Black Glass

by Karen Joy Fowler

  “I bet she threw like a girl,” said Harris, trying for a light tone to mask the fact that he was genuinely upset.

  His wife was not masking. “Her aim was supposed to have been extraordinary,” she said in her schoolteacher tone, a tone that invariably suggested disappointment in him. “Women are cut off from the rich mythological tradition you men have. Women are so hungry for heroines. Name one.”

  “What?” said Harris.

  “Name a historical heroine. Quickly.”

  “Joan of Arc,” said Harris.

  “Everyone can get that far. Now name another.”

  Harris couldn’t think. She tapped her fingers on the page to let him know that time was passing. He had always admired Morgan Fairchild for her political activism, but he assumed this would be the wrong answer. If he hadn’t been so irritated, he could probably have come up with another name.

  “Harriet Tubman,” his wife said. “Donaldina Cameron. Edith Cavell. Yvonne Hakime-Rimpel.”

  She really was a snob, but she was also a fair-minded woman. She was not, Harris thought, one of those feminists who simply changed history every time it didn’t suit her. Harris got out of bed and went back to the study. His feet were cold on the bare wood floor. Blankets or no blankets, it would take a long time for his feet to warm up. He fished Carry Nation’s autobiography out of his stack and brought it back.

  “You haven’t read about her daughter,” he said. “There’s nothing about Charlien in the pretty little version for children that you chose to read.” He flipped through his own book until he found the section he wanted. He thrust it in front of his wife’s face, then pulled it back to read it aloud. “‘About this time, my precious child, born of a drunken father and a distracted mother, seemed to conceive a positive dislike for Christianity. I feared for her soul and I prayed to God to send her some bodily affliction which would make her love and serve Him.’”

  Harris skimmed ahead in the book with his finger. “A week later, Charlien developed a raging fever,” he told his wife. “She almost died. And when she recovered from that, part of her cheek rotted away. She had a hole in her face. You could see her teeth. But it was a lucky thing. Because then her jaws locked shut, and she wouldn’t have been able to eat if there wasn’t a hole in her cheek to stick a straw through.” He made an effort to lower his voice. “Her jaws stayed locked for eight years.”

  There was a long silence, a silence, Harris thought, of reevaluation and regret for earlier, hasty judgments. “That is a very ugly story,” his wife said. She took the autobiography away from him and began to turn the pages.

  “Isn’t it?” Harris wiggled his arm underneath her. There was a longer silence. Harris stared at the ceiling. It was a blown popcorn landscape, and sometimes Harris could imagine pictures in it, but he was too tired for this now. He looked instead at the large cobwebs in the corners. Tomorrow Harris would get the broom and knock them down. Then he would get out the vacuum to suck up the bits of ceiling that came down with the cobwebs, the little flakes of milky asbestos, the poisonous snow, the toxic powders. Nothing the vacuum couldn’t handle. And then Harris would need a rag to remove from the furniture the dust the vacuum had flung up. And then the rag would need to be washed. And then . . . it was almost like counting sheep. Harris drifted.

  “You can’t possibly think those things happened because of Carry’s prayers,” his wife said.

  Harris woke up in amazement. His arm had already gone numb from his wife’s weight. He pulled it free. “So now she’s Carry?” Harris asked. “Now we’re on a first-name basis?”

  “Look at the religious climate she grew up in. You don’t believe God afflicted a little girl with such a horrible condition because her mother asked Him to?”

  “What kind of mother would ask Him to?” said Harris. “That’s the point, isn’t it? What kind of a horrible mother is this?”

  Harris’s wife was still reading the autobiography. “Carry worked for years to earn the money for surgery,” she told Harris.

  “I’ve read the book,” he said, but there was no stopping her.

  “She ignored the doctors who said the case was hopeless. Every time a doctor said the case was hopeless, she went home and earned more money for another doctor.” Harris’s wife pointed out the relevant text.

  “I’ve read the damn book.”

  “The condition was finally cured, because Carry never gave up.”

  “So she says,” said Harris.

