Unkillable (7 page)

Through the curtain was a set of stairs leading to the upstairs apartment. It too, was crowded with Voodoo-esque crap, but didn’t smell like asscense.

We sat down at Marie’s kitchen table, one of those 50’s formica-topped things with the ring of chrome around the bottom, and she told us her story. It was the same sad story of any immigrant family business, I guess. Her mom worked her fingers to the bone to give her daughter a better life. She wanted her daughter to take over the family business, and continue the tradition. Marie hated the business, hated it with a passion. The twist was that the business was Voodoo.

Marie said she never thought it was real. Her mother had taught her all her ways, but none of the spells had ever worked for her, least of all the spell for snaring man’s heart like a bird on the wing. But if the spells were fake, how come Marie’s mother always had such handsome, young men around her, even though she was old and withered? When Marie realized that her only way out was a college scholarship, she became very interested in school. Science and mathematics most of all. Of course, her mother would never allow her to go to college, so Marie waited until after she turned eighteen to tell her mother about the scholarship she had won. She would be leaving her mother and her sad little shop and the poor, ignorant Haitian immigrants that she thought her mother preyed upon.

She had meant to tell her simply, politely, but when the dam of pent up emotion broke, it all came pouring out of her. All the years of frustration. All the years of holding her mother in contempt, but having no way to rebel. A mother who wouldn’t tell her who her father was or where he might be. Who dressed her in homemade clothes that smelled funny. A mother who she was ashamed of because she couldn’t bring the few friends she had over to the house.

Most of all, a mother who wouldn’t let her call her Mom -- who demanded that Marie call her Momma Oya, just like everybody else in the neighborhood. And worst of all, a mother who was there for everyone else in the neighborhood -- interceding with the spirits of the dead, blessing a business, interfering in matters of the heart and exorcising demons. She had shrieked at her mother, “Spirits? Christ, Mom. Spirits possessing people? There’s no such thing as spirits!”

And when her rant was done, as she stood before her mother, proud and scared and shaking from the adrenaline that was coursing through her body. Her mother had said nothing. Marie wasn’t prepared for that. She was prepared for wailing and screaming and curses and a thousand other kinds of protest, but her mother just looked sad. “I’m leaving, Momma Oya, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

Marie stormed upstairs and slammed the door to her room. If she had waited, she would have seen her mother cry.

The next day Marie got a pain in her stomach, one that wouldn’t go away. When she told her mother about it, her mother didn’t even look up. She just said, “You g’wan, you go that hospital. Let them scienstific fix you up.”

Marie went back to her room and tried to sleep. But the pain wouldn’t let her. The pain grew worse and worse. Eventually she took herself to the emergency room. An MRI showed that her stomach was filled with tumors.

That’s when she came to believe. When she realized that there was more to the world than could be measured or imagined. That’s when she realized that her mother would rather kill her than lose control.

I would have thought that this story was complete and utter bullshit -- that this pretty girl was batshit crazy, except for one thing. At the table, there were four of us. Me, Bruce, Marie and squeezed in between Bruce and I, a large Haitian man, blacker than the underside of the dark side of the moon, who didn’t say much. In fact, he didn’t say anything at all.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, “but who is this guy?” I asked, jerking a mangled thumb at the comatose guy sitting next to me.

“He doesn’t have a name. The Rat took it.”

“The Rat took his name?”

“That’s what made him like that. That’s what you gonna be like,” said Marie, deadly serious.”

“You mean taller? And black?”

“You joke.”

Bruce jumped in, trying to impress the pretty girl, “C’mon, Dan, take this seriously.” The living, they’ll do anything to get laid.

“I don’t have to take this seriously. If I take this seriously, it just sucks too much. Besides, you really think The Rat took somebody’s name?”

“If Marie says so,” said Bruce.

“Yeah, hard-on? What’d that rat grab the name by when he carried it away? This is bullshit, I’m calling him Bob.”

Marie reached across the table and touched the man’s hand tenderly. “He saved my life.” She continued her story.

