Any Minute Now (32 page)

She coughed, and for a moment White felt certain she was going to be violently ill, but then she caught hold of herself, or perhaps he was wrong altogether.

In any event, she went on, but seemingly in a different vein: “Albin, do you know what a chimera is?”

He nodded. “Nowadays, the word is used to define a terrible vision, but I believe it's a mythological beast of some sort.”

“When I was little, my uncle Felix used to read to me from Homer.
The Odyssey
, can you imagine?” She gave a little snort. “He started with
The Iliad
, but I couldn't bear it—all that blood shed for the stupidest of reasons.” She sipped her mezcal, seeming to have calmed a bit. “So
The Odyssey
. Man, I loved those strange creatures and people, you know? So, anyway, it was Homer who first described the chimera and, if you can believe it, I remember the passage. Let me think now, oh yes, ‘a thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle, and snorting out the breath of the terrible flame of bright fire.'”

She looked up from her mezcal, and White was startled to see that her eyes were enlarged with tears. “They raped me, Albin, one at a time. Then they poured liquor all over me, and all three took me together, like a three-headed monster, like chimera: snake, lion, goat.”

In the silence that ensued, the small, everyday sounds of the cantina came rushing in: the clatter of plates, the call of orders, the ring of the cook's bell, the murmur of small talk, an occasional burst of laughter that to White felt absurdly out of place.

He cleared his throat. “What happened then, Lucy?”

“What happened then?” She blinked. “They left me there, smeared with my own blood, their sweat, and their semen. But what did it matter? The deed had been done. To them, I was nothing more than a lump of clay. I had no warmth, no heartbeat, no breath. I was dead to them, as I always had been.”

“I'm sorry,” White said, surprising himself that he actually meant it.

“Why should you be sorry? You're not a woman.”

And in just those few words she had put him in his place, had defined the unfathomable space between them, had made him see that whatever he thought he knew about women and life, he didn't. He should have felt resentful, angry even. He imagined he would have with anyone else. But Lucy Orteño had a quality he could not describe, let alone understand. However, there was one thing he knew for a fact: he would never let anything bad happen to her again.

 

33

The spinal cord is made up of nerve fiber bundles that deliver messages from the brain to the body. These bundles, protected from trauma by the bones of the spine, run down from the base of the brain through a canal in the center of those bones. This is the network that carries messages back and forth from brain to body and vice versa.

This simple anatomy lesson had been explained to Whitman not by a doctor, nurse, or neurosurgeon, but by a man apparently of middle years with no formal medical training. He didn't call himself a doctor, or anything of the sort. Yet people came from all over the bayou to seek his counsel and, in some cases, feel his hands upon them.

The man had extraordinary hands—long and slender of finger, their movements both supple and subtle, as if they had not aged past twenty years or so. The man's name was Preach—at least that's what the locals called him, though Whitman finally discovered his family name was Desmortiers. The boy on the bike Whitman had met that morning in southern Louisiana was in some way attached to Preach, though later he discovered they were not related. Preach was not married—never had been—and he had no children. But there was something odd about that kid that had stuck in Whitman's mind. Maybe it was the fact that he had the black shiny eyes of a crow.

Preach was a man with prematurely white hair, long on top, so short on the sides his skull was visible. His eyes were the palest blue Whitman had ever seen. His long, crooked nose and thin lips gave him a cruel countenance, but he welcomed Whitman cordially enough. He was bare to the waist, sweat pouring off him in thick rivulets. Whitman couldn't help but notice the deep crater in the right side of his back, lacquered with skin so shiny it almost glowed.

“I was shot with an arrow,” Preach said, clearly noting the direction of Whitman's gaze. “When I was just about that boy's age. Left for dead.”

“I'm sorry,” Whitman said.

“Why? You didn't do it.” He turned to face Whitman, revealing another, smaller pucker in the flesh of his chest. “Plus which, I've survived worse—a gunshot, for one.”

After that, Whitman got down to business. He told Preach that he had been sent to the bayous to learn.