  His wife regarded him coolly. “I don’t think Carry would lie.”

  Harris turned his back on his wife and lay on his side. “It’s very late,” he said curtly. He turned off his light, punched angrily at his pillow. Unable to get comfortable, he flipped from side to side and considered getting himself another sherry. “What’s to like about her? I really don’t understand.” Harris felt that his wife had suddenly, frighteningly, become a different person. They had always been so consensual. Not pathologically so—they had their own opinions and their own values, of course—but they had also generally liked the same movies, enjoyed the same books. Suddenly she was holding unreasonable opinions. Suddenly she was a stranger.

  His wife did not answer, nor did she turn off her own light. “This is an interesting book, too,” she said. He heard pages continuing to turn. “There are hymns in the back. Honey, if you dislike Carry Nation so much, why do you have all these books about her?”

  Harris, who always told his wife everything, had not yet found just the right moment to tell her that, the last time he was in Panama, he had summoned a loa. Harris pretended to be asleep.

  “You just don’t like her because she had a hatchet,” his wife said quietly. “Because she was a big, loud woman with a hatchet. You’re threatened by her.”

  Harris sat bolt upright so that the comforter slid off him. Was that fair? Was that at all fair? Hadn’t they had a completely egalitarian, respectful, supportive marriage? And didn’t it make him sort of a joke in the DEA for his lack of machismo, and hadn’t he never, ever complained to her about this?

  “Good night,” his wife said evenly, snapping her light off. She had her side of the comforter wound in her fists. It fell just a bit below her shoulders so he could see her neck and the start of her spine, blue in the moonlight, like stitching down her back. She breathed, and her spine stretched like a snake. She pulled the comforter up around her again. She had more than her share of the covers.

  Beside the books on her nightstand was the little black toad. Harris had given it to her for Christmas. It stared at him.

  And wasn’t he, after all, the person who’d brought Carry back? Now he was glad he hadn’t told her. Harris’s feet were too cold, and he couldn’t sleep at all.

  • • •

  “I’VE READ OVER your report,” Harris’s superior told him. “I took it up top. It’s a little spotty.”

  Harris conceded as much. “The form was so small,” he said.

  “And not really designed for exactly this sort of problem.” With tone of voice, phrasing, and body language, Harris’s superior managed a blatant show of generosity and condescension. Harris’s superior was feeling superior. It was not a pretty thing to see. It was not a pretty thing to see in the man who fought so hard to award the Texas Guard a $2,900,000 federal grant so they could station themselves along the Mexican border disguised as cactus plants and ambush drug traffickers.

  Harris looked instead at the map on the wall behind him. It was a map much like the map in Harris’s study; the pins were different colors, but the locations were identical. “This is the DEA’s official position,” his superior said. “The DEA does not believe in zombies. The DEA believes in drugs. One of our agents was inadvertently drugged on Christmas Eve and imagined a great many things. This agent now understands that the incidents in question were hallucinatory.

  “If it is ever proved that this agent
called forth a loa, then it is the DEA’s position that he did so in his leisure time and that the summoning represents the act of an individual and not of an agency.

  “The DEA has no knowledge of or connection with the gorilla woman. Her malicious and illegal destruction of private property is a matter for the local police. Do you understand?”

  “Unofficially?” asked Harris.

  “Unofficially they’re reading your report in the men’s room for light entertainment,” said Harris’s superior. “You’ll see bits of it on the wall in the second stall.” Harris already had. Item six: I don’t know where she got the body. Scratched with a penknife or the fingernail-cleaning attachment on a clipper, just above the toilet paper dispenser.

  His superior leaned forward to engage in actual eye contact with Harris. It took Harris by surprise; he drew back.

  “Unofficially we were impressed with the report the General gave us. We were impressed enough to interview some of the Miami eyewitnesses. They’re not the sort of wing nuts in sandals you might expect to find in the tabloids. Our agent spent two hours with a Mr. Schilling, who owns the Miami bar. He’s a pretty savvy guy, and he says she performed feats of superhuman strength. How did she get into the Vatican embassy? No one ever sees her come or go. She took out a crack lab in Raleigh, North Carolina, a week ago. Did you hear about that?”

