Homemade Sin

by V. Mark Covington

  “Saying goodbye to Mama?” Madam Zola had slipped up behind her unheard. Startled, Hussey stood up quickly and turned toward the psychic.

  “Yes,” Hussey said, catching her breath and then relaxing at the sight of Madam Zola. “I can’t believe she’s gone.”

  “Oh, she’s not gone,” the psychic said. She took Hussey’s hand. “She lives on in the apprentices she taught, like the man who taught her lived on in her. Your grandfather would be proud of you.”

  “Thanks,” Hussey said. “I think he would like that I’m studying to be a doctor.”

  “I was talking about you being a voodun,” Madam Zola said. “That man was the best voodun we ever had in Cassandra.”

  “My … my mother’s father was a voodun?” Hussey was flabbergasted.

  “Who do you think taught Mama Wati?” Madam Zola said.

  When Hussey arrived home from her trip to the graveyard she found Roland and her mother sitting on the front porch drinking sweet tea, chatting and looking through an old photo album.

  “Your mother was telling me about your acting career.” Roland smiled and held up a picture of three teenage girls dressed in black dresses, on a high school stage, gathered around a large black cauldron. Dry ice was sending tendrils of fake smoke steaming out of the cauldron and creeping across the stage floor. “Which witch were you?”

  “I played Varmeta, the weird sister in the center, and you should know we weren’t witches, we were three roadside psychics stirring a pot of Brunswick stew, instead of three witches stirring a cauldron like in Macbeth. Did you tell my mom you wrote that play?”

  “You wrote Shakespeare in the Trailer Park?” Hannah Paine said, impressed. “My, my, a doctor and a writer. When did you find the time?”

  Roland cut his eyes toward Hussey.

  “Hussey was so good in the play,” Hannah said. “She also played Barbie Q Bacon.”

  “All the psychics played other parts,” Hussey said. “The psychics were only on for a couple of minutes during the opening scene.”

  “Didn’t Cutter play Hameo?” Hannah laughed. “Remember the pink flamingos, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? They were spies and they kept moving their heads to follow what the actors were saying.” She laughed again.

  “I remember my big death scene before the Tempest that flattened both mobile home parks,” said Hussey.

  “‘A plague o’ both their double-wides,’” Hussey and her mother said in unison.

  “Have you written any other plays?” Hannah said to Roland.

  “Well, my medical career doesn’t give me a lot of time, but I’m working on some novels.” Roland again glanced at Hussey.

  “Hussey, don’t let this one get away.” Patting Roland’s knee, Hannah continued. “Well, it’s time for bed. Roland, I made up the guest room for you, and Hussey, I put clean sheets on the bed in your room.”

  Hussey smiled at Roland and then laughed. “Too bad we don’t have a balcony; we could do the balcony scene with Hameo and Barbie Q tonight.

  Roland laughed and quoted:

  “‘But, soft!What light through yon bug zapper breaks?

  It is the east, and Barbie Q is the sun.

  Arise, sunshine and show me thy beautiful moon.

  Come, get thyself a cold one.’”

  Hussy responded:

  “‘Oh Hameo, Hameo!

  Wherefore art thou Hameo?

  Deny thy Trailer Park and refuse thy NASCAR driver;

  Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,

  And I’ll no longer be a Rebel Buford fan.’”

  Roland almost choked on the mention of Rebel Buford.

  “Didn’t Rebel Buford crash at Daytona a few days ago?” Hannah said, stopping just inside the screen door.

  Roland watched Hussey’s face for some glint of recognition or guilt as she cast her eyes to the floor. Roland could see the cheek muscles tighten as if she were grinding her teeth.

  “I don’t follow NASCAR,” she said.

  She knows something, Roland thought.

  Hannah Paine was descending the stairs when Roland and Hussey came in. As she turned and headed for the kitchen she called over her shoulder; “Well, I’m going to get a glass of water and go to bed. See you kids in the morning.”

  Hussey stopped at the bottom of the stairs, took a step toward the kitchen, then and turned back toward Roland. “I think I’ll go and have a little chat with my mother. You know where the guest room is, right?”

  “Your mom showed me while you were out.”

  Hussey gave Roland a parting grin and followed her mother into the kitchen. Hannah was filling a glass from the tap.

