Sacrifice

by Farris, John

  Butterbaugh examined a plaid lap robe on the backseat, where the madwoman may have slept for an hour or two at a time, in parking lots or at interstate rest stops. A squashed chocolate-covered cherry was stuck to the blanket. He shook out a couple of dead flies.

  "Don't think that'll happen. Obviously she's delusional, or worse. According to your statement, she made reference to having been 'locked away.' Institutionalized. We'll find out where and what the circumstances were."

  He backed out of the front seat and closed the door, went around to the back of the Pontiac, and unlocked the trunk.

  "No, whether she stays as the guest of the state of Georgia or we ship her back to the authorities in British Columbia, she won't be in a position to cause you any more trouble." Butterbaugh smiled. "Who knows? She might pick up another newspaper a month from now and see the photo of somebody she thinks is her long-lost daughter. Forget all about you."

  I didn't smile. He pulled out an old-fashioned carpetbag with brass fittings, put it down and searched the trunk with his flashlight. He found nothing of interest, and closed the trunk lid.

  "What will happen to her car?"

  "Impound. We'll take everything out and store it, along with the luggage and the contents of her handbag. Well, I guess that's about all there is to do here. By the way, how's Sharissa? We can't seem to get together on a time for that match."

  "She's competing in the Southeast Junior Regionals, beginning next weekend. Seeded second, as a matter of fact."

  Butterbaugh pitched the flashlight to the cop on duty and we walked back to the restaurant.

  "Like to see her play," he said. "Where's the tournament going to be?

  "Chattahoochee Tennis Club in Atlanta."

  "Maybe I can—"

  His foot struck something on the asphalt pavement and sent it skittering, a flash of gold in the lights above the entrance to the Ovenbird's kitchen. He retrieved the object from the edge of a big dumpster and held it up. I recognized the half-dollar-size engraved locket Mrs. Roxanne Sullivan had been wearing.

  "It's hers," I said. "The chain must have snagged on something when they were carrying her outside to the ambulance."

  "Let's have a look." But he couldn't find the hidden catch to open the locket.

  "Probably nothing much inside," I suggested. "Another picture of Frederick."

  "Yeah. I'll put it with her other effects." He separated a plastic sandwich bag from several that he carried in a coat pocket and dropped the locket inside.

  "Do you need me for anything else?" I asked Butterbaugh.

  "We'll want you to sign a complaint. I'll bring it around to the store tomorrow; you're only a couple of blocks away from the Hall. Hope you can salvage something of your evening out."

  But I already knew there was no chance of that. Caroline was anxious to leave and Fog Hatley couldn't coax her to stay, even though he assured us everything would be on the house.

  On the way home I broke a bad silence by saying, "Another close call."

  Caroline had her hands over her face. "Stop," she said. She hissed when she breathed. That made me uneasy. It was a familiar symptom, recurring when she was near an emotional crisis. "This was . . . too much, don't you see? I don't even want to think about . . . that woman."

  As soon as we were in bed, I began, with an urgency that surprised us, to make love to Caroline. We'd always had good sexual relations, except for those down times in her life when it was useless to approach her. We started all right, she was very responsive; then she just turned off. Her eloquent fingers were poised lifelessly at the base of my spine as if she had forgotten not how, but why. She didn't ask me to stop, knowing I was closer to my climax than she had been, but, burdened with the sudden blankness of her flesh, I couldn't keep on, so it was one of those rare fizzles for us.

  We lay side by side on the bed with the moonlight on our bodies, holding hands.

  "You haven't changed, either," she said.

  "What, honey?"

  "We've been married eighteen years, too."

  "I thought we weren't going to—"

  "Look at me. Everything sags, or puckers. I have to have a rinse twice a month or I'd be as gray as my own mother—"

  "Don't," I said.

  "But you're still the same. Your body is—"

  "Usually I run thirty miles a week, minimum."

  She was quiet for a long time, but because of the rhythm of her breathing I knew she hadn't fallen asleep. "Ever been to British Columbia?" Caroline asked me.

  "I was up there just last week, scouting for a nice little topless lounge to buy."

