by Rebecca Ore
“Wasn’t this a factory once?” Maude asked.
“Long time ago,” Follette answered. “So, Doug, what do you think?”
“I’m a bit nervous about the greenhouse.”
“Why?” Follette asked. He smiled slightly as though he knew the answer.
“Reminds me of the dipshit ecologists in Berkeley.” Follette said, “It’s a nice place to eat. We’re thinking about putting in some catfish tanks. Just for fun.”
“Okay, as long as you don’t think indoor catfish farming is the wave of the future,” Doug said.
“We don’t have any windows in the offices,” Follette said, “so we’ve got this to bring people out, get them together for lunch. I thought you might be going into something with Luke.”
“We’re supposed to talk at lunch,” Doug said.
Follette went to the glass wall and pulled a lever. Maude hadn’t noticed two layers of glass until styrofoam beads poured into the hollow space between the inner glass and the outer. Follette pulled the lever the other way and the beads went whirling back to storage. “We’ve been working on some environmental stuff here, but it’s all so expensive,” Follette said after most of the beads disappeared. A few were stuck to the glass. Follette went up and flicked his fingers against the glass at one bead, then called on an intercom for Dr. Fisher.
The man they’d seen on the video came in. “Senator,” he said, bowing his head slightly.
“Georgie, this is Douglas Sanderheim, from Berkeley. He’s interested in talking to you.”
“Berkeley? Lawrence Lab?”
“Corporate research.”
“Oh.” Dr. Fisher seemed disappointed. “Communications technology.”
“We’re actually more interested in energy problems and agricultural problems here. I’m not actually one of the researchers, but since the patrons felt education would be part of the program, I came on board to help the researchers make better presentations.”
Follette said, “Dr. Fisher has an education doctorate.” Maude wondered if anything they developed could go operational for less than $20,000.
Doug said, “Perhaps I could get interested in agricultural problems.”
Fisher told him, “Even though I don’t have a science PhD, I’ve studied at the Farallones Institute and New Alchemy before here. And I’ve worked with Ivan Illich.”
Doug smiled a now I know what you are smile and looked at Follette who was checking the bead wall for clinging styrofoam. Follette looked over his shoulder at Doug and shrugged, then looked back at the bead wall. Doug said, “Georgie, have you studied chicken fighting?”
Follette turned around. Fisher said, “I’ve been suggesting to Senator Follette that he might consider making chicken fighting a felony in this state, not just the gambling. And we need better gun control laws, too.”
“If all my people thought like you, I’d be pretty well pleased to make some changes,” Follette said with a wink to Maude.
“If you ban handguns, you’d stop old people and women from committing most of the justifiable homicides,” Maude said.
“Precisely,” Doug said. “Guns empower people too weak to make good use of swords and knives.”
Follette smiled, his lips stretching farther on the side Fisher couldn’t see. Georgie Fisher looked at them as though they were mocking him. “It shouldn’t be that way.”
Follette said, “Now if we could just invent a soybean that would make people stop killing deer and deer stop eating crops, we’d all be so happy.”
“Science isn’t magic,” Georgie said.
“How well I know,” Follette said. “Could you take Doug around? I want to talk to Maude about her people.”
After the two men went out, Maude asked Follette, “My father’s people or my mother’s people?”
“Does he know Luke could kill him? Can’t you get him to leave?”
Maude didn’t answer. She felt around her for magic, then said, “Doug’s pretty arrogant about how important he is, what he can do. Luke charms him by pumping his ego.”
Follette sat down at one of the tables in the greenhouse and nodded to the women at the food counter. Maude sat down across from him. “You’re not really here, are you?”
“You didn’t feel any magic, did you?”
“I don’t always look for it.”
“I felt you looking for it. You got some narrow-band powers but they could be intense.”
“Maybe, but I don’t want to develop them.”
“Some of your father’s people also had some power.”
“And besides, magic’s cruel,” Maude said.
Follette sighed. “You’re right on that, partly. Magic can be cruel. Why doesn’t all this bother Doug? He’s an engineer.”
“He’s always dreamed of magic. He thinks it’s something like a science.”
“Atoms don’t have personality, despite quark charm. What we deal with has minds.” One of the women from the food counter set a cup of coffee in front of Follette. He pulled a pill bottle out of his suit jacket pocket and took one. “And they get bored with their clients, sometimes.”
“Are you and Luke fighting at that level?”
“We have. But I decided a few years back that human life meant more than entertaining archaic gods gone mad from lack of mass worship. I got earnest. I got boring. So, the personalities threw a little something at me.”
“Would you be able to save Doug if Luke decides to sacrifice him?”
Follette sipped his coffee, then shrugged. “I’m a powerful man in my own way.”
Maude filled in, but a dying man. “So what happens to Doug isn’t that important.”
“I was just a servant, public servant.”
“You’re not dead, yet.”
“I got Bracken this research institute. But you saw Georgie. Had to hire someone who could keep the science people from exciting the mill hands with technological dreams. I’m disappointed that you haven’t warned Doug that he can’t learn magic.”
“He’s sure he can master anything. He wants me to master it too.”
