Mockingbird

by Sean Stewart

  Just then I finally realized it wasn’t me, Toni, talking anymore. Toni would have sat and seethed, or told Professor Manzetti to screw off. But not daunted him. Not tried to hurt him. ‘If you wouldn’t trade a god for thirty pieces of silver…’ That was purely Momma, in her best Gypsy Bitch incarnation.

  It worked like magic. Professor Manzetti stood there at the kitchen table absolutely paralyzed, partly ashamed and partly fascinated and utterly hooked. I almost blew the whole effect of my speech by giggling; I almost lost it at the sight of him, still as a cat in the dog pound, trying to figure out what to say next.

  My God, my mother was a bitch. Not your common or garden variety bitch, though. Momma was the Notre Dame of bitches, the Empire State Building. She had range like a B52 and more stopping power than a .357 Magnum. Women like her should only happen in operas. And like any woman in the opera, she had a boundless capacity for love. God she loved us. Me and Candy and Angela, John Simmons and Mary Jo and Daddy too. It’s a wonder we were all still breathing.

  I decided to ease up on poor Dr. Manzetti. Actually, I found him attractive as hell, even though he was kind of a bastard. I liked the little black hairs on his forearms. I liked his sense of principle, although it was woefully misguided in the case of the Riders. And I like a man who can hold his silence. I have come to see restraint as a great virtue. “You said you wrote a paper on Momma. Did you ever come here to see her?”

  “No. I phoned and talked to your mother once, but she said she didn’t want to see me or answer my questions. I tried to respect her privacy.”

  I laughed. “Privacy? Momma loved an audience. She just didn’t care for the truth, that’s the problem. I can just see her face at the idea of a trained scientist coming to investigate her. It would be like inviting the IRS to come over for a friendly audit. Still, you should have called back again the next day, you know. Momma probably would have said yes. I don’t think she could resist any listener for long.”

  “I wish I’d known that.” He walked back over to the chifforobe. Carefully he reached for Mr. Copper’s polished fetish. “May I?”

  “No.” The word was out before I even stopped to think.

  “Okay.” His hand froze and then retreated.

  “Sorry. We just…we don’t touch those,” I said.

  “Okay.” He took a step back, away from the chifforobe.

  “Sorry,” I said again, and immediately felt stupid for having told him not to touch the dolls, and doubly stupid for feeling stupid about it. Why are we always apologizing to men when we haven’t done anything wrong? “So how did you come to hear about Momma?”

  “When I was an undergraduate I went to New Orleans one year for Reading Week. I had a bit too much to drink,” he said. “I got lost.”

  I waited. “And?”

  He looked at me. “I got really lost. So lost I wasn’t really in New Orleans anymore. I was down on the east side of the Quarter…” He stopped. “I haven’t told this story very often.”

  “Am I supposed to promise not to laugh? Don’t worry, Dr. Manzetti. I have a lot more experience believing impossible things than most people.”

  He smiled. “I guess you do. And please, call me Rick.” I nodded. “The short version is that I wandered out of New Orleans and into some other city. It was like New Orleans, but it was like New Orleans in a dream, or a story by Kafka. If cities were people, that was what a city might dream. Does that make sense?”

  I thought of the long, empty streets through which the Little Lost Girl was always walking, walking, walking, the black girls with their curling fingernails and Pierrot blowing fire on the street corner. “Oh yes,” I said. “I know that city well.”

  “I didn’t think I was there that long. An afternoon and most of a night, I would have said. Finally I dozed off on a park bench. When I woke, I was back in New Orleans. Seven days had passed.” He looked at me. “You must think I was really drunk.”

  I laughed. “I guarantee you that few people alive can tell the difference between liquor and miracles more easily than me. Were your parents worried?”

  “Hysterical.” He grinned. “They made me move back in with them until I finished my undergrad degree. But I went to Tulane for my master’s just to return to New Orleans. I never found my way back into that other city, but when I was doing my master’s, I talked to some old vodoun women who mentioned the Texas Girl.”

  “Somehow you heard a story about the Little Lost Girl—”

  “And I knew. Yeah.”

  “Are you religious?”

  “Sort of. I guess I’m sort of a twisted Catholic,” Rick said. “I don’t know. The more I learn, the less sure I feel about what to believe.” He squatted, looking at Pierrot. Pierrot leered back.

