by Joey Ruff
I poured the coffee and took a stool near her, turned to gaze out the window at my car. “What time is it?”
“A little after eight. We were going to let you sleep. What time did you get in?”
“What are you, my mother?” I took a sip of coffee.
She laughed a little, looked up from the paper. “Sorry.”
“I got in late.” I looked down at her plate. Chunks of apples were baked in. “Is that streusel on top?”
She nodded. “It’s good. Want some?”
I took another sip of coffee. “Maybe later.”
She returned to her paper for a moment before asking, “Did you come in my room last night?”
I looked absently at her: jeans and a yellow tank top, long black hair pulled up. Huxley’s amulet hung around her neck. It looked nice on her, the purple of the gem complemented her skin tone, seemed to bring out something in her eyes. She wasn’t that rich, dark chocolate brown her father was; she had a little cream in her coffee.
“Happy birthday,” I said. “It was your father’s. He wanted you to have it..”
“Thanks.” She turned back to her paper. “And thanks for blowing out the candle.”
“If I hadn’t, Chess would have.” I took another sip, held a little on my tongue for a minute before swallowing. My leg still hurt, but it felt nice to sit down. “The necklace looks good on you. It was one of his charms. I suppose it’s magic.”
“Yeah…Medieval soldiers used to wear amethyst into battle; they believed it had healing properties.” I arched a curious brow at her over the coffee mug. “And they say the ancient Greeks would carve wine goblets from it to keep them from getting drunk. It’s supposed to be a symbol of purity and soberness, for the body and mind.”
“Where did that come from?”
“I’ve been up for a while. The necklace inspired some research in the library.” Her hand went to her neck as she said, “It’s beautiful, Jono.”
“I’m starting to worry I won’t have need for the prepared speech Huxley made me memorize.”
“I’m guessing the bones were from a black cat, or two rather, according to the belief that all of the magical power in the cat resided in a single bone.”
“Okay. Why do you say a black cat?”
“I can tell you’re not superstitious,” she said. “Huxley was a hoodoo guy, and in hoodoo the bones of a black cat are used for good luck, protection against dark magic and rebirth after death. Which is reinforced by the wishbones, most likely from a pair of black roosters.”
She was nailing it so far. “Alright. How ‘bout the beads then, smart ass?”
“Well, black onyx is typically worn in the festival of Samhain and represents death.” She stopped for a minute. “Which is funny because the onyx, amethyst, and bones all tip their hats to the patron loa of New Orleans, Samedi and Brigette, also known as the Ghede who preside over graveyards.” She paused a moment, taking a sip of coffee. “The loa are the voodoo gods.”
“I know what the loa are,” I said, not so much annoyed but playing it off that way.
“Now the Ghede don’t do anything without first invoking Papa Legba,” she continued. “Are you familiar with him, too?” She gave me a wicked smile and continued before I could say anything. “According to voodoo tradition, he opens and closes the doors from the world of the living to the spirit world, turns the wheel of fortune, and opens doors of opportunity. The gold, jet, and red tiger’s eye pay tribute to him.” When she finished, she took a deep breath and turned to me proudly. “Was that the prepared speech?”
I scratched my head and said, “Something like that.” I took a bite of her streusel cake and asked, “Did you figure out what it does then, too, genius? Or did your books not say all that?”
“I have a theory, but why don’t you tell me.”
I took another bite of cake as I thought over the words to use. “We fought a lot of stuff, and Huxley wasn’t terribly good at hand-to-hand combat.” She nodded. “He did spells and shit, which took a lot out of him. When he wore down, the amulet would glow, and he would get a renewed fire. He tired often, called the amethyst his second wind.”
I looked at her for a quiet moment and said, “What’s your theory?”
She looked down at the amethyst. The gem seemed to glow in response to her, like the dying flicker of a flashlight bulb, but that might have been my imagination. She didn’t look up as she said, “My father bound his energy to the gem.” She shrugged. “Huxley was trying to cheat death.”
The smile that found its way to my face with those words was undoubtedly awkward and uncomfortable, but it didn’t silence the words that followed. “Too bad it didn’t work.” I didn’t need to mention that he’d been dead for ten years. Huxley was always the elephant in the room whenever she asked me about the past, about old cases. She never really asked about him, and if the topic came up, she always found a way to change the subject to something else.
“Well, it’s a good theory, anyway,” I said, my smile muted now but more sincere.
She didn’t say anything, just nodded in understanding.
“He asked me to tell you about him.” I wasn’t good with feelings and the sappy stuff. It wasn’t easy for me. “He was proud of you, ya know. As far as I could tell, you were probably the thing he cared for most. It was important to him that you remember who he was.” I paused a moment. “Do you…have any questions…about him?”
She thought about it for a second, looked down and away. Careful not to meet my eyes, her hand found the amethyst, and her finger traced the outline of the gem. I thought I saw something glisten in the corner of her eye, but she blinked and it was gone.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “But if you think of anything….” I stumbled into silence a moment. “There was this one time…” I probably sounded stupid, but all the talk about my old mentor had kicked some things up in my head. “We were in Peru chasing a clan of chupacabra – nasty little bitches – and we’d holed them up in a cave in this forest. There were probably five or six of the buggers, and they’d taken some goats, but this little farm boy had wandered in after them. Huxley summoned some kind of arctic wind, froze the nut hairs off those nasties and left the boy completely unhurt.”