  Harris had not. He was alarmed to hear she was already as far north as Raleigh. He rechecked the map. There it was, a black pin through the heart of North Carolina. “Unofficially the DEA doesn’t give a damn where she came from. Unofficially the DEA expects you to take care of her.”

  Harris nodded. He had always seen that the burden of responsibility was his. With or without the DEA, he had never intended to shirk it. He had already been spending his sleepless nights making plans. “With support?” Harris asked.

  “At my discretion. And certainly not visibly.”

  It was more than Harris had hoped for. He moved to the map on the wall. “She seems to be moving directly north. Sooner or later, I figure she’ll hit here.” He drew a line north from Raleigh to Richmond, a small circle around Richmond. “Somewhere in here. So. We concentrate our forces in the larger bars.

  “Now, the body is the real issue. Is it a real body? If so, it’s doable. If not, we’re in trouble. If not, we need expert help. But let’s say that it is. She shows herself, we attack with the bufotoxin/tetrodotoxin package. This could be a bit tricky. She won’t drink, of course. The potion can go right through the skin, and sometimes the bokor simply sprinkles it on the doorstep, but I’m guessing she’s the sort who won’t remove her shoes. We might try a Shirley Temple, load the tetrodotoxin into the cherry. Even if she won’t drink the ginger ale, I’m willing to bet she’ll eat the cherry. The dosage will be guesswork, and someone will have to take it to her. Of course, I’m volunteering.”

  “No hallucinogenics,” Harris’s superior said.

  Harris’s mind was filled with cherries. He had to blink to clear it. “I don’t understand. We’re just trying to persuade the loa to abandon the host body.”

  “You summoned a weapon. This weapon served us at the Vatican embassy. It’s a useful weapon. We don’t want it destroyed.”

  “You don’t understand,” Harris said. “You’re not going to control it. You can’t talk to it. You can’t reason with it. You can’t hurt it. It doesn’t feel pity or remorse or self-doubt. It makes no distinction between drugs and liquor and nicotine. And it will not stop. Ever.”

  “We want it on the team,” Harris’s superior said.

  “You’re tying my hands,” said Harris. His heart had never beat faster except for maybe that time in Mexico when Rico had slipped and used his real name during a buy, and that time above the Bolivian mountains when two engines failed, and that time when his wife was supposed to be home by seven and didn’t arrive until after ten because the class discussion had been so interesting they’d taken it to a bar to continue it and the bar phone had been out of order, and that time he was on bufotoxins.

  “The problem is not here in the States with the consumers. The problem is down there with the suppliers.”

  “You’re sending me on a suicide mission.”

  “We want your loa in Colombia,” Harris’s superior said.

  • • •

  HARRIS PACKED HIS CLOTHES for Richmond. He had no red underwear, but he had boxers with red valentines on them. They were a gift from his wife. He put them on, making a mental list of the other items he needed. Eggs dyed yellow, fresh eggs, so he would have to pick them up after he arrived. Salt. Red and white candles. The black toad, for luck. Feathers. Harris pulled his Swiss Army knife out of his pocket and reached for his pillow.

  “Patrick?” Harris’s wife called him from the kitchen. “Patrick, would you come here a moment?” Harris put the knife away.

  His wife stood in front of the refrigerator. In one hand she had the picture of Carry and her hatchet, torn from The Girl’s Life. The edges were dipped in red candle wax. “I found this under the Tater Tots,” Harris’s wife said. “What is it and how did it get in my freezer?”

  Harris had no answer. He had to stall and think of one. He opened the refrigerator and got himself a beer. “My freezer?” he said pointedly, popping the flip-top. “Isn’t it our freezer?”

  “How did this get in our freezer?”

