Blue Bottle Tree Page 17

  Some nights he did not come home at all, because he had to work all night, he said. A lawyer’s work is never done. Mom was on edge whenever that happened. A couple of weeks ago I was at my tree, staring into space, trying to figure out what was really going on with them. They might have been holding it together for the sake of me and Ava. Seven came down from his cave, which he rarely did. He reminded me that we all saw proof of the trial cases in the papers, that my dad working nights was probably true. Later I found out that Seven’s dad had died in a secret military action when Seven was very young. He never had a dad. He did not mention that to me, when anyone else would have said, “Oh, you think you’ve got it bad…”

  I let the transport guy and the nurse move me from one bed to the other like I was an invalid. Then I was alone with my mom. She was quiet, sad, and puzzled. I wanted to tell her what had happened, but I couldn’t. Teenagers strangling themselves while having sex and Voodoo possessions were still frowned upon in my family.

  Then the nurse came in with a bag of blood and hooked it up. I was so exhausted by then, I couldn’t even stay awake.

  When I woke up the next morning, Mom was asleep in the chair. They had given me three units and I felt like I could run a marathon. You never know how much energy you have until it’s gone and all comes back. I had been getting weaker and weaker for so long and losing my mind, but suddenly it was over. I could have turned cartwheels down the hall.

  They checked my numbers and said hemoglobin and hematocrit were up just like they were supposed to be. I got a prescription for an iron supplement, was given strict orders to get another blood test in a week and, for God’s sake, go to the doctor if I ever have heavy menses again.

  “Thank God,” my mom said. “Why didn’t you tell me?” But she was shaking her head as we left, and it was something we would never discuss again.

  21 He Sprayed His Hoof With Glass Cleaner, Flossed Between His Toes

  Not surprisingly, the cracks on my lips improved, and were totally gone in a couple of days. I still had the shoelace, and was getting more curious about it. Maybe all the weird stuff that I thought happened, had not really happened. I rode my bike to the cemetery and confirmed there was a new grave. There was no doubt that Seven LaVey had recently died in his sleep. I checked at his house again and at his cave. I went to the dump. I saw Ray Dimple waxing his car and he took me for a ride. We scoured the town and even the backroads. We never saw Seven or talked to anyone who had seen him. Over and over we heard the same unhelpful line: “I thought he died. Didn’t he die?” like their team had a lost a football game—no, like somebody else’s team had lost, and they didn’t care either way.

  “He did have a funeral,” I told them. “But it was a hoax. He’s not really dead. He’s like …a zombie now.” When you say something like that to people, they turn their heads and cut their eyes like a rare bird just took wing. It’s too much to process. Then they come back and tell us we should go to the police, but not really, because you know, what?

  Ray Dimple believed me. He at least drove me around for half a day. Then he tried to get in my pants.

  I had the gnawing feeling that I would eventually have to go back to Victor. His party had come and gone without news of another death. So, presumably, Victor Radcliffe had not actually perished while strangling himself and having sex with Velvet West.

  I went back to his house and down the steps to his dungeon. He gaped at my return, or maybe he was surprised at my extraordinary return to good health. “I could have burned a black candle on you,” he said. “But you were suffering enough.”

  “You’re not Baron Samedi.”

  “I have a black candle I could still burn on you…”

  “Guidé knows you’re a fraud. So let’s just get down to it. What have you done with Seven?”

  “A fraud could not have done that. Poor Seven LaVey, death by unknown causes. In his sleep no less. Some people actually want to die in their sleep. Did you know? I disagree. Death should be vigorous. Do not go gently, as they say.”

  I sat down in his bondage contraption. “Maybe you should get rid of that,” I pointed at the spring which anchored his rope to the ceiling, “and bring the noose a little higher. You’d get better results.”

  He touched his hoof to his lips, contemplating. “I wouldn’t want to take the element of chance completely out of it,” he mused. “Lucky at love, lucky at life, I always say.”

  “Where is Seven?”

  “Up above, don’t you think?” He slanted his eyes wistfully toward heaven.

  “You showed him to me that night. At the dump.”

