Marie had never hated her mother more than at that moment. “No,” she said, “I’d rather die here, alone, then be with you.” Momma Oya just smiled.
“I gwan an talk to des Doctor. You comin’ home with me. You should be with family at the end.” Momma Oya bared her yellow teeth in a grotesque smile. Marie turned her head away.
But dark power also flowed through Marie’s veins. When she turned back and saw Momma Oya’s man standing there, she realized that her destiny wasn’t the kind of thing she needed permission to fulfill. She smiled at him, cut her right palm open with her left thumbnail and started a spell of her own. Somehow, deep inside her, she knew that this time the magic would work.
When Marie got home, she was surprised to discover that The Nameless Man had not left. One night, he came to Marie and thanked her for breaking Momma Oya’s spell. He kissed her on the lips softly and Marie felt the pain of lust more keenly than the tearing ache in her guts. Even as her body was wrecked and dying, it wanted him. After all, Marie was 18, and he was 25, if that. He was one of the most beautiful men she had ever seen. And she had never been with a man.
To keep the electricity in her body from showing on her face, she asked him, “If the spell she cast on you is gone, why don’t you flee?”
The Nameless Man gave her a sad smile and asked, “Where a simple man gonna hide from a witchy woman like that? No, chere, dere nothing we can do. We both powerless agin her.”
Marie knew he was right, but she looked up at him with her soft eyes. Maybe it was a precise mixture of lust and pity. Maybe it was the beauty of youth wrapped in the wings of the angel of death. For whatever reason, in that instant, Marie’s eyes cast another spell. The Nameless Man fell in love with her on the spot.
Their coupling was tender, savage and irrevocable.
Later that night, The Rat came to The Nameless Man and made him an offer. The Nameless Man knew that rat for what it was, and was so terrified he was sure he would not be able to speak. It was no impediment. The Rat and the man reached an agreement.
The next day the cancer was still in the house, but it had switched stomachs. Now Momma Oya was sick and dying. Marie was horrified. She was horrified that she might have done this to her mother. She was horrified that it might be another one of her mother’s tricks and that she would be struck down by the awful pain again. But when The Nameless Man told her that Kalfou, the God of Crossroads and Bargains, had come to him and made a deal, she was horrified at how relieved she was.
They had two weeks. Two weeks of bliss. They made Marie’s room a sauna in which every drop of young lust was sweated out of their bodies. Marie came to know what it is to love a man. But in all that time, in all those quiet hours lying in each other’s arms, The Nameless Man would never tell her what bargain he had made with the spirit who had appeared to him in the shape of a rat.
Miraculously, Momma Oya went gently. One night, when Marie took her dinner, instead of cursing and throwing things, Momma Oya said, “Don’t be so sad childe. It couldn’t end no other way for me. The life I did, the things I done. If it have to be like dis, it have to be like dis.” Marie thought it was a trick like everything else. But it was not.
Across a series of days, her mother told her everything. How she had been molested as a child by her own father. How she had run away from home and was taken in by the old woman who lived down by the river. How the old woman scared her father so much that he left her alone. She told Marie how she wanted the power, needed the power, to feel safe. In the end, though, nothing had made her feel safe. And, sooner or later, she saw her father in the face of every man she had been with.
Marie said nothing. She listened from a safe distance and waited for the other shoe to drop. At the end, right before Momma Oya died, she cursed her daughter. Like all things to come out of that hateful woman’s mouth, it came out sideways. She wrapped the curse in prophecy.
“You tink you gwanna lay with that warm strong man after I’m gone. No. No, Childe. He leave you as soon as I’m cold. And nothing you can do will ever bring him back to you. No, all you gonna get to love is a cold man with a bitter heart. A man dead but not dead.” Marie screamed that Momma Oya was a liar and ran from the room.
That night, The Nameless Man held her in his arms and told her that he would never leave her. That Momma Oya told lies because she was old and bitter and evil to the core. He wiped away Marie’s tears. They made love again and then fell asleep.
