Blue Bottle Tree Read online

  “We know all about you,” Victor said. He let himself down enough to stand and loosened his arms from around Velvet. The ropes were only binding when they wanted them to be. She kissed his hoof as he pulled it away.

  I scanned the room for weapons. They might kill me here. I had told my mother I was staying with a friend. No one would miss me for a day. “Please!” I said. “I’m sorry.” The wall held a sword and a crossbow. No way could I use those. Medieval two-ball flail? I would probably kill myself. They would surely use them on me. I sobbed and wiped back tears. I was stuck and whimpering. I could not have felt more beaten. “I admit it. I sabotaged your reed. It was a stupid, childish thing to do, and I wish I hadn’t done it. I’m sorry, okay? I’ll make it up to you …some other way.” I sniffled. I was groveling and hated myself for everything. “I just want to leave. Please don’t make me do this.”

  Victor leaned over to the wall, dragging Velvet with him, and unhooked a noose. “We’re not going to hurt you,” he said. “Until you welcome pain, you will only blubber and whine. Which would bore us. Our pleasures are more sophisticated than that.” He fitted the noose around his neck and pulled it tight. Velvet hiked up her skirt and situated herself, straddling him, and they strapped themselves together again. Victor’s weight was in the harness with a few inches of slack in the rope between his neck and the coiled spring it was anchored to in the ceiling. “You tried to steal him, Penny. Just like you stole first chair. And now for his birthday you will deliver him to me in a way that you can never take away.”

  I nodded. I had lost my mind days ago. This was the final shattering of the reality it had been. “I’m sorry. You’re right. Whatever you want. Whatever you want me to do.”

  Victor drew me to them with a finger. He kissed me. He teased my tongue with his.

  He passed my lips to Velvet’s and she was tender, loving me. She pulled me in and pressed her breasts to mine, as open as her heart could be. “Back up now,” she said. “You’ll have to release the spring …in case we go too far.”

  They tested the noose by rocking back and forth in the harness. Only a slight bend in Victor’s knees and he would strangle. I did not commit to helping. I did not want anything to do with it. I could just leave. Slink backward up the steps and be gone. They were too tied up to catch me. But it was too much! I yelled, “Are you guys crazy?”

  I had seen kids having sex before, not graphically, but on the backseat of the bus after games. You always knew who was going to do it beforehand. In those cases, the couples had to keep it quiet and be relatively discreet. They covered up so the chaperones in front wouldn’t know. But everyone else knew. Stuff like that always got publicized before the act. That was different from this. Victor and Velvet were not concerned with modesty in any way. Frankly, Velvet had occupied those backseats as much as anybody—she and whoever her boyfriend of the week happened to be.

  Back in the fall I was with Seven on the way back from a game. It was a particularly long ride home from a particularly faraway game. I had not really meant to end up with him. But after our halftime show, I was standing around the concession stand and realized I had forgotten to bring any money. Seven had a hot chocolate and it looked so good! He saw me breathing into my hands and made a joke about me getting frostbite, which was an inside thing between us, from the time we got together and it began to snow. I thought he had forgotten about that, but apparently, he had not. It was cute. Then he said he didn’t even want his hot chocolate and he gave it to me, got distracted by something else. He probably did want it. He was just being nice.

  So on the way back from the game, he happened to have a seat to himself. I acted like there wasn’t anywhere else I could sit and was only going to plop down by him as a last resort. It was a very long ride home. We kissed a couple of times, but I didn’t think he really liked me. He probably had another girl by then, so I said I liked someone else too. Seven and I weren’t even a couple, but if we had, somehow, gotten one of those backseats that night…

  But this was totally different. I knew I wasn’t thinking straight, but still. Seeing Victor like this made me sick that I had ever admired him. Surely he was not really doing the asphyxiation routine. People do actually die that way. As if he heard my thoughts, Victor cried out, “I am immortal on my twentieth birthday. I cannot die tonight!” And his laughter rocked the room.

  “Would you say Victor is well hung, Penny?”

  My mouth flew open. She was proud of herself, catching me by surprise like that. “I don’t know. I don’t…”

  “Do you even know what it means?”

