Black Magic

by Russell James

  Andy had grown up in the south Florida heat, but even that hadn’t prepared him for his final summer in Kandahar. Each day peaked at one hundred and four degrees in the shade and there was no shade to be found. He once watched another soldier fry an egg on the hood of his M51 five-ton tractor. Sea breezes regularly cooled Citrus Glade’s summer days, but any puff of wind that crossed southern Afghanistan felt more like the rush from an open oven.

  He’d enlisted and chosen this specialty, 88-Mike, officially a Motor Transport Operator, and rationalized that it was an applicable skill in the civilian world. There weren’t many want ads for 11-Bravo Infantry on the Miami Sun-Sentinel jobs site, but long-haul truckers were always needed. At least that’s what he told everyone.

  He’d wanted to be a soldier since he was a kid, watching in awe as John Wayne tread the sands of Iwo Jima and Robert Duvall announced that “Charlie don’t surf.” But when the time came to enlist, when he sat in that office full of the real Army, knowing that he’d be deployed into combat zones in southwest Asia, he flinched. That infantryman, whose job was, as the recruiter said, “to close with and kill the enemy,” faced an opponent with the same mission statement. He could find something just a bit safer, not embarrassingly safe like computer programmer, but something with a more reasonable level of danger. Big-rig driving seemed like the ticket.

  As Specialist Andy Patterson bounced along the rutted highway his last week in country, he wished he’d had more foresight. In this war, he hadn’t picked something safer. The most common enemy they faced were hidden IEDs and Andy drove a big target. Every run from Point A to Point B, no matter how short, was a nerve-wracking experience, a constant scan for fresh-dug earth and exposed wires. Everyone he passed was a potential trigger man for a buried explosive charge.

  He felt cocooned wearing the defensive implements of war; helmet, flak vest, gloves and glasses. But all these safety items never made him feel safe. He still rode in the flimsy cab of a truck riding over a tank of diesel fuel.

  The fateful day, with a week before he rotated home, he hauled a tanker of water, as inoffensive a cargo as there could be, and one he hoped the Taliban would ignore. After all, the deliveries were to villages in the province, clean water to keep kids healthy. But he and the Taliban rarely thought alike.

  He rolled into one of the destination villages. Escort vehicles filled with infantry and topped with swivel-mounted machine guns bracketed his truck. When he stopped at the destination point, soldiers scattered to provide a perimeter.

  The arrival drew a crowd and crowds made Andy nervous. Worse, the wizened village elder was on hand to take credit for the arrival of fresh water. A local leader’s show of American support was too often a magnet for Taliban retribution.

  He rushed through the setup for the water drop, connecting the pump hose from the truck to a big rubber blivet the Army had stationed in the town. He opened the valve.

  Kids materialized, as they always did, to watch this amazing process. They played around a spray of water from the blivet coupling. A few men of dubious loyalty stood along the crowd’s edge. Andy looked down to check the flow rate and when he looked up again, the men were gone. His heart skipped a beat.

  A civilian woman dressed head to toe in a black burqa passed through the crowd like a cancer cell among the healthy bright colors. She closed on the village elder. Just her eyes showed.

  Her eyes. Andy would never forget her eyes. They positively burned, two hot black coals focused on a target, immune to distraction, looking out from deep within the evil side of being human. He stood frozen at the tail of his truck.

  The rest happened in slow motion, and each time he relived it, those replayed seconds ran like minutes. Only Andy had the angle to her actions. She reached the village elder. The children were too engrossed in the waterworks to pay her any mind. Her hand extended from beneath her future shroud. She held a black cylinder with two wires at one end, a red switch at the other. Her thumb hovered over the button.

  Soldiers shouted in deep elongated syllables. Weapons snapped as riflemen brought them to bear. The slow-motion thump of his heart pounded like a countdown clock.

  He was closest to the woman. In a few strides, he could have been on her, and wrenched her thumb from over the red harbinger of death. He could have brought the rifle slung across his back to bear and with one bullet ended her misguided mission. He could have shouted to the world that she had a bomb.

