Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“What’s the difference? Maybe the old guy had some calcification of the liver. Cirrhosis, say.”

“And Atuele cured cirrhosis by giving it to the chicken?”

Donnelly smiled gently. “Atuele wouldn’t say he cured it. He might say that he got a spirit to move the stone from the man to the chicken.”

“A spirit again.”

“He works with spirits. They do his bidding.”

Hilliard looked at his friend. “I’m not sure what happened back there,” he said, “but I can live without knowing. I was in Botswana before they sent me here, and in Chad before that. You see things, and you hear of things. But what I’d really like to know is how seriously you take this guy.”

“Pretty seriously.”

“Why? I mean, I’m willing to believe he cures people, including some specimens the doctors have given up on. Powers of the mind and all that, and if he wants to think it’s spirits, and if his clients believe it, that’s fine for them. But you’re saying it’s more than that, aren’t you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why?”

Donnelly drank his drink. “They say seeing is believing,” he said, “but that’s crap. This afternoon didn’t make a believer out of you, and why should it? But think what an impact it must have had on the old man.”

“What’s your point?”

“I had a ceremony,” Donnelly said. “Nine, ten months ago, just before the July rains. Atuele summoned a spirit and ordered it to enter into me.” He smiled almost apologetically. “It worked,” he said.

The Hilliards’ dinnerwas guinea fowl with a rice stuffing, accompanied by sautéed green beans and a salad. Hilliard wished his wife would get their cook to prepare some of the native specialties. The hotels and all of the better restaurants served a watered-down French cuisine, but he’d eaten a fiery stew at an unassuming place down the street from the embassy that made him want more. Marilyn had passed on his request to the cook, and reported that the woman did not seem to know how to cook Togolese dishes.

“She said they’re very common anyway,” she told him. “Not to Western tastes. You wouldn’t like them, she said.”

“But I do like them. We already know that much.”

“I’m just telling you what she said.”

They ate on the screened patio, with moths buzzing against the screens. Hilliard wondered what moths had done ages ago, before electric lights, before candles, before human campfires. What did their phototropism do for them when the only lights at night were the stars?

“I had lunch with Donnelly,” he said. “I never did get back to the office. He dragged me out of town to see a witch doctor with a college education.”

“Oh?”

He described Atuele briefly, and the ritual they had witnessed. “I don’t know if he was really cured,” he concluded, “or what was wrong with him in the first place, but the change in him was pretty dramatic.”

“He was probably the witch doctor’s uncle.”

“I never thought of that.”

“More likely he believed he was sick, and the witch doctor got him to believe himself well. You know how superstitious they are in places like this.”

“I guess the chicken was superstitious, too.”

She rang for the serving girl, told her to bring more iced tea. To Hilliard she said, “I don’t suppose you’d have to study at the Sorbonne to learn how to kill a chicken.”

He laughed. The girl brought the tea. Hilliard normally drank his unsweetened, but tonight he added two spoons of sugar. He’d been doing this lately. Because life needs a little sweetness, he told himself.

He did not say anything to Marilyn about Donnelly’s ceremony.

“I wasn’t gettinganywhere,” Donnelly had explained. “I was the kind of guy never got fired and never got promoted. What I was, I was never a take-charge kind of a guy.”

“That’s not how you seem.”

The smile again. “Alan, you never knew me before my ceremony. That’s the whole point. I’m changed.”

“A new man.”

“You could say that.”

“Tell me about it,” he’d said, and Donnelly had done just that. Reluctantly, he’d let it drop to Atuele that he’d been overlooked for promotion. Before he knew what was happening, he was admitting things to the shaman he’d never even admitted to himself. That he was ineffectual. That something always held him back. That his timing was off, that he never did the right thing or said the right thing, that when the going got tough he invariably shot himself in the foot.

“He told me I was afflicted,” Donnelly recalled. “That there was an imbalance that ought to be set right. That I needed a spirit.”

“And what happened?”

Donnelly shook his head. “I can’t really talk about that,” he said.

“You’re not allowed? If you talk about it your wish won’t come true?”

“Nothing like that. I mean I literally cannot talk about it. I can’t fit words to the tune. I don’t know exactly what happened.”

“Well, what did you do? You put your hands on a chicken and the poor thing couldn’t peck straight anymore?”

“Nothing like that.”

“Then what? I’m not making fun of you, I’m just trying to get the picture. What happened?”

“There was a ceremony,” Donnelly said. “Lots of people, lots of dancing and drumming. He gave me an herbal preparation that I had to swallow.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It didn’t get me high, if that’s what you’re thinking. It tasted like grass. Not dope, not that kind of grass. The kind cows eat. It tasted like lawn clippings that had started to compost.”

“Yum.”

“It wasn’t that terrible, but not your standard gourmet treat, either. I didn’t get a buzz from it. At least I don’t think I did. Later on I was dancing, and I think I went into a trance.”

“Really.”

“And there was a ritual in which I had to break an egg into a clean white cotton handkerchief, and Atuele rubbed the yolk of the egg into my hair.”

“It sounds like a conditioning treatment.”

“I know. Then they took me into one of the huts and let me go to sleep. I was exhausted, and I slept like a corpse for two or three hours. And then I woke up.”

“And?”

“And I went home.”

“That’s all?”

“And I’ve never been the same again.”

Hilliard looked at him. “You’re serious.”

“Utterly.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know what happened. But something happened. I was different. I acted differently and people reacted to me differently. I had confidence. I commanded respect. I—”

“ Wizard of Oz stuff,” Hilliard said. “All he could give you was what you had all along, but the mumbo jumbo made you think you had confidence, and therefore you had it.”

But Donnelly was shaking his head. “There’s no way I can expect you to believe this,” he said, “because seeing isn’t believing, and neither is hearing. Let me tell you how I experienced it, all right?”

“By all means.”

“I woke up the next morning and nothing was different, I felt the same, except I’d slept very deeply and felt refreshed. But I also felt like an idiot, because I’d danced around like a savage and paid five hundred dollars for the privilege, and—”

“Five hundred dollars!”

“Yes, and—”

“Is that what it costs?”

“It varies, but it’s never cheap. It’s a lot higher relatively for the Togolese who must make up ninety-five percent of his regular clients. I’m sure that old man this afternoon must have paid a hundred dollars, and likely more. What do you give your house servants, twenty-five bucks a month? Believe me, it’s less of a sacrifice for me to come up with five hundred dollars than for a native to part with several months’ wages.”