CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The little city used to be called Springtown, but that wasn’t odd enough, so locals changed the name to Stringtown. Clearly a higher note on the Okie scale of humor. Marie could name ten strangely-named Oklahoma towns right off the top of her head: Cement, Corn, Pink, Slap-out, Gotebo, Bowlegs, Roman Nose, Beer City, Paw Paw, and Tin City. If pressed, she knew another baker’s dozen. Most were hardly more than a gas station, a church or two, and a collection of name-related stories too weird for history books.
Stringtown had a minimum-security prison; that’s what made it stand out in Marie’s mind. Several of her moderately-notorious boyfriends had done time within its razor wire borders. It also had a mental hospital, but she had never heard of that until Dr. Moon brought her there. Marie had to admit the Stringtown Mental Health Facility was a pretty nice place for a crazy house.
According to Dr. Moon, the Choctaw Nation paid the bills. There must have been a lot of them. The place was far more modern than Flanders. Its rooms were nicer. Its common area was bigger. Its grounds had better landscaping. And its therapeutic style was nearly humanitarian—restraints tied with bows, stylish straightjackets, electroconvulsive units powered by dry cell batteries.
“Everything is better in Stringtown,” Dr. Moon promised Marie, and his promise was not empty.
The staff was quiet and polite. Most were members of the Five Civilized Tribes, with the numbers slightly weighted in favor of Creek and Choctaw. The rooms were almost private—single occupancy but no locks on the doors. Medications were monitored carefully and the more potent psychoactive agents were used only on the troublesome minority.
Dr. Moon was an important man at Stringtown, just as he had been at Flanders, but at Stringtown, no one except Marie called him Dr. Moon.
“Here I am known as Dr. Selene,” he told Marie. But he wasn’t cross when she slipped occasionally and called him by his old familiar name. Selene was one of the moon’s many names, after all, and Marie was a client in a mental hospital. The staff would make allowances.
At Stringtown, Marie was Dr. Selene’s special patient. He was her only therapist, and when Dr. Selene wasn’t around, she had the run of the facility. The other doctors and the support staff allowed Marie Ferraro to do as she pleased, as long as she didn’t try to leave. They treated her like a royal concubine who was temporarily under house arrest but still a favorite of the king.
Their frequent private sessions were proof of that.
Marie and the doctor sitting in a tree, K-i-s-s-i-n-g. So far that was just a rumor, but things could easily go that way. They’d have passed the point of no return already if Marie hadn’t known romantic terrain so well.
When it was time to apply the brakes she told the doctor, “Archie’s presence is strong in this place.” That always did the trick.
Psychiatrists usually keep a poker face in session. They sit outside the patient’s range of vision. They speak in monotones, avoid emotionally charged language. Shrinks had many ways to avoid steering the discussion with inadvertent cues. Dr. Selene didn’t use any of them. His face turned sour every time Marie mentioned Archie. Sometimes she’d put Archie in the middle of a sentence like punctuation, just to see what happened.
“When I was pregnant with Sarah—Archie—I never felt depressed.” Worked every time. Like thumping an erection with a pencil. Marie learned that trick from an RN while visiting one of her boyfriends in a prison hospital. Hard to believe a man with a gunshot wound could be so easily aroused. Morphine, handcuffs, and critical injuries barely dull the urge. Marie knew a great deal about men, but she still hadn’t figured out why they were so proud of having testicles.
“Archie.” Marie said the name apropos of nothing. Dr. Selene’s brow furrowed. He crossed his arms. Shouldn’t a shrink know better than that?
She suspected her sessions with Dr. Selene didn’t fit into any accepted therapeutic protocol. She suspected her meetings with this doctor weren’t sessions at all, at least in the psychiatric sense of the word.
Marie was pretty certain Dr. Selene was interested in more than her mind. Not too surprising. Men were naturally drawn to her, the way male moths were drawn to pheromones secreted innocently by females of their species. Men were all alike. All horny bastards, regardless of genus, species, or even kingdom. When the necessary ingredients came together, things proceeded according to the laws of chemistry.
Maybe that’s why they call chemistry a hard science. As soon as a man breathed Marie Ferraro’s pheromones, his passions ignited like a kitchen match raked across a rough surface.
Bless their hearts. A man’s most complex patterns of behavior were at the mercy of that pesky Y chromosome. Once his buttons had been pushed, he reacted as predictably as a butterfly or a bull elk or a tomcat, and Marie had already embarked on the delicate process of finding Dr. Selene’s buttons.
