The maniple also signified his passage into the priesthood. Embroidered with his liturgical name, Father J. J. Speed, it had been given to him at his priestly ordination by the bishop himself. Though technically not required since the Second Vatican Council, he wore it on his left arm during every Mass, and he was wearing it during his last Mass in Normal, Illinois, Palm Sunday, twenty-odd years ago. Along with every other article of clothing in the church, he had lost all of his vestments—maniple included—in the tornado. It was therefore unnerving when, toward the end of his stint shaking down potheads in Playa del Carmen, Mexico—the morning after he’d shaken down the dreadie and the Japanese kid on the beach, in fact—he met a street vendor selling a random selection of fancy garments and silks, one of which was his own misplaced maniple.
Stupefied, he purchased it immediately and demanded to know where the vendor had obtained it. The vendor, however, a wheelchair-bound Mexican named Omar, became very evasive the more he repeated his question, nervously petting his black-and-white cat, and Special Agent J. J. Speed’s spy-borne suspicions were aroused. Although, he didn’t really care what flimsy racket this bum thought he was protecting. He just wanted to know where he’d found his maniple. Who knows, maybe his other vestments were nearby. Not that he necessarily longed for them—not at all, really—but he was curious and he had some time to kill. He decided to place Omar under surveillance.
Quinta Avenida, the pedestrian walkway that runs parallel to the beach, was a pleasant place to hang around, anyway, made all the more so by the second-story, open-air tequila bar overlooking Omar’s stand. But even with a buzz it was a boring stakeout. The most exciting thing he observed in two hours was Omar explaining to some idiot gringo that the metallic hematite necklace he was considering was a rare form of coral. The tourist believed him, and attempted ineptly to haggle, but Omar, shrewd enough to watch the eyes of his customers, would accept nothing less than full price for his rare coral necklace. The tourist paid Omar’s asking price, and Special Agent J. J. Speed shook his head in disgust. Everyone wants a goddamn coral necklace to wear back home.
Most interesting to Special Agent J. J. Speed, however, was the fact that Omar knew how to watch the eyes of his customers and use it to his advantage. As every secret agent worth a deck of phony passports knows, when confronted with an object of beauty or desire, the human pupil involuntarily dilates, creating the sparkle we sense when someone finds us attractive. It had taken him a month of training on the biofeedback machine to learn to control his own pupil dilation. This was esoteric, secret spy-game stuff this bum was abusing to ply his trade, and Special Agent J. J. Speed was indignant. He needn’t have been, for as accomplished as Omar was at watching the eyes of his customers, he didn’t know enough to watch the eyes of his own cat. His black-and-white cat sat perched on his shoulder, glaring up at Special Agent J. J. Speed, holding him under feline scrutiny for most of the entire time he sat there. Special Agent J. J. Speed wished it were nighttime. Then, he could have used his supersecret night-vision goggles and stared down the cat. Omar sure as hell didn’t have a set of those.
64 AFTER TWO HOURS and several shots of Gran Centenario Añejo tequila, Special Agent J. J. Speed observed the boisterous arrival of a friend of Omar’s. To great mutual hilarity, Omar enthusiastically relayed the story of the idiot gringo and his rare coral necklace. They prolonged their amusement by inventing absurd scenarios of how thrilled the idiot gringo’s idiot wife would be when he gave her the rare coral necklace, and how she would wear it and brag about it to all of her idiot gringo friends, and how they would envy her and try to steal it, and on and on, chasing flights of fancy.
Eventually, Omar left his buddy with his vending cart and wheeled away. His cat, no longer staring at Special Agent J. J. Speed, sat in his lap now. At one point, Omar stopped and purchased a tamale, chatting amiably with the food vendor awhile, nothing too suspect. Not caring if he momentarily lost sight of Omar, Special Agent J. J. Speed hung back, following at a relaxed distance. A man in a wheelchair is easy to relocate anyway, he slyly reasoned. Just follow the trail of the parted crowd.
