by Bryan Camp
The zombie snatched the door open but paused in his flight to look at Jude. His eyes were dark pools above the shimmer of his spectacles. “Y’know, the difference between a bokor and a priest ain’t just the kind of magic you do. It’s who you are. That darkness you got? That shit come from the heart.” Then he closed the door and was gone.
Jude waited until he was sure the musician was gone before he wiped the salt from his palm. Part of him wished Leon had called his bluff, so his old friend would know he hadn’t made something as nasty as zombie powder. He’d never messed with that kind of magic, that bokor shit, the necromancy. That hadn’t been the kind of magician, the kind of man he was.
The question was, what was he now?
Chapter Seven
When she picked him up at his apartment late the next morning, Regal didn’t look as rough as Jude expected. He wasn’t sure if she’d sweated it all out the night before or if she was still riding the buzz of booze and magic, but he avoided her eyes on the short ride to the Quarter just the same. It only took about ten minutes of wandering the quiet streets to find Celeste Dorcet’s place on Rampart, but when they did, it didn’t look like much. The sign swinging in the breeze advertised it as MAMA CELESTINE’S VOUDOU SHOPPE, the words painted in a childish scrawl of garish acrylic. Regal peered through the hazy, dirt-crusted window and made an incredulous noise. The inside was like every other voodoo-themed tourist trap, votive candles and copies of The Serpent and the Rainbow shelved next to herbal remedies and glass pipes colored with tie-dyed neon swirls.
“You sure about this?” she asked Jude. “You might score a dime bag here, but that’s the closest you’ll get to any real magic.”
Jude—who had gone to watch Tommy’s band after leaving the Maple Leaf and was thus still a little hungover—didn’t bother to reassure her, just scuffed the toe of his shoe against the sidewalk to direct Regal’s attention to the chalk drawing there: two wide V’s intersecting in a diamond shape, the inside thatched like a stylized leaf, the outside surrounded by asterisks. To most people, it would look like nothing special, an abandoned game of hopscotch or the incomprehensible marks of a civil engineer signaling the location of a gas main or a sewer line. “This is the veve for Ayizan,” he said.
Regal cursed. “Can’t believe I missed that,” she said. Veve were sacred symbols unique to each loa, signatures and conjuring charms and passwords all rolled into one. Ayizan was the loa of the marketplace and the patroness of mambas.
The bell above the door jingled as Jude walked in, though he doubted the girl at the counter heard it. She seemed focused on the magazine in front of her, white wires trailing down from her ears and disappearing into her pocket. She had a whole goth look going, T-shirt torn at the collar and sleeves, lipstick a dark stain. Her dreads were tied back with a black handkerchief. Piercings dotted her nose, her eyebrow, her lip. Her head bobbed in time with the music, and when she opened her mouth, to Jude’s surprise, she didn’t let out a death metal screech. “I’m mad about you, baby,” she sang, her voice all rhythm and blues.
Jude walked up to the counter where tea pouch labels promised everything from sexual potency to spiritual enlightenment. The girl looked up, her eyes wide with surprise, like she wasn’t expecting customers. She pulled the buds from her ears and, sure enough, the music coming from them was soft and easy. “Help you?” she asked.
She was pretty enough and—though still fairly young—old enough that before-the-storm Jude would have made a pass at her, said something about how she probably drove all the boys mad. “What’s that you’re listening to?” he asked instead.
She bit her lower lip, a flush creeping across her brown skin. “‘Wear Your Black Dress,’” she said. “It’s by this guy, Willie Egan? I got it ’cause the album’s called The Devil Is a Busy Man and, y’know.” She shrugged and waved her hand around the room, as if that explained her choice. “Wasn’t what I expected, but I’m totally in love with it now.”
Jude nodded. His mother loved that kind of music, too. It wasn’t impossible that he had the same record among his mother’s things, back in the house he’d lived in before the storm.
“You guys need something?” the girl asked.
“We’re looking for Celeste,” Regal said. Something in her tone told Jude she was looking to play bad cop.
