The Sick Horror at The Lost and Found

The Sick Horror at The Lost and
Found

Copyright © 2014
by Heidi King

Smashwords
Edition

Cover Art and Illustrations by

Chase
Wills

* * * * *

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

Special thanks to the families of the
authors who let me use some creative license while using the blogs,
letters and diary entries to weave their stories into one. To you,
the reader, know that although these were once written as complete
short stories, because the authors knew each other, the stories
refer to events and people that require you to read the stories in
order.

Get Out If You
Can!

By Dr. Michael
Anderson

My hotel concierge warned me not to
look for her. She was in what he described as a somewhat sordid
area of Panama City. I did my best to take his advice. But I
couldn’t get my needs satisfied through traditional means. I was
desperate. I was told I could find her in Chinatown.

The actual street is called
Salsipuedes. Seventeenth Century maps of Old Panama show that this
street bore the same name then as it does now. But it is not so
much a name as a warning: Salsipuedes literally means
Get Out If You Can
. And
‘street’ is a bit of a misnomer… Salsipuedes is more of a labyrinth
of contradiction. There are wooden kiosks selling almost everything
- from hand woven textiles and cheap leather to electronics and
decades old romance novels. National Geographic magazines from the
50’s sit beside porn from the 80’s. It was on Salsipuedes, I was
certain, that I would find her – the Voodoo priestess of former
dictator/CIA informant turned drug kingpin, General Manuel
Noriega.

It is easy to miss the dark and narrow
opening of the street. You are likely to continue along Avenida
Central to Parque Santa Ana, one of Panama’s more colorful areas
and overlooked attractions. Here you can see Kuna Indians in their
colorful traditional dress feeding squadrons of hungry pigeons as
diablos rojos roar by. If you have a seat near the gazebo facing
the landmark Café Coca-Cola you will see old rail tracks that lead
down to the colonial white-washed neighborhood of Casco Viejo. But
if you hang a right by mistake, you enter the real area of danger
-- the poverty stricken, violent neighborhood of Chorillo. But past
the dangerous barrio, only a few hundred meters further and over a
barbed wired fence, there is a pleasant green neighborhood that
looks like small town America. In fact, until very recently, it was
American territory - the Panama Canal Zone.

The U.S. invasion of Panama was less
of an invasion than an expensive manhunt with heavy firepower.
Bullet holes scar the dark, ominous high-rises of Chorillo --
vestiges from when the US came to look for Noriega at the
Comandancia, his fortified headquarters. But he was already on the
run.

Uncle Sam’s boys continued their
search at his officer’s club, beach home and luxury houses. Each
place they destroyed when they discovered he was not there. Panama
has left them in ruins as a kind of way to flip him the bird. The
officers’ club in Casco Viejo, however, was temporarily used as a
location for a party hosted by a Bond villain in the movie Quantum
of Solace.

At one of his luxury homes they found
some peculiar items. According to U.S. military reports, Noriega
left behind porn, a portrait of Hitler, an assortment of books,
beads, stones, cocaine, a Rosicrucian portrait of Jesus, plaster
statues, dried food "offerings" and an altar made by his Brazilian
Voodoo priestess. They also found a freezer full of voodoo candles.
Each bundle of candles was wrapped in a piece of paper with one of
his enemy’s names on it. His enemies included Dick Cheney, then the
US Secretary of Defense, and the President, George Bush Sr., with
whom Noriega was connected through the C.I.A (Noriega was a paid
informant when Bush was the Director of the C.I.A.) If the candles
were meant to somehow bring these adversaries down, they failed, as
most of these politicians or their sons made great comebacks. Many
of Noriega’s items can still be purchased today, a short distance
from his headquarters -- in that esoteric maze of
‘Salsipuedes’.

Noriega left behind his
voodoo and his voodoo priestess in his time of trouble and
literally turned to the Church. He had been hiding at the Vatican
Embassy when American G.I.s set up across the street where Multi
Centro, a huge Colombian owned shopping mall, now sits. The
Americans didn’t fire guns at the Embassy of the Holy See but
rather blasted Guns and Roses´. Noriega eventually had enough
of
Welcome to the
Jungle
, and surrendered.

With Noriega behind bars in Florida,
the Americans had no interest in his Brazilian "mama," or
priestess. But I had to find her.

My desperation came three days after
island hopping in Bocas Del Toro. An excruciating rash had turned
up on my calves and ankles. I went to three pharmacies. Usually,
even if they don’t know what you have, the pharmacists sell you
some kind of mysterious drug. One pharmacist swore that my rash was
actually the result of insect bites, but still, none of the
pharmacists offered any kind of remedy. After a week, I was
starting to lose my mind. A friend suggested that I go to
‘Salsipuedes,’ so I left my watch at home, took only a copy of my
passport, mustered up some courage, and ventured into the crowded
alleyway.

Before I arrived at
La Tienda Esoterica
, I
could smell the incense drifting down the street. Inside my eyes
took time to adjust to the darkness, but they finally wrapped
around angelic statues of The Virgin Mary sitting next to dark clay
skulls. Penthouse magazines next to Good Housekeeping.

I understood that
Salsipuedes is not a large scale voodoo shop. There isn’t any one
dogma unifying things – there is as much Catholic as there is
Santería. And the list doesn’t end there: experts say that many of
Noriega’s possessions were not Voodoo or Santería, but a product of
Mexican black folk art called
Brujería
– Witchcraft.

