“Are you in?” I say as Tina situates herself in the front seat of the Lincoln with a nod. Slamming the door behind her, I go around to the other side and hop in behind the wheel. Already in the back seat, Sis is checking herself in the window’s reflection. Garrett watches condescendingly from the carport. Tina tries her best to ignore him. “Have you ever seen a look like that? Like we’re disappearing into the pages of a Stephen King novel with the witches and the goblins and the headless everybodies.”
“I’m not so sure we’re not,” Sis says, popping her Juicy Fruit, a newfound habit to replace the smokes.
I start the engine and turn the air conditioner on full blast. “Just try not to look at him.”
Tina examines herself in the sun visor mirror and purses her lips. “Well, Fanny says this fellow comes highly recommended.”
Sis hoots from the back seat. “A ringing endorsement.”
* * *
A woman who looks like a “Touch Me in the Morning”–era Diana Ross waves sleepily from the entrance of a narrow dirt road.
“You can walk in from here,” she says, leaning into Tina’s open window.
Honest to God, I can see three bats dip just behind her in the summer heat.
“Are we doing this?” Sis asks sheepishly, the only time to my mind she’s ever asked anything sheepishly.
“Hellpecker yes,” I say opening the car door, feeling a bit sheepish myself.
* * *
The bonfire in back of the ramshackle shotgun house casts a supernatural glow across Tina, prostrate on a long, wooden table next to a grinning human skull and a copy of the New Testament. Scattered items of junk have been fashioned into art around the riverside abode: a mile-high stack of wrought iron patio chairs, clearly inspired by the Watts Towers, peers over the proceedings, while a life-sized aluminum Christmas angel hangs like a lynching victim from a tattered rope in a nearby pine. A pair of African American children playing in a burned-out Chevy make me think of survivors in a TV miniseries I’d seen about the apocalypse.
Brother Peter, a tall West Indian standing across the table from me, holds his thick, ancient hands out over Tina’s body and motions for me to do the same. He locks his eyes into mine like he’s trying to read my thoughts.
“Okay, you feel de heat?”
“Yeah,” I say, definitely feeling something. “I feel it.”
His gaze suggests I’m in over my head. “Heezzzzzbokmon,” he hisses.
A cockeyed parrot squawks from its perch just behind my head. Flinching like a whipped hound, I make a gallant attempt to recover.
“Nooooow,” he says, “to make your hands into de wings of a dove.”
Taking his lead, I fan out my hands in front of me like the feathers of something he’ll find acceptable.
“HEEZBOKMON!” No hiss this time, more like an outright holler.
“Bo Skeet—” Sis says from her lawn chair underneath the Christmas angel.
“Silence, sister!” Brother Peter shuts her down hard without a glance in her direction.
The parrot squawks, and I hurriedly change the shape of my hands into something less incendiary.
“Okay now, mooove it to de left.”
I follow Brother Peter’s giant shadow as we move our hands to the left, his forceful eyes following me from across the table. “HEEZBOKMON! HEEZBOKKK!”
The parrot dances on its perch, flapping its wings like someone’s trying to kill it.
“HEEZBOKMON!”
My tipping point.
“What are you saying?” I say, downright panicked. “I don’t know what that means, and you keep yelling it at me!”
Sis whispers behind my ear. “Ease back, man.”
“What?” I say, wary as hell of speaking to anyone but Brother Peter.
With her hands on my shoulders, Sis moves me back an inch. “You need to ease back.”
“Ease back,” Tina whispers, like we’re all on our way to the principal’s office.
“Oh,” I say, relieved someone finally broke the foreign dialect code. “Ease back. Right.” Still too petrified to look our fearless leader in the eye, I carefully take two steps back, my hands still over Tina’s chest. From my peripheral vision, I can see Brother Peter offering a tiny nod of affirmation.
“Heezebok,” I say, and this time I mean it.
* * *
Brother Peter walks us to the car, no flunky in sight, his hand on Tina’s back. Although he is addressing my mother in soft tones, Sis and I are able to hear every word. “Pray, meditate, whatever it is you do. But do it twice a day. Concentrate on one thing that gives you power. Do this religiously. If you do this thing I’m telling you, the powers of darkness won’t have room to get in. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” my mother says.
We are now at the car. Brother Peter and Tina are facing each other. He takes both her hands in his.
“Say that you understand, but use your voice where I can hear it,” he says.
“Yes,” Tina says, louder. “I understand you.”
“Say your name. Your first name.”
“Tina.”
“Again.”
“Tina,” she says a bit louder.
“Again.”
“TINA!” she says, like a town crier.
Brother Peter smiles and opens the passenger door. “Every single day,” he says.
Tina gets in the car. “Tina.” She says it one more time and smiles as he closes the door.
When we are all finally tucked away in the car, I look over at my mother, who is blushing like a bride.
“Tina,” she says, glancing out the window at the place where Brother Peter had just stood.
* * *
The big blue lights of the Highway 43 Chevron Station signals our late-night return to civilization. Tina has tuned the radio to cool jazz. Sis lies across the back seat, asleep for all we know.
“Okay, Sis,” Tina says. “It’s time to come clean. Fanny told me.”
“Told you what?”
Tina turns around. “You found Brother Peter, not Fanny.”
I can hear Sis sit up. “Well, no.”
“You didn’t?”
“Melanie Pugh mentioned him,” Sis says. “He led a prayer circle for her daddy. So, I mentioned him to Fanny and she said she’d met him a couple of times and thought he was the real deal. So—”
“You asked Fanny to take the fall in case it turned out to be a bust.”
Sis looks out the window. “You could say that.”
Tina holds her hand over the seat for Sis to take. “It wasn’t a bust, Sis.”
“Well, you just never know,” Sis says, taking her mother’s hand.
The sense of pride and anticipation in the car is palpable.