It wouldn’t take long. Marie had manipulated romantically-inclined doctors before. Medical men were no more resistant to her charms than plumbers, or politicians. With the right incentive, they would put aside moral codes and lifetime aspirations. They would give no thought to consequences until they had waded into the depths of scandal. They’d not panic until their reputations were caught in the undertow, far beyond the possibility of rescue.
But this time, Marie wouldn’t slip into her old habits. She would handle Dr. Selene delicately. She wouldn’t sleep with him unless it was absolutely necessary. She would remain true to Archie Chatto in her own fashion.
Nothing past second base, she told herself, unless it couldn’t be avoided. Marie Ferraro was no callow heartbreaker. It had always been her policy to let a man down easy whenever it was possible.
“Archie is an Apache.” Marie watched the doctor’s reaction. Her lover’s name made his complexion change. Sometimes he flushed. Sometimes he grew pale. It was a flight or fight reaction, she supposed. The psychiatrist didn’t know whether to attack or retreat. That was good. Masculine indecision is a girl’s best friend, much better than diamonds—except in a pawnshop.
“His great-great-grandfather knew Geronimo. Archie comes from a long line of warriors and medicine men.” Marie recognized the signs of eminent collapse. The cracks in Dr. Selene’s professional façade grew wider under the pressure of Archie Chatto. The man was a veritable Perma Jack commercial.
Marie fed the doctor tiny bites of boyfriend history, and it made him ravenous. Jealousy is a first-rate romantic appetizer. Her favorite author, Nicholas Sparks, had captured the concept perfectly in The Guardian.
Every favorable Archie Chatto statement would make Dr. Selene feel less adequate. He would have to brag about his own accomplishments before she knocked the props completely out from under him with lavish praise for her jailbird Apache boyfriend.
A pissing contest. Wasn’t that what men called it? Such simple creatures. The penis is the standard unit against which every aspect of their world is measured. Men know the exact length of their penises, but have only a vague idea of their hat or shoe sizes. An astronomer had once told Marie that the earth and moon were separated by the length of 720,000,000 penises. Who could have imagined?
Time to let the doctor talk about himself. There wasn’t a man alive who had trouble doing that. Before long he would talk himself into being in love with Marie Ferraro. His most cherished secrets would be hers for the asking. So would his points of vulnerability. His soft parts.
Then Marie would carry the psychiatrist in her hand, use him like a key to unlock the doors of the mental hospital where she was held against her will. Was she the first woman who had seduced the good doctor? Probably.
Once Dr. Selene was set in motion, Marie need only listen. She’d nudge and tease him in the appropriate direction with fine adjustments of tone and facial expression. Sessions were supposed to work this way. It was just a matter of determining who was in control.
“The Apache are little more than savages.” Hashilli was surprised at himself, talking to a woman this
way. He’d never felt it necessary to justify himself to anyone, much less a female. But Marie Ferraro was different. For reasons he did not try to understand, he needed her exclusive approval.
“Apaches drink too much. They fight too much. They do everything too much.” It was a sore point with Hashilli that the Five Civilized Tribes had never captured the imagination of the white man like the Indians from the old Wild West.
Euro-Americans heaped praise on the puffed up philosophies of the Cheyenne and the Sioux. They found much to admire in the brutal nomadic-warrior lifestyles of the Comanche and the Apache. But the Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Seminole were treated with contempt.
Hashilli supposed it was because the tribes of the American Southeast had met the white man first. They had seen their destiny written clearly in future history’s ledgers and had struck the best deals they could. Because the civilized tribes had acknowledged their fate and made a relatively quick peace, the Europeans held them in low regard.
“Our history is as rich as that of the Apache,” he told Marie. “Our warriors are as fierce, and our magic is as strong.” Hashilli wanted to tell this woman everything. For reasons he could not understand, he wanted to fill her to the brim with respect and admiration for the Choctaw culture. Hashilli wanted Marie to recognize him for what he was, an exceptional member of an exceptional tribe. Before he quite knew what he was doing, he found himself telling Marie Ferraro how an attempted murder had established his credentials as a powerful Choctaw sorcerer.
“The magic bullet started out in the pistol of a Seminole gunman with revenge on his mind.” Even members of the civilized tribes could find murder in their hearts when it came to settling family matters.
“My grandfather was the object of the assassin’s revenge, but I was his target of convenience.” It was a daunting task to kill a Choctaw witch in the peak of his powers, so the gunman settled on the witch’s heir.
“I was as innocent as any baby,” Hashilli said. “I never knew a mother or a father. My grandfather raised me with the help of his family, but we really weren’t related—not in the ordinary way.”
