“Mad Dog,” he said, “it sounds like Penny wants to play.”
“No, I don’t,” but I could feel the edges of my mouth rising with anticipation and I was about to burst out laughing. The whole idea—tying Mad Dog up was so hilarious. He was sitting there perched on the edge of the daybed—a scruff of bad hair and way too much paunch, lips parted, slack jawed like a dunce. He looked so pitiful, hoping the other kids were going to invite him to the party.
As he grasped where we were going with all this, he asked, “Will it hurt?”
“Not as bad as being shot,” Velvet said, laughing.
In what could only be described as an ill-conceived maneuver, Mad Dog grabbed the brown bottle of datura and turned it up. He gulped it all and wiped his lips. He coughed and sputtered but it all stayed down. “Aaahhh! Now I’m ready.”
The effects were quick. His pupils floated up past his eyelids and he fell backward on the daybed, into the swan’s wings. The impact on hard wood jolted him and his eyes dilated into focus.
“Oh, goodness, Mad Dog. I would not have done that,” Victor said.
Mad Dog took a deep breath and expelled it, his attention sharpening on Victor. “I actually feel pretty good,” he said. “In fact, I feel great!” He stood up and his whole body twitched, like a dog shaking off water. To Victor, he said, “Is it going to make me a zombie?”
“Let’s not talk about zombies right now, Rickey.”
“Ha!” Mad Dog raised his voice. He puffed his chest out with more gusto than I knew he had. “Why not? Because you’re going to make me go watch him? While you stay here with the girls? While I have to do all the dirty work? No, I don’t think so. Not tonight.” He picked up the bottle of absinthe and gulped it down. “Whoo-whee!” He blew out breath like fire. “This is awful!”
“I think you need to leave,” Victor said.
Mad Dog was losing his coordination—his hands trembled and his steps were erratic. He replaced the bottle on the tray, barely, careened across the room, set the rifle toward the dump, and peeked through the scope. “How’s our boy? He doing okay? How many times have you shot him tonight?”
“Did you shoot someone else?” I asked.
Velvet rolled her eyes. “This would be more fun downstairs,” she said. “I want to interrogate! And punish!”
“Seven’s down for the night,” Mad Dog said. “You stopped playing the drum. No drum, no zombie. And if he’s not coming out again, I’m not leaving.” Mad Dog’s tone was defiant. I don’t think he had ever spoken to Victor like this before and it was all bursting out of him in a rush. He took it as far as he could. “I don’t care what you do to me. Let’s go downstairs. Whatever. I don’t care anymore.”
“But that’s just it, Rickey. You don’t care. You don’t care about anything. And that makes you boring. You don’t have any core.” Victor’s condescension usually worked in moments like this. It sounded like it would stifle Mad Dog now too, but Mad Dog was out of his head. Nothing could stop him. “Come here,” he dared me. “Look.”
I peered through the scope. There was an upside down blue kiddie pool in the half light of the dump. “That’s where we keep him,” Mad Dog said.
Victor pinched Mad Dog’s shoulder with the toes of his hoof.
“That’s where you keep who?”
“Your friend. The zombie.” A peal of laughter exploded from him. “Seven! Our zombie. This is zombie juice,” he said, holding up the brown bottle. “He drinks a lot of this, every day. He’s blasted out of his mind!”
“Is that true?” I scrutinized Victor’s eyes and Velvet’s. “Well?”
They were at a loss for words. Mad Dog brushed Victor’s hoof off his shoulder. “We’ve been practicing to make him smash your clarinet. And right on cue, he did it!”
“You trained him to do that?” I was baffled.
“Did you really believe Seven’s grandmother was behind it?” Mad Dog went on, “Luckily he found that axe. Luckily I’ve been telling him to find it for the last three days. So much for Seven LaVey, the good guy. He’s a monster! We couldn’t let him bring the clarinet back to you when you lost it, either.”
“Mad Dog, shut up!” Victor yelled.
