“Call me Mama.”
Zane smiled. He took a bite of the beans and looked out at the river. The sun had set and the sky and water looked like identical cobalt mirrors reflecting each other. The police boat was gone and the only movement he could see was from a cormorant making a v-shaped wake as it prowled below the surface. He wondered if the cops had given up, or if they would resume their search in the morning. He resolved to find a newspaper as soon as it came out.
“So what you runnin from?” said Mama Ethel.
Zane felt suddenly nervous. “Who said I was running?”
“I dint say you did nothin wrong. Plenty a good cotton plants get chopped down from associatin with weeds. I can see you ain’t trouble. You just in trouble.”
Zane looked out at the river and watched the ghostly streaks of fish cruising through phosphorescence. Mama Ethel hummed a tune he guessed to be from a gospel hymn. When she finished, she picked up a hypodermic needle, but after looking at it for some time, she wrapped it in a napkin and set it aside.
Zane blurted, “Last time I talked to my mother, I told her I hated her.”
Mama Ethel leaned back and looked at Zane down the bridge of her nose. Then she nodded her head. “I sho know how it feels to be on the other end a that. But you don’t really hate her, do you?”
“No. I could never hate her. I just wish she was different. I wish she was… more like you.”
Mama Ethel’s booming laugh echoed off the bridge rafters, driving out a few pigeons. “Why in the world would you wish that on yo momma?”
“Because you don’t blame your daughter for your situation.”
Mama Ethel looked at Zane for a moment, and then she stood and said, “I know zactly what you need.” Zane watched her go up the embankment. He hoped that she would not offer him drugs because he doubted he had enough strength to resist, dirty needle or not. But she simply grabbed two blankets and a sweater from one of the crevices. She laid the blankets out on a piece of cardboard and gently smoothed them down with her large hands, and then she rolled up the sweater and placed it as a pillow. “Come on, child, let me tuck you in.”
Zane felt uncomfortable about her offer but the unwavering smile on her face made it impossible to decline. He carried the duffel bag up the embankment and set it down beside the bed, and then he lay down. Mama Ethel pulled the top blanket up to his chin and folded it in under his sides until he looked like a pastry. Then she lay next to him and ran her fingers through his hair.
“Now I lay me down to sleep,” she whispered, “I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”
Zane closed his eyes and savored the feeling of Mama Ethel’s warm, calloused hand caressing his scalp. To the world she may have been a homeless drug addict who lived under a bridge, but at that moment to Zane she was nothing less than an angel.
“If I die before I wake,” she continued, her whisper waning, “I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
Her hand stopped moving. It sat motionless on Zane’s head for a long time before the tips of her fingers started trembling. She sniveled, and then in a low murmur she said, “Goodnight, Mikaela.”
“Goodnight, Mama,” whispered Zane.
Zane slept a hard, dreamless sleep and woke to the sound of singing. “I once was lost but now am found...”
It was Mama Ethel, belting out Amazing Grace as she prepared their breakfast: two coffee cups full of stale Cheerios with water instead of milk.
“When we’ve been here ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’ve first begun.”
The morning sun, floating low in the east, had not yet been obstructed by the bridge and in the gleam Mama Ethel seemed almost ethereal. When she noticed him awake, she brought him his cereal.
“You know what, Mista Zany?” she said. “Last night I dint need no dope to sleep. First time in years. I think you brought me some hope, or sumpin like it.”
Zane smiled. “You’re a good mama, Mama.”
She sat beside him and put her cereal down. “You know, Goldilocks wasn’t Mikaela’s favorite book.”
“No? What was?”
“Billy Goats Gruff.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Well, these three goats start to cross a bridge one by one, but a big ugly troll lives under it. ‘Who’s that trampin over my bridge?’ the troll says. ‘Now I’m comin to gobble you up!’ But when that troll finally goes up, the biggest a them billy goats knocks him right smack in the water.” Mama Ethel’s chestnut eyes flushed with tears and she gazed down. “Sometimes I wonder if Mikaela thinks a me as some nasty ol troll, hidin in the darkness while life just passes over me like a long line a billy goats.”