Her brow furrowed. “Who? You mean Miss Celestine?” She glanced over her bare shoulder, looking at the beaded curtain that led into the back. “She, uh, she ain’t in today.”
Jude caught the hesitation, heard the lie in her voice. “Look,” he said, before Regal could get started. “We’re not here to hassle anybody, okay? We just have some questions. Tell her Leon Carter sent us.”
A voice came from the darkness behind the thick glass beads, rolling and imperious like storm clouds on the horizon. “Sweetwater ain’t sent you here, no,” she said. “He called to warn me you was coming, though.”
A hand split the curtain, rings on every well-manicured finger, thick bangles clattering on the wrist. Celeste Dorcet followed. She wore a loose, flowing gown of thin yellow fabric, an embroidered shawl across her arms and shoulders. Everything about her seemed different than Jude remembered, the sound of her voice, the expression on her face, her posture, the tilt of her head. But then, everything about her was different. Jude had met Legba in Dodge’s card room, not this woman.
The girl behind the counter looked from Jude to Celeste, eyes wide and darting. “Miss, I mean, Mama, I’m sorry. I tried to, I—”
Celeste turned to her, a warm smile plumping her already-round cheeks. “They ain’t no concern of yours, child, don’t you worry. You just mind the store, hear?” She looked back to Jude and Regal, frowning as if she didn’t like what she saw. “He said to expect a tall creole drink of trouble. He ain’t said nothin’ ’bout no white girl look like she got a mind to chew a mouthful of halfpenny nails. Ain’t room back here for three.”
Jude exchanged a glance with Regal, who made a curt nod that said, Fuck it, go on then.
Celeste raised her arm, opening the hole in the strings of beads wider. “Well, young man, you comin’ in or you gonna make an old woman beg?”
Beyond the beaded curtain, a short hallway led into a small, dimly lit space, decorated more like a suburban living room than the lair of a voodoo queen. Thick carpet covered the floor; a lumpy, threadbare sofa stretched along one wall. The only other seat in the room—a wicker-framed futon with a thick green cushion—creaked and snapped as Celeste lowered herself into it. A ceiling fan cut lazy circles overhead, most of its lights burnt out, which made the walls feel close, subterranean. A vanilla candle burned on a table in the corner, the kind that always smelled to Jude like fresh-baked yellow cake. An ancient behemoth of a television huddled in the other corner, tin-foil-patched rabbit ears on top of it. Celeste had the news on, the sound turned low. She reached over and clicked the knob, the picture squeezing down to a flickering point before vanishing. Faintly, from the front room, Jude could hear the girl making small talk with Regal.
Jude eased himself down onto the sofa, sure that wherever he sat, a spring waited to jab at him. The voodoo priestess picked up a sweating glass of iced tea from the top of the television, drinking from it in large, thirsty gulps. “So,” she said, gesturing at him with the glass. “Why don’t you say your piece so you can be on your way.”
Jude considered asking for a drink, but something in her dark, glittering eyes said she wasn’t in a hospitable mood, so he skipped the foreplay. “I need to know what you remember from the other night when Legba rode you.”
One of her eyebrows, trimmed and plucked within an inch of its life, rose in an imperious arch. “What makes you think I’m gonna tell you a damn thing about that?”
The one thing Jude had found that all practitioners of magic had in common was a reluctance to share anything with those who weren’t initiated into their little slice of the magical community. To a mamba like Celeste, a bokor like Jude was about the la
st person in the world she would willingly discuss the mysteries of her faith with. The trick, he’d learned, wasn’t to pretend like you belonged. It was to show that you knew you didn’t belong, and that you didn’t care.
Jude grinned. “What makes you think I’m leaving without getting what I came for?”
She made a derisive noise halfway between a laugh and clearing her throat before taking one last drink from her tea, smacking her lips as she set it down. The gesture seemed false, somehow, part of an elaborate act. “This don’t quite sit right,” she said. “And I tell you right now, I don’t care for you none, neither. But I’ll tell you what I know to keep your shadow from off my doorstep.” She gathered her dress in one hand, drawing her legs up beneath her. She gripped the fabric so tight that her knuckles whitened. Jude looked up from her fist to her tight jaw, her glaring eyes.