  “Momma never went to church. ‘If God wants to find me, He can hunt me down,’ she used to say. Which he did, I guess. They did. I don’t know much about where she grew up, except that whatever little town it was, it was deep blue Baptist. Momma always said she felt like a lion in a den of Daniels.” Rick laughed. I liked that. “Momma didn’t call them Riders for nothing, you know. When a god comes into your head he kills you to make room. The Riders hounded my mother all her life. She would have done anything to be free of them.”

  “Do you think so?” he said. “Really?”

  I looked at him for a long time. “No. You’re right. She wouldn’t have given them up. It was me who wanted the Riders gone.” I stood up, suddenly upset. My tummy, just beginning to swell, bumped the edge of the table. “Would you like a Coke?” I said. I’d picked up some of the good stuff Mary Jo had found for Daddy to drink, even though the pregnancy books wouldn’t let me have any myself. “It’s real old Coke. There’s a little Mexican tienda where you can still get it.”

  “No thanks.”

  I got my Coke—Classic Caffeine Free in a can, of course. Sigh. “Momma used to say, ‘Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it.’ I think we would all be a lot safer without gods.”

  At that exact moment I heard a laugh. A tiny, mean snicker, quiet but unmistakable. It came from the chifforobe. My heart stopped; then raced, smashing against my ribs.

  “Let’s talk about money,” I said. I tried to keep the panic from my voice. Oh God, I had dallied too long. I could feel the Riders staring at me from the chifforobe, staring and staring. I had to get them out of the house, out of my life, quickly, quickly.

  “That was abrupt,” Rick said. “May I sit down?”

  “Please.”

  He sat at the kitchen table with his back to the chifforobe and took a calculator from his briefcase. “Thirty thousand for the fetishes, I said that. They’re the keystone of any collection. Would you be willing to sell the cabinet as well?”

  “The chifforobe? Sure, yes, please. Everything. Take it all.” My heart was still racing and my stomach was tight, as if I were standing like Mary Keith on the edge of a building, holding my baby, my beautiful baby, the dizzy world one sickening step away.

  The baby gave a little kick and I gasped.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, fine. Come on, let’s get on with it.”

  He looked at me. “Are you sure you are feeling well enough? You look quite pale.”

  “I’m fine! Write. Write, please.”

  He looked at me again. “Now, you said that there was a whole body of Little Lost Girl stories that went with the Riders, is that correct? I would very much like to record as many of them as you can remember.”

  “Yes, okay, we can talk about that some other—” The left chifforobe door trembled and then creaked a little further open. A long sharp nose emerged from the gloom, and a long sharp chin with it. Pierrot grinned at me from his shelf and laid one thin finger on his lips.

  “Oh my God.”

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing,” I whispered.

  Rick Manzetti checked his Day-Timer. “I have to be back in New Orleans by the fifth. Would you have time for us to start collectin
g stories in the next couple of days?”

  Pierrot toppled forward, turned a somersault in midair, and landed on the tile floor with a soft thump, like a cat jumping off a sofa. Rick didn’t seem to notice. I tried to speak, but no words came out. I wet my lips and tried again. “Fine. That would be fine.”

  “Good.” Rick made some notes on a pad of yellow scratch paper and punched more numbers into his calculator. I could barely see him. My vision had fled, as if in a dream; all I could see was the tiny doll-sized figure of Pierrot advancing over the tile floor. He turned a handspring, paused, and executed a lordly bow. Then he scuttled across the floor like a crab and fetched up against my chair leg.

  Rick noticed nothing. “Can you think of anything to add? Any old potions, old books, family albums, photographs? I’d be interested in any of it.”

  “No,” I said, remembering with despair the two glasses of Mockingbird Cordial that Candy tricked me into drinking the day we buried Momma. I felt a tiny tug on the bottom of my skirt, then another, slightly higher. Pierrot was climbing up the outside of it.

  “All right. If you change your mind, just let me know. For the collection we’ve already discussed, fetishes, cabinet, and stories, I’m prepared to offer…um, thirty-five thousand dollars.” He met my eyes.

