by Ben Fountain
She jumped him with a vengeance then, scooching up on her knees and grabbing his belt, hanging on as he backpedaled down the couch. They were laughing as she pinned him against the cushions, both of them gasping in strained little bursts.
“Whoa, Lissa.”
“Gimme somma that!” She’d freed enough of his belt to wank it around like a lasso.
“Melissa, stop. We can’t do this.”
“Give it up!” she shouted.
“Come on Melissa, stop.” His voice was soupy underneath, losing tensile strength; what man didn’t dream of being ravished this way? She had his pants open and was starting her dive when he shuddered and grabbed her hands, pulled her up short.
“Melissa,” he said steadily, without cruelty, “enough.”
“You aren’t sleeping in there tonight.” Her voice surprised her, the harpy venom in it—could she take it back?
“But I have to sleep in there.”
“Bullshit!” When she pushed she could feel the strength in his hands, how he could snap her wrists like cheesesticks if he chose.
“I made a promise—”
“Uh, hello? I seem to recall you making a few promises to me.”
“I did. And I’m not forgetting that.”
“Well it sure looks like it to me.”
There followed the worst argument of their married lives—the worst, anyway, for Melissa, who couldn’t provoke a decent angry word from him. It was like trying to punch out a roomful of shadows, her frustration climaxing with a placid kiss from Dirk and the announcement that he was going to bed.
“You aren’t sleeping in there with her!” she rowled at his back. “You aren’t!” she cried as he turned the corner. “Dammit, Dirk!”—one final shout before futility overtook her, the realization of how dumb, how utterly clueless you were to think you might control anything about your life. She went to the kitchen and banged pots and pans for a while, then took herself to bed in a wicked funk. After cutting off the lights she masturbated, scraping herself into a shallow, passionless clench which as an act of revenge was a total failure. Then she lay there dry-eyed and completely still, wondering if she could live with this.
Five years ago, at the end of her job interview, Mr. Bryan sat her down in his corner office and gave Melissa what she described forever after as “the talk.” “This is a pretty lousy business,” said her future boss, a short, cheerfully caustic man with Gucci pouches underneath his eyes and a Little Richard cloud of jet black hair. “We get rapists, murderers, drug dealers, child-molesters, just about every bad deal you can think of walks through that door, and it’s our job, it is our sworn constitutional duty, to work like hell to get these scumbags off. So. Think you can handle that?”
Melissa was not quite nineteen. She was living away from home for the first time and would have dug ditches not to go back. “Yes sir,” she said, “I think I can handle it.”
Fayetteville might not be the big city, but it offered all the excitement a small-town girl could reasonably want. In her first several years on the job she was flashed at her desk, had a knife pulled on her, watched a gang fight erupt in the reception area, and called social services on a hooker client who slapped her toddler three times in as many minutes. As an education she couldn’t have asked for more, and the strenuous sleeping around she did those first few years, that was part of the education, maybe the main part. At the time she’d felt the truest way to live was by tunneling down to the wildness at your core, though she regularly shocked herself with what she found there. Did other women feel this way? she wondered. She suspected that she had unspeakable things inside her, a black hole of lust that might suck her past the point of no return, and she took her share of hits, pushing the limits of that—plenty of men were more than happy to exploit her sexual nature. Luckily Dirk had come along just as she’d found herself at the cusp of a premature cynicism.
“So whadda we got?” Mr. Bryan asked this morning, puffy-eyed, tie dangling loose around his neck.
“You’ve got your sanity hearing at ten, the guy who shot his ex’s dog,” she called through the door to his office. “Then you’re due in Judge Hershoff’s at eleven-thirty, that’s your motion to suppress James Fenner’s kilo. Okay, phone calls.” She switched to a different pad. “You know Miss Blinn, our stripper? She called and said a hose in her car broke, she’ll bring the cash over as soon as she can but it’s not going to be today. Artis McClellan’s mother called, she said his ankle monitor’s giving him infections again. Then Roland Nash, he told me to tell you that D’Shawn Weems is a lying sack of you-know-what, and if he tells the cops what he’s been telling you then he’s going to beat D’Shawn up and stick his head down a commode.”
