But this man sees him.
Andrew walks backward, out of the picture window’s frame—the boy seems to track him as he moves, and he waits by the fireplace before continuing to the second picture window. By the time he gets there the boy is gone. Utterly gone. Had he even been there? He licks his lips and looks at the space on the mantel where his best scotch used to sit before he emptied the house of booze.
Wish a bottle there you have a spell for that six sentences and a pinprick and a bottle will sprout where the blood drop falls.
He shakes that away and goes back to the left-hand window, peering into the woods where he saw Pac-Man boy, using a hunter’s patient eyes, and he sees no movement, no line of shoulder or haunch breaking the bloom of foliage. But now he wants a drink, and he wants it bad.
One remedy works better than any other for chasing that particular noise out of his head.
The room of skins.
• • •
He goes to the raw oak door and closes his eyes, remembering his first hunt, remembering the sliver of raw stag heart his uncle had offered him off the knife.
This door will open for you only if you have eaten the heart of something killed with your own hand.
He slides the brass handle into his palm and turns, feeling the door open easily on its hinge. This is a small room, its walls hung with stags’ heads and hide maps and an antique wardrobe on either side. One window gives on a sort of brambled alley leading down the hill toward the forest path, and he goes to open this.
I’ll kill two birds at once here; I’ll have a boozeless run in the brambles and see if I can find the Jesus-looking boy.
Should I go scary or fast?
Does the boy have a gun?
It didn’t seem so.
What if he’s watching me change?
Fuck him, then. Let him watch. Maybe he’ll shit himself.
Andrew opens the window as slowly and quietly as he can; it is always best to open the window first, while one still has thumbs.
He opens the left wardrobe now, its door cutting off his view of the window, and he regards the selection of furs hanging from their iron hooks. Fox. Wolf. Bear. Stag. Bobcat. All the indigenous beasts, safest to run in these woods. The right-hand wardrobe holds more exotic skins, skins for special occasions.
No, he will run a New York beast today.
He runs his hand on the black bear pelt.
He killed this bear with an Osage orange longbow and a flint arrowhead made by a master fletcher in Pennsylvania.
He has named the bear Norris.
Norris will do.
Now he sticks his thumb in his navel and pushes, saying in old French, “I open myself.” He imagines his thumb slipping bloodlessly under his skin, and so it does. It doesn’t precisely hurt, but the feeling is deeply creepy. He works the thumb under and skins himself. He hangs his skin from the one bare hook in the wardrobe. He has to be quick now—one can’t just hang out skinless—so he takes up the black bear skin and puts it over his flayed shoulders, feeling it grab him, feeling it wrap all of him so his legs are bear legs and his cock a bear’s cock and his snout smells berries and sap and he chuffs his bearness and climbs comically out the window.
Let’s see how Pac-Man shirt likes this.
• • •
Picking up the boy’s scent is easy with the bear’s nose; the smell is tangy and human and strong, innocent of soap. He dips his head and trundles into the underbrush, his shiny black bear-shoulders working as he tracks. Not far from the house, near the strawberry patch he has to put off foraging from by sheer force of man-will over bear-will, he smells out a pile of shit. Human shit in the woods doesn’t seem odd to the bear, but Andrew-in-the-bear is mildly offended that somebody would not only come slinking and spying near his actual house, but would have the territorial nerve to leave droppings.
Odd droppings for a man, too.
This boy clearly eats fast food like many boys, cheap mash of discarded, hormone-bloated cow full of preservatives and despair, but he doesn’t chew much before he swallows. He also eats beetles. He had fingered cicada larvae out of the ground. He had eaten earthworms raw and had cooked beetles in squirrel fat, and had gorged on squirrel and even fine squirrel-bones.
Very fast, or a good trapper.
Or a good shot.
But I smell no gun, or gun oil.
A man can kill a bear without metal.
You did.
This is more boy than man.
The boy has also eaten strawberries.
My strawberries!
