Zombies: The Recent Dead Part 23

Months later, when Christmas came, my mother picked out my presents, spent hours poring over the discount bins at Toys "R" Us and JCPenney's looking for toys I might like that wouldn't break the bank. When the morning of December twenty-fifth finally came around, I found her asleep on the couch. She'd waited until late to bring out the toys and had fallen asleep wrapping them. When I saw what Santa had brought, I cried. I said they were stupid. I said they were awful.

Like everyone, I've done some s.h.i.tty things in my life. I've hurt good people, most of the time without meaning to. And I've forgiven myself for those misdeeds, because like everyone, I convince myself that the things I do, I do because I must. But I've never forgiven myself for what I said that morning.

My mother had tried to explain, rapidly wiping tears from her eyes before I could see them. She said that there must have been a mix-up. Santa, she explained, had confused our house with someone else's. She said she was surprised it didn't happen more often. But all I could do was cry and whine and complain about how good I'd been all year.

"I know, sweetie," she sniffed, comforting me, hugging me. "You've been so good. We'll write Santa a letter. We'll write him a letter and he'll clear everything up. You just have to give it a little time to get there."

By the following Christmas, I didn't believe in Santa Claus. Yet to this day, my mom still writes "From Santa" on a couple of presents every year.

"I don't get it," Ginger replied when I finished telling the story.

"That's what I think love is."

"But it's such a sad story," she explained. "What does that have to do with me?"

"I love you."

"I love you, too."

The second slow song ended. The DJ came on to announce that the next song would be the final slow number of the evening. I'd reason, years later, that neither of us really loved each other then. I'd also figure that it didn't really matter.

"I love this song," she said. It was a song about dreams, about having a nightmare that the singer's true love had died. "You know, I've never had a nightmare since I've been here. I don't think I've had a single dream."

I looked down at her, at the people staring at us with attraction and disgust.

"I love you," I said again, to the whiskers on her head.

"I love you too," she said as I pulled away, turned around, and began to run.

I found Paul in the gymnasium, trying to dribble a basketball and failing. As I approached, I watched him pick up a ball with both hands and drop it. He swatted at the bouncing thing and missed, waited for it to settle at his feet, then picked it up again. I looked at the floor around him, at the equipment he'd dragged from storage: dodge b.a.l.l.s, footb.a.l.l.s, soccer b.a.l.l.s and nets, tennis rackets, swim caps, and racing hurdles. He was wearing a gym uniform. The shirt was inside-out. I picked up a metal baseball bat, felt the weight. I watched him pick up the basketball again. Outside, moonlight streamed in through the high windows. I held the bat over my shoulder, stood like a major leaguer. I thought about Ginger. I thought about Art's blood in his mom's ice cube trays. I thought about Christmas, and swung the bat.

They were asleep when I got home. The TV was on and the color bars watched over them silently. My father sat at the end of the couch with my mother sprawled out on the adjoining cushions, her head on Pop's lap. The old man's brow was creased, his throat moving and sounding, talking to someone in his dreams. His head ticked to the left and he spoke again, in his throat. His mouth opened suddenly, breathing in.

"Hey," I said quietly. I put a b.l.o.o.d.y hand on his twitching shoulder. "I'm home."

About the Author.

Nik Houser was born in a small town which, when Nik was a boy, made the mistake of selling off the logging rights of a sacred forest which the local Cheyenne elders called Ta'ovo'omeno, or p.i.s.sed-Off Mountain The clear-cut trees were sold to a mill which supplied a variety of companies throughout the region. That Autumn, while writing a paper on Christopher Columbus, Nik's pencil, which had been made from Ta'ovo'omeno wood, came back to life and wrote a report of its own called "My Human Teacher is an Imperialist b.u.t.thead." Nik's teacher did not believe the boy's story about his pencil, though not for long. Undead paper products soon began to terrorize the town. Zombie books made from Ta'ovo'omeno paper would slam shut at the most suspenseful parts. Wooden chairs scooted away when someone tried to sit in them. Soon, the plague spread to anything made of wood: grocery sacks split, to-do lists wandered off, whole wood-frame houses began to creak and sway, ready to fall. One afternoon, Nik found a Post-It note (made from YOU-KNOW-WHAT) stuck to the fridge which read "Gone to find a better son, please die before we return." Nik and his family left town that very night. Recently, Mr. Houser tried to return to the town, only to discover that the covered bridge which lead to it had collapsed. There was no sign of the town beyond. Too many trees blocked the way. Please visit www.nikhouser.com Story Notes.

