Poison Tongue (2 page)

“I know, Mama.”

She began to fret, wiping her sweaty palms on her dress. Her eyes never found my face, but still I knew all her attention was focused on me.

“Don’t worry, Mama,” Silvi said. “Nothing bad will happen to Levi. Ward will protect him. Won’t you, Ward?”

“Always. And forever.”

My gaze slid to my best friend, sitting at the end of the table. Ward sat with his thick, dark brown arms crossed over his chest. When he sat up straight like that, it reminded me of how much bigger he was than myself. His head was shaved clean, and the tank top he wore was the same crisp color of the whites of his eyes. His dark, almost-black eyes looked right back at me as if he knew every thought that was running through my mind. He probably did. Ward knew me better than anyone else, and I him. My mama often said we’d been designed since the beginning of time to stand side by side.

“Still,” I said, “for peace of mind, I’ll go to Miss Annamae’s and pick up a few things.”

Ward stood up, then tucked his chair back under the table. “I will come with you.”

“I know.”

“Stay close,” Mama warned, even though we all knew it was in vain.

As I walked by my little sister, drawing at the table, I tugged on one of her strands of hair. “Do you need anything from the store, Silvi?”

“Yes.” She didn’t look up. “More black and white pencil crayons.”

Ward and I left through the back door. As I stepped outside onto the back porch, I shielded my eyes from the bright, blistering sun. The hot Louisiana air hit me like a solid brick wall. The winters here were hot, and the summers even hotter. The summer sun was unrelenting, the heat forcing a person awake even in the middle of the night. The humidity seeped into a person’s bones and stayed there. Gran used to say that once you lived in Louisiana, its tinge of heat followed you around wherever you went. She once said she could spot someone from Louisiana in a group as easily as picking a gumball out of a bag of marbles.

I looked out into the wide-open field behind our house, staring off into the hazy distance at nothing but the dirt and short weeds.

“Is it something we should talk about?” Ward asked from where he was standing behind me.

“It could be nothing.” I swallowed hard, forcing the dryness of my throat away. We both knew it wasn’t nothing. Dreams like that rarely meant nothing—at least not when I was the one having them.

“You have always been a terrible liar, Levi.”

I ignored him. “Sun’ll be up high soon. We should go before midafternoon, when it gets too hot to breathe.”

I stepped down the rickety, splintering wood of the porch steps, Ward, naturally, following close behind me. We rounded the path along the side of the house, me running my fingers along the paneling of the house as we passed by. White paint chips tickled my fingertips before fluttering from the panels and dropping to the flower beds below them. The house was old and hadn’t been painted in years. It had been one of those family things we’d set out to do, before Mama couldn’t any longer. Now the residual memory of the three of us last painting the house together weighed heavily on her, bringing her spirits into a dark place.

“What will you get at Annamae’s?” Ward asked.

“Oils, candles, roots, incense, herbs. Just the basics to make a mojo bag or two.”

“Nothing stronger?”

I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. “No.”

We spent the rest of the walk in silence, glancing at the few houses on the street, at the packed-down path we walked along. The few people who passed by us smiled at me or nodded an acknowledgment. Malcome was a small town, and almost everyone knew everyone. It was the kind of town where folks knew each other on a first-name basis and constantly called upon their neighbors for small favors. Since I kept to myself, I didn’t pay much attention to many of the Malcome townsfolk, and in turn I was given the same courtesy.

The town of Malcome, if one could even call it a town, was southwest from Baton Rouge. The town bordered onto a bayou that was so vast most folks thought the bayou itself might’ve been larger than the town as a whole. People thought our town was defined by that bayou—everyone from around here knew about it and knew to steer clear. More than once someone had gone missing into those deep, dismal waters of the swamp.

Children around town liked to tell tales about beasts living in the swamp. They spoke of monsters, with long, spindly fingers dripping with acid and decay, that would reach out from the pits and grab hold of whatever they could find. Others talked of demons and curses or people half-dead, living just beneath the surface of the waters, watching, waiting to tear the gentle flesh off passersby.