But it was no use. Mad Dog rolled on. “Or what? You’ll throw acorns at my window? You can’t make me throw acorns at my own window, so who’s going to do it?” He looked back at me, confiding. “Yes, Penny. I didn’t really want to throw stuff at your window. You seemed scared. I don’t hate you. But yes, it was me. Seven had nothing to do with that.”
My head rattled. All the weird things were beginning to make sense. “Oh,” he went on, “and your sister told me about the reed. Genius Velvet here didn’t even know. Nobody knew, except Ava. And now your secret’s out. Too bad you graduated. Otherwise you’d be a real loser next year. You’d probably get kicked out of band.” He chuckled, but his stamina had run its course. He fell back on the daybed and conked his head on the swan’s wing. His eyelids fluttered.
“…and he’s out,” Velvet said. They both looked at me. “Let’s go downstairs, Penny. You’ve been very bad.”
They were just going to continue on with another night’s perversities. God knows what they wanted to do next. My head was buzzing and I knew they could kill me. Either on purpose or not. They could do anything. Leading me down the garden path until we reached the place where I gave in, where I became like them by doing what felt wrong. “No! I’m not going downstairs. I’m not doing anything with you guys!” The single light at the city dump flickered. “I’m going to get him. He needs me.”
“I wouldn’t,” Victor said. He loaded a shell into the rifle and slammed the bolt down again. “You can try, Penny. But I’ll tell you, your luck won’t be good. You’ll have bad luck, or you won’t have luck at all.”
I fumed. Now I knew, and I wanted to kill him. “When I see you again, I won’t be so nice.” I stormed out, done forever with Victor Radcliffe.
24 Goat Made The Gumbo, But Rabbit Eats It
“All this started when Seven took your clarinet, right?” Marie LaVey asked. I had come to her house the morning after I had been in the turret. Mad Dog, Velvet, and Victor, they could all just go to hell. The windows were open and a warm breeze blew through.
“Yes, and I went back to the cave,” I said. I hesitated, the thought of the bones caught in my throat like a betrayal, a secret that Seven had given me, and I could not tell her about it. “Ahem.” Clearing it away, I went on. “The first time I was here, you made a mojo hand for me. I need another one, or something else, for good luck. I don’t know everything he’s up to, but Victor is behind all this. I think he made me get Lyme disease, and anemia, too.”
“I don’t think he caused those.”
“Anyway, he knew about them. He said it was your eye on me, and he lied about everything!”
“I know just what you need,” Marie LaVey said. She hopped up from her chair, and collected ingredients from her kitchen cabinets. She crumbled a piece of gingerbread cake into a cotton bag, poured cinnamon on it and sugar, and stirred birdseeds in. She tied the bag by its string and gave it to me. “This should do the job. You just have to sprinkle a little under your tree and in the field to the cave. When the flowers grow from these seeds, your luck will get better.”
I took it. “Thank you,” I said. I had the idea it wasn’t enough. “Don’t you need to do something else, like say something to it, or christen it somehow…”
“Feed it,” she said, approvingly. “Awaken it. Maybe you should do it. If you’re going to use hoodoo, you might as well learn to do it right.”
“I trust you,” I said.
She blinked several times and sighed. “I’m an old lady now. I couldn’t do it by myself. I tried. The first night I tried. I’ve tried over and over, but I don’t have the power like I used to. I couldn’t find him. I couldn’t bring him back. But with your help…”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m ready.”
She walked me to her al
tar. The picture of Seven as a little child was there, playing in a tub. He looked cute, his hair a wild mess, scrawny arm muscles, and soap glistening on his skin. A white candle burned behind it. Saint Peter was on the candle, a magnificent halo around his head, standing at a crossroads, holding a scepter and a crucifix. “They’re at the crossroads now,” Marie said. “Seven and Saint Peter. They’re at the crossroads. Saint Peter is watching over him. I’ve been burning a candle since the morning they took him to the hospital. A white candle—for purity, and advantage over an enemy.”
