Bones

by Eli Easton

  “Yes,” I said. That was exactly what I thought. “And people like my mother are so afraid of dying that they find a religion that assures them that there is some kind of life after death.”

  “I take it your mother thinks you’re going to hell because you’re gay?”

  I nodded.

  “Vodou welcomes homosexuals. We make the prettiest altars.” He laughed.

  My eyes went wide.

  “In fact, some say the Lwa Ezili Danto is a lesbian.”

  “So in your case, you just found a religion that says it’s okay to be gay,” I said, my filter once more failing to activate. “It’s all the same thing.”

  “Maybe. But I’ve experienced things, Taylor. Things I can’t explain. I’ve seen things. I’ve seen people ridden by the Lwa.”

  “Ridden?”

  “Possessed. I’ve seen them do things that people can’t do. I saw a man take hot peppers and rub them in his eyes and they didn’t even water. He yanked his pants down and rubbed them all over his cock and balls. And when he came out of it an hour later, he was perfectly fine. Had no idea anything had happened.”

  I looked away. Crazy. It sounded crazy. It opened up too many possibilities. The least being that the peace I had made with myself by throwing out the possibilities of a “God” might have been hasty.

  “And what about my cousin?” Myles held up a finger. “A guy I thought was Catholic, pointing me to Papa Legba? Here my cousin had been practicing vodou all these years, and I had no idea.”

  “Well, it isn’t exactly a religion people have bumper stickers for,” I said.

  “W.W.P.L.D?” he asked.

  I looked at him confused.

  “What Would Papa Legba Do?”

  I laughed despite myself. “Yes.”

  Myles leaned on the table again and stared into my eyes.

  I felt my dick stir. I forced myself to look away.

  “It could just be coincidence, you know,” I said. “Your cousin being into voodoo.”

  “And my dreams?”

  “You just read about this Papa dude once and forgot about it. Then you broke up with your first love and got drunk and had a weird dream.”

  “And the guy with the hot peppers?”

  I turned back to him. “You know they were hot peppers? They could have been any kind of pepper. Did you touch them? Did you try one?”

  “I smelled them,” he said. “No way was I going to try one. I don’t have the taste for hot and spicy like my grandmother. Her étouffée set my tongue on fire even when I was a kid.”

  “The guy could have switched them. Used sleight of hand.”

  Myles sighed. “Yes. I suppose.”

  “And the human mind is capable of some pretty weird stuff. There have been religious fanatics doing all kinds of wild things since religion was invented. Walking on hot coals, lying down on beds made of nails. And those Catholics who manifested the stigmata. Hands and feet bleeding. Hysteria. It doesn’t mean that there is a God or that there is anything after we die.”

  I wound to a stop. Shit. Why did I do that? I wondered. Mr. Hottie was looking at me with sex in his eyes, and I had gone and acted like a fool. Talk about a mood-messer-upper.

  “Well, Taylor. I do believe there is life after death. I know what I know. I know that through vodou. The other religions? They never interested me. My mom sent me to Sunday school when I was little, but she never went to church. She didn’t care when I stopped going. And then… well then, Papa Legba. Less than a week later, I found a teacher—right out of the blue. I never looked back. It was like I had no real life before vodou. It was like before then, I was only waiting for my life to begin….”

  Myles drew in a long, deep breath, smiled, and took a drink of his coffee. After what seemed like an hour, he turned back to me. “Above all, Taylor, vodou is about the spirits of your ancestors. Not only the Lwa, but our personal family dead. They’re there. They see us and want to help us. The vodou religion is about keeping family with you, in your thoughts and in your heart. It’s about preserving the love of family. Public ceremonies are for the Lwa, but for me, for practitioners, the most important spirits are always those of our family.”

  I bit the insides of my mouth. Closed my eyes. Forced them back open and looked at the sexy man sitting across the table from me. There was such passion in his eyes, in his expression. But a peace as well.

  Had I ever seen my mother look peaceful?

  Boy! What would she think if she saw me sitting here today? Ha! Not only with a man, but a practitioner of vodou! She would roll in her grave. Or in the grass of paradise, or wherever she was.

