by Joe McKinney
“You need to sleep to heal,” she said.
Every syllable she spoke brought an explosion of color in his eyes.
He didn’t so much put his head down as let it fall. “What are you...?”
“Sleep,” she said. “For now.”
***
He was awakened by the need to piss. He dreaded the prospect, remembering the pain it had been causing him over the past week, but the need was greater than the fear and he rolled over onto his hands and knees. He was still dizzy, still weak as a kitten. The young Indio girl was on her back, naked, her dark, heavy body patterned by silvery coins of moonlight that filtered into the shack through holes in the roof.
He groaned, and the girl shot bolt upright.
“You startled me,” she said.
“Sorry,” he answered.
He tried to lick his lips to moisten them, but his tongue was dry as a desert rock.
“Do you need to make pee pee?”
That made him laugh, and laughing made him cough. “Yeah, I need to make pee pee.”
She helped him to his feet and then scratched at the corners of the black tar paste on his groin until it started to give. Then she peeled it away.
“I take you,” she said, and slid her strong body under his arm.
She held him up that way as he did his business into the dirt behind their shack, and then led him back inside. She laid him down on the sheet again, her hand behind his head to guide it down onto the floor, and then, as he struggled to remain conscious, she reapplied the black, tar-like goo to his groin.
He passed out again before she was finished.
***
When he awoke there was a shaft of early morning sunlight lancing through an open window. Dust moved sluggishly in the air. He sat up in bed and looked around and was confused to find himself alone. It was his father who was confused, and Paul realized he knew that, understood it perfectly, because he was also confused, and he was, at least for the moment, one and the same as his father, a perfect echo, feeling what he felt, seeing what he saw, knowing what he knew. That was how complete the union of the two had become.
It was also how he knew that the feeling of broken glass being pushed through his father’s urethra was gone, and how the shortness of breath was gone, and the ringing in his head from too much alcohol and hallucinogenic mushrooms was gone. The machine that was his father’s human body was, for the first time in what Paul knew to be a very long time, free and clear of pain and fog.
A rooster crowed somewhere close by. He moved his chin to the left and then to the right, really pushing it out, stretching the muscles in the neck that had grown tight from sleeping on them wrong.
He stood and worked the kinks out of his shoulders. Then he looked down at his groin and peeled away the dried black paste. Not knowing what to do with the thing once it was off, he looked around the room and finally decided to toss it into a corner where a couple of dirty Styrofoam cups and some other trash lay.
He intended to go outside and piss, for he felt now that he could do that without fear, and in one of those funny little tangents the mind sometimes makes when it should be thinking more immediate thoughts, he told himself that it was going to be a mighty big team of wild horses that dragged him into the next dirty cantina whore’s bed. That thought was all it took to get him dressed.
He walked outside, into the bright, hot sunshine, and called out Magdalena’s name. He could see now that the shack was in the midst of an enormous plain of bone white dust, the monotony of it broken only by an occasional acacia tree and a patch of hearty weeds in the sparse shade. But it was mostly bone white dust and hot wind as the plains stretched off toward the black rock mountains in the distance. The girl was nowhere to be found, and neither was her mother—that lithesome, black haired beauty who had so ably cured his burning crotch. He wanted to meet her, finally talk to her, now that his eyes could actually focus. And he wanted to know if she really knew what she had said she knew when she promised him special knowledge of the ways of the world.
But first things first, he told himself. He was of the body, and as such, subject to the needs of the body. He walked around the back of the shack where he vaguely remembered pissing the night before, or maybe the night before the night before, and unzipped his fly.
He stood there, head thrown back, eyes closed, shoulders slumped, waiting for the flow, when he heard a noise, the slowly uncoiling rattle of an aroused rattlesnake.
Cock still in hand, he looked down and saw nothing but dirt. He turned around in a clumsy circle, and saw movement in the shadow of an old metal bucket up against the back wall of the shack.
He was too late to move away, for even as he back-peddled, the snake struck, punching into the calf muscle of his left leg, its fangs cutting through the denim like it wasn’t even there and plunging into the meat beneath.
Martin screamed. Paul screamed, too.
The snake disengaged, fell away, and recoiled, its rattle going very fast. Martin fell backwards. He was clumsy because he was stiff and he was scared and now he could feel the burn of the venom coursing through his body, like somebody was trying to push a lit cigarette through his arteries.
Paul felt like he’d just run his head into a wall. His vision was all heat shimmers, the ground tilting up at wrong angles, like he was walking across the deck of a boat on rough seas.
He collapsed to his knees and there were more rattlesnakes, all around him now. They were big ones, with bodies as big around as his legs and diamond-shaped patterns on their creamy brown hides and heads the size of a slice of pie. He felt another punch into his legs and he went down on his side, screaming. Another bite caught him in the back of the thigh, still another on the shoulder, and one more in the belly. The pain was so immediate, so intense, he no longer felt fear. There was only the burning inside him.