She lit a blue votive, blew it out, and held the bag over the ribbon of smoke. “Give me your finger,” she said. I held out a finger and she pricked it before I saw it coming. She squeezed a few drops of blood into the open bag. “Now it has power,” she said. She chanted:
* * *
Kan sôléid te kashe,
Li té sorti Bayou,
Pou, apprened le Voudou,
Oh, tingouar, yé hén hén,
Oh, tingouar, yé éh éh,
Li appé vini, li Grand Zombi,
Li appé vini, pol fé mouri!
* * *
When she finished, she tied off the bag and gave it to me.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
She mused, deciding if I was ready. “The rat’s gains are only for the serpent,” she said. “Victor Radcliffe has grown big enough to eat.”
“You know?”
“I’m going with you to your tree. Didn’t you say it looked like someone had been digging there?”
“Yes. They raked up a pile of leaves.”
A little later, she had found my black stockings under the magnolia. Then we were sneaking around the corner of Victor’s big yard, bringing his trick back to him. “Our luck is turning already,” she said. “And this is just the thing.” We had come upon a recently dead possum, no doubt one that Victor had shot.
Marie adeptly stretched my stockings around the possum without touching it. We crept around to the front porch. “This will turn the bad luck back on him,” she said. “The flies will pour into his house like a plague.”
“That’s so gross!”
“Yes, honey, it is. Goat made the gumbo, but rabbit eats it.” Her eyes twinkled and she wrapped the stocking legs around the dead possum tighter, tied it all up in a ball. “Victor Radcliffe is no Baron Samedi. He’s a fraud in many ways, but he did capture Seven’s soul. He’s a bokor. A charlatan at times, a magician at others, one who ultimately serves himself and not the loa. But he has more power than I knew. This will remind him that I have power too.” She took aim and bowled the possum deep under Victor’s porch, through a crawl space that went under the house. Tickled with herself and rightly so, she loped across his backyard and was at the edge of the woods in a flash.
Back at her house, she had me file shavings from a red brick. I stirred milky pellets of lye into boiling water with a generous pour of salt and swirled the brick dust into that. We scrubbed her steps with the concoction and she said it would keep our enemies out.
Marie produced an antique blue medicine bottle, one with a cork stopper. “This was a favorite toy of Seven’s,” she said. “When he was just five or six, we used to mix up magic potions and drink them.”
“You did? What kind of potions?”
One corner of her lips smiled. She raised an eyebrow on the opposite side just the way I do, and it made me laugh. “Most of them were sweetness conjures, to make him a nicer boy. They contained milk and sugar, chocolate syrup or strawberries and cream. Food colorings he really loved. Orange was his favorite, and yellow. He said those conjures filled him up with sunshine, and sometimes, I think he really did glow.”
The joy was in her eyes, and I knew it was her love for Seven that was going to make the difference, no matter what else we were about to do. “Tonight,” she said, “we’re going to take back Seven’s soul.”
“Shouldn’t we try to catch it on your tree? On the blue bottle tree?”
“No, dear. The tree has lost its riddle. There was a suicide in Bellin and one of those bottles caught the soul of the poor boy. His name was Wendell Gee. That little willow is too poor to hold a soul as heavy as that.”
When the distant drum beat began, she crooned her incantation:
* * *
Li appé vini, li Grand Zombi,
Li appé vini, li Grand Zombi,
Oh, tingouar, yé hén hén,
Oh, tingouar, yé éh éh,
Li appé vini, pol fé mouri!
* * *
I understood that she was invoking the help of Li Grand Zombi. Then she said something to Guidé, and spoke of Baron Samedi, the real one, the King of the Dead. Into the medicine bottle first went a pinch of pulverized chicken bones, to keep our enemies out. Her tone rose and she chanted. She swirled on one foot, the ballerina’s pirouette. She swept air into her lungs, balanced on her toes and chanted to the loa.
She shaved a dandelion root, to remind Seven where his home was. Blackberry leaves with hooks on them would ensnare Seven’s soul. Spanish moss to tangle and capture it, nails to hold it down, an acorn so his soul could grow anew. All of this went into the blue medicine bottle.