Other than special thanks to Kit Reed who pointed me in the right direction to find Mr. Houser's story . . . really, what more can I say? Except, maybe, that if they do get that Zombie Channel going, I think this would make a keen basis for a series: Gravestone High School.

Zora and the Zombie.

Andy Duncan.

"What is the truth?" the houngan shouted over the drums. The mambo, in response, flung open her white dress. She was naked beneath. The drummers quickened their tempo as the mambo danced among the columns in a frenzy. Her loose clothing could not keep pace with her kicks, swings, and swivels. Her belt, shawl, kerchief, dress floated free. The mambo flung herself writhing onto the ground. The first man in line shuffled forward on his knees to kiss the truth that glistened between the mambo's thighs.

Zora's pencil point snapped. Ah, s.h.i.t. Sweat-damp and jostled on all sides by the crowd, she fumbled for her penknife and burned with futility. Zora had learned just that morning that the Broadway hoofer and self-proclaimed anthropologist Katherine Dunham, on her Rosenwald fellowship to Haiti-the one that rightfully should have been Zora's-not only witnessed this very truth ceremony a year ago, but for good measure underwent the three-day initiation to become Mama Katherine, bride of the serpent G.o.d Damballa-the heifer!

Three nights later, another houngan knelt at another altar with a platter full of chicken. People in the back began to scream. A man with a terrible face flung himself through the crowd, careened against people, spread chaos. His eyes rolled. The tongue between his teeth drooled blood. "He is mounted!" the people cried. "A loa has made him his horse." The houngan began to turn. The horse crashed into him. The houngan and the horse fell together, limbs entwined. The chicken was mashed into the dirt. The people moaned and sobbed. Zora sighed. She had read this in Herskovitz, and in Johnson, too. Still, maybe poor fictional Tea Cake, rabid, would act like this. In the pandemonium she silently leafed to the novel section of her notebook. "Somethin' got after me in mah sleep, Janie," she had written. "Tried tuh choke me tuh death."

Another night, another compound, another pencil. The dead man sat up, head nodding forward, jaw slack, eyes bulging. Women and men shrieked. The dead man lay back down and was still. The mambo pulled the blanket back over him, tucked it in. Perhaps tomorrow, Zora thought, I will go to Pont Beudet, or to Ville Bonheur. Perhaps something new is happening there.

"Miss Hurston," a woman whispered, her heavy necklace clanking into Zora's shoulder. "Miss Hurston. Have they shared with you what was found a month ago? Walking by daylight in the Ennery road?"

Dr. Legros, chief of staff at the hospital at Gonaives, was a good-looking mulatto of middle years with pomaded hair and a thin mustache. His three-piece suit was all sharp creases and jutting angles, like that of a paper doll, and his handshake left Zora's palm powder dry. He poured her a belt of raw white clairin, minus the nutmeg and peppers that would make it palatable to Guede, the prancing black-clad loa of derision, but breathtaking nonetheless, and as they took dutiful medicinal sips his small talk was all big, all politics: whether Mr. Roosevelt would be true to his word that the Marines would never be back; whether Haiti's good friend Senator King of Utah had larger ambitions; whether America would support President Vincent if the grateful Haitians were to seek to extend his second term beyond the arbitrary date technically mandated by the Const.i.tution. But his eyes-to Zora, who was older than she looked and much older than she claimed-posed an entirely different set of questions. He seemed to view Zora as a sort of plenipotentiary from Washington and only reluctantly allowed her to steer the conversation to the delicate subject of his unusual patient.

"It is important for your countrymen and your sponsors to understand, Miss Hurston, that the beliefs of which you speak are not the beliefs of civilized men, in Haiti or elsewhere. These are Negro beliefs, embarra.s.sing to the rest of us, and confined to the canaille-to the, what is the phrase, the backwater areas, such as your American South. These beliefs belong to Haiti's past, not her future."