I hadn’t been paying attention to her as I talked and happened to glance over at her as I said, “Of course, the goats were dead…”
She’d turned away from me, wiped her eyes with her fingers, sniffled a little. She took a breath and said, “Can we not do this right now?”
I took another bite of cake, put a hand on her shoulder, and said quietly, “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged me off, stood from her stool a minute, and looked out the window, a hand over her face. When she turned back, she looked collected. She smiled weakly and said, “Thanks for the necklace.” Then she sat and turned back to the paper.
I finished her cake in silence. There were other places I could be, other things I could be doing, but they could wait. I didn’t know how things were going to go, and if she still wanted to talk, I didn’t want to just walk away.
After a time, she folded the newspaper and set it aside. I watched a pair of wrens fighting over a discarded apple core in the back grass, couldn’t help but notice her silence, and eventually I turned to look at her. “What?” I asked, the last of the cake in my mouth.
“I thought you would have told me what happened by now.”
“What did happen?”
“Last night. You were supposed to be gone an hour. Obviously, something happened, and then on the phone you said something about a new case. So, spill.”
I told her about Eric Gables’ visit, the sheriff’s office, and my excursion at the Siren’s Song. I left out the bits about kissing Lorelei and the sad drive home.
“So now what?”
“Today, I was going to go by Adam’s school. There was something in the journal about where he met Dewey.”
“The imaginary friend.”
“Right. A
nd then I was thinking about going by the Johnson place.”
“But the sheriff told you to stay away.”
I shrugged. “Don’t you think I could get more out of the bathroom then the cops did?”
“Maybe,” she said, “but what good does it do you if you get arrested?”
“Fine. What do you suggest then?”
“They go to the same school, don’t they? Adam Gables and Clint Johnson?”
“I guess.”
“You’re already going to be there, just see if you can ask the kid a few questions, get him on neutral ground.”
I considered that for a second. “Not a bad idea.” Then I asked, “So what happened to you yesterday? I called the house a few times.”
“Well, Terry’s cousin Rebecca called.” She didn’t call him Ape, she called him by his Christian name, said it was more personal that way. He did let us live in his house and all, we ought to treat him like a human, not like a circus act. That’s more or less what she told me once. She’s gonna join PETA when she grows up, too. “I thought that was weird. I’ve never known any of his family to call here before.”
I nodded. “I don’t think he’s talked to Rebecca since his parents’ funeral – what – twelve years ago. What the fuck did she want?”
She grew quiet for a minute before she said. “You remember Ape’s uncle, Arthur?”
Arthur David Towers was a Howard Hughes-type eccentric. He’d married several times to people like Ava Gardner and Susan Hayward, and, inevitably, when the relationships fell apart, he would take off in a hot-air balloon or take a dog sled across the arctic. He climbed Everest, ran with the bulls in Spain, and rode a camel across the Sahara. What’s more, he became famous for his exploits, sold the book rights on his life and starred in two feature films, as himself.
Last year, however, he turned eighty and started falling apart. Doctors told him to take it easy, but after all the things he’d done, he’d never learned to relax and he was going crazy sitting still. He broke his hip trying to scale the roof of his house.
Arthur had quite a few kids from all of his marriages – Rebecca being the eldest – and whether they were looking out for him or trying to keep him out of the way for their own good, they put him in a home.
“Of course,” I said, fearing I knew what was coming.
“He’s missing. Terry and I went out to the assisted living home.”
“Wait. What? Missing how?”
“Just gone. He got up and walked away, from what they told us.”
“When?”
“Last Tuesday.”
“Arthur’s been missing for a week and a half, and that bitch calls him up yesterday?”
“I know.”
“Arthur’s the only one in the family who doesn’t hate Ape because he’s…well, a monkey. He’s been like a dad to him, and that bitch…”
“You haven’t heard anything yet,” she said. “The nurse told us Arthur liked to pretend he was still having his adventures, exploring and whatever, right? So one night, maybe a month ago, they found him in the basement, unconscious. Apparently, he had a seizure and for the past few weeks, he’d been a complete vegetable: spoon-fed, diapers. Nurse-care, 24/7.”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“I know. They found his empty wheelchair by the forest outside the home. There weren’t any footprints or anything. Ape’s a mess over it all.”
“Did they call the police?”
“Yeah,” she said. “They swept the forest and found nothing. There was a neighborhood and a school past the trees, and they looked there too.”
“And you said they found him in the basement? When he had his stroke? Where exactly?”
She seemed to think about it for a moment before she said, “In the laundry room, face down by a sewer drain. Why?”
“Any chemical burns or bug bites?”
“Nothing. His nurse said that was the first thing they did when they found him was check him for injuries, as they were liable. Also, he was sponge-bathed regularly, so any marks or whatever would have been found.”
“Life’s full of mysteries. Where’s old monkey boy now?”
“He’s in the garden.”
