Godhead

by Hansen, Jalex; Alexander, Writing as Jordan

  He ran his finger lovingly over the shape of my mother on the porch. “Am I being perfectly clear?”

  I wanted to return to shade and loneliness, to delirium, and sickness, and the blank slate of non-existence. “I will not tell anyone anything.”

  “You will comply with everything I ask you to do without question from now on.” “And what does that mean now?”

  “It means you will get your strength back for a couple days. I realize you have been through an ordeal and I am sorry.” He reached to smooth my tangled hair. “It was for your own good…and the good of those you love.”

  “I understand.”

  “I will have someone pack your bags for you, we will leave in two days.”

  From outside, the earsplitting shriek of a pulled nail whistled into the bedroom. The first part of the window barrier fell outside. I could see Nacho’s bleary eyes crinkled in a smile. “Hello lady,” he said when his mouth was exposed. “Ju been gud.”

  I had to close my eyes against the unwelcome brightness of the sun. I looked away from Nacho into Dante’s eyes as still and flat as a shark’s. “Where are we going?”

  “To the mainland. I have business to take care of.”

  “America?” it sounded foreign to me now, exotic, and clean, and unreachable.

  “If it’s still there.”

  “But what about the plantation?”

  “A well oiled machine takes care of itself. And I have many eyes on everything should they be led astray.”

  I contemplated my empty soup bowl, my chances of freedom, any choice at all. “You told me once,” I began, carefully choosing my tone. “That there was something I could do to be released from my obligations to you.” I thought errantly of Rumplestilskin, of freedom given only when the captive became the trickster.

  “You will have to be patient. If you do everything I tell you, you will see that we all will get exactly what we want.”

  “And Julián? I can’t tell him I’ll be leaving?”

  “Don’t burden the Father any more. He will at first be relieved that you are gone and then he’ll become complacent. He’ll try to forget you and then he will wish for you again. He’ll fight against that and convince himself he has won, and then when he sees you again…well that all depends on you and your obedience to me.”

  “You are trying to confuse me.”

  He rose to his feet, smoothed the blanket on which he had been sitting in an uncharacteristic and finicky gesture. “You’re tired and worn out and you’re not ready to see clearly. I’ll take care of you until you are able to take care of yourself…whenever that might be.”

  The sun came streaming in now, lifting the darkness and sickness, making the clean white of his shirt seem to glow. “Rest now, he said. “And I’ll bring you more soup.” He took the key out of the lock and slipped it in his pocket leaving the door open. “If you need anything just call,” he said.

  I did not rest well the next couple of days. I started at every sound in the night. I wandered the house to feel the freedom of my own ability to pass through doorways. I ate ravenously from the food in the refrigerator, a selection Dante had chosen, cold cuts and salads, shrimps and bread. Man’s food, quick and satisfying.

  I stood on the veranda and by the light of the moon saw the buildings that were rising from the parched land as far as the boundaries extended. A small village, a boom town had grown during my captivity. It was never quiet, the workers competed with the howler monkeys, all other wildlife had been pushed back into the forests that no longer thickened and rooted the land.

  I could not venture into the fields, as soon as I reached the bottom step Nacho appeared and said, “Gud night lady.”

  The day we left, Julián came buttoned up tight in his collar and shirt. His face was drawn, his eyes deep and heavy. I stood in the doorway blocking his entry.

  “What is it? I did not expect to see you.”

  He shook his head loosening the words in his mouth so that they could fall. “Matilde has been found.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at Dante who was doing accounts at the table. He did not look up.

  “Where had she gone?”

  “She is dead.”

  The world spun around. I watched the wash of color and light as it rotated around me and dropped me right back where I had been standing a moment before.

  “She was found at the base of the temple with her throat cut.”

  “I am so sorry,” And I was, because it was me that had killed her no matter who had wielded the knife. I thought of Nacho and his blade. More than anything in the world I wanted to kneel at Julián’s feet and touch the hem of his pants. I wanted to ask for mercy. I wanted to feel his hand on my head.

  Dante spoke from the table. “A terrible thing Father. What will happen to the children?”

  “Her husband has taken them away. He will not come back here.”

  “A terrible thing,” Dante repeated. “Can you come in for a drink?”

  Julián shook his head, hung it like an old dog. “No. I only wanted to tell you.”

  I tried to think of the right thing to say, of anything to say. “Is there any idea who did it?”

  Julián’s empty gaze did not waver, but rested level with my eyes. “No. But Pierre is gone too. I am sorry too. Isabei, I know they were your friends.” He nodded toward Dante. “Have a good evening señor.”

  I wanted to tell him I was leaving, that I did not know when I would see him again, but I was bound by my promises, by my errors. All I could do was call goodbye to his bent, cold, unresponsive back.

  I turned on Dante, walked stiff legged to the table and leaned over him trying to regain any position at all. “Just tell me if it was you, if you had her killed because of me.”

  “Maybe someone saved me the trouble hmmm? Sit down. I’ve told you a hundred times before I don’t want you standing over me.”

  “I want answers.”

