Godhead

by Hansen, Jalex; Alexander, Writing as Jordan

  “Are we sinking?” I shouted over the roar of the storm.

  “We’re too low in the water!” he shouted back, “We have to drop some cargo.”

  I followed him toward the hold and tumbled down the stairs. Already the men above were opening the hold hatchway; the wind blew stinging gusts of water down on us plastering my hair into my eyes. The sailors were pulling the crates up and throwing them overboard, the priceless treasures consumed by the ravening sea.

  I crouched in the doorway watching as the last crates were hauled upward and cast away. “We’re still too low!” Dante shouted. There were orders in Spanish and Kriol and then several of the sailors were down in the hold with pick axes breaking apart the altar and sending it above in chunks to be dispatched.

  Over the storm I heard the hum of the godhead and I threw myself over the stone, sheltering it with my arms. “Not this one!” I cried. Although I hated the thing I was responsible for it, I had delivered this monstrous child out of the earth.

  Dante grabbed the back of my wet shirt and hurtled me aside. “Get out of the damn way woman!”

  They finished with the altar, interring my last sacrifice, washed clean of bloodstains to the bottom.

  Dante restrained me as they headed for the godhead but then held up his hand. “You can stop now,” he told them.

  The hold was closed, and everyone huddled below decks in the lounge where the glass still held and the water spat and gagged just high enough to be worrisome but not destructive. We rode out the wallowing storm together in silence as Dante’s treasure filtered down and away into the black depths.

  He was a fearsome creature over the next few days. Speaking to no one and backhanding anyone that got in his way. The trip had cost him money and reputation. He had cast the best finds of his career overboard to save himself and the boat. The rest of us, I am sure, never crossed his mind. He must have regretted not tossing the humans overboard. If he could have he would have I am sure.

  When the men did not know I was listening I heard snatches of their conversation. They had heard about my bloody appearance when the godhead was lifted, they thought I had started the storm.

  The weather left behind a blank, clean, mockingly beautiful sky.

  Two days after the storm we anchored out near a deserted island. I stood at the railing watching the endless patterns of the water ruffle and ripple. The sea was as clear as fresh air and made warm slurping kissy sounds against the hull. Small fish slickered in its glassy depths, and the clarity made the shifting bottom seem mere feet away, close enough to touch. I thought if I could just fall in, plunge into the juice of the world, I would find that lucidity in myself, and slake the acid need that ran through my fibers. It would only take a moment submerged in blue to purify me. I could already see myself over the edge and in the blue light. And then I had done it.

  The water enfolded me and rinsed out the shadows. It clung to my skin, wet and loose, and firm, cold and warm all at once. I opened my mouth to suck in life’s amniotic fluid, and was surprised to feel the saline burn. My lungs choked and clenched, taking away the bliss of the light, the striated bottom, the flak of fish.

  My arms pulled me back to the surface where I bobbed disoriented for a moment before other arms had a hold of me and were dragging me back aboard, laying me ragged and dripping at Dante’s feet.

  He said, “You are becoming a nuisance.” He hoisted me to my feet and walked me below deck through the lounge and down the stairs to the hold.

  “I hear the godhead,” I told him. “It hums.”

  He kicked open the door with his foot and pushed me into the blackness. “You’re so enthralled with the damn thing, why don’t you spend a few days with it.”

  He slammed the door and then I was gobbled up by the darkness.

  At first I was not afraid. I was confused a bit by the quick transition from the bright warm ocean to the dark cold belly of the Sea King. I felt my way across the space looking for the edge of the room. When my hand encountered the slick and gummy surface of the wall I slid down against it and pulled my knees to my chest. When apprehension did come, it was not for my immediate concerns: hunger, thirst, warmth. I knew Dante’s methods, and if I did not give him any trouble eventually these needs would be met. If nothing else, he had to open the hold to take out the godhead. If he wanted me dead he could have left me to, I could not escape. I would be trapped in this hold and dragged down to the depths to die slowly at the bottom of the ocean, or simply in a large enough swell I could be crushed by the shifting of the godhead. My terrors drifted in another direction. I was trapped in this pit with my discovery. I could not help but feel that the godhead had discovered me, that it had heaved itself from the earth to trip me, to make its presence known. It wanted me for some purpose; it had reared itself from the void to pluck me.

  I scrabbled on my hands and knees across the wet floor searching for the stone. I jammed my fingers right into it skinning my knuckles. I sat down in front of it and ran my fingers over its visage, the large protruding eyes, the flat wide nose. I stroked the space between the generous lips and imagined the teeth within, gnashing at me sudden and swift and unseen. I felt the sneer above his lip, and I swore in my dark induced paranoia that I felt it shift under my touch, upcurl just ever so slightly into a cruel and baiting smile. I have you alone. I heard it say. I rule the dark.

  I put my arms around it, pressed my face into it, dared it to take me, to show itself, but nothing happened. I retreated quickly spooked by my own daring. I tripped and hobbled my way back to the wall where I sat with my heart thudding and my eyes wide open shut by darkness.

