Chapter 47
Several overturned ashtrays were on the floor. It was the work of a moment to locate a cigarette b.u.t.t, a matchbook with the Gateway Bar logo on it. The matches were damp and sticky. Harris put the b.u.t.t in his mouth and tried to light one of the matches with his left, b.l.o.o.d.y hand, his right clenched on the trigger of the tranquilizer gun. He bent several matches before giving up. He switched the match to his right hand, still holding the gun, but not in a ready position, not with a finger on the trigger. He bent several matches before one flamed.
The loa charged immediately. "Filthy poison! Breath of h.e.l.l!" she screamed. She was old and huge, and her hatchet wavered over her head. There was no time to shoot. Harris rolled.
Harris rolled through the many-colored puddles and fountains of drink and immediately to his feet, shaky on his hurt knee. Before she could transform, before she could regroup herself for another charge, Harris shot her.
She was in the middle of a scream. She stopped, looked down to her right hip where the tranquilizer dart had hit her. Super Mario Brothers 2 celebrated with a little riff: Dee, dee, dee, dee, dee. A fountain of red grenadine sprang up. The loa raised the hatchet, took a step into the fountain. The petals of red flowers exploded around her and fell onto her like rain. She threw the hatchet. Her aim was off; it clattered harmlessly a few feet behind him. She took a second step and then fell in his direction. One moment she was an enormous shadow and the grenadine fountain rose behind her like the distant fireworks of the Fourth of July and the smell of cherries was everywhere; the next she lay in a black heap on the floor, and the fountain had trickled to nothing. But in the tiny, invisible s.p.a.ce between those moments, the loa left the body.
Her z'etoile rose from the black heap and spun above it. Harris could see it, like a star in the room. It came toward him slowly, backing him up until his heel touched the hatchet. Then it came faster, fast as falling, blazing larger and unbearably hot. His left hand found the black toad in his pocket so that, at the last possible moment, the moment before contact, when he threw up his hands to protect his face from the searing heat, the toad was in them. The z'etoile swerved and entered the toad instead of him.
Harris dropped the toad to the floor, grabbed the hatchet, and smashed with the blunt end. The toad skittered, and he followed it over the sticky floor among the maraschino cherries, smas.h.i.+ng again and again, until the toad cracked in one long rent down the middle and went to pieces. The z'etoile tried to leap away, but it was in pieces too now, like the toad. It shot in many directions and entered video games and broken keyboards and customers and lounge rap singers and ashtrays, but only in subdued, confused sparkles. It was the best Harris could do. He lay down on the floor and imagined there were shoes, open-toed and pointy with nail polish on the toes, canvas and round-toed, leather and bootlike, all about him.
"Come on," someone said. It sounded like his mother, only she was speaking through a microphone. He must be late for school. The song from Super Mario Brothers 2 was playing in the background, but when wasn't it? Harris tried to open his eyes. He had no way of knowing if he'd succeeded or not. He didn't see his mother. He saw or imagined DEA agents attempting to lift the body of the huge woman from the floor. It took three of them. "Come on," someone said again, nudging him with a toe.
"I'm coming," said Harris, who refused to move.
Meanwhile, in an abandoned inner city warehouse...
The background is test tubes and microscopes and a bit of graffiti, visual, not verbal. A bald-headed man stands over a camp stove. He holds an eyedropper above a pot with green liquid inside. Steam rises from the pot. Three more drops, he thinks. He has a snake tattooed on his arm.
Knock, knock! "I said no interruptions," the man snarls. The liquid in the pot turns white.
The door opens. A shabby man enters, his clothes torn, his hair matted. "Give me some," the shabby man says.
The bald man laughs at him. "You can't afford this."
"I'll do anything," says the shabby man.
"This is special. This isn't for the likes of you."
"The likes of me?" The shabby man remembers a different life. There is a white house, a wife, two children, a boy and a girl. He is in a business suit, clean, carrying a briefcase. He comes home from work, and his children run to meet him. "Who made me into the likes of me?" the shabby man asks. There is a tear in the corner of one eye.
He lunges for the pot, takes a drink before the bald man can stop him. "Wha-?" the bald man says.
The shabby man clutches at his throat. "Arghh!" He falls to the ground.
The bald man tells him to get up. He kicks him. He takes his pulse. "Hmm. Dead," he says. He is thinking, I must have made it a little strong. Lucky I didn't try it myself. He goes back to his cooking. "Two drops," he says. He thinks, I'm going to need someone new to test it on.
Later that day...
