by Ann Beattie
“Yes,” Derek said.
“The symbolism was obvious. You couldn’t rescue your friend, so you were rescuing his friend, the monkey.”
“Right. But you’d said to me before that you thought . . . didn’t you think the toys had the equivalent of souls?”
“I might have talked about how we mythologize things,” Hidburt said. He sat back in the chair. “But exactly what does this have to do with the voodoo doll?”
“Well, I wondered . . . do you believe in them? In their power, I mean.”
Hidburt reached for one of the mugs. He swirled the liquid inside. “Yes,” he said simply.
“I have it in the car. I didn’t know whether I should bring it in or not. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know exactly how to bring it in. I suppose I could have put it in a bag, or something, but I couldn’t . . . after all these years, what would you have thought if I’d walked in with a voodoo doll?”
“I’ve seen stranger,” Hidburt said.
“Could I get it?”
“Yes, of course. Go get it.”
“If you saw it, you could tell more about it.”
“Are you asking, or trying to reassure yourself?” Hidburt said. “Go get it.”
He got up and walked out of the room. The house was quiet. There was no aroma of coffee; he had never been brought his orange juice. Outside, the dog again beat its tail, but didn’t stand. It didn’t turn its head to watch him walk to the car. He opened the car door and took the doll out of the glove compartment. He’d put it there, as if in a little coffin, because he hadn’t wanted to look at it on the drive. Now, the doll felt slightly damp and warm. He held it in his hand and started toward the house. In one of the windows, he thought he saw Casey’s face, but as he came closer, he realized it must have been a shadow cast from a downspout.
He was lost in thought, so he was surprised when the dog suddenly rose and trotted up to him, collar jingling. The dog was interested in the doll. He no doubt thought it was a dog toy. Or it might have been some weird, New Age bone. Derek snorted and looked at it from the dog’s perspective. Which made it look at once curious and harmless—a silly thing, created by a silly person. It embarrassed him that for days, he had been so sure it had an awful power. He gave in to the dog’s curiosity and held it lower, for the dog to sniff. The dog sniffed and sniffed, like a cat with catnip. When he raised his arm, the dog gave a little leap in the air.
“Don’t give him anything that could splinter inside him, like a turkey bone, because it could cause internal bleeding,” Casey suddenly said. She was standing again in the doorway. She had on a cap turned backwards. She was wearing glasses.
“Oh, no, this isn’t for the dog. It’s something I brought to show the doctor,” he said, feeling suddenly very peculiar.
“Please don’t feed the dog,” Casey said again, as if he hadn’t spoken.
He raised his hand, meaning to show her it wasn’t food. As he did, the dog lunged, got the doll, and began to run, bolting across the sand.
“No!” Casey screamed. “He could die!”
This brought Hidburt immediately to her side. She began to speak to him urgently, whispering, pointing to him all the while, real hatred in her eyes.
“The dog!” he heard Casey say, but Hidburt was turning her away from the door, quite forcefully, disappearing with her inside the house. Should he follow them in? The dog had almost vanished; it had moved much faster than he’d thought possible. He had misjudged the dog’s abilities. The dog had run fast and far, disappearing in the direction of swampy mangroves. What had he caused now? More confusion and unhappiness. He never anticipated anything: not that his wife would leave him; not that his girlfriend could be truly malicious and crazy; not even that a dog would jump for a toy and dash off with it. Everything was a big surprise to him. Just as Sallie had said when she told him she was leaving: everything came as a biiiiig surprise.
He walked slowly up the steps. Casey was crying. He could hear her, even over the classical music that had been turned on. He heard the doctor’s voice in the distance, and eventually, as Casey’s crying subsided, he heard him more clearly, consoling her as one would console a child. He knew he was overstaying his welcome, but still, he sank back into the chair he’d sat in earlier. Surely Hidburt would understand—or could be made to understand—that the dog’s getting the doll had been a simple accident, and really: it was not his fault if Casey was out of control. He had not intended any of it. Hidburt had been quite willing to see him. In fact, he had all but said that his was a lonely life.
