Bones

by Eli Easton

  To my surprise she beat me there. Gay almost never beat me anywhere. It takes time to look fabulous, after all, and she was looking fabulous that afternoon, as usual.

  Gay could have been anywhere from forty to sixty—it was impossible to tell. Her skin was all but flawless, there were only the tiniest lines around her eyes, and to look at her would put her on the younger end of that age range. But she would say things, mention events in her life, that would place her on the other end.

  She was wearing a black-and-gray Chanel sweater dress that fell to just above her knees and a huge black hat with a white band that was straight out of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She wore black-and-white pumps, and, of course, there was her jewelry. When was Gay ever without her jewelry? Today it was gray freshwater pearls. Two long strings around her neck and matching bracelets and earrings. And then a huge crystal doorknob ring. Ostentatious, and yet she always got away with it. I asked her once why she wore such large stones, and she said, “Well, because most people are afraid of them, and I’m not at all. The bigger, the better.” She wagged her eyebrows. “Wouldn’t you agree, Taylor?”

  She smiled her huge, perfect, white smile the minute I walked in the door, and her big brown eyes went wide, as if she wouldn’t or couldn’t be happier if I were Matthew McConaughey or Bradley Cooper instead of plain old short Taylor Dunton.

  If I were a woman, she is the woman I would want to be. What’s more, even though I’m not flashy like she is, she says I’m the man she would want to be. Not sure why, but she always says it’s so.

  “Hey, darlin’,” she said without a trace of a drawl.

  I went to her table, where she was perched on a high stool as if modeling for a magazine ad. I kissed her cheek. “You look gorgeous.”

  “Oh stop,” she said with a girlish smile and a tone that meant she didn’t want me to stop at all.

  “Let me see that ring,” I said and held out my hand.

  She placed hers in mine. “You mean this old thing?” She giggled.

  The stone wasn’t quite the size of a doorknob, but it looked just like one of those old-fashioned ones like my grandmother had in her house in West Virginia. It had to be the size of a golf ball cut in half.

  “Damn, girl.” It was all I could think to say.

  She dropped her head back, exposing a lovely white throat, and let out a long and delightful laugh. Heads turned. She laughed loudly, and there was nothing she could do about it. Gay was who she was.

  A waiter arrived like quicksilver. “Good afternoon,” he said with a flamboyant hand gesture.

  He was very cute and very gay—he could not have passed for straight for love or money. Not that he needed to. I was just generally more attracted to men who were a little more, well, masculine. Please note I did not say “straight acting.” God I hate that. Straight acting. What bullshit.

  “I’m Dart,” said our waiter, “and I’ll be serving you today. May I interest you in a cocktail? Something to eat?”

  Gay’s eyes flashed. “Martinis?” she asked me.

  “Of course.”

  She turned to the waiter. “Why, yes, Dart. You may interest us in cocktails. We’ll have two martinis, very clean, three olives.”

  “Gin or vodka?” Dart asked.

  Gay rolled her eyes. “Please. We want real martinis. Gin.” She looked at me. “Tanqueray? Bombay? Do you have a preference?”

  I raised my hands. “Whatever Gay wants.”

  “Gay wants lots of juniper.” She turned back to the waiter. “Bombay Sapphire, please. And don’t do more than wave the bottle of vermouth in the general direction of the glasses.”

  “Ah… okay,” our cutie replied, and I could tell by the expression on his adorable face that he had missed the Winston Churchill reference completely.

  She opened the little menu and pointed. “We’ll have the hummus b’tahini as well and”—she glanced at me—“the steamed mussels?”

  “Ummm, not today,” I said. Not on a stomach that had been witness to what I’d seen. “How about their vegetarian spring rolls.” Something without meat.

  Gay sighed dramatically and nodded, and the waiter scurried off.

  “Did he really say his name is Dart?” Gay asked. “Really?”

  We laughed and then we talked. About life and jobs and her husband and my lack of one. We talked about the waiter’s ass and how round it was and about the bartender who made our cocktails and what a hunk he was.

