Shaman's Blood

by Anne C. Petty

  Hal looked her over, doubt in his eyes. “Certainly.” He went to the living room and left the three of them standing together.

  Nik put his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned against him. “Are you ill?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She bit her lip. “It means, let’s just get this business over with and go home.”

  Following Hal out to the living room, she added, “I really wouldn’t mind if I never came back here again.”

  Chapter 6

  August 1956

  Ned stood at the edge of the clearing. Sundown. Dry heat scorched the parking area in front of the windswept tent. Brown dust devils whipped dirt toward beat-up vans and trucks, an old Packard station wagon missing its hubcaps, and a few nicer cars jammed in front of Brother Micah’s Southern Tent Revival.

  “Gloryhalleluiahamenbrother praiseJesuspraiseJesus … praiseJesus!” Voices of the faithful peaking, falling, then building again toward climax. And over the top a strident nasal voice Ned assumed must be Brother Micah. Or maybe a lieutenant, if Brother Micah already had his hand in the box. He understood how this worked. He’d heard it all before, a lifetime ago.

  Ned shivered in the heat, rubbing his arms through his long-sleeved shirt. Tall and rail-thin, he hitched up his pants and cast a look over his shoulder into the trees. Nothing he could see, but his arms and chest stung like he’d taken a nap on an ant bed. The demon stalked the fringes of his perception, sometimes serpentine, sometimes just a shadowy smear. He didn’t figure anybody else could see it, but he wouldn’t bet money on that. He saw it plenty good enough, mostly in his fitful dreams but occasionally in broad daylight.

  Which was why he was here in hot, dusty Texas instead of dark and sultry Louisiana where he’d been the past year. How long had it taken him to get here, coming full circle to witness that spectacle of belief and terror from childhood that he hated most in the world? For Ned, counted time had crawled by with little attachment to dates, but he reckoned he’d been on his own for close to three years. Not such a bad accomplishment, when he stopped to think about it.

  After his desperate escape from mosquito-bitten Florida, he’d hooked up with migrant workers heading to Chilton County, Georgia to pick peaches, strawberries, and sweet Vidalia onions. He’d fit in okay with the crew, who took him for an odd Tex-Mex mix with his olive-golden skin and tawny hair that threatened to bush out all over his head unless he kept it razored close to his skull. The only thing that mattered to them was that he didn’t look one hundred percent Anglo, which meant he could get in line at soup kitchens and climb into pickup trucks heading out to the onion fields without too much of a wayward glance. He would come back to the migrant camps in the evening, covered in gray-brown dust from bending over the onion beds in ninety-degree heat, his long-sleeved sweat-soaked shirt clinging to his body like another skin. Conditions were primitive, some said inhumane, but it was nothing different from what he’d grown up with–no plumbing or electricity, just the oppressive heat and drone of insects in summer or brief but sharp bouts of cold in winter.

  Following the migrants on their seasonal odyssey, he’d drifted from Georgia to Alabama to the Carolinas and back without much ambition, just going where the vegetable farms and orchards were hiring and where his thumbed rides took him. Sometimes he stayed a while in those places, depending on whether there was a job he could do without drawing too much attention to himself. He was mostly homeless.

  In 1954, he’d joined a crew working the strawberry harvest on a farm not far from Atlanta. It was early April and the dogwoods were clouds of white on slender gray-brown branches. Consuela and her brother Manolo, friends he’d worked with all season long, had persuaded him to go with them in Mano’s battered pickup over to Atlanta for the Dogwood Festival. It was an arts and crafts shindig held each spring in Piedmont Park. Consuela wanted to hear the live music and Mano just wanted a change of scenery. Ned could sell his drawings, they’d argued, when he’d balked at the idea of big crowds and curious people. But he’d gone with them in the end, and that day—especially that night—became etched in Ned’s brain forever.

  It was true what Mano’d said—people were willing to pay Ned good money for his little drawings of peach blossoms and wooded hillsides. But more lucrative than these were the quick-sketch likenesses he could draw of children, pets, families, boys trying to impress girlfriends, and sharp guys decked out in fancy suits and fedoras with pencil-slim gals latched onto their arms.