Zora mentally placed the good doctor waistcoat-deep in a backwater area of Eatonville, Florida, and set gators upon him. "I understand, Dr. Legros, but I a.s.sure you I'm here for the full picture of your country, not just the Broadway version, the tomtoms and the shouting. But in every ministry, veranda, and salon I visit, why, even in the office of the director-general of the Health Service, what is all educated Haiti talking about but your patient, this unfortunate woman Felicia Felix-Mentor? Would you stuff my ears, shelter me from the topic of the day?"

He laughed, his teeth white and perfect and artificial. Zora, self-conscious of her own teeth, smiled with her lips closed, chin down. This often pa.s.sed for flirtation. Zora wondered what the bright-eyed Dr. Legros thought of the seductive man-eater Erzulie, the most "uncivilized" loa of all. As she slowly crossed her legs, she thought: Huh! What's Erzulie got on Zora, got on me?

"Well, you are right to be interested in the poor creature," the doctor said, pinching a fresh cigarette into his holder while looking neither at it nor at Zora's eyes. "I plan to write a monograph on the subject myself, when the press of duty allows me. Perhaps I should apply for my own Guggenheim, eh? Clement!" He clapped his hands. "Clement! More clairin for our guest, if you please, and mangoes when we return from the yard."

As the doctor led her down the central corridor of the gingerbread Victorian hospital, he steered her around patients in creeping wicker wheelchairs, spat volleys of French at cowed black women in white, and told her the story she already knew, raising his voice whenever pa.s.sing a doorway through which moans were unusually loud.

"In 1907, a young wife and mother in Ennery town died after a brief illness. She had a Christian burial. Her widower and son grieved for a time, then moved on with their lives, as men must do. Empty this basin immediately! Do you hear me, woman? This is a hospital, not a chickenhouse! My pardon. Now we come to a month ago. The Haitian Guard received reports of a madwoman accosting travelers near Ennery. She made her way to a farm and refused to leave, became violently agitated by all attempts to dislodge her. The owner of this family farm was summoned. He took one look at this poor creature and said, 'My G.o.d, it is my sister, dead and buried nearly thirty years.' Watch your step, please."

He held open a French door and ushered her onto a flagstone veranda, out of the hot, close, blood-smelling hospital into the hot, close outdoors, scented with hibiscus, goats, charcoal, and tobacco in bloom. "And all the other family members, too, including her husband and son, have identified her. And so one mystery was solved, and in the process, another took its place."

In the far corner of the dusty, enclosed yard, in the sallow shade of an hourgla.s.s grove, a s.e.xless figure in a white hospital gown stood huddled against the wall, shoulders hunched and back turned, like a child chosen It and counting.

"That's her," said the doctor.

As they approached, one of the hourgla.s.s fruits dropped onto the stony ground and burst with a report like a pistol firing, not three feet behind the huddled figure. She didn't budge.

"It is best not to surprise her," the doctor murmured, hot clairin breath in Zora's ear, hand in the small of her back. "Her movements are . . . unpredictable." As yours are not, Zora thought, stepping away.

The doctor began to hum a tune that sounded like Mama don't want no peas no rice She don't want no coconut oil All she wants is brandy Handy all the time but wasn't. At the sound of his humming, the woman-for woman she was; Zora would resist labeling her as all Haiti had done-sprang forward into the wall with a fleshy smack, as if trying to fling herself face first through the stones, then sprang backward with a half-turn that set her arms to swinging without volition, like pendulums. Her eyes were beads of clouded gla.s.s. The broad lumpish face around them might have been attractive had its muscles displayed any of the tension common to animal life.

In her first brush with theater, years before, Zora had spent months scrubbing bustles and darning epaulets during a tour of that d.a.m.ned Mikado-may Gilbert and Sullivan both lose their heads-and there she learned that putty cheeks and false noses slide into grotesquerie by the final act. This woman's face likewise seemed to have been sweated beneath too long.