Zane put his hand on her back. He suddenly realized that he had the ability to help her. He unzipped the duffel bag and pulled out one of the stacks of coins.
“I want you to get back on your feet and go spend some time with Mikaela,” he said. He handed her the stack. She looked at it cautiously.
“What’s this?”
“A gift. They should be worth enough to get yourself a place to live, maybe even buy your daughter a car for her next birthday.”
Sunlight glinted off the coins and Mama Ethel gasped as if she had just seen God. Her hands shook and her breaths quickened into something like hyperventilating. “Mista Zany, is these real gold?”
Zane smiled. “Have a look.”
She dug into the shrink-wrap with her long, dirty fingernails and wrestled out a coin. This was the first time Zane had seen one of them in daylight and, without the obscurity of the plastic wrap, it did not resemble a round of modern bullion as he thought it would. Instead, its edges and width were uneven, and the crude design on the front looked familiar.
“Oh my God,” said Zane, taking the coin from her.
He pulled his doubloon necklace out of his shirt and his face contorted in confusion and shock as he compared the two coins. They were identical, even down to the text around the edge: Nuestra Señora de los Dolores. How was it even possible? He ripped open the stack and held the coins in a pile in his hands. Nuestra Señora de los Dolores. Nuestra Señora de los Dolores. All of them Nuestra Señora de los Dolores.
He stood abruptly. “I have to find a telephone.”
Chapter Seventeen
Dominic was overcome with grief as he watched Mela cutting off her hair with a conch-lip knife. He wanted to grab the knife away from her. Given the somberness of the other natives, however, he thought it unwise to interrupt the ritual. Slowly, methodically, she held her hair in thick handfuls and sliced it as close to her scalp as possible, dropping each bulky strand into a woven basket, until the basket overflowed and her face looked boyish. Without her locks to cloak her, she stood there completely and unashamedly naked, until one of the women brought a girdle of moss. She seemed loathe to wear it and only upon her mother’s urging did she finally wrap it around her waist.
Mela’s mother, too, had sliced off her own hair, as did three other women whom Dominic guessed were Ona’s lesser wives. They gathered each of their baskets of hair and walked in a straight line out of the village wall with the entire tribe trailing them. A somber chant rose from the row of people. Francisco and Dominic followed.
“Why did they do that?” asked Dominic.
“Widows cut their hair,” said Francisco, “and do not remarry until it has regrown.”
Dominic stepped to the side of the line and stared at Mela walking in front. Without her gown of hair to cover her, he could run his eyes down the arc of her back and around the curvature of her hip and all the way to the nape of her knee which flexed as she walked. “And what about daughters of widows?” he said.
Francisco did not answer.
The procession ambled through the village entryway and came to a three-way fork in the trail. The path on the right, Dominic knew, led to the river, but he had not yet explored the other two. A disconcerting feeling overcame him when he saw that the trail to the
left was demarcated by two poles sticking out of the ground, each with a human skull on top. He was relieved to see the natives take the middle path.
The surrounding oak trees, with moss sagging from their twisted limbs, looked as dreary as the natives. The middle trail tapered and soon became so narrow that the ferns on either side brushed against Dominic’s legs. The air grew dim and cool. He shivered.
The procession passed a knoll of higher ground, comprised not of earth but of empty shells—clams, oysters, mussels, snails. The shells toward the bottom of the hill were bleached white by the sun, while the newer, darker ones near the top were still cloaked with beards of algae. It was the village trash heap.
As they came around a bend in the trail, Dominic heard a shrill, fanatical chanting, and as they entered a clearing, he saw that its source was an old man jumping and twirling around a small mound of dirt. Other mounds were spread throughout the clearing, but only this one bore the dark moistness of being freshly dug. The old man wore the preserved face of an actual panther over his head like a skullcap, making it look like he had four eyes and four ears, half of them feline. His long white hair stuck to his face like a spider’s nest. Most of his body was stained red with some earthen pigment, and he held an ironwood staff adorned with shells, bones and other forest trinkets that rattled when he waved it over Mela and the women.