At twenty-two I should’ve been too old to believe in tales of monsters and half-dead people living in the swamp. But I knew something about that swamp wasn’t right.

A memory of the time I’d wandered into the swamp popped into my head. I was only a young boy then, but I hadn’t been able to help myself. I had wanted to touch the hanging reeds from the heavy tree branches, feel the muck and grime that floated on the surface of the water against my fingertips. I hadn’t known any better, hadn’t known to ignore the way that kind of evil called to my young heart. Because it did call to me, ever since before I could remember. It howled my name, and I so badly wanted to reply.

The moment I had dipped my small hand into that black, black water, my vision went white. Static filled my ears, so high-pitched and piercing it had stung. It rang out a high-pitched howl like a tortured cry from a creature of hell. And then there was nothing. Nothing I could see, nothing I could hear, nothing I could smell or taste. But I felt it, that internal fullness, that heavy happiness. It was a desire like nothing else. More than an itch that had been scratched.

I was whole. I was happy. I was in love with this new, endless darkness.

The next thing I knew, I awoke on a dirt path a few hundred meters away from the bayou. My young body ached, my throat had been dry, and tears had pooled at the corners of my eyes.

Ward’s worried face lingered above me. I blinked at him and asked, “What happened?”

“Your body went slack the moment you touched the water. You doubled over, as though you were in pain,” Ward replied. “It was like you had become boneless.”

I’d looked past Ward, into the cerulean-filtered sky. “I felt something.”

“What did you feel?” he asked. Even then I’d known Ward wouldn’t ask me what I saw. Visions would lie to me, feelings would not.

“Something wicked. Something dark. Something lovely.”

His brow furrowed. “Then we must stay away from the swamp, Levi.”

“It calls to me. Sometimes so loudly, it hurts. I ache for it. I ache to feel the depths of the water up to my waist, to stare into the black abyss on the other side.”

“Never.” Ward grabbed my shoulders and pulled me up into a sitting position. His dark eyes searched mine for a promise I couldn’t ever give him. “Tell me never again, Levi. It is evil. It is wrong. I can feel it.”

“But I want it, Ward,” I said in a shuddered breath. Even then I could hear it singing to me. “I want the darkness.”

“You cannot want darkness, Levi. It will never want you back. It will slip through your fingers like mercury.”

Since then, every time I’d heard the evil of the swamp waters calling to me, I’d remembered Ward’s words, remembered the look of terror in his eyes. As I grew older, I dreamed of it often, imagined what it would be like to submerge my body into those black waters, only to be lost with all the others.

“Levi.” Ward brought me back to where we were walking down the path.

“Yes?”

He said nothing, only stared down at me. The concern he felt was written all over his face. He wasn’t trying to hide it from me. I could tell he wanted me to know he was worried about the dream I’d had.

“It will be okay.”

“I know,” he said. “I will never let anything happen to you.”

MISS ANNAMAE’S
shop was a small slit in the wall between the post office and one of the two grocery stores in town. The outside had large bay windows that were covered from the inside with black curtains. A glowing sign that read “Tarot” hung from the window and flashed bright pinks and yellows.

When I pushed through the door, the robust smell of incense hit me like water beats against the ocean shore. It smelled floral and natural and so familiar it immediately put my mind at ease.

The shelves were lined with glass jars, small boxes, and colorful knickknacks that I couldn’t have put a name to if I tried. At the end of the aisle was a barrel full of raw plants and herbs that were individually wrapped in clear plastic bags. A small, three-tiered table sat off to the side. On its top were varying sizes of large white and pink crystals and tiny blue rocks. The lights were dim, but the colorful vials and dolls hanging along the walls screamed loudly, even without needing the direct lighting. It was a small shop, but it was packed to the brim with anything and everything someone who practiced could want.

“Levi,” a smooth, deep voice said from behind one of the aisles.

I walked around a wooden barrel and slipped between two displays of small boxes with skulls on their labels.

“Miss Annamae.” I stopped in front of the counter she leaned behind. She smiled at me when I said her name.