A sigh like dust drifted through her boss’s door.
For the next two hours Melissa answered the phone, typed letters and motions, juggled the walk-ins, and tracked down shifty witnesses. If she didn’t singlehandedly run the criminal justice system she kept her end of it from clogging up altogether, this in spite of feeling slightly homicidal this morning. Her emotions were skidding around on a sheet of ice, a big jackknifed trailerful of ire and angst careening through the traffic of a normal day. Dirk had still been asleep when she’d left for work, so their argument was technically still in play; time out! she said to herself when James called, feeling something like relief. They made small talk for a while. He called her “angel.” His voice was smooth and sweet as hot buttered rum.
“What say you and me grab some lunch today?”
She hesitated.
“It’s just lunch, babe, come on. I want to take you someplace special.”
Melissa sighed. Mainly it made her sad, what he was offering.
“I don’t think I can.”
“Don’t think you can!” he cried, still cheerful, still glib, but she could feel his anger rising. “You have to eat, don’t you?”
“Yes, but James…” She lowered her voice. “I just don’t think I should see you anymore.”
“Melissa.”
She swallowed.
“We need to talk. That’s why I’m asking you out, we need to talk about that night. Outside the bar, when we—”
“I know what we did.”
“These aren’t casual feelings I have for you. I think we had something special going on.”
“Oh James. What we had was a makeout session in a parking lot.”
“You know it was more than that. You know where it was heading, if the car alarm hadn’t gone off we’d of—”
“But it did. That’s life. And my husband’s back and I’m in a different place now.”
He sucked in a breath. “All right. All right. But I heard about you, I know some people you used to party with. They told me what a little wild-ass you were—”
Her eyes burned. Dammitdammitdammit…
“—you may be acting the good little wife now but I know what a whore you are, you cocksucking little cunt—”
She slammed down the phone and kicked back from her desk. She would not, repeat, NOT cry, but with this macho bastard stalking her and two sex-crazed goddesses swarming her husband, maybe she was allowed—or maybe she was just getting what she deserved, an evil she’d brought on Dirk and her both. Some dark, avid thing spilling out of herself. Lay DOWN that sin! the radio had howled this morning. WARNING, the sign at Calvary Baptist read today, EXPOSURE TO THE SON MAY PREVENT BURNING. Twenty thousand American soldiers had invaded Haiti, and this creature, this succubus, had singled out Dirk as the chosen one. Melissa knew there was someone she could call for help, someone she’d been aware of all along, but this was family, which usually made everything worse. She managed to stall for most of the rest of the morning, then finally plunked the phone book down on her desk. Dialing the number she considered the pause-giving fact that PSYCHICS was right next to PSYCHOLOGISTS in the Yellow Pages.
“Hello?” Her cousin Rhee picked up on the first ring. Melissa launched into an explanation of who she was, Margaret Poole�
��s youngest daughter and thus Rhee’s second cousin once removed—
“I know who you are,” Rhee interrupted, laughing—she couldn’t have been less fazed if they talked twice a day.
Melissa asked if they might meet. To discuss a small, uh, personal matter—
“How about for lunch?” Rhee suggested.
“You mean today?”
“Sure, why not?”
Melissa resisted the thought that Rhee had been expecting her call. They made plans, then Melissa asked how she would know Rhee at the restaurant. She hadn’t seen her older cousin in years, and had a fuzzy recollection at best.
“Oh,” Rhee laughed, “don’t worry about that. I’m pretty sure you’ll recognize me.”
Her hair was, how to put this? If not orange, then orange-like, sort of a bonfire color. Melissa’s cousin turned out to be a short, sturdy woman in her early fifties, with a doughy though pleasant face, smooth, rosy cheeks, and Wedgewood-blue eyes that were happy, direct, and shrewd. They met at the India Palace restaurant near Bragg—Rhee’s suggestion, Melissa had never had Indian food but the duskiness of the place seemed suitably exotic. The twangy sitar music on the sound system reminded her of cats in heat.