But as time passed and Hidburt did not return, he began to feel more uneasy. Should he leave a note of apology? Would it be best to get back in his car and drive away—was that the way things could return to normal? He was just about to do it—he saw blank paper in Hidburt’s printer—when the doctor returned, shaking his head in embarrassment.
“One step forward, two steps back,” Hidburt said. “I apologize. She sees that she reacted excessively, but she doesn’t have perfect control over her emotions. She’ll be bringing my coffee and your orange juice.”
“I’m awfully sorry. It all happened so fast that I—”
“What doesn’t? Except those things that we wish would pass quickly,” Hidburt said.
“I guess we can assume the doll’s long gone, and I don’t have to worry about that anymore,” he said.
Hidburt’s small smile faded. “Oh, its being gone doesn’t mean you don’t have to worry about it,” he said. “It does simplify my removing the spell, though, because without seeing it, I can do what you might call a generic banishment, though that will probably work just as well. But in order to be very specific, I’d have to know exactly how it was marked.”
He could imagine it, being gnawed in the boggy ground under the mangroves. Just when he had convinced himself it was harmless, the doctor was telling him that its power would still have to be diffused.
“You won’t mind that I don’t speak the words out loud?” Hidburt said. He opened the top drawer of a filing cabinet pushed under his desk and removed a box. He rummaged around in it and took out something dark and small. Then he reached in the box and took out a book of matches. He looked around and reached for a coffee mug, poured its remaining liquid into another mug, and turned it upside down on the desk. He placed what turned out to be a little cone of incense on the mug and lit it, fanning the match slowly until the tip of the incense glowed orange. Then he closed his eyes and blew it out, squeezing his eyes shut even more tightly, moving his lips as he spoke silent words. A smell something like jonquils filled the room. In the background, music ended and was replaced by silence. He could not hear Casey anywhere in the house, though he imagined that as soon as anything upset her, they would both hear her immediately.
“Please. No negative thoughts,” Hidburt said quietly, opening his eyes and looking up. As Derek looked at him, surprised, Hidburt bowed his head and began moving his lips again. “There,” he said after another minute. “I can tell because of the change in the air that it’s already taking effect. Can you feel it yourself? Sometimes people can.”
“Then there really was a spell? All this time, the spell was on?”
“If you’d told me on the phone what your concern was, I’d have invited you to come out that day.”
“But Hillary’s all right? Nothing’s happened to her?”
“Well, these things usually aren’t timed to keep coming at a person like balls from a pitching machine,” Hidburt said. “In all probability, she’s fine.” He pushed his phone forward. “Please call and put your mind at rest,” he said. “The curse has been undone. Would that it was always so easy.”
He nodded in agreement. He reached for the phone. He looked at it and concentrated, but the Lake Charles number kept popping into his head; he couldn’t remember the newer number.
“I’m afraid to ask if you’re psychic, because you probably are,” Derek said. He added: “I’m afraid I haven’t memorized my ex-w
ife’s new number.”
“Too many things to remember,” Hidburt said. “That’s what Casey and I wrestle with every day.” As he spoke, he seemed to deflate, slightly. Hidburt frowned. “Not only am I not psychic,” Hidburt said, “but if I might overstep my bounds and ask you a personal question? I’m a little surprised to find that during the period I knew you, you had a wife and a daughter. I assumed that you were his lover. Not that it’s any of my business if you were or you weren’t.”
“Why did you assume that?”
“If I recall correctly, he told me that.”
“Well, it wasn’t true. I worked for him. I wasn’t his lover.”
“I see,” Hidburt said. “Well, people say many things, some of them true, some of them not.”
“I know he wanted me to be his lover, but I wasn’t,” Derek said.
“Near the end, quite a bit of pretense often goes on. People think that the dying see things so clearly, but even the ones who are in their right minds . . . in my experience, even then men remain dreamers and writers of fiction. You take my example of the brothers who intended to grow their sponges; they just wouldn’t believe they couldn’t prevail.”