The bald man is dressed in a winter coat. His tattoo is covered; he wears a hat. He enters a city park. A grandmotherly type drinks from the water fountain. She leans on a cane. Such a cold winter, she is thinking. A group of kids skateboard. "My turn!" one of them says.
The bald man in the hat approaches one of the kids. This kid is a little small, a little tentative. "Hey, kid," the bald man says. "Want to try something really great?"
The grandmother thinks, Oh, dear. She hobbles on her cane to a large tree, hides behind it.
"My mom says not to take anything from strangers," the kid says.
"Just a couple drops," the bald man wheedles. "It's as good as peppermint ice cream." He takes a little bottle from his pocket and uncorks it. He holds it out.
I shouldn't, the kid thinks, but he has already taken the bottle.
"Eeeagh!" Carry Nation emerges from behind the tree. Her cane has become a hatchet; her costume is a black dress with special pockets. "Son of Satan!" she screams, hurtling toward the bald man, hatchet up. Whooos.h.!.+ The hatchet takes off the bald man's hat. Kaboom! Carry strikes him with her fist. Kapow!
Colors happened on the inside of Harris's eyelids. Harsh, unnatural, vivid colors. Colors that sang and danced in chorus like Disney cartoons, dark colors for the ba.s.s voices, bright neons for the high notes. Harris was long past enjoying these colors. Someone had put Harris to bed, but it was so long ago Harris couldn't quite remember who. It might have been his mother. Someone had bandaged his hand and cleaned him up, although his hair was still sticky with liquor. Someone had apparently thought Harris might be able to sleep, someone who had clearly never dosed themselves with bufotenine. Never licked a toad in their life. Someone brought Harris soup. He stared at it, abandoned on the nightstand, thinking what a silly word soup was. He closed his eyes, and the colors sang it for him with full parts. A full choral treatment. Soup. Soup. Souped up. In the soup. Soupcon.
The phone rang, and the colors splashed away from the sound in an unharmonious babble of confusion. They recovered as quickly as the ringing stopped, re-formed themselves like water after a stone. Only one ring. Harris suddenly noticed other noises. The television in his
"That was your superior," she said. Harris laughed. Souperior. "He said to tell you, 'Package delivered.' He said you'd be anxious."
He wishes he worked for the CIA, the colors sang to Harris. Package delivered.
"Patrick." Harris's wife was touching his arm. She shook it a little. "Patrick? He's worried about you. He thinks you may have a drinking problem."
Harris opened his eyes and saw things with a gla.s.sy, weary clarity. Behind his wife was the Oprah show, her favorite. No wonder he hadn't noticed the television was on. Harris's mind was moving far too fast for television. Harris's mind was moving far too fast for him to be able to follow what his wife was saying. He had to force his mind back, remember where she thought he was in the conversation.
"I'm a moderate drinker," he said.
"He sent over a report. Last night. A report the government commissioned on moderate drinking. It's interesting. Listen." She had pages in her hand. Harris was pretty certain they hadn't been there before. They popped into her fingers before his very eyes. She ruffled through them, read, with one finger underlining the words. " 'To put it simply, people who drink a lot have many problems, but few people drink a lot.
" 'People who only drink a little have fewer problems, but there are a great many people who drink a little.
" 'Therefore, the total number of problems experienced by those who drink a little is likely to be greater than the total number experienced by those who drink a lot, simply because more people drink a little than a lot.'"
Harris was delighted with this. It made no sense at all. He was delighted with his wife for producing it. He was delighted with himself for hallucinating it. He would have liked to hear it again. He closed his eyes. The colors began singing obligingly. To put it simply, people who drink a lot have many problems, but few people drink a lot.
"All I had was a s.h.i.+rley Temple," Harris told his wife. He remembered the voices in the living room. "Do we have company?"
"Just some women from my cla.s.s," she answered. She put the report down uncertainly. "He's just worried about you, Patrick. As your supervisor, he's got to be worried. The stress of field work. It's nothing to be ashamed of, if you have a problem. You've handled it better than most."
Harris skipped ahead in this conversation to the point where he explained to her that he didn't have a drinking problem and she was persuaded. She would be persuaded. She was a reasonable woman and she loved him. He was too tired to go through it step by step. Now he was free to change the subject. "Why are there women in the living room?"
"We're just doing a project," his wife said. "Are you going to drink your soup?" Soup, soup, soup, the colors sang. Harris didn't think so. "Would you like to see the project?" Harris didn't think he wanted this either, but apparently he neglected to say so, because now she was back and she had different papers. Harris tried to read them. They appeared to be a cartoon.
