Eventually, her shoulders cramped, and she rested.
While canoeing, she’d experienced only muscular physicality. Resting, she felt the tumor growing in her brain, slowly but irrevocably crushing billions of neurons and thousands of synapses, severing signals sent to her vital organs that would soon, one after another, shutdown forever.
Sunlight sparked from dewdrops collected on broad leaves. Her reflection danced on the water in pockets of glittering light.
“Andrew,” she said, offering the boy her canteen, then insisting when he refused to drink. The boy was small for his age but strong, thin, a crop of lush black hair. He wore a Cub Scout shirt and was missing his two top-front teeth. But his face was immobile, lifeless, morose. He showed no interest in the flock of wood storks alighted in the uppermost branches of a nearby grove of strangler figs, a snail kite soaring overhead with a Butterfly Peacock Bass, at least ten pounds, twitching in its talons, or even the manatee munching plants on the floor of the swamp.
The boy had been mute for four weeks, since Charlotte Crow had pried him from his father’s corpse. The skin of the boy’s father was turning from brown to a purpled gray, his lifeless eyes open wide, his mouth agape. Charlotte Crow had tried but couldn’t close his frozen jaws. The best she could manage with his eyes was to lower them partway.
Charlotte Crow covered Karl’s body with a blanket. “An overdose,” she said, moving the corpse to reveal a syringe still inserted in his calf. The boy, one hand still clutching his father’s body, shouted, “No!” His breath carrying the word – “No” – was seized in a mighty talon of Eagle, his power animal. The Great Bird took flight, holding in its other talon a vision of violence that had recently frightened the boy.
Was it a vision of something from his memories, perhaps of his father’s deliriums or outbursts, like the ones that had forced his mother to file a complaint with his parole officer? Perhaps it had been a scene from one of those glorifying-violence TV shows that were all the rage— bloodthirsty U.S. cavalrymen raiding Indian villages, slaughtering out-gunned brave Native American warriors, trampling squaws and screaming children beneath their horses’ hooves, or a homicidal homicide detective investigating one of his own murders. Or maybe the purloined vision was what the boy had seen, or thought he’d seen, the night before, when his father, in violation of the terms of his parole, had shown up drunk and had tried to force his way into their home.
When the boy was disturbed, he could summon powerful forces from hidden reality. Uncontrolled, these forces could cause substantial harm, even death, forces that so far had been kept at bay by Eagle. With Eagle gone, there was no way to know how great a menace the boy could be – to himself, to others – especially in his emotional state since losing his voice.
Charlotte Crow’s ordinary-reality diagnosis of the boy’s inability to speak would have been post-traumatic stress with an optimistic prognosis that psychotherapy twice a week would lead to an eventual if not early adjustment that would accompany acceptance of the loss, enabling the boy to manage his grief and to reclaim his voice from the shock of unexpected tragedy and the ensuing trauma that had deprived him of it. But Charlotte Crow had seen Eagle take the boy’s voice, requiring a diagnosis beyond the purview of Western mental healthcare.
What was necessary, what the boy needed, was a journey with Charlotte Crow to the underworld where they would find and retrieve his voice. The boy’s mother hadn’t been consulted. Betty Mae had strongly opposed her sister’s plan. The risk of the boy seeing the vision purloined by Eagle was too great. As Eagle had taken the vision, there was good reason to keep it from the boy.
“While Eagle has the vision,” Charlotte Crow had said, “the boy doesn’t have Eagle. Without Eagle, there will be violence.”
“When he recovers from the trauma, his voice will return,” Betty Mae had said.
Charlotte Crow said, “Why don’t you stick to philosophy or cosmology or whatever it is that you do?”
Betty Mae rejoined, saying, “With whom are you actually angry?”
It wasn’t Betty Mae’s opposition that had caused Charlotte Crow to wait four weeks to take the boy on a shamanic journey to the Lowerworld. Before this day, she’d been too weak to travel. But on this day Golden Bear, her power animal, had brought her respite from the disabling pain and fatigue. And surely The Creator had Her reasons for this gift of relapse.