  “I don’t think I would ever have referred to the freezer as my freezer,” Harris said sadly. He drank his beer, for timing rather than thirst, an extra moment to let his point sink in. Then he amplified. “I don’t think you’ll find me doing that. But with you it’s always my kitchen. My Sunday paper. My bed.”

  “I’m sorry,” said his wife. She held out the picture. Harris spoke again before she could.

  “It signifies,” he said. “It certainly signifies.”

  His wife had the tenacity of a hound. “What’s with the picture?”

  “I spilled wax on it. Accidentally.” Harris had not survived in the Latin American drug theater without some ability to think on his feet. He took the photograph from her. “Naturally I wanted to remove the wax in such a way as to do as little damage to the picture as possible. This picture came out of a library book, after all. I thought I could remove the wax easier if the wax was hard. So I put it in the freezer.”

  “Why were you reading by candlelight?” his wife asked. “You tore the picture out of a library book? That doesn’t sound like you.”

  “The book was due back. It had to be returned.” His wife was staring at him. “It was overdue,” Harris said.

  He missed the loa in Richmond. A few hours after his wife took the picture out of the freezer and before he’d hidden it under the bed, pinned beneath a glass of salt water to force the loa across an ocean, she struck. Harris’s superior caught him on the car phone on the way to the airport. In addition to Richmond, there’d been a copycat incident in Chicago at a cocaine sale. The sale had been to the DEA. They had worked on it for months, and then some grandmother with a hatchet sent it all south. “I want her on the plane to Colombia yesterday,” Harris’s superior said.

  Harris canceled his reservation and drove to Alexandria. She was coming so fast. For the first time, he asked himself why. Was she coming for him?

  • • •

  “STRAYING TONIGHT, straying tonight, leaving the pathway of honor and right. . . .” The song came from inside the Gateway Bar, punctuated with sounds of breaking glass, splintering wood, and an occasional scream. Harris had been beepered to the spot, but others had obviously arrived first. It was ten in the evening, but across the street two men washed a store window. One sat in his car behind a newspaper. Two more had levered up the manhole cover and knelt beside it, peering down industriously. One man watched Harris from a second-story window above the bar.

  Harris set his case on the sidewalk and opened the latch. HAPPY HOUR! t
he bar marquee read, RAP SINGING! OPEN MIKE! HOGAN CONTEST! He took a bottle of whiskey from his case and poured himself something stiffening. Someone else would have to drive him home. If there was a ride home. Of course there would be a ride home.

  He began to sprinkle a circle of salt outside the bar door. He drew a salt triangle inside it. There was a breath of silence; the awful singing resumed. “She’s breaking the heart of her dear gray-haired mother, she’ll break it, yes, break it, tonight.”

  A young woman in a wet T-shirt flew out of the bar, landing on his knee and his salt.

  Harris helped her to her feet. She was blond, garishly blond, but that was just the effect of the bar marquee lights, which laid an orange tint over her hair. I SURVIVED CATHOLIC SCHOOL, the T-shirt said. “She told me to go home and let my mother have a good look at me. She called me a strumpet.” The woman had not yet started to cry, but she was about to.

  “She was once badly beaten by prostitutes.” Harris was consoling. “Maybe this is a problem area for her.” The beating happened in 1901, when the proprietor of a Texas bar, feeling it would unman him to attack Carry Nation himself, had hired a group of prostitutes to beat her with whips and chains. He had also persuaded his wife to take part. Harris had paid particular attention to the incident, because there was a vulnerability and he wondered if he could exploit it. He was not thinking of real prostitutes, of course. He was thinking of undercover vice cops. Beating was a common step in the creation of a zombie. The ti bon ange was thought less likely to return to a body that was being beaten.

  Still, there was something distasteful about this strategy. Carry Nation had gone down like a wounded bear, surrounded by dogs. She might have been killed had her own temperance workers not finally rescued her. “There is a spirit of anarchy abroad in the land,” Carry Nation was reported to have said, barely able to stand, badly cut and bruised. For the next two weeks she appeared at all speaking and smashing engagements with a large steak taped to the side of her face. She changed steaks daily.