She was a middle-aged woman with skin almost as dark as Ward’s. She and I were about the same height, but where I was slender, she was curvy. Her hair was curly and dyed a bright red color that somehow still looked natural, even though I knew it wasn’t. Her catlike eyes were lined with black makeup that made her light hazel eyes all the more striking.

“I see you brought Ward with you,” she said with a twist of her lips.

Ward only folded his thick arms across his chest.

Without looking at them, Annamae drew tarot cards from a stack that sat atop the counter. Her long, teal fingernails gently scraped the top of each card before she either flipped it and laid it out on the counter, or discarded it unseen into another pile.

“Would you like to know what your card is today, Levi?”

“Not today,” I replied. “We’re here to buy some things.”

“I know. But you should let me tell you your card for the day. I feel as though it will be… interesting.”

My stomach twisted as it always did when Annamae wanted to read my cards.

“No,” Ward said. “We do not have the time.”

Annamae’s grin grew wider. “What’s the hurry?”

“I had a dream,” I said. “My mama is worried. She thinks I need to do a cleanse.”

“And you really think a simple cleansing is enough to help you?” she asked.

Neither Ward nor I said anything in reply. She sighed and pulled all the cards back into one neat, little pile. She set them off to the side and leaned across the counter with her bright red curls falling in waves around her face. “All right. What do you need?”

“Bay leaves,” I replied. “And pine needles, basil, rosemary. Cleansing soaps and herbal bath crystals.”

She leaned away from the counter and looked me up and down. “You’ll need an amulet too. It won’t fix you, but it will help.”

I nodded. I knew Annamae wouldn’t try to sell me something I didn’t need. Tourists? Sure. But my family had been coming to see her since we moved to this town when I was only young. When I was fourteen, she once tried to sell me a love potion. I’d guffawed and told her there was no such thing. She’d grinned wide and said I might be too smart for my own good. The next time I’d come in, she’d cut my purchases in half, telling me that I didn’t need most of the things I thought I did. Since then she’d been upfront and honest with me.

Miss Annamae was a good person, if skeptical by nature. I knew this as fact. I could see her soul.

“You have a gift, Levi,” my gran had said. It was the first time Gran had ever mentioned the oddness that surrounded me. I was in the fourth grade at the time and had barely understood the weight behind her words. Together we’d been sitting in a field watching the birds in the live oak trees as dusk began to overtake the sky.

“When you look into a person’s eyes, you will see their soul. It will come as easily to you as breathing air.”

It hadn’t been until years later that I fully understood what she’d meant. Even though I’d grown up in a house that practiced rituals, card readings, cleansings, spells, and hoodoo, the thought of looking into a person’s eyes and seeing their soul had baffled me. A soul wasn’t like a tarot card, an elixir, or a small bag of herbs and leaves that Mama held in her hand and chanted to. A soul wasn’t tangible. A soul wasn’t a living thing.

And then there’d been a boy.

I’d first seen him from across the secondary school parking lot. He must’ve been the new kid that every other student in Malcome was talking about. There had been something off about him—something different and unusual. He was compelling to me in a way I hadn’t fully understood then. It hadn’t just been that he was attractive—it was deeper than that.

“What’s your name?” In a burst I’d sprinted across the parking lot and stopped mere feet in front of him.

His eyes were almost as dark as his henna-colored hair that hung low over his eyes. The dirty leather jacket he wore strained over his slim arm as he plucked the lit cigarette out of his mouth and leered at me.

“Sterling.”

And that had been when I’d seen it—his soul—in all of its transcendental beauty. It was the ocean: vast, huge, blue. Waves ripped and tore and thundered and crashed. I saw tsunamis that consumed everything in their path, waves that hugged so tightly they engulfed. Waters of unimaginable magnitudes and colors lived behind his eyes, straining to thrash free.

Sterling had a soul. He had the most beautiful soul I’d ever seen. It was as alive as him and me, as alive as the look in his eyes and the beating of his heart. He was a good person, and I’d known it the moment I’d laid eyes on him. But his soul thundered too loudly. Those waves would rock too many boats. I knew that just as surely as I knew the sky was blue and that life was destined to be unfair.