Oh, this will not do, not by half.
He snuffs and makes his way around to where the boy had been crouched in the woods, looking at the picture window. Tracks and scent loop back into the woods, so he follows, and soon finds himself looking back at the window leading to the room of skins.
The boy is halfway between the tree line and the open window, contemplating a dash for it. He not only sees the house, he is about to go in!
Fuck this!
Andrew-in-the-bear chuffs and lopes at the boy, who turns and looks passively at the bear. It would be fair to say the boy looks curious, but he does not give off the satisfying rush of fear-smell Andrew-in-the-bear hoped for.
The bear four-legs up to the boy, then stands.
Only a little taller on his hind legs—Norris had not been a huge bear—but still lethal.
He breathes his hot bear-breath into the boy’s face, but the boy just blinks at him.
Why doesn’t he run?
He pushes the boy’s chest with his forepaws, not hard, but more than gently. The boy staggers back, but still makes no meaningful move to retreat.
Okay, you want it rougher? I can do rougher.
Now he grabs the boy’s pants with his jaws, slipping his fangs surgically under the waistband, and he throws the boy back, half tearing the jeans. The boy falls but gets to his feet again. Beginning to walk away, but not frightened.
Faster, you little shit.
Now the bear swipes at him, curling his claws back so he doesn’t lay him open, but heavily enough to send him sprawling.
To Andrew’s surprise, Pac-Man shirt doesn’t stand up this time, but breaks and runs on all fours. The bear shuffles after him on two legs, Andrew-in-the-bear dimly aware of the irony.
Just before the feral young man makes the tree line, he stands again and gives the bear one more longish look. A look of assessment, calculation.
Calculate this.
The bear charges, and the boy sprints away.
Who was that boy?
No, really, who the fuck was he?
The bear lumbers back toward the house, checking over his shoulder and sniffing the air once or twice to make sure the interloper is really gone.
Then he waddles over to the strawberry patch and eats himself almost sick.
Too dominated by bear-hunger to notice or care that the berries are frozen.
45
This is what Andrew does at the AA meeting.
He greets Bob, the chair, on his way in, remarking once again on how happy Bob is. How goddamned, unassailably happy. The man went to jail four times for DUI and involuntary manslaughter, got evicted, lost two marriages, a boat, and a career as a charter captain; now he works at a church resale shop, hasn’t got a pot to piss in, and yet . . .
“Andrew! Haven’t seen you in a week or two. We missed you!”
“I must have felt you missing me, Bob. Here I am.”
Bob hugs him like Andrew’s his little brother, nothing fake about it.
Unlike when his own brother hugs him, though that hasn’t happened for a while.
Maybe fifteen years since Charles gave Andrew something other than a perfunctory manshake.
Bob has fifteen years sober, a bona fide elder statesman.
Bob’s nothing like Charley.
Bob went for donkey-and-sandals Jesus, knows Charley’s BMW Jesus is something else.
Bob’s eyes twinkle like he figured out God’s his secret Santa and he knows you’ll figure out he’s yours, too, in your own sweet time. Early on, Andrew swung between feeling inspired by Bob and really resenting him; where does a beat-up old fellow who isn’t much to look at, can’t do magic, can’t afford a restaurant meal, and hasn’t gotten laid since the Berlin Wall fell get off just glowing like that? It’s a little like being luminous, only Bob will never learn magic out of a book and make things happen in the world. All the magic happens in Bob’s head—he stopped trying to change the world and just changed how he looks at it.
It’s genius, really, if you can manage it.
Why make a big house for yourself when you’re happy in a shack?
Why lust for a new car when your crank-handle windows work fine and Chancho fixes your rusted-out old beater at cost?
You could shit in Bob’s shirt pocket and he would run to spread it on his blueberry patch.
Between her introduction to the hostile side of magic and the coming death of her father, Anneke needs Bob.
With the ancient Russian crone who captured and tortured Andrew twenty-nine years before now stalking him, the magus needs Bob, too.