“I better go see if he needs my help.” When I stood up, I winced. The pain was much worse this morning than it had been, severe enough in my legs that they began to buckle under me. I quickly grabbed the stool, and Nadia leapt to try to hold me up.
“It’s your back, isn’t it?” she said. “Ape said it was bothering you when you left the house yesterday, and I’m sure having it cracked around a stripper pole didn’t help any.”
“You always say the sweetest things. Stripper pole. Sounds so dirty when you say it.”
“Most people don’t have a Siren mistress to knit them back together, Jono. You’re lucky.” She helped me across the kitchen to the table. “You need to lie down. Do you want the floor or the table?”
“It doesn’t really matter. Probably won’t get up from either.”
She helped lower me to the floor, the whole time the pain robbed my brain of all words but one. “Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck….”
When I was finally on the floor, she rolled me on to my stomach. “Sorry ‘bout the cusses, love.” She slid my shirt up around my shoulders, stretched my arms above my head. “What are you doing?”
“Just trust me on this. Okay? It’s something Huxley did when I was little.”
I wasn’t aware that she remembered much about her father, but if anyone could help me now, it was Huxley with his old-world remedies and feel-better mojo.
She disappeared. One of the cabinets opened, and she muttered to herself, “Oh, where is it?” Then, “Ah,” and the cabinet closed with a thud and she was back at my side.
“This will probably be cold,” she said, and a chill hit my lower back and began to spread like maple syrup on a stack of pancakes. The hairs on my arms stood up. “Sorry…not sure how much of this to use.”
She must have figured it out because I heard her set something down. Then her hands, warm and welcome and strong, moved against the cold on my back with a force I wouldn’t have equated with someone as young as her, or as feminine.
“What is that stuff?” I asked.
“Olive oil. Hush.” She began chanting something in what sounded like Hebrew and rubbed and spread as she chanted. From the lower back she moved to the middle, the cold oil spreading with her, and then she rubbed my shoulders, chanting all the while.
She paused for a minute and then the rubbing resumed and in English she said, “Lord, how are they increased that trouble me! Many are they that rise up against me. Many there be which say of my soul, There is no help for him in God. But thou, O Lord, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter of mine head. I cried unto the Lord with my voice, and he heard me out of his holy hill.”
I recognized the old Psalm, and my voice joined hers in chorus. “I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the Lord sustained me. I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people, that have set themselves against me round about. Arise, O Lord; save me, O my God; for thou hast smitten all mine enemies upon the cheek bone; thou hast broken the teeth of the ungodly. Salvation belongeth unto the Lord; thy blessing is upon thy people.”
She said it once more, this time in Greek, and as she rubbed, all the pain began to vanish, and a pulse of violent heat surged from my toes to my knees, and into my thighs. From there, it moved into my hips, and to my lower back, where the pain seemed to originate. For a moment, the heat grew more intense and passed from my lower back into my shoulders, my neck. It passed into my jaws, my tongue, and my entire head felt like it was on fire. I squeezed my eyes shut and a scream tore through me like a ripsaw.
As I yelled louder, I could hear Nadia’s even mantra rising in volume but not tempo to be heard over my cries. Tears began to run down my cheeks. I felt heat and pain surging behind my eyes, felt like someone had my head in a vice as my ears plugged.
And just as I
thought I couldn’t take anymore, the heat and pain were gone.
I sat there for a moment, catching my breath and assessing the damage. Nadia stood, and then the sink turned on and another cabinet opened. As soon as I could feel her next to me again, a rough, dry cloth rubbed against my back, soaked up the oil.
“How do you feel?”
I took a deep breath and said, “Better.”
“You ready to sit up?”
I didn’t say anything, just put one hand flat against the floor, then the other, and pushed up. I pulled my knees up under me and slowly rolled into a sitting position, leaned forward and slid my shirt back down.
“What’s your pain level right now?” She sounded like a doctor all of a sudden. “From one to ten. Ten being the most unbearable.”
I sat there for a second, tried to be the zen master of my body, sensing every part of me, turning up nothing. “There is no pain. How did you…?”
She sat next to me and handed me the glass of water she’d drawn. I took it eagerly and emptied it in one swallow.
“When I was six,” she said, “I was riding my bike. A dog came out of nowhere and scared me, but I was going too fast and couldn’t stop. I swerved to go around it and ran into a fence and fell flat on my back. With the wind taken out of me, I sat there, struggling to breathe, and Huxley ran up to me. He took me in his arms and carried me back to the house.
“When I could breathe again, I was crying, saying my back hurt, my back hurt, and I remember seeing blood. When I fell off the bike, I landed on a sharp stick, and it jabbed into me. There was so much blood and I was so scared.
“But Huxley wasn’t. He took a rag, soaked up some of the blood, and then he grabbed the olive oil, and he quoted that Psalm.”
“Psalm three,” the priest in me said.
She nodded. “Psalm three. First in Hebrew, then in English, then in Greek. The whole time he chanted, he massaged the oil into me, and stayed calm, kept his words steady. When he finished, the blood had stopped and the pain was gone.” Then she said, “I’m surprised I remembered that. I haven’t thought about it in so long.”