  Instead, he ducked. He whirled backward and plastered his back against the cool steel of the water tank. His calves hit the big trailer’s tires and he held his breath. The world went back to full speed.

  The sound of the explosion rolled though Andy and made his organs vibrate. The body of the suicidal woman vaporized. Nails and screws that surrounded her charge pinged against the water trailer like stones into a steel can. A wave of brown dust washed under and around the trailer, rushing by his legs like some polluted sea. Bits of bloody flesh sprinkled the ground in a hellish rain. For two eternal seconds, all was silent.

  Then came the screams. Children wailed in inconsolable pain. Parents cried in horror and rushed to retrieve their dying futures. Soldiers shouted orders and radios crackled with emergency calls. One of the infantrymen lay on the ground, right leg sheared away at the knee.

  The head of the suicide bomber lay on the ground near Andy’s feet, the headdress torn away to reveal the face of a young woman his age, jaw torn away, tongue exposed. The eyes that smoldered with hatred were now glazed and vacant. A woman the age to be caring for children somehow driven to kill them. It was all insane.

  Around the other side of the truck, small bodies lay in pieces. The village elder was a ragged torso. Blood splattered the tanker’s side. Water spewed through shrapnel punctures in the blivet’s thick rubber and the bladder slowly deflated. In the shock of it all, Andy remembered to do the strangest thing. He shut off the truck’s water valve.

  He owned this scene. He could have intervened, and these children would not be dead. He checked his hands, his feet. Undeservedly unscathed.

  But outside damage and inside damage were two different things. Andy was back in the States in a fortnight and shredded his re-enlistment papers. He wanted to get as far away from the visions of carnage and the humiliation of his cowardice as he could. He bullshitted his way through the cursory outprocessing psych evals, left everything he owned in a barracks dumpster and came home to Citrus Glade and the DPW.

  Standing amidst the newborn weeds in the DPW lot, he gave the dry-rotted tire of the dump truck a kick with his toe. When the town had been more of a town, the dump truck had made rounds once a week and picked up oversized items. That service disappeared years ago. The dump was strictly do-it-yourself.

  The idea of putting the big truck back to work as a fee-based service surfaced, but Andy topped the list of those who opposed it. He had no desire to climb back into a cab any higher up than the pickup truck. The thought of it make his hands shake. His excuse was that the beast had two forward gears and no reverse. Transmissions weren’t cheap. The mayor agreed.

  As he sprayed the final few feet of resurgent weeds, he noticed that the greenery pointed like an arrow across the street and to the small park around the World War I memorial, which bloomed like it was springtime.

  There was something familiar about the pattern on the ground, the bend in the parking lot that crossed to the memorial. He couldn’t quite place it.

  There wasn’t time to sweat it now. Some kids had yanked a stop sign out off CR 12. He had to replace it before someone decided to exercise their newfound right-of-way and got killed.

  Chapter Thirty

  Dolly felt fresh as springtime flowers.

  She’d gotten eight solid hours of sleep last night, the first time in ages. But there was more to it than that. The world seemed to have more…clarity. Things looked sharper. Things felt sharper. She felt sharper. Her right knee didn’t hurt when she got out of bed in the morning. For whatever reason, tod
ay was going to be a great day and she was going to take advantage of every minute of it.

  She called Andy and he picked up his cell on the second ring.

  “Are you at work already?”

  “Such as it is,” Andy said. “What’s wrong?”

  Of course he would jump to such a conclusion. She rarely called him. Since she’d moved to Elysian, she had felt like a burden. She felt guilty calling him, taking him away from his glowing life to support the dying embers of her own.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” she said. “Just the opposite, in fact. How about lunch today?”

  “Let me check my schedule. I can wedge you in. Where do you want to go?”

  “Somewhere cheery,” she said. “Pick me up here at noon and don’t be late.”

  “Not one minute,” Andy said. She could hear the smile in his voice.

