Black Glass (6 page)

His wife stood in front of the refrigerator. In one hand she had the picture of Carry and her hatchet, torn from
The Girl's Life.
The edges were dipped in red candle wax. “I found this under the Tater Tots,” Harris's wife said. “What is it and how did it get in my freezer?”

Harris had no answer. He had to stall and think of one. He opened the refrigerator and got himself a beer. “My freezer?” he said pointedly, popping the flip-top. “Isn't it our freezer?”

“How did this get in our freezer?”

“I don't think I would ever have referred to the freezer as my freezer,” Harris said sadly. He drank his beer, for timing rather than thirst, an extra moment to let his point sink in. Then he amplified. “I don't think you'll find me doing that. But with you it's always my kitchen. My Sunday paper. My bed.”

“I'm sorry,” said his wife. She held out the picture. Harris spoke again before she could.

“It signifies,” he said. “It certainly signifies.”

His wife had the tenacity of a hound. “What's with the picture?”

“I spilled wax on it. Accidentally.” Harris had not survived in the Latin American drug theater without some ability to think on his feet. He took the photograph from her. “Naturally I wanted to remove the wax in such a way as to do as little damage to the picture as possible. This picture came out of a library book, after all. I thought I could remove the wax easier if the wax was hard. So I put it in the freezer.”

“Why were you reading by candlelight?” his wife asked. “You tore the picture out of a library book? That doesn't sound like you.”

“The book was due back. It had to be returned.” His wife was staring at him. “It was overdue,” Harris said.

He missed the loa in Richmond. A few hours after his wife took the picture out of the freezer and before he'd hidden it under the bed, pinned beneath a glass of salt water to force the loa across an ocean, she struck. Harris's superior caught him on the car phone on the way to the airport. In addition to Richmond, there'd been a copycat incident in Chicago at a cocaine sale. The sale had been to the DEA. They had worked on it for months, and then some grandmother with a hatchet sent it all south. “I want her on the plane to Colombia yesterday,” Harris's superior said.

Harris canceled his reservation and drove to Alexandria. She was coming so fast. For the first time, he asked himself why. Was she coming for him?

•   •   •

“STRAYING TONIGHT,
straying tonight, leaving the pathway of honor and right. . . .” The song came from inside the Gateway Bar, punctuated with sounds of breaking glass, splintering wood, and an occasional scream. Harris had been beepered to the spot, but others had obviously arrived first. It was ten in the evening, but across the street two men washed a store window. One sat in his car behind a newspaper. Two more had levered up the manhole cover and knelt beside it, peering down industriously. One man watched Harris from a second-story window above the bar.

Harris set his case on the sidewalk and opened the latch.
HAPPY HOUR!
the bar marquee read,
RAP SINGING! OPEN MIKE! HOGAN CONTEST!
He took a bottle of whiskey from his case and poured himself something stiffening. Someone else would have to drive him home. If there was a ride home. Of course there would be a ride home.

He began to sprinkle a circle of salt outside the bar door. He drew a salt triangle inside it. There was a breath of silence; the awful singing resumed. “She's breaking the heart of her dear gray-haired mother, she'll break it, yes, break it, tonight.”

A young woman in a wet T-shirt flew out of the bar, landing on his knee and his salt.

Harris helped her to her feet. She was blond, garishly blond, but that was just the effect of the bar marquee lights, which laid an orange tint over her hair.
I SURVIVED CATHOLIC SCHOOL
, the T-shirt said. “She told me to go home and let my mother have a good look at me. She called me a strumpet.” The woman had not yet started to cry, but she was about to.

“She was once badly beaten by prostitutes.” Harris was consoling. “Maybe this is a problem area for her.” The beating happened in 1901, when the proprietor of a Texas bar, feeling it would unman him to attack Carry Nation himself, had hired a group of prostitutes to beat her with whips and chains. He had also persuaded his wife to take part. Harris had paid particular attention to the incident, because there was a vulnerability and he wondered if he could exploit it. He was not thinking of real prostitutes, of course. He was thinking of undercover vice cops. Beating was a common step in the creation of a zombie. The ti bon ange was thought less likely to return to a body that was being beaten.

