Magic (The Remarkable Adventures of Deets Parker Book 2)

by J. Davis Henry

  Mai yanked her hand from mine and wrestled my other one away from her tit.

  Her drooped eyelid somehow flared open. She hunched like a trapped animal.

  “Mai.”

  A furious light shot from her, and she slapped my jaw—hard. She looked horrified that she had struck me, then became immediately afraid as she anticipated my response. When I did nothing but wince, she berated me with accusatory gestures and rapid-fire curses for turning her act of caring for my wounds into a invitation to fuck. She gathered her things together and, after tossing my shirt over my withering cock, hung her head for a moment, mumbling what I took as regrets that she had given in to her curiosity.

  With a dismissive resurgence of anger, she stormed out the door.

  She had to get away from the stranger in her valley.

  Mistakes had been made that night by both of us, and mistakes killed you in that wilderness.

  God, the mountain air was cold. It entered the room and my bones the moment she was gone.

  Oh Christ, what have I done now? What just happened? I thought she.... There was something there, foreign, so different from one another, that wanted to reach out and discover the uniqueness of the other. We both saw that. We both had revelations to share. We’d never have known them in any other way.

  Was it just in my mind? Not hers?

  She was the one who told me to strip. Was she that naive? She saw the bulge, lifted my shirt. Man, was I that far off, or wasn’t that a signal of her desire?

  Was it all just medicinal? No, I don’t believe it. She’s fooling herself.

  Throughout the night, I constantly kicked at my itchy blanket, adjusted my hard, flat sack of a pillow a hundred times...

  Oh, man, her son was just outside the door.

  Wriggled out of the sinkhole in the grass-stuffed mattress...

  I know what I saw in her face when she looked at me.

  Closed my eyes and agonized...

  Man, I can never get this sex thing right. Maureen with ‘you’re not even in me’, my finger in Cecilia while I could hear her parents talking nearby. Almost fucking Phuong for what? Being a spy? Feeling turned on by the power over frightened women in a stream, coming inside Brenda after being knifed by her. Man, what’s with me?

  Devastating Teresa with… maybe everything I do. Getting Sam, the wrong woman, pregnant in our threesome. And now this foul-up with a well-meaning Mai, who’s probably convinced I’m the demon she believed me to be in the first place. I get lost in the jungle and even here in the middle of the wild, I find myself pissing off and getting slapped by the only chick around. What a screw-up.

  What do I do to make things right?

  In the early dawn, I was standing in the doorway looking at the sun glinting on Pico de Tigre, feeling as lost as I had ever been in the last few weeks. The clank, clank, clank of Mai’s goat sounded nearby. It sauntered up the stream path with Mai trailing about fifty feet behind.

  I stepped back into the shadow of the shack, hoping Mai hadn’t seen me. Whether she could or couldn’t, as she walked by, she was glaring in my direction.

  Whoa, that look’s poison. I’d almost rather have the jaguar breathing down my neck.

  She let the burro out of the shed and went out into the pasture to gather plants into a basket she carried everywhere. I watched as she dug up a dozen wild tubers before I stepped out and called out to her the words I had struggled all night to remember. I had second-guessed myself until the fireplace had cooled to low embers before I finally settled on how to phrase my apology. Without my little orange dictionary, I didn’t have much to work with—maybe a vague memory of Cecilia insincerely apologizing for some minor tease.

  “Mai, yo siento.” I thought that sounded right. I believed that I had just told her I was sorry. She ignored me, picked up her basket, and strutted farther away, entering into the jungle.

  A roll of thunder sounded, and I lifted my eyes up to a clear, cerulean sky. Rising high above a distant plateau, the snow and ice on the jaguar’s peak flashed rays from the morning sun. They reminded me of Teresa’s eyes. I thought of how angry and hurt she had been the last time I saw her and felt the pounding of her fists against me all over again.

  And Mai walloped me too.

  Then the thunder pealed again across the cloudless sky, and I heard the mountain ask me why I was here in its domain.

