by Sean Stewart
“Head?”
“Shoulder. I think I fell on it badly.” How stupid she had been, so caught up in her fantasies she hadn’t seen the two thugs waiting for her.
“I’ve got some ointment that will help that.” The apothecary ducked behind his counter.
“Why is there a golf club head sticking out of the mixing bowl?”
“It’s not a golf club, it’s a pestle. A Ping three wood pestle, to be exact. All the best witch doctors use them. Ah. Here we go.” Josh reappeared holding a small tin that had once contained chewing tobacco. He popped it open. The red paste inside smelled so strongly of turpentine and hot peppers it made Sloane’s eyes water. He moved behind her. “Right shoulder?”
“Y-yes.”
His fingers touched the strap of her dress, hesitated, and then he began to slide it gently to one side.
Sloane pulled away from him. “I’ll be fine,” she said.
His hand left her shoulder. “Yes. Okay. That’s fine. Take this home, Ms. Gardner. Have one of your servants rub it in gently and then cover it up with a nightshirt. No, on second thought, the stuff does smell,” he said. “Better wear one of the servant’s shirts. Don’t want to ruin a good nightie.”
That was a cheap shot. Hell hath no fury like an embarrassed man.
Joshua held out the tin and she took it. “The ointment will feel hot,” he said. “Your maid should be careful not to touch her eyes, and she’ll need to wash her hands afterwards.”
“Thank you.”
Joshua went behind his counter and began grinding with his mortar and pestle. They waited in awkward silence for the Gardner carriage. Damn, Sloane thought. If she were her usual self she would have handled the situation far more deftly. She would have been able to politely deflect his attentions in a way that left neither of them feeling embarrassed. As it was, the sound of the carriage wheels grinding to a stop outside was heartily welcome. “Goodbye,” she said. “And thank you again.”
Bill, the Gardners’ stable hand, was waiting outside. He helped her up into the carriage and then geed up his horses. The carriage rattled into motion, passing one ratty bungalow after another, some kept in decent shape, with little bits of garden, while others had gone completely to seed, with drought-stricken grass lying tangled around rusting car parts and salt-rotted tires. The ride home was agonizing for Sloane. Her heart was torn, one part desperate to celebrate her mother’s recovery, the other hardly daring to hope, because the disappointment would be so unbearably bitter if somehow Momus had betrayed her.
“We never noticed you’d lit out,” Bill said. He tugged his reins and turned his team onto Broadway.
“I try to be inconspicuous. Are there many guests left?”
“A couple.” Sloane didn’t like the sound of that. Surely a miraculous cure would have kept the whole gathering riveted. “Funny—” Bill paused as they clopped through a patch of moonlight. Then the canopy of live-oak limbs closed overhead. “Funny part of town for you to get to, Miss Gardner. Not so safe, I reckon.”
“We should certainly get some of the streetlights fixed,” Sloane agreed. “I’ll suggest it to Mother.”
Another silence. Bill pushed his team into a smart trot. Nobody was anxious to stay out under a full moon more than necessary. They passed the Bishop’s Palace, the great mansion where Randall Denton now lived, and entered the familiar district of Galveston’s great homes. Ail the streetlights worked here, of course. Sloane was pretty sure Joshua Cane would have remarked the difference.
“It don’t take a genius to guess what you was up to,” the driver said gently.
Sloane froze inside. “What?”
“With your mom so poorly, it ain’t hard to figure what you might be doing at a doctor’s house. But if you don’t mind some advice. Josh Cane isn’t going to help you. I got family that can’t afford a real doctor, so when my cousin come down with pneumonia, she went to Josh. He’s a stiff-necked little cuss, but he’s honest, I’ll give him that. Told her what she really needed was to break into a real doctor’s office and steal some penicillin. Probably good advice. She died two weeks later.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I guess what I’m saying is, Josh Cane does the best he can for the poor folk that can’t do any better. But he ain’t got any miracles to sell. You stick with a real doctor that went to school before the Flood and still has some of the old drugs left. That’s my advice, and Josh will tell you the same if you ask him.”
Sloane couldn’t think of anything to say.