“It drove my wife crazy that I was so devoted to him, but it wasn’t sexual. I was only devoted to him as a friend.”
“My dear man, I hope you don’t think I’m doubting you,” Hidburt said.
“No, but I think she believes that to this day. That there was something else. I think she was very jealous of him.”
“As would be natural, if she believed that.”
“And she thought I was hanging around for his money. She only thought the worst of me.”
Hidburt shook his head sadly. “I’m not a marriage counselor,” he said. Hidburt stood. “I’m afraid if you’d like a glass of orange juice, we should proceed into the kitchen ourselves,” he said. “I’m sorry not to have at least provided you with a beverage.”
“No, think of all you’ve done for me. Really. I can’t thank you enough. May I give you something—”
“Absolutely not. Your intuition brought you to me again, and my skills allowed me to fulfill your request.”
“Your dog will come back all right, won’t he?”
“Plenty of life still left in him. I was glad to see that,” Hidburt said, smiling.
“Should we look for him?”
“Why? Gnawing on his treasure out under some tree, happy as a pig in shit, as they say.”
At the door, Derek held out his hand. Hidburt clasped it with one hand and patted his shoulder with the other. “You take care of yourself,” Hidburt said. “Life’s bad enough when you do, so there’s no point in not.”
“I really appreciate this. I can’t say how much—”
But the second time Hidburt patted his shoulder he also saw to it that Derek stepped onto the landing outside the door. Raising his hand in silent farewell, he quickly closed the door.
He was halfway back to Key West before he began to wonder whether Hidburt might not have trotted out a few tricks as a sort of salve. Whether the whole afternoon hadn’t been something of a put-on. Did an educated man really believe in the power of voodoo? Or, as a Jungian, was it a belief in symbolic power? Perhaps he’d seen so much he hadn’t expected to see that he came to accept everything. And if you could accept anything, why couldn’t your own charade—your own exorcism charade—be part of that?
Still, he felt that some spell had lifted. He felt relieved, wanted to remain impressed, not to seriously consider the possibility that Hidburt, himself, was some crazy old man. As well as what he might have done in removing the spell, he had also listened and believed—surely he’d believed—what he had told him about his relationship with Wendell.
Wendell who, near the end, had said to him: “I’ll float back like an old trout, belly-up. I’ll be reincarnated as the most banal thing you’ve ever seen—and since there are sure to be so many of them, you’ll have to wonder every time whether it isn’t me. Every time the trash is knocked over. Every time a branch falls on your car. Every time you get a piece of junk mail. It might be me in the envelope. You just keep right on, without me, rowing in that big, grand cesspool of a canal, past those beautiful palaces, underneath those starry skies, but all that flotsam and jetsam—you’re going to have to wonder, with every piece that floats by, whether or not it’s me.”
Well: Wendell certainly never would have come back as anything so dramatic as a voodoo doll. That was a crazy woman’s curse, whereas, in his dying, filled with spitefulness and envy for the living, all Wendell had wanted him to be haunted with was the dingy ordinariness of life. If he did reconcile with Sal-lie, would Wendell blow a cold wind from the great beyond, sending a shiver up her spine on the night he proposed? Would he take a ghostly walk, preceding them, all the way upstairs, to become—if not his lover—at least the gritty sand on the sheets?
Coydog
FRAN reached between the car seats, hauling the insulated JL nylon bag onto her lap and unzipping it. Inside were airplane peanuts she’d saved from her most recent business trip, and celery sticks, apples, plastic spoons, and a jar of peanut butter. Hank had run into a convenience store to buy crackers, but had grabbed cookie wafers by mistake. Back in the car, all the time she laughed, Hank had done a slow burn. She bit into an apple and offered him another, with her free hand. He shook his head no.
“You seem a little down,” she said. “What about a pep talk? Should I give my husband a pep talk?”