“Learn our crooked ways,” Preach said with a glint in his eyes. “And I don't mean corrupt, fraudulent, or faithless.” He looked Whitman over. “I dunno. Can't learn nuthin' here lest you have the gift. D'you have the gift, Mr. Whitman?”

“I'm not sure.”

Preach grinned, his teeth as yellow and snaggled as a dragon's. “Well, then, let's you an' me find out.”

Preach worked him all that afternoon and late into the night. An hour or two after midnight—time in Preach's presence was as malleable as it was uncertain—he sat back from the fire he'd made and said, “Okay, then. Ask your questions.”

Whitman did just that.

“This is how we create zombies,” Preach said near the end of their time together. “And this is how we return them to a normal state.”

All the skills Preach had taught him Whitman now brought to bear on Flix, for he suspected that the poppy-based alkaloid drug administered to his friend was having much the same effect as Preach's zombification ritual.

“You've got that look on your face,” Charlie said, squatting beside him. “That look you had when you came from the Well.”

Whitman, concentrating on what he needed to do, said nothing.

Charlie licked her lips nervously as she watched Flix. “Will this work?”

“Hold his hand, if he becomes agitated.”

“You mean restrain him.”

“No, I mean precisely what I said,” Whitman said as slowly as if he were speaking to a child. “Flix doesn't need to be restrained; he needs to be grounded by a human touch.”

“Right. Got it.” Charlie nodded. “Okay.”

But her question,
Will this work?
still hovered in the air between them.

Of course, if he was wrong, Flix was doomed, but Whitman chose not to dwell on that possibility. It was Preach who had said, “In negative thoughts lie your destruction.”

Palpating the base of Flix's skull, he found the channel where the main nerve bundles resided. Tracing the line down, he came to the nape of Flix's neck, and found it abnormally stiff, as if it were a slab of steel instead of flesh, blood, meningeal fluid, and articulated bone. This partial paralysis was not unfamiliar to him. Preach had made him run his fingertips up and down the neck of a member of his “parish” who he had zombified to keep him alive after a horrendous accident. Whitman should have been reassured that he was on the right track, but Flix's paralysis was much worse.

Well, there was no help for it but to press on.

With his fingertips at the base of Flix's skull, he said very softly to Charlie, “Take his hand. Now.”

Charlie did as he asked, and he began. There were twelve cranial nerves. The one Whitman needed to get to was the trigeminal. As its name implied, it was divided into three branches. The problem, again, was the paralytic that was a part of the injection given to Flix, in effect making the nape of his neck armor-plated. The only recourse was to try and access the vagus nerve, which affected the esophagus, chest, and heart. Interrupting the vagus signals would cause brief unconsciousness and thus a lessening of the paralysis. The problem was if Whitman wasn't careful, if he couldn't get the vagus functioning in time, Flix would die.

But what choice did he have? With Charlie holding his friend's hand, he found the vagus, which was far easier to get to, and, as Preach had taught him, interrupted its signals. Immediately, Flix's eyes rolled up in his head and he slumped, unconscious, into Whitman's arms.

“What's happening?” Charlie cried, alarmed.

“Don't worry,” Whitman assured her. “Keep hold of his hand. And get those dog tags out of the way.”

With her free hand, Charlie scooped up the pile of dog tags Flix had dropped on the ground.

Whitman's fingertips searched for Flix's trigeminal nerve. Seconds ticked by, but he forced himself to slow down, to calmly find his way through the loosened paralysis to the right spot. Flix's heart had stopped. His breath was stilled. And Whitman's fingertips were up against what felt like a bar of steel, the last, most powerful defense the poppy alkaloid serum had created to protect itself from being interfered with.

In short, Flix was dying, and Whitman didn't think there was a damn thing he could do about it.

*   *   *

“Did you kill them?”

Lucy put down her fork. “What?”

“It's a simple enough question,” White said. “Did you kill the men who raped you?”

“I never saw them again.”