“He is Yaba,” said Francisco, his voice gruff with disdain. “The village shaman.”
“And what is in the mound?” asked Dominic.
“For a normal funeral it would be Ona’s body, but it is too dangerous to retrieve it from the Ais, so they buried some of his possessions instead. His spear. His ceremonial headdress. And the bones of his firstborn—and only—son, who was sacrificed fifteen years ago.”
Yaba motioned toward the mound and the women came forth and spread their chopped hair over it in clumps. Before long it was impossible to determine whose hair belonged to whom, except for Mela’s. Hers stood out because of its thickness and sheen. Dominic watched tears stream from Mela’s eyes. Despite her newly unfeminine look, he ached to hold her.
Mourn for your father, he thought, while I mourn for your beauty.
With her basket now empty, Mela bowed her head and handed what looked like a cup fashioned from a conch shell to Yaba. He danced around the mound and set the shell on its highest point. “Ah ah ah aye,” he chanted. “Ah ah ah eh.” He suddenly threw down his staff and leaned back in an unnatural, contorted posture, with the back of his head touching the top of his shoulders and his arms twisted straight out behind. It looked as if his back had become his front.
His eyes, rolled back in his head, were as opaque as fish eggs, and his eyelids fluttered over them. He yammered out a rash of words that, to Dominic, sounded like gibberish. The natives gasped. A few women cried out.
“What did he say?” asked Dominic.
Francisco stared at Yaba with contempt. “Nothing. He is trying to frighten them.”
“Tell me.”
Francisco sighed. “He says the spirits warn that Ona will return from the dead, but at a terrible price.”
“What price?”
“A rain of fire. A great dragon rising out of the sea. Pestilence and mass death.” He sent a dismissive backhanded wave toward Yaba. “Pay no attention, though. Yaba is a charlatan, a soothsayer.”
Later in the afternoon, Dominic found himself sitting around the central fire with the men of the village, including Itori and Francisco who sat on either side of him, and Utina, who sat in the center with an air of detached pride on his face. The men seemed to be telling stories about Ona—Dominic heard the name repeatedly. Everything else they said was indecipherable and Francisco was too involved in the passionate conversation to translate.
Mela entered the circle carrying a large wooden bowl and a conch shell cup almost identical to the one atop Ona’s memorial. Dominic admired the gentle grace of her walk, but when a dribble of black liquid spilled out of her bowl, a wave of nausea surged through him. “Cassina,” he groaned, as if the drink itself were one of his worst enemies.
Itori looked at him and smiled. “Cassina.”
“Not for me,” said Dominic. “Never again.”
“This cassina will not make you ill,” said Francisco. “It has been prepared by the women, as it is supposed to be.”
“I do not care who prepared it. I will not drink.”
“Commander, it is an important part of learning how we live. They expect you to partake. Otherwise you will not be invited on tomorrow’s hunt.”
“So they will shun me if I do not drink their awful swill?”
“They simply want you to be of clear mind. Self-awareness and purification are the keys to being a good hunter. When you look into the black drink, they say you see yourself as God sees you, and when you drink, you are cleansed.”
“It involves God? Even more reason to decline.”
Mela kneeled in front of Utina. She dipped the cup into the bowl and held it out to him. He bowed toward her, took it, and drank. When he gave the cup back to her, he stroked her hand. Prickles of jealousy erupted inside Dominic, but when he saw the look of anger that Mela shot at Utina, he relaxed.
Next, she came to Itori, and as he drank, Dominic’s body hummed with anxiety. This was the closest he had yet come to Mela. When Itori returned the shell to her, she stood, hesitated, and then kneeled in front of Dominic and presented it to him. With her ample pink lips, obsidian eyes, and lean, willowy body, she was far more breathtaking up close, even without her long hair. She could have asked him to drink poison and he would have agreed to it. She put the shell in his hands and cast her eyes to the ground. His heartbeat hastened and he breathed her in. Her scent was strong—water lilies, pine sap, tilled earth, sweat—and her chest heaved with an anxious catlike pant. She seemed as nervous as he was.
