A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (16 page)

Take New Orleans, Louisiana, for instance. Napoleon snatched the city from the Spanish, who he defeated in Europe, and then two years later he sold it to the United States. This city was the casual possession of a small man who commanded fire of his own. But the city had a long history even before Napoleon held it. For a hundred years it had been a city with French and Spanish people but with many from the Caribbean, too, the West Indies and elsewhere, black people with fire of a different kind. You can’t live around New Orleans without hearing about voodoo. And one night soon after I learned about Tr
n V
n Ha, I saw a program on our television where a very thin little black man taught hard lessons to his enemies with voodoo. My wife was sitting there with me and I kept my face very calm, never letting her know that I was listening to the voice of history right there in her presence, and even when the thin little black man made some mistakes that let the lumbering Americans catch him, I knew that I had to grow and learn and command the fire once more.

So on the very next day I called in sick to the phone company and I went across the bridge and past the great mandarin hat of the Superdome and down into the French Quarter, where the television and the movies all suggested voodoo was practiced. I walked the main streets of this area and there were boutiques and T-shirt shops and pizza parlors and jazz places and places where women danced whose husbands, if they had the power I once had, would have long ago bombed New Orleans into rubble. But the shop I found among all of this was run by white people, large Americans with neat shelves full of books and jars and dolls that I clearly sensed had nothing to do with the real voodoo.

So I went out of that shop and looked up and down Bourbon Street and I realized that this was all like Tr
n V
n Ha’s Vietnamese restaurant, a phony thing. I went up to the next comer and turned down a side street, then took another turn and another until I was in a cobbled street of narrow little houses with spindlework porches and I walked along and I smiled at the black people on their stoops and I stopped at several of the stoops and asked if there was a voodoo man in the neighborhood. I have learned the lessons of history and I felt a kinship with these people and I was comfortable asking them for help, even though most of them looked at me very strangely. Finally an old man with a gray film in his eyes and a walking stick leaning on the post next to him said to me, “What you want him for?”

I said, “I have a beautiful wife who has a wandering eye.”

The old man nodded and said, “I know that trouble,” and he told me how to find the house of a voodoo man, a Doctor Joseph. He said, “You ax Doctor Joseph what you want. He be a powerful low-down papa.” (I learned later that a papa is what many people call a male voodoo witch. And a “low-down” papa is willing to perform black magic and do evil deeds.)

I thanked the old man and made my way to another street much like the one I’d just left. I found the house, but I was expecting something different. This was like all the other houses, no strange symbols hung over the door or animal bones dangling on string or anything at all, except I did see a tiny sign by the doorbell. I went up onto the porch and the sign was a three-by-five card, laminated and nailed there, and it said, DOCTOR JOSEPH. HARD PROBLEMS SOLVED. If he had a great power like the old man said, then I liked Doctor Joseph already. This was my own style, of course. Low-key. I rang the bell and waited and then Doctor Joseph himself answered the door. I know this because he said so. As if he already knew me and knew what I wanted, he opened the door and instantly said, “I am Doctor Joseph. Come in.”

I stepped into a foyer that smelled of mildew and incense and my eyes were slow, straining to open to the darkness, and I couldn’t see a thing, but I followed in Doctor Joseph’s wake and we entered a front sitting room. He waved his hand and I sat in an enormous soft old chair and I could feel the springs of the cushion beneath me. Doctor Joseph sat opposite me in a cane-backed chair and he had seemed from the moment he opened the door like a very large man, bigger even than any American, but now that he was sitting before me, I could see that I was mistaken. It may have been a little spell he’d cast over me. I hoped so. But now he let me see that he was not big. He was as thin as any Vietnamese and he was a younger man than I’d expected, though this, too, may have been a spell. His eyes were very clear, very large, and the tight black curls of his hair had not the slightest touch of gray. His lower lip pushed up into an inverted smile and he was obviously ready for business, so I began.

I told Doctor Joseph everything about my wife, about the burden I’ve had to bear. I did not tell him that I once used the U.S. Air Force to correct my problems. I am still, at heart, a spy, even in the presence of a low-down papa, though being the papa that he was, he probably knew all of this anyway. After hearing me out, he tented his fingers before him and looked past me to the window where the filmy curtains let in the morning light that illuminated the room. He kept his eyes outside for a long while and I finally looked away from him, too. The room was very small, and except for the two chairs and a wooden pedestal table beside Doctor Joseph, there were no objects at all in the room. The empty walls were very dark in spite of the light from the window, and when I looked closer, they seemed to be actually painted black. There was a heavy curtain at a doorway which must have led to the rest of the house, and perhaps back there were all the potions and mysterious objects of the voodoo doctor. I don’t know. All that was in this room was the smell of incense and the low-down papa’s gaze, which was traveling beyond me.