Lucy went back to eating. She seemed oblivious to the fact that the tacos had grown cold, the lard in the refried beans was congealing. To White, the food was slops, fit only for dogs. But then he hadn't been where she had been, hadn't suffered as she had suffered. Watching her now shovel the food into her mouth with a single-minded concentration, he caught an inkling of just what a privileged life he had led. Despite his innate hatred of Caucasians, despite being hyper-aware of his origins, the indignities that had been visited on his great-grandfather, he was an inauthentic African American. He'd been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, had never suffered even a fraction of what his forebears had. He was far too wealthy and powerful for any white man to insult him, even in jest.

In contrast, what did Lucy Orteño have? Nothing. He wondered now whether she was telling the truth. If it had been him he would have moved heaven and earth to find those men and punish them. She looked to be the kind of person who would do that—who had, in fact, done it, but short of coaxing a confession from her he would never know the truth.

He wondered whether, in the end, it mattered. She was ripe for dealing death. He recognized the flinty spark in her eyes, in the fierceness of her demeanor. She had descended into the depths of hell and had emerged still alive, if not unscathed.

At that moment, she picked her head up, wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “I want to ask you a question.”

“Anything,” White said, once again surprising himself because he meant it.

“Was that carving there when you built the Well?”

“No, it was carved by one of our members.” He paused, his expression turning thoughtful. “One of our ex-members, I should say.”

“Can you tell me which one?”

“I shouldn't.”

“You said I could ask you anything.”

She was right, he had, and he was nothing if not a man of his word. “Well, okay. You might even know him since he's a friend of your uncle Felix. Gregory Whitman finished carving that alchemical symbol a day before the waterfall began to churn the surface of the
cenote
.”

*   *   *

“He's dying,” Charlie said.

“Tell me something I don't know.” Whitman could tell Flix was on the verge of death, and in a minute or so, even if he managed to revive his friend, he'd be worse than dead, his brain deprived of oxygen for too long.

Whitman closed his eyes, imagined Preach's delicate-boned hands, felt Preach's presence mixing with his own gift—as Preach had called it—still a mystery to him. And there it was! All three branches of the trigeminal beneath his fingertips. He sensed the blockages the alkaloid cocktail had set up, interfering with the nerve messages between Flix's brain and his body.

Quickly now, he manipulated the nerves as he had been taught, playing them like the strings of a violin. He wasn't yet quite done, but he couldn't wait any longer. With his free hand, he stimulated the vagus nerve. At once, Flix sucked in a lungful of air, his heart beat strongly, and, as his eyelids fluttered open, Whitman completed reestablishing the brain-body connection through the trigeminal.

Flix's eyes were clouded, out of focus. Whitman slapped him hard across one cheek, then the next, much as an ob-gyn will slap a newborn's behind to wake him to the new world.

Flix gasped, his eyes focused, staring up at Whitman.

“C
ompadre
,” he said through a thickened tongue, “I sure could use a shot of tequila right about now.”

Whitman laughed, and Flix, clearly feeling his old self come flooding back to him, turned his head to look at Charlie.

“You're holding my hand.”

“I can drop it, if you'd rather.”

“Thanks,” Flix said. “Thanks for that.”

Charlie's gaze drifted over his head to lock onto Whitman's face for a moment. “Anytime,” she said. “We're all in this together.” Then she broke contact with him and rose. “There's no tequila here, but water will be better for you anyway.”

“Flix,” Whitman said, as Charlie went back into the villa. “Tell me how you feel.”

Flix ran his tongue around his parched lips. “Once, when I was a kid, I was real sick. I don't recall what it was, but my temperature spiked to 104, 105. Two days later, it broke. I feel now like I felt then. Like I'd come out the other side of a hallucination or a nightmare.” He shook his head. “To be honest, Whit, I don't remember much of what happened since we've been here.” His expression turned troubled. “Except … something … I don't know…”

He was interrupted by Charlie returning with a large glass of iced water. He drank it greedily, over Whitman's admonition to take it slow. When he had drained the glass he put it down beside him. That's when he saw the clutch of dog tags dangling from Charlie's fingers.