“And you tried to explain to him what magic is?”
“All but told him Luke would kill him. Couldn’t quite say that because it sounded crazy. And Doug’s so cocksure. His hero is an atomic scientist who was a disciple of Aleister Crowley.”
“Fighting chickens are also cocksure. However, an occasional bird looks at the other rooster and goes, oops.”
“What part does Terry’s husband John play in this?”
“He’s amorphous bad news. Lured a kid he took shooting into his bullets.”
Follette knows that? Maude nodded. She felt Follette reach out with magic toward the west. He sat quietly for a while, then shook his head. “Maybe the black kid’s people will get him, but he’s pretty heavily armored.”
“Why do or did you and Luke do these things?”
“Besides the promise of living on so long? Magic’s exciting, like a chicken fight.” Follette smiled at Maude. She wondered if even his human-centered dreams came tainted by adrenaline addictions. He said, “You ought to be wondering what you’re getting out of sleeping with a doomed man.”
“We’re all doomed, so I’ve heard.”
“If the Christians are right, but I haven’t seen Jesus visiting as much as I’ve felt that crazy Norn in the abandoned weaving shop petting the crab gnawing on my life threads. And cutting at your grannie’s thread with that flint knife of hers.”
“Nobody’s seen the Norn in awhile.”
“Unless you’re crazy vindictive, you don’t go looking for a Norn. So, you plan to warn your lover about how lethal Luke’s planning to be to him or you getting something out of Luke?”
“It’s not one or the other.”
“It always is something.”
Doug and Georgie came in then. Doug said, “It’s fascinating, but I can’t stay longer. We’ve got to get back to Taylorsville to have lunch with Maude’s uncle.”
“Luke
. We’ve been talking about him,” Follette said. He stood up. Maude wondered if he’d warn Doug himself, but Follette nodded at her.
In the car, Maude said, “He told me to warn you that Uncle Luke is going to pit you against John. I mean that in cockfighting terms.”
“Luke told me cancer turned Follette mean. You can’t take him seriously.”
“You’re sure?” Maude felt around Doug and found a magic cord feeding down through the sutures of his skull bones. The cord slithered out and away faster than she could trace it.
“Why would your Uncle Luke want to hurt me?”
“Because you’re not a warlock.”
“I’m willing to learn.”
I’ll try again. “You can’t learn magic. You’re born to it.”
“I’ll ask Luke about that.”
“You trust my uncle more than me?”
“Well, Maude…” Doug didn’t finish but Maude reached out and found a vision of herself in a straighjacket in his mind. Bastard. She yanked the vision out of his head and felt the fabric of the universe around them tremble. The entities were watching. Doug said, “You were a welfare cheat. You picked up men in bars. Wasted your life. And you expect me to believe you more than Luke?”
“Shit, Doug, I’m not crazy. You picked me up, for crying out loud.”
“That’s not what I remember. I remember you coming on to me because I said something magic.”
“You’re the kind of man who gets a hard-on whether a woman excites him physically or intellectually.”
“Except for this hysteria from you, I’ve been having a marvelous time here,” Doug said. “The mountains are beautiful. The people are friendly. The magic seems harmless to anyone who wasn’t a doper.”
“And the land is cheap. Am I invited to this lunch with Uncle Luke?”
“He said he needed to talk to me man to man.”
An entity whispered promises, live forever, forget this dying man. She tried to make herself small, an ordinary mortal. “I’ll just bop off to the library, then.” She wanted to tell Doug to ask Luke what magic could be learned, what magic came with the blood. With that reminder from her, an entity uncurled a helix of Maude’s DNA, cooing, shaped by us, bred from us.
Jesus sacrificed himself Maude thought, a god to mankind, not mankind to the gods. Even if Jesus was only a philosophical concept…
“What are you thinking?”
“About what religions are,” Maude said.
“What your uncle believes seems to work.”
“Like voodoo,” Maude said. “The real God is remote.”
They didn’t say anything more to each other until Doug stopped in front of the restaurant. Maude saw Luke’s car, not the Essex but a younger but still old black Studebaker sedan circa 1947 or so. She said, “I’ll walk to the library.”
“No, it’s your car. Take it.”
“The library’s not that far. Pick me up when you’ve finished talking to Luke.”
Doug shrugged and pocketed the keys. Maude began walking toward the library. She looked at Betty and Luke’s house when she came to the head of Main Street. Their maid, Sue, stood on the porch and nodded at Maude.
The Reverend Springer joined her on the sidewalk and said, “We need to talk to you.” We didn’t sound like paranoid expansiveness.
“I’ve got to be at the library when Doug finishes lunch with Uncle Luke.”
He nodded, so Maude followed him to a neighborhood of small frame houses behind Main Street where the townspeople’s black servants lived. Reverend Springer nodded at the houses and said, “It will all be torn away in a few years.”
He turned up a bare dirt walk and led Maude into a board and batten house.
Paintings of Jesus, Mary, Saint Sebastian, angels, and great speckled birds covered the walls. Why should I talk to this man, Maude thought, his paintings are crazy.