Face down in the dust now, he turned his head toward the black hills in the distance and saw a form walking towards him. It was the woman, he knew that, though her form had changed, so that she no longer seemed the beautiful, lithesome black haired young mother with the supple midriff and the long, slender fingers. Now she was a wire-haired Indio grandmother, short, squat, heavyset, and as she stood next to his head and looked down at him, he could see the coarse black hairs on her legs.
She held a rattlesnake by the middle and knelt down next to him and said, “You are not going to die.”
“I’m bit,” he said, and groaned. He was crying. “Please help me...”
“You are not going to die,” she repeated. “Be patient.”
***
Time rolled by. It could have been a long time, or it could have been no time at all. He wouldn’t have known the difference even if there’d been a clock staring him in the face. What he did was lay there in the dust, expecting to die. He lay there until Magdalena came along and lifted him to his feet. He moved like an arthritic old man. But she took his weight on her shoulders just as she had done that first night that she took him out to urinate into the dust, and she led him on.
The old woman was sitting on the ground nearby, rocking back and forth, while her hands worked at a furious pace, twisting baling wire around sticks and twigs, assembling them into odd, lattice-like structures. She was chanting something, the words hardly distinguishable in the flood of slurred syllables.
The air smelled of burning wood, and he noticed a small brass bowl on the ground behind her, a piece of charcoal and some grass smoking there.
Martin said, “What are—” and stopped there, for at the same time he felt Magdalena squeezing his arm in warning and saw the old woman turn her face up at him. Her eyes had rolled up into her head and showed nothing but yellow streaked through with red, threadlike veins. But her chants never stopped and her hands never stopped flying over the sticks, building them into the shapes he saw all around him.
The lattices formed a semicircle. In his haze, he turned his eyes from one to the other and counted five in all. The old woman was
working on the last station of this semicircle, but in the middle, not far from where he hung on Magdalena’s arm, was an Angora goat thick with gray mohair tied to a post in the ground. Its black eyes were wide, perfectly round, and though they showed no real sense of understanding, and though the animal hardly moved, he could tell it was terrified by the short, tentative bleating it made.
The whites of the old woman’s eyes stayed on Martin as her hands finished their task. And then, without so much as a pause after the last stick was secured in place, she rose to her feet and approached him, pulling a long carving knife from her apron as she came.
“Is it true you have come here to learn the ways of the world?” the old woman said.
“Yes,” Paul heard himself say.
“You have lain with many women, no?”
“Yes,” the voice that spoke for both Martin and Paul said, though it sounded ashamed.
The old woman cleaned the blade on her apron.
“You have taken the mushrooms that grow in the shadow of the acacia trees. I could smell them in your sweat when you first came here.”
“Yes.”
“These are traps set along the way for the foolish. There is no wisdom in a woman’s crotch, no more than in the crotch of a tree. And the mushrooms are more foolish even than the woman’s crotch, for at least with a woman you have a little fun, no?” She laughed. “But the mushrooms...ah, the mushrooms. Many Americans come here to buy them.” She shook her head. Her face was the color of old leather and deeply creased, her forehead smeared with ash. Her lips were white and crusty with chapped skin. A strand of wiry gray hair fell down across the symbols on her forehead and she let it stay. “The mushrooms are a fool’s paradise. They make you sick and they make your body smell of damp wood and the doors that they open do not lead anywhere but to twisted versions of the things you already know. There is no wisdom there. Only the illusion of wisdom.”
“Where is wisdom?” Paul heard himself say.
The woman touched the tip of the knife to his chest. “If I were to cut out your heart and hold it in one hand and wisdom in the other, and told you I could only put one of the things back in, which would you have me do?”
“Wisdom,” Paul said. “I want to know everything.”
“As you wish,” the woman said.
And with that the woman turned and picked up the smoking bowl from the ground. She stuck the first two fingers of her right hand into the bowl and got them black with charcoal soot. Then she came back to him and touched his forehead with her sooty fingers and painted her symbols there.
“This marks you, Martin Henninger. emet. emet. emet. It is a symbol that will allow you entry into the mysteries you about to witness. Those who lack this mark can go no further.”
She turned away again and picked up the goat by the throat and raised it to its hind legs with one hand. The fearful grunting it made was silenced like it had been chopped off with an axe. Then, with a fast, precise overhand motion, she jammed the point of the knife into the goat’s throat and cut downwards, flaying the animal open. With two fast cuts she removed the animal’s still beating heart and held it in her hands.
She held it up before him and said, “We are merely conduits for an ancient, primitive power that is more fundamental even than our most basic notions of good and evil. In exchange for our service as conduits we are allowed to glimpse the forces that control existence. It is a hard service you now undertake. It is a terrible charge you have sworn to keep. But the reward is vast knowledge.”
She worked toward him, the still-beating heart dripping slick blood between her fingers, streaking her knuckles.
“Open for me now, and accept the symbol of your charge, for the end of man is knowledge, and part of you ends today so that another part may begin.”
And with that she stepped forward again and held the beating goat’s heart towards him. He felt something moving in his chest, and when he looked down, saw a vaginal gash opening there, its labial lips shining with his blood, quivering for the seed about to be planted there.