  She rolled to her right, then rolled back and hit me with a pillow, her usual response to my occasional absurdities. I tickled her. Finally she begged me to quit.

  "Sharissa'll hear us."

  "I don't think it'll do her any harm to know we have fun in bed. After all these years."

  Caroline, pleasantly warmed and dampened from our exertions, snuggled against my chest and reached lower. I was fully erect.

  "I could—if you want—you know—what you like?"

  "And I'll do what you like." Although, after eighteen years of marriage, she was still too bashful—prudish, I suppose—to admit that she liked it. The mutual act we performed, to our complete satisfaction, is still a felony in the state of Georgia, and men—but no women that I know of—have done long stretches in prison for their pleasures. The Baptist church was against it, too, I'm sure. I tithe, and attend our church faithfully. But no sensible man would allow his religion to regulate his sex life.

  "How did you ever learn to make love like that?" Caroline murmured, when we were finished. She had said it many times before, not really expecting an answer. Just contented, I liked to believe.

  And my stock reply was, "Curiosity and unlimited opportunities with the woman I love."

  Soon the old Timekeeper was back, in my dreams. On a cloudless morning with the sky tinted gold and rose by the newly risen sun, we were making our way up the seven levels of the stone pyramid on the east of the great plaza I had crossed in a previous dream. The plaza had been deserted before, but now I was aware of the presence of thousands of people, congregation for a sacred day. I felt the music they were making through my skin, for I was naked except for a pure white loincloth. Naked, my skin ritually oiled, and barefoot. My hair was long in the dream, but tied above my head with a panache of feathers that hung down between my shoulder blades.

  The stairway rising before us was wide and steep, and slippery, from blood that had dripped on the steps, the blood of ritual sacrificers who had preceded us. The odor of blood enflamed me. I was in a state of drug-induced ecstasy bordering on delirium, yet I continued to climb steadily behind the Timekeeper, the ticking of his antique watch resounding in my ears, hammering me on and upward. The Timekeeper carried a deerskin bundle under one arm. Where there was no blood, the loaf-shaped stones of the pyramid were gleaming white from smooth layers of gesso. The Timekeeper, despite his great age and the steepness of the pyramid steps, moved with no show of effort toward the temple at the top.

  Smoke rose in many columns from censers placed within the unroofed temple. As we reached the last level, I saw Caroline. With two attendants flanking her, she came through a portal of the temple and walked toward me, eyes wide and tranced, an expectant smile fixed on her face. She wore a headdress of flowers and a jade-green shoulder cape over a flowing white robe of a gauzelike material.

  The Timekeeper placed his gold watch and the deerskin bundle on a stone altar decorated with painted masonry figures. Behind the altar there was a massive stone head, part human and part monkey, with a gaping mouth that revealed many teeth. Despite my own state of ecstatic entrancement, I was afraid to look for more than an instant at the face of the deity.

  As I took my place at one side of the altar, and Caroline stood opposite me, the Timekeeper, seeming so out of place in his shabby suit of dull black cloth, unwrapped the deerskin bundle, taking out sacred objects
carved from rock crystal or bone, and a loaf of chocolate in rice paper. The chocolate he placed in the mouth of the stone deity.

  The other object in the bundle was the razor-sharp spine of a stingray.

  The Timekeeper passed a shallow ceremonial bowl filled with strips of beaten-bark paper to an attendant, and gave the rope the thickness of Caroline's little finger to the other attendant to hold. Then he approached Caroline and placed a hand on her bare left shoulder.

  Caroline, staring wildly with the pupils of her eyes as large as plum stones, swaying a little to the sounds of drums and conch-shell trumpets from the plaza far below, put her tongue out of her mouth as far as it would reach, and kneeled. The attendant holding the ceremonial bowl placed it at the level of her breasts. Caroline grasped the rim of the bowl lightly with both hands. Then the Timekeeper drove the point of the stingray's spine down through the middle of her tongue.

  Her throat bulged slightly but she made no sound, gave no indication she had felt the cruel spines of the stingray as they penetrated one of the most exquisitely sensitive parts of her body.