After all the doctors had told Marie there was nothing that could be done -- that she had weeks to live and all that modern medicine could do was make her comfortable, Momma Oya came to visit. She brought The Nameless Man with her to carry her purse.

As Marie lay back on the pillow, clutching the button that dispensed the morphine, and watching the world swim a little more with each hit, she saw the way things were for the first time. How all the men in Momma Oya’s life came and withered.

With the clarity of vision reserved for those who have resigned themselves to death, she realized why her father had never come around. Why she never saw any of the many pretty young men who had been Momma Oya’s boyfriends. They were dead, all of them. Somehow Momma Oya sucked the power out of them and moved onto the next one. And if she would give her own daughter cancer to keep control, really, what was the death of a stranger compared to that?

Momma Oya asked her daughter if she wanted to come home. Asked her daughter if she was willing to give up all this foolishness and become what she was destined to be. If she was, then Momma Oya would make the pain go away.

Marie had never hated her mother more than at that moment. “No,” she said, “I’d rather die here, alone, then be with you.” Momma Oya just smiled.

“I gwan an talk to des Doctor. You comin’ home with me. You should be with family at the end.” Momma Oya bared her yellow teeth in a grotesque smile. Marie turned her head away.

But dark power also flowed through Marie’s veins. When she turned back and saw Momma Oya’s man standing there, she realized that her destiny wasn’t the kind of thing she needed permission to fulfill. She smiled at him, cut her right palm open with her left thumbnail and started a spell of her own. Somehow, deep inside her, she knew that this time the magic would work.

When Marie got home, she was surprised to discover that The Nameless Man had not left. One night, he came to Marie and thanked her for breaking Momma Oya’s spell. He kissed her on the lips softly and Marie felt the pain of lust more keenly than the tearing ache in her guts. Even as her body was wrecked and dying, it wanted him. After all, Marie was 18, and he was 25, if that. He was one of the most beautiful men she had ever seen. And she had never been with a man.

To keep the electricity in her body from showing on her face, she asked him, “If the spell she cast on you is gone, why don’t you flee?”

The Nameless Man gave her a sad smile and asked, “Where a simple man gonna hide from a witchy woman like that? No, chere, dere nothing we can do. We both powerless agin her.”

Marie knew he was right, but she looked up at him with her soft eyes. Maybe it was a precise mixture of lust and pity. Maybe it was the beauty of youth wrapped in the wings of the angel of death. For whatever reason, in that instant, Marie’s eyes cast another spell. The Nameless Man fell in love with her on the spot.

Their coupling was tender, savage and irrevocable.

Later that night, The Rat came to The Nameless Man and made him an offer. The Nameless Man knew that rat for what it was, and was so terrified he was sure he would not be able to speak. It was no impediment. The Rat and the man reached an agreement.

The next day the cancer was still in the house, but it had switched stomachs. Now Momma Oya was sick and dying. Marie was horrified. She was horrified that she might have done this to her mother. She was horrified that it might be another one of her mother’s tricks and that she would be struck down by the awful pain again. But when The Nameless Man told her that Kalfou, the God of Crossroads and Bargains, had come to him and made a deal, she was horrified at how relieved she was.

They had two weeks. Two weeks of bliss. They made Marie’s room a sauna in which every drop of young lust was sweated out of their bodies. Marie came to know what it is to love a man. But in all that time, in all those quiet hours lying in each other’s arms, The Nameless Man would never tell her what bargain he had made with the spirit who had appeared to him in the shape of a rat.

Miraculously, Momma Oya went gently. One night, when Marie took her dinner, instead of cursing and throwing things, Momma Oya said, “Don’t be so sad childe. It couldn’t end no other way for me. The life I did, the things I done. If it have to be like dis, it have to be like dis.” Marie thought it was a trick like everything else. But it was not.

Across a series of days, her mother told her everything. How she had been molested as a child by her own father. How she had run away from home and was taken in by the old woman who lived down by the river. How the old woman scared her father so much that he left her alone. She told Marie how she wanted the power, needed the power, to feel safe.  In the end, though, nothing had made her feel safe. And, sooner or later, she saw her father in the face of every man she had been with.