It wasn’t anger making her combative, Jude realized, but fear. Was she afraid of what the loa would do to her for telling him things he ought not know? Or was she afraid of him?
“What I can tell you ain’t much,” she said. “Ain’t exactly like you got a clear head when the loa ride you. What you remember is less than the whispers of a dream. All I know from the other night is one minute I’m asking Papa Legba’s leave to talk to the spirits, next thing I know it’s morning and my mouth tastes like . . .” She made a face. “Legba always rode my husband, Damballah protect us. He liked the pipe Legba smokes, him.”
“So if I needed to speak to Legba, you could make—”
Celeste was already shaking her head. “No, no. Don’t work like that. Papa come when he come, not when you want. You got a need, you ask; you don’t tell nothin’.”
Jude clenched his jaw. “I’m not known for my patience, Ms. Dorcet.”
“Hold your water,” she said. “I’m getting to it. This about that card game, right?”
Card game? A frisson of suspicion ran up the back of Jude’s neck. “Thought you said you didn’t remember anything.”
“I said it was like a dream, though a nightmare is closer to the truth. I ain’t like to forget that room this side of the grave.” She gave him a look, a tightening of the lips and a tilt of the head that said that he was one of the things she remembered. “Point is, the next day when I woke up, head full of rum and smoke and bad dreams, I had one thought real clear, in Papa Legba’s voice, not mine. It said I had to be ready, because he was gonna need a horse to ride again in a couple, three days.”
“Again? For what?”
She shook her head. “Like he would say. Some funeral, I ’spect.”
“Why do you say that?”
“’Cause that’s his place. The crossroads between this world and the next. That’s why we call on him first of all the loa, so he can open the way. And when you go to your grave? You best hope Papa Legba there to show you the way home.”
Out on the sidewalk, Regal had her phone up to her ear, listening and nodding and frowning. She mouthed “Mourning,” and then pantomimed a hangman’s noose drawing tight, eyes squeezed shut and her tongue lolling out. Jude stifled a laugh and looked up and down Rampart Street, realizing he had no idea where they should go next. It was an alien, unsettling feeling for him. His whole life he’d followed his gift at times like this. The results might have been cryptic—once he’d been drawn to fire hydrants, another time to a certain vintage of wine—but once he understood what his gift was trying to tell him, it had always led him the right way. Living without it made even familiar sights uncertain, a bad dream of his childhood home where the rooms were all out of place, a compass needle forever spinning with no true North.
Regal slid her phone into her back pocket and made a dramatic sigh. “Hope you got some good news,” she said, “’cause His Mourningness is getting impatient.”
“She told me where we can find Legba.”
“Fuckin’ A. Where’s that?”
“Dodge’s funeral.”
Regal pulled in a deep breath and puffed out her cheeks when she blew it out. “Well, that sounds like a whole barrel of fucked up. Good luck with that.” She waved off Jude’s questioning eyebrow. “I know, I know. Not my idea. Mourning’s got me chasing down another lead. Something about the Egyptian god.”
“You don’t need help with that?”
She waved him off. “Don’t worry about me. I can be invisible when I want to be.” She yawned, then, abrupt and intense, the kind that looked like it hurt a little. “Jesus, but first I’m going to crash for a while. Unless you’ve got something in that bag that’ll keep me awake for a few days.”
“I do, actually, but you wouldn’t like the side effects.”
“This is me not asking,” she said. She pulled tourist Mandy’s little pink cell phone out of her back pocket and tossed it to him. “Here. Saved my number in the contacts. Catch up with me tomorrow. You know, if you’re still alive.” She grinned artificially wide, showing all her teeth. “Sleep tight!”
But he couldn’t sleep. He tossed and turned for an hour or so before giving it up as a lost cause and going back to the piles of books and websites he and Regal had spent the morning searching through.