  “That’s a lot of money,” I said. Pierrot was inching his way around my lap, just under the edge of the table. With a sudden jerk he swung himself around so that he was climbing up the back of my chair, still hidden from the anthropologist. I bit my lip to keep from screaming. Over in the chifforobe, the Widow was pacing along her shelf: back and forth, back and forth, staring at me with her black button eyes.

  “The collector who first alerted me to your mother’s, ah, passing, is very affluent,” Rick said.

  Something hard and sharp bumped against the back of my neck, and a small voice said, “I’ll bet you your life I can bite my eye.”

  I screamed. “Oh God! I’m sorry, they’re not for sale. Any of it. I have to keep them, I have to keep them all, oh Christ. God damn it, I have to keep them all.”

  I cried and cried, helpless and shaking.

  “You want my advice?” Pierrot said as the door closed on fine, smart, handsome Dr. Richard Manzetti and his thirty-five thousand dollars. “Hold on to that penny.”

  SEVEN

  After Rick Manzetti was gone, I stalked to the chifforobe and demanded of the Widow how she meant for me to keep my family, how I was to provide for the child growing inside me. Now, when I really needed to hear her, the Widow didn’t answer. The gods never do.

  For that matter, the Widow didn’t seem to be giving Candy much help landing her man, either. The spring dragged on, and when Carlos finally spoke about the possibility of marrying Candy, he was talking with me. It was a few days after my aborted meeting with Rick Manzetti that Carlos asked me to come for a ride in the Muertomobile. It was Cinco de Mayo, the fifth of May, always a big day in the Hispanic community, celebrating Mexico’s independence from the Spanish. It was also pretty close to four and a half months for me: halfway through my pregnancy. I finally had a bit of a tummy, just a little bulge above the seat belt.

  A tiny skeleton—whittled from real human bone, Carlos said—jiggled from the rearview mirror. I wished Carlos a happy Cinco de Mayo and he wished me the same. Then, more delicately, he said, “Candy tells me there will be no money from the professor after all. Los duendes drove him away. Too bad.”

  “You can only be luckier than average fifty percent of the time.”

  “Es verdad.” Carlos had shown up on the doorstep like a man braced to make out his will, saying he had to talk to me. It was just past lunchtime, 85 degrees outside, and Carlos was in his summer uniform, a white muscle shirt that showed parts of his tattoos: red lines radiating from the Sacred Heart on his left breast; the top edge of a Mayan mandala that covered much of his thin back, and black widow spiders, six or seven of them, scuttling along his ropy arms. I had invited him in for a beer, but he shook his head. “No, we should not talk here, por favor. Anyplace else you like, or just in the car maybe. I need to talk to you alone.”

  “I am alone. Daddy’s on the road.”

  “Your pardon,” he said, “but you are not.” And he glanced at the chifforobe where Momma’s gods were watching us.

  So it was I found myself in the front seat of the Muertomobile, sinking in crushed red velvet as we rolled solemnly through the residential Montrose streets. It was hot and horribly humid but the hearse predated air conditioning, so all I could do was roll down the window. Sluggish waves of sweaty Houston air oozed into the car. A year before I would have said it smelled like hot grass and engine exhaust, but now my pregnancy-enhanced nose discriminated a much more complex chemical bouquet: warm asphalt gave off its distinctive scent as it softened in the sun, for instance. There was the car wax Carlos had buffed lovingly into the Muertomobile’s body, and the hot rubber stink of its big black tires. Somewhere lilacs were blooming. And, too, the refineries on the east side of town added their own aromas to the air, tinctures of sulfur and diesel fuel and burning plastic. Two days earlier, according to the radio news, environmental toxicologists had discovered noticeable quantities of xylene, an industrial solvent, in the groundwater over in Baytown. They had been called to investigate because kids in the local trailer parks were waking up in the middle of the night with bloody noses they got from breathing.

  Not that the pollution seemed to stop Houston’s vegetation. Industrial effluent might as well have been vitamins as far as the local flora was concerned. Pecan and sycamore trees had unfurled their leaves, the monkey grass gleamed gunmetal-blue and green, and the cardinals and mockingbirds were feasting on the season’s first fresh crop of mosquitoes. There were frogs and lizards on our patio every day, so many I had taken to closing the French doors sometimes.

