I hardly need point out the usefulness to the drug cartels of a DEA agent entirely under their control.
Harris’s hands were sweaty on the keyboard. He licked a finger to taste the salt. There was a map on the wall beside him, marked with five colored pins. One pin went through the Vatican embassy in Panama. One was in the Senate Bar in Miami. The others continued northward in a more or less direct line. If extended, the line would pass through Washington, D.C.
Item five: the loa. At death, the ti bon ange survives and returns to live in another body. Each of us has a direct spiritual lineage back through history. After many such renewals, the individual spirit metamorphoses into disembodied, undifferentiated energy. It joins the cosmic pool of life where the loa reside. When a loa is called back, it returns from this pool as a purified, mythological version of itself. The individual ti bon ange has become archetype. The same mythological figures we know as saints of the Catholic Church also appear to the Voudon as loa.
On the evening of December 24, 1989, I convinced several DEA agents to join me in calling forth a loa. We did not call forth a specific spirit by name. We called to our own spiritual ancestors. We asked for a weapon in our struggle against the drug cartels.
“Send us a DEA agent with balls,” Harris shouted. He was laughing, ecstatic to be in his body again. His hands tingled, his lips were numb, his thighs were warm. The war was over and he was not among the dead. It was Christmas Eve. Ruiz and Casteneda and Martin and several others, ties loosened, suit jackets askew, shoes off, danced the dance with Harris in Señora Villejas’s garden. They threw the contents of their drinks into bushes pruned to the shapes of elephants and camels and giraffes. They crushed flowers with their hands, and Martin had unzipped his pants, rezipping them so that a white hothouse iris extended from his crotch. Of course, it hadn’t really been the dance. It had only been something they made up.
I would prefer not to identify the men who joined me in this ceremony since the suggestion was entirely my own. I would like to repeat, in my defense, that I was at this time under the influence of bufotoxin, known for its hallucinogenic properties, as well as alcohol. I was not conducting myself soberly. We did not for a moment believe that we would be successful in calling up such a spirit. The entire enterprise was conducted as a drunken lark.
Clinically speaking, I suppose we were trying to protect ourselves from our fear of the Voudonist by making a joke of it. I had just survived an attack on my soul. That I did not believe in this attack, imagining it to be purely hallucinatory, does not change the fact that I was unnerved by it.
In the light of recent events, however, and with the benefit of hindsight, it seems possible to me that we have underestimated the effectiveness of the South American drug cartel Voudon. The Haitian zombie is typically described as dim and slow-witted. Among our top government officials are men who fit this description, men known also to have been in Latin and South America. The DEA should make a list of these men, meet with them on some pretext, and offer them heavily salted foods.
Ruiz was gaping at him. A z’etoile fell from the sky into the garden. It came in the form of a burning rock. It landed in one of the camel bushes and melted the garden.
The shapes of the flowers and trees remained, but now they were made of fire. The DEA agents burst into flames. Harris could see their shapes, too. They continued to dance, stamping their flaming feet into the liquid fire of the lawn, shaking their flickering hands.
A woman emerged from the camel bush, not a real woman but a woman of flame. She grew larger and larger until she was larger than he was, wrapped her fiery arms around him. The air was so hot he couldn’t breathe it. Harris panicked. He fumbled for the toad in his pocket, remembering how he’d escaped into it once already, but she touched it with one finger, melting it into something small and phallic. She laughed and melted it again, shapeless this time, a puddle of black glass.
“Who are you?” Harris asked, and she told him. Then she scorched the bottoms of his feet until he fainted from the pain and had to be carried home.
The next morning, the toad was in his pocket and his feet were healed. Ruiz came to say good-bye. “Feliz Navidad,” said Ruiz. He brought a present of candied fruits. “Kiss your wife for me. You lucky bastard.”
Harris thanked him for the gift. “Great party,” said Harris carefully.
Ruiz shrugged. “You had a good time,” he agreed. “You were a wild man.”
They said little else. On his way to the airport, Harris directed his taxi past the home of Señora Villejas. The garden was green.
• • •
CARRY’S MOTHER WAS sometimes better when she had new places and people to see. Carry’s father, George, had trouble with his real estate business. The Moores moved often, and they grew poorer. When Carry was ten years old, they moved to Cass County, Missouri. Carry missed Kentucky. She missed Bill and Eliza, who had been sold. She missed her beautiful Kentucky house.
But Cass County was an exciting place to live! Just across the border, in Kansas, people who liked having slaves were fighting with people who didn’t. The people who liked slavery were called bushwhackers. The people who didn’t were called jayhawkers. Kansas had an election to see if they would be a free state with no slaves. Bushwhackers from Missouri took the ballot boxes and said they would count the votes for Kansas.
They said that Kansas had voted to make it illegal to even say that you didn’t like slavery. Anyone who said they didn’t like slavery could be killed. So many died, people began to call the state “Bleeding Kansas.”
This was a hard time for Carry. She went to bed for five years.
Psychologists now say maybe having a mother who thought she was Queen Victoria is what made Carry sick for such a long time. Psychologists are people who study how people feel and behave.
In 1857, her doctor said she had consumption of the bowels.
But George, her father, said her sickness was a punishment for not loving God. He came to see her sometimes in her bedroom. “Why won’t you love God, Carry?” he would ask. He would have tears in his eyes. “You are going to die and break my heart,” he would say.
Carry didn’t want her father to be unhappy. She tried and tried to love God better. Carry thought she was a horrible sinner. Sometimes, when she was a little girl, she stole things for her slaves, little bits of ribbon, spoonfuls of sugar. Her own heart, Carry said, was the blackest, foulest place she ever saw.
One day when Carry was twelve, George took her to a revival meeting. “Who will come to Jesus?” the minister asked. Carry said that she would. Carry had a fever. George was afraid she was about to die, so even though it was winter, the minister and George took her right away to an icy creek. The water was cold! Carry waded into it, and the minister pushed her under.
When she came up, Carry said that she had learned to love God. She made her slaves come to her bedroom so she could preach to them. Carry told them that God sent you troubles because He loved you and wanted you to love Him. God loved Carry so much He made her ill. God loved the slaves so much He made them slaves. Now that Carry loved God, she began to get better, and in two more years she was able to get out of bed.
The slaves thought that since they loved God, maybe they didn’t need to be slaves anymore. They told George they wanted to go to Lawrence, Kansas, where slavery was illegal. Lawrence, Kansas, was very close to Cass County, Missouri.
George told the slaves they were all moving to Texas instead. Texas was very far from Lawrence, Kansas.
Item six: I don’t know where she got the body. A loa usually manifests itself through possession, but I remember no one at the party as large as this woman is reported to be. In addition, I have a memory of the loa materializing out of flame. I need not repeat that I was under the influence of bufotoxin at the time.