"It's for the women's center," his wife said. "It's a Carry Nation/Superhero cartoon. I thought maybe you could help advise us on the drug stuff. The underworld stuff. When you're feeling better. We think we can sell it."
Harris tried to read it again. Who was the man in the hat? What did he have in his bottle? He liked the colors. "I like the colors," he said.
"Julie drew the pictures. I did the words."
Harris wasn't able to read the cartoon or look at the pictures. His mind wasn't working that way. Harris's mind was reading right through the cartoon as if it were a gla.s.s through which he could read the present, the past, and the future. He held it between himself and the television. There was a group of women on Oprah. They were all dressed like Carry Nation, but they had masks on their faces like the Lone Ranger, to protect their real ident.i.ties. They were postmenopausal terrorists in the war on drugs. A man in the audience was shouting at them.
"Do you know what I'm hearing? I'm hearing that the ends justify the means. I could hear that in Iraq. I could hear that in China."
The women didn't want to be terrorists. The women wanted to be DEA agents. Harris's supervisor was clearing out his desk, removing the pins from the map in his office as if casting some sort of reverse Voudon hex. He had lost his job for refusing to modify recruitment standards and implement a special DEA reentry training program for older women.
In a deserted field in Colombia, a huge woman gradually came to her senses. She stared at the clothing she was wearing. She stared around the Colombian landscape. "Where the h.e.l.l am I?" her ti bon ange asked. "Que pasa?"
From the safety of his jail cell, Manuel Noriega mourned for his lost yachts.
A woman in a wet T-s.h.i.+rt played a new video game in the dark back room of a bar. MY MOTHER TOLD ME TO BE GOOD, BUT SHE'S BEEN WRONG BEFORE, the T-s.h.i.+rt read. Bar-smasher was the name of the video game. A graphic of Carry Nation, complete with bonnet and hatchet, ran about evading the police and mobs of angry men. Five points for every bottle she smashed. Ten points a barrel. Fifty points for special items such as chandeliers and p.o.r.nographic paintings. She could be sent to jail three times. The music was a video version of "Who Hath Sorrow, Who Hath Woe." The woman in the T-s.h.i.+rt was very good at this game. She was a young woman, and men approved of her. Her boyfriend helped her put her initials on the day's high score, although anyone who gets the day's high score probably doesn't need help with the initials. She let him kiss her.
Harris was back in Panama, dancing and raising a loa. The Harris in Panama could not see into the future, but even if he could, it was already too late. Raising a loa had not been his real mistake. By the time the loa came, everything here had already occurred. Harris had made his real mistake when he took the toad. Up until that moment, Harris had always played by the rules. Harris had been seduced by a toad, and in yielding to that seduction he created a whole new world for himself, a world without rules, just exactly the sort of world in which Harris himself was unlikely to be comfortable.
"Come on," his wife said. "What do you really think?" She was so excited. He had never seen her so animated.
She was going to be old someday. Harris could see it lurking in her. Harris would still love her, but what kind of a love would that be? How male? How sufficient? These things Harris was unsure of. For these things he had to look into himself, and the cartoon looking gla.s.s didn't go that way.
He held the cartoon panels between himself and his wife and looked into her instead. He had never understood why Carry Nation appealed to her so. His wife was not religious. His wife enjoyed a bit of wine in the evening and thought what people did in the privacy of their own homes was pretty much their own business. Now he saw that what she really admired about Carry Nation was her audacity. Men despised Carry Nation, and Harris's wife admired her for that. She admired the way Carry didn't care. She admired the way Carry carried on. "I always look a fool," Carry wrote. "G.o.d had need of me and the price He exacts is that I look a fool. Of course, I mind. Anyone would mind. But He suffered on the cross for me. It is little enough to ask in return. I do it gladly."
"I know it's not literature," Harris's wife said, a bit embarra.s.sed. "We're trying to have an impact on the American psyche. Literature may not be the best way to do that anymore."
Harris's wife wanted to encourage other women not to care whether men approved of them or not, and she wanted and expected Harris to say he approved of this project.
He tried to focus again on the surface of the gla.s.s, on the cartoon panels. What nice colors.
"Kapow!" Harris said. "Kaboom!"
We come from the cemetery, We went to get our mother, h.e.l.lo mother the Virgin, We are your children, We come to ask your help, You should give us your courage.
-VOUDON SONG.
Chango Chingamadre, Dutchman, & Me.
R.V. BRANHAM.
Asi!"
Dutchman and me heard it, drawing closer.