Bob doesn’t know exactly what’s wrong in their lives, they don’t share tonight, but he’s glad they came. He reads from the Big Book, and then he talks about forgiveness.
Andrew has trouble staying on message.
He’s not thinking about forgiveness.
He’s thinking about self-defense.
He’s thinking about revenge.
46
New Orleans in June is a sort of bright, dangerous sauna whose steam seems to come from the crotches and armpits of its citizens; its nucleus is a tangle of colonial streets where tourists tread on bones; they drink liquors distilled from the sweat of dead West Africans, the grandchildren of whom have been pushed to low ground to await their centennial drowning, but some of these don’t wait quietly. It is easy to get shot here, or stabbed, or clubbed toothless, even in the bright places that smell of rum and fruit juice, even as rotten cops look down at you from the saddles of their horses and fat Iowans and Michiganders sleep above them in overpriced hotels, dreaming of the morning’s beignets.
Haint likes this about the French Quarter; he likes walking among the entitled and the blind and feeling their condescension toward him; he is another curiosity in a city teeming with them, an intentionally scarred and branded black man with skin that looks almost indigo, his crown of graying hair horseshoeing a balding dome that bears a front-to-back row of scars he inflicted himself with a hot razor.
“I liked your letter,” Haint says to Andrew as both men sit sweating in Coops. “You write your words tight and plain and press hard with the pen, none of this loopy shit.”
“I e-mailed you,” Andrew says.
Haint enunciates each of the next words carefully, as if explaining things to a well-meaning but disappointing child.
“I am talking. About the way. I saw it in my head. I saw your e-mail as a letter.”
Haint is one of those half-mad users whose conversation must be sifted to separate delusion from actual magic. This is often difficult.
“You press hard with the pen,” he continues. “You mean what you say’s what that says, and I keep such men close to my heart.”
He wipes his ridged dome with the greasy and formless bicycle cap he carries more than wears, then takes another bite of the jambalaya he has rendered lukewarm in temperature (if not in taste) with Crystal hot sauce that pools like orangey blood around its rim.
“Will you help me?” Andrew says.
“Another thing I like ’bout you is you don’ try and act like you ain’t scared.”
Andrew nods.
“Anybody smart’s scared of that ol’ . . . her. Her, I mean. I didn’t even know she was real. Heard bad stories, figured they was stories. But if she is an actual actuality, and she is that old, she gonna make Marie Laveau look like a Girl Scout, home team pride aside and all. Yeah, I’ll help. But keep the book. I ain’t got no use for books and I don’t read English so good’s I got any hope of readin’ Russian.”
The part about not reading English is a flat lie. Haint reads like an Oxford scholar but hides his brilliance behind a hedge of ain’ts and cain’ts.
Andrew’s e-mail offered one of the treasures he brought home in 1983, a beautiful tome on invisibility written in the time of Peter the Great, a remarkably valuable book for reasons both aesthetic and practical.
But what Haint says next tells Andrew the hoodoo man already knows how to disappear and isn’t interested in acquiring something to barter with.
“I want that hand.”
“You already have a Hand of Glory. Hell, I heard you had three of them.”
“Not like that one. Mine open locks and turn lights on and off. Useful as hell, don’t get me wrong. But you know what that Russian hand does, don’t you?”
“Stops hearts.”
“Works, don’t it?”
“It works.”
“How do you know?”
“It works.”
“Prolly you knocked a squirrel out of a tree with it. Only you ain’t never tried on a person ’cause you ain’t like that. Me, I’m like that. That’s why you want me.”
Andrew nods. Of course Haint had heard of Baba’s lethal Hand of Glory; Haint is a collector of murders, a man who has gathered an arsenal of artifacts that take life. He is rumored to have a Turkish knife that, when used on a piece of lambskin the user has bled on, will cut or stab whatever the user thinks about cutting or stabbing, even across the sea, provided he has seen it and can picture it clearly. Years ago he carried a Polaroid camera around his neck in case he wanted to capture your image.