  By the time the Contreras siblings were ready to call it a day, Ned had enough money to buy some serious whisky. Mano had done the actual buying, of course, Ned being underage. Back in their tiny shack in the migrant camp, squeezed among others just like it, they’d quickly drained one bottle of Johnny Walker and started on another. By the time the whisky slammed into his cerebellum big time, Ned knew he’d made a cold, hard mistake, the kind there was no backing away from, because he felt it coming at him full tilt. He fell to the rough plank floor of the shack and buried his head between his knees.

  “Hah!” the creature hissed in his ear. “Gotcher attention now, Neddy-boy.” Even through clinched eyelids he could see the red eyes inches from his face, smell its fetid, blood-soaked breath up his nostrils.

  “Eh, Ned, whatsa matter?” Consuela was smiling a big alcohol-blurred grin. “You’re not gonna be sick on the floor, are ya?”

  “Cut him some slack, he’s just a kid. Probly never been fallin’ down drunk before. Right, amigo?” Mano touched his shoulder all friendly like, but Ned slapped it away.

  His head came up. “Don’t…don’t—” he croaked, scrambling away on his knees, away from…what?

  “Shit, it’s just me,” Mano said, sort of smiling, sort of not.

  “I…I can’t tell.” Ned knew the creature could mimic human voices perfectly, all the better to lure them into whatever black hole passed for its lair. What it did with them after that, he didn’t want to imagine.

  The shack was awash in shadow, the single oil lamp on a low table throwing everything into sharp-angled relief. A hand reached and grabbed his shirt front. Ned went into overdrive, punching and thrashing as if the very devil had hold of him.

  Manolo switched from cool drunk amigo to pissed-off Mexican in a single breath. “What the shit, man? You cruisin’ for a bruisin’, hombre.” He punched back.

  A moving shadow leaped along the wall, and Ned lunged away from it. The table jostled, the lamp toppled over. Oil spread. Caught fire. Other flames flared in his memory. Ned was screaming, or maybe that was Consuela…he couldn’t tell.

  He’d hopped a boxcar headed south by the time the embers were cold.

  * * *

  After that, Ned kept moving. Day-to-day subsistence was a challenge, but he relished his independence, hard as it was. At age nineteen, he felt he could take pretty good care of himself, minus the shapeshifter that dogged his trail. He’d sworn off alcohol completely after that terrible night in the migrant camp. Clearly it brought his defenses down, and he had no desire to hear that rasping voice with its hissing tongue so close to his ear again. Although he was dimly aware of its malice, the creature had retreated for the most part, as if it kept vigil from a distant hilltop. The scale marks on his skin had begun to fade, and Ned rested more easily.

  What had led him to knock on the door of the tiny office behind Delphine’s Soul Food in New Orleans in search of a job he couldn’t say. Delphine Savoie, expert cook and voudou priestess, had put him to work washing dishes in her tiny café in the French Quarter, and it was she who’d shoved him onto the path that led eventually to Brother Micah. Which meant his dishwashing employment lasted just a few weeks. He’d felt sorry about that, having to leave the eatery before he’d even learned the names of the regulars who came for dirty rice and ham hocks topped with okra and tomatoes and a side of corn fritters laced with chipotle peppers. But when she’d spotted those faint scale-like designs below his rolled-up sleeves
, the jig was up. She’d hauled him through her office, asked him what the markings were, and then in a full-on panic dragged him out the back door and pushed him into the alley, wild-eyed. Actually, the dragging and pushing had happened after she’d held him by the arms for several jagged heartbeats and gotten a second-sight glimpse of his hidden companion.

  “It’s like a caged dog … it paces away and then comes back to lunge against the fence again,” he’d told her. That was when she’d decided to have a closer look.

  Between clenched teeth, she revealed what he’d already suspected. “Those marks are the sign of a barrier, put there for protection against some great wickedness.”

  That was the one piece of useful information Ned gleaned from her terror. She couldn’t tell him anything about who’d put them there, but she could see the fluid malevolence held in check by their presence. It made sense. Sometimes the scale-like images faded to the point where only Ned knew they were there. When that happened, he couldn’t feel his nemesis, either.

