“Look, I need to get Pinky’s car back to him,” I tell him. “I can come back later.”
“No, no, no, no.” He draws his open hand down over his face. “I tell you now what I know about Byron. I might know one or two thing. We can hope-” He makes a gesture, his hands rising into the air. “We can hope it help you.”
My mood sinks. It doesn’t sound like he’s got any hard information about Boudreaux’s whereabouts.
We’re interrupted when a woman arrives. She wears a long faded dress and has bare feet. She’s nervous and very deferential to Diment. She holds a white rooster in her arms, confining it in such a way that it does not struggle. Diment makes a little bow in my direction and gets up to inspect the bird. He pulls its wings up and pushes its feathers apart here and there. The bird makes a clucking sound every once in a while and moves its head in little jerks, its red comb wobbling, its bright eyes staring. “It’s good,” Diment says, and instructs the woman to put the chicken into an empty pen. The bird goes inside in a flurry of squawks and feathers. The woman closes the pen by inserting a stick through a double loop of vine.
“She bring this for the sacrifice,” Diment says, when the woman leaves. “She come back later. You are here first.”
My mind vaults to the chicken blood on Kevin’s shirt, the one the police found in my closet.
“You’re going to sacrifice it?” Until Diment spoke of sacrifice, I’d been thinking the hen was there to lay eggs. And the rooster, was – I don’t know – a pet.
Diment nods. “You don’t like this.”
I shake my head as if to dismiss his idea, but he’s right, of course.
“That don’t surprise me. You think it primitive, I’m right?”
“I guess.”
“Sacrifice the core to all worship, go way back, all the way back, I’m thinking. The god or the gods create the entire world and give you life in it. To honor the god, you perform the ritual, you give him back one of his creature, you give the life of thing back to nourish him.
“Sometime, we have hard times. We have drought or the animals fall sick. Yet even then the animal for the sacrifice cannot have disease. Cannot have flaw. So to give the healthy animal back in hard times, that hard to do. But hard times when you need the loa most of all, yes?”
“I understand the idea, but-”
Diment makes a harsh and dismissive gesture, puts his hand on my arm. “Let me ask you one thing: You a Christian man?”
“Sort of.”
“The Christian faith built on sacrifice, you understanding, yes? God ask Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac, then God relent. He take a lamb, instead. He take a lamb instead of Isaac. He take a life. No, he not require the son of Abraham, but God require this of himself. He sacrifice his only son, let him to die up on the cross in the hot sun, spill his own son’s blood, take his own son’s life. Not a chicken, not a bull, not a lamb – his only son. And Jesus, he know ahead of time. Don’t he say at the Last Supper – ‘This is my body, this is my blood.’ The communion – this rite. It’s about sacrifice, no? You drink Jesus blood, you eat his body.”
“You’re right,” I tell him. “You’re absolutely right. But-”
“You still think to kill the chicken – this somehow backward, yes? Let me ask you: How you respect life if you don’t respect death? Let me tell you – you think I a bloodthirsty man, I like to spill the blood?”
“No. But-”
“You live in your head,” Diment says, shaking his own head sadly. “Alex, you must also live in your body.” He thumps his chest. “You must live in here. You must learn to live in here.”
“I live in my body.”
“No. Three hours out of the ground and already you back up here.” He touches his head and sighs, a deep, fatigued sound.
“I’m sorry.”
He shakes his head.
“I think maybe Byron still practices sacrifice,” I tell him. “He left one of the boys’ T-shirts at my house, soaked in blood. It made the police think I’d killed my sons… until they tested the blood.”
“Byron – he like to kill things, yes?”
I don’t know what to say.
He holds out a hand toward me in a gesture of… benediction. “No. Byron… like the owl or the panther.” He shakes his head. “He hunts, he spill blood for his own self, to slake his own thirst. I try to teach him how to use that, but…” He shakes his head.
“What do you mean?”
“That dog,” Diment says. “He come my way, about that time. I tell him that dog was a waste. I tell him, ‘you piss away your power, boy, you got nothin’ left.’ And he ask, what power is that? So I tell him: the power you get when you put the hurt on things. The power you get when creatures be dyin’. The power of the sacrifice, yes?”
“And what did Byron say?”
Diment shrugs. “He asked me to teach him.”
“About what?”
“Magic.”
“Like card tricks?”
Diment shakes his head. “No, no, no. He already know that kind of thing. Byron – he could make you look the wrong way, every time. He wanted to know about the Mysteries. He wanted to know about the sacrifice, what we call the ‘real magic.’”
“And you could teach him that?”
“Oh, yes. But I can’t talk of this with you. You don’t understand. You don’t even understand your own faith about sacrifice. I tell you this: Something look like magic, this not always so.” He taps his temple. “You can’t see what happen, you can’t see the true cause.”
“But you could talk about it with Byron?”
He nods. “I could teach him. I did teach him.”
“Like what? What did you teach him?”
“I teach him the loa, the signs and the meanings, the sacrifice, the dance, everything to bring the power of the other world into this world. How to help the spirit move on when somebody die. How every spirit have a place in this world, how to get the spirit come here without they hurt you. How to make the juju, the mojo, the veve. How to do every kind of thing I know how to do. Even how to get the spirit on your side to put the hurt on someone. I teach Byron everything I know. I teach him the herbs and leaves. And he use that to kill.”
“His father.”
“Yes.” Diment nods slowly. “I teach him the ways. But he not really learn.”
“What do you mean?”
But Diment just shakes his head. “He use everything only for Byron. That not the way. That the very first thing I try to teach him, with the little dog. He pretend to learn. But he stay the same way. The same Byron.” I see tears in Diment’s eyes. He shakes his head hard, as if to dispel them. “He come by here when he gets out, you know that?”
“From Port Sulfur?”
“Yes.” He wags his head. “After those many year. He spend a few days with me. I hope… he’s changed. So many years, he’s a man now. But-” He shakes his head. “He the same Byron, only stronger. I am happy when he go away again.” Abruptly, Diment stands up.
“You come.”
I follow him inside, into the room with the altar. He steps forward, mumbles something, and plucks from the crowded array of objects what looks like a postcard. He hands it to me.
The light is bad – just a couple of candles and the Christmas tree lights. And what I’m looking at reminds me of the cards opticians use to test for color blindness.
“What is this?”
“You look,” Diment says.
It still seems to be no more than a smear of colors. I have to stare at it for three or four minutes before it gives up its secret. Concealed within a field of bloodred blobs are a pair of clownlike faces, their eyes gazing implacably at the viewer.
“What is this?”
“Turn it over.”
A printed note identifies the painting as