Part 3 (1/2)

”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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s, 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-s.h.i.+rt 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-s.h.i.+rt 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 prost.i.tutes.” 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 prost.i.tutes 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 prost.i.tutes, 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 smas.h.i.+ng 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-s.h.i.+rt. 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 s.h.i.+rt. Harris pulled out a handkerchief and cleaned her face. He heard tw.a.n.ging 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 s.h.i.+rley 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 s.h.i.+ny 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 gla.s.s 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 s.h.i.+rley 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-s.h.i.+rt. 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-s.h.i.+rt sat with her hands over her ears and stared at him. NEVADA BOB'S, the T-s.h.i.+rt 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 appet.i.tes 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 was.h.i.+ng windows, and the street was two video games away. Harris's amus.e.m.e.nt 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 creme 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.

The fountains were endlessly mobile. They rose and diminished unpredictably so that at one moment they could be between him and the loa, screening her from him, and the next moment, without his taking a step, he and the loa could be face-to-face. This gave the hunt a sort of funhouse quality. The loa was likewise changeable now-a big and ugly woman one moment, a lovely young one in a wet T-s.h.i.+rt the next-and this, too, added to the fun. Harris much preferred hunting young women without bras to hunting old ones with hatchets. Harris approved the change until it suddenly occurred to him just what the loa's strategy was. She was fiendishly clever. The same way a maraschino cherry laced with tetrodotoxin could be hidden among other, innocent, maraschino cherries, a loa, a.s.suming the shape of a young woman in a wet T-s.h.i.+rt, could hide among other young women in wet T-s.h.i.+rts. Harris would have to think of some way to identify her. Failing that, he would simply have to shoot everything in a wet T-s.h.i.+rt with the tranquilizer gun. This would probably require more tranquilizer darts than he had on him.

He would have to entice the loa out of hiding. He would have to make himself into bait.

Several overturned ashtrays were on the floor. It was the work of a moment to locate a cigarette b.u.t.t, a matchbook with the Gateway Bar logo on it. The matches were damp and sticky. Harris put the b.u.t.t in his mouth and tried to light one of the matches with his left, b.l.o.o.d.y hand, his right clenched on the trigger of the tranquilizer gun. He bent several matches before giving up. He switched the match to his right hand, still holding the gun, but not in a ready position, not with a finger on the trigger. He bent several matches before one flamed.

The loa charged immediately. ”Filthy poison! Breath of h.e.l.l!” she screamed. She was old and huge, and her hatchet wavered over her head. There was no time to shoot. Harris rolled.

Harris rolled through the many-colored puddles and fountains of drink and immediately to his feet, shaky on his hurt knee. Before she could transform, before she could regroup herself for another charge, Harris shot her.

She was in the middle of a scream. She stopped, looked down to her right hip where the tranquilizer dart had hit her. Super Mario Bros. 2 celebrated with a little riff: Dee, dee, dee, dee, dee. A fountain of red grenadine sprang up. The loa raised the hatchet, took a step into the fountain. The petals of red flowers exploded around her and fell onto her like rain. She threw the hatchet. Her aim was off; it clattered harmlessly a few feet behind him. She took a second step and then fell in his direction. One moment she was an enormous shadow and the grenadine fountain rose behind her like the distant fireworks of the Fourth of July and the smell of cherries was everywhere; the next she lay in a black heap on the floor, and the fountain had trickled to nothing. But in the tiny, invisible s.p.a.ce between those moments, the loa left the body.

Her z'etoile rose from the black heap and spun above it. Harris could see it, like a star in the room. It came toward him slowly, backing him up until his heel touched the hatchet. Then it came faster, fast as falling, blazing larger and unbearably hot. His left hand found the black toad in his pocket so that, at the last possible moment, the moment before contact, when he threw up his hands to protect his face from the searing heat, the toad was in them. The z'etoile swerved and entered the toad instead of him.

Harris dropped the toad to the floor, grabbed the hatchet, and smashed with the blunt end. The toad skittered, and he followed it over the sticky floor among the maraschino cherries, smas.h.i.+ng again and again, until the toad cracked in one long rent down the middle and went to pieces. The z'etoile tried to leap away, but it was in pieces too now, like the toad. It shot in many directions and entered video games and broken keyboards and customers and lounge rap singers and ashtrays, but only in subdued, confused sparkles. It was the best Harris could do. He lay down on the floor and imagined there were shoes, open-toed and pointy with nail polish on the toes, canvas and round-toed, leather and bootlike, all about him.

”Come on,” someone said. It sounded like his mother, only she was speaking through a microphone. He must be late for school. The song from Super Mario Bros. 2 was playing in the background, but when wasn't it? Harris tried to open his eyes. He had no way of knowing if he'd succeeded or not. He didn't see his mother. He saw or imagined DEA agents attempting to lift the body of the huge woman from the floor. It took three of them. ”Come on,” someone said again, nudging him with a toe.

”I'm coming,” said Harris, who refused to move.