  I first saw you in a vision while massaging Teresa’s back. Now, over a year later, I’m led to you by a blue-eyed jaguar and a path of violence.

  The mountain rumbled in acknowledgement.

  You see, last night it occurred to me that after Mai was helping me with her tender hands, more or less like I had massaged Teresa, she ends up bashing me just as hard as Teresa did back when we broke up. It’s like I came all this way under a curse. And I reach the other side of my mountain vision and what happens? I get smacked in the head again. By a surrogate Teresa.

  Nothing, the mountain didn’t answer back.

  Or maybe it’s just Mai reacting, feeling betrayed, like Teresa had.

  I collected some little blue wildflowers and a large red blossom with yellow stamen and arranged them with various grasses and small green rubbery branches in a drinking cup. After placing the flowers on the path up to Mai’s house, I started to walk back to Bronx’s place. Alerted by its clanking bell, I turned to see the goat heading straight for the flowers. I charged the animal, yelling and waving my arms in hope of frightening it away. The red blossom was sticking from its mouth as I grabbed for the bouquet’s container.

  The goat butted at my leg and bleated.

  “Hey, man. C’mon, goat, get away. Go eat something else. These are for Mai. Look at all the tasty goodies around here you could eat.”

  “Baah.” He butted me again, a bit more forcefully.

  “These are for Mai.”

  I grabbed at the flower in its mouth. The goat jerked its head back. We struggled to tear my peace offering from each other’s grip.

  During the tug-of-war, I noticed Mai nearby, holding her son close to her. They were watching the battle for the flower with puzzlement. For a second, I thought they were going to turn and run like they had when they had first seen me on the mountain path. The boy broke loose from his mother’s grip and swatted at the goat, then pulled at its horns. The flower shredded, but I placed the bits I had in my cup, pushing the torn petals around, arranging them among the little wildflowers until I thought it looked presentable.

  I held the flowers out towards Mai. “Yo siento?”

  She stepped back, leery of my gesture. Maybe what I was saying didn’t mean “I’m sorry.” Or maybe she’s wasn’t going to forgive me. Or maybe she thought I was trying to seduce her.

  I tried again. “Yo no malo más.” I won’t be bad anymore?

  Mai’s face creased with worry as she eyed the gift I held out to her.

  I searched for the Spanish word for pretty. I pointed at the flowers. “Bonita.”

  She gathered her son into her voluminous skirt and, looking back at me nervously, crossed her porch to her front entranceway. She glanced skeptically over her shoulder once more before shutting the bamboo door.

  I placed the cup and flowers in the notch of a nearby tree and told the goat to leave my offering alone. With a smirk and a disregarding stare, the thief chewed the stolen red petals, flipped its tail, and then let drop half a dozen pellets from its anus.

  Chapter 25

  That night, I ate my usual dinner of cheese and corn bread along with a banana and some peanut butter for dessert. Sitting out by the stream, I drank too much aguardiente and generally felt sorry for myself. Mai wasn’t showing herself, so I brought the burro in, brushed him down a bit, and gave him a treat of oats.

  “I think I’ll do a drawing of you tomorrow.” He twitched an ear, not seeming to care one way or another.<
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  I scratched at his thick mane. “Good night.”

  Sitting in front of the fire, I grew restless and began poking around Bronx’s belongings—knives, tools, wire, rope, a kerosene lamp, a flashlight, toilet paper, tins of food, six blue ceramic drinking cups, an assortment of metal bowls, glass jars of powders or unrecognizable shriveled-up plants, cans of soups and vegetables, a few shirts, and a couple of pairs of pants. A Washington Senators baseball cap. By the bed, he kept a large cardboard beer case filled with ammunition and small gun-cleaning tools. A wooden box I was very familiar with held the medical supplies, a sewing kit, two bars of soap, and several toothbrushes. Towels and blankets were stacked next to a half dozen jugs of water and a barrel of kindling.

