by Alan Rodgers
With the Lady
Lisa closed her eyes in the darkness of the Lady’s cloak, and she kept them closed for the longest time.
After a while the sounds of the city faded around them, and everything grew still as stone. When the quiet grew deep enough to hurt her ears, Lisa opened her eyes and saw the Lady, carrying her with one arm as she held her bright fiery sword in the other. They were in the corridor, again, the passageway between life and death that led one way to Heaven and the other way to Hell, and the bright sword kept the darkness of that awful place at bay.
It’s over now, Lisa thought. The world is done with me.
But when she heard herself think those words she knew they weren’t true.
“Where are we going?” Lisa asked.
The Lady turned and looked at her, but she didn’t answer.
Lisa wondered if she should be scared. What would they do to her, she wondered, after they judged her? — and then she thought about the rolly-eyed boy, and how she hit him so much she put him in the hospital, in the hospital so bad she maybe even killed him. And she knew there was a place for people who do things like that to little retard boys.
And she knew that place was Hell.
I’m going to go to Hell, Lisa thought. And she tried not to be afraid, but part of her was terrified; and part of her just thought it was the right thing because she deserved it. That part wasn’t afraid, but it was very sad.
The Lady looked sad, too.
Now they crested an incline, and suddenly the gates of Heaven and Hell appeared before them.
Both gates were closed — bolted home and sealed. Between them there was a fountain, and below that fountain was a reflecting pool.
The pool was glassy-still despite the burbling gush at its center, and it reflected everything around them as clearly as if it were a mirror.
Perhaps even more clearly — for that pool caught the essence of the things around it as no ordinary mirror could; and when Lisa looked at it she knew things about the nature of Heaven and Hell that she didn’t want to know.
As if she had a choice!
The Lady carried Lisa to the edge of the pool and set her down beside it — and for the first time Lisa saw her own reflection in that water.
When she looked in that water, Lisa saw herself in perspective. She saw how tiny and insignificant she was — not just among grown adults seven times her size, but before a world infinitely larger than she was, too.
And in the mirror of that water she saw the things about herself she didn’t want to see, like the retard-boy’s blood that covered her hands, and always would; and as she saw that dried and crusted blood she rubbed her tiny hands against one another, trying to clean them. It was no use, because the boy’s blood was a part of her reflection, now, and it always would be, but even so tiny flakes of scabrous matter dusted away from her hands as she rubbed them.
When those flakes touched the water of the pool, Lisa’s reflection shimmered, dissolved, and faded away; and then suddenly the water shone as bright as day, driving away the darkness of the hall.
For a moment Lisa thought she’d somehow set the pool afire. But then she saw an image coalesce on the day-bright surface of the pool, and she knew what was to come.
It started like this: she saw an awkward little boy waddling across a yard, watching a baby asleep curled up in a tight little ball.
That’s me, Lisa thought. He’s watching me.
When the boy got close enough to touch the baby, he hesitated a moment — stood hovering above the smaller child, staring at her intently. After a moment he began to drool, but he didn’t seem to notice — not even when a long slidey droplet of his drool drizzled down to spatter on the baby’s leg.
He spit on me, Lisa thought. That ugly retard spit on me.
“Wake up, baby,” the boy said. His voice was hardly more than a whisper.
The baby didn’t hear him.
“Wake up, baby!”
And when the baby still didn’t wake, the boy put his warm sticky hand on the baby’s shoulder, and began to shake her.
“No!” Lisa shouted. “I don’t want to see!”
But the vision continued. As the baby grumbled at the boy, asking to be left alone; as the boy persisted, badgering the baby —
Lisa grabbed the Santa‘s cloak, pulled on it as insistently as she’d yank her mother’s skirt. “Make it stop, Lady. Please? — I don’t want to see again. I can’t stand to see it, please?”
The Lady frowned. She didn’t answer.
Below them on the water the boy yanked the baby to her feet, and the baby responded by hitting him — again and again and again.
It was so much different, seeing it this way. At first when Lisa’d hit the boy she was just trying to protect herself, and then she sort of lost track of everything. The only time in all of that she really saw him was right at the end, as the teacher grabbed her and pulled her off the boy — for that tiny moment she looked down and saw all that blood, saw the boy looked like something made of pulp, and she ached for him, and she screamed —
Screamed!
But now she saw every moment of it. Every tiny blow the baby’s sharp hard fists jabbed the boy. She saw how he first began to bleed the third time the baby hit him in the mouth; how his arm twisted funny when he fell, trying to get away from her; how she hit his nose three times and after that the shape was different.
She heard him scream, and scream again; and then he begged her not to hit him anymore.
The scene transfixed Lisa. She gaped at it; without even realizing she leaned out over the water to look at it more closely. “Stop it!” she shouted, trembling as the baby battered the soft stupid boy. “I told you, stop it!”
But the baby didn’t stop. How could the baby ever stop, so far away in time?
“I’m warning you,” Lisa said. “I warn you!”
As the baby jabbed and jabbed and jabbed, and now the boy’s nose began to gush with blood.
And Lisa just stopped thinking.
Just stopped thinking.