Gotcha motherfucka! Special Agent J. J. Speed thought dramatically to himself as he observed Omar a hundred feet ahead turning a sharp left down an alley. By the time he got to the alley, however, Omar was already three blocks away. No longer encumbered by the thick pedestrian traffic, his strong arms wheeled him along at maximum clip. He was headed away from Quinta Avenida and the developed shoreline—where Playa del Carmen presents itself to European and American tourists as a well-polished mall of overpriced Mayan gimcrack—and into the third-world slums and shantytowns that lay just beyond the tourist facades. Turning here and turning there, Omar was continually glancing up, scanning for something.
“What are you into?” Special Agent J. J. Speed muttered grimly to himself, imagining he was tailing a nuclear terrorist rather than a crippled Mexican street vendor. Soon thereafter, Omar abruptly stopped. Taking ahold of his cat, and without the least fumble of hesitation, he heaved her two stories straight up, toward one of the countless laundry lines crisscrossing the alleyway. Alarmed, Special Agent J. J. Speed watched the flailing, mewing mass of black-and-white fur claw instinctively into a skirt, her weight releasing it from its pins and carrying it back down on her descent, whereupon Omar caught her with deft expertise, immediately petting and praising her, feeding her bits of his tamale.
Omar repeated this scenario several times in the next hour, a laundry thief on his supply run, wheeling around town tossing his cat two stories up, stealing only the choicest garments. Special Agent J. J. Speed watched the whole spectacle, cringing with each toss as if he were watching a figure skater attempting a triple jump, and breathing a sigh of relief when she pulled it off. Later that afternoon, he stopped by Omar’s cart again and offered to buy the cat for a hundred dollars American. It was no big deal, really, a fraction of the amount he’d pilfered from his last shakedown.
Surprised, Omar counteroffered two hundred. “She’s a special cat,” he earnestly explained. She wasn’t, by the way. It would be easy for him to initiate another kitten into his game, pimping her with praise and tamales.
“One hundred,” Special Agent J. J. Speed insisted.
Omar shrugged, taking the money and handing him the cat. Better not push his luck, he figured. This gringo’s eyes were not sparkling.
65 GRINNING, OMAR TOLD Special Agent J. J. Speed that the cat’s name was Mota. For obvious reasons, Special Agent J. J. Speed could not be seen going around Mexico, clicking his tongue and calling out for marijuana in soprano singsong. So, he called her nothing at all for the first few days. His was not a terribly creative mind, after all, and he had great difficulty conjuring some meaningful designation. He finally settled on Wilhelmina, the name of his favorite prostitute in Panama. A free-spirited little feline, Wilhelmina went her own way by day. Toward nightfall, just when he thought she’d abandoned him or that she would never find him, there she’d appear, no matter where he happened to be. She had a very good nose.
Thus it was with some fret that Special Agent J. J. Speed sat drunkenly on that French Quarter curbside waiting for Wilhelmina to appear. His own words kept echoing in his ears, a hammering mantra of malice. I’m not your fucking brother! I’m not your fucking brother! Inwardly, he ogled aghast at his own malevolence. I’m not your fucking brotherl I’m not your fucking brotherl He may as well have gargled cold blood from the chalice of malice as scream such words. What kind of a Cain archetype am I? he wondered, cringing against the realization. Looking down at the maniple still scrunched in his hands, he proceeded to open it, gingerly, as if peeling back the petals of a sleeping flower, though the only nectar to be discovered was his own dollop of hanky scum. Wiping the puddled snot from his maniple onto his pants, he began to fold it carefully, even reverently, the action putting him in mind of another life, the life of Father J. J. Speed, the pastor, the porn fiend. He noted the snags in the silk where Wilhelmina’s claws
must have succeeded in yanking it from some laundry line in Mexico, a couple of inches above where his name was embroidered in golden thread: Father J. J. Speed. For a split second, he knew he was no happier now than he was then. Where the hell is Wilhelmina? he thought angrily. He wanted a toothpick.
