Adam Levin - The Instructions

“I promise!” said Maholtz. Bam let go and Maholtz hid his face.

Some kids I couldn’t see were singing, “Next stop, Frontier Motel/ the place where Gurion’s fat black dad who fell dwells.” Was it the bandkids? Is that why they’d apologized? The song was definitely coming from toward the front of the bus.

I stood up to check, but then, in this whisper that seemed to project like a shout — even as it managed, because of its whisperiness, to sound like the voice of total reason, like he was explaining something neutral and scholarly — Bam, leaning further into the aisle, said to me, “I don’t like Benji Nakamook, but I do respect him.”

I should have left right then. If Bam wasn’t starting up with me, I couldn’t fight him — even if I’d wanted to, Benji had my word — and if I couldn’t fight him, I had no good moves. With every beat that passed, although I didn’t quite know it yet (I rarely ever trickled; the feeling was foreign), I was losing snat. Yet instead of leaving, I sat back down. I sat back down and tried to caulk. That like-and-respect line was just too tempting; I’d heard it in movies and never thought it meant much — all its abstraction, its gangster profundity. I thought I’d caught Slokum speaking out of his depth.

And so I played dumb, to get him to talk more.

I said, I’ve never really understood what that means — you like a person, but you don’t respect him. Sounds like nonsense.

Bam said, “It means I want to empty your best friend’s face but I wouldn’t want to do that if I didn’t know how much snat was behind it.”

I thought: So much for caulking.

And yet I caulked more.

I said, Why should I care what you think about Benji, anyway?

Bam whispered, “Should? Who said should? I’m not the one who told you you should. That said, it’s pretty normal you care what I think of him — you’re his friend. But the thing is, you want to be my friend, too — why wouldn’t you, right? We’re sitting here, talking, totally peace. The thing is, you want to be my friend too, but you don’t believe you can be a friend to both of us. Why is that, Gurion? Did I say you couldn’t? I’m not really asking that. I know I didn’t say it. So who was it said you can’t be my friend? Actually, I guess I’m not asking that either. We know who said it. What I guess I’m asking is why you would listen. That’s a question for real. You don’t have to answer out loud you don’t want to, you think it’ll somehow betray him or whatever. I understand. Believe.”

I don’t need your—

“Permission. Right. I know. You don’t need my permission to speak or withhold. I didn’t even kind of mean it that way, kid — colloquial trappings, my mistake. And I know you think you’re trickling, here, but you’re the only one who thinks that. All you’re really doing is hearing me out, and listening never compromised anyone.”

The bus stopped in front of the Frontier Motel, balding brakes squealing; Bam paused til they quit.

“You want me to put out my hand?” he said. “I’m gonna do the friendly thing and put out my hand. I’m gonna put out my hand just so you can refuse it, and when you refuse it, you’ll see what I do. You’ll see I’ll do nothing. So here goes,” he said. “Get ready for victory.”

He put out his hand. I walked past his hand. I went to the wheel-well seat for my bag. I banged fists with Vincie and crept off the bus.

Flowers kneeled on a striped blanket, arranging pebbles and sticks in the mud under an evergreen shrub along the outer wall of the Frontier’s Welcome Office. He sang his spells quietly, almost mumbling them, so no one could make out the words. A generator next to the shrub gave the songs extra cover with its fan-noise. On the shrub’s other side, where Flowers had laid the blanket, was a concrete walkway that led from the motel’s drop-off circle to the front door of the Welcome Office. A whole hedge of evergreen shrubs grew on the opposite side of the walkway, but Flowers only ever hoodooed the one shrub. He’d been doing it for a couple weeks by then, since autumn had kicked in.

It was already November, but the hoodooed shrub had berries, and bugs and insects got confused into hatching. In the mornings, when I went there to wait for the schoolbus, the walkway would be speckled with the dew-covered bodies of newborn ants and beetles who’d died trying to get across to the shrubs that weren’t hoodooed. I’d ring the bell and Flowers would come out the door with broomy paintbrushes we’d use to sweep the bodies into square, sand-colored envelopes. It always chilled me up to do it because I couldn’t help thinking how the bugs died freezing. I’d seen flies invade air-conditioned houses and get slow til they fell, but air-conditioned houses aren’t as cold as Illinois at night, in the autumn, where it gets below 32 degrees sometimes, and I’d wonder if the liquids in the bugs I’d swept started turning to ice before or after they’d died. When I’d imagine before I’d get chilled up the most.

All the winged insects, though — lived. Flowers called them sentries. The sentries nested in the hoodoo shrub, never flying farther than the drop-off circle, and they always returned to the shrub after a minute or two. Somehow they didn’t freeze to death. They never tried to get inside the Welcome Office either. Mostly the sentries were lightning bugs, but also there were earwigs and at least ten cocoons between the branches, so there would be butterflies soon, or moths. I didn’t know how long the insects would survive, and Flowers only gave me a funny look when I’d ask him, but I hoped they’d make it through winter — I wanted to see the glow of lightning bugs during a snowstorm.

Aside from that, I didn’t really know what to think of the hoodoo Flowers did on the shrub. He said hoodoo wasn’t magic but a science derived from arcane knowledge, except what was magic if not a science derived from arcane knowledge? Even that question seemed to piss him off, though, so I called hoodoo science when I didn’t call it hoodoo.

Being magic wouldn’t make it bad anyway. Not necessarily at least. Adonai disliked magic that looked like miracles since that kind of magic threatened to screw up the arrangement, but not all kinds of magic were wrong, I didn’t think, even though former Kabbalists (not the moviestar kind with the red bracelets and bottled water, but the real kind), like my dad, would have disagreed. Avraham himself not only knew magic, but taught it to the sons that he had with Keturah, and the way that moment’s described in Torah, it says that Avraham, on his deathbed, “gave all that he had to Isaac. But to the concubine-children who were Avraham’s, Avraham gave gifts.” The gifts were the magic, and gifts are good things.

I think Flowers got touchy when I called hoodoo magic because he wanted to teach me to be a hoodooman and he assumed that I thought magic was bad (even though I’d told him I didn’t), and that that’s why I didn’t want to learn to be a hoodooman. That’s not how it was, though. Good or bad, arcane science or magic, I didn’t care to practice hoodoo any more than I cared to practice Kabbalah. I didn’t care to make golems or help fireflies live through autumn and winter. Golems always backfired and fireflies were bugs. What I wanted was to learn to write better scripture and to be a better scholar, and since I could learn those things from Flowers — an experienced writer with a scholarly brain — and since those things were infinitely learnable, those were the only things I wanted him to teach me.

I walked across the drop-off circle from the bus and stopped when I saw him atop his blanket. He had his back to me, and I knew that between my stealth and the fan-noise of the generator there was no way he could hear me if I didn’t want him to. And I didn’t want him to. I didn’t want to interrupt his spell-casting. After about ten seconds of watching him, though, one of the roving insects — an earwig — landed on my pointer, and even though I stayed still and kept silent Flowers revolved to face me as soon as the thing touched down.