A swath of Florida’s southeast coast six to twelve miles wide from Miami-Dade County in the south to Palm Beach County in the north, from the City of Homestead, the southernmost community of the Miami Metropolitan area, to the town of Jupiter, the northernmost community of Palm Beach County, had been dredged, drained, paved over, and built up with low-rise office buildings and shopping malls so that the cityscapes – landscapes, hardscapes, and architecture – of any particular commercial or residential zone were indistinguishable from the others. Those adjacent areas that had been spared the destruction of development that decimated native flora and fauna, a near sea-level plain of saw palmetto, pine stands, and swampland, likewise were mostly indistinguishable from each other.
It was here, within this homogenized terrain, in the affluent City of Coral Gables, that Dr. Charlotte Crow Abiaka maintained offices for her practices of shamanism and clinical psychology, and so it was here that she was called upon to determine if the mental, emotional, and therefore spiritual problems of her patients were indistinguishable one from another’s once they’d been categorized, cataloged, and compartmentalized as the American Psychiatric Association would have it, as the American Psychological Association would have it, as health insurance companies and employers providing health insurance would have it: assignment to one or more diagnoses with numerical descriptors in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Was one person’s depression indistinguishable from another person’s save for the degree or extent of the disorder? Not in Charlotte Crow’s view or experience. She developed patient-care plans based on the etiology rather than the specific symptoms of their emotional troubles.
Insight into Charlotte Crow’s scholarship, experimental techniques, and her reasoning could be found in the eclectic books that she’d savored, treasured, and shelved in her offices: by Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History; by Sophocles, Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus; by Sigmund Freud, Sexuality and Love and Murder, Mourning, and Melancholia; by Marjory Stoneham Douglas, The Everglades: River of Grass; and by Mimerose P. Beaubrun Nan Dòmi: An Intimate’s Journey into Haitian Vodou. Her scholastic and experimental inquires greatly inspired by these authors and their oeuvres had shown that often a patient’s recovery was hindered more than helped by a pigeonholed diagnosis or by assembly-line, health-insurance-approved treatment predicated on symptomology.
Western medicine – the prescription of psychotropic drugs and psychotherapy – were often insufficient to heal emotional damage to the psyche or to a relationship regardless of its cause: trauma, genetic disorder, errant brain chemistry, or garden-variety dishonesty or treachery. This was why, in her practice of shamanism, Charlotte Crow traveled with Golden Bear into hidden reality in search of palliatives that could contribute to cures for her patients. Now, three months before Karl’s death, she was conducting final sessions with her patients, as there was no escaping the fact that soon she’d be too ill to help them, too ill to help herself. And so she’d not be able to complete her work with some of them even if all that remained was travel in hidden reality to gain insight.
One patient that Charlotte Crow believed she could have helped if she’d had the time, which she did not, was Hailey Levine Rosen, 39, five feet four inches tall, one hundred fifteen pounds, a high school English teacher, an avid tennis player, married to Al Rosen going on ten years – an attractive, beautiful actually, quick, compassionate, clever, delightful woman – who was then in session with Charlotte Crow.
Hailey had begun psychotherapy because of unremitting feel
ings of guilt caused by her extramarital affair. She was in love, but not with Al, so she had no intention of breaking off the affair. Her dilemma, as she saw it, was whether to tell him.
Hailey’s sex life with Al had become unsatisfying. He hadn’t done anything wrong, anything other than failing to keep her interest. He was a star at work, the young president of a bank that had branches throughout the south. But he was clueless about Hailey’s feelings of loss of intimacy, loss of the connection between spouses that the best of marriage has to offer. He had no clue that anything was amiss, no clue that he was missing anything. And so, perhaps, he wasn’t missing a thing. But Hailey, in near constant conflict and turmoil, was missing a great deal.
At this juncture, Hailey had firmly resolved– her exact word had been “resolutely” – never to tell Al. Once words are spoken, she’d decided, they couldn’t be taken back. And as she was never going to leave Al as he had done nothing wrong, she would never speak the words.
It was too early in her therapy for Hailey to come to terms with the fact that her silence coupled with the continuation of the affair deprived Al of the decision of whether to leave, deprived Al of a fair opportunity to assess his marriage, assess his life.