"De a Pepe timbales!" Dutchman served one of her regulars-a patent attorney-his espresso. "Asi!" She made change. "Mira el H.P.!"
Dutchman hawked into the sink behind the bar, cleared her throat and covered her mouth before sneezing. She then turned to me: "Hey, M.E., make yourself useful and turn the friggin' record over."
M.E., that's me. Mervyn Eichmann. Now you know why I use the M.E. "De a Pepe cojones!"
I put the other side on, and gently slipped the needle onto the edge of that divine platter. Louis Armstrong to you, Sir. Call him Satchmo and you'll be on your a.s.s. "Potato Head Blues." (This was the D.B.A. Dutchman had used when she sailed into the rotten apple and decided to get a business s.h.i.+ngle and take over this dump-er, ah, bistro-serenaded by her flying phonograph and her flying 78's, inherited from her uncle, who'd drawn succor from them while stationed on the Maginot Line in the mid-thirties.) "DE A PEPE SANTOS COJONES!"
Who else, none-other-than El C.C., Chango Chingamadre, former Great Black Hope of Bebop, Newyorican Contingent, with a box, a big heavy box. He was a spidermonkey on the needle. A monkey with another monkey on his back. "On The Road," Chango Chingamadre declared.
"Cool it, babe," Dutchman told him. "Mistah Armstrong, he's swinging."
"Sorry, Dutch." Chango set the box on the bar. Dutchman examined the side.
"Viking, eh?"
"Fell off the back of the truck," I offered by way of suggesting how it had come into our acquaintance's hands. Dutchman unfolded the flaps. It was On The Road.
"B.F.D., babe. The long-awaited Kerouac debut-"
"You can give me twenty for it, eh? C'mon, Dutch."
"Hey, this is yesterday's papers. Everybody in the Village has been reading the galleys for donkey's years."
"Look." Chango was sweating. He needed a fix. In a rather bad way. "Gimmie ten now and ten when you sell 'em all."
I'd walked over to examine the books. Fifty. Hardcover. I opened one. First edition. And a slip, "Review Copy."
Dutchman saw the slip: "Why didn't you say so? h.e.l.l they're worth something." She took out a couple of ten-dollar bills. "Sorry, I'm a bit short now. Come back tonight and I'll give you the rest."
Chango smiled. "... 'S cool."
"But Don't Spend This All On Junk; Get Some Food In You. And get a jacket, 's cold evenings."
"I go to the Queen of Night," Chango replied, "...'s warm there."
I poked Chango's shoulder to get his attention, and he turned to face me. "You ought to stay away from that scene."
"But I get to sit in with the house band, M.E. I get to jam... we play the secret music. That house band is-"
"House band, my b.u.t.t," Dutchman told us while furiously scouring at some other or thing behind the bar counter. "A bunch of hasbeen-neverwas-nevergonnabe no-account junkys-"
I glared at Dutchman. Chango mumbled some Spanish c.r.a.p and started to leave, but turned, and grabbed a book; he gave it to me. "Keep it for me, till I go home to the old lady."
Word on the street was that he'd met his old lady at the Queen of Night's salon. (I'd even heard from one gone case that she was the Queen of Night's kid sister.) Well, they'd been together, gotten a cold-water boxcar flat with a Harlem air shaft view. Chango insisted that one night he'd found her naked with someone (I think; it's hard to tell, Chango'd been incoherent on that point, raving on about blood candles and a bowl filled with wax and a goat's severed platter on a large head) and they'd had an uncool fight. And she'd kicked him out.
"It'll be good, tu miras, we make up; she take me back home."
Dutchman exchanged glances with me; we all knew she'd never take him back home. Not now. Now home for her was a six-by-six-by-six plot of land in potter's field.
Chango was out the door before you could say s.h.i.+t or s.h.i.+nola. Dutchman frowned, shook her head.
"You really laid into him, Dutch."
The patent attorney spoke up: "Could I buy a couple of those from you. They're for a nephew, his bar mitzvah's next week."
"Ten percent above cover." Dutchman was unpacking the books.
"But-"the patent attorney wanted to haggle-"you've already got a good markup at cover price."
I turned away, to let Dutchman hustle a good price from the customer. In the back, by the rest rooms, I saw a woman rush past... actually, I just saw a flash of her flashy dress. It was funny. I hadn't noticed anyone else besides Chango come in.
"Fifteen percent. I hear you're a good lawyer. You can afford it." She put the books on the small bookcase by her dusty bar minor, along with the City Lights Howl and Other Poems.