She did her best to sit calmly in the carriage, but when they arrived home she abandoned Bill to stable the horses by himself and hurried up the walk, ignoring the pain in her shoulder. She jerked the front door open, pushed past a startled housemaid carrying a tray of desserts, and burst into the Gold Room.
Her mother was by the square piano, still sitting in her wheelchair, pretending to listen to a conversation between Randall Denton and Kyle Lanier. Randall liked to give Kyle a few glasses of wine and then get him talking because his speech decayed into the white trash patois of his childhood in a way Randall found amusing. Sloane could tell her mother wasn’t paying attention. She looked utterly drained, as if even the effort of conversation was a terrible exertion.
The room fell silent as the last few guests turned to look at Sloane, taking in her bruised face and cut cheek and the bloodstains on her beautiful lichen-colored dress. She felt her heart thudding dully in her chest. Her mother’s eyes fluttered open. “Good God, Sloane,” she murmured. “You look terrible.”
Sloane walked across the room, cheeks burning. “How are you feeling?” she whispered.
“Better than you, by the looks of it. What were you doing out? You were supposed to be here,” Jane Gardner said. “I could have used a little more help, Sloane.”
“I…I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be gone so long.” Sloane took one of her mother’s hands. It was lifeless, her bones like sticks stuffed into skin that didn’t fit right anymore. It’s too soon, she told herself. Of course it will take a while. It was childish to expect everything to be fixed in a flash. “It’s nothing important. I fell down.”
Her heart beat and beat against her ribs, hurting her.
Or maybe it just doesn’t get any better than this.
Chapter Five
THE RECLUSE
LATE that night, as Sloane lay aching in her bed and stinking of Josh’s bruise ointment, she decided she would have to beg off the next day’s work—won’t that make Mother even happier with me—and visit Odessa. Momus had lied to her. Or if he hadn’t lied, he had tricked her. Either way, Sloane had made a bargain with a god and it wasn’t working out. Odessa was the only person in Galveston you could go to with that kind of problem.
As a little girl Sloane had spent many a long, sultry day at Odessa’s place, the old gambling joint called the Balinese Room that hung over the Gulf of Mexico at the bottom of 23rd Avenue. After lunch, Odessa always made her take a nap in the hammock by her workbench, and Sloane would lie with her eyes closed, the scratchy ropes making diamonds against the skin of her back and legs, determined not to go to sleep, trying to identify every sound: the stop-and-start whirr of Odessa’s sewing machine, the heavy chop of the ceiling fan overhead, the maddening whine of a mosquito in her ear, shutters creaking and clacking, curtains fluttering.
“’Dessa, why do they call you the Recluse?” she had asked one day when she was eleven.
“Do they?” Odessa said, not looking up from her sewing. This was a kind of fib Odessa often indulged in. What Odessa called “ladylike” was often not much different from what Sloane’s mom called “lying.” It wasn’t hard to keep the rules straight, unless you were talking to both of them at once.
Odessa picked up the doll she was working on and studied it critically through her wire-rimmed bifocals. Her fingernails were very long and sharp, and they were always painted, bloodred or sea green or seashell white. Today they glimmered like mother-of-pearl. “If th
ey do call me that, I suppose it’s because I live alone and keep to myself. That’s what a recluse is, honey. A hermit. Did you get anything from Vincent Tranh?”
“Uh-huh.” Sloane dug Uncle Vince’s handkerchief out of the pocket of her shorts. It was nothing special, made from rough Galveston cotton spun on the Island, but Odessa had asked for something he kept near him. “I told him I needed it to make a doll dress. He thinks all girls play with dolls.”
“Aren’t you a good little liar.” Sloane squirmed. “Well, thank you, honey.” Galveston’s last angel considered the square of cloth for a moment, then cut out two matching tunic pieces and tacked them together.
“What are you making?”
“A shirt for my doll, doll.”
Sloane turned on her side in the hammock so she could watch Odessa work. “Randall said it was from brown recluse, like the spider. Mom calls them fiddlebacks. He said his cousin got bit by one and her whole leg turned black and the meat fell right off it so you could see the bone and she died.”
Odessa gave her a sharp look over the tops of her bifocals. “Randall Denton ought to learn to hush up.” Sloane hushed up instead. Randall was three years older than her and a complete jerk, but she didn’t want to get him in trouble with the witch.