  “Julián,” I whispered. Over and over I spoke his name as a mantra to keep the abyss away, to shield myself. There in the shapeless embalming darkness the last of the heat fizzled away, and I was filled with cool water and emptiness. I could feel my skin prickled with goose bumps, I could smell the brine condensing on the walls. I could no longer hear my own heart beat. In that transforming void I was finally allowed awareness, and with it came shame for all that I had done, for the corruption I had courted. I could not save myself, nor could I ever hope to look for rescue from Julián. I had damaged what he loved, both the woman and the fledgling spirit. I was coming home broken.

  This was not my mother’s bed of roses, this was something that reached back much farther, a dark slimy stain on my spirit that had been carried in the blood from far off places I could not even name.

  I did not belong to anyone. I was between times. Into that gulf I called out one more time hoping that there was something stronger than Dante, stronger than lust, stronger than the ancient killing fields of the Maya that had burdened me with their stone emblem.

  The ocean had swallowed the heat, my pride, my will, and spat me back out.

  I called out seeking a builder to reconstruct my soul.

  The days passed in long silence with only the suck of the sea and the grating of the godhead in the hold to mark the moments. At night the engines ran, and when they stopped at last, I knew that morning had come. Three times this happened, and then in the middle of another thrumming silence the doors were flung open and I was taken back into the light, dazzled and emptied.

  We were home.

  Chapter Fifteen

  PLAGUES

  Dante said, “The company provides.”

  My banana kingdom had become an empire. Nothing was left of the jungle around my home. Acres and acres of bananas created a new smaller canopy that was intersected with narrow dirt roads. Miles of cables directed themselves to the landing platform of the empacadora, and ringed all around the perimeter were shacks and cinderblock buildings; the homes of the workers, the commissary, the makeshift infirmary, and an afterthought of a school.

  My father’s house, Dante’s house, sat in the middle of it all, King of the Hill, and off in the distance its faded mirror image, the Mayan temple, sat groveling and decaying into the future.

  Three hundred acres had been scraped,
and burned, and replaced with productive civilization. Three hundred acres of color, and light, and sound, of secret medicinals, and ancient footpaths had been swapped for modern industry and two hundred wage laborers.

  “So many buildings,” I said.

  “We’ll expand,” Dante assured me. “Even this will not be enough then.”

  What is enough? I wondered. But I did not give voice to my thoughts. Silence ran fleet-footed through my mouth and mind. I had become a creature of compliance. My purpose was to survive until the answers came.

  Dante had had the godhead installed as a prominent fixture in our front yard among the cannas and the mandeville. It looked down on the fields with its benign eyes and twisted snarl.

  He blamed me for the loss of the Olmec artifacts, blamed my discovery for taking the space and weight that should have belonged to his treasures. He was as superstitious as the natives in thinking me bad luck. He put the godhead there to remind me of my curse, of his own folly, and to frighten the workers.

  It was a week before Julián appeared, dressed in collar and jeans. I answered the door and felt the little gold cross burn around my neck. The shame that I had become aware of in the pit of the hold now multiplied ten fold when I looked at his face, the clear empty depths of his eyes, the fine skin, the clean patch of white at his throat. I was sure I no longer smelled of rain, but like trickery and cravings and blood overlaid with the decay of a broken spirit.

  “Isabei?” he asked, confirming my fears.

  Impulsively I tore the necklace from around my neck and threw it square in his face. I told myself it was to protect him from the vice of this house, from the threats he did not know he lay under. “Go away!” I shouted. “I don’t want you here anymore!” I slammed the door.

  When I peeked out of the living room window I saw him crouched holding the broken necklace in between his fingers, a look of bewilderment on his face.

  That night as Dante came in from the fields on his way to his room he stopped and rubbed the red streak left on my neck when I tore the chain. “You’ve lost your necklace,’ he said. “Have you lost your faith as well?”

  I did not answer. He no longer expected me to. My silence both irked him and relieved him.

  The next evening, Saturday, the woman that Dante had hired to clean and cook made a pork roast that filled the house with the sweet ooze of melting onions and garlic and lime. She was an older Garifuna woman, her hair gray steel wool on top of her tar black skin, and deep beautiful amber eyes. She looked wise and loving, but she never attempted to talk to me or befriend me. She located all the cleaning supplies Matilde had left behind and went about her business, ignoring me. I did not even know her name. I did not ask. She was safer if she remained anonymous.

  As she set the table, Julián once more appeared at the door, and this time Dante let him in.

  “Look who’s come to see us Isabel, the good Father.”

  Julián made no reference to the day before. He declined a plate of food, but took a glass of red wine, rich Spanish wine in a thick cool clay mug. We were strangers now, everything had changed. Besides the obvious and confusing matter of my marriage, I was a different woman, a wild creature tamed and trapped. I could no longer hide my state.

  Dante acted as if everything was normal, as though we played bridge on the weekend and had cocktail parties, and he came home from the office and kissed me and sat down to a dinner I had made. Ward and June in the jungle.