Hashilli had never talked to anyone about his history, but he was prepared to reveal everything to this charming, crazy woman. She leaned toward him. Her face lost the hint of worry lines that always accompanied her discussions of the Apache. Her breathing slowed. He wondered, only for a moment, if he should stop. He could leave the room, discontinue the sessions. Marie Ferraro was his captive, completely within his power. What harm could come of her fantasy romance with the Apache?
I can stop this any time I want, Hashilli told himself. Even as that thought took form in his mind, Hashilli recognized it as a sign of addiction.
Marie smiled. She radiated the charm that came so easily to her.
Hashilli’s pulse quickened. His fingers tingled. Marie Ferraro became the only three dimensional image in a flat world. Beautiful. Important, like the Choctaw people, like family magic, she was there for him. In the moment.
“Everyone knew how dangerous Grandfather could be, but I was a green sorcerer. Killing me should have been a simple matter.” Hashilli told Marie how he and his grandfather lived in a little house separated from the rest of the family by the Kiamichi River.
“They called it a shotgun shack, four small rooms all in a line.”
Hashilli told Marie how the Maytubby wives took care of him in turns. Each morning the new nursemaid would paddle a jon boat across the river and take the last one’s place. The family was large, so none of the young women would be exposed to the magic for too long.
“Power is the enemy of procreation,” he said. “Magic sterilizes ovaries as effectively as X-rays.”
Baby Hashilli was in the arms of his favorite caregiver when the Seminole gunman made his move. The young woman who held him was new to the family, an Italian girl from McAlister, anxious to prove her value to her tribal in-laws.
“She was a Christian girl with no real faith in Choctaw magic.” It was only natural she would treat a baby witch like an ordinary child. She cuddled him and sang to him and carried him from room to room as if he never learned to walk. It was Hashilli’s first sustained contact with a woman since coming into his grandfather’s care. The caretaker was the only woman who ever held him with affection, but he remembered her only through his grandfather’s stories.
“She would dance through the house with me in her arms,” Hashilli said, “stepping and spinning to music only she could hear.” The dancing daughter-in-law couldn’t know about the gunman hiding in the blood grass under the kitchen window.
The assassin’s plan was simple. One quick shot. A baby witch would die. A line of sorcerers stopped along with the child’s beating heart. So many families had blood scores to settle with the Maytubbys. With any luck the assassin’s deed would be accomplished without revealing his identity.
But Hashilli’s caregiver chose exactly the right moment to spin across the room. The bullet struck the dancing woman in the neck, just above her collarbone. The severed arteries filled the room with a fine red mist that covered everything, including the baby in her arms.
“I lay on the wooden floor with her body over mine.” The song within the nursemaid’s mind was silenced by the violence and so was the baby in her arms.
“The blood, the silence, the bodies crumpled on the kitchen floor were enough for the gunman.”
No need to prod the corpses with his foot. No need to risk an encounter with angry ghosts. After a careful look through the kitchen window, the assassin ran away. He ran back to an anonymous life of nightly prayers and troubled dreams. Not once did he consider the gift of power he had given to the youngest sorcerer in the Maytubby clan.
“The bullet lodged in the kitchen wall. It is a talisman,” Hashilli told Marie. “Magically pushed away from its intended target. It collected a blood sacrifice on the way to its final resting place.”
The shotgun shack became a shrine to the power of Hashilli Maytubby, the bullet hole and the brown stains on the walls and floor were testimony to his legend.
“You are the only one outside the family who knows the story of the magic bullet,” Hashilli told Marie. “In all these years, the only one I’ve trusted with this secret.”
There it was, the softest part of all.
“I’ve been there.” Marie told him without meaning to. “I’ve been to your cabin. Hid there with my first lover. Between bank robberies and shoot outs.” She’d seen the brown stains and the hole in the kitchen wall, but never realized what they were.
She could see the doctor’s rush of pleasure at this tiny bit of her personal history. His pupils dilated. His normally rigid posture relaxed. He took a deep noisy breath through his open mouth. A breakthrough.
“The blood grass and creeper were still there,” she said, “and an old wooden jon boat pulled onto high ground and turned upside down, just across the water.” The place had the feel of magic, though Marie hadn’t recognized it at the time. No termites weakened the wooden structure. Biting insects didn’t fly through the broken windows. The roof never leaked even in the hardest rain.
“No bird nests clogged the chimney,” she said. “It still drew smoke from the wood fires we burned in the kitchen stove.”
The doctor was clearly pleased to hear Marie had taken refuge in his cabin, ecstatic that his shrine had offered sanctuary like the great religious fortresses of ancient Europe.
“Intersecting histories,” the doctor said. “Proof that we are linked by fate.”
As far as Marie could see, there were two critical flaws in the psychiatrist’s logic. She was in love with Archie Chatto, and there was no such thing as witches.
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