  “I wouldn’t kick him out of bed,” Gay said and giggled.

  “Not even if I had to listen to country and western,” I added.

  I waited for the second round of martinis before bringing up the dead body. We needed a bracer for that.

  Gay’s eyes went wide and wild. It was hard to tell if she’d gone pale—that’s how creamy-white her complexion is. “Gee whiz,” she said, never taking her Lord’s name in vain. “How did you do it?”

  “I remembered the Hindenburg,” I said, and took a healthy swallow of gin with more gin.

  “Ah,” she said with a nod. She knew the reference and partook of a generous amount of her martini as well.

  On May 6th, 1937, Herbert “Herb” Morrison was the reporter who covered the famous Hindenburg disaster. Everyone’s heard it—or at least a version—at one time or another. “It burst into flames!”—“It’s crashing terrible!”—“This is one of the worst catastrophes in the world.” And of course him signing off the air because of “the humanity” of it all.

  As the story goes, Herb was fired that day. Never go off the air!

  Turns out, it’s an urban legend. Herb left WLS on his own a year or so later and pursued a long and distinguished career. But the point is still there nonetheless. Cover the news. As a reporter for the Chronicle, it’s my job to observe and report and not to look away. Of course, I had looked away, hadn’t I? I guess pet parades and gay pride events hadn’t prepared me for the sight of that man cut open from stem to stern. Could anything have prepared me for that?

  I hadn’t signed up for that.

  But hadn’t I?

  Wasn’t reporting the news what I wanted to do? Didn’t I want to be the next Woodward and Bernstein? The new Judith Miller? One who doesn’t go to jail, of course.

  Would Chadrick or motherfucking Rockower have looked away?

  I don’t think so.

  “Next time, I won’t look away.”

  “You think the killer is going to strike again?” Gay asked.

  I looked at her in surprise. Had I said that out loud?

  But it was right then that I realized I did think there was going to be another killing, just like in the movies. I don’t know how I knew, but I did. I was sure of it. Did I have a reporter’s instincts after all?

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do think they’re going to strike again.” I downed the rest of my cocktail.

  Gay waved the waiter over and held up two fingers, so I quickly grabbed the pick with the olives so he could take the glasses away. I popped one in my mouth.

  “Brookhart seems to think it was witches or Satanists,” I said through a mouthful of olive, staring into the nothingness over my friend’s shoulder. I could see that body still. Horror movie special effects had nothing on the real thing.

  “Oh, heavens no,” Gay said and made a clicking sound with her tongue. Was she tsking me? “Not witches. I don’t know about Satanists, but certainly not witches.”

  I opened my mouth to ask her how she might “certainly” know any such thing, when I remembered. She had a friend who was a witch. Gay might consider herself a Christian, but she had a very eclectic circle of friends. Hey, I was her gay best friend, after all.

  “I knew her back in college when she was called Party Patty,” Gay had told me one evening while we were soaking in her hot tub and drinking G&Ts. “Now she’s Patricia the Prairie Witch.” She made quotes with her fingers in the air over that last part. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw her at Greta’s little soiree.” Greta was another of Gay
’s friends and a rival for who threw the best parties. “It was actually kind of funny. Apparently it was some kind of coup getting Patricia the ‘Prairie Witch’ to give a little talk at her party and perform a little Beltane ritual. So when Patty and I took one look at each other, screamed like college girls, and threw ourselves into each other’s arms, I thought Greta was going to shit.”

  Gay wouldn’t say “Jesus Christ,” but she had no compunctions about using the word “shit.”

  “So I can tell you right now,” Gay said as Dart delivered out fresh martinis and our noms, “that witches do not believe in human sacrifice.”

  Dart’s eyebrows shot up and disappeared in his gel-coated bangs—I sighed and gave him a “don’t ask me” expression—and he swiveled on one heel and flew away. Gay and I burst into laughter. And remember, Gay’s laugh was not a quiet one.

  When we settled down, she leaned across the little table, and in a conspiratorial tone, said, “Sounds a little closer to voodoo to me.”