  “No!” He brought his fist down on the table scattering papers and knocking over his drink. I stepped back, afraid again. “No you do not want answers; you want to live with your head in the sand. You crave denial woman.” He threw the sheaf of papers at me and they fluttered and fell at my feet. “Do not bother me. You should have learned your lesson. I will tell you what you need to know when you need to know it. Now go get your bags. We’re leaving.”

  I stood for just a moment thinking to resist him one more time.

  He said, “You have learned your lesson haven’t you?”

  I had. I went to get my bags

  .

  Chapter Twelve

  VEILS

  The Sea King cut through the water, skimming troughs and swells, purring as slippery as a cat through the narrow airless passages.

  It was a prison of endless blue and white cocoon clouds. I watched the days pass from behind glass, the nights were just as Dante had said, the stars stuck to the windows, each cold orb plastered tantalizingly close, but unreachable.

  There were a dozen or so armed sailors on board, but I did not recognize anyone and they left me to myself. I was the lady on the bowsprit traveling on a pirate’s ship. I was the plunder.

  I went downstairs to the hold once and found it unlocked and empty. I stood in the dank underwater darkness and listened to my breath and the slosh of waves. I was very, very careful not to make any missteps that would land me down there, the natural choice of punishment I feared. I ate alone in the cabin on silver and china, food that was no doubt delicious that I used only to assuage my hunger, and did not remember tasting.

  Dante slept in a berth on the opposite side of the boat and I was given the round red satin bed to myself. I curled up in the middle of it, the bug in the rose. I tried not to smell him in the sheets.

  There were books on the shelves in the main salon, old Victorian tomes no doubt chosen for their pretty spines. I read them when the quiet began to roar in my ears. But the stories of unrequited loves and flamboyant villains made me feel as th
ough I had eaten too many chocolates. I spent most of my time waiting for evening when the sunset gilded the water and gave it a molten viscosity, a dense glory. I wanted to reach in and feel it coat my hands in warm gold syrup.

  In slightly more than a week we reached New Orleans. Miles out the water had grown murky and opaque as pavement. The smell of civilization was carried to me; of exhaust, and fried foods, and the miasma of humanity. It was not a pretty approach, just another skyline. The paddle boats churned up wakes that knocked me off balance when they crashed into our hull.

  We skirted the city and put in amid the grimy docks of the shipping port. Our own sleek white craft was an effeminate dandy among the barges and battered boats of shippers. The dock lines were secured and the motors fell silent. We were tied to the city with rope umbilicus, drifting near but not part of it. Seagulls screeched overhead fighting over the rotten fish heads that perfumed the wharf.

  “Not much to look at,” Dante said beside me at the rail. “We’re in the juicy old cunt of this whore, but there is more to her, fancy homes hung around her throat, good food in her navel and armpits.” He jostled me familiarly with his elbow, lewd and amused with himself.

  “When do we get off the boat?”

  “I’m going right now, you will stay here until I think you are ready to stand on American soil again.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s easy to disappear in New Orleans.” He pronounced it N’awlins. “But I know all the hidey holes.”

  I felt the pull of my mother, of the ground of the same continent that she walked on far to the north. Even if she could help me I already knew the stakes. There was no one else.

  “I have no one to go to but you,” I told him. “I would not endanger my mother or…Julián.”

  “Ah…but Julián is just a memory for now.”

  “You have long arms I imagine.”

  “You are getting smarter every minute,” he said. “It won’t be long and I’ll come back for you. You’ll have plenty of company watching out for you.” he pointed to the shifting unresponsive men clustered on the dock waiting to be given their pay, and allowed to spend it on God knows what pursuits were available here. “They will take turns standing guard.”

  Without comment I turned my back on him and went below deck to wallow in my imprisonment a while longer.

  Three days I sat in silence smelling reek and brine and listening to the voices from across the world whistle and shout to each other as the ships came and went. The Sea King bounced and jiggled on the fat water whenever a ferry or barge passed.

  It began to rain, which was just as well, I was afraid to go above anyhow, there were too many eyes. The water poured down the windows and I watched the free world pass through the veil of the storm. I found comfort in the cracking maw of thunder and lightning, it seemed to me proof that God existed and was doing His best to frighten people into line.

  I went down into the hold and sat in the dark, imagined the chains biting into my ankles, the scrape of wood at my back. The blood of the European gentry also flowed in my veins, but I no longer felt any allegiance to them. They were the impurity that tainted my true soul. My pale skin was a farce. One drop of the slave bound a person to that history, to that bloodline. It overrode everything else.

  Dante found me there, huddled and shivering my eyes wide open when he pulled the chain on the light. He said, “It seems I have given you a taste for the underworld.”

  I stood eye to eye with him and smiled without saying a word.

  “I‘ve come to take you to shore. That is unless you’d rather stay here.”

  I walked past him and started up the steps. I could feel his eyes on me, watching me walk. He chuckled in a low throaty rumble, the satyr on the stairs, and I resisted the urge to look back, to see what effect I had had on him.

  I was transported by car, a long black behemoth with clean glass windows that fogged up in the humid rainy air. I stared straight ahead refusing to look at Dante’s hometown. He talked about it as we passed, exposed its bones and muscle and tender flesh with stories and anecdotes from his own experience. It was like listening to lurid gossip about a woman you knew, you wanted to indulge in the stories, but also close your ears to impropriety.