All this Zora registered in a second, as she would a face from an elevated train. The woman immediately turned away again, s.n.a.t.c.hed down a slim hourgla.s.s branch and slashed the ground, back and forth, as a machete slashes through cane. The three attached fruits blew up, bang bang bang, seeds clouding outward, as she flailed the branch in the dirt.

"What is she doing?"

"She sweeps," the doctor said. "She fears being caught idle, for idle servants are beaten. In some quarters." He tried to reach around the suddenly nimble woman and take the branch.

"Nnnnn," she said, twisting away, still slashing the dirt.

"Behave yourself, Felicia. This visitor wants to speak with you."

"Please leave her be," Zora said, ashamed because the name Felicia jarred when applied to this wretch. "I didn't mean to disturb her."

Ignoring this, the doctor, eyes shining, stopped the slashing movements by seizing the woman's skinny wrist and holding it aloft. The patient froze, knees bent in a half-crouch, head averted as if awaiting a blow. With his free hand, the doctor, still humming, still watching the woman's face, pried her fingers from the branch one by one, then flung it aside, nearly swatting Zora. The patient continued saying "Nnnnn, nnnnn, nnnnn" at metronomic intervals. The sound lacked any note of panic or protest, any communicative tonality whatsoever, was instead a simple emission, like the whistle of a turpentine cooker.

"Felicia?" Zora asked.

"Nnnnn, nnnnn, nnnnn."

"My name is Zora, and I come from Florida, in the United States."

"Nnnnn, nnnnn, nnnnn."

"I have heard her make one other noise only," said the doctor, still holding up her arm as if she were Joe Louis, "and that is when she is bathed or touched with water-a sound like a mouse that is trod upon. I will demonstrate. Where is that hose?"

"No need for that!" Zora cried. "Release her, please."

The doctor did so. Felicia scuttled away, clutched and lifted the hem of her gown until her face was covered and her b.u.t.tocks bared. Zora thought of her mother's wake, where her aunts and cousins had greeted each fresh burst of tears by flipping their ap.r.o.ns over their heads and rushing into the kitchen to mewl together like nestlings. Thank G.o.d for ap.r.o.ns, Zora thought. Felicia's legs, to Zora's surprise, were ropy with muscle.

"Such strength," the doctor murmured, "and so untamed. You realize, Miss Hurston, that when she was found squatting in the road, she was as naked as all mankind."

A horsefly droned past.

The doctor cleared his throat, clasped his hands behind his back, and began to orate, as if addressing a medical society at Columbia. "It is interesting to speculate on the drugs used to rob a sentient being of her reason, of her will. The ingredients, even the means of administration, are most jealously guarded secrets."

He paced toward the hospital, not looking at Zora, and did not raise his voice as he spoke of herbs and powders, salves and cuc.u.mbers, as if certain she walked alongside him, unbidden. Instead she stooped and hefted the branch Felicia had wielded. It was much heavier than she had a.s.sumed, so lightly had Felicia s.n.a.t.c.hed it down. Zora tugged at one of its twigs and found the dense, rubbery wood quite resistant. Lucky for the doctor that anger seemed to be among the emotions cooked away. What emotions were left? Fear remained, certainly. And what else?

Zora dropped the branch next to a gouge in the dirt that, as she glanced at it, seemed to resolve itself into the letter M.

"Miss Hurston?" called the doctor from halfway across the yard. "I beg your pardon. You have seen enough, have you not?"

Zora knelt, her hands outstretched as if to encompa.s.s, to contain, the scratches that Felicia Felix-Mentor had slashed with the branch. Yes, that was definitely an M, and that vertical slash could be an I, and that next one- MI HAUT MI BAS.

Half high, half low?

Dr. Boas at Barnard liked to say that one began to understand a people only when one began to think in their language. Now, as she knelt in the hospital yard, staring at the words Felicia Felix-Mentor had left in the dirt, a phrase welled from her lips that she had heard often in Haiti but never felt before, a Creole phrase used to mean "So be it," to mean "Amen," to mean "There you have it," to mean whatever one chose it to mean but always conveying a more or less resigned acquiescence to the world and all its marvels.

"Ah bo bo," Zora said.

