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I pulled up in front of the hoodoo conjure’s house and let the engine idle. He hadn’t moved from his rocker on the porch. A coastal winter heat had set in for the afternoon and he rocked languidly. He lifted his hat off his knee and waved.
I shut off Bubonic and stepped out onto the gravel road. I’d come in from the opposite direction to avoid entering the crossroads where I’d first seen him. Whatever sorcery hid underneath the dust and stones, I figured I’d stretched my terrible luck as far as it would go.
Arms crossed, I slouched against Bubonic’s hood and called out. “You weren’t kidding about people not being friendly ‘round here.” His wide mouth broke into a toothy grin, but he didn’t respond. “Mind if I come over and talk?”
Coming from a cop or a shaman, this was a loaded question. In the spirit world, people didn’t go to judges to get search warrants. They brokered deals. An agreement to let somebody into your yard, your private space, could be more binding than anything the criminal justice system could dream up.
“You welcome to try.” More grinning, ear to ear.
I rubbed at the stubble on my chin. Reckless? Sure, but the shot clock was ticking. “I’ve made worse deals lately.”
I made my way across the road to stand at the edge of the ditch. His yard stretched on the other side, a weed-choked sea full of hidden danger. I recalled my recent flight and a smile crossed my lips too. This would be easy if only that magic were at my command.
“A man so close to dyin’ ain’t normally so happy. You either cocky or you head ain’t in this game.”
Either he’d read the tumor on my own spirit, or he was referring to the lethality of his booby trapped front lawn. “I wore the Cloak of Kibaga last night. Wishing I could do it again.”
I didn’t expect him to understand, but he nodded in recognition. “Fit you better than the Holowa’s clothes.”
My turn to be surprised. “What do you know of my magic?”
“Cross that lawn, if you dare, and I’ll tell you a bit.”
“You just watch. I’m about to go awwf.”
He only laughed harder, raspy and uproarious. “Do your thing, youngin’.”
I opened up my sight and reached for the Above. The golden plate under my shirt heated like it had been left on the dash on a summer day. Not enough to hurt, it felt good, cleansing. Warmth coursed through my flesh and cradled my bones. Under the unrelenting radiance of the sun, that which had been hidden was revealed.
On my first visit, I’d felt the pull of the Below and looked away. This time, the lawn stirred and writhed.
An ominous rattle started from somewhere near the middle. Another joined, then another. A layered hissing started up and movement flickered between the stalks of grass and trembling dandelions. I opened myself further, willing the traces of the Below be swept aside so I could pinpoint the danger. My senses stretched to their limits.
Something bigger, meaner, strayed into my peripheral at the crossroads.
I snapped my head that direction. All that was there was an empty intersection. A booming laugh from the old hoodoo had me eyeing him.
Under the sight of the Above, the old man sat proud and tall, no sign of the gnarled hands or twisted leg. His porkpie hat had lost the brim and was trimmed with golden emblems. His rickety rocker had become a mahogany throne upholstered with leopard skin and embellished with exotic horns. A horseshoe I hadn’t noticed before glowed like a beacon above his front door.
And from the roadside to his porch steps swayed a carpet of vipers.
He stood, ignoring his cane. “You be real sure you wish to cross.”
I shrugged out of my jacket and tossed it toward the car. The bad throw wasn’t quite going to make the distance, so I beseeched the wind for a small favor. It gusted my jacket smartly onto the hood. Style counts. Ignoring the conjurer’s mocking expression, I rolled my shoulders and drew my knife.
“What you gonna do with that? Tell you what, you cut the grass on the way, I get you some lemonade.”
Little did he know, my patience for trash talking old shaman had become limitless.
I backed up across the road and crouched, shaking my arms to circulate the blood. Pushing up my sleeve, my eyes fixed on the old man’s porch, I raised the blade. One quick cut and I dropped to a knee.
With the knife’s bloodied tip, I drew out a circle in the gritty dirt. This was my sun, my power source. As the circle closed, I felt a surge of magic which began right under my sternum and exploded through my veins. From my medicine pouch, I drew a pinch of magnesium and sprinkled it into the furrow. The old man watched from his chair, elbows propped on his knees.
When Atofo had first shown me this ritual, I thought he was setting up some David Copperfield nonsense. Anybody who’d used a road flare knew magnesium burned; that wasn’t magic, just showmanship. But the reason magnesium burned, according to Atofo, was that it stole the sun. The magic part returned this stolen essence to its rightful owner and let the shaman hitch a ride.