Marie said nothing. She listened from a safe distance and waited for the other shoe to drop. At the end, right before Momma Oya died, she cursed her daughter. Like all things to come out of that hateful woman’s mouth, it came out sideways. She wrapped the curse in prophecy.

“You tink you gwanna lay with that warm strong man after I’m gone. No. No, Childe. He leave you as soon as I’m cold. And nothing you can do will ever bring him back to you. No, all you gonna get to love is a cold man with a bitter heart. A man dead but not dead.” Marie screamed that Momma Oya was a liar and ran from the room.

That night, The Nameless Man held her in his arms and told her that he would never leave her. That Momma Oya told lies because she was old and bitter and evil to the core. He wiped away Marie’s tears. They made love again and then fell asleep.

The next morning, Momma Oya was dead. But when Marie came back to wake The Nameless Man and tell him, he was already gone. The whites of his eyes rolled back into his head. His body was still there, but Kalfou had taken his name. In his culture, it meant that The Rat had his soul.

When Marie had finished her story, nobody knew quite what to say. I looked over at The Nameless Man. He had drool running down the front of his shirt.

“I have to find some way to kill the Russian,” I said.

“I don’t care how many men you kill,” said Marie, “I just want to get The Rat. He betrayed us. He will betray you as well.”

I looked at The Nameless Man for a long time and thought about how there were things that were worse than death, worse even than the strange state I found myself in. I must have thought for a long time because Bruce kicked me and asked, “Well?’

“Yeah. Yeah, sure. For old Bob here? Yeah, I’ll get revenge for Bob, too.”

Marie didn’t smile, but she nodded.

“Are you in?” I asked Bruce. He looked at Marie and his lust answered for him.

“Yeah, man, this shit is wrong. And it’s gotta stop.” He was kind of an idiot.

“Okay,” I said, “We’re gonna kill The Rat. What’s the plan?”

* * * * *

Chapter 14

We cleared a space in the cluttered living room. Odds and ends and relics and bits were all pushed to the side. When I asked Marie what we were doing, all she said was, “We’re gwan summon a powerful spirit.” I noticed that her accent was thicker. I was sure that it was part and parcel of the mumbo-fucking-jumbo, but what was I supposed to do? Things were weird. In the words of the great Gonzo himself, Hunter S. Thompson, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

As for Bruce, all he wanted to do was look at Marie’s perfect breasts as they rolled about in the loose cotton dress she was wearing. Had I been like that when I had been alive? Probably. How could a warm-blooded man resist?

Marie lit a fire in a bowl of hand-hammered iron, and placed it in the middle of the room. We sat around it while Marie beat out a complicated rhythm on a drum that was covered with some kind of skin. I don’t know what she was burning, but a strong, strange earthy scent filled the air. Seconds bled into minutes. Maybe an hour passed, but it might have been the blink of an eye. It was like that.

Marie began to groan from deep in her belly. The drum fell away from her hands as the rhythm of the drumming seemed to pass into her body. She twisted and writhed in a fashion that was at once painful and erotic. Bruce was so distracted that he did not notice when Bob, the comatose man who still sat at the kitchen table, joined in with a series of wordless barks.

Finally, Marie let out a loud cry and collapsed on the dirty carpet, her dress soaked through with sweat. Bruce and I looked at each other and then around the room. In a perfect anticlimax, the flame that had danced in the iron bowl sputtered and went out.

I opened my mouth and started to say, “Well that was a complete waste of time.” I was interrupted by a knock at the door, so all I got out was “wuh-” I just sat there with my mouth hanging open, not knowing what to say.

Marie motioned to Bruce to open the door. Bruce shook his head no.

“Oh, for cryin’ out loud,” I said. “Come in.”

The door opened, and in stepped a man who was dressed like a cross between the Mad Hatter and an escapee from a New Wave punk band circa 1978. There was, of course, the top hat, a leather jacket, a t-shirt that seemed to be fashioned from an actual British flag and jeans of an impossibly tight variety. The man looked heroin thin, but there was something almost too alive about his eyes.

“What do you want?” I asked.