"Miss Hurston?" The doctor's dusty wingtips entered her vision, stood on the delicate pattern Zora had teased from the dirt, a pattern that began to disintegrate outward from the shoes, as if they produced a breeze or tidal eddy. "Are you suffering perhaps the digestion? Often the peasant spices can disrupt refined systems. Might I have Clement bring you a soda? Or"-and here his voice took on new excitement-"could this be perhaps a feminine complaint?"

"No, thank you, doctor," Zora said as she stood, ignoring his outstretched hand. "May I please, do you think, return tomorrow with my camera?"

She intended the request to sound casual but failed. Not in Dumballa Calls, not in The White King of La Gonave, not in The Magic Island, not in any best-seller ever served up to the Haiti-loving American public had anyone ever included a photograph of a Zombie.

As she held her breath, the doctor squinted and glanced from Zora to the patient and back, as if suspecting the two women of collusion. He loudly sucked a tooth. "It is impossible, madame," he said. "Tomorrow I must away to Port-de-Paix, leaving at dawn and not returning for-"

"It must be tomorrow!" Zora blurted, hastily adding, "because the next day I have an appointment in . . . Petionville." To obscure that slightest of pauses, she gushed, "Oh, Dr. Legros," and dimpled his tailored shoulder with her forefinger. "Until we have the pleasure of meeting again, surely you won't deny me this one small token of your regard?"

Since she was a sprat of thirteen sashaying around the gatepost in Eatonville, slowing Yankees aboil for Winter Park or Sunken Gardens or the Weeki Wachee with a wink and a wave, Zora had viewed s.e.xuality, like other talents, as a bank of backstage switches to be flipped separately or together to achieve specific effects-a spotlight glare, a thunderstorm, the slow, seeping warmth of dawn. Few switches were needed for everyday use, and certainly not for Dr. Legros, who was the most everyday of men.

"But of course," the doctor said, his body ready and still. "Dr. Belfong will expect you, and I will ensure that he extend you every courtesy. And then, Miss Hurston, we will compare travel notes on another day, n'est-ce pas?"

As she stepped onto the veranda, Zora looked back. Felicia Felix-Mentor stood in the middle of the yard, arms wrapped across her torso as if chilled, rocking on the b.a.l.l.s of her calloused feet. She was looking at Zora, if at anything. Behind her, a dusty flamingo high-stepped across the yard.

Zora found signboards in Haiti fairly easy to understand in French, but the English ones were a different story. As she wedged herself into a seat in the crowded tap-tap that rattled twice a day between Gonaives and Port-au-Prince, she found herself facing a stern injunction above the grimy, cracked windshield: "Pa.s.sengers Are Not Permitted To Stand Forward While the Bus Is Either at a Standstill or Approaching in Motion."

As the bus lurched forward, tires spinning, gears grinding, the driver loudly recited: "Dear clients, let us pray to the Good G.o.d and to all the most merciful martyrs in heaven that we may be delivered safely unto our chosen destination. Amen."

Amen, Zora thought despite herself, already jotting in her notebook. The beautiful woman in the window seat beside her shifted sideways to give Zora's elbow more room, and Zora absently flashed her a smile. At the top of the page she wrote, "Felicia Felix-Mentor," the hyphen jagging upward from a pothole. Then she added a question mark and tapped the pencil against her teeth.

Who had Felicia been, and what life had she led? Where was her family? Of these matters, Dr. Legros refused to speak. Maybe the family had abandoned its feeble relative, or worse. The poor woman may have been brutalized into her present state. Such things happened at the hands of family members, Zora knew.

Zora found herself doodling a shambling figure, arms outstretched. Nothing like Felicia, she conceded. More like Mr. Karloff's monster. Several years before, in New York to put together a Broadway production that came to nothing, Zora had wandered, depressed and whimsical, into a Times Square movie theater to see a foolish horror movie t.i.tled White Zombie. The swaying sugar cane on the poster ("She was not dead . . . She was not alive . . . WHAT WAS SHE?") suggested, however spuriously, Haiti, which even then Zora hoped to visit one day. Bela Lugosi in Mephistophelean whiskers proved about as Haitian as Fannie Hurst, and his Zombies, stalking bug-eyed and stiff-legged around the tatty sets, all looked white to Zora, so she couldn't grasp the urgency of the t.i.tle, whatever Lugosi's designs on the heroine. Raising Zombies just to staff a sugar mill, moreover, struck her as wasted effort, since many a live Haitian (or Floridian) would work a full Depression day for as little pay as any Zombie and do a better job too. Still, she admired how the movie Zombies walked mindlessly to their doom off the parapet of Lugosi's castle, just as the fanatic soldiers of the mad Haitian King Henri Christophe were supposed to have done from the heights of the Citadel LaFerriere.