  I sighed. Religious crap. “Have you ever been ridden?”

  “Not by the Lwa,” he said, and wagged his eyebrows.

  I grinned.

  “So the evil stuff. That’s all Hollywood?”

  He sighed. “Well….”

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, I’d be lying if I said that. It’s like that thing about the news only covering NAMBLA—the North American Man/Boy Love Association. There are Lwa who run hot.”

  “Hot?”

  “There are Lwa that are more forceful and ready to do violence. I don’t have anything to do with them. Only the most trained should approach them. There is just no reason to call upon Bawon Kriminel, or Bakalou Baka, or especially Linglessou Basin-Sang. His name means Bucket-of-Blood.”

  I froze. Bucket-of-Blood? I thought about the buckets at the murder sites. “What about Baron Manjè Kè?”

  Myles eyes went wide. “What do you know about Baron Manjè Kè?” He pronounced the name much more exotically than I had.

  I gulped. “Just wondering?”

  Myles shook his head. “I wouldn’t wonder about the Heart Eater, if I were you.”

  Heart eater? Should I tell him about the missing hearts? Wait. He should know, right? It was in the papers. In my stories. Surely he’d read them?

  “Are you hungry?” Myles asked.

  “What?”

  “I’ve got a lasagna I made last night. I could throw it in the oven—only take about an hour or so.”

  “Lasagna?” I asked stupidly.

  “You were expecting maybe jambalaya?”

  I grinned, suddenly feeling more at ease. “Maybe.”

  “My jambalaya’s not bad. But my lasagna is better. And it’s ready.”

  “Okay.” I said. “And maybe I can have some of that New Orleans coffee?”

  “That’s for next time,” Myles said with a flashing grin.

  Next time? I returned his grin.

  And with that thought in my head, and all too happy to stop thinking about a Baron who eats hearts, we amscrayed to Myles’s apartment.

  IT WAS a nice little place, a six-unit brick building a few blocks from Troost. The kitchen was tiny, as it was in most of the old apartment buildings built at the turn of the last century, mine included. But whereas mine was a disaster, his was an organized miracle. That he’d made something that I found as complicated and messy as lasagna in such a small area was a wonder to me.

  “The secret is you don’t cook the pasta ahead of time,” Myles said. “You prepare everything the night before—layering like usual, meat, cheese, lasagna pasta—but you use the pasta dry. During the night, the pasta absorbs moisture from the sauce. None of it gets broken or shredded that way.”

  “Hmmm…,” I said. “Of course, it’s not a secret now.”

  “It is if you don’t tell,” he said and then shocked the shit out of me by kissing me. Not on the mouth, on the tip of the nose, but it was a kiss! That guy had kissed me.

  While the lasagna cooked, and after he cut up some bread and slathered it with garlic butter and set it aside to pop in the oven at the last minute, he poured us a couple of cocktails—rum, of course—and we went out onto his balcony.

  “You know, I’d never guess you were into vodou. You. Your apartment. It doesn’t look the least… ah….”

  “Vodou-ie?”
Myles asked, giving me a goofy grin.

  I shook my head. “Not the least bit.”

  “But you saw the saints?”

  I stopped, turned around, and looked back through the glass doors. Had I?

  “There’s one right here,” Myles said, and pointed to a small figurine on the ledge of the balcony. It looked a lot like a statue of the Virgin Mary, except she was black. “Our Lady of Czestochowa, the Polish black Madonna, represents Ezili Danto.”

  “The lesbian Lwa,” I said.

  “Exactly.” His smile got bigger. “You remembered. Some people think of her as an evil spirit, all rage and anger. When she was alive, it is said she was instrumental in the Haitian revolution and that slavers cut out her tongue for what she did. But she is a loving mother and gives her children the strength to face any obstacle. She can be a fierce warrior, but she is a faithful protector and fights hard for her devotees. She is one of my patrons, and I’ve been praying to her a lot these last few days.”

  “I—I see.”

