You know, when other women realize that their marriage just isn’t cutting the wedding cake, they go get a quickie divorce. Wham, bam, thank you man, and don’t forget to send the alimony check on time.
Not me.
Oh, no, I couldn’t just get something as simple as a divorce from my husband. I needed a friggin’ exorcism.
And that fun little errand had brought me four thousand feet up into New Mexico’s rugged Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Up onto some godforsaken plateau covered in scraggly pine trees. To add to the surreal look of the place, a couple dozen pebble-sized stones, spaced along an abstract pattern, emitted faint light as if they’d been dipped in cheap Day-Glo paint.
I faced a roaring campfire, sitting on a log that had been split in half to make a crude bench. The rough ridges of the wood threatened to tear right through my thin blue jeans. I looked truly pathetic.
Last time I’d checked myself in a mirror, about three hours ago and four thousand feet lower down, my eyes were sunken in and dark enough to do a raccoon justice. My straw-blonde hair looked no better than a rats’ nest. One that had been condemned by the rats before they moved out.
My teeth chattered like a matching pair of porcelain-veneered castanets. I pulled the Navajo blanket more closely about my shoulders. The blanket was a garish thing, decorated with red, yellow, and green squares and whorls and probably some kind of Aztec god that ate people’s hearts at the local Waffle House. Of course, all I cared about right now was that the damned thing kept me halfway warm.
Dora, the shaman performing the sacred rites for me, didn’t look anything like I’d imagined. Say ‘female shaman’ to the central casting geeks at Paramount or Warner Brothers, and see what you get. They would’ve sent over someone old, wizened, with great facial lines and a kind expression. Maybe who managed to pull off the vibes of Wes Studi crossed with Maya Angelou.
No, Dora looked more like one of those tawny-skinned, impossibly fresh-faced teenage girls in jeans-and-silk tops that women’s magazines were always trying to pass off as self-actualized housewives. Women say that they hate the girls in Playboy who display cellulite-free butts and triple-D silicone implants. Nuh-uh. The girls we really love to loathe are the ones in Ladies’ Home Journal or Good Housekeeping who pretend that they’ve blown past 35 with nary a wrinkle to be seen.
Dora began a liquid, repetitive drone of a chant that rose and fell with the wind. She raised her delicate arms and began to move. The gestures, as elegant and fluid as the motions of the models I’d once filmed in Mapplethorpe’s studio, gracefully turned into some kind of interpretive dance.
I shouldn’t have jinxed myself right then and there, but I did. I thought for a split second that hey, maybe this is actually going to work. Maybe I’d be free and gloriously single again.
Stupid, stupid Cassie.
A low growl came from just beyond where the firelight danced at the edge of the clearing. I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but I really didn’t need to. Dora had heard it too.
She stopped her dance. Turned so that her back was to the leaping yellow flames. Slowly, she dropped into a defensive crouch.
Dora held her ground as the shining white bear-tiger thing that had stalked me all the way from California slipped out from between the trees and stood, completely unafraid, in the open space of the clearing.
It looked like my husband had decided to show up.
The man – the man-thing – that I’d dated, taken to bed, cuddled between my legs, and promised marriage vows began to pace back and forth. As if trying to decide the best way to attack its prey. Dora didn’t take her eyes off of it. Neither did I. But as that dark-humor-part of my brain caught up with what I was seeing here, I let out a bubble of a laugh, something that would’ve done justice to a Girl Scout who’d gone boy watching for the first time.
That thing, that Mitchel-thing I’d slept with?
I’d actually walked down the aisle with it. Taken marriage vows with it. For richer or for poorer. For better or for worse.
And for sickness and in health.
Oh, that was just too friggin’ much.
Mitchel’s bear-tiger form let out a roar that must’ve shaken the window fixtures on houses as far away as Santa Fe. I felt the very air itself recoil from that savage sound.
And I could smell his breath now, in his beast form. Unpleasant, burning bacon on hot copper kind of scent.
He could see that the only way to me was through Dora. Fangs glistened in the moonlight. He leaped at her. Ebony claws thrashed the air. Like some kind of horrific threshing machine come to life.
Freeze Frame.
Hey, hold up for a moment. This is me, Mrs. Cassie Thantos. Formerly Miss Cassie Van Deene of Chatsworth, California. I’m sorry to interrupt your reading enjoyment just as it’s getting good.
I know, I know. This is the part where, if this was a feature-length motion picture, that the F/X budget would be kicking in. Some cool CGI to show the creature-thing I married, maybe some high-flying wire-work that would show Dora doing a triple-flip karate kick that would flatten Mitchel’s ball sack.
I’m stopping the story for a moment to ask you to please take this seriously. This really, really happened to me. And before anyone out there starts making blonde jokes, don’t think that I wouldn’t have noticed that my husband went around on all fours and wearing a Day-Glo tiger pelt instead of a European-cut Armani jacket with French cuffs.
Believe me, he was a lot better dressed at the start of all this.
I want to start us there.
I need to start us there.
If it helps put you into the scene of events, then that’s all well and good, you know. But it’ll help me a lot more if I just get it out of my system, off my friggin’ chest, and onto the page.
So think of it as being my therapy buddy.
Stick with me, okay?
And…jump to Scene 1, Act 1. Way before Dora and I met the creature of the Shaggy White Lagoon on a mountaintop north of Taos.