But suppose Felicia were a Zombie-in Haitian terms, anyway? Not a supernaturally revived corpse, but a sort of combined kidnap and poisoning victim, released or abandoned by her captor, her bocor, after three decades.

Supposedly, the bocor stole a victim's soul by mounting a horse backward, facing the tail, and riding by night to her house. There he knelt on the doorstep, pressed his face against the crack beneath the door, bared his teeth, and sssssssst! He inhaled the soul of the sleeping woman, breathed her right into his lungs. And then the bocor would have marched Felicia (so the tales went) past her house the next night, her first night as a Zombie, to prevent her ever recognizing it or seeking it again.

Yet Felicia had sought out the family farm, however late. Maybe something had gone wrong with the spell. Maybe someone had fed her salt-the hair-of-the-dog remedy for years-long Zombie hangovers. Where, then, was Felicia's bocor? Why hold her prisoner all this time, but no longer? Had he died, setting his charge free to wander? Had he other charges, other Zombies? How had Felicia become both victim and escapee?

"And how do you like your Zombie, Miss Hurston?"

Zora started. The beautiful pa.s.senger beside her had spoken.

"I beg your pardon!" Zora instinctively shut her notebook. "I do not believe we have met, Miss . . . ?"

The wide-mouthed stranger laughed merrily, her opalescent earrings shimmering on her high cheekbones. One ringlet of brown hair spilled onto her forehead from beneath her kerchief, which like her tight-fitting, high-necked dress was an ever-swirling riot of color. Her heavy gold necklace was nearly lost in it. Her skin was two parts cream to one part coffee. Antebellum New Orleans would have been at this woman's feet, in private, behind latched shutters.

"Ah, I knew you did not recognize me, Miss Hurston." Her accent made the first syllable of "Hurston" a prolonged purr. "We met in Archahaie, in the hounfort of Dieu Donnez St. Leger, during the rite of the fishhook of the dead." She bulged her eyes and sat forward slack-jawed, then fell back, clapping her hands with delight, ruby ring flashing, at her pa.s.sable imitation of a dead man.

"You may call me Freida. It is I, Miss Hurston, who first told you of the Zombie Felix-Mentor."

Their exchange in the sweltering crowd had been brief and confused, but Zora could have sworn that her informant that night had been an older, plainer woman. Still, Zora probably hadn't looked her best, either. The deacons and mothers back home would deny it, but many a worshipper looked better outside church than in.

Zora apologized for her absentmindedness, thanked this-Freida?-for her tip, and told her some of her hospital visit. She left out the message in the dirt, if message it was, but mused aloud: "Today we lock the poor woman away, but who knows? Once she may have had a place of honor, as a messenger touched by the G.o.ds."

"No, no, no, no, no, no, no," said Freida in a forceful singsong. "No! The G.o.ds did not take her powers away." She leaned in, became conspiratorial. "Some man, and only a man, did that. You saw. You know."

Zora, teasing, said, "Ah, so you have experience with men."

"None more," Freida stated. Then she smiled. "Ah bo bo. That is night talk. Let us speak instead of daylight things."

The two women chatted happily for a bouncing half-hour, Freida questioning and Zora answering-talking about her Haiti book, the sights of New York, the smell of the turpentine harvest in the Florida pines. It was good to be questioned herself for a change, after collecting from others all the time. The tap-tap jolted along, ladling dust equally onto all who shared the road: mounted columns of Haitian Guards, shelf-hipped laundresses, half-dead donkeys laden with guinea-gra.s.s. The day's shadows lengthened.