  “Yes, I know. But I’ve never seen his…”

  “No, Penny. You haven’t.” Velvet wiggled herself on top of Victor. He gurgled and hissed, choking. With a rush of ecstasy, he bit Velvet’s neck. “Not yet, my dearest,” Velvet said to him, arching her back. She raised herself up. To me she asked again, “How do you know if a man is well hung?”

  “Come on. Everybody knows.” I crossed my arms over my chest. I was not as experienced as Velvet West, but she didn’t have to talk down to me like this.

  “The hangman’s fracture is a fracture of the C2 vertebrae—this one.” She dug her little finger under the rope. Victor coughed and gagged as the rope pinched his windpipe. “It’s caused by hyperextension of the neck, and the vertebrae cuts the spinal cord. The result is an erection, and ejaculation. I’m going to have Baron Samedi’s child!” They roared like maniacs and kissed deeply, tongues lolling all over each other’s necks and faces. They were breathing hard and Victor’s knees buckled. The noose caught him and they dangled, suspended in air. “Hang him well, Penny! Hang him well. Don’t let his feet touch the ground!” Velvet wailed and the rope jerked, they embraced more tightly and twitched in spasms. Her legs were wrapped high on his back and her small body thrashed, her breasts bounced with the spring of the hangman’s rope.

  I screamed and ran out as fast as I could.

  Murky dawn emerged as I ran down the drive from the Radcliffe estate. The party was over but some stragglers remained. Car doors were open, legs dangled out, and passed out people were scattered around the littered grounds. A mass of painted women were sleeping on the stage, entangled like a nest of snakes. I did not know what to do. There was no way I could tell my parents or my sister, or anyone. I thought that Victor was inviting me over because he liked me. I thought he wanted to be with me. I honestly believed I could dispense with Velvet West.

  But now I had seen it, seen him hanging in the death ecstasy, and Velvet trying to squeeze a baby out of a dead man. Good God. I admit she’s sexy, but not even she could do that. I laughed, not believing my own memory. It was ridiculous. They had to be joking. They had tricked me. They were probably back there laughing themselves to death about the fool I had been.

  Whatever I had felt for Victor before, it was not the same after that. He was crazy. They were both crazy.

  I had wrapped the shoelace Seven had given me around my wrist like a friendship bracelet. Now my fingers hooked under it. I untied it, and pulled it off. I stared into the texture, trying to figure out why he had given it to me. He seemed so sad and vacant, working like that at the dump. He was like Victor said, a zombie. I wanted so much to tell him about the most insane fucking party of my life and how I felt like I had changed. There was an invisible door and I had gone through it. I glanced back up at the house. There was no big tree. No swing. What I had seen the night before was more real than that. The end of Penny Langston in a swing. But Seven was the only one who would get it. Only someone who thinks like you knows how to fill in blanks like that. I could see him taking it all in. Then he’d say, Yuck, Longstocking. I can’t believe you kissed that animal. Or something like that.

  All things considered, he must be back at home. Zombies are not real. Funerals are. A doctor pronounced him dead. I need to get more sleep. But he’s not gone. I saw him. He has to be at home. As the sun took a commanding place and dew shimmered on pale green grass, I turn
ed toward Jack Rabbit Lane. Victor told me I was forbidden from seeing Marie LaVey, which made me want to see her more. Her house was close and I felt light-headed. I didn’t want to pass out on the road. Even if Seven was not there, she would be. If I could mind my manners well enough and not get freaked out about spirit possessions or whatever else, she could tell me what was really going on. Whippoorwill, I heard, and my heart quivered. The girl on the swing had waved goodbye. She was never going home.

  20 A Glass That Once Held Fine Wine

  Marie LaVey opened the door before I knocked. She knew there was a connection between Seven and me and she knew I was hurting too. “Come in, child. Please,” she said.

  “I saw Seven,” I said. “He’s alive.”

  She listened intently as I told her what happened. She nodded and smiled like I was a crazy person making it all up, until I got to the part about, “He’s a zombie!” Then she knelt before her alter, spoke to Saint Peter, prayed, and begged his help. She turned back to me and said, “We need Guidé, child. We need Guidé!”