  The three small rooms were bare of furniture except for two chairs, a rough pine table, a workbench, and, near the kitchen fireplace, the sleeping bag and lumpy grass mattress I slept on, plus Bronx’s bed. Most all the small items I studied hung from walls or sat on open shelves. There were no closets. I didn’t feel like I was prying, just paying more attention. I had been absorbed in taking care of myself and, though curious, hadn’t looked about the place to try and figure out Bronx. I had relayed the story of my travels to him, leaving out mention of ghosts or demons and similar weirdness, talked about Greenwich Village and Yardley, yet he hadn’t shared a word about how he came to be in this remote Andean valley or where he was from.

  There were no pictures, letters, or books that could give me a clue of who he had been in the US.

  I don’t think he chose to be a hermit. He was forced into hiding.

  Another two days and nights passed without seeing Mai or her son.

  When I wasn’t worrying myself about Mai’s distrust of me or fantasizing about her slipping into my room at night, I was enjoying the solitude and beauty of the wilderness. According to Bronx, it was unlikely for jaguars to be on this side of the high plateau, and snakes didn’t thrive at all in this climate. “Not impossible, just not a concern,” he had said. Although the jungle areas still gave me pause, I felt relaxed, spending time sketching the landscape and exploring the nearby open grasslands and rocky slopes.

  I awoke on the third morning to the clanking of the goat’s bell. By the receding volume, I guessed the animal was walking down the valley, away from Bronx’s cabin, which was not its usual routine.

  Deciding to try to make amends with Mai one more time, I gathered some more flowers. Dew sprinkled tiny rainbows across the meadow. The air was cool and fresh, a large eagle circled in the currents above me. The stream dove and played over rocks, meandered in small pools, then continued on, never ending.

  It’s beautiful here.

  With reconciliation as my purpose, I approached Mai’s pathway to her house.

  My mood turned to a perplexed muddle when I came across an array of burned-down candles set on large, flat leaves. Above them, vines were tied from tree to tree, criss-crossing the path. From the vines hung intricate patterns of tied string. Some were woven into spidery diamonds, others resembled spiked starbursts. Dominating the blockade, a blood red weave of macramé crosses and hoops stretched across the walkway, commanding me to go no further. A cheaply framed print of a woman with roses in her hair and a halo around her head was perched against a rock off to one side.

  Weird, is that Saint Rose?

  My eye veered from the picture to a patch of figures scrawled in the dirt. Etched with a sharp tool were spirals and loops, plus thin rectangles surrounded by organic wiggles and amoeba-shaped blobs. I thought one shape resembled a fish, but didn’t dwell on it because I was overcome by that shock that always came—that I would never get used to—whenever magic placed another piece of the universe’s puzzle in front of me. Struck with awe, I stepped forward with a numbing disbelief in what my eyes were witnessing.

  There, crudely drawn, was a four-legged creature with what appeared to be wings or feathers along its back. Balancing on its nose was a five-pointed star. Every detail was identical to the caricature of the sniffing animal from the equation scratched into Monster Alley’s wall. I was stunned. An Andean Indian woman casting a warding-away spell against the white demon that had tempted and violated her—had drawn the symbol.

  There was a direct connection between New York and this remote mountain path.

  My awe gave way to a dizzying nausea. A breeze spun Mai’s talismans, and as I stared at them, my mind struggled to make sense of the situation. Instead, my thoughts were reeled in and captured by the spider web of vines and magical weavings.

  Each of the knotted shapes hanging across the path took on hallucinatory images of women in my life.

  I was ravaged by guilt again.

  Teresa’s face loomed, damaged and enraged. Lola spread her legs on a grassy lawn. Brenda stood naked and bloody. Sam held a faceless baby. Mai wriggled to keep my hands off her tits. The women twirled, catching on one another, forming stringy entanglements. They whispered and screamed and kissed and fought. They cried and scratched and laughed. They cast me away with hexes, then, with tantalizing eyes, dragged me deeper into their spell of love and revenge.

  My mind—my whole being—faltered, entangled by the magical totems of pain and blame.

  Why does this feel like Teresa reaching into my heart?

  The web of sorcery spun and danced like a crazed puppet show.

  I’m sorry for all the hurt. I didn’t understand any of my actions. I just did them. Can you hear me?