And what was with this “walk away” bullshit? He knew it must be the key to unraveling this conspiracy. Ever since he’d arrived in New Orleans, people were doing the most random absurd things and then touching the side of their nose, pointing at someone, and saying, “Walk away.” And the bartender’s exhortation was not the first time he himself had been targeted. Just a week ago, while standing in the checkout line at the supermarket, a young woman had stolen a box of Count Chocula out of his grocery cart, yelled, “Walk away!” as she touched the side of her nose and pointed at him just before sprinting down the toiletry aisle. It had made his hair stand on end. And now, he’d had three glasses of ice water splashed in his face by some lecturing bartender, and all he’d ever been able to say was, “What the fuck?” He didn’t understand. Where the hell is Wilhelmina? he wondered. He wanted a toothpick.
Experimentally, as if not sure it was there, he touched the side of his own nose. Idly, and oblivious to the fact that he looked exactly like a drunk sitting on the sidewalk and contemplating a pick, he tapped the side of his nose. Touching the nose is more significant than the “walk away” command, he realized. He reasoned this because he saw people every day touching the side of their nose and pointing at one another as they passed. They would say nothing, but it was like a nod of recognition, a goddamn secret handshake. When he would ask anyone what the hell that was supposed to mean, they would simply do it again and say “Walk away.” He had looked up the gesture in the Agency’s limited-access online database of all known languages and gestures, but he’d only found two citations: The first was a reference to Clement Clarke Moore’s poem, “The Night Before Christmas,” where Saint Nicholas lays a finger aside of his nose just before up the chimney he rose. That seemed a dead end. The second citation was a reference to an ancient Celtic signal of shamanic knowledge, implying also that Santa Claus was a shaman. That sounded conspiratorial, all right, but ultimately it was just another riddle beneath the proverbial enigma. Where the hell is Wilhelmina already?
And why in God’s name am I craving a toothpick? Special Agent J. J. Speed picked at his teeth with a fingernail. He hadn’t so much as thought about a toothpick since the tornado, and now here he was craving them like some gutter junkie. Looking around, he realized that he was sitting on the curb in front of an all-night diner. He was less than twenty feet away from a toothpick! There, he could see the little dispenser, right next to the cash register, just inside the glass door. Without a second thought, he hefted himself up and strode into the diner. As the jangling door announced his arrival to a handful of besotten barflies nursing cups of coffee, he immediately pressed the dispenser, releasing a toothpick. He picked it up, noting its quality immediately, its lathed perfection, two and a half slender inches of gently grained birchwood. Raising it to his lips, his heart leapt. Touching it to his lips bathed his whole body in a sigh of reassurance and renewal. A few tentative gnaws, and he instinctively squinted. Chewing a toothpick demands a cool squint.
Reaching down, he summoned two more from the dispenser. With these he saluted the hostess, who was just then bleating, “Smoking or nonsmoking?” Replying with nothing but a happy flick of his toothpick, he grinned and exited the restaurant, where Wilhelmina now sat patiently awaiting him, just like he knew she would be.
His confidence soaring, Special Agent J. J. Speed scooped her up and carried her purring over to his hotel, taking care to hide her under his jacket while walking through the lobby. Once in his room he stroked her ears for a while before restraining her and fastening a collar around her neck that contained both a homing device and a radio microphone. Special Agent J. J. Speed had hatched a plan to tail Wilhelmina tomorrow, drunkenly figuring that if she’d just happened to claw his long-lost maniple off a laundry line in Mexico, maybe she’d just happen to stumble across a new lead on this assignment. He certainly didn’t have anything else to do. But whatever his reason, Wilhelmina didn’t appreciate the indignity of being subdued by some stinking, grunting primate who then tied some kind of scratchy something around her throat. She thrashed her tail and kicked frantically at the collar with her hind legs, rowling angrily at her monkey friend, who, in order to make up, fed her some kibble. She accepted the gesture, and shortly thereafter Special Agent J. J. Speed passed out on the bed, curled like a fetus around his purring ball of companionship.
The First Knot: A Gentle Breeze
LIKE ANY fourth-dimensional entity worth his self-transforming hypercube, Clovis could move forward and backward across time. Moreover, if he believed the rumors whispered about him by the gnomes when he was pretending to sleep, he was the only King of the Wood to be able to do this willfully, to exert some control over precisely when he visited. Whoever preceded him, in other words, dropped helplessly into and out of time with no control whensoever. But lest we laud Clovis’s unprecedented ability and ignore his muse, remember that Clovis only learned to do this from a rogue nymph who consorted with him on the rare occasions when they could escape the watchful eyes of the gnomes and boars.