He watched her hand and the heart she held in her hand slip into his chest. And then the hand came out empty. The gash sealed again, leaving no trace of its presence, though he could feel the new beat echoing through his body. He tried to breathe and succeeded only in making a stuttering, coughing sound. But then the breaths did come, and when they did, he felt strong, stronger than he had ever felt before.
Half-smiling, he looked down at the old woman.
She did not return the smile.
“You have been marked,” she said.
He nodded slowly.
“Come,” she said, “we will eat, for there is so much still to learn.”
***
Paul blinked several times and then gasped. He was in his own apartment, the air hot and stale smelling. Rachel’s mountains of paperbacks were on the floor before him, and he was still sitting in the recliner.
He glanced over at the digital alarm clock on the bedside table and groaned. It was 3:18 in the afternoon, and he was exhausted.
He forced himself to stand up.
The memory, or the vision, or whatever it was still echoed in his head, but he didn’t try to interpret it. Not just yet. It was all too fresh, too violently raw, for his thoughts to make sense.
He unsnapped the keepers that held his gun belt to his pants belt, then removed the gun belt and stuffed it under his side of the bed. After that he unlaced his boots and stowed them in the corner of the room. They were filthy with dust and would have to be cleaned and polished before his next shift on Tuesday night. Then he unzipped his jersey and let it fall on the floor.
Next came his body armor, with its multitude of Velcro straps. His sweat had formed a sort of vacuum seal between the panels of his vest and his white t-shirt underneath, and when he peeled the panels away he saw black all over his shirt.
He swiped at it with his fingers, noticing only then that what he was touching was the same greasy dust he had seen pouring from under his father’s shirt in the boxcar.
“Oh shit,” he said, and started beating at his chest and stomach with both hands.
The dust fell away in clumps, and only when he got most of it off his shirt, and it lay in peppery piles on the floor next to his socks, did he realize that it had coated nearly every inch of his skin with a fine layer of grit.
Chapter 9
It was Sunday afternoon, about one o’clock, and Anderson was in the car, headed for the Medical Examiner’s Office. His cell phone rang and he fished it out of its holster on his belt and checked the caller ID. It was Margie.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hi,” she whispered.
He caught the tone of her voice and figured she was still at Jenny Cantrell’s house. She’d been there since nine that morning.
He pulled off the road and into a KFC parking lot.
“How is she?”
“It’s hard,” she said. “There have been so many phone calls. I wish people wouldn’t call like they do. I know they’re just trying to help, but it makes it so hard. The phone just won’t stop.”
“Maybe you ought to take it off the hook,” he said.
“Yeah, maybe,” she said. “Her mother called this morning. She’s coming down tonight around six. I’m gonna stay here with her until then at least.”
“Okay. I’m gonna be later than that, I’m pretty sure.”
“Yeah,” Margie said. “Listen, that’s what I was calling about.”
“Oh?”
“Can you talk to Jenny for a sec? She wants to talk to you.”
Before Anderson could answer, before he could prepare himself, he heard Margie say, “Here he is, dear,” and then there was a pause as the phone went from one woman to the next and then, suddenly, Anderson found himself talking to Jenny Cantrell. He remembered how awkward he’d felt the first time he’d seen her after she heard the news of Ram’s death, holding her while her whole body shook against his, how totally inad
equate he’d felt to the task of comforting her.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hey, Jenny,” he said. “You want me to tell my wife to clear out of there?”
“No,” she said, and he heard a laugh in her voice that was not really a laugh at all, but great sadness trying to sound brave and strong to the rest of the world. “She’s been great. Can I keep her a while longer?”
“Sure,” he said. “Long as you need.”
There was silence between them for a moment, then she said, “You’re going to his autopsy today.”
It was not a question. She already knew.
“Yes,” he said.
“I was wondering...” Her voice trailed off there, but he didn’t speak up. He let her find her own thread to follow, let her get the words out at her own pace. She said, “I was wondering...his wedding ring. I want it.”
“Okay,” he said, and said it right away, without bothering to tell her that the Medical Examiner’s Office had strict rules about the dispensation of property and how things like that simply weren’t done. He said it right away because he didn’t care about those things. They didn’t seem to matter.
“Thank you,” she said.
He closed his eyes and let his chin fall to his chest.
And then Margie was back on the phone.
“It’s me,” she said.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be,” he said. One autopsy could take the better part of two hours. He had forty-six to attend. Even with multiple examiners working...
“I could be real late,” he said.
“It’s okay. I’ll either be here or at home.”
“I’ll call you.”
“Love you,” she said.
“Love you too, babe.”
***
The Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office was tucked far back into the northwest corner of the University of Texas Health Science Center’s campus. In order to get to it, he had to pass by a guard’s shack, where he was waved through with a nod and smile because they knew him there. From there he drove down a winding two-lane private road lined with neatly spaced crepe myrtles on both sides. During wet summers, the crepe myrtles were laden with pink blossoms. But it had not been a wet summer, and the trees that Anderson passed were so starved for water they almost seemed skeletal.