Hailey’s infidelity and silence were injuring her psyche, injury that possibly could be averted if Charlotte Crow had the strength to travel in hidden reality on her patient’s behalf. The best Charlotte Crow could do in this, her final session with Hailey, was to try to elevate her perspective by saying to her, “So you’re sentencing yourself to a lifetime of silence?”
Hailey didn’t respond.
“You’ve made a decision for now,” said Charlotte Crow. “But it’s a decision you’ll be able to revisit.”
“No,” said Hailey, thoughtfully, “you’re right. It is a life sentence. It’s a burden I’ll bear. But not alone.” She gave Charlotte Crow a warm smile. “I can always talk to you.”
“We have to talk about that,” said Charlotte Crow.
Resuming her labors, with Andrew still looking unwaveringly straight ahead, Charlotte Crow paddled deeper into the swamp. Approaching the gateway to the Lowerworld, she turned her paddle sideways and braced it against the gunwale to swing the canoe beneath a canopy between hardwood hammocks. Without any indication that he was about to move, Andrew stood, then toppled over the side. A cottonmouth water moccasin, tan with gray-and-black diamond stripes, slid into the water and undulated toward the boy.
Charlotte Crow dipped the paddle and pulled back hard. As the rear of canoe came around, she lifted Andrew into the boat. The viper came out of the water too, twisting in a spiral, fangs locked in the flesh of the boy’s arm. With her hunting knife, she quickly decapitated the snake, then pried off its mouth and tossed the snake’s head and still writhing body overboard. A cloud of bloody bubbles percolated while the snake’s flesh was quickly stripped from its skeleton in a frenzy of feeding fish.
Skin on the boy’s arm fringing the wound seared. He turned cold; his pulse raced.
Charlotte Crow tore off her blouse to make a tourniquet. Goosebumps covered her breasts, her maroon areolas shriveled, her nipples were erect. The boy’s eyes fluttered as she tied the knot. She sucked blood and venom from his arm and spit the warm fluids over the gunwales. His eyes glazed, then closed.
Aunt Charlotte Crow’s breasts glow like shining twin moons framed in the soft orange-red light of sunset. From one of her nipples a sweet liquid drips and spreads across a cupped hand like cream poured over a cake. She cradles Andrew, lifts a teat to his mouth. He sucks on it as a hungry infant would. Despite the succor, he is freezing in the moist heat, the air putrid with an odor of decay.
In the distance he hears bones tumble – tic- a- tic- a- tic- a- tic – slowly at first and then faster and faster and louder and louder, the rattling sound is punctuated by a high-pitched whistle: shree- shree- sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeel
The rhythmic beat of a drum joins the sound of the tumbling bones and shrieking whistle: tom-pom-pom-pom
The beat booms faster and faster, louder and louder until the sounds subside into the faint echo of his beating heart.
At night Andrew sits on a bed of blankets on a chickee deep in a hardwood hammock, sipping tea. Aunt Charlotte Crow shows him a hollow in a buttonwood tree growing alongside the chickee. The hollow teems with aquatic plants in water so clear he sees through its depths to roots dangling above a sandy bottom.
She says, “You will swim with Golden Bear to the Lowerworld. There you will find Eagle.”
He nods.
“In the Lowerworld, everything will be alive and strange things may talk to you: rocks, trees, birds, even the sea. Don’t listen. When you find Eagle, he will be wrestling with a vision. Don’t look at it. I will take the vision from Eagle and Eagle and Golden Bear will take you back to ordinary reality.”
He nods again.
“When The Creator made the Middleworld, Dog could talk,” Aunt Charlotte Crow says, beginning the narration of a Seminole fable. “He lived with our ancestor, Jeremiah, a powerful medicine man, and his wife, the African princess and shaman, Akila, one of your ancestors. Early in their marriage, Jeremiah often went on long walks late at night, making Akila unhappy. So she sent Dog to follow Jeremiah. In the next village Jeremiah lay beside a young woman. Dog ran home and told Akila.
“When Jeremiah came home, Akila cast a spell on him. He stopped wandering at night and then the marriage was good. But Jeremiah was angry. He said to Dog, ‘I know it was you,’ and he took Dog’s voice away. Now Dog’s voice is gone forever. Dog will never speak again.”
