length away from him.
Manno’s eyes—Agau’s eyes—locked on mine. “And what will you give me in exchange? My protection comes with a price.”
“I’ll marry you. No loa has ever claimed me.”
“Baron Kriminel says otherwise.”
“Baron Kriminel is a liar.”
He smiled. “That much is true. But I don’t want you. You’re too old.” His glanced at Sylvenie.
She gasped. “I’m already married.”
“I would claim you only once a week.”
Sylvenie turned to me. “This was not part of the bargain.”
“You can have her once a month and me as well,” I offered.
“And the girl.”
I shook my head. “I can’t make that bargain. Ayida is too young. And her parents aren’t here to bargain for her.”
“All three or nothing at all.” Agau tossed chicken bones into the fire.
“No bargain.” Ayida appeared just outside the ring of light cast by the fire. She was filthy, her clothes caked with muck and body smeared with what might be blood or might be something else. Her voice was still high and nasal.
“Ayida!” I took a step toward her, and then stopped, catching myself. “Baron Kriminel.”
“Aren’t you clever?” Kriminel stepped into the firelight, walking with a masculine swagger. Ayida’s arms were riddled with bite marks—human bite marks—probably from her own mouth.
“What have you done to her?”
Kriminel chortled. “What do you care? The girl is an empty vessel, waiting to be filled. No soul, or such a tiny one that it’s inconsequential. She’s barely more than an animal, and you sacrifice those to my kind regularly.”
“She’s a person, and you’re hurting her.”
Kriminel ignored me and instead turned to Agau. Manno stood, towering over the tiny girl even in his decrepit state. “Baron. I see you’re still mounting children, like a pathetic weakling.”
Ayida’s body moved faster than any serpent I’ve ever seen. With a growl, she barreled into Manno and knocked him to the ground. Screaming, the two loa fought each other, punching and kicking and biting, abusing the human bodies they possessed.
“We have to stop them!” Sylvenie cried.
“Get more food!” I told her. She ran for the house.
I grabbed the bottle of tonic from my pack and doused the fighting loa with the liquid. They both screamed and reeled away from one another. “Stop this!” I shouted. “Agau, do you see now why I want protection for the girl? She’s too easy for the lowest of spirits to mount.”
Agau glared at me through red-rimmed eyes. “I don’t care about the girl. I don’t care about any of you!” His voice boomed, startling birds in the jungle to take flight in a flurry of wings.
Baron Kriminel laughed, a sinister sound that made me shiver. “Your gambit to save the girl has failed. But I will offer you a bargain even if he won’t.”
Sylvenie appeared with bowls of food and laid them at the feet of the two loa. They both squatted and used their hands to scoop pork and plantains into their mouths. “What bargain do you offer?” I asked breathlessly, terrified of the
answer.
“Marry me as you should have done twenty years ago.”
The world was suddenly hazy, my vision a tunnel. “What would be the terms?”
“You’d be my wife. You’d do my bidding. You’d let me mount you whenever I choose. In exchange, I’ll leave the girl alone.”
Sylvenie moved beside me and laid a gentle hand on my arm. “You can’t do this, Erzulie. To be married to Baron Kriminel would be the cruelest fate I can imagine.”
I remembered the stink of burning flesh and the piercing screams of my vision. “There are crueler fates.” I turned to Kriminel. “I’ll marry you if you’ll give the girl your protection. No loa are to mount her, ever, for the remainder of her life.”
Kriminel stood, his mouth smeared with grease. “You would make this bargain for her?”
“Not only for her.”
“NO.” Agau threw his bowl aside like a petulant toddler. “The women are mine. I will protect the girl! Not you, pathetic scum.” He advanced on Kriminel.
I called for him to stop, but it was too late. This time Agau wasn’t interested in a brawl. He laid his hands on Ayida’s shoulders. His mouth opened and the sound that emerged was thunder, but louder than any thunder I’d ever heard, so loud it shook the ground. Ayida struggled for a moment, and then her eyes grew wide and her body went limp.
Agau gently laid her on the ground. “Baron Kriminel is no match for the god of thunder.”