He shrugged, looking in the rearview mirror as he passed a small white car. Across the top of the rearview was an additional mirror that allowed you to see four other views of the road. It was like one of those fashionable series paintings she’d been seeing in the downtown galleries: paintings that imitated photographs, or rather snapshots, of inconsequential things. One of the mirrors magnified Hank’s blue eyes; another provided a view of Hank in profile.
“If your sister asks her usual elliptical questions, why don’t you think about what she probably wishes she could ask directly, and answer the implied question?” Fran said.
“I don’t want to be doing this. I don’t want to be doing this. I don’t,” he said.
They were riding in a borrowed car. Their car had electrical problems. Cars were loaned by friends these days the way furniture used to float around in the sixties. This one had been borrowed from a man visiting their neighbors in Morristown. He had driven to New Jersey from Los Angeles, and his idea of the perfect vacation was to spend one week being driven by others or taking cabs. The car was a big navy-blue Buick the man had won in a blackjack game in Lake Tahoe.
“Dreamy Dora,” Fran sighed.
“I know what you’re going to say next,” he said. “You’re going to say that if there’s a pause in the conversation, it isn’t my responsibility any more than hers to fill it.”
His hand, rubbing a lock of hair off his forehead, was magnified in one mirror and appeared clawlike in the next. The mirror made her unhappy. She stopped checking it. She put the apple core on the dashboard. A truck passed them on a curve, hissing its brakes. Gravel flew backwards, plinking their car. Their car. It was not their car. It was a car a stranger had won gambling.
This would be the group at Hank’s parents’ summer gathering: Georgette, Hank’s mother; Winston, Hank’s stepfather; Aunt Hettie, who was not actually an aunt, but the local Amway dealer; Uncle Macklin, Aunt Hettie’s boarder, who had recently become engaged to her, thereby earning the honorific “Uncle”; real Aunt Georgia, eighty-four; Dreamy Dora, Hank’s sister; Myra, Dora’s constant companion. Myra was a recovering alcoholic who had been in Dora’s therapy group. She replaced mufflers for a living.
Every year, there was a Fourth of July party on June 28, so the family wouldn’t have to be on the road on the Fourth. Similarly, Christmas was celebrated the first weekend in December, and Winston’s mid-January birthday was combined with the Christmas celebration. Georgette would allow no mention to be made of her
birthday, though she sent cards to others. She tucked handkerchiefs into every card she mailed, so they always arrived marked “postage due.” It was funny. Everybody’s family was funny, except on the day you were driving toward them.
At the gas station, Hank pumped and Fran got out to stretch. After only a few months without running, her body felt lax and permanently stiff: those two descriptions, which might seem contradictory, were actually two distinct, troublesome things. She had stopped running on her doctor’s advice, to see if her periods would resume. She was twenty-nine. She and Hank had decided they should have a baby.
A few miles past the gas station, they saw the sign pointing to Route 676, and Hank heaved a sigh as they turned in the direction to North Lake. “You know what I feel like every time I come to see them?” he said. “I feel like I’m not really an adult. Like I don’t have a job. Like where I work is just an illusion. I also feel like I’ve never gotten it up in my life. I feel like my anatomy doesn’t exist.” He looked at her. “And after that un-adult outburst, would you care to share any of your innermost thoughts with me?”
“I feel that I don’t have breasts,” she said.
In spite of himself, he laughed. He reached over and patted her knee. “I know I say this every year,” he said, “but I really see no point to visiting on June twenty-eighth. Next year I’m not going to do it.”
Through the side window, she saw rowboats tied to big tree trunks near the lake. And someone . . . someone pedaling an enormous duck, or swan. Someone sitting atop a swan, skittering erratically on the bright blue water.
“God almighty,” Hank said. “It’s Macklin. Isn’t that Macklin out there? That’s his lamb’s-wool hat, I swear it is.”
A duck, not a swan. It zigzagged out of view, but as she squinted into the distance, she remembered that Macklin had for years been carving wood to make what he called “folky art.” Now, one of his big creations was apparently floating around North Lake.