Still, there was something distasteful about this strategy. Carry Nation had gone down like a wounded bear, surrounded by dogs. She might have been killed had her own temperance workers not finally rescued her. “There is a spirit of anarchy abroad in the land,” Carry Nation was reported to have said, barely able to stand, badly cut and bruised. For the next two weeks she appeared at all speaking and smashing engagements with a large steak taped to the side of her face. She changed steaks daily.

Probably it had left her a little oversensitive on the subject of professional women. The woman in the street was obviously no strumpet. She was just a nice woman in a wet T-shirt. She seemed to be in shock. “It was ladies' night,” she told Harris, over and over and over again.

Salt and gravel stuck to her face and the front of her shirt. Harris pulled out a handkerchief and cleaned her face. He heard twanging sounds inside, like a guitar being smashed. He put away his handkerchief and went back to his case. “I have to go in there,” he said.

She didn't try to dissuade him. She didn't even stay. Apparently she had hurt his knee when she landed on him. He hadn't noticed at first, but now it was starting to throb. The agent in the car, part of his backup, showed the woman a badge and offered to take her out for coffee and a statement.

Harris watched the taillights until the car disappeared. He poured himself another whiskey and had sharp thoughts on the subject of heroines. It was easy for his wife to tell him women were hungry for heroines. She didn't work undercover among the drug lords in Latin America. Teaching women's literature didn't require exceptional courage, at least not on the junior college level where she taught. And when a woman did find herself in a tight spot as this one had just done—well, what happened then? Women didn't want heroines. Women wanted heroes, wanted heroes to be such an ordinary feature of their daily lives that they didn't even feel compelled to stay and watch their own rescue. Wanted heroes who came home and did the dishes at night.

Harris rubbed his knee and cautiously straightened it. He took the black toad from his case and slipped it into a pocket. He took a tranquilizer gun and, against all orders, a mayonnaise jar containing the doctored Shirley Temple. The ginger ale was laced with bufotenine rather than bufotoxin. Bufotoxin had proved difficult to obtain on short notice, even for a DEA agent who knew his way around the store, but bufotenine was readily available in South Carolina and Georgia, where the cane toad secreted it, and anyone willing to lick a toad the size of a soccer ball could have some. Perfectly legal, too, in some forms, although the two state legislatures had introduced bills to outlaw toad-licking.

“Touch not, taste not, handle not!” The voice was suddenly amplified and accompanied by feedback; perhaps the rap singer had left his mike on. The last time Harris had heard Voudon singing he had been in Haiti, sleeping in the house of a Haitian colonel the DEA suspected of trafficking. He had gotten up and crept into the colonel's study, and the voices came in the window with the moonlight.

Eh! Eh! Bomba! Heu! Heu! Canga, bafio te! Canga, moune de le! Canga, do ki la! Canga, li!

The song had frightened him back to his room. In the morning, he asked the cook about the voices. “A slave song,” she said. “For children.” She taught it to him, somewhat amused, he thought, at his rendition. Later he sang it to a friend, who translated. “‘We swear to destroy the whites and all they possess; let us die rather than fail to keep this vow.'” The cook had served him eggs.

Harris felt no compulsion at this particular moment to be fair, but in his heart he knew that, had his wife been there, she would never have let him go into that bar alone.

The bar was dark; the overheads had all been smashed, and the only light came from something that lay in front of Harris. This something blocked the door so that he could open it just halfway, and he could identify the blockage as Super Mario Bros. 2 by the incessant little tune it was playing. It was tipped onto its side and still glowed ever so slightly. Situated as it was, its little light made things inside even harder to see.

Deep in the bar, there was an occasional spark, like a firefly. Harris squinted in that direction. He could just make out the vacant bandstand. A single chair for a soloist lay on its back under a keyboard that had been snapped in half. The keyboard was still plugged in, and this was what was throwing off sparks. Harris's eyes began to adjust. Above the keyboard, on the wall, about spark-high, was a nest of color-coded wires. The wall phone had been ripped out and stuffed into one of the speakers. Behind the speakers were rounded shapes he imagined to be cowering customers. The floor of the bar was shiny with liquor.