  “No, you must be mistaken.” It was all a game with him, parry with a lie.

  “He gave me this.” I produced the string.

  “A friendship bracelet, how cute.” He made the tsk-tsking sounds. “Oh, he shouldn’t have.” Again he reached to the back of his mind for something deep. “When hell gets full,” he said, “they say the dead will walk the earth. Have you heard that? How sad, poor Seven was not even permitted into hell.”

  “Marie LaVey is the real thing. Not like you. You’ve never been ridden by a loa. You just do terrible things. I’m surprised she hasn’t exposed you yet.”

  “She’s not likely to do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s an arrangement in our family.”

  “You’re in their family?”

  “An arrangement between our families, I should say. It goes back a long time.” He opened a tool kit, chose a farrier knife, and chipped a splinter from his hoof. “Did you know the bones inside here, the medial and lateral claws of a cloven hoof, are actually similar to a person’s third and fourth fingers? Phalanges. The bones inside here are called phalanges, just like fingers, and the joints are basically the same.”

  “Look, Victor, I don’t care about your hoof bones. I just want to know that Seven’s all right. He’s my friend.”

  “But he’s not your friend. He’s nobody’s friend. Not anymore. He can’t be. You saw him. He’s a zombie.”

  “He knew me. He wanted me to have this.” There was no point dangling the string in front of him. He had taken a lazy seat on a stool, was filing his hoof with a rasp. He blew away the dust and rounded the edges. He admired his manicure before glancing back up.

  “After stalking you? All those nights throwing rocks at your window—wasn’t that enough? He’s bad news, Penny. Forget him.”

  “I never actually saw him throwing the rocks. It could have been anybody.”

  “Really?” A subtle raise of an eyebrow, so absorbed in his work. “He’s changed, Penny. He died, and what he is now is not something you want to know. Besides, you don’t need him. You can be with me, and Velvet. Come to Nashville with us this fall. I’ll set you up.”

  “Why do you know where Seven is, and nobody else does? His mother and grandmother don’t even know.”

  “I think they have an idea.”

  “I’ll tell the police.”

  “Go ahead. The paperwork is all in order. And the good Bellin police are oddly …confused about what actually happened, and not just a little trepidatious. Bad luck tends to befall them, and their family members, when they inquire beyond paperwork that is in order.”

  “I—I was possessed, by Guidé—who said you are a fraud.”

  “Mounted—you were mounted by Guidé. Make no mistake about it: Christians are possessed by devils. The Voodooienne is mounted by a loa. You were not possessed by a god. You became one.”

  “Okay, right. Whatever.”

  “And what did Guidé say about Seven?”

  “He said I had to find him. I can help him, Victor. I need to help him.”

  He sprayed his hoof with glass cleaner, flossed between the toes, and buffed it to a shine. “I’ll make you a proposition,” he said. There was a cruel twinkle in his eye.

  22 Meow Said A Cat

  Lucid moments came less and less. Time had lost meaning. There was only the slow, rel
entless beating of the drum. It rolled through the nights like a tide, waves crashing and receding. Primitive, staccato calls to action. Alternatively, there were lulls when I could sleep. My life revolved around the beating of the drum.

  Around sundown it began, from somewhere far away or maybe it was close—it was hard to place it. The sound echoed, crescendoed, and modulated. Every change in rhythm signified action, the time to do something else. The mechanism that had held my kiddie pool to the ground was gone, but I kept the blue plastic shell over my hole for protection, for shelter. I felt safer with it there and I worked when the drum said do.

  I trundled up the ladder when I heard the call. Cats weaved around my legs as I began my sorting. I had once found a bag of cat food and they loved it—hoped it would become a regular thing. Hoof and Mad Dog had beaten me into submission. My old buddy Mad Dog might have even been more liberal with the lash than Hoof. Sometimes it happens like that. He had his orders when Hoof was gone, so maybe he was just doing what he was told.