Her godmother made a sleeveless shirt from Vincent Tranh’s handkerchief, running it through the sewing machine. Then she slipped it over the head of the doll she had been working on since Sloane had arrived. It was a thin doll, with black hair and a sallow complexion.
“Hey,” Sloane said. She squinted at the doll. “That’s Uncle Vince.” Odessa didn’t answer. “Why are you making a doll of Uncle Vince?”
“Honey, this is ’Dessa’s business.”
“You made me bring you his handkerchief. You owe me an explanation.”
“Ah, I hear your mother talking.” Odessa put the doll down on her workbench and straightened, putting her hands on the small of her back and rubbing briefly. “All right, kiddo. The thing is, Uncle Vince has begun to see the Prawn Men.”
“What?”
“He has begun to see the Prawn Men. He’s getting so he can dip a finger in the ocean and tell the next day’s weather. Find where the fish are hiding by smell. Yesterday he discovered he can drink salt water,” Odessa said disapprovingly. “The magic is beginning to seep into him.”
“How do you know that?”
“It is my job to know.”
Sloane looked at her godmother, frightened. “But those things just make him a better sailor. He can bring home more fish and shrimp; there’s more food for everybody. It’s nothing bad.”
Odessa looked at her sympathetically. “But it’s magic, doll. And we don’t let the magic in, here. That’s how Galveston survives. I don’t let it in.” She turned back to studying the doll and gave its tummy a light poke with her long, shimmering fingernail. The doll flinched.
“But you have magic! You use it all the time!”
“That’s different.”
“Why!”
“That’s my job,” Odessa repeated. Sloane could see the doll struggling weakly in Odessa’s hand. The witch stood up, ignoring it, and walked over to the shrines at the side of the room. Here, where the bandstand used to be in the swank Balinese Room restaurant, there were five votary cabinets, one for each of the Krewes: Momus, Togetherness, Thalassar, Venus, and Harlequin. She went to the Krewe of Thalassar’s blue-painted votary, decked with sand dollars and starfish and bits of fishing rope. She opened one of the cabinet doors, kissed the Vincent Tranh doll lightly on the head, and popped it inside. “When someone springs a leak, you see, it can’t easily be patched.” Odessa latched the cabinet shut. “So we let the magic take them instead.”
Faint bumping sounds came from inside the shrine.
“You’re making Uncle Vince gone to Krewes!” Sloane cried in horror.
Odessa came back to the hammock and put her hand on the side of Sloane’s face, ignoring the way the girl shrank from her. “Oh, kiddo, it’s a hard old world we live in these days.” Tears were glistening in the witch’s eyes. Sloane hated her anyway. “I’m sorry you asked about the doll, but you had to understand sooner or later. Somebody will have to do this when I’m gone, you know.”
“No!”
“No, not yet. For now the old Recluse will do it, and for a long time. Don’t you worry.” Her tone became more businesslike. “But now. I’m afraid I can’t have you telling anyone about poor Uncle Vince. Stick out your tongue, doll.”
Sloane shook her head, mute.
Odessa looked at her. Behind her bifocals, her eyes were green and unfathomable, like the sea. “Stick out your tongue, child.”
Sloane wished afterward Odessa had used a spell. She should have held out, she should have forced her godmother to witch her. But the image of a little Sloane doll filled her mind, a little brown-haired figurine locked inside the Krewe of Momus shrine, bumping and scuffling in the darkness while the Momus puppet sat on top, dangling his legs and grinning like a wicked Humpty-Dumpty with horns.
She stuck out her tongue.
“There’s a doll,” Odessa said. And she touched the tip of Sloane’s tongue with one long fingernail.
From that day on, Sloane could not say Uncle Vince’s name or talk about him in any way. Not at the wake they held for him after he disappeared that spring, and not for many years afterward.
SLOANE thought of that day as she walked toward Odessa’s house. It was hot and dry again. Drought-blasted vegetation creaked and whispered underfoot, withered grass and palm fronds and live-oak leaves dry and brittle as locust shells. At least the drought was keeping the horrible mosquitoes in check.