The next morning, Momma Oya was dead. But when Marie came back to wake The Nameless Man and tell him, he was already gone. The whites of his eyes rolled back into his head. His body was still there, but Kalfou had taken his name. In his culture, it meant that The Rat had his soul.
When Marie had finished her story, nobody knew quite what to say. I looked over at The Nameless Man. He had drool running down the front of his shirt.
“I have to find some way to kill the Russian,” I said.
“I don’t care how many men you kill,” said Marie, “I just want to get The Rat. He betrayed us. He will betray you as well.”
I looked at The Nameless Man for a long time and thought about how there were things that were worse than death, worse even than the strange state I found myself in. I must have thought for a long time because Bruce kicked me and asked, “Well?’
“Yeah. Yeah, sure. For old Bob here? Yeah, I’ll get revenge for Bob, too.”
Marie didn’t smile, but she nodded.
“Are you in?” I asked Bruce. He looked at Marie and his lust answered for him.
“Yeah, man, this shit is wrong. And it’s gotta stop.” He was kind of an idiot.
“Okay,” I said, “We’re gonna kill The Rat. What’s the plan?”
* * * * *
Chapter 14
We cleared a space in the cluttered living room. Odds and ends and relics and bits were all pushed to the side. When I asked Marie what we were doing, all she said was, “We’re gwan summon a powerful spirit.” I noticed that her accent was thicker. I was sure that it was part and parcel of the mumbo-fucking-jumbo, but what was I supposed to do? Things were weird. In the words of the great Gonzo himself, Hunter S. Thompson, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
As for Bruce, all he wanted to do was look at Marie’s perfect breasts as they rolled about in the loose cotton dress she was wearing. Had I been like that when I had been alive? Probably. How could a warm-blooded man resist?
Marie lit a fire in a bowl of hand-hammered iron, and placed it in the middle of the room. We sat around it while Marie beat out a complicated rhythm on a drum that was covered with some kind of skin. I don’t know what she was burning, but a strong, strange earthy scent filled the air. Seconds bled into minutes. Maybe an hour passed, but it might have been the blink of an eye. It was like that.
Marie began to groan from deep in her belly. The drum fell away from her hands as the rhythm of the drumming seemed to pass into her body. She twisted and writhed in a fashion that was at once painful and erotic. Bruce was so distracted that he did not notice when Bob, the comatose man who still sat at the kitchen table, joined in with a series of wordless barks.
Finally, Marie let out a loud cry and collapsed on the dirty carpet, her dress soaked through with sweat. Bruce and I looked at each other and then around the room. In a perfect anticlimax, the flame that had danced in the iron bowl sputtered and went out.
I opened my mouth and started to say, “Well that was a complete waste of time.” I was interrupted by a knock at the door, so all I got out was “wuh-” I just sat there with my mouth hanging open, not knowing what to say.
Marie motioned to Bruce to open the door. Bruce shook his head no.
“Oh, for cryin’ out loud,” I said. “Come in.”
The door opened, and in stepped a man who was dressed like a cross between the Mad Hatter and an escapee from a New Wave punk band circa 1978. There was, of course, the top hat, a leather jacket, a t-shirt that seemed to be fashioned from an actual Brit
ish flag and jeans of an impossibly tight variety. The man looked heroin thin, but there was something almost too alive about his eyes.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“What do I want? You’re the Happy Jasper what called me,” he said. I looked at Marie. She looked back at me and shrugged.
“You know,” he said, managing to sound exasperated and amused at the same time, “The summoning and all that? What? Ye expected a puff of smoke?”
“I thought voodoo spirits were supposed to be black,” said Bruce.
“Clearly, there are more things in heaven and earth than what’s dreamt of in your philosophy,” the man in leather and the battered top hat said with a smile.
“Okay, who are you?” I asked. “Who is he?” I asked Marie. She just shook her head and put it down on the floor. This was grand. What a help the crazy voodoo broad was turning out to be. How screwed? All the way.