And she lashed out at the image on the water, reached for the baby’s throat to tear her away from the boy and throw her out across the hall —
But of course she couldn’t do that.
The image on the water was just an image, not the scene itself; Lisa couldn’t grab the baby girl who beat and beat and beat the idiot child — because the baby wasn’t there. And neither was the boy. All Lisa could do was slap the water, splash the surface; send droplets of that water flying everywhere.
The splashing water spattered all across the pool, but it didn’t disturb the stillness of the water. No more than the fountain did.
Lisa didn’t care. She hardly even noticed. When her hand came away from the image holding nothing but the droplets of water that clung to it, she struck again and again and again, screaming in rage and frustration, and she felt the same rage consume her that had consumed her as she’d beat the retard half to death, and if she’d been able to get her hands on the baby or the boy that moment she’d have killed them both —
— killed them both —
— and in her rage she forgot herself entirely.
Forgot where she was, forgot what she was doing, and lost her balance.
And tumbled headfirst into the reflecting pool that rests between the gates of Heaven and Hell.
Lisa almost drowned deep down in the stillness of that water. She would’ve died if anything could die in a place past life and death.
This is what Lisa saw as she thrashed and gasped and coughed and choked deep beneath the imperturbable surface of the reflecting pool between the judgment gates:
She saw her mother, worried out of her mind for her missing daughter and the mayhem and the end of their new life;
She sa
w Robert Johnson, somewhere down in Hell, playing his guitar;
She saw Santa Barbara standing above the pool, watching Lisa, waiting for her to find herself and save her soul from the rage that wanted to drown her;
She saw the open gates of Heaven, and the pearly haze that lay impenetrable to light beyond.
I’m going to drown, Lisa thought. I’m going to die.
She tried to remember how to swim, but it was so hard! She was so terrified — panicked by her circumstance, blinded by her rage. And all she knew about swimming was from a few days that summer years ago, when the lifeguard lady at camp taught her how to paddle and when to hold her breath, but she couldn’t remember, not for nothing, and everything she did remember didn’t work because she’d already breathed in more water than she’d drink in a week.
“Help!” Lisa shouted, trying to get the Santa to lift her from the pool and save her life. “Help help!”
But her words got lost in the coughing and the choking and the water and the Santa didn’t hear or didn’t listen, she stood above the pool as Lisa thrashed and gasped and suddenly lost hold.
Grew weak as a kitten, and tired. As the blackness faded in around her and she died.
Lisa didn’t really die, of course. No one can die when she stands in that place that’s neither life nor death. Instead she lost her grip on where and when she was, and the currents of the world swept the girl away.
When she woke she lay soaked and broken in an abandoned lot three blocks northwest of Escuela Santa Angelica.
As she woke she heard the Santa whisper in her ear.
“You need to let go of your rage, child,” the Santa said. “If you don’t let it go it will destroy you.”
Lisa turned to face her, to confront her, to accuse the Lady of abandoning her child to the waters that would drown her.
But the Lady was nowhere to be seen.
“Come back!” Lisa shouted. “You come back here!”
“You need to let go of your rage.”
Lisa whipped around to face the direction from which the voice had seemed to come — and saw nothing.
“Don’t leave me alone!” Lisa shouted — and as she said the word alone her shout became a wail. Then she was crying, bawling like a baby or sissy or some big soft old retard boy.
“Lisa!” someone called, and for a moment Lisa thought it was the Lady, returned to her, come to save her from her lonely fate in a burned-out lot in Spanish Harlem.
But it wasn’t the Lady. It was Lisa’s mother, looking frayed and frightened and defeated, like she’d spent the whole afternoon searching for Lisa and thinking the girl was dead.
“Mama,” Lisa wailed, and she opened her arms and let her mother lift her from the rubble of the broken lot, and carry her away.
Lisa’s mama made a telephone call as soon as they got home.
She set Lisa in her chair and picked up the phone and dialed Mama Estrella’s number, and when Mama Estrella answered she said, “Mama Estrella? Something terrible has happened. Yes, to Lisa. She, she — yes, please. Come as soon as you can.”
Mama Estrella knocked on the door ten minutes later.
“What is it, Emma?” Mama Estrella asked. “What has she done?”
“At the school, Mama Estrella. She hurt a boy, and then she disappeared. When I found her in the field she was — wet. Soaked to the skin with something that, that — look.” Lisa’s mama gestured at Lisa’s clothes, at her own clothes where the water from the reflecting pool had touched them.
The water had bleached Lisa’s dress white — not just white but a shade of white so blinding-bright that it hurt Lisa’s eyes to look at it. Mama’s clothes were white like that, too, everywhere they’d touched Lisa while she was still drying.
“Oh my God,” Mama Estrella said. She knelt before Lisa and began to examine her. “Are you burned, Lisa? Your skin, your eyes?”
“No, Mama Estrella,” Lisa said.
“What happened to you, girl?”
“I —” Lisa began. And then she stopped. She had to stop, she knew. She didn’t dare tell that woman what she’d seen. “Nothing happened, Mama Estrella. I just got lost, that’s all.”
Mama Estrella scowled.