  “Voodoo?” I snapped.

  She tossed a shoulder. “The skull face. The chickens. Doesn’t that sound all very Serpent and the Rainbow to you?”

  I sat up straight in my chair. “Well, damn. It does, doesn’t it?”

  She nodded, delicately picked up a crab cake that was no bigger than a KFC biscuit, and took a bite.

  Voodoo? Really? “In Kansas City? I mean, whoever heard of voodoo in Kansas City?”

  Those eyes of hers got wide again. “Oh, darlin’. There’s a shop and everything.”

  “Huh? A voodoo shop?” I couldn’t believe it. KC was hardly New Orleans. “Where?”

  She laughed. “Baby, walk out the front door, turn right, walk ten feet, turn right at the corner—walk, maybe twenty feet? Look to your left, and there it is. Right across the street.”

  “You’re shitting me!” I looked at her, eyes agog.

  “I shit thee not! I went in there one day to buy stuff for my little St. Patrick’s Day party and got the surprise of my life!” She laughed nervously and rolled her eyes. “It’s called Lucky Charms, so what did I know? I mean, it’s got a four-leaf clover painted on the front of it. I walked in and saw not one bit of green! It was all candles and skulls and creepy little altars on every wall. My hair stood on end! It did!”

  Voodoo? Here? In Kansas City? I couldn’t be more surprised if it had been a church dedicated to the worship of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.

  “Maybe you should talk to them.” She nodded enthusiastically. “Yes! Of course you should. There’s no ‘maybe’ about it.”

  Voodoo? I gulped.

  “I’ll go with!” She grinned.

  “I thought it spooked you,” I said.

  “Oh, it did. It does. Quite a bit in fact. But I’ll have you with me this time.”

  “I don’t know….”

  “Quick,” she said. “Down your drinkie. We’ll get a third round, and that should give us the courage to enter the lion’s den!”

  Good God. Was I going to do it again? Was it Lucy and Ethel on another ill-advised adventure?

  Of course, if she was right—if the murder was some kind of voodoo sacrifice—what better place to get information?

  But then again, it might also be a place to get noticed by a group of voodoo killers.

  The gin won out in the end, and armed with liquid courage, we marched out the door of The Corner Bistro, ready to take on a zombie army.

  BUT THE little shop, set back from the side street and looking ridiculously innocuous, would not get a visit from us that day.

  Marching back and forth in front of the little cement block building was a small mob carrying signs and sandwich boards. Protestors. “God Will Prevail,” and, “On Your Belly You Will Go.” “Drive Out the Serpents,” blared another, and, “Suffer the Witches to Burn!”

  There was even a man standing on a folding chair and yelling to all who would listen. “And the great dragon was thrown down,” he cried. “And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him!”

  The man was incredibly handsome, as such evangelical types are wont to be. He reminded me of Aaron Eckhart, the actor who played Harvey Dent in one of the Christopher Nolan Batman movies—I’m not sure which one. I mix the titles all up in my head. He was wearing a gray suit, of course, with a dark blue tie—I could tell that even from across the street—and I found myself hoping he was sweating his balls off. Not that he was. Preachers who knew they spoke the Word of God didn’t seem to sweat, not even in a revival tent on a morning when it was already topping a hundred degrees, even in the shade.

  I shook my head. I knew people like this. I’d seen them outside gay pride events.

  I took pictures. I even recorded a bit of it.

  And then Gay and I went home.

  I was tempted to stop for one more martini. But four is where I always forget the end of the evening, after all, and I had a story to write.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening researching voodoo online.

  The information was conflicting. Different essayists and bloggers couldn’t even agree on the spelling of the word. Besides “voodoo,” there was also “vodou,” “voudou,” “vodun,” “vudun,” “Vudu,” and hell, so many others. Even “hoodoo.”

  And yeah, Vudu was some kind of Internet service, wasn’t it?