“Don’t you like my paintings?” Reverend Springer asked. He went to a refrigerator standing in the main room and pulled out four cans of soft drinks.
Two old black women came out from a bedroom. Maude knew that they were the grandmothers of the boy John killed. One was white haired and tiny. The other was huge, almost six feet tall and fat. Her hair had only a bit of grey in it.
“So the family knows where John is now.”
“Only us,” the big woman said. “We want Martin’s soul back. We don’t tell his father and the brothers if Martin’s soul comes to rest. He ought not be a slave to the man who killed him.”
“Martin fell to temptation,” the little grandmother said. “John always be egging him on with gun talk.”
Maude knew that Doug would have said that the boy didn’t have to break into John’s house. “How old was he?” she asked.
“Ten years old,” the little grandmother said.
“Where’s his mother?”
“She’d come shooting,” the big grandmother said. “Same as my son.”
“I don’t know what I can do for you.”
Reverend Springer gave each of them a canned soda. Maude opened hers and drank. The two grandmothers did the same. Reverend Springer said, “But do you want to help?”
“I’ve always hated the magic.”
“I’ve always had a power to fight magic, but without magic around, the power’s just craziness,” Reverend Springer said. He opened his own soda and drank.
“Do you need the magic, too, then? If it makes you sane, don’t you really need it as bad as any witch?” Maude asked. The two grandmothers huddled together.
“What’s your lover doing in this?” Reverend Springer asked, not answering her.
“He’s thinking he’s going to be an apprentice when he’s more like a sacrifice. Or a hold on me,” Maude said, not realizing until she spoke that the latter could be another of Luke’s objectives.
“I think I’d be happy to fade back into being a chronic hebephrenic if I worked God’s will.” He finally answered Maude’s question.
Maude said, “Maybe the drug companies will find the right drug for you.”
He said, “Do you understand how awful my life was, Miss Maude who pretended to be one of us to cheat herself a living?”
“I think so.”
“If having magic to fight makes me sane, you can see I’m a tempted man.”
Maude knew that he wanted someone to understand his sacrifice, if he made it. And if he didn’t, he wanted her to forgive him. She said, “You can’t kill all the magic.”
“If you get us back Martin’s soul, then we’d have no fight,” the little grandmother told her.
Reverend Springer said, “Witches don’t just give.”
Maude asked, “Why have you brought me in on this?”
The Reverend Springer said, “We need someone who can walk into her cousin’s house and feel for a boy’s trapped soul. You take it and bring it to us.”
“Why should I do this?”
“Because you will feel less guilty for being a thief from innocent people,” the Reverend Springer said.
“Considering what I could have worked with magic, I am innocent.” Maude looked at the paintings covering the walls and said, “Maybe we’re all mad.”
“Please,” said the little grandmother.
“I’ll think about it.” Maude left the house and walked back to the library alone. In the library, she picked up a copy of Scientific American and turned to the math section, trying to tear herself away from all magic. If she felt for the boy’s soul, the entities would feel her. Perhaps she could find the boy’s soul without magic. Neither John nor Terry seemed to know what precisely they were doing.
Doug came in and said, “I had a great talk with your uncle.” He swung his arms around Maude and hugged her. “He reminded me to be nice to his niece.”
“Did he say anything about Follette?”
“Nothing much, just told me to get back to him if Follette offered me a job. I brought you a sandwich and a Dr Pepper. Let’s go up the mountain.”
&
nbsp; Outside the magic? Maude said, “Sure.”
“Luke said Edgar Cayce is responsible for the hippies up in Floyd County. Cayce claimed to find geomantic energies up near Copper Hill.”
“Power from old mining machines,” Maude said. “Magic babble unites you with others who share your belief system. Has nothing to do with reality.”
They drove up to the Blue Ridge Parkway. The magic faded after the fairystone belt, but Maude felt tendrils of it. The sky was blue. Around them, rock spines showed through the leafless trees. Pines and, then higher, hemlock accented the hills with green dots and patches. The car swerved up and around a logging truck at the one place they could pass. “Like magic,” Doug said.
They drove into Floyd and walked around. “Like Bolinas,” Maude said, “only colder.”
“It’s not that cold today,” Doug said. “We could go fishing. I could trout fish all year round, Luke said.”
“Did you ask him if you could be a magician, too?”
“He said you’re a bit paranoid. Maude, I’m no fool. I could tell real magic from hippie enthusiasms.”
“Am I better in bed than Susan, my witch wannabe roommate?”
“You’re more real.”
“Thanks.”
“I’ve been looking for something that would get depth to my life, more complexities.”
“Study biology.”
“It simplifies us.”
“Check out a major world religion.”
“Polytheism is more complex.”
“Master of complexities, that’s what you want to be?”
“I want to master real complexities. Not fake complexities. All the hippie astrologies and magic systems do is test your memory.”
Maude said, “When I’ve read science fiction, the stuff in magazines such as Analog, say, it seems like the characters are really thin. I wondered if that was an artifact of a technological society as much as bad writing. But if suffering like crazy makes great characters, then I’m not so sure the aesthetic pleasure is worth it.”