  If New Orleans were a woman she would look like my mother. Her slattern’s red hair forced into respectable shape, her proper dress improper over prurient curves. Her lipstick would be red; her heels would clack over pavement and sink into dimples in the mossy cracks. She would age like a woman of the world, but still always suggest the willing naked virgin under the rosebushes.

  I first learned the city by smell. In my refusal to look I saw with my nose, the rich roux, the magnolias, the perfumed ladies, the dockworkers sweat, the hot oil, the musky wet air. Each scent was distinct and decipherable. To see it as well as smell it would have been overwhelming.

  I was taken to an apartment with carpet and furniture the color of milk, and salt, and fresh churned butter, and gulf coast sand, and white iris petals; an apartment that floated and drifted in non-color, a place you melted into rather than stood upon. I drifted in it, watching the fractured street scene I could see through white curtains as delicate as Queen Anne’s lace obscuring twisted ironwork bars. I could see passersby on the cobbled streets below and beyond that the edge of a park where children played and lovers kissed on the park benches at night.

  Dante supplied me with magazines, and books, and a television set, and a deck of cards. A woman came and cleaned everyday, quickly and efficiently. She spoke no language I knew and wanted only to finish her work. She dusted and mopped around me indifferently, I was just another piece of furniture, an errant cushion to be fluffed and tossed aside on the sofa.

  Food was delivered to me under silver domes. Thick rich gravies and creamy delights, briny- sweet sea creatures, and fat spicy beans, and sausages with skin that split and burst juice upon biting. I ate sticky pastries and licked powdered sugar from under my clean nails and off of my pink fingertips. Dante fed me out of my perpetual girl’s body and into a woman’s and brought me new dresses and peignoirs that fit the curves I was developing by laying in this cloudy bier stuffing myself to excess and reading romances.

  He lulled my longing to escape, my fear of this new prison with treats and numbing comfort. I was a plump housecat sated with fish heads and a warm fire. I would not have left if the door had been swung wide open and the world brought to my doorstep. Here there was no life, but there was no pain either.

  Dante came once a week and played cards with me and shared a bottle of wine. I drank my fill and was toddled off to bed, sleepy and muddle headed with oysters and booze. He would stay the night on the couch and in the morning would bring me beignets, or chocolate filled croissants, and smoky chicory au lait, and orange juice. We would share the newspaper and eat breakfast. He was kind and generous, the magnificent benefactor. I began to doubt my own sanity. How had this man been so utterly cruel to me before? Anyone twisted and evil could not have cared for me so well. I told myself he had a good heart, that he had lived a life of distance and debauchery, but craved companionship and comfort the same as anyone else.

  What I did not admit was that fear had made me pliable. Like a hatter’s mercury, the poison he wielded softened me and changed my shape. Fear made me satisfied. I accepted this place of comfort and removal because the alternatives were much worse.

  At night when I lay feeling the heaviness of my new body cocooned in down and Egyptian cotton I tried very hard not to think of Julián, fearful that I would summon him here to this limbo with me, this limbo that masqueraded as Heaven until the lights went out. In the darkness Hell can be anything you want it to be.

  It was over breakfast when he gave me the ring. It was large and gold with a show stopping chunk of ice teetering on the top of it.

  “It will fit,” he assured me.

  “This is an engagement ring,” I said. I had become a master of noticing only what wa
s put before me, in stating the obvious.

  “You are marrying me,” he said.

  I laughed, overturning my mimosa and spilling champagne tinged with orange juice into my lap and over the morning paper. “Why in the hell would I do that?”

  “To protect yourself, and as an ends to the means.”

  “You’ve been fattening me up for sacrifice,” I told him.

  He was on the floor in front of me wiping my lap with the linen napkins. The ring sat on the table winking. “It you marry me you get what you want…if something happens to me you get the plantation, you have the protection of my money, my status and my employer.”

  “But…”

  “If you want, we can ask Father Julián to perform the ceremony.” He sat on the floor smiling at me waiting to see how the remark stung. I pushed him backwards with my bare foot and he sat back heavily on his solid rump. I immediately regretted doing that, he looked angry and I wanted to finish breakfast before he locked me away again. “What do you get out of it?” I asked him.

  He stood up and tossed the wet napkins on the table into the puddle of juice, sticky and sweet. “That remains to be seen. I always get something out of my investments. I’m lucky that way.”

  “I don’t want to be your wife.”

  “I don’t want to be your husband. I am doing this for you.”

  All the food and drink and long sleepy days had taken away my ability to calculate. “Are you doing this to make me compliant?”

  “Ha!” he barked, a fat white walrus sucking the sugar off a donut. He spoke with his mouth full. “If you were any more compliant I would have to wipe my feet on you. If I had realized you could be bought off so easily I would never have starved you.” He sat down and picked up the ring, sliding it up and down his pinky, the only finger it fit on. “You’ve locked your own door and you know it. You have no where to go. I am offering the only option that might get you what you want.”

  “And what do I want?”