  I fell to my knees, begging to see beyond the grief and confusion that had ambushed and engulfed my psyche.

  I can’t let go of the pain.

  Feeling crippled by the magic, I crawled back up the path. I stuck my head in the cold stream and held my breath. Pulling free, I took a deep breath, then plunged my head back under. Over and over.

  An hour later, I lay on my back gulping for air or reason or strength to move. Christ, this is Teresa’s dream for me. I may not be awake. I’m laying in a sewer in New York somewhere. I’ll be here for forty million years until I wash away.

  I gripped at the grass to hold on to the earth as it spun through space. I focused on the far-off mountain’s silhouette. It seemed a magician of eternity, conjuring me into this wild place. Was its purpose only to confuse me?

  Why the Monster Alley symbol of the creature with the star? Why here on this path? Did a mystery ever truly unravel itself?

  Is there anything expected of me?

  Exhausted and weakened from the physical strain of trying to survive the guilt-ridden mystical pummeling, I asked the shadows filling the valley to carry me home.

  I filled myself with aguardiente and collapsed onto my mattress in front of a roaring fire.

  Sometime during the night, I awoke and watched the low glow of embers waning and surging. There in the black room, crouched before the red flickering, the even darker outline of the Shadow Creature balanced on the balls of its feet. It was shaping something in its hands. Every so often the firelight would dim further, swallowed by the creature’s presence. I knew intuitively that the shadow used the fire’s energy to manipulate the project it molded with its fingers. I couldn’t see what the creation was—only another dark object, occasionally flaring up with a shot of flame. I sensed the Shadow Creature was reshaping the core of the living universe right there in my room.

  I wondered if the Shadow Creature was God, or my soul, or a magical hallucination—maybe a spirit, or an interdimensional being. Could it be an angel? A demon? Was it alive, like I was?

  It continued sculpting by fire, not acknowledging me, its attention directed at the material it forged. I felt I was observing it from a distance, like the shadow was sitting in another room in front of a different fire, far far away.

  Listening to the burning wood’s comforting sizzle, my last blurry impression was of the flames springing back to life and the ebony figure fading to nothing.
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  Maybe that’s it… all this confusion in my mind, my life being a mess... has to do with… or will be just about... nothing.

  Chapter 26

  The next day, I awoke to a sound I hadn’t heard in a long time. A dog barking. From the cadence, I easily understood what it was saying.

  “There’s rhyme and reason to all things. Wake up.”

  “Okay, pup. I’m listening.”

  A bubble of joy rose within me.

  The time had come to move on.

  I studied a map Bronx had drawn of the area. It included mile markers, travel time, and notes alongside prominent landmarks or topography. The route out of the high valleys cut through pastures and jungle, alongside and across rivers, finally reaching the Merida valley where the only major road in the state wound its way through civilized lands. I still had two days of light hiking to reach that highway. From there, I could seek help from Cecilia’s household in the city of Merida or hitch north back to Caracas. There seemed little reason for me to stay at Bronx’s, but I thought I’d wait around to thank him, plus I felt a responsibility to care for the burro.

  In the late afternoon, I heard a donkey bray and watched Bronx plod up the path, his hand resting on a case of beer strapped to the back of the animal. He flipped a carton of Kools at me. “You were in luck.”

  I could smell alcohol on his breath.

  He gave me a hard look that twisted into a shake of his head. “Damn, Deets. I don’t know the full story, but I can guess it. I saw Mai about six hours down the trail. She said she’d be gone for awhile.” He scratched at his beard. “Saw the magic at her entranceway too. A zinger. She put in one hell of a devil-zap on you.” He grunted as he untied the animal’s load of bags and boxes. “Help me unpack these supplies, and then we’ll grab a beer and talk. Got us some real hot dogs for dinner.”

  I slammed the bottle cap off a Zulia on the edge of a piece of timber and drank deep. “Man, that’s good.” I ripped at the wrappings covering a cigarette pack, stuck a Kool between my lips and savored the menthol I hadn’t tasted for over a month.