  This year looked to be a season of vines. More ivy than I ever remembered ran up the brick houses in our neighborhood, beards of Spanish moss hung thick from all the live-oak trees, and the signposts at the end of the street had been engulfed by scarlet runner beans so that the street names were hidden. It reminded me of Bill Jr.’s vision of Houston reclaimed by the swamp, a Lost City in the jungle. Brown bayou water would seep over the asphalt and alligators would bask on the hoods of cars lying abandoned on the drowned expressways. Catfish would nose through the first floor of our house, swimming into the chifforobe where Momma’s gods would lie rotting. A dense canopy of swamp pine, live-oak, and vine maple would close overhead. In the night, infernal yellow fire would still spit and roar from the deathless refineries on the east side of town.

  “So. I am not sure I can marry your sister.” Carlos made a little clicking sound with his tongue against his teeth. The black widow on his right bicep rose and sank as he turned onto Mulberry Street and cruised down toward Westheimer following a Lincoln Town Car with a Holy Spirit On Board! bumper sticker. He glanced at me again. “This is private, hey? Solamente entre nosotros.”

  “Bueno.”

  We turned left onto Westheimer, passing Taurian Body Piercing and 2nd To None Resale Boutique and Dragon-Forge Custom Jewelry and Tarot Cards. “Two things. First, Candy…Candy is a nice girl. I like her. She makes a good girlfriend. But a wife? I don’t know. A wife means a house. A family. But Candy…she does not have a very serious mind, no? She is not like you. She works in a bar. Is that enough for a child, I ask myself: a mother who works in a bar?”

  “Carlos! You paint cars!”

  “This is different.”

  “I’ll bet Candy makes as much as you do in a day, when you add up her tips.”

  “It is not a matter of money,” Carlos said with dignity. “Well, okay, it is a little. I don’t think I want my kid in a public school.” He shook his head, making the tiny inverted crucifix dangling from his ear bob and swing. “Too many bad kids in the public schools. Maybe we need to send the kids to a private school, maybe a Catholic school—that’s a lot of dinero.”

  I
struggled with a vision of Carlos’s tiny Mexican witch-daughter with inverted crucifix earrings sitting demurely in a Catholic elementary school with her little hands folded across a workbook.

  “Beside the money, it’s a matter of dignity. What I do with cars, it’s part of my dignity. I’m not saying my wife has to be rich. But what if I have a daughter, eh? The mother of my daughter should have a dignity, you see? She should not be working only for the money.”

  I felt sweat stains blooming under my arms and along the waistband of my maternity shorts. “Not everyone can be a priest, Carlos. Some people just have to work for a living. They find their dignity in different places.”

  “Sí, okay, but where is Candy’s, eh?” We waited at the light at Westheimer and Montrose, across from Oh Boy! Boots and Shoes, which I would lay good money sells more pairs of genuine calf, ostrich, and rattlesnake cowboy boots to gay men than any other store on the planet. “I think you grabbed up all the serious mind. Candy is drifting. A mother needs a more serious mind.”

  Ah. Suddenly I thought I could hear the steely voice of La Hag Gonzales. I patted my tummy. “Carlos, I promise you no woman has a baby without getting a serious mind. You don’t drift with a baby in your tummy. It holds you down.”

  He made that clicking sound again, then nodded. “Okay. Maybe you are right. You know, I was real worried about the money thing, until I found out you were embarazada. Pregnant. I thought, well, if she can do it, by herself, no husband, then for sure Candy and me could be brave enough.”

  We passed Slick Willie’s on our left. Only two cars in the parking lot; they would have just opened. I wondered if Candy was on shift. “Uh—glad to be so inspirational,” I said. Oh Carlos, if you knew how terrified I was, you would not take courage from my example.

  (Momma and Daddy have been fighting, one of those fights where she screams and cries, while Daddy’s voice stays calm and level until he leaves the house “to run errands.” Momma stays at the kitchen table long after his Impala has pulled out of the driveway and disappeared into the night. “Men call us emotional,” Momma says. “That’s horseshit, Toni. Men are the romantics. They think they can keep everything under control.” She lights a cigarette. “I think I want a beer. You want a beer, honey?” I am thirteen. I shake my head. Momma rummages in the refrigerator and pulls out a bottle of Tecate. She comes back to the table and pokes my chest with one long carmine fingernail. Bits of ash from her cigarette get on my T-shirt. “Women see too clearly not to despair.”)