From Ashton Villa it was twelve blocks due south on 23rd Avenue to the Seawall and the Balinese Room pier, but it wasn’t a very nice twelve blocks. Once she got on the seaward side of Broadway, the neighborhood rapidly deteriorated. Mangy dogs snarled at her as she went by. Roosters screamed from atop junked cars. A few blocks from Joshua Cane’s apothecary shop she passed a front yard that had been fenced in with chicken wire. Five or six hens scratched in a dirt courtyard inside. Under a sign that said BEWARE OF GOD someone had nailed the carcass of a rat to a little wooden crucifix. Sloane kept her eyes downcast and hurried past.
She was grateful, as always, to leave the barrio behind and come out onto Seawall Boulevard. Salt grass had taken root in the cracked road, and sea purslane and camphor daisies that seemed to live off dew and sea spray, surviving even the drought. The pavement was littered with the shells of crabs and oysters, dropped there by seagulls to smash and spill out their tender meat. The shells crunched and scraped beneath Sloane’s feet as she crossed the road and stood for a moment, looking out at the ocean. A hazy salt light glittered over the Gulf, making her eyes smart. Rags of foam split and heaved on the sea’s back. Waves broke twenty yards out from shore, their crests boiling brown and dirty white.
She thought of Vincent Tranh, gone to Krewes; lost at sea only days after Odessa had closed his doll inside the Krewe of Thalassar votary. The doll Sloane had helped to make. That would have been only a few months after Joshua Cane’s father gambled away their house to…some Denton or other. She remembered Odessa tapping silence like a nail through her tongue. She tried to say Vince Tranh’s name out loud. Her tongue lay dead in her mouth.
The Recluse was not a good woman to cross.
Sloane turned right and walked half a block to the Balinese Room pier. In the 1930s and ’40s, the Balinese Room had been not only the swankiest nightclub in Texas, but the heart and soul of the Maceo mob empire. So completely had Sam and Rosie Maceo controlled the town that the Island was known as the Free State of Galveston, a pocket Atlantic City with palm trees, where every schoolchild ran odds sheets for Maceo bookies and the visiting sailor could find more prostitutes per capita than in Shanghai. By the time Sloane was a girl it had been sixty years since Guy Lombardo or Jimmy Dorsey had played the Balinese Room, but sometimes during her visits she could still h
ear their ghosts: glasses clinking, faint laughter, the rattle of a slot machine paying out. The smell of scotch and good Cuban cigars.
The nightclub had been built on a T-shaped pier, with a restaurant and kitchen in the stem of the T and a casino at the back, far over the ocean, where Odessa now slept. Sloane’s shoes click-clacked across Odessa’s weathered boardwalk. The Gulf swell gathered and lapsed below, foaming around the barnacle-crusted pier posts. Sloane passed the guard’s hut. Once upon a time, a sentry had been stationed there. If the cops or the Texas Rangers showed, his job was to push the buzzer that rang in the casino at the far end of the pier. There the blackjack tables and roulette wheels would fold up into the wall like ironing boards, and the wealthy mobsters and Houston high rollers would hastily sit down in front of pre-dealt hands of cribbage and old maid. No sentry stayed in the guard’s hut anymore. Now it was home to the engine block of a ’97 Lincoln Town Car with a carburetor reconfigured to run on propane. It hummed away, generating the power for Odessa’s lights and refrigerator, her electric drill and soldering iron and sewing machine.
The front door of the Balinese Room was smoked glass. Sloane stood in front of her own dim reflection; today she wore charcoal slacks, a white cotton blouse, and a simple veil worn back to keep the sun off her neck. A green anole the size of her middle finger clung to the glass door, staring at her. He puffed his throat out into an angry bag as her reflection passed under him and disappeared inside.
Early on a hot morning the Balinese Room’s red velour upholstery had the sad, dingy look that bars viewed in daylight always do. The Gulf breeze passed through Odessa’s open shutters, making the fishing nets that decorated the walls sway and slap. Messy strands of spider-silk drifted, trembling, from chair backs and table legs. Sloane could see several more anoles, one frozen in the middle of a dinner plate as he made his way across a table, another clinging motionless to the back of a chair, eyeing her balefully.