“Oh honey,” Rhee exclaimed, clamping Melissa in an eye-popping hug, “I am so glad to see you. And just look at you! My God what a gorgeous woman you’ve grown into!” Hearing her cousin’s weirdly familiar mile-a-minute voice Melissa at once felt the undertow of family relations. She dearly loved her family, but after a couple of hours in Lumberton she always felt herself smothering under the ties that bind, all that tightly wound energy compacting on itself like a rubber band ball.
As she followed Rhee through the buffet line Melissa considered her cousin’s history, how she’d led a life of exemplary conformity until a falling kitchen light fixture knocked her cold. After that she began acting odd, the oddness consisting, so far as Melissa had gathered, of exercising, backtalking her husband, and learning to play the drums, as well as casually mentioning to family members that she could now channel signals from the other side. Eventually she left her husband and moved to Fayetteville, where to the horror of her kin she set up shop as a psychic. One of the more successful, by all accounts: word drifted back that she was much in demand among private detectives and desperate families, and that her services were not unknown to various law enforcement agencies.
Out of nervousness Melissa loaded her plate, while Rhee took only flat bread and rice. In line they talked about their hometown kin; Melissa felt herself reverting to the mumbly torpor that family always seemed to inspire, but after they’d settled themselves in a booth and unrolled their flatware, Rhee said:
“So you got out. Congratulations.”
Melissa sat up; it was like a needle in the spine.
“And you did it while you’re young,” Rhee went on cheerfully, “see how smart you are? Whereas it took me forty years and a whack on the head to realize Lumberton was going to be the death of me. Genius is wisdom plus youth, you know who said that? Me neither but I’m sure no genius, I blew half my life doing what everybody expected me to. We have to live our own lives and that’s what you’re doing, I’m just so proud of you! Now tell me about yourself.”
Melissa gave the expanded résumé version—home, marriage, work—while Rhee ate her rice and bread in dainty garden-club bites, a style imprint from her previous life. Melissa heard herself describing Dirk as “a wonderful guy”; children were covered by alluding to the thinking-about-it stage. She was conscious of Rhee listening with a level of attention that was gratifying, and at the same time unnerving. She seemed to absorb everything, but behind that sunny, dumpling-textured face you had no idea what the woman was thinking.
“It sounds like you’ve done just wonderfully for yourself,” Rhee observed when Melissa ran out of things to say.
“I’ve been lucky.”
“Yes, lucky.” Rhee’s smile was wry, and a little distant, as if an old boyfriend’s name had come up. “And I trust you’re happy, Melissa. Because that’s what I want for you.”
“Well,” Melissa gave a weak laugh, “mostly?” Rhee sat there pleasantly, patiently, like a sales clerk waiting for money; after several moments Melissa realized that her cousin wasn’t going to break the silence, so there was nothing left to do but spill it.
“You know,” the older woman remarked after Melissa had told her about Erzulie and Dirk, “it never ceases to amaze me.”
“It doesn’t?”
“And yet it happens all the time, this strange and wonderful way of the world which brings a thing and its polar opposite together. Think about it, Melissa—your husband, a white man, a southern white man and a warrior from the most powerful nation on Earth, gets connected with a black woman spirit from Haiti. The goddess of love, opposite of war. And this isn’t just any old fling, they get married. Now what could be heavier than that?” Rhee’s eyes fired a startling salvo of tears; as if overwhelmed or suddenly drowsy she slumped into the booth’s high back, her features flattening into a moonlike mask that Melissa found oddly compelling. After a moment Rhee surfaced with a shake of the head.
“Okay. So how do you feel about this?”
“Well, I think it’s starting to make me crazy.”
Rhee nodded as if this was the sanest response imaginable. “How’s Dirk been treating you since he got back?”
Melissa gazed across the restaurant, suddenly miserable. “It’s never been better,” she said, clearing a sob from her throat.
“But you’re resisting.”
“I guess I am.”
“Why are you resisting?”