I stabbed Atofo’s knife into the circle. The energy radiating throughout my core struck downward and channeled through the otherworldly blade. A blinding orange flame erupted. I tilted my head and called out.
“Father sun, as you leap across the face of This World, so will I!”
The magic seeped into my legs. They surged and flexed with the captured energy. I rose back into a sprinter’s crouch and cracked my neck, staring across the distance from the ditch to the old man’s porch: a solid fifteen yards.
Even magic has limits. I ain’t no Bob Beamon. Long jumpers were built like beanpoles. Me, I’m more compact, built for endurance not speed. There’s only so much you can stuff inside a human body. Even with the spell, there were no guarantees.
“If I die here, Atofo,” I muttered, “no more chitlins.”
I kicked off into a loping sprint. With each stride, I tried to envision myself covering more and more ground. But I couldn’t help comparing this to the mysterious power which had filled my soul when I’d run from Fenwick Hall.
There’d been a natural infusion of my flesh and the force behind Kibaga. I’d felt free because I’d been the magic. My spirit had been unleashed, not injected with some mystical performance enhancer. Right now, I felt more like a stunt man doing wire work, not the awakened vessel of a primal force.
Uncertainty drove home as my feet left the ground.
Windmilling through the air, pushing my legs out in front for every extra inch, I saw the glittering snake eyes in the grass and caught sight of the sea of bony rattles shimmying their deadly warnings. About the time my downward arc began, one of the snakes lashed out, its unhinged jaw obscenely pink, and curved fangs dripping with venom.
The teeth came up short. The serpent fell limp into the weeds. More followed.
I’d accounted for the distance. What I hadn’t accounted for was how high these damn snakes could leap. They struck with such fury their entire bodies left the ground and soared in awkward, tumbling flights. They caught air like Jordan, went aloft like fleshy arrows. Jaws snapped closed near my ankles and I thanked the Lord for my high top Timbs. The old man gripped the arms of his throne and hovered in anticipation.
“Kiss my ass. Kiss my ass. Kiss my ass!”
Sounded like disrespect, maybe a joke. It was neither.
Magic was older than language. Older than time itself. A spell could use any old words you wanted. Latin? Sure. But did the original people of Africa have Latin? Those cave painters in France? Hell no. Language was part of culture. What mattered more was the mojo behind the words. And these? They had power.
The horseshoe over his door glinted and I looked away. The sun’s energy cut off. I was dropping toward the porch like dead weight, those stunt wires yanked and cut. In that compressed moment, I had no time to cast. I struggled to find my concentration and pointed my toes for those extra few inches.
My boots barely caught the edge of the porch. The old man had dropped back into his rocker, hooting, and pointing that knotted, oaken finger, his pork pie hat askew. Arms flailing, legs fully extended, I had no way to recover. I was falling on my back into that yard.
I wasn’t about to go down into a viper’s nest blind. I rolled over as I fell, still holding Atofo’s knife. Angling the blade point down, I pulled it tight to my chest.
The tip sunk into the warded ground and held firm. I continued to fall face first and the owl feather pommel struck the golden breastplate with a sonorous din.
A wave of force exploded across the yard and the snakes closest tumbled away in an arc of whipping grass. Boards rattling, flaking white paint from the house burst into the air in a shower of snow as the same shockwave tossed me up and out of the yard.
Silence filled the air in the wake of that gilded note. I balanced there, my heels on the edge of the old man’s porch, paint chips drifting down on all sides. I tried to play it off. He’d gone to block me, and I jammed on him all the same. Yep, that was just how I rolled, old man. Showboatin’ my magic on your damn stoop.
Then a dreadful rattle sounded near my right foot and I got shook.
Not gonna lie, I screamed. One of those snakes had latched onto my boot. Mouth open wide enough to swallow my fist, I watched it jerk as it pumped its venom into a steel toe.
By now, old brother on the porch had nearly fallen out of his rocker, cryin’ with laughter.
No more playing it cool. Emperor Scorpion came out and my damn turn to strike. I put a round through the base of the snake’s skull, inches from my foot.
I may not be able to shoot hoops, but guns, I got that.
A shiver ran up my spine as I hopped on one foot and shook the mangled corpse into the yard. The dead snake wriggled then turned to ash, scattering on the breeze. My moment tainted, I turned to face the old man’s judgment. He’d stopped laughing now and peered shrewdly.
“You got any idea how long it takes to powder damn near three thousand rattlesnake skins?”
I holstered my gun. Without asking, I dropped into an empty chair beside him. “Longer than I got, for sure.”