  She hung up and went to the day room. Walking Bear had his usual seat at the picture window. She came up behind him and placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “Good morning. What do the birds tell you today?”

  Walking Bear grabbed her fingers. His hand was rough, calloused, strong. He looked up and straight into her eyes. She could not remember the last time they had such direct, intense, unnerving eye contact. His brown eyes seemed to go on within him forever.

  “It’s all wrong,” he said. “Fall is almost here and this is all wrong.”

  Dolly’s hand started to hurt.

  “The birds are too active. Rabbits scamper and don’t rest. There is no balance.”

  Every sentence Walking Bear said got progressively louder and his grip on her hand tightened. She began to be afraid. He was a big man and if he got out of control…

  “Walking Bear, please,” she said as she tried to squirm her hand free of his.

  “Look!” he shouted. “You’ll see it if you look!”

  His voice had already carried to the nurse’s station and Nurse Coldwell had come at a run. “Walking Bear!” she yelled. “Let Dolly go!”

  Walking Bear released Dolly. He stood and turned to face Nurse Coldwell. He towered over the shorter nurse, his shoulders still powerful despite his age. His face was a confused mixture of fear and anger. “I’m sorry. But the animals… there is something wrong.”

  Strange outbursts from patients were just another part of the day at Elysian. While Walking Bear wasn’t one of the regulars, the staff’s training kicked in no matter who was involved. Two other, larger male nurses followed in Nurse Coldwell’s wake. Walking Bear’s jaw went slack, and he looked like a child who realized his last tantrum had crossed the line. He raised his hands waist high.

  “I’m okay, I’m okay.”

  The male nurses stopped on either side of him. Their eyes darted from Walking Bear to Nurse Coldwell and back, waiting for the order to restrain.

  “Why don’t we go back to your room to relax, Walking Bear,” Nurse Coldwell said. Her tone was a command, not an invitation.

  “No problem,” Walking Bear said. He left the day room, head hung, with the two male nurses in tow.

  Dolly watched the episode with distress. Walking Bear might have had a few delusions about his pseudo-Indian heritage, but in all her time at Elysian, she had never seen him agitated or even hint at becoming violent. His perception of a connection with the local wildlife’s consciousness was harmless. Walking Bear was one of the few here she could count on to have a clear head.

  Why did he have to do this on a morning when she felt so wonderful? Was there some fixed amount of mental health available at the home? When she felt great, did someone else have to feel bad? She certainly hoped not.

  Shane Hudson missed all the morning’s day room excitement. Normally, he’d have been there by now, but this morning had unfolded as anything but normal.

  Progressive nerve damage was a bitch. The affected extremities didn’t hurt or feel any different. As far as Shane could tell, his legs were as good as they had been when he played wide receiver for Citrus Glade High and when he stalked the humming factory floor at Apex Sugar. He just couldn’t move them well. His brain sent the command, but his damn legs screwed up the reception. At first it was weakness, then he needed the cane, then the goddamn chair. The quack doctor said it was just a matter of time before the dying nerves withered away completely and he would need to be lifted out of bed, unable to make the short walk to the bathroom or his chair. Then he’d be back where he started eight decades ago, laying in a bed, pissing into a diaper. Screw that.

  This morning he pulled back the covers and stared down at his legs. Atrophy had worked its evil spell on the muscles and his legs were a shadow of their former glory. He reached down to swing them over the edge of the bed and to his shock, they beat him to it. The message to move got through and the two happy volunteers slid out over the side of the bed.

  Shane stared in disbelief. The worthless sons of bitches were finally reporting for work? He reached down and felt the muscles in his calves. The flaccid little bastards had a little spring to them for once. He massaged them and felt a tingle, like when a limb wakes up from being asleep.

  He scooted off the edge of the bed and gingerly stood, putting most of his weight on his arms. His legs didn’t do the usual spastic shudder. He lifted his hands from the bed, and shifted his weight to his feet. It wasn’t the normal, panicked, temporary return to verticality, but a stable, confident stance. He stretched to his full height and gave his knees a little flex.