“Now we have to lure his spirit in,” she said. When the drum stops…” We waited at her table. She had poured thin lines of salt, making an X and a circle wide around it. From one of the legs of the X, she poured out a spiral, three times around the X, and finally connected it to the circle. The medicine bottle was placed on the X’s cross. Marie made up some of the same sweetness conjure chocolate milk. She gave me a sip too and with our hands together, we dripped a few drops into the bottle. “Be ready with the shoelace he gave you,” she said. “When the drumming stops, drop it in. When he gave that to you, he was asking for your help. His spirit will come to it, will follow the shoestring like thread follows a needle. We charge it with this.” She gave me a polished stone, silvery blue and translucent. “Kiss this moonstone, to awaken his soul.”
All of this she did and said with a seriousness beyond faith or prayerful hope. There was passion in her chanting. Her certainty was absolute, but I also felt like her own will to help Seven played a big role too. No matter what was said or what special concoction was made, her love was stronger than all this other stuff. Her love was alive and mighty, manifesting before my eyes.
In a moment, the drumming paused and I did it. I kissed the moonstone and dropped it in. I let the shoelace swirl down into the bottle, catching on barbs of blackberry leaves, tangling in the moss.
A warm breeze blew in and the bottle tipped over. Marie LaVey shuddered. “Now, child, cap it now.” I did, pressing the cork on as hard as I could. We sealed it with white wax from the St. Peter candle.
She cut a length of shed snakeskin and slid it over the mouth of the bottle. The snakeskin was as thin and crinkly as tissue—dull gray, but still flexible, stretching between the scales. It encircled the medicine bottle’s neck. “Li Grand Zombi requires this,” she said. “Seven’s soul must pass through the body of a serpent before he can be human again.”
Marie held the bottle to her heart. Into the candle wax she pressed a skull-shaped bead. She knelt and chanted before her altar, settled the bottle beside Saint Peter’s candle, just as it burned out. “We’ve done it, child.”
“Can I take it to him now?” I was ready, I wanted to bring Seven back.
“Not now. We’ve undone the work of Victor Radcliffe, and he won’t be happy. What you want to do is dangerous, and he will probably try to kill you for this.”
“How will he even know?”
The drumming began again, frenzied and delirious. “You hear that?” Marie said. “His drum makes a fuss because it’s empty now.” She listened intently, discerning what the cadence meant. “The snake has little eyes, but he sees us. He sees us well.”
I lit a candle, nudged it up behind the medicine bottle, and peered through our work at the dancing flame. Everything we had put in the medicine bottle shimmered yel
low, glowing like it was alive.
25 Fly High, Thunderbird. Fly!
“What are you thinking!” I bellowed at the imbecile.
Mad Dog ceased his chaotic drumming, brought his mind back from the distant, ignorant place it so frequently inhabited. “I don’t know. I just felt like playing something different.”
“The drum is playing you, Rickey. You lost it.” I had been in the basement, working on a Return to Me conjure for Penny. The pink candle had burned down. I had carefully wound strands of her hair into the wax before it dried and was about to bury it in a new clay pot.
Then I heard it. I had left Mad Dog in charge of the drumming and was going to return to the turret soon, change the tempo, and put Seven to bed. But then it stopped. Silence and a whoosh blew through the basement and out. Then the drumming began again, frenzied and stupid.
“I just took a little break,” he said, looking guilty. There was a smoldering joint by my rifle.
“You were supposed to keep the rhythm constant.” The huge assoto drum was as lifeless now as a dead tree trunk. But of course he could not see that. “The drumbeat kept Seven working. His soul was in the drum.”
“I didn’t mean to…”
“And now the eagle has flown.”
Mad Dog looked to the stars. “Fly high, Thunderbird. Fly!”
“It did not go to heaven, you idiot.”
“Oh, right.” He looked down.
“There either.”
“I’m sorry,” Mad Dog said. “I didn’t mean to…”
“You will be punished, of course.”
He swallowed hard, and began removing his clothes. We had arranged a system of punishment, in which he stripped down and ran across the yard, giving me target practice. Losing Seven’s soul would be a five-shot offense.
Blue Bottle Tree Page 19