  I assumed Louisa would come marching out of the back room again, possessed, and then I would be told what was going on. We would figure out a way to rescue Seven.

  But she did not. “Isn’t it going to happen?” I asked.

  “Calling upon Guidé is no trivial thing, my baby.”

  “But what about Seven’s mom?” I said. “Doesn’t it always happen to her?”

  This was evidently the stupidest thing anyone could ever say. She shook her head. “Louisa is not well. Guidé does not come when the curse is on her.”

  And then we began this elaborate invocation. She said, “Zo wan-wé sobadi sobo kalisso,” and repeated it. Then she had me say it too. She tapped the floor three times with a rattle, then gave it to me and I did the same. We made a concoction of a whole bottle of rum and hot peppers, more hot peppers than I had ever seen in anything—ten jalapeños, twenty dried red chipotles, and a dozen more orange habaneros. After I cut up the first couple of jalapeños, I sneezed. Then I could not stop sneezing. Marie wrapped a scarf around my face and gave me a whole bottle of cayenne powder. “Pour it in, baby. All of it.” And I did. She made me wear plastic gloves and cautioned me not to touch my face. I could feel the little beads of sweat on my forehead and reached up to wipe them with my sleeve. She caught my hand and said, “No!” When it was done and mixed up to a toxic rum and raw pepper soup, she had me sprinkle libations in the four corners of the room, then stand in the middle with the bowl at my feet.

  She had a bag of flour and took pinches from it, made a cross in the middle of the room, and drew a square around that. “Zo wan-wé sobadi sobo kalisso!” she said. The cross met at the point where I was standing, and then I knew, Guidé would not be coming to Louisa. Guidé was coming for me.

  I was terrified. I trembled, and fell. The next parts happened in a blur and I blacked out when I hit the floor. Louisa and Marie LaVey told me about it. Frankly, I would not have believed them, but the white lines on the floor were smeared, and I had flour all over me. I was also wet from the rum and pepper mix—my hair, face, white dress. I picked green, red, and orange slivers from my hair. There was no way I could have touched them before without sneezing like a maniac, but now I was immune.

  Marie said I fell to the floor in convulsions. The floor and the whole room looked like a catastrophe, but I was the only one who was messy. Marie and Louisa—who had apparently come out of her room when I started making noise—were calmly sitting at the table. At first I was proud, I stood straighter, and thought they would heap praise on me for what I had become. Having been the vessel of a god, I thought it made me special—like I had crossed a line into the realm of the divine—and I should be treated accordingly. But that was not the case. Guidé was the god. Not me. With him gone, I was just another girl. Like a glass that once held fine wine, there was nothing special about me when Guidé was gone.

  “First you took the libations, girl. Guidé did. He turned up that bowl and devoured it all, slaked his hunger like a beast. He washed his face in it. He washed his hair. He said, ‘It’s me, Papa Guidé, and I am strong!’ Then you danced around the room, pitching forward and back, moaning, staggering and falling all over the floor. That was Guidé riding you. Do you speak Creole, child?”

  “No.” I shook my head, scanning the floor and then my arms for wounds. There were no cuts or scrapes that I could find, and I did not feel drunk. If I drank that whole bowl full of rum and peppers, it would have killed me. They said I did.

  “Do you speak Creole, child?” she asked again. “Guidé does, and once he mounted you, he said, ‘Sé mwê Papa Gédé—mwê fò!’ He made himself strong on libations. He picked up that sofa just to show us he could!”

  The sofa was heavy and substantial. “There’s no way I could do that.”

  “You didn’t child. Guidé did.” Louisa poured boiling water over the tea infuser and gave the cup to me. “Drink this, baby.”

  I took a sip.

  “This next part is going to come hard,” Louisa said. “Believe me, I know how it is. Guidé has been on my back more times than I can remember. He says terrible things, mean things, about me and everybody else.” She locked a wisp of hair behind her ear.

  “I want to know,” I said. “Did I do anything wrong? Did I hurt anybody?”