  Shane smiled. The old legs felt good. Not ready to kick the shit out of a lazy Apex employee good yet, but a hell of a lot better than yesterday, or even last month. Whatever brought this improvement on, he’d take more of it.

  In the privacy of his room, he paced the floor with steady steps, reacquainting himself with life from five-foot-nine point of view. With every liberating stride he relived some slight he had to endure trapped in that goddamn wheeled prison of a chair. No more of that shit.

  But when he left his room late that morning, after Walking Bear had returned to his, Shane rolled out as he had the day before, black oak cane across his lap. He wasn’t about to share the news of his rejuvenation with the inmates, or the staff of this dump. He’d nurture this cure on his own, hold the news to himself until the right moment to awaken the others to the triumphant return of Shane Hudson, and the distribution of some serious payback. With accrued interest.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  It wasn’t possible.

  Felix Arroyo held an orange in his hand that could not be. This little green ball had been shriveled and undersized the day before yesterday, the leaves around it curled inward from the lack of moisture. If someone wanted pictures to define a failed crop, his acreage was the model grove.

  But the fruit at his fingertips now was something completely different. The plump sphere had a healthy, waxy feel. The robust, dark green skin shined in the morning sunlight. The tree’s leaves opened wide, speckled with the daybreak’s dew. Felix ducked his head between the branches and drank in the tangy scent of ripening citrus. It had to be a dream.

  The three-row swath of rejuvenated trees swept across his grove west of CR 12 to the far end of his property. Two-thirds of the way down, another north/south band of brighter green trees intersected the first at a right angle. In all, a quarter of his crop looked as healthy as an Ag college demonstration plot.

  Carlina approached from between the verdant rows of trees. She carried a handful of bright wildflowers in her gloves.

  “These are from the field across the property line,” she said. “Our good fortune spreads.”

  “I don’t understand it,” Felix said. “I’m happy about it, but I don’t understand it.”

  “How can you not understand? You see the healthy trees. They form the cross.” Carlina raised her flowers to the sky. “God is the source of our gift. Our prayers are answered.”

  It was a miracle, Felix knew that. And as far as he knew, the Lord was the only source of those.

  Reverend Wright awakened
to his own religious epiphany that morning.

  Years ago, a member with extra concrete and the skills to use it had built a little fountain in front of the church. Water poured over a low precipice and into a narrow white pool. It was supposed to represent the River Jordan, home of St. John’s baptisms, praise Jesus, but lately it looked more like a soupy green gash between the concrete walkways. The pump was weak and the level of chlorine it took to keep the algae down made entering the church akin to walking through a bleach factory. Dissolved minerals had stained the waterfall an ugly rust red.

  When he arrived at the Congregation of God Church that morning, the water in the small fountain at the entrance sparkled crystal clear. Water flowed over a bone white waterfall and danced all the way to the drain at the pool’s end before its return trip. Reverend Wright had tried every remedy at Glades Hardware and nothing had restored the old fountain to its former glory. Yet somehow, overnight, it turned pristine.

  As the Reverend stood in admiration of God’s wonders, Maribel Wilson walked up beside him. She added her off-key contribution to the choir each Sunday, but her collection basket contribution more than made up for it in the Reverend’s eyes. She only came up to the Reverend’s shoulder. She wore a wide straw hat and big sunglasses, the uniform of her morning constitutional.

  “Reverend,” she said. “You cleaned the fountain.”

  “As always,” he answered, “I cannot take credit for the work of the Lord. It was that way when I arrived.”

  Maribel edged her glasses down her nose and gave the area a closer inspection. “Really? Wait, there’s something else…”

  The Lord’s bounty did not stop at the fountain’s edge. The flowers along both sides of the walkways were in full bloom. The ornamental yews sprouted bright green growth. Between the fresh water and the budding bushes, the air had the sweet smell of spring.