I hurried to Ayida and laid my hand on her chest to be sure she was still breathing. When her ribcage rose and fell I let out a laugh that was half relief and half disbelief. “Thank you,” I breathed to Agau, hardly believing I’d so narrowly missed such a terrible future. Ayida was safe; we were all safe.
“Don’t thank me yet,” Agau replied. Manno’s arms opened and he smiled lasciviously.
Sylvenie and I went to him without hesitation.
In the morning, Sylvenie and I awoke in Manno’s arms. His mouth was curved in a beatific smile, but his body was stiff and cold. I covered Manno’s still form with the blanket, my mind still hazy with memories of the night before, memories of skin and mouths and hot, wet darkness. Sylvenie smiled, though it was full of sorrow, and I couldn’t help smiling myself.
Ayida was sitting on the porch.
“Bonjou, Ayida,” I said quietly, cautiously.
“Bonjou, Erzulie Tio,” she replied, turning to look at me. Gray clouds roiled behind her eyes, dark with the promise of rain.
I breathed a sigh of relief. “Let’s go home.”
Sylvenie took my hand. “You know that it’s not over, don’t you? You’ve deceived Baron Kriminel twice now. He’ll come for you again, as soon as he has a chance.”
I nodded, squeezing Sylvenie’s fingers and reaching for Ayida’s hand. “Agau saved me this time. Next time I probably won’t be so lucky.”
“Then why do you smile, Erzulie Tio?” Ayida asked, and I noticed that her voice sounded deeper and more resonant than it had before.
“Because you are safe, Ayida, and that’s all I wanted.”
As we made our way into the jungle, hand-in-hand-in-hand, I could have sworn I heard the gods laughing.
Young Girls Are Coming to Ajo
Ken Goldman
The neon blinked erratically like a badly twitching eye.
VACANCY…VACANCY…VACANCYVACANCY . . .
Seen from the highway, the roadside motel off I-85 in Pima County did not fool anyone. It wasn’t trying to. The old Papago Indian who ran the place hadn’t bothered replacing the burned out neon of the Canyon Motel’s sign, and late night motorists new to this godforsaken section of Arizona highway made no sense of the hot pink lettering that read “Ca yo Mo el.’ But that confusion dissolved with one look at the cabins. Visited more frequently by tumbleweeds than flesh and blood customers, here romance and candle lit dinners took a back seat to the sweat and stink of the genuine article. If you wanted pretension, for a few greenbacks more there was the Carousel twenty miles up the road; if you preferred the down and dirty basics, you wanted the Canyon.
The muffler of Howard Corbin’s rental had started bitching on SR143 South thirty miles out of Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport, nothing serious enough to warrant stopping for but sufficiently aggravating to frazzle the salesman’s nerves by the time he entered the mining town of Ajo 130 miles outside Tucson. A tavern he approached called itself The Fork in the Road, its front window logo shamelessly displaying a fork - the dining utensil variety - lying on the dividing line of a highway. What the place lacked in charm it made up for in ugliness, but in a town inhabited mostly by lizards a beer is still a beer.
A few cold ones helped replace some of the hot piss inside Corbin with the more conventional kind; however, to really do the trick there was only one thing. First he called home to check on Edie and the kids before heading towards the bar to search for his curative.
The bleach job perched on the last stool clearly was a working girl, judging from the black hint of skirt she wore, an obviously uncomfortable second skin meant to look like silk but that clearly wasn’t. Too dark toned to be a real blonde she probably had a good ten years on him too, but when she caught his stare he motioned to the bartender to freshen whatever the lady was drinking and ordered another cold draft for himself, reducing his introduction to the fundamentals.
“Hello. I’m Howard.”
The woman clutched her long strapped hand bag as if expecting the man to lunge for it, but Corbin flashed his choicest balls out smile at her. Normally he would have added his surname, incorporating into his howdy-do the obligatory “…of Reinhardt & Reed Realtors, serving regions of the American Southwest.” But that was not the business transaction Howard had in mind.
The woman thanked him for her white wine spritzer barely looking up from her glass. She appeared reasonably sober and that was good if she were game for a toss. At least she wouldn’t be passing out later. When she spoke again she almost managed to smile.
“Lilly. Let me guess. Salesman from out of town, right?”