  ”Mom, I have something to ask you,” Hussey said.

  “I approve,” Hannah said. “I think he’s a nice guy, and he’s a doctor and a writer. He’s head and shoulders above that Cutter. I never trusted that boy. I always thought his driveway didn’t go all the way up to the house, if you know what I mean.”

  “No, that’s not it,” Hussey said. “I want to ask you about your father, my grandfather.”

  “Wonderful man, salt of the earth,” Hannah said, taking a sip of water.

  “Did he practice voodoo?”

  Hannah dropped the glass into the sink. The glass shattered and water splashed all across the front of her dress.

  “Your grandfather was a country doctor,” Hannah said, a little shaken. “He used whatever worked to heal people. Sometimes he used some strange potions and powders he mixed up in the little room upstairs in his house, but voodoo? Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Madam Zola said he taught Mama Wati voodoo. Is it true?”

  “Mama Wati was his housekeeper.” Hannah picked shards of glass out of the sink. “When she was a young girl, she used to help him mix powders and poultices in his little laboratory. I snuck in there once when I was a little girl, and I did see some strange things. Rows and rows of potions and powders: weird stuff pickled in jars on the shelves. And he had this big leather book called Conjures he was always scribbling in.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me?” Hussey said and then realized what her mother had said. “Did you say he had a leather-bound book called Conjures?”

  “Yes, he said the book was two hundred years old. His great, great, great, grandmother brought it to this country when she came here in the early eighteen hundreds.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”

  “Because there are some things parents don’t tell children because children would start asking too many questions,” said Hannah, rinsing the residual shards of glass out of the sink. “And I was afraid you might have found out about the other thing.”

  “Other thing?” Hussey said.

  “Your great, great grandmother was Haitian. A real voodoorine.” Hannah wiped her hand on a dishtowel. “I think she was called a quadroon. It meant that she was one quarter black.”

  “I know what a quadroon is, Mom, but that’s a rather discriminating term.”

  “I remember when ‘discriminating’ was a good word,” Hannah said, in an attempt to change the subject. “Like someone had discriminating taste. It meant they only wanted the best; now the word has changed. Like ‘gay’ used to mean happy …” Hannah dropped the dishtowel on the counter and looked Hussey in the eye.

  She’s avoiding the subject, thought Hussey, babbling on about nothing. “Mother,” Hussey tried to interrupt, but her mother was on a roll.

  “And hooking up,” Hannah went on. “Back when I was a girl, we hooked up the tractor to the plow and dragged it over the fields or we hooked up a fish on the line, and dragged it to the bank, but hooking up means something different now. Does it still mean dragging something?”

  “Usually Mom, it means dragging someone into something.” Hussey took the break in her mother’s tirade to jump in, trying to bring her back to the topic. “Why didn’t you tell me about my great, great grandmother?”

  “It was a family scandal,” Hannah said, taking a
fresh glass from the cupboard and filling it with water. “It was a long time ago and folks have forgotten. Your father and I wanted to let it die. You were already spending too much time with that voodoo woman and your father didn’t want you to know. He didn’t want to encourage you.”

  “I had all the encouragement I needed. You should have told me,” she said as Hannah took a step toward the door.

  “Some things you don’t tell the people you love for their own good,” Hannah said.

  Hussey thought about Hannah believing Roland was in medical school and nodded. “Goodnight, Mom.”

  When Hussey was sure her parents were asleep she tiptoed into the guest room where Roland was sound asleep. She eased into bed beside him and nuzzled his neck until he woke up.

  “Did you have a nice talk with your mother?”

  “My mother is nuts,” Hussey whispered.

  “Do you want to compare parents and sucky childhoods?”

  “No, I’d rather hook up.” Hussey smiled at Roland in the darkness.

  On the drive back to St. Petersburg, Hussey was lost in thought. She stared out of the window and thought about her grandfather. She remembered visiting him when she was a little girl. She would sit on the floor on a big hooked rug playing with her dolls in the room upstairs he had converted into his pharmacy and watched him mix powders, roll pills and heat liquids over a blue gas flame. She could picture the rows and rows of jars stacked on shelves from floor to ceiling. He was practicing voodoo, she thought, and all this time I thought he was just a simple country doctor.