  The Timekeeper took the rope from the other attendant and threaded it through the slit in her tongue. One end of the rope hung over the ceremonial bowl. Caroline was bleeding freely and her chin was covered with her blood, which dripped steadily from the end of the rope until it saturated the paper in the bowl.

  At a signal from the Timekeeper an attendant removed the ceremonial bowl and brought it to me. Caroline remained kneeling, and with glazed eyes still unfocused, reached up and removed the length of rope from her tongue. She coiled it ritualistically, and placed it in the hollow of a jaguar's skull handed to her by the Timekeeper.

  It was my turn. I placed the ceremonial bowl between my bare feet and squatted. The already-bloodied spine of the stingray was handed to me. I pushed my loincloth aside and took my penis in my free hand. It was semi-erect, the foreskin beginning to tighten at the base of the darkening glans. With the needle point of the stingray spine I pierced the foreskin around the glans three times, then took fresh strips of bark paper from a plate offered me by an attendant and threaded them through the foreskin slits until the ends of the paper hung down from my partly tumescent penis. I watched the papers slowly become saturated with my blood, until they could hold no more; then the first drops formed, grew fat and fell into the bowl where they mingled with Caroline's own shed blood . . .

  I started up, hearing Sharissa crying in her crib, and got out of bed with fewer than half my senses functioning properly. Caroline wasn't there. I wondered if she had gotten up to warm Sharissa's bottle, but I realized, dimly, that Sharissa was five months old now and had been sleeping through the night, after her last feeding at eleven. I made my way down the dark hall from our bedroom, finding everything strange, unfamiliar, but still hearing the wail of my precious baby. . . threw open the door to her room and stood blinking in the glow of the nightlight in the socket at the foot of her bed. Not her crib. What the hell had happened to—

  Sharissa sat up slowly and gave her tousled hair a shake.

  "Daddy? What's the matter?"

  "I . . . heard . . . I thought I heard you crying."

  "Me?" She yawned and stretched. "Uh-uh."

  "Then I was dreaming. Dreaming that you were just a few months old."

  Sharissa laughed. "Oh, Daddy. What brought that on?"

  "No idea. Sorry I . . . woke you up, sweetheart."

  "Don't worry. Go back to bed. See you in the morning."

  In the hall I heard Caroline coughing downstairs. I found her in the living room sitting cross-legged on the sofa in her short nightgown, hunched over a photo album in her lap. There was a pack of Kents on the coffee table. She was smoking, holding the cigarette with a pinched craven intimacy, and there were butts in the coffee mug she was using for an ashtray.

  A hunger for tobacco had always been a prelude to one of her depressive phases. She turned the stiff gray pages of our wedding album with a robotic, mildly distressed monotony, her normally clear, light brown eyes hazed by smoke. She smiled sadly between puffs on her cigarette.

  "'Til death do us part,'" I heard her say.

  "Caroline?"

  She looked up, not surprised. "Oh, hi." Her gaze wandered; she cocked her head, as if my image had appeared, mysteriously, near the crown molding. Or some other image of great interest to her.

  "Where did you get the cigarettes?" I asked from the doorway.

  "Oh, Jim Shively gave them to me to hold. He said absolutely not to give him one even if he begged, he was turning into a human chimney."

  "So now you're turning into a human chimney."

  "I'm having just this one," she said blithely. "Then I'll quit."

  My expression accused her of nothing, but she lowered her gaze and fidgeted while slowly returning her attention to the wedding album. There were other photo albums on the coffee table. She had taken them all from the breakfront cabinet and was making visual contact with the flash-frozen past. First car, first home, first and only cherished child. I wondered if there was any Xanax in the house. She'd always been able to get out of the darker corners of her mind with the help of suitable medication. I'd opposed the suggestions of her doctors that Caroline undergo psychoanalysis. Aside from the expense, in my view the story of psychoanalysis is basically a history of windy theory, intellectual thuggery, and cunning emotional intimidation.

  "How many did we have at our wedding reception?" Caroline said. "A hundred sixty-eight guests? Look at this. Here's Maceo Hubbard and Roy Starke. I went to school with both of them." She looked up at me earnestly, trying to share her ordeal. "Maceo's dead."