It was like a jigsaw puzzle without a picture. He could sense that an answer, a pattern existed, but the shape of the thing eluded him. He knew one of the gods at the card game had murdered Dodge, and it wasn’t too far of a leap to presume that the “big prize” they’d all been playing for was the motive.
What could that prize be, though? What could Dodge possibly offer a bunch of deities that they couldn’t attain on their own? And why, he wondered, was it of interest to those particular gods? What did a god of scribes, an angel, a vampire, and a god of the crossroads all have in common? It was a riddle with no answer, a joke with no punch line. He couldn’t ignore Regal’s insistence on including him in the group, too. He’d been invited to that same table. Whatever united them, it was a connection Jude shared, a link to his long-absent father. Figuring out the nature of the prize wouldn’t just help him find Dodge’s murderer.
He might also find himself.
Chapter Eight
The god lives; the god dies; the god lives again. Killed by a spear of sharpened mistletoe, or upon a cross of cedar, or in the midst of a sacred ball game. Or he is torn apart by his brother, his limbs scattered from one end of the kingdom to another. Or he collapses with exhaustion during the harvest. Or he is devoured by monstrous giants, leaving only his heart behind. After death, he travels to the Underworld, for three days, or a year, or nine months, or until the world itself dies if the right conditions are not met. The important thing is that the one-who-died always returns, stitched back together by his wife, born of a new mother’s womb, rising from the earth with the corn, or the wheat, or the grapevine. Reassembled, resplendent, reborn. Whether in cycles or only once, whether meant to represent the final chapter of the world or the promise of ever-renewing life, these stories, these myths, share one crucial truth: Even the gods can die.
Jude stepped out of the cab and onto Basin Street, where one of the rare pleasant summer days in New Orleans bloomed, a strong breeze sweeping the thick, hot air from the streets, the sky bright and clear and ceramic blue. It was hard to ruin days like this. Yesterday the heat had been nearly unbearable, tomorrow the rain would likely come in torrents, but this day felt like grace, like benediction. In a strange way, it was the perfect day for a funeral.
Unsure where Dodge was going to be buried, Jude started with St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, since it was the oldest one in the city. It felt strange, trusting his only promising lead to what amounted to an educated guess, but without his gift tugging him in the right direction, he had to hope for a little luck. But any vestige of doubt vanished as he walked up to the neutral ground between Our Lady of Guadalupe Church and the cemetery. The crowd, milling around like a casting call for the hallucinations of a drying-out drunk, told him he’d come to the right place.
A centaur—his hair and beard shaggy and wild—exchanged greetings w
ith a nāgiṇī—a white woman in a punk rock leather jacket from the waist up, a huge, coiled serpent the rest of the way down. A fat brown-skinned man with the head of an elephant flicked and curled his wide ears. A hairy giant rested in the shade of an oak tree, his huge bare feet spread out in front of him. A black woman who appeared normal save for the blue flame that burned above her head seemed to be talking to someone high in the oak’s branches, though when a mouth formed in the foliage and replied, Jude realized that it was the tree itself she spoke to. Jude saw werewolves and a many-armed goddess of destruction, a Roman god with a face on either side of his head, animals that stood and wore clothes like men, a monkey carved out of stone, and things for which he knew no name. Jude wondered how many of these beings had come to pay their respects to Dodge, and how many were just here for the inevitable debauchery afterward. Jude had no doubt that there would be a drunken wake for the fortune god; Dodge had been a god of New Orleans, through and through.
A tapping noise invaded Jude’s thoughts, growing closer until it stopped with a final clack. Jude felt a tug at his coat. He turned to find Celeste next to him, leaning on a cane so heavily that her arm trembled from the tension. She wore a suit of pale lavender, her jacket and pants, her trilby hat and tie and gleaming shoes all the exact same shade. Something in the coordination seemed comical, almost cartoonish. She held one hand to her hat, keeping it slanted against her head despite the stiff wind threatening to tear it loose.
“Lend me the strength of them sturdy legs of yours to aid me ’cross the way,” she said in a voice not her own, a sonorous patois of French and African accents that Jude recognized from Dodge’s card game.