  “You’re awful quiet,” said Roland. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Mostly about voodoo,” Hussey said, still staring out of the side window, “and my grandfather.”

  “Lost in the mumbo jumbo?”

  “There is a fine line between medicine and mumbo jumbo,” Hussey said, turning her attention to Roland. “And it gets blurrier all the time. You’re a doctor, of sorts; at least you played one at my parent’s house.” Hussey smiled at Roland. “Is there really so much difference between a doctor and a voodun? I mean a doctor looks at symptoms, figures out what’s wrong and then prescribes a remedy, same thing a voodun does.”

  “But doctors prescribe real medicine approved by the Federal Drug Administration and produced in a laboratory under clinical conditions. The medicines doctors use have been tested on animals or prisoners or something, and are proven to work. What kind of medicines do vooduns use? Eye of newt, toe of frog? Not what I’d call scientifically approved medications.”

  “Is that the difference?” Hussey said. “FDA approval? Did you know that about seventy percent of all new drugs in the past twenty-five years have been derived from natural products? I’ve done a little research on it. Taxol, one of the best anti-cancer drugs, came from the Pacific Yew tree. Morphine and codeine come from the opium poppy. The heart drug, digoxin, comes from foxglove flowers. Turbocuarine, the muscle relaxant, comes from a South American plant containing curare, which is, by the way, an old ingredient in zombie powder. And all those drugs were given FDA approval.”

  Roland’s mouth was agape.

  “Even simple drugs,” Hussey said. “Aspirin comes from willow bark, quinine comes from the cinchona tree, and a lot of antidepressants contain St. John’s Wort. Dandelions are used in drugs for kidney and liver medicines.”

  “I had no idea,” said Roland.

  “And the toe of frog thing …” Hussey smiled, “… ever heard of drugs called Os Tigris, or Versica fellea ursi, or Hippocampus?

  “Don’t we serve those at the restaurant?”

  “Tigers’ bones, bears and seahorses,” Hussey said, ignoring his attempt at humor. “There’s your toe of frog. My grandfather always said if you want to figure out something that’s going on that makes no logical sense, you follow the money. The pharmaceutical companies make a lot of money on the same stuff vooduns and witches have been mixing up in their kitchens for hundreds of years. Did you know eighty percent of the world population uses herbal medicine for primary healthcare? But in this country we’re at the mercy of the pharmaceutical companies. I think my grandfather knew the secret. He figured out what ailed a person and then prescribed what worked, whether it was hydrocortisone or henbane, digitalis or dandelions.”

  “What I hate is the way they build irony into prescription medicine,” Roland said.

  “Irony?” Hussey said.

  “Yeah, I have gout attacks a couple of times a year and the only drug that stops the pain also gives you diarrhea.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “When you have gout you can’t walk, so they give you a drug that makes you run to the bathroom … it’s ironic,” Roland said.

  Hussey giggled.

  “Yeah,” Roland continued, “then there’s the stop smoking drug that makes you suicidal. You take the drug so you live longer and then you kill yourself. And the Parkinson drug that turns people into compulsive gamblers. They can hold the cards without shaking while they lose their life savings.”

  Hussey giggled again.

  “Or the drugs that cure social anxiety, for guys who are too shy to go up and talk to a girl in a bar; their side effect is to make you lose your sex drive. So now you can chat up the girl, but so what?”

  “Or Viagra.”

  “I didn’t know there were ironic side effects to Viagra,” Roland said.

  “It makes you cocky.” Hussey laughed.

  “At least I got you to lighten up,” Roland said.

  “But seriously,” Hussey said, somber again, “what if someone came up with a simple drug that could stop phobias, not an FDA approved drug, but a natural mixture made from mushrooms anyone could gather in a pasture. I stumbled on it when I planted some mushroom seeds in buzzard puke years ago. I found the strangest mushrooms growing the next day. They were a dark purple and had little green spots. And the tops of them were all swirly, like the tops of soft serve ice cream cones. I ground them up into a powder, added a few other things and Mambo powder was born. I examined the chemical compounds and the new mushrooms were similar to mushrooms used to make Borko powder, the permanent zombie stuff, so I figured it would have a similar effect on the brain, but there was one element I couldn’t identify. I figured trial and error, right? So I tried it out on a neighbor’s dog that had a terrible fear of sheep and it cured him. So I know it works on animals, it cures their phobias, or any other inorganic psychological problems, but some of their reactions to it haven’t been what I had hoped. I haven’t tried it on people yet,” she lied. “But, if I can find a way to reduce the side effects, it might work on them too.”