Now Steve Jobs has armed him with a smartphone.
If you are on Facebook, or if your image can be Googled, it is said this man can cut your throat no matter how far away you live from his warehouse apartment on Frenchman Street. Or Carondelet. Or wherever it is this week—it is also rumored that Haint’s apartment is actually in a black trash bag he can blow up into the window of any abandoned place, and leave with in minutes.
He received Andrew’s e-mail under the name [email protected]. Until 2000, when he finally went digital, he used to get letters through a PO box under the name Sam E. DiBaron. It was the same PO box he used to arrange killings, but never for money.
Always for things.
Never yet for anything he wanted as much as Baba Yaga’s Hand of Glory.
“Can you do it?”
“If I cain’t, you cain’t.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No. ’Cause I don’t have one. I don’t know if she can die, and if she cain’t, I don’t know if I can stay hid from her.”
“I did.”
“I know. That’s the only reason I’m thinking about trying this crazy shit. How’s your boudin?”
Andrew nods appreciatively.
“They don’t put it on the menu; never on the menu ’cause they cain’t sell enough for how fast it goes bad; just on special sometimes. Normally you don’t want restaurant boudin—what you want is gas station boudin somebody’s mama boiled up in a Crock-Pot out in Grosse Tête or Scott or Breaux Bridge, if you can stand them coon-asses out there. But it ain’t bad here. They know what they doin’ here. Dreddy white fella in the kitchen plays a mean fiddle, too. I’m goin’ to hear him tonight. You wanna come?”
“Love to. Thanks.”
Haint now swigs his beer and uses a thumb-struck stove match to relight the reeking stub of cigar he has rested on the crown of his bottle cap. At his third puff, a woman at the booth to the right issues a dainty
cough behind a dainty hand, at which the polo-shirted man with his back to them turns and throws a disapproving glance.
It was probably this fucker who stacked Jack Johnson songs on the Internet jukebox.
Haint discreetly raps the table with his knuckle and a car alarm goes off on Decatur Street outside. The man looks doorward now and excuses himself, fumbling with his keys. As he crosses the threshold, Haint deftly snaps the matchstick between two fingers with his thumb and the big man trips, foolishly trying to break his fall with his hand. His wrist snaps audibly and he issues a gagging cry. The woman gets to her feet, her distaste for cigar smoke and shirtless black men forgotten. The waitress runs to help, wiping her hands on her apron. The dreddy bearded fellow peers out the kitchen door, and a teenaged boy begins to film the incident with his phone, ignoring his mother’s admonitions. The jukebox sputters now, aborting the song it had been playing and starting up Billie Holiday’s “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.”
Haint keeps eye contact with Andrew throughout, puffing contentedly on his cigar. Mismatched earrings shine dully in the hoodoo man’s ears.
“Maybe you can.”
“Maybe I can,” the man agrees, his eyes twinkling.
47
Andrew has some time to kill before night comes down, so he walks around the Quarter. Construction everywhere, as usual; torn-up roads blocked off with orange webbing, tourists filtering by one another on what’s left of the sidewalk, stepping carefully around piles of shelving for this or that new store. On Royal Street, women in Mardi Gras feathers dance in the heat while cameras turn and film crewmen detour folks up Orleans, some of these pooling up in the margins and holding up phones to film or snap stills of the dancers.
On Dauphine, the woman who runs a perfumery is yelling at the owner of the tattoo parlor next door because the new electric purple paint job smells like paint. He nods at her briefly, then goes inside. She yells at his retreating back, is still yelling at the door when he comes back out holding a ukulele, which he plays in accompaniment to her oration, driving her volume up and making her widen her eyes with fury. Andrew is nearly jabbed in the eye by her gesticulating finger, laughs as he continues past them, has the good sense not to answer when she screams, “What’s so funny!” at his back.
The Necromancer's House Page 13