  “It wasn’t you, child,” Marie said, more sternly. I was just going to have to face it, to accept it. What had happened was not me. I was not in control. She stood up to her full height and said, “He had a message for you. He said, ‘Tell my horse she’s a fool!’ And honey, I don’t want to be saying this, but I think you need to know. Guidé is a physician. He’s mean, but he also helps. He said, ‘Tell my horse she needs blood. Tell her go to the hospital, tonight! She knows why!’”

  “Okay, I’ll go,” was all I could say.

  “He said stop fooling with Hoof. Hoof ain’t no Baron Samedi. He’s a fake. He’s a con artist and none of it’s true. Guidé knows Baron Samedi well, and that boy’s never been rode by Baron Samedi! Never been rode by anybody. Faker! He’s a fraud!”

  “I think I figured that part out myself.”

  “He said you’ve got to help Seven. You do, baby. You’ve got to help him. That string you’ve got binds you to him. Find him. It’s almost too late.”

  “What else? What else did he say?”

  “That was all,” Louisa said. “He shook out of you and a few minutes later you woke up.”

  “We’ve got to do like he said, baby.” Marie was making ready to go. “We’re going to the Emergency Department now.”

  She gave me clean clothes and an hour later I was being examined by a very serious doctor. He wore thick glasses and looked like he had never told a joke in his life. He had no time for anything I had to say except exactly what he wanted to know. If I tried to tell something else, he stopped me, and brought me back to the answer he wanted. He was asking some embarrassing stuff. Stuff I did not want to think about, or talk about to anybody. All my makeup was gone and he was very curious about my lips and how cracked up they were. “I’m going to get some blood work,” he said, and left the room.

  When he came back, his eyes were mad, mystified. “How much have you had to drink tonight?”

  “I don’t know. I think it got spilled on me.”

  “Humph. Spilled. Well, your blood alcohol content is enough to put a man twice your size into a coma.”

  I shrugged. “I’m really not sure.”

  “The test must have been off. There’s no way it could be true. I’m going to treat the patient, not the lab.” He was plenty proud of himself, dispensing with the impossible result, and getting back to the solution of the mystery. “You’re anemic,” he said. “Aside from there being almost as much alcohol in your veins as blood, ha!” He cracked himself up like it was the first time in his life, but caught himself and stopped. He said, “Menorrhagia should have been enough for you to know. Angular stomatitis is a symptom of iron defici
ency. That’s what’s wrong with your lips. Why didn’t you call your doctor when you started getting weak? When your flow was heavier than usual, when you started getting these symptoms?”

  “I thought it was no big deal.” But this was not really a question he wanted answered. He was chiding me. “Your hemoglobin is five point three. Do you know what that means?” Of course I did not. He went on to explain what a stupid, terrible person I was for not taking better care of myself. “Hemoglobin carries oxygen to your tissues. You have about a third as much of it as you need. It’s a wonder you were able to walk in here at all. I’m admitting you for a transfusion. Is there anyone you want to call?”

  My parents arrived to the med/surg floor at about the same time I did. “Oh honey, I hope you’re okay,” Mom said.

  “I’m just tired. Anemia? I never would have guessed it was that much…”

  “They say you’ll feel a lot better after you get some blood.”

  And Dad was pissed, which was his way of showing that he loved me. “Why didn’t you tell us? Where did you go tonight? Whose clothes are you wearing?” I was in no mood to explain anything. He sniffed. “Have you been drinking?”

  “Don’t do that,” Mom said. “This is not the time.” She ushered him out of the room and he kept walking.

  “Big trial in the morning,” he said as he disappeared down the hall.

  I was glad she got rid of him. My dad had a way of making bad situations worse. Only exerting influence in the family when it was too late. Before the incident with the reed, he had pushed me to be first chair. “I can’t believe Velvet West is first chair and you’re not. You need to practice more.” But it was inconvenient for me to practice at home, there was too much noise competing with his programs, and he wanted peace and quiet when he got home from work. He thought the magnolia tree was appropriately far out from town. I wouldn’t bother anyone there, and it was still close enough that I could walk to and from it safely. So, he strongly recommended that I go there every day to practice. And I did. He could be very hard to please.