There was a precision to Rhee’s voice, a tone of vigorous self-respect, that obliged Melissa to focus her thoughts. To decide what was real in her life, perhaps. “Well, there was a guy. While Dirk was gone.” She told her cousin about James.
“So do you care for this man?”
“Not anymore. Not ever, really.”
“But you were attracted to him. Sexually.”
“Well, yeah. I guess I was.”
“Do you think that’s strange?”
“I think it’s wrong.”
“Did you think you were going to go your whole married life without wanting to sleep with someone else?”
“I don’t know. I guess I never really thought about it.”
Rhee studied her. “Have you told Dirk?”
“No, no, God no, never.” Melissa paused. “Do you think I should?”
Rhee shrugged. “Dirk’s not having an earthly affair, you know that. Not in the sense he’s stepping out with another woman.”
“No.”
“And it doesn’t sound like he’s trying to hide anything.”
“God no. He wants me to know everything. It’s just…” She concentrated. “It scares me,” she went on, wondering if fear was what it took to make something real. “I don’t know what I’m dealing with, what he’s brought into the house—whether he’s messing around with something evil, satanic. Does that make any sense?”
Rhee’s face took on a neutral thoughtfulness, every feature except her smile, which revealed nothing. “Well, based on what you’ve told me, this Erzulie sounds like a lot of different things. Kind of a slut, a sexpot who’s also a saint, sort of a gorgeous Virgin mother—Lord, no wonder he’s got a thing for her. But is she evil?” Rhee seemed to double back on herself. “I might need a couple of days to think about this. In the meantime”—she’d caught Melissa’s panicked look—“I want you to take it slow. Be nice to Dirk, let him be nice to you. I bet he’s dealing with a lot, coming home from a place like that. Try to see it his way as much as you can.”
“All right. But what about James?”
“What about him?”
“What if he keeps coming at me?”
“Oh Melissa, that’s easy. Just call the cops.”
Was there a homegrown voodoo right under her nose, a french-fried North Carolina version she’d been missing all this tim
e? It seemed possible as she made her daily commute, staring out from her car past the orderly fields toward the brooding wall of trees in the distance, that deckle-edged veil of luminous green standing in for the less penetrable jungles of the mind. There was voodoo in Haiti, why not here? With a little prodding Dirk described the ceremonies for her, which sounded chaotic but happy, like swimming in a heavy surf. Melissa tried to picture her very Caucasian spouse dancing in the midst of a couple of hundred Haitians.
“Didn’t you feel funny, the only white guy in the middle of all that?”
“It felt good,” he said. “I felt like I was home.” So where was the evil in all this? Evil was the mini–killing field he and his buddies discovered behind the Haitian army barracks, the twenty corpses they dug up with their trenching tools. Evil was La Normandie, the Macoute social club in Port-au-Prince with its snapshots of murder victims taped to the wall. Evil was the hovering presence of death everywhere, the cemeteries with their scores of tiny children’s graves. At night, lying in bed after love, Melissa held Dirk’s hand and listened to the stories until he drifted off to target practice. Pow- pow-pah-pow. His leave had ended a week ago and he was putting in eight-to-five at Bragg, ramping up for the next big thing. Colombia, Bosnia, the Middle East, or maybe Haiti Part II—the rumors mutated every couple of days. And when he left, what then—she dreaded that. At work she kept getting hangup calls, while on Saturday and again on Tuesday she accepted Dirk’s goodnight kiss and sent him off to sleep with his goddess. How did normal people live? She tried to remember. Meanwhile she waited for Rhee’s call as if waiting for the results of a medical test, which took more out of her than she realized; when Rhee phoned on Wednesday, Melissa felt the independence she’d nurtured all these years collapse in a sorry heap. Thank God for family.
“I’m getting some funny vibes on this,” Rhee told her. “And I was thinking it might help if I could spend a little time out at your place? I’d really like to have a look at that altar he’s fixed up.” They made arrangements for the following day: Rhee would meet Melissa at the office and they’d drive out to the trailer together, grabbing a bite to eat while they were there.