  At any rate, there was no chance I would rebel or try to escape. I had nowhere to go. He had brought me to understand that Penny Longstocking had not been there. She was, in fact, dead, as were my mother and grandmother. I never had a shoelace. I never had a cave. I only had a hole. The rest was my imagination—madness leaking into my thoughts where there should have been only blankness. I learned to focus on the drumbeat, to act according to the rhythm, to eat and drink, sleep and work all in step with the cadence. It was better that way, not to think. Eat the corn meal mush, drink the bitter juice. Never any salt or sugar. Never a fruit or vegetable or a bite of meat. Trudge through the mire, keep sorting junk.

  I emerged from the hole at sundown and worked until the rhythm changed. Then I ate and drank. He must have changed the recipe for the zombie juice because it was thicker now, almost like milk, and darker green. I drank more and more of it, and was always thirsty when it was gone.

  In the first days, I was beaten when I did not act as the drum demanded. So, I learned. The drum itself was an assoto, huge and blue with a skull painted at the top. It was a deep, open-ended cone, maybe six feet long. A hollowed tree trunk, from a dragon’s blood tree. Dragon’s blood trees are rare, indigenous to islands in the Indian Ocean and when cut, they bleed red sap that looks like human blood. Swirls of red were painted over the blue. An animal skin was stretched on top and held tight by pegs and cords. It was streaked with yellow and orange, a life-sized skeleton on one side, white crossbones, and a sinister smiling skull near the top. The skull’s mouth was sewn shut by the cords. I understood that it was sacred. My soul was inside it, the face was mine, the blood was mine. My soul had been transferred to there from the bottle where he had kept it when he took me from the morgue. So it was comforting when the rhythm began, and I longed for it when I awoke to silence.

  I was made to kiss the ground before the drum, and pour libations to it. I was made to remove its hooded white robe, and the only time my hands were cleaned was before I touched it. When standing alone and clothed before me, it looked like a person—like my father, I believed.

  Hoof and Mad Dog were not always there. But they were close enough to attack if I stepped out of line, if my work went too slowly, or if I failed to keep an article that was wanted. I lost interest in an escape plan, or any plan at all. I did my job. Even if the rhythm was coming from miles away, the tone and timbre guided me, the accents directed my feet. Sometimes I doubted my senses, the sound was so distant that it might have been memory. Methodical and mechanical churning, more mindless then mere routine. Primal behavior sorting trash, keep or toss away, instinct learned before a brain could think. It told me what objects Hoof wanted. An umbrella was no prize. But a filthy cushion was a privileged find. If I pleased him he might share the cushion with me. It was not my place to decide. The executive level of decision-making was done high above me, for me, and I was only there to carry out the act. My capacity to reason was not clear. There were not words forming as much as impressions, spurs to action, motions triggered by sight, sight confined to what I needed to see, all guided by the drum, the pulse, the beat.

  “Meow,” said a cat. Meow is what a cat said. I knew that. I heard them. They always said the same. They wanted me to find more food.

  It was on a night like this that Penny Longstocking appeared again. I was sorting refuse from treasure as usual, and had found an axe. Even a small axe can cut down a big tree, I remembered my grandmother say. I had set it aside. The drum sound was distant, and it stopped when I saw her. She was holding her clarinet, and the string I had given her was around her wrist. After being told so many times she was dead, that I had only imagined her, that I had not given her a shoelace—there she was. Again. “Seven?” she said. I stood still, the mottled cat weaved between my legs. Penny asked me how I was doing. Church bells so loud in my head. Double vision. Unable to concentrate.

  “No worse,” I muttered, but she could not understand. My voice sounded like talking underwater, garbled nonsense. Her reaction was wincing, afraid. Like I had said something terrible. Like I was going to hurt her.

  “Are you okay?” She realized the senselessness of her question, inquiring into a zombie’s wellbeing. “I mean, Seven? Is that—is that even you?”

  I was embarrassed. Humiliated beyond imagination and went back to sorting garbage. I was whipped if I stepped out of line. My thoughts vacillated from paranoia to panic and back to dullness—stupefaction until more zombie juice arrived. Does she really not know how it is? Unable to enunciate, unable to make meaningful expression, I continued to work. I desperately needed help but did not know how to ask for it. Any movement toward her would seem aggressive, would scare her.