  “You better hope the medical community doesn’t find out about it. It could cost them a lot of money if people started growing their own medicine. Those folks can be ruthless.”

  “Money.” Hussey sighed. “People have been so programmed to believe what costs more works better. The drug companies have preached that for so long it’s ingrained. Did you know there was a study recently where they gave two groups the same drug and told one group the drug was cheap and the other group that the drug was expensive? The folks who thought they got an expensive drug reported better results. Money is a powerful talisman.”

  “Well, it does ward off poverty,” Roland said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Something’s Fishy At The Voodoo Lounge

  When Roland and Hussey stepped into the Fugu Lounge the place was packed. Every table was filled and the rich and famous from all over Florida were munching fugu and sipping absinthe. Dee Dee had moved her sushi works to the bar so she could take drink orders and slice sushi at the same time. She was alternately making drinks and cutting sushi and shashimi like a demon. Orders were backed up, and there was a line at the door waiting for tables.

  “What the hell is going on?” Roland said loudly as he surveyed the crowded restaurant. “Where did all these people come from?” A man dressed in a loud Hawaiian shirt and khakis and wearing boat shoes sat at the bar,
waiting for a table. He handed Roland a copy of the St. Petersburg Beach Times folded over to a restaurant review.

  “It has to be this article,” the floral shirted man said. “It came out in the paper yesterday, so I told my wife, Mun Bun, ‘we must boat over and try that place’. So I fired up the Criss Craft, found a slip here at St. Pete Beach and here we are. I guess a lot of folks had the same idea.”

  Roland held the newspaper and Hussey stood behind him and read over his shoulder:

  The St. Petersburg Beach Times

  The Snooty Foody – Restaurant Critic At Large

  By Winfrey Pinth Merrmian

  Nothing Fishy at the Fugu Lounge

  Previously the Blue Flamingo Lounge, the newly opened Fugu Lounge, located on the ground floor of the Santeria Hotel, is simply, in this critic’s opinion, Fugulishous. Gone are the gauche beachy trappings, the fish nets and buoys dangling from the walls, the Margaritaville Poster behind the bar and the horrible stuffed fish that disgraced the wall. Now, voodoo statues and African idols abound. The Fugu Lounge is sexily salted with death and deliciously peppered with intrigue. The bartender, looking more like a mercenary than a maître d’, greeted me and my companion at the door and seated us while a devilishly beautiful waitress offered pre-dinner drinks. She suggested the house drink for me, a Voodoo Curse, a scrumptious concoction of rum, vanilla with a somewhat bitter under-taste shaken then set aflame. My companion, ever adventurous, tried a Hoodoo Hemlock shooter, gussied up with a sprig of actual Hemlock for show. I was even given a Sonoran Desert Bufo toad to lick, ‘like licking lime after a shot of tequila’, the waitress explained. Feeling plucky, I played along and licked the frog’s back enthusiastically. I must admit, my drink gave me a wonderful pre-dinner buzz; however my companion complained of sudden fatigue and commented on how bright the colors had become.

  We sipped our drinks while we watched Chef Dee Dee prepare our repast. The sushi chef had a strange and angry look in her eye, a somewhat sociopathic smile, and her language was a mite coarse, but I assume that was part of the ambiance. The chef dons thick plastic gloves before she touches the fish and continually yells “Bonsai” before slicing into each fugu fillet. You can almost see a bead of perspiration on her forehead as she concentrates on cutting it perfectly so as not to ‘release the poisons’ as she says. Of course, this is all for show and she never leaves character. You would almost think her creations are genuinely poisonous the way she carries on, warning the customer that each dish is potentially more deadly than the last. Of course, I knew she was simply pulling my leg. The ceremony surrounding the food preparation is equally as theatrical. The show is simply precious. You would think she was handling plutonium.