And then I saw her. Her black face
remained hidden among the hundreds of smoke-stained, angry-faced
idols. Only its size announced that it was human. The lines around
her eyes and deep jowls told me she was old enough to be Noriega’s
priestess. I imagined on my way over that I might ask about the
former general but now I dared not. Like many of the
Afro-Antilleans in Panama, the woman spoke English. I told her I
had a rash, and without telling her more she asked me to lift up my
pant legs. Her eyes widened at the sight and she gasped. “Do you
have money?” she asked. I showed her.

“
I have just what you
need,” she said with a thick Caribbean accent. Without expression
she forcefully took my arm and pulled me into a dusty, damp side
room filled with oils and dried herbs. She transformed from ominous
sentinel of occult idols to eager servant. She stepped onto a
ladder and started pulling things frantically from high off the
shelf. Soon, she was crushing seeds and plants in a ceramic bowl,
using a crucible. I sat in silence as she boiled tea, added the
leaves to the tincture, and mixed in various other oils.

When her elixir was finished, she had
me place my feet in a large metal bowl. Then she lit a bundle of
wild grass and blew the sweet smelling smoke at my ankles, feet and
legs. She got down on her hands and knees, prostrated herself in
front of me and began chanting in a language I couldn’t recognize.
I closed my eyes. I respected the seriousness by which the shaman
did her work. She massaged the natural medicine everywhere below my
knees- even through my toes. It brought instant relief.

I lost track of time… I started to
doze but she woke me with the sharp chime of a small cymbal. I put
my shoes and socks on. She gave me a bottle of what she had created
and told me to rub it on my legs four times a day and leave it on.
“Must not wash!”

Despite the street name’s warning, I
escaped Salsipuedes without incident and returned home cautiously
optimistic. Three days later my legs were silky smooth. The
medicine woman succeeded where the pharmacists failed. A few weeks
later, when I ran into my friend that recommended that I go to
Salsipuedes, I thanked her.

“
I’m glad the oil helped
with the bites,” she said.

“
Bites? No, not bites.
That’s what the pharmacist thought too, but this was some kind of
mysterious rash.”

“
What? No, no, no. You were
bitten by
chitras
,
sand flies. They hang out on tropical islands and get you when your
legs are under the shade of the table. They are so small you never
see them… they’re sometimes called no-see-ums. You don’t feel them
for a few days, but if they get you badly, they burrow under the
skin, pop out later and bite again. There is no way to get rid of
them except coconut oil… it drowns them when they pop
out.”

“
But the shaman cast out
the evil… she put a lot more in than just coconut oil - I saw
her…”

“
Oh. Hmm. How much did you
pay for the shamanic healing?”

“
Oh. Ahhhhh. Twenty dollars
or something like. Something like that…. Sixty-two
ninety-five!”

O.K. I must confess- I am not so
naïve. I am what many consider a kind of voodoo priest, one of the
few remaining Jungian psychoanalysts. My real fault is one I make
often in Panama – I forget to negotiate the price first. But, in
the end, I paid to experience a dying art that maybe should live
on: the combination of faith and medicine. Shamans play a
significant role in societies because of their ability to elicit
hope using both religion and medicine.

And so, for me
‘
Get out if you can
,’ has taken a new meaning. Every time I return to
Salsipuedes, I see something new. I can’t seem to ever really get
out, I guess. Maybe that is the real meaning behind the street’s
name.

Perhaps Noriega’s flight from the
American military manhunt was telling… when on the run he left the
paraphernalia from the black arts behind, ran into the Embassy of
the Holy-See and surrendered. The flight to Christ continued. In
the Metropolitan Correctional Center of Dade County, Florida,
Manuel Noriega has surrendered again – this time he surrendered his
soul to Jesus Christ. He has been baptized as a born again
Christian. He is still awaiting a hearing in France to decide what
will happen to his living mortal coil. Perhaps his conversion is in
earnest. But if not, Get Out If You Can, Manuel. And if you do, I
will see you on Salsipuedes. Please introduce me to your Voodoo
priestess.

What We Have Here is a
Failure to Communicate

By Steve Banks

I can’t tell you about banana
republics like Panama… about the joy of little freedoms… about
cigars, Cuban – go ahead light them in public. About discos, on
Calle Uruguay – open ‘til the sun starts shining. About beer
tunnels, my favorite – models ask you how many they can open for
you before you drive off. About hookers, Colombian – 18 years old
(más o menos) that you willingly ignore are pros until your buddy
tells you the taxi money home was enough keep them in blow for a
month. About Christmas, just another excuse for a party – where
pasty white skin like mine is actually checked out by women hotter
than the girls that threw beer in my face at college. Fucking enjoy
them, because these freedoms come from a lack of due process… enjoy
them, because whether you do or not one day this lack of due
process will come sneaking up behind you and bite you in the ass.
Remembering these freedoms can keep you from losing your shit in a
Panamanian jail. I know.

Maybe I should begin at the beginning.
If you want to know the truth, it has a lot to do with Paul. Paul
Newman.

Anna Nicole Smith, Oh My God! Is the
surge working? Mortgage meltdown, arctic meltdown, how is your
iPhone? Did you hear Angelina has new babies? This was the dorky
banter I participated in, which made me a big fat dork. I paid my
mortgage, I was going to vote for Obama, and I never cheated on my
wife. Then Paul Newman died.

When I first heard, “What we have here
is a failure to communicate,” in the Guns and Roses song, I ran
down to the Blockbuster and got all Paul’s movies. Cool Hand Luke
from the aforementioned song was my favorite. He got the shit
kicked out of him in jail and when no human could take more, and
all he had to do was lay down, he got up to get the shit kicked out
of him again. I never understood the movie or why he did that but
for some reason I loved to see him get the shit kicked out of him.
Like, fuck you, hit me again.