  “Aren’t you even going to say anything?” She was sarcastic now, like it was my fault that I was a zombie. “I wanted to help you, and you won’t even look at me?” Clearly, Victor had gotten to her, and she was believing him. “You don’t have to live at the dump. Your mother and grandmother want you to be with them.”

  She wanted me to die? To be with my mother and grandmother? Her cheeks melted and her lips drew back, revealing a mouth full of fangs. She hissed when she spoke, her tongue was forked, and it slithered out between words. Hoof had told me she was a devil. I had woken to him saying it. I was hearing it over and over, dreaming it. Then I found Hoof standing over my kiddie pool, repeating the words. He had warned me. He had prophesied that the devil would return, and he said what I had to do. “When you hear the drums rat-a-tat-tat,” and I was hearing it. I was suddenly stung by a thousand bees.

  I turned from Penny and pointed, across the dump to the Radcliffe estate. It was the best I could do, a half-hearted attempt to accuse my tormenter. Their castle was fairly close, on a hill with the crow’s nest of a turret visible from where we were.

  “Victor? You’re pointing at Victor’s house?” She spied the turret. “He and Velvet are into some weird stuff.” She rolled her eyes. Too bizarre to tell, evidently. I faded in and out. Penny Longstocking was an apparition. Her face morphed from rotting flesh back to herself. Her tongue lashed out. I knew it was long. My mind played tricks on me. My eyes saw things that were not there. I misunderstood most things I heard. Meow said a cat, which might not have happened, might not have been a cat. I gathered that Victor had made her a proposition which she was considering, or else it was a trick. She was trying to tell me something, but understanding was totally beyond me. He had given her this last moment to see me, to which she had agreed. I focused as intently as I could. “They’ve invited me to come to Nashville with them in the fall. He’s got a big house there and he said I could have my own room. He thinks he can get me into Vanderbilt. His parents are totally connected. I was planning on going to school in Madrid for a couple of years. But it’s so close to Bellin it’s almost like not even leaving. Nashville is a real city. And Victor giving me a place to live? Wow. In downtown Nashville, West End by Vanderbilt… That’s a hard offer to refuse. And if I go with them, he’
ll let me see you again. If I please him…” Frowns formed on her forehead. Mad Dog had taken his place and was watching, drumming quietly so he could hear everything. They had tricked her. She was tricking me. Everyone was being tricked. “I might even get into Vandy’s marching band. Go Commodores!” She held her clarinet up in triumph but she didn’t mean it. I didn’t understand. “Or whatever.” She shuffled on her feet. “Let me know that you are in there,” she whispered. “Let me know there’s still a chance.”

  Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat! I hesitated and my back was stung by a legion of insects. These swarmed around me usually, hovering and biting only sometimes. But when I did not please Hoof, I was besieged by many at once. They were invisible. They stung the back of my neck. They stung my legs and arms.

  She said he had proposed to her. There had been a proposition. She was leaving to be with him. Leaving me to this. Penny Longstocking did not owe me anything but I felt betrayed. Rage boiled—what little left I had—the only feeling I knew was mine. She was in collusion against me and winking like it was an inside joke. A shell game more complicated than I could comprehend. I felt another sting. My legs were raw from these. At night, I dug bits of metal out. Insects don’t leave steel pellets. Victor told me that they did.

  I grumbled. She had it wrong. I shuffled toward her with my feet barely leaving the ground, arms outstretched—a grotesque primal groping. My voice was a death rattle, my windpipe choked with blood. She stifled a scream. The hairs on her arm stood up as I tore the clarinet away from her. I positioned it carefully on a block of stone. The axe was propped beside it. I had thought Hoof would like the axe. It was long and heavy. The head was like a wedge, half sledge hammer, half blade. Rat-a-tat! Now a drumroll, accented with pops and crackles. “Hey, what are you doing?” Penny said. I heaved the axe over my shoulder and smashed the clarinet, hammered it, pulverized it to splinters and twisted metal keys.