“Who am I then? That’s an impertinent question from one so young as yourself. And the answer might take more time than you have, my son. So for the sake of moving the polite discourse along a bit, you can call me JACK.”
He took off his hat and bowed deeply. There was something about the way he said “Jack” As if it was something to be proud of. More than a name. A legacy, an identity and ringing far, far off, an ancient war cry.
“So, are you here to help us?” asked Bruce.
“‘Help you? Help YOU? Thought never crossed my mind until you mentioned it.”
“What spirit are you Jack? What do you do?”
“All trades really. That’s why they call me Jack, isn’t it?” And here he smiled a smile that was hideous in its feigned innocence. “But I think what you need, is a man what’s good with a knife. No leech will cure what ails you. Especially you, sir,” he said, raising his voice to address The Nameless Man. “No, no, I should think not. What you need is a real artist. A sure-handed surgeon with the courage to make the cuts that need making. Do the needful, as it were.”
“Wait, why are you here?”
Jack smiled wistfully. “Well, I was somewhere else, doing… well, it scarcely matters now, when I suddenly found myself at the bottom of a dark alley. Not terribly unusual that, but what was curious were the strong urges I was having to climb, to ascend the stair and knock on this very door. So I follow me urges -- always do you see, that’s what gives a man his power. So I knock on the door and then your voice saying come in. And here I am in the colonies. So your dress fits as well as mine, so to speak.”
“Great,” I said to Marie, “You summoned a chimney sweep.”
“I take exception to that remark,” he said, bristling and straightening his battered leather jacket, “I’m no working man, I’m a genteel man, I am.”
I said, “You are the chimney sweep from Tim Burton’s wet dream remake of Mary Poppins.” He was on me before I could blink. As he held a straight razor to my throat, I realized I had never seen anyone, or anything, move so quickly, yet be so utterly at ease. Marie breathed in sharply. Bruce scuttled backward like a fat, fleshy crab.
“Just a little off the back and sides,” I said in a bored tone. ‘Cause screw him. Maybe I didn’t have any clue who he was, but he had no idea what I was. How could he? I didn’t even know.
“Oh, you’re a special one then,” Jack said as he flicked a few strands of hair from my face. It was the kind of thing that could be mistaken for a loving gesture. He waved the razor away from my neck using only his wrist. “Not like them, then? Soft, warm, full o’ red sap, the juice of life.”
I just looked at him. Fairly cool, but having no idea how in the hell I was going to speak if he cut out my vocal cords. Maybe I’d get one of those vibrating boxes that old smokers used. As if I wasn’t scary enough to small children already.
The razor disappeared. In its place he offered his hand for a shake. “You’re one of the brotherhood then, a fellow traveller. Pleased to meet you, uh...”
I took his hand and as he shook it vigorously, I said, “Dan. My Name is Dan.”
Jack’s face fell a little bit at that. “Well you’ll be needing an alias then. A nom de guerre as it were?”
“So you’ll help us?” I asked as he climbed off of me.
“’Help them? Your friends?”
I nodded, realizing how strange it was to have friends for the first time -- friends of necessity, but real friends nonetheless -- only after I was dead.
Jack shook his head quickly back and forth. “No, no, no, you’ll not want me to give them my assistance. But you. Ye might learn a fthing or two. Walk with me. I get nervous without the fog in me lungs and the feel of the cobbles betwixted me toes.”
“It’s New York,” I protested, “There aren’t any cobblestones…”
But he was gone and my words addressed an open, empty door.
* * * * *
Chapter 15
The wooden heels of Jack’s boots made a strange sound as he walked through the city streets. His steps were light and fast and I struggled to keep up. He took turn after turn after turn, moving through crowds, alleys, cross-town traffic, and restaurants all with equal ease.
I have no idea how long we walked.
Finally, the sound of his boots changed. Somehow, the sound of his footfalls became more right, more fitting.
“Ah,” he said, “That’s better.”
I looked down and I’ll be damned if we weren’t walking along a street paved with large round stones. “Cobblestones?”