“Look into the bowl,” said Francisco.
Dominic did not want to look away from Mela, but at Francisco’s second urging, he did. It took a moment for the ripples in the black liquid to disappear, but when they did, he simply saw himself. He appeared as dirty and disheveled as he had ever been, and the white streaks above his ears made him seem older, but it was exactly the reflection he had expected to see. He laughed inside. If this was how God saw him, then God’s eyes were no more exalted than any of the people around him.
“Drink, and look again,” said Francisco.
Dominic took a deep breath. He feared that Mela would be disappointed if he did not drink. He would have to try, and he hoped he could at least hold it down until she was out of range. Closing his eyes, he gulped the cassina. It went down with the bitterness of vinegar and left an aftertaste like rotten fruit. He felt the fluid hit his gut and his insides burned, but, to his surprise, the nausea did not come. Perhaps he was getting accustomed to it.
“Now look,” said Francisco.
Dominic sighed. When would the old man admit there were no visions to be seen in a bowl of cassina? He decided to humor him one last time. When he looked into the shell this time, however, he saw nothing—no reflection, only a black sheen. He squinted and looked closer. Still nothing. He looked up to see if the light had changed but the sun still blazed overhead, unobstructed.
“I see only blackness,” said Dominic.
“Decipher the meaning,” said Francisco.
Dominic felt dizzy. Perhaps the cassina was having some strange effect on him. Who knew what kind of herbal hallucinogens the natives might have infused into it? He gazed deeper into the black drink and it seemed as if the gloom suddenly sprouted tentacles that wrapped around the back of his head and pulled him down into a darkness unparalleled. He had the sensation of falling through something even thinner than air and the only light he could see was from the erratic flicker of the memories of his great many misdeeds and all around him in the inky void he could hear the whispers and moans of charred creatures who claimed to have once been men.
“Help me,” he whispered.
/> At once the head of a panther appeared out of the dimness and he found himself again sitting among Mela and the others. He shivered. She put her hand on his shoulder. It felt like ice. The panther, still in the black drink, stared up at him with vacant soulless eyes. Dominic jumped up and threw the shell. Cassina splashed all over Mela.
“Be calm,” said Francisco.
“Yaraha,” said a voice from behind. Dominic whipped around and came face to face with Yaba, still wearing his panther headdress. Dominic stopped shaking. Perhaps he had simply seen Yaba mirrored in the cassina. But even if that were the case, why had his own reflection been so black?
Chapter Eighteen
Zane had not used a payphone since his childhood, but he was happy to discover that at least one still existed in the world. He found it on the outside wall of a rundown gas station. As ancient to him as a medieval artifact, the payphone’s heavy, bricklike receiver glistened with human grease. When he brought it to his face, the smell of alcohol and stale breath overcame him. He inserted the money and dialed his father’s number.
Moments earlier, Mama Ethel had given him the two “quottas” he would need for the 50-cent phone call. It did not feel right to accept money from a homeless person, but she insisted, and “beside,” she said, “it ain’t nothing compared to what you given me, and I ain’t talkin bout gold.” She promised she’d have lunch ready for him when he returned. He intended to leave that night under the cover of darkness, although part of him wished he could stay with her forever.
“Just rememba two things, Mista Zany,” she said as he left. “First of all, the worm betta not find nothin pretty in the robin’s song. And don’t you dare forget that the cat’s gotta eat if he smells any meat. Go on now. Do whatcha gotta do.”
He tried to decipher her idioms as he walked but he finally decided that he should not get lost in what were probably just the ramblings of a lonely woman who had spent too much time in squalid seclusion.
The riverfront town he found above the bridge—Titusville—had certainly seen better days. Like other communities populated by Space Center employees, this one had sprouted up out of nowhere in the fifties, but now, after the end of the Shuttle program, Titusville was a tired old man wearing the same clothes he did as a teenager.
The Sound of Many Waters Page 12