  Julián was innocent but too wise to be fooled. “I have to admit I was very surprised,” he said right there in front of both of us. “About the two of you. “

  Dante said, “Well it looked like you really meant your vows after all. So I thought I’d step in.”

  Julián’s skin paled just a bit underneath the surface. “You are a lucky man…congratulations.” He raised his glass.

  Dante did not raise his own in response. “She’s quite a handful padre, I saved you some trouble.”

  Julián’s features remained steady. “She does not seem to be any trouble to me. She’s rather subdued.”

  “Not so subdued you need to talk about me like I’m not here,” I interrupted.

  Dante laughed, “See Father, it only takes one wrong word and all hell breaks loose, if you’ll pardon the expression. She gets very …creative…when it comes to her responses.”

  I tried to steady my hand on my fork and did not answer.

  Julián pulled back, not wanting to make things worse for me. “And you’ve changed other things as well. The godhead in the yard for instance.”

  “Isabel found it and refused to part with it.”

  “You found it...where?”

  Dante added wine to my glass. “I have a friend in New Orleans, an antiquities dealer; I bought it for a wedding present when I saw how fond she was of it.”

  “It’s Olmec?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you think señor that certain things should be left as they are?”

  “What you really mean is that I should put things back where they were.” He watched Julián carefully, gauging his features, staring into his eyes until Julián blinked, until he could feel it. “So you do not, I assume, approve of the expansion of the plantation.”

  “I am a guest tonight; my adverse opinions should not be aired over your dinner table. I apologize.”

  “No, no, by all means go ahead,” Dante said. “I welcome a worthy adversary.”

  Julián sat up straighter. “I am not looking for an enemy.”

  “Perhaps only a gracious opponent?”

  In their sparring I was suddenly reminded of my wager with Dante. Here was Julián already being sucked in, despite my refusal to follow the bet through. Was it fate then? Was that what was required to appease Dante and make him leave us alone?

  Julián had stood and gone to the window, his back to us and all our Machiavellian tactics. “The Maya villagers have no work.”

  “They can work for me.” Dante’s voice was smooth and congenial. He relished being in control, it made him benevolent. “We can offer better wages than they had before, and health care and even a small school house for the children, so they do not grow up illiterate itinerants themselves.”

  “The Maya are not itinerant.” Julián swung back around and faced Dante, his eyes filled with emotion if not sight. “They want to be stable, to support themselves. They only need a bit more land to support their families, to have better milpas and maintain their own productivity. Surely you can spare a few acres for them, land that had belonged to their forefathers.”

  “Land that they stupidly lost to my forefathers,” Dante corrected.

  “Even so.” Julián’s shoulders slumped.

  “Padre, you know as well as I do that a wise king does not divide his kingdom.”

  “Earthy kingdoms rise and fall señor. There is only one kingdom that deserves glory and recognition. And in order to gain entrance to that kingdom you must give of yourself on Earth.”

  Dante chuckled. “I don’t need an afterlife Father as long as the here and now treats me well and doesn’t demand too much of me.” he flicked a glance in my direction like a glob of sputum. “If you need God to keep you on the straight and narrow you go right ahead, but for the most part I see you God fearing Christians as a bunch of hypocrites looking for guidance. I am at peace with myself Father, and you with all your good intentions, and self flagellation, and sore knees cannot say the same thing.”

  Julián looked to be gathering himself to speak, but the words were failing him.

  Dante said, “How about some dessert?”

  “I have to be going.” Julián choked on his own politeness, already heading toward the door, he bumped into the nameless housekeeper who had been coming in to clear the plates. “Pardon me ma’am.”

  “See him out Isabel,” Dante commanded. “Where are your manners?”

  I practically galloped from the table after Julián, not sure what I was going to say or do. I caught up t
o him outside on the veranda where he stood with clenched fists taking deep steadying breaths of moist night air.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him hoping to cover any number of things.

  “You do not need to apologize. It is not your fault. I should not let him get to me. So many of his kind out there have tried to rile me, but he’s the only one that succeeds.”

  “Why is that do you think?”

  He turned to me his breath falling into its normal patterns, his hands loose at his sides. “You know why Isabei.”

  I nodded, but in truth I didn’t know exactly why. He had given me a sentence to ponder and puzzle, the way women have always lain awake at night trying to decipher what they want to hear in the simple statements of the men they yearn for. I followed him down the stairs to his bicycle. Nearby the godhead sat. I could not hear it humming anymore, but I knew that it might at any time. Feeling my gaze he followed it with his head. “I walked into it parking my bike, felt its features.” I thought I saw him shiver. “Gruesome thing...why did you want it?”

  “It wanted me.” I hadn’t meant to say that.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out the gold cross, its chain repaired. He placed it around my neck and clasped it. “Keep it Isabei. You might need it.” He mounted his bicycle and rode off into the night following the tracks he had left coming here.

  The mechanism of the plantation whirred and clanked all the next week getting another shipment ready. Large skids were loaded onto trucks and taken to the docks which had been enlarged and improved courtesy of the fruit company. The bananas would be floated out on barges where they would be allowed to ripen for several days while they waited for the ships that would take them to America or England.