“They’re here my, young friend. Not on many streets, and none of them are long or, perhaps long for this world, but they’re. Here. And ‘tis long enough to serve our promenade. Now, questions.”
“Are you a good guy or a bad guy?”
“My son, my son, it’s not quite as simple as all that-- there’s a bit more commerce betwixt the light and the dark than yout might imagine. For example–” And here he did a little jig on the uneven stones, “Imagine I was a murderer most foul. Not a Bonny Jack, a Dandy Jack as you see before you, but a Red Jack, covered in the blood. And if in my revels, a small dove was to come and sit on my shoulder and say, “No, this one, no that one,” and move my hand ever so slightly. Well then, what’s it matter to me? I’m on the job anyway. And happy to help those that help me.”
“So what are you saying?”
“One hand washes the other, give and take. But your rat friend, he’s not playing along is he? He’s in it for himself. Got what you might call, ambition.”
“And what are you in it for?”
“Ho, ho, too right. Too right. Clever boy. It’s a wonder you didn’t manage to live longer. Well, you might say I’m grateful to you for bringing me back. But you didn’t manage to do that all on you own. So, let’s choose to believe that I’m here as a favor. Tell you what’s what -- sort you out a bit.”
“You’re a teacher?”
At this, Jack barked a laugh. “That coat doesn’t quite fit me does it? Look, if you’d know the truth of it, you’ve been presented,” and here a nervous little courtly bow, “presented as it were, with a marvelous opportunity. You’ve been given the chance to widen your horizons. It’s a great adventure.”
“That’s pretty easy for you to say, you’re still warm-blooded.”
“Oh, Dan. Daniel – you know that name doesn’t suit you. You really need another. A coronation name.”
“It’s my name.”
“It’s a shame is what it is.”
“Are you going to tell me what I’m mixed up in or not?”
“Alright, alright. It’s like this. Good, Evil, they don’t exist.”
“What do you mean they don’t exist?”
“Well, I mean, they exist in the storybooks, of course. But out here, in the night air, there’s no such thing. And it’s confusing, because people have instincts. Take this healthy lass,” Jack said, pointing to a women through a bay window. Her flesh pressed against the strictures of a woman’s business suit like meat pressing against a sausage casing as
she hunched over a laptop computer.
“You see, she’s naught but a ball of stress that one. She’s worried about her job, she’s worried about having kids, about eating too much – but her body don’t know any of that. All her body knows, especially that grey bit at the top of her spine, is that it’s stressed. The same as if a tiger was trying to eat her. And so it reacts accordingly. Adrenaline, a desire to fight or flee…”
He turned to me and summed up his argument, “And there you have it, she’s nothing more than a prisoner of her constructs. More animal than human, despite what you may have been led to believe from her puffy opposable thumbs.”
“Yeah, she’s screwed just like me. Most people are. What’s your point about good and evil?”
“Well, it’s an instinct isn’t it? Just like the stress. See at one time, it had a point. Ye know, running from Tigers and all that. A mother’s insane courage when her child is attacked. But this good and evil, it don’t serve anymore.”
“But, Vlade isn’t evil. The Rat, okay, I’ll buy that he’s evil.”
“And where does that leave you?”
“Man, I’m just out here, doing what I have to do.”
“But you’ve killed, I can smell it on you. And you’ve felt nothing of it. Done it as neatly as parting your hair. Does that make you evil?”
I thought about it for a minute, “Well, I didn’t have a choice. I mean, I had to.”
“And ‘ow do you know that The Rat isn’t just doing what he has to do? I’d hate to stand in the dock with that as my defense. But they’ll never catch Auld Jack, he’s far too wiley for that.”
I hate people who refer to themselves in the third person. Also, I hate the English. And finally, I hate people who can never seem to come to the point. Auld Jack was winning on all counts.
“So there’s no good. No evil. Then what’s the point?”
“The point, me lad, is that it’s what you make of it. What you choose to believe.”
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