  Delphine claimed to be a rival of the famed Marie Laveau, whose backyard rituals caused many a New Orleans resident in the 1950’s to sprinkle salt over their doorsteps. According to the hand-lettered sign tacked beside the Soul Food office door, Mistress Savoie knew about protection, how to cast it and how to break it, but what she’d seen in Ned, or just behind him to be more precise, was apparently more than she felt prepared to confront.

  “That’s old serpent majik,” she told him, “but somethin’ else, too.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper that Ned strained to hear, and she’d made a protective hand signal in the air in front of his nose.

  “Go find yourself a Pentecostal snake-handler. I don’t want nothin’ to do with this.” He could smell her sweat, patchouli laced with something musky, making dark circles on her cotton blouse under her ample arms. And then he’d found himself curbside, watching the street lamps come on in the tepid Louisiana night and wondering what the hell to do. True to form, he’d hitched a ride out of town within the hour, heading west. It was a pattern that felt disturbingly familiar.

  * * *

  In the fading sunlight, Ned heard what he’d been waiting for.

  “Eloi shandai, shandai, harakushka, eloi …” The tongues of angels, according to St. Paul.

  The high nasal voice set the tone, and others in the congregation took up the chant.

  “Jesuslord … shandai … release Your Holy Spirit, lord … harakaharaka shandai …”

  Ned started walking toward the tent. Voices murmured, someone wept. A woman screamed, a baby began to cry and was shushed. Nasal Voice upped the ante and built the crowd into a frenzy.

  “Behold! The power of the Holy Ghost! Fill us up, fill up these sinners—witness the power of His protection!”

  Ned knew without a doubt what was going on by now. He pushed the tent flap aside and stepped into the sweltering confines of Brother Micah’s Southern Tent Revival. The stench of raw sweat and mildewed canvas filled his nose and mind. How many years ago had he been in one of these tents? The gloom was lit by a couple of hurricane lanterns hung from the tent struts, their sharp white light revealing maybe a hundred folding chairs set in rows bisected by one long aisle. A low wooden stage took up the space in front of the chairs. Onstage, Ned saw what he’d expected to see: several middle-aged men, thin to skinny, dressed in the kind of nondescript plaid shirts and shapeless pants you’d find in charity clothing centers. But the one who worked the crowd wore a cowboy-styled shirt and bolo tie. Ned pegged him for Brother Micah. A high table dominated center stage, and on it sat a couple of wooden boxes, each about two feet square with their lids closed. Except for one.

  The oldest man dipped his hand in the opened box and hauled out a timber rattler. He held it high over his balding head, its buzzing tailtip brushing his eyebrows. More shrieks from the crowd and loud yelps of “Praise Jesus!” The serpent began to thrash its tail, and the man danced around with it a bit, then reached into the box again, extracting another rattler. Ned felt a wash of old fear.

  “Behold! The power of the HOLY SPIRIT!” shouted the man in the bolo. Ned stood transfixed at the back of the crowd, drinking in the scene, the moaning, praying, weeping, shouting, and singing voices wrapping him up in the group trance. A gaunt, gray-haired woman who’d been standing at the back of the stage stepped forward and opened a second box. Ned felt sweat running down his ribs and mingling with the sour smell of the tent, not so much from the spectacle in front of him as from the unbearable stinging across his chest and the barest suggestion of a rasping voice inside his head. Or maybe it was the agitated buzzing of the captive serpents—he couldn’t tell.

  The woman flipped her long braid over her shoulder and reached into the second box, pulling out an even longer, fatter snake. A western diamondback, by its markings. More shrieks from the crowd. Ned felt lightheaded. He wasn’t sure why Mistress Savoie had thought this was what he needed to do to get his answers, but some enlightenment had better happen soon or he would be out the tent flap and running flat out toward the dirt road behind the trees. And then he froze. There was a boy, a little younger than Ned had been when his mother had dragged him to handlings like this. The kid stood motionless at the edge of the stage. Ned didn’t need a close up of the tight mouth and pallid cheeks to know paralyzing terror when he saw it. The woman turned to the boy and thrust the diamondback toward him. “Take it!” he heard clearly over the cries of the faithful and the fearful. The boy took a step forward and reached out, grabbed the reptile clumsily from the woman, and then promptly dropped it.

