Patricia Geary - Strange Toys

I nod, seeing wild goose chases, corridors running into corridors, mementos that turn to dust and surprise you over time. In the partial light of twilight, I take a good long look at the thing hanging around my neck. “Listen—”

He is.

“Want to come to my houseboat for dinner? We could—”

“Fine.”

We take our fresh raspberries out on deck and sit in the canvas chairs. The evening is so lovely, it is like an advertisement for giving up real life and moving into the swamp.

“This is the third night in a row that the moon looks full,” I opine.

Barnett nods. “Maybe this is the third night in a row that it is full. Think of that?”

“But that’s not possible.”

“Oh really?” He tilts back in his chair, one of those overly confident men who will never tilt too far and bruise his butt. “What the hell is a full moon anyway?”

My fourth grade science is rough. After all, that was the year my family tramped around the country. “Well, it’s the night that you can see the whole moon. I mean the whole half of the moon.”

“Now, does that moon up there really change?”

“No.” I sigh. “It just looks like it’s changed because of where we’re standing.”

He grins, his full lips resembling mine in a pout. “Alright! So, if the moon looks full for three nights, why then it is full for three nights.”

“‘Appearances are evil,’” I mutter. “‘But they are everything.’”

“Come again?”

I smile, thinking of Alonso and his double entendres. “That was just something Jean-Paul Sartre said. ‘Appearances are evil, but they are everything.’”

He snorts. “Them Frogs and their ideas.”

The silence, if you can call it that, continues. And all around us, the bayou continues its eat-and-be-eaten agenda.

“Third full moon in a row,” he muses. “That’s the night to do what you’ve been afraid to. Never can tell when you’ve missed your last chance.”

My arms goosepimple up. “Okay,” I say forcefully. “This is it. Now or never. What the hell do you want with me?”

He doesn’t miss a beat. “Honey, the question is the other way around. You called out to me, I came. Here I is. Now then, what do you want?”

“I want you to take me in your pirogue to the place where the boys went into the other world.”

“You sure about this?”

“Absolutely. And I know where that place is going to be.”

“How come?”

“Well, remember the voodoo group we were talking about? Before the shop closed down, I had this sister, and she…”

You’ve already heard the story.

We drive and drive through the back muddy roads of the swamp, me at the wheel and Barnett directing us. After the first fifteen minutes I lose all track of space and then, after however long, all track of time.

“Pull over here,” he’ll say, then hop out for a minute, to study a tree or a bog or the angle of the moon.

A couple of times he lights candles at the roadside, which he pulls from his jacket pocket.

“What are those for?”

He smiles. “Offerings for the ancestors.”

Eventually my back and shoulders get tired, my lats and my delts and my pecs are throbbing from the workout. “Are we going anywhere for real, or are you just torturing me?”

“Patience, babe.”

And silence.

Once he asks, “Honey, would you say that the individual was more important, or that the principle was?”

Think a minute. “Depends on the principle. And the individual.”

“Let’s try a for-instance. For instance, would you die for something you believed in or someone you loved?”

“What are you getting at?” Ah, well, all that is left is forward .

“Just answer.”

I try to think about the “thing” I believe in. And who in the world I love. Aunt Edith, Bread. Julie? Die for them? Die for “good”? And what about the cats. “Yes. Who wants to live forever?”

Out the window, the moon grows ever rounder, ever oranger. It is too large to be innocent.

“Would you die for me?”

My mouth opens with an indignant response, but freezes open. Out of the corner of my eye, Barnett’s body seems to glow. His hair acquires a life of its own, snaky red and pink and fuchsia and mauve and rose and vermillion and crimson and scarlet and flamingo and coral. His gray eyes are like two beams of the searchlight. Is he human?

But of course he is. Only my eyes are tired.

And then, however much time later, he says, “Okay. Here we are.”

We climb out of the jeep and I’d swear this was the same place Alonso and I parked.

And the whole of the swamp is exactly itself, the separate places indistinguishable.

“The boat’s thisaway.”

“Wait a minute. Do we need special clothes? Clothes at all? What about this charm around my neck?”

He laughs softly. “Honey, it don’t matter what you wear. What you think, who you thinking about. At this point, either you got it or you ain’t.”

This is the most sobering thought of all.

And my mind goes completely clear.

Here and now.

Either you are here, here and now.

Or you aren’t.

“Okey-dokey,” he calls. “Climb on in.”

We paddle soundlessly through the thick, dark water. In the moonlight, leaves are glossy, moss is dense as memory. The other denizens of the waterways, the alligators and the shockingly large snakes, ignore us—disguised as a tree trunk, we are part of them. And It.

You think of the Asmat Indians and their Soul Ships. Traveling to visit their ancestors in damp little boats with magnificent carvings.

Our boat is plain but at least it has a bottom.

“Where we’re going,” Barnett says. “Maybe this ain’t what you have in mind.”

“Oh yes it is.”

And we paddle on in the night.

And then I hear it. A low rumble fans out over the bayou. The rumble turns into a chant. And when the chant is clearly audible, the shimmer of fire is there, yards away, right through the trees and the vines.

Dozens of figures clothed in white sway and chant, gathered around a circle enclosed by flickering candles. Inside the circle is an altar, facing east. It is dressed with bottles of dark rum and red wine and coconuts, honey and pieces of hard candy. Behind the altar is a plain pine coffin.

“Is this what you had in mind?” he whispers.

“Yes.”

Conga drums begin. Sammy appears, dressed entirely in white, a white turban decorated with pentangles on his head and a large cigar in his mouth. Walking in a funny, crook-backed way, he alternately spews rum, tosses handfuls of cornmeal into the fire, and issues clouds of cigar smoke.

He is joined by a woman dressed in a full white skirt with many petticoats, a white ruffled overblouse, and many strings of glass beads, carved beads, seeds and seed pods. Her hair is tucked under a white bandanna covered with signs and symbols.

Her energy is down. Even with all the things that ornament her, she appears less a priestess and more a transient in the world of the spirit.

And the face?

Bruised, sickly, and oh so weary.

Deane.

My sister Deane stands in the center of the circle.

As if it were possible to walk over water, and no doubt it is, my body makes to climb out of the pirogue. But Barnett’s hand like a circle of iron clasps my wrist.

“Don’t.”

“Are they really there?”

The moonlight. The water. The lacy trees—

And the way you can see the trees on the other side of these people. I mean, right through them.