On the other side of the bar were the video games. Street Fighter, Cyberball, and Punch-Out!! all bore the marks of the hatchet. Over the tune of the video, Harris could hear someone sniffling. The mike picked it up. Otherwise the bar was quiet. Harris squeezed inside, climbing over Super Mario Bros. 2. His knee hurt. He bent and straightened it experimentally. Super Mario Bros. 2 played its music:
Dee, dee, dee, dee, dee.

The loa charged, shrieking, from the corner. “Peace on Earth,” she howled, as her hatchet cleaved the air by Harris's head, shattering the mayonnaise jar in his hand. The loa's stroke carried her past him.

A piece of broken glass had sliced across his palm. Harris was bleeding. But worse than that, ginger ale laced with bufotenine was soaking into the cut and into the skin around the cut and way down his wrist. He had dosed the Shirley Temple to fell a linebacker with a couple of sips.

Harris dropped the tranquilizer gun and groped blindly to his right until he located a wet T-shirt. He rubbed his hand with it, all in a panic. Someone slapped him. There was a scream. The hatchet sliced through the air above him and lodged itself into the bar's wood paneling. The tune from Super Mario Bros. 2 played on. The other singing started, in cacophonous counterpoint.

“An awful foe is in our land, drive him out, oh, drive him out! Donkey-faced bedmate of Satan,” the loa shrieked. She struggled to remove the hatchet head from the wood. She was an enormous woman, a woman built to compete in the shotput event. She would have the hatchet loose in no time. Harris looked about frenziedly. His heart was already responding, either to bufotenine or to the threat of hatchetation. The tranquilizer gun was on top of Super Mario Bros. 2 and under the loa's very feet, but farther into the bar, at a safer distance, Harris saw his maraschino cherry on the floor. He dropped, ignoring the alarmed flash of pain from the injured knee, and groped with his uninjured hand. Something squished under his palm and stuck to him. He peeled it off to examine it.

It was a flattened cherry, a different cherry. Now Harris could see that the floor of the Gateway Bar was littered with maraschino cherries. One of them was injected with tetrodotoxin. There was no way to tell which just by looking.

Near him, under a table, a woman in a wet T-shirt sat with her hands over her ears and stared at him.
NEVADA BOB'S
, the T-shirt read. It struck Harris as funny. The word
BOB
. Suddenly Harris saw that
BOB
was a very funny word, especially stuck there like that between two large breasts whose nipples were as obvious as maraschino cherries. He started to say something, but a sudden movement to one side made him turn to look that way instead. He wondered what he had been going to say.

The loa brandished her hatchet. Harris retreated into the bar on his knees. The hatchet went wide again, smashed an enormous Crock-Pot that sat on the bar. Chili oozed out of the cracks.

“I shall pray for you,” the loa said, carried by the momentum of her stroke into the video games. “I shall pray for all of you whose American appetites have been tempted with foreign dishes.” She put her arms around the casing for Ghouls 'n Ghosts, lifted the entire thing from the floor, and piled it onto Super Mario Bros. 2. The music hiccoughed for a moment and then resumed.

There was now absolutely no exit from the bar through that door. Harris's backup was still out there, peering into manholes and washing windows, and the street was two video games away. Harris's amusement vanished. He wasn't likely to be at his best, alone, weaponless, with a hurt knee, and bufotenine pulsing through his body. Only one of these things could be rectified.

The bar was starting to metamorphose around him. The puddles of liquor on the floor sprouted into fountains, green liquid trees of crème de menthe, red trees of wine, gold trees of beer. The smell of liquor intensified as the trees bloomed. They grew flowers and dropped leaves in the liquid permanence of fountains, an infinite, unchanging season that was all seasons at once. A jungle lay between Harris and the loa. His tranquilizer gun was sandwiched between Super Mario Bros. 2 and Ghouls 'n Ghosts. The barrel protruded. Harris wrenched it free. It took three tries and the awesome properties of the lever to move the uppermost video game. Harris tried not to remember how the loa had picked it up off the floor with her hands. He retrieved his gun and went hunting.

She was coy now, ducking away from him, so that he only caught glimpses of her through the watery branches of liquor. A sound here and there indicated that she had stopped to smash a wooden keg or pound the cash register. Harris himself was stealthy, timing each footfall to coincide with the tones of Super Mario Bros. 2.