Clovis had no idea why this nymph’s motivation differed from the other elementals—all of whom seemed to derive great delight in keeping him baffled—but he trusted her nonetheless. He tried asking her name once, but her only response was a music so piercingly beautiful that he could scarcely fathom its sound. Indeed, it was only by the whisper of the ninth echo that his eardrums reverberated something that resembled Snapdragon, but he never dared ask her to repeat herself.
In any event, as long as Clovis spoke only in the present tense while dropping into time, he retained perfect control over exactly when he visited. As for how he dropped into time, it was as easy as remembering a time he had already visited before he stabbed his sword into the earth and said whoa now! Of course, since he could only visit a time he remembered visiting, this limited him to the single period he happened to stumble into before he learned how to exert some control. Consequently, Clovis became quite fond of the twenty-first century, and it was great consolation to hold some familiarity with an epoch and its peoples. But there was a dire proviso to all of this. If he ever spoke of the past or future from within time, his ability would be forever lost, and he would be just another lonesome King of the Wood, careening through time uncontrollably.
Meditating amongst bluebells at the base of the king oak one day, Clovis pondered the knotted strip of leather the former King of the Wood had given to him just before he evanesced. Originally, it appeared as though there had been four knots in it, though by the time he inherited it one of the knots had already been undone, presumably by the prior King of the Wood. And of course, the gnomes had tricked Clovis into untying the second knot as well by telling him that it would ease his loneliness.
This wasn’t entirely untrue, but what they didn’t tell him was that untying the knots was also a way of summoning a new challenger to his crown, and was typically a strategy of last resort. Unfortunately for the gnomes, most humans in the twenty-first century were much too domesticated to even guess at how much more there was to life than their narrow socialization had indicated, and even Diablo—the man who could see Clovis—could not see him for who he really was. Even if Diablo could have seen him or the mistletoe, Clovis had no interest in murdering him in order to defend his crown. He enjoyed picking on him too much, and he wasn’t even sure the crown was worth defending in the first place.
The gnomes also neglected to mention to Clovis that when the first knot was untied by the prior King of the Wood, a gentle breeze was released into the world of humans, and that when Clovis untied the second knot he released a brisk wind. These were tremendous understatements. The gentle breeze, Clovis learned from Snapdragon, was the whirlwind that had claimed his wife
and child. The brisk wind was the tornado that had stampeded through Normal, Illinois. And according to Snapdragon, if the third knot were ever untied it would release a maelstrom. When Clovis asked her what would happen if the fourth knot were ever untied, she simply smiled mischievous and said that the maelstrom would be the calm before the storm.
So, bored with his immortality one timeless day and desperate for something, anything, to happen (even if it might summon fresh challengers to his crown), Clovis impulsively untied the third knot.
I’ve just released a maelstrom, he marveled, and immediately wondered if this too were an understatement.
66 “IT WOULD behoove us to groove,” Diablo rhymed under his breath, enjoying a lull in pedestrian traffic on Bourbon Street. He sat with his right arm draped lazily behind him, supporting his head, and his legs were propped on a table displaying an assortment of handmade seashell pipes. Diablo had held this position among the artists and vendors in the French Quarter for more than fifteen years—ever since he ran away from home and eventually found himself volunteering at a free kitchen in the Ninth Ward during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, long before Laughing Jim came along. “Or move us to prove?” he tentatively attempted, striving to continue his rhyme, but shook his head and grimaced at the contrived and complacent stupidity of his second line.
Diablo’s glance fell upon his left hand, inevitably noticing his bestumped middle finger. Like opening a door with no pins in its hinges, its absence never failed to surprise him. Invariably, it jolted his attention and left him with the lingering inkling of being not quite who he thought he was. It was an oddly comforting state of mind, opening easily into reverie, and this particular reverie led Diablo into a recollection of his running away and of Doreen and that dude slamming on the slouch almost twenty years ago.
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