  "I know. Heart."

  Her breath hissed hotly as she smoked. "I saw Roy the other day. He looks bad. Most of his hair's gone. He's at least fifty pounds overweight. I think he said something about having a vein-stripping operation."

  "Sweetheart, please come to bed."

  "In a minute," she said sharply, turning a page. "And here you are."

  "No," I said, moving closer to the sofa. "This is me; and that's a picture in a wedding album. And I'm not just the same as I used to be. I'm older and better."

  Caroline nodded slightly and turned another page. "One hundred sixty-eight guests. Each of them a friend or relative of mine. Where were your relatives?"

  "I didn't know then, and I don't know now. What are you trying to do, Caroline?"

  One of the pages came out of the album as she turned it. She held up the page with an apologetic smile and mumbled, "Coming apart."

  I reached down, taking the page and then the album it had come from out of her hands. She didn't resist me. I put the wedding album on the coffee table with the others. I sat down beside her. She surrendered the cigarette, holding it upright like a tiny torch, and I took that too, put it out in the coffee mug. We sat side by side, not looking at each other, like two strangers about to take a trip.

  "The long and short of it is," Caroline said, "I don't know who you are. You're somebody from Baltimore, Maryland, who did his service at Fort Belvoir, was discharged from the Army, and settled in Sky Valley."

  "Because I loved it here. The first time I saw this town, I knew I was going to stay."

  "And I fell for you like a load of bricks. Didn't care where you came from, even though Mama and Daddy had their objections. I married you because you were a kind, decent, loving man, and you've taken wonderful care of me. Sharissa and I adore you, Greg. But who are you?"

  "Just a guy who's had a little luck in his life, after a bad beginning."

  "Did you ever make any attempt to find out who your father was, what happened to your mother after she abandoned you?"

  "You know the answer to that."

  "But why not?"

  The residue of tobacco smoke in the air was giving me a stuffy nose. The cabinet clock in the center hall struck three-fifteen. I didn't want to be angry with Caroline; lately she'd been under more stress than any human being should be asked to cope wit
h. Much of it I had unwittingly provided.

  "I think it's obvious no one wanted me when I was born. Why should I care about them? I have all the family now I've ever wanted, or needed. It would be just too painful for me, Caroline. Please try to understand that."

  She glanced at me uncertainly, mollified if not content. I took her hand in mine. Caroline touched the bandage that covered my forehead, then the fingers of my left hand that were beginning to straighten. In a few days, when the stitches came out and I had the full use of my left hand, I hoped there would be no further reminders of the unfortunate accident.

  "A little luck," she said. "Yes. That's all there is to it sometimes . . . isn't there?"

  "Good morning, Daddy," Sharissa said. She was poaching eggs and making French toast. The purple crape myrtle outside the breakfast room windows was full of towhees telling us to "drink-your-tea!" I saw a blur of wings near the hummingbird feeder on the back porch. The surface of the lake was a misty early-morning gold.

  "Good morning, babe." She had on her running shoes and summer-weight track warm-ups. "Where're you off to?"

  "Bobby's coming by for me. I need to put in five miles every morning until the tournament starts. Did I tell you? I drew Jan Cassiday in the first round?"

  "You've always had trouble with that left-handed serve of hers."

  "It's not Jan's such a great player, but she doesn't make many mistakes. I can't let her wear me down."

  "I know how much you hate running."

  "Well, it won't be so bad with Bobby along. He's been running all summer out at King Forest."

  "Maybe I'll join you in a couple of days, when Jesse gives me the okay."

  Sharissa served up eggs and French toast for us and we sat down in the breakfast room. She poured fresh orange juice from a chilled pitcher and we dug in.

  "Mom left at five-thirty," Sharissa said.

  "The senator's barnstorming north Georgia today. Seven stops in ten hours."

  "That old fool," Sharissa said, which was uncharacteristic of her. "And don't give me that look, I know how you feel. Mom's wasting her talents. I wish she'd go back to work for the Tribune."