Golden Bear climbs on to the chickee, nuzzles Andrew.
Aunt Charlotte Crow says, “You will find your voice in the Lowerworld, but like Dog you will lose it forever if you tell anyone what you did or saw there.”
Aunt Charlotte Crow turns on a tape recorder. It plays steady drumming augmented by the sound of bones tumbling in a rattle and the shrill of a whistle, the cadence and sounds a reprise of a song his grandmamma often listens to: “Highway 61 Revisited.”
Aunt Charlotte Crow lights candles, lies on the floor of the chickee, and closes her eyes.
Golden Bear leads Andrew to the vibrant water pooling in the hollow. Aunt Charlotte Crow sleeps and Andrew tries calling out to her, but his constricted throat won’t allow his voice to pass. Following Golden Bear, he dives into the water in the hollow of the buttonwood tree and swims toward the sand below. Bubbles form pockets of air, allowing him to breathe; his clothes adhere like a second skin. Branches wrap around his ankles, pulling him back, urging him in gurgling whispers, “Don’t go.”
Golden Bear frees him, and Andrew sinks gently as a pearl would through a flask of shampoo until, abreast of the roots he spills into air and spins heels over head into daylight and on to the expanse of an orange beach. Fires light the crests of waves. Clouds, the color of dewberries, float by.
Eagle flies back and forth: out to sea and then back over the beach. In his talons he holds a livid cloud, slashing it with his beak as if it were a scythe. In the surf, Golden Bear leaps and swipes an open-clawed paw at the cloud.
Andrew runs toward Eagle—-arms flailing, legs pumping, heart pounding. The sand is cold. The roar of the ocean waves crescendo. The aquamarine seawater becomes ash-gray.
The wind carries an odor like the smell of turpentine. Swirling grains of sand become a cyclone of vermin that lift Andrew off the beach, swarm over him until Eagle beats the pests with his wings, freeing Andrew, who falls back onto the orange beach.
Trapped within the plum-colored cloud held in Eagle’s talons is Andrew’s purloined vision: his mother fighting with his father, who is ill and weak. His father struggles.
“Help me, son,” he says, falling to the bed of the cloud, he extends an arm toward Andrew, rolling until he lies prone, his face toward his son. “Help me.”
Andrew wants to cry out, “No! Momma. No!” But the vise gripping his throat tightens.
H
is mother leaps upon his father’s back, sinks her viper fangs into his arm. Shrieking, his father struggles to his knees, writhes, then collapses into the posture of a fetus, bleeding within the embrace of the ominous cloud. His mother’s eyes blaze yellow and red like molten lava, a silvery musical laugh dances on her blood-smeared lips. Triumphantly she stands over Andrew’s vanquished father.
Aunt Charlotte Crow leaps into the sky, seizes the cloud, and yells, “Run, Andrew. Run!”
Andrew runs back across the beach, his feet bruised, his breath short. He stumbles. Eagle lifts and carries him to roots dangling above a clear-water pool spread across the orange sand beneath the base of the buttonwood tree. The power animals and the boy dive in. Andrew floats to the surface. When he climbs out of the hollow, the chickee still glows in candlelight.
Aunt Charlotte Crow is asleep, her clothing soaking wet like his own. He undresses her, staring at her breasts, her purple nipples. He dries her, covers her with blankets, then takes off his clothes, lies beside her under the blankets, and sleeps.
In the morning, Andrew awakes to the sight of what can only be Aunt Charlotte Crow’s corpse, swathed in brightly colored Seminole cloth, bobbing in her canoe. He gags on an odor of death. The air is humid and already hot, the light a brightening gray. Betty Mae takes the tape recorder and stashes it in a canvas bag.
“Aunt Charlotte Crow,” Andrew cries. He runs toward her canoe but Betty Mae, quick as a cobra’s strike, steps in front of him.
“Did she die, Grandmomma? Did she?”
Sotto voce Betty Mae whispers thanks to The Creator for returning Andrew’s voice, hugs her grandson, then holds him at arms’ length.
The Speed of Life Page 8