“Seattle,” he said.
“Like that dead race horse?”
Bar talk. Wise-assed and meaningless. It always went the same.
“Well, welcome to Ajo, Mr. Howard-from-Seattle. It’s where summer meets the winter.” She smiled coyly.
“And what does that mean?”
“I haven’t a clue. But it’s on all the signs here.”
“And Ajo…does that mean anything?”
She grinned, seeming proud of her reservoir of knowledge. “Ajo comes from the Indian word au-auho…it means red paint. The Sonoran desert is covered in red sand and the Papago tribe were great believers in cosmetics, wore lots of paint or something like that. Their Indian reservation still has a few residents just down the road.”
“Tell them we’re not giving them back Manhattan.”
Her grin spread. “Those were the Canarsie Indians.”
He had coaxed a smile from her which meant he was home free even if this wasn’t sparkling repartee. Once you passed your twenties conversation from a bar stool rarely entered that territory; into your thirties you just tried not to sound pathetic.
He could tell the woman had been pretty once, maybe she had even bordered on beautiful. But the downslide had definitely begun and the gild was off this Lilly. Still, it was a seller’s market tonight, and he was buying. They were two strangers sharing a patchquilt of irrelevant loungespeak that always precedes an excursion to a woman’s underwear. Corbin had learned from years on the road to treat any barfly like a lady during the preludes. A woman seated alone on a tavern stool often had some pieces missing, so you had to prepare for anything if you were going to get into her pants.
#
When conversation turned thin Howard mentioned hosting Mr. Jack Daniels inside the trunk of his car, and the woman did not play dumb about his intentions. Moments later Lilly sat cross-legged next to him inside the Escort directing him to the first motel she saw alongside the dusty
Sonoran desert highway. She murmured only “Here” and Howard dutifully pulled in.
Ca yo Mo el
[Blink . . .]
Ca yo Mo el
[Blink . . .]
Corbin hoped a nest of roaches would not come crawling from the bed linen, or worse, from his companion. Three other cars, each old and dirty, had parked outside the cabins, and that did not constitute much of an endorsement. Inside the small office the dried out Indian on the swivel behind the desk sat close to a small revolving fan that sent his long wisps of hair dancing. Mopping sweat from his silver crowned pate he never got out of his chair. “One Night?” the old guy asked, pivoting toward the Escort parked in the lot outside. He must have noticed the woman sitting in the front seat but he gave no indication except to give his balls a healthy scratch.
Corbin nodded, deciding as he signed the register that his last name was now Smyth. He could have just as easily told him he would be staying for however long a good fucking took, for all the old fart cared. He looked at the Indian’s name tag.
“Tuakam, is it?” he asked. “Did I say that right?”
“Tuck, they call me here. There’s two of you?”
That covered the small talk.
“Yes.”
“Number three’s vacant, third cabin on the left. Close to the ice machine if you need it. Cash or credit?”
“Cash. Thanks.”
Old Chief Plays-with-His-Nuts did not give a steaming turd about the nocturnal activities of the clientele he registered, and procuring forty dollars up front concluded his portion of their transaction. The Indian reached up to yank a key from among several rows of them, returning his attention to the small black and white television that featured a pasty Mary Tyler Moore in an episode filmed years before lovely Mary had hit the wall.
Howard returned to the Escort. “The Indian who runs this place looks like he could use a good delousing.”
“The Tohono O’odham Nation has a reservation nearby at Gila Bend. They’re what’s left of the Papago. They take the shit jobs around here because they work cheap. Indians manage a lot of the motels along here.”
Howard nodded as if he cared and drove the Escort to number three, popping the car’s trunk for his night bag and heading for the ice machine. At the cabin’s door he jumbled the key before the lock finally gave. Some former guest had given the ratty carpet a good soaking in piss and the acrid odor assaulted him the moment they entered, but Howard doubted the other cabins smelled any better. He flipped the light switch and nothing happened. Corbin found his way to the night stand and tried the lamp there. It worked although the bulb’s wattage was low, bathing one wall a sickly yellow while leaving the rest in shadows. He turned on the air conditioner, a cheap and rusted window unit that immediately banged and rattled.