  There was general finger-pointing as well, plus lots of “my-version-of-voodoo-is-better-than-your-version,” just like with every denomination of Christianity I’d ever seen. The Haitians said the New Orleans version was a bastardization of real voodoo, and the New Orleans “vodouisants” seemed to stick out their tongue and bang their assons all the louder—assons meaning ceremonial rattles. There was Santería as well, and apparently it was very different, and practitioners of either didn’t appreciate being lumped together with the other.

  I couldn’t find any real information on a Baron Mange Key, although there was a reference to a Baron Manjè Kè. I could only wonder if he was the same guy. There was almost nothing on him at all except that he was a part of the whole voodoo thing. He seemed to be someone you didn’t want to mess with.

  I found out that the serpent shouter was quoting from Revelation 12:9. It had nothing to do with voodoo or snakes or anything creepy like that. It was a total out-of-context rant that in reality had to do with the Roman Empire being the devil or some such thing. But hey, taking verses out of context seemed to be commonplace. My mother had certainly done a lot of it in her time. I don’t like to read the Bible. Far too much of it had been pressed on me—read: shoved down my throat—when I was growing up. And Revelation had always been the most confusing and scary part of the whole damned book.

  After reading all I could read about voodoo online, I headed over to Video Obsession and rented everything I could find. Luckily, Blockbuster hadn’t killed the independent store—due mainly to the gay porn and movies like I was renting. Voodoo Island. The Zombie King. The Skeleton Key. Isle of the Snake People. I Walked With a Zombie. And yup, even The Serpent and the Rainbow, which was supposedly based on a true story. I watched them all night, drinking lots of coffee from The Shepherd’s Bean, often with my finger on the fast-forward button. I only had to watch a small part of The Believers because it turned out that movie was all about Santería, and yeah, that was something different.

  There was one powerful line from the movie though: “Name me one religion where atrocities have not been committed in the name of a god.”

  It made me think. What religion, indeed.

  But still. Human sacrifice?

  The Internet said vodouisants didn’t practice human sacrifice. Of course, it also said Herb Morrison was fired for going off the air when he was covering the crash of the Hindenburg. So, what to believe?

  Or maybe this murder wasn’t voodoo, vodou, Vudu—whatever—at all? Maybe it was Santería after all?
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br />   I guess I was going to have to go to Lucky Charms.

  So early in the morning, exhausted but pumped up on caffeine, I put together a story I hoped Mencken could tolerate and sent it off, along with an e-mail that said I’d talk to the owner of Lucky Charms.

  “You read that right,” I wrote. “Kansas City has a voodoo shop, and the only reason I haven’t talked to the owner yet is because the protestors wouldn’t let me by.” It was a bald-faced lie, of course, but I had to say something he might accept.

  Lucky Charms had a website—who doesn’t these days?—and I knew they would be open at 11:00 a.m., and I planned to be there with bells and rattles.

  After I got some sleep, that is. Although that turned out to be sleep filled with dreams of zombies and a strange-looking black man with a crow on his shoulder and a bright red heart painted on his face.

  THERE WAS nothing about Lucky Charms that was anything like I expected. Even the building, which I could see, now that the protestors were gone, was rather uninteresting. It was a simple cinderblock, shoebox-shaped structure, the front a pale butter yellow color along with the store’s name in large green letters that stretched from one side to the other. Someone had also painted a large four-leaf clover (the easier to fool Gay into looking for St. Patrick’s Day decorations), what I think was supposed to be a rabbit’s foot, a horseshoe (end’s facing upward, of course), a lady bug (I wasn’t sure why), a rainbow (gay friendly?) and a penny on the facade.

  It looked nothing like Marie Laveau’s shop in New Orleans. I’d stopped in front of it once when I had gone to Southern Decadence—the big gay version of Mardi Gras that often attracted as many as 125,000 people. I even peeked inside the place but hadn’t gone in like some of my friends. The small, white, weatherworn building with the black shutters had creeped me out a little bit.

  Lucky Charms, on the other hand, looked harmless. I could see how Gay hadn’t realized what lay within. How many times had I passed it and not even noticed it was there?