  The enraged rattler hit the tent floor with a resounding thwap and snake-warped its way down the aisle, amid shrieks of panic and tumbling chairs as men, women, and children fought to get out of its path, which was aimed directly toward Ned.

  Without blinking, Ned reached out as he’d done on many other such nights long ago and grabbed the serpent firmly behind the head, hauling it up. Its body whipped the air for frenzied seconds and then wrapped around his arm up to the elbow. It felt dry and heavy against the meat of his forearm, hanging on for all it was worth.

  “Don’t be scared, son,” said his mother. He felt her at his back, close to his shoulder. “She’s milked dry.” Ned turned fast, swinging the arm with the snake in a wide arc, scattering screaming worshippers in its wake. She wasn’t there to see, but he’d felt her. He looked back toward the stage and saw Mr. Bolo hurrying toward him. Ned shifted his attention to the snake.

  She glared at him with vertical-slitted pupils, the striped ridges over her eyes giving her a cat-like expression. Her gaping mouth showed recurved fangs, fully extended. Ned’s grip was firm behind the wide triangular head, holding her as tightly as she held him. The snake was channeling all its aggression and panic into its madly buzzing rattles. Below the black and white stripes of her tail he counted nine, with a broken tenth. He knew you couldn’t precisely date a snake’s age from the number of rattles, but from her girth and length, she had the feel of a reptile that’d been around for awhile.

  Ned held her face up at eye level and touched the ridge over her eyes, ran his finger over the snout, and lightly traced the curve of one perfect fang and then the other. The snake shivered all along the length of his arm, squeezing him in a death grip. Someone near him screamed and he barely heard Brother Micah’s high-pitched voice saying something about aiming for the open box at his elbow. Ned shut them out and focused entirely on the red-brown eyes of the serpent. She held his gaze, and then, unexpectedly, her pupils widened and it seemed to Ned that her head changed shape, becoming rounder, smoother, smaller, with wide-set eyes and no brow ridge. Her stripes faded to a smooth brownish olive-green with diagonal rows of darker scales forming an all-too-familiar chevron pattern down her body. Ned choked and nearly let go. Somebody had him by the shoulder. He blinked hard, coming out of the vision.

  “That’s some fancy handlin’ you done there, son. Here now, I’m gonna peel ‘im offa you and you can just ease ‘im back
in the box quicklike.” Brother Micah held the empty snake box just under his hand. Ned nodded and watched, still as stone, as the older man wrestled the coils loose. Ned aimed the snake’s head down into box and let go. It fell heavily into the container without offering to bite. He let his breath out.

  Brother Micah handed the box to one of his subordinates and turned back to Ned. “What’s your name, son? You from around here?”

  Ned shook his head, avoiding the question of his name. He rubbed his arm, getting blood flowing properly now that the snake tourniquet had been removed. To his relief, the ant-sting illusion was gone, too.

  “You know, I could use a cold-nerved fella like you. You handled that snake like a pro. In fact, I’m thinking mebbe the Lord sent you here, to help us keep doing His work.”

  Ned was suddenly painfully, aware that everyone was staring at him. “No, I don’t think so,” he managed. “I was just…” He frowned, unable to articulate exactly what he was just doing there. He’d found them more or less by instinct and a few lucky questions back in the last town.

  Ned stumbled out of the tent, his mind a blur. He tried to orient himself toward the road, and then realized someone had fallen in step with him. A young guy, nearly as tall as himself, loped along beside him. White t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his biceps, well-worn jeans, scuffed cowboy boots, dark blonde hair swept back from his face in a pomaded wave, unlit cigarette clamped between his lips—the essence of cool. He vaguely reminded Ned of that popular young actor whose name escaped him. The one who’d taken himself out in a blaze of race car glory last year. It had been all over the news.

  “Need a ride somewhere?” The stranger’s voice was friendly, with a hint of amusement.

  “Yeah, I do. Much obliged.”