“You’re lying, child. Tell me the truth.”
“Tell her the truth, Lisa.”
Lisa didn’t say a word.
“How did you get wet, Lisa?”
“Wet. . . ?”
Lisa couldn’t tell them about the reflecting pool any more than she could tell them about the Santa. She knew that. She tried to think of a lie to explain the water that’d soaked her, but all the lies that came to her were obviously transparent.
“Don’t give her that, young lady. You tell Mama Estrella what happened to you.”
Lisa looked down at her feet, pretending not to hear.
“Lisa!”
“It’s all right, Emma,” Mama Estrella said. She put one hand on Lisa’s cheek, ran the other through the girl’s hair. Her fingers found an itchy lump near Lisa’s hairline and probed it.
“Ouch!”
Bent close to examine it —
— and gasped.
“What is it, Mama Estrella?”
“Shungó.” Mama Estrella said that name softer than a whisper, as though she were afraid that speaking it out loud would call the Lady to her. “It’s Shungó’s hand behind all of this, isn’t it?”
Lisa’s mama shuddered. “I don’t know any Shungó,” she said. “And I don’t want to know any.”
“You’ve seen her,” Mama Estrella said. “The Lady in the grotto behind my store — no, not Mary, the other one. The virgin with the sword.”
“Santa Barbara. . . ?”
“Yes, Santa Barbara — the goddess who repented.”
“What’re you talking about?”
Mama Estrella scowled; she muttered derisively.
Lisa knew why. But she didn’t say a word.
“We need to go back to the boneyard,” Mama Estrella said. “We need to ask Shungó to take her mark off your daughter’s forehead.”
Lisa’s mama made a frightened little sound, like Mama Estrella had struck her with a rod, or worse. “I won’t go back there, Mama Estrella. I won’t.”
“Emma —”
“Use a little common sense, Mama Estrella Perez. Nothing good ever walks out of a graveyard — not now, not when you woke Lisa, not ever. If I want an exorcist, I’ll call a priest.”
Mama Estrella started muttering again. It sounded like she was swearing out a curse, but Lisa couldn’t hear the words.
“Can you do it here, Mama Estrella? Could you do it downstairs in the grotto?”
Mama Estrella closed her eyes, rubbed her temple. “Let me think,” she said. And then she was quiet for a while. Quiet and — faraway-looking. It almost seemed like she was praying.
And maybe she was praying. Santeria ladies like Mama Estrella love Jesus as dearly as anyone does, and more dearly than most people do.
“Mama Estrella. . . ?”
Mama Estrella opened her eyes.
“In the morning,” she said. “Downstairs in the yard — as soon as the sunlight shines directly on her grotto.”
Lisa’s mama nodded. “All right, then. If you think it’ll help.”
Mama Estrella smiled. “It will,” she said.
She left without saying another word.
Lisa didn’t expect to see her again until the morning, but it didn’t work out like that. A couple of hours after dinner, when Lisa and Mama were sitting in the living room watching old movies on TV, there came a knock on the door, and when Lisa’s mama answered it she found Mama Estrella waiting for her.
“You’ll need me here tonight,” Mama Estrella said. “I’ll sta
y on your couch.”
Lisa’s mama looked a little bit surprised, but she didn’t argue. Lisa wished she had; she didn’t like Mama Estrella very much. She sure didn’t want to spend the night that close to her.
But no one asks little girls about things like company, and Lisa’s mama didn’t, either. So Mama Estrella Perez stayed with them that night, and when Lisa went to bed she had the strangest dream.
She dreamed the Lady took her hand and led her into an endless night-black wilderness. After a long time they came to a bonfire.
On one side of that fire sat Robert Johnson — she knew him from her other dreams, and she recognized him. On the other side there were six old, old men. They were strange and beautiful old men, and even though Lisa didn’t know any of them, she recognized them in her heart, and she loved them.
Of course she knew and loved them! Everyone who has the magic and the music in her heart knows those men when she sees them! They were Kings — old Kings who’d ruled the Mississippi lowlands from New Orleans north to Chicago back before the world broke open. And when they picked at their guitars the sound was beauteous to behold — listen, listen now as Charlie Patton picks his worn guitar, and listen as the strings speak: “Lord have mercy,” the guitar says. “Lord, Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy — pray, brother, pray, save poor me.”
He held the guitar strangely — one hand around its neck, the other all but covering the guitar’s open mouth. It was almost as though he were choking the words out of it, Lisa thought, and then she thought that was such a strange idea.
All of it was strange, everything about that dream. Later Lisa decided that she’d only imagined it.
But it was true, every solitary bit: there in the dream that was stranger than the truth she heard Charlie Patton’s guitar singing, pleading for mercy.
Then Charlie Patton’s guitar went silent, and Lisa realized that the Lady had left her. Robert Johnson stood up on the far side of the fire, and he held out a hand to her.
“Lisa,” he said. “Lisa Henderson.”
It was the first time in all Lisa’s dreams of him that Robert Johnson had addressed her by name.
“I’m afraid,” Lisa said, but that was a lie. Lisa was a brave girl! She was never afraid.