Finally Doctor Joseph’s eyes came back to my face and when they did, I felt a burning in my sinuses and a weakness in my arms and legs. Then he said, “How much is this woman worth to you?”

I figured he was talking about his fee. I shrugged and he knew what I was thinking because he kind of snorted and said, “You and I will deal with that later. I’m speaking of a different realm. Three times you will have an opportunity to deny her. If you are going to call on the High Heavens, then you best know exactly what you want and exactly how bad you want it.”

I was losing track of his words, but I could sense he wanted some kind of declaration from me before he would proceed. So I gave him the only answer I could possibly give. I did not even think about it. I said, “She is worth bringing fire from heaven.”

Doctor Joseph nodded his head at this and his eyes bored deeper into me. I felt like I was about to sneeze. He said, “I could give you some good gris-gris for the doorstep of this man, but I think something stronger is called for.”

I nodded and I found that I could not raise either of my hands and I twitched my nose at the threatened sneeze, hoping Doctor Joseph would not take this as disrespect. Then he rose from his chair and he did not need to tell me to stay seated because I knew for certain that I had no command of my body at that moment. He disappeared through the curtain and I waited and it struck me that I was not even breathing, but then Doctor Joseph reappeared in the room, a sea wave of incense smells following him. He passed his chair and was looming before me and I sank down, the springs sproinging beneath me, and Doctor Joseph bent over me and I closed my eyes tight. “Here,” he said and something dropped lightly into my lap.

I opened my eyes and he had pulled back. In my lap was a small brown paper parcel and Doctor Joseph said, “Inside is a hog bladder. You will also find a vial of blood. You must fill the bladder with the shit of a he-goat and then pour in the blood, tie up the bladder with a lock of your wife’s hair, and then at the stroke of noon throw the bladder over your rival’s house.”

I nodded dumbly.

Then Doctor Joseph’s inverted smile poked up again from his chin and he waved his hand and I don’t remember getting up and crossing the room and going out the door, though I must have. But I just found myself standing in the street before his house and under my arm in a brown paper parcel was a hog bladder and a vial of the blood of who-knows-what and I was faced with a quest for goat shit. And I thought to myself, What am I doing? I thought of Bu’ó’m’s face and I could see in my mind that it was very beautiful, but history taught that a beautiful woman would always bring torture to her husband. Simply ask the American actor Mickey Rooney. I should drop this paper parcel in the nearest trash can and leave that woman, I thought. It might strike you as strange, but this was not a common thought for me, to just remove myself from the field and let my butterfly flyaway. It was a very uncommon thought. In fact, this may well have been the first time I had it. I later realized that this was also my first opportunity to deny my wife. But the thought vanished as quickly as it came. I pulled the parcel from under my arm and looked at it and I wondered where in New Orleans I would find goat shit.

I am a small man but very clever, and soon I found myself approaching the gate to the petting zoo in Audubon Park. I was in luck, I thought, because it was a weekday morning and there was no one in sight. Just me and a pen full of sheep and goats who were as fidgety as unwilling whores, waiting for the petting that would come at them every day. Before going in, I sat down on a bench to figure out how to handle this. My hands began to work at the string on the parcel, but then I realized that the goat shit didn’t have to go straight into the bladder. I could gather the droppings in something more easily handled and then put them in the bladder later. I was very pleased with myself at this thought. I knew how to plan effectively.

So I got up and went back to the concession stand and ordered a box of popcorn, thinking to dump the com and use the box. I glanced away for a moment, hearing the crunch of popcorn being scooped into the box, but thank Buddha I glanced over to the girl just as she stuck my box under a silver metal spout and reached up to the pump. “No butter!” I cried, and the girl recoiled as if she’d been hit. This could not be helped. I was concerned about inadvertently altering Doctor Joseph’s formula. Who knows what butter might have done?

With the box in hand, however, I grew calm. So much so that I returned to the bench near the petting zoo and sat and ate the popcorn and enjoyed it very much. And this turned out to be a big mistake. I did think to wipe the salt out of the box with my hand-kerchief, but taking the time on the bench to eat the popcorn set up the arrival of a class of schoolchildren just as I stepped into the pen. I heard them laughing and talking and then saw them approaching along a path and I had to decide whether to back out of the pen and sit on the bench and wait for everyone to clear out or head quickly for the goats. The sun was getting high and I figured that it could be one class after another for the rest of the day, so I looked around the pen. There was a scattering of pellets here and there, but I didn’t know exactly what a sheep’s shit might look like and I didn’t want to make a mistake. I spotted a white goat rubbing itself against a wooden post and I went over to it and lingered at its tail.