  “I can show you my altar if you want.”

  “That’s up to you.”

  He looked thoughtful for a moment. “Maybe tomorrow,” he said. “I have my reasons.”

  I didn’t care what his reasons were. I just knew he’d used the word “tomorrow,” and I was kind of hoping he was thinking what I was thinking.

  We sat and chatted, about things vodou and non-vodou, and watched people walking their dogs—Kansas City was a very dog-friendly city. A man across the street worked on his glorious garden. Most of the flowers were done for the year, but he had some rose bushes that were going full guns and some tall purple daisy-like flowers that were a cool splendor.

  I told Myles that the job at the Chronicle had brought me to Kansas City. After my mother died, I had to get out of Chicago. I’d been working at a small city paper in the suburbs, doing mostly human-interest stories, the feel-good kind. The ones that made you smile or cry happy tears.

  “Not vodou-sacrifice stories,” Myles said.

  “People who practice vodou don’t sacrifice people,” I informed him.

  His eyes flashed. “Really? That’s good to know. I wouldn’t want to sleep with a guy who might try to cut my heart out.”

  My heart pounded—in my chest (where it belonged).

  I forced myself not to think about what he’d said and thought about something he’d said before instead. “Earlier. You were talking about being… ridden? By the Lwa?”

  He nodded.

  “But you never have been?”

  “No,” he said, a sad tone to his voice. “I’ve come close, I think. A couple of times. I was in a fete, a vodou ritual, and I was walking back and forth, and then my foot, my right foot, just suddenly stuck to the ground. I almost tripped. And I felt this… this tingling running up my leg, and I knew, knew it was about to happen, and I….”

  “What?” I asked, gooseflesh running up my arms.

  “I panicked.” He sighed. “And it stopped.”

  “And you want that to happen? You want to be ridden by a Lwa?”

  “Of course I do. I live for it. Wait for it. What a way to serve the spirits!” He went silent, and I had no fucking clue what to say to that. I was pretty creeped out, to tell the truth. “When they come through, when they ride someone, then they are able to talk to us, help us, give us advice.”

  “I see.” God. It was starting to become more than I could take.

  “So what made you want to do the crime stuff?” Myles asked me, suddenly changing the subject. “Why are you interested in vodou killers and all that stuff?”

  “I’m tired of the bake sales and turtle races and stories about cops rescuing Chihuahuas off busy freeway medians. No one reads that stuff.”

  “I do,” Myles said, leaning back and putting his feet up on the balcony ledge. He’d kicked off his shoes, and by Christ, even his feet were sexy. I’d never really been into toes before, but damn. There is an exception to everything. They were long, but not too long, and deep tan color, with just a bit of hair on each knuckle—nothing apelike. I found myself imagining all kinds of things I could do to them.

  “Earth to Taylor?”

  “Huh?” I jumped and looked into his face. Myles was grinning mischievously. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

  “I said I like those kinds of stories. I don’t even read the news anymore because all it’s about is war, and school shootings, and vodou serial killers.” He shook his head. “I found the minute I stopped reading that stuff, my spirit lifted, and I was better able to face even the worst of days—like going in to work and finding protestors outside my shop.”

  “Don’t you think we need to know about war and school shootings?” I said defensively.

  Myles leaned backed and put his arms back over his head. “I don’t seem to. I get through my day just fine without hearing about the horrible things human beings do to one another. Why doesn’t the news cover more stories about cops rescuing Chihuahuas off busy freeway medians? That’s the stories I would read.”

  “You know you’re basically telling me that what I want to do is a waste of time, right?” I couldn’t help but feel a little attacked.

  Myles looked over at me. “Well, one good thing about your job….”

  “What’s that?”

  “It brought you to me.” And he leaned forward and kissed me. Not on the tip of the nose either. Right on the mouth.

  And oh, those lips. Gentle at first, then quickly demanding my full participation, tongue asking for entrance into my mouth. I gave it and answered with tongue of my own. My cock shifted to full hardness, throbbing in my pants. By then his hand was cupping my face, and I was all but dizzy.

  Myles pulled back. Then he kissed the end of my nose. And then the son of a gun leaned back in his seat again, head resting in his crossed arms, as casual as could be. As if he hadn’t just given me about the hottest kiss of my life. He flashed me an innocent look. Except there was a decided bulge in the crotch of his pants as well.

  I’m going to get laid, I thought. With one of the most beautiful men I’ve ever seen. For some reason, I flashed on that boy in summer camp—so dark brown from the sun. How his high, round ass was so white against the rest of his tan, tan skin, and how it was red by the time we had taken each other’s virginity. How funny it was that he couldn’t sit down that night (for more than one reason) and how fun it was when we snuck out of our cabin and down to the shower house, and I rubbed burn cream all over those solid, round mounds of flesh.

  I wanted Myles. I wanted him that minute. Fuck the lasagna. It could burn to ash. And I’m not even the kind who jumps into bed with just any guy at the drop of a—no, who am I kidding? I am that kind of man. I am a man, after all. Men think with our dicks, even if we don’t always do what they tell us to do.

  And then there is the fact that I am a gay man. So no hetero flowers are required.

  Plus, I’m thirty and fucking never had a boyfriend last longer than a few months, and goddamned if I know why. I’m a nice guy. I’d date me. And I’m not exactly a “ten,” but I’m not ugly. Men don’t pound on my door, but I don’t exactly have to wait until closing time to get lucky either.

  So if I can’t get a man who wants to marry me, I’ve learned to settle for one-night stands. Forget about movies and popcorn. If I didn’t pounce on opportunities, I’d never have sex. And isn’t sex better than nothing? At least it’s some human contact.

  Yes. I wanted Myles. And I wanted him now.

  “Later,” Myles said with a knowing grin. “We have all night.”

  “Why?” I blurted, that echo still in my head.

  Myles turned those dark eyes on me. “Why wait? Why, because you’re adorable.”

  “Me?” I squeaked. Oh, he could say that all night!

  He sat up and turned in his chair. “Yes, you. What do you think?”

  “I think your gris-gris are worth a hundred times what you charge for them,” I said happily.

 
; “Does that mean I get you?” Those eyes were summer lightning again. I could hardly breathe.

  “You had me at ‘May I help you,’” I managed.

  Myles chuckled. “I wanted you the second you walked in the door of my shop.” He leaned in and kissed me again. Not like the last time, but not a kiss on the nose either. Then again, with just a touch of tongue. “I think you are so hot,” he whispered. “I’m kinda hoping you have a hairy chest. I keep thinking I see a bit peeking out of the top of your shirt.”

  “Hairy chest,” I whispered.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I—I have a hairy chest.”

  “Oh good,” Myles said.

  Somehow we made it through dinner.

  And the loving was good.

  I KNEW it was a dream. I don’t know if I have ever actually been aware I was dreaming before, but this time I did. It was night and there was a clear sky and a full moon shining down on the road where I was walking. The air was full of night sounds. The reeeeeeee-reeeeee of crickets, the chir-up, chir-up of frogs, and even a deep echoing hoo! hoo! of an owl (which, if you have ever heard one, you would never think it sounds like the supposed questioning who? of children’s stories).

  Then, up ahead, I thought I could make out two people. There was a flash of fear, and then I knew who one of them was, and the fear went away. Myles. He was too far away to tell from sight—especially under the silver-blue light of the moon—but I knew anyway, the way we know such things in dreams. And as I walked, I realized who was with him. The man had a wide-brimmed hat and a wreath of smoke around his face. It was Papa Legba. They were standing at a crossroads (with street signs that said weird things, like “awake” and “living” and “death”) and I found myself speeding up, not slowing down, compelled to get to them as quickly as possible.

  Suddenly, I was afraid, but it was not of the two men waiting ahead—one of them my now-lover and the other a vodou saint. No. The fear was because of the something I suddenly knew was behind me. Right behind me. Close and getting closer. I wanted to turn